#110 with Kat Cole - Ideas From the Head of a $4B+ Business

Exactly. So I run a as president and COO called Focus Brands. $4 to $5 billion in global consumer product sales, just under 7,000 units, 60 countries, 7 food brands that people know and love: Cinnabon, Auntie Anne's, Carvel, Jamba Juice, Moe's Southwest Grill, McAllister's, and Schlotzsky's. The business grows by acquisition, so we're constantly looking for new brands that are big enough to make sense in our portfolio but have enough upside potential in multichannel retail franchise CPG growth to bring them in and apply all of our strengths to those brands to build them over time.

I was kind of like the great poet Drake, started at the bottom, now I'm here. I am one of those stories. So I started out as a hostess and a waitress when I was 17, 18 years old. At Hooters restaurants, putting myself through college, first person in my family to get into college, grew up the child of a single parent alcoholic father, helped raise my sisters. And so, I just had to work to pay for school, and I was the first person to get into school, and so everybody was really excited. And then, something really crazy happened. Hooters happened to be growing around the world at the time that I was a waitress, and I was asked to be a part of the training team that would go launch the franchise on different continents. Around the world. And so I said, yes, I started doing that. Australia, then Central America, South America, Asia. I did that so much. I was traveling. I had to be in these countries for 20 to 40 days to launch the franchise. I very quickly moved from being on the team to leading the teams. And by the time I was 20, I had opened up the franchise on most continents and was failing college because I was never there. So I dropped out of school before I got my 2-year degree. Luckily, since the company was growing, there were many corporate job opportunities for people with my experience in the company. And so I moved to Atlanta from Jacksonville and took my first corporate gig with a paycheck instead of cash and tips.

And found my way into the professional world. And again, as the company grew, I grew. I was vice president of that company when I was 26, while they were doing $700 to $800 million in revenue. Stayed with that executive team, all kinds of really interesting things during that executive tenure that we could double-click on later. Started my humanitarian work in Eastern Africa, did a lot of nonprofit leadership that gave me some really cool parallel leadership experiences that allowed me to be just a better leader at a younger age than many people because I was leading my, like, my day gig, my nonprofit on the side, humanitarian work, and Eventually, when I was 31— well, before that, went back to school. I have my master's without having a bachelor's. So, I went through an MBA program. Is that allowed? Nights and weekends. It is allowed. It is rare but possible. And that's the story of my life. Rare but possible. And then became the president of Cinnabon and helped turn that around out of the recession. And again, as that company grew, I grew. Every 3 years, I've had a different and larger gig and now oversee all the business.

Kind of a mixed bag. I love that you've talked to people that have both responses. For me, the way a version of that showed up— when people talk about imposter syndrome, I've found that some are talking about slightly nuanced different experiences. Like, one is just this, this self-talk, "I don't deserve to be here." You know, "Do they, do they think?" I don't deserve to be here. Is everybody looking at me like, what is she doing here? Right? So there's that worry, that internal talk. But then there's another version that was more what I experienced. So that first version, I haven't experienced, but the version that I've experienced is an over-indexing on humility and curiosity at times when I really needed to pull forward more courage and confidence. And I would ask myself in my head, because I respected the people I was now a peer of so much, who in the early days, they had been in business longer than I'd been alive. Literally, I was a 26-year-old executive and they were in their 50s and 60s. They had worked for 30 years. And so there was something in my head that whether it was caused by them or not, that made me ask, who am I to question them? You know, it comes from a place of deep respect. And there were times where I had the humility to ask that question. But I should have had more courage to answer it. And the answer is, you are the vice president overseeing these functions, and if you don't ask these questions, no one will. And I learned very quickly, because I had so much responsibility at such a young age, when I did not use my voice when I had a seat, that I would later regret it. Um, and whether that was bringing up something that was supposed to be what I was there to advocate for a particular stakeholder group, or just an idea that I had that could have saved us a ton of money, or made us a ton of money, or helped do something better, and I just held back because I thought, again, who am I to kind of wedge that into these guys', historically guys', discussion, and I always regretted it. And so I learned from that pain, from that regret, that I shouldn't over-index on humility. Humility's good, but I need to pair it with confidence and courage so that I'm always showing up in the way I should.

Yeah, that's a good way of putting it. Like, it's the classic thing, like, your strength is always also your weakness depending on the context. And so if you, if you over-index on any one thing, whether it's confidence, right, confidence becomes arrogance, right? If it's humility, humility becomes, you know, I don't know what the word would be, but sort of that, that mousy feeling where you didn't step up and you didn't do the thing that you were trying to be nice, and that actually the nicest thing would have been to step up and say something.— and I'll share a little story of mine that's sort of similar. So I started my career as an entrepreneur. You can't even call it a career. I was a college kid. I thought I was going to go to med school and then I had this idea to start a sushi restaurant and I went and decided I'm going to build the Chipotle of sushi. So yeah, I come from the quick-serve kind of background. That was the very first thing I did and I got the confidence to do it. I think I've told the story once before, but I got the confidence to do it because I took this class at my university called Getting Rich. It was my senior year. I had done all my That was the name of the class? That was the name of the class. And it was actually really funny. It was taught by this woman, Lisa Keister, who changed my life. I should email her and tell her she changed my life. She had graduated, and she had graduated with a degree in Mandarin, and all of her friends were like going to, you know, become bankers, consultants, lawyers. They knew what they were doing. They were on that track, that pre-approved track of like, this is what a good career looks like. And they were like, this is, you know, 20 years ago, they're like, oh, what are you going to do with this Mandarin degree? What the hell is that? You know, and she was like, I don't know, but like, I bet I could find a job in China. Like, if I could speak Chinese, I can go. So she went over there and she found a great career basically bridging companies in China with who wanted to do business with the West. And she was like, I could speak both languages. I was a friendly face. I could make it happen. And so she makes a killing by '22, '23. She comes back to the States. She invests it all in the dot-com boom because she's like, oh, the internet, this is a great thing. Invests it all, gets this huge run-up. Fortunately decides like, "You know what? I want to buy a house and I want to change things up." Pulls it all out right before the crash. So she avoids the crash, not because of some genius, but then invests it all in real estate. So then from 2001 to 2006, she's in real estate, which is also on this huge run-up. Then she takes it out. By 30, she's retired. She's married to the man of her dreams and she's done it all. She's like, "What do I want to do now?" So she's like, "Man, everything that helped me succeed in life, I didn't learn in school." So she decided to go back to the university that she went to, which is Duke, which is where I went, and she decided to become a professor and teach the class she wished she had. She named it Getting Rich because she's like, "I know this will attract the type of person I want, and it's not going to be a class about getting rich. It's going to be a little bit about personal finance, so you learn a little bit about the way money works." And then every class I'm gonna bring in a speaker, like someone like you who would come in and say, "Hey, here's my path. Here's how I stumbled into success. Like I didn't have some magic clarity when I got started. I just sort of did one thing and then the next thing and then eventually I figured it all out and I took the road less traveled." So anyways, I heard that and that's when I was like, "Oh, shit. These people who are telling their story about starting a t-shirt company or becoming the vice president of JP Morgan, they all said the same thing," which was like, I was just as clueless as you back when I was 20 years old and just started following my nose of the most interesting thing, tried to do a great job of it, and whether I succeeded or failed up, this is America. It's amazing. You can even fail and you go up. And so, and they were like, look, at the end of the day, I'm the one hiring people, you know, so I'll tell you what I look for in a resume. Everybody's got the same degree, you know, every, you know, I go down to the bottom of the resume where it says like other. And I try to figure out, do you have anything to offer me? Any other experiences in your life that are novel or different? Um, because that's what separates you from the other stack and the other people in the stack of papers. So anyways, long story, but I'm going to get to the part that was relevant to what you said, which was I do a couple startups. I fail essentially with them. Um, like minor success, but failure really. And then, uh, I decide, okay, I'm coming to Silicon Valley. That's where I want to be. And I joined this idea lab started by this guy, Michael Birch, who had him and his wife had built multiple companies, multiple successes, and now they were sort of like, well, we're billionaires, but we still want to create new startup, new startup ideas. But now we don't need investors. We'll do it on our own terms. So they, they buy this pimped-out office in San Francisco. They smash together 7 condos and create their dream office out of that. And then they hire up a team of 20 of the smartest engineers and they're like, great, we own this whole thing. You all own equity in any project we do. It's like sort of communism for startups. And, you know, we're going to build our own ventures. And so I joined him just to work for him. And I, I didn't know what the hell I was doing, but I knew two things. One was I had this idea was how do I get 20 years of experience in the next 4? Kind of like what you were saying, which was like by throwing yourself in the fire and being like, oh, you rose your hand, you raised your hand like, oh, press time, I'll go launch, you know, our Australia business or wherever. Like, you will go learn a lot more that way. So that's why I joined his startup lab, because I was like, oh, a lab has multiple ideas, so I will get multiple reps rather than just focusing on one thing. And I'll learn from this guy who's done it before, so I'll get a bunch of experience just sitting next to him every day. And that's what happened. But along the way, he emailed me one day and he was like, hey, meet me at this coffee shop today. Don't come to work. Meet me at this coffee shop. You know, there's something I'd like to discuss. And I was like, 6 months into the job and I was like, "Oh, shit, I'm getting fired." I heard this is what happens. They take you offsite and they sort of shoot you where nobody could see you. Because I had been changing a whole bunch of things. I had been doing the thing you said, which was like if I saw something that didn't make sense to me, I would just say it didn't make sense and I'd change it without even asking for permission. I was like, "I probably overstepped." Okay, whatever, lesson learned. I told my mom, I was like, "I'll be home for lunch. I'm probably getting fired today." I go meet this guy. And his wife, and he was basically like, it was the exact opposite. He was like, you know, uh, he's like, every single person I ever hired at this lab, 20 people I hired, and I said, you know, make of this what you want, you know, whatever you make of this is what your experience will be. He's like, I told all of them that. And then what everyone does is they go and they sit at their desk and they wait to be told what to do. And they just do what they think their job title is. And he's like, we hired you as product manager, but you've been acting like the CEO of this lab. And I want to make you the CEO. I want to give you my job and I'll move to the board and you run this thing. I was 24 years old. And in that moment, I had this fear, like kind of what you were talking about, the nuance number 1 that you mentioned. And the fear I had was, and I asked him this, this is how I got over the fear. I asked him, I was like, you know, I'm the youngest person at the company. I'm 24. I've been here the least long. I've only been here for 6 months. Are other people going to be okay with this? Like, I get that you're crazy, but like, ultimately, you're gonna leave and I'm gonna be the one standing in front of them and if they don't respect me, I'm screwed. He told me this, he gave me this anecdote and I think, I honestly think he made this up but it worked. It totally made me feel great which was he goes, he goes, I talked to, you know, these 4 leaders of the team, you know, already. I asked them how they feel about this. They all were supportive. In fact, you know, Paul called me yesterday and was like, dude, are you making this transition yet? Like, what's the holdup? And that just gave me this like wind in my sails that I was like, "Oh, they want me to lead," and then I never questioned it again. And now looking back, I'm like, "I think he might have made that shit up. That might have been like totally not true," but it was a real gift that he gave me. And so, for anybody out there who's putting somebody in a position where, you know, they're punching a little bit above their weight, they're not, you know, sort of technically on the resume qualified to do this, give them that gift of like, people want you to lead. They trust you, uh, in some way, somehow. It really changed my experience. It sounds like, uh, for you, you, you had that, uh, on your own.

Okay, one that I actually started— this was, I don't know, 6, 9 months ago— started messaging a few investor friends and people who I know are passionate about this topic, and they loved the idea. I got busy, so maybe somebody will do something with this. So an app that lets me enter all the life decisions that I want to enter and evaluate and measure my real environmental impact. So the shampoo I buy, the method of transportation I have, my food choices, and I want to score, right? It's just for me. And then if there's enough, if there are enough people participating, enough data points, it can kind of benchmark by region. By different demographic if I opt in to show that, because there is so much greenwashing that there are things that are promoted or advertised as better for the planet that when I've had occasion to work with experts or go deep into the research of the entire value chain, it's actually not. And there, you know, there are websites right now that rank products in this way. So EWG, you know, whatever version it's become now where you can put in your SKU, scan the barcode, and it'll tell you if it's like green, yellow, or red, or if it's good, fair, bad, or horrible for the planet, or if it's got concerning ingredients for your body. So like a really souped-up version of that where it's easy to click transportation home, utilities, food, whatever it is, and I put it in and then I can see how the choices I make add value to the planet or are hurting. And for me, it's just about driving more consciousness. And then of course you could gamify it and like do all kinds of things, and it could actually create energy around the growth of companies that really are net better for the planet. So it just feels like there's a lot of good that could come from that.

Right. So let me tell you what I like and I'll tell you what I dislike about it. Maybe you could tell me why I'm wrong. So what I like about it actually is, well, besides the like net good that would come of something like this, what I like about it is that I think you could start this as a quiz. So I've noticed just in trying to make things move on the internet, quizzes are like, I don't know, they're like the bacteria of the internet. They just spread like crazy. And you know, I was telling you about Michael who was the kind of CEO of The Lab. He had launched, he got big on a social network. It was like kind of as big as MySpace back in the day, as big as Facebook. And he had launched it with a quiz and in 9 days he got a million members. Wow. Back then, that was really fast. Like, a million was a lot back then in the internet size. And he did it with just a quiz called the Best Friends Quiz, which basically was like, how well do you know me? I answer questions about me, and then I send it to you. You get a score of guessing what I would have said, and then I'll do the same back for you. And it was this viral quiz. The guys who were behind Tickle, I remember, did this with which dog breed are you, right? BuzzFeed did this. And so I think that there's one way to onboard people with this, which is just like, Question, question, question, question, question, score. And how does that compare to blah, blah, blah? And so you don't even have to make— it doesn't even have to start as a full-fledged, you know, app app. It can be something that just collects a whole bunch of people's information and interests around their lifestyle choices.

I remember he was saying he was working with Panda Express at one time. They're trying to get people to make healthy choices and they were trying to figure out how do we, how do we label our menu so people make healthy choices? Should we include, you know, this information or what? And the experiment he wanted to try, which I think ultimately didn't work because they didn't implement this, but the experiment he wanted to try was when you walk through the door, there's actually two lines. There's the, I'm like, I'm going to treat myself or I'm going to make a good decision for myself. Both are positive, but it was like, go left or right. And then the menu you see is a different menu and you just only get the options, but you make the choice up front. You don't have to like wade through the tasty and then the like maybe healthier options and try to figure it out. So I don't think that would work. But he did tell us about one experiment that did work in the psychology realm around this, around climate. So he was talking about, he's like, why is it that people will buy a Prius or they'll buy an electric car now and then Tesla maybe now, but they won't do— they won't like insulate their water heater or something that will have like actually quite a big impact. Exactly. And they won't do that, but they'll virtue signal in other ways. They'll recycle a bottle, but they won't change this thing that's actually a bigger impact. Why do people do that? And so he's like, "I think it's about signaling. I think that there's a—" The power of optics, yeah. Yeah, the optics. You feel good that you are signaling to the world that you do good. And with your water heater, it's in a closet somewhere in your house, in your garage or something like that. No one sees it. You don't even see it. And so the motivation to do it is very, very low. It's only for the diehards. And so he then— they ran this experiment in a neighborhood where they would put a sign in the grass. I've read about this. Yeah, it had this amazing result. So you put the sign that said like, hey, we upgraded our water heater, we went clean and green or something. And so you were signaling to everybody that our house, we did the thing. And as you know, in a neighborhood when 5 houses did it, then everybody felt like, oh shit, we should probably.— which probably not be the neighbor who didn't do this.

Okay. Um, so next is, uh, food business, like restaurants. So think, you know, the whole restaurant world's being blown up right now, right? Like right-sizing of retail, independent restaurateurs, casual dining, fine dining being heavily disrupted alongside other food trends. So first I'm thinking of starting kind of the modern food chain, the unfranchise franchise that is about healthy food, but food as pharmacy, where you go in, you get a diagnosis in some way from some network of doctors that take your blood test and do all these things and are like, these are the types of things you need to eat menu A. And then there's this chain of restaurants that has Menu A, B, C, D, something more fabulously marketed than that, but you get the point. And it's this like beautiful, delicious place that ignites the senses, that blends the pleasure of food and the functionality of food, and very clearly communicates it as food is medicine. But it's not just that positioning of healthy, it is what I think the future of restaurants really will be. Which is if you were building one today, it would be the best of all worlds. It would be part sit-down with a lot of outdoor and kind of space, built for delivery, built for pickup, built for takeout and speed. It would have meal kits, to-go items that you could pick up. It's a little bit grocery store, it's a little bit convenience store, it's a little bit restaurant, it's a lot off-premise and production. With all the design elements of coming in and out really safely and easily with fully contactless experience. So it's not only the what it sells at scale is a part of the future of food, but it's the how it does it and the routes to market that are not just these old models that have patchworks of some of these channels, like start over from ground zero, bringing all these things together in one place, make it a franchise so local entrepreneurs, local independent operators can have a part of scaling this future of food and make sure it's at a pricing tier that is low to mid, so it is broadly accessible and not just the aspirational type of product that is typically introduced to the market. That one's not as far off as the first one, and there's little symbol— little signs of it happening in certain markets, but no one's doing it with that much that much intention at scale. Maybe I will one day, post-Focus Brands.

So, one, I think a delivery-only or an off-premise mostly model is going to only continue in popularity and prominence around the world. The math really only makes sense today in hyper-densely populated areas, 'cause you have to have enough delivery-only business, only through a digital channel. Right. To warrant the rent and the supportive infrastructure that, and I'm very familiar with what all those are, as you can imagine, the different companies that are doing it, Kitchen United, Cloud Kitchens, all the ones doing it around the world. So you've got to really have not only a different marketing engine to market digitally for what are typically impulse purchases. You know, I'm hungry, I want food now. What type do I want? What's going to be fastest? Which brand do I trust? Am I in the mood to experiment? Do I have time to experiment? You know, all this back to psychology. All the psychology that goes on. You've got to market differently and transact differently. So in hyperdense markets, many cities in China, many cities in India, Kuwait, Manhattan, this has been going on, delivery-only businesses, for decades. It's not new. They just also had some customer-facing part of their business. And then you looked at it and said, wow, we're paying premium for this real estate. If most of our revenue is going to be delivery, which only makes sense in very dense markets in most cases, right? And because you need the cost of delivery to be low and you need the time of delivery to be low in order to properly batch and keep it efficient, whether you're a third party or a self-delivery person and you've got your 3 kids driving around on a scooter delivering the food, doesn't matter. The delivery time has to be fast. The radius has to be short. The only way the radius is short is if the density is there. And so cloud kitchens are crushing, crushing it. Dark kitchen, cloud kitchen, whatever you want to call it, in hyper-dense markets. There is a lot of churn in tenants in cloud kitchens in not dense markets. People are excited about it, they're trying it, and they're going, oh, I only have delivery revenue. And that's not necessarily working for the economics that these companies that are trying to do this at scale, um, really need to make it work. I think it's all going to work itself out in North America. We are just so behind the rest of the world in delivery-only concepts. I mean, pizza obviously has figured it out for a long time, right? But the whole economics of the model, the digital infrastructure, and they have their own driver networks, so it makes a lot of sense. Other industry sectors are trying to come at it from the outside. Owning your own driver infrastructure is very expensive, competitive, and the insurance alone is something a lot of small businesses can't bear. So using a last-mile logistics partner, like an Uber Eats or a DoorDash in the US, which they are, they do have big growing parts of their businesses that are last mile only, not marketplace, not front end, but back end. All of those, it's just all kind of the puzzle pieces are coming together. It's all coming together. Slowly, they're already like clicked and glued around the world. They're just slowly coming together in the US and they're coming together faster in dense markets. I'm a fan. It's just not as Not as much the, "Oh yeah, totally, that's the solution today," as a lot of people think or some of the hype I've heard because they clearly don't understand the economics. But it's getting there.

You know, restaurant. That's— it's the easiest. It's the lowest friction way to use the way the platform is structured without confusing the consumer. So it shows up as an Auntie Anne's location. But right when you pull up the menu, it says— that's the problem is it's got to have a lead location. But because it— because the brand shows up in the menu, it does show up in the search. So if you search Cinnabon, but Cinnabon's actually co-branded with what was first an Auntie Anteans. You search Cinnabon, it pops up, it says Anteans, but then it shows you the Cinnabon menu item. And so that's how we do it when we're co-located today. Gotcha. Okay, that makes sense.

You mean the emails everybody's sending me? You know, one thing I think is just important for your listeners, that we always bring forward our full selves. It just so hap— one, we have a lot of businesses in Asia, so we had a little bit of a heads up of what was happening. Gotcha. And Auntie Anne's and Cinnabon are both in Asia. They're mostly in malls there as well. So, we had a sense of what that would be like for malls. Malls are only, you know, just over 15% of our business at Focused Brands, but it's a majority of the business for Auntie Anne's. Okay. And so, benefit of having a diversified portfolio, but very serious impact for one of the brands. And then Cinnabon to a lesser degree because it's in more areas, but still meaningfully in malls and airports. And airports are just as impacted as malls. Yep. And so, I was in the hospital in the ICU with my then 7-month-old daughter. Who had IVs, feeding tubes, because she had a horrible respiratory virus, and I did as well. We caught it from our toddler, and it was just horrible. Wow. And so here I am in a hospital while there's a nursing shortage because there were no tests. And so basically, if any doctors or nurses exhibited any symptoms, they had to self-quarantine. Right. So there were— I'm dealing with that, and then you know, working on my phone in the hospital with my mask on, not sure if what I have is what she had because we hadn't— they weren't— hadn't identified it yet. We finally identified it was something called metapneumovirus, which is one of the big bad seasonal viruses. It was not COVID. But right as COVID was hitting, you know, it was already big in Seattle, kind of coming west from the west across the United States, and just a lot of alarmist you know, news coming out and very quickly the malls started shutting down. Right. And it started in states that tend to be more progressive and then quickly moved to the rest of the country as more information was shared about how it spread. And I was navigating the period that you just asked about with my child, weak, thin, tubes in her nose. We finally got out of ICU. This was mid-March, so really peak, peak hitting. Us with lack of knowledge, coming home, having all these conference calls with people from all over, pulling— my baby was pulling her feeding tube out of her nose, shoving it back in her nose while I'm dealing with this. So the— oh my God, just the— that reminder of we all have full lives even during these times. So then what was it like in addition to that? One, her and her health her health was the most important thing to me. So it kept everything else a bit more in perspective, which was actually very healthy. Then what I'm really proud of, both for my leadership and my team and the whole company, is that we got crystal clear on the few priorities we had, which was one, protect people, right? Safety of our employees, safety of our managers, safety of our community. Whatever that meant. If we were open, that meant extra safety precautions beyond what food businesses already have to do. It meant not asking people to travel or not having them go, even before a lot of these companies started shutting down offices and before travel bans were put in place. We were already going down that path. Safety, number one. So preserve health and well-being. The second priority is preserve cash. Because these businesses are small. Yep. Collectively, they're quite large, but independent franchise-owned businesses— I think JPMorgan or one of these banking financial institutions puts out a report every year that basically says the average independent retail operator, including restaurants, has like 14 to 21 days of cash on hand max. And that is very typical of super small business owners. And so we knew we had to preserve cash. So keep everybody safe, make sure there's nothing we're asking people to do or that, that conflicts with that, make sure that we're providing any safety precautions, etc. Then help them preserve cash. So put a pause on any royalties, put a pause on any advertising fund, make sure that we're negotiating with vendors to help franchisees not be stressed about their near-term obligations while they are wondering what is going to happen. So we just, I mean, it was so powerful having that clarity. You know, don't talk to me about anything unless it does one of those two things. Keep people safe, preserve cash. And if it conflicts with either of those, we're not going to do it. And if it does both of those, it's moved to the top of the list. And that was it. So we did that incredibly well. Every communication, every email, every department went to work. I mean, radical focus. Then we were thoughtful about the stages in the evolution. So we were amazing at responding to the crisis with heart and with mind. But then things start to normalize and all of a sudden the government starts to respond with— Yep. —help, aid packages. And every city had a different regulation and it was a spaghetti mess of things for the owners, franchisees to navigate. And so then we went to work with every external resource, our own lawyers, our private equity firm, just trying to consolidate guidance and information so that it also de-stressed them and allowed them to make informed decisions. Then PPP comes and all of these business owners, these small business owners are trying to figure out, do they qualify? Should they apply? Do they need it? If they do, how do they get in line? And it was our job to just guide as much as we could. And then as it normalized a bit, putting systems in place that allowed them to open. Most of our malls are open and most of them are doing more sales than people would think, mainly because not all the food providers are open. And so, yes, it's a smaller pie of customers walking through and mall employees, but we're getting a bigger share. Of that group, which is great. And in most cases, the mall operators— again, this is a small portion of our total business— but the mall operators are running on one shift and not two. So in some cases, short term, they're able to preserve their livelihood and profitability because it's lower sales, but more than people would think, but running it off one shift. So a bit improved margins because of the labor ratios. And the real question is, what's the future? You know, which of these malls are going to get repurposed into something that doesn't make sense for a snack business? Which ones are going to have a long, slow, painful exit? So which ones are going to close fast? Which ones are going to be a slow road to go away? And which ones actually, because you then will have a redistribution of retail shopping, even if it's less, you know, just like our example of food, there are fewer places for them to go. And in some communities, malls are community centers. It's not just a place to get shoes. And so I think that's going to be really interesting to watch. And so we're helping them navigate real estate negotiations. You know, what— how do you approach a mall landlord with a lease? Do I just wait until it gets really bad and then I have more leverage? Do I try to renegotiate something now so I can plan my business? What happens if it's a large mall developer versus an independent? And so we've moved from crisis response and clarity to helping them navigate unbelievable amounts of information in an unprecedented time and way that many people were kind of reaching out to support government and local entities, back to, okay, getting back to what is now our new normal. They got to start paying rent. The stores are open. Bills are coming due. Some of our brands are doing better than last year's sales because they have drive-throughs and curbside and the benefits of the technological investments we made. So, the other discipline and where I think we've been good, but it's been a great lesson for me, is to keep stepping back and asking, are we exiting one chapter of crisis management and entering into another? You don't want to get stuck in a certain type of behavior too long.