Customerland
Customerland is a podcast about …. Customers. How to get more of them. How to keep them. What makes them tick. We talk to the experts, the technologies and occasionally, actual people – you know, customers – to find out what they’re all about.So if you’re a CX pro, a loyalty marketer, a brand owner, an agency planner … if you’re a CRM & personalization geek, if you’re a customer service / CSAT / NPS nerd – you finally have a home.
Customerland
Empowering Marketers with Innovation and AI at Constant Contact
Frank Vella, the dynamic CEO of Constant Contact, joins us to share his inspiring journey from helping family-run businesses in Canada to leading one of the most trusted names in small business marketing. With an extensive background at tech giants like Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, Frank brings a fervor for innovation and a deep understanding of the challenges small businesses face today. In our conversation, he reveals how his personal history and passion for technology align with Constant Contact's mission as it nears its 30th anniversary, establishing a strong foundation for future success.
Dive into the future of small business marketing as we discuss Constant Contact's strategic initiatives, including their exciting acquisition of Txtify. Frank highlights how AI advancements and global expansion efforts are reshaping the way businesses engage with customers, making marketing more intuitive and effective. The conversation uncovers the transformative potential of these strategies, with practical examples of how technology can simplify processes for entrepreneurs. As we close, we express our excitement for future discussions with Frank, eager to explore ongoing developments at Constant Contact that continue to empower businesses worldwide.
You know my customer never asks for AI. Hey, how are you using artificial intelligence? It actually scares them if we use that word. But what they do say is how do we just get that done without knowing what to say? And that's where we deploy it. Just give me your website. I'll scrape your colors and your brand and your logo, so immediately, anything you do looks like yours.
Speaker 2:Today I was lucky enough to get on Frank Vela's schedule. I believe you've been trying for quite a while to do this. Frank is CEO of Constant Contact, which is, first of all. It's just really interesting because of who Constant Contact is, but with a little bit of research you find out that Frank Vela is also a really interesting person. So for all those reasons, and many more, frank, thanks for joining me. I really appreciate it.
Speaker 1:Frank, it's an absolute pleasure. It's my honor to be here. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 2:So I kind of just dipped the toe in the water here about your background. But if you would just to set some context for this conversation, tell us how you got here, where you've been and what brought you here.
Speaker 1:Excellent, so how I got here specifically and maybe the why I'm here specifically and maybe the why I'm here. I remember I was leading my last company, which I had been at for several years, a founder-led company doing data and analytics for large enterprise, and the private equity sponsor that owns Constant Contact knew of me and called and said we have this company that we hope is somewhat interesting for you to lead. And I draw this analogy. I say you know, there are times you might be at a reunion and somebody says, hey, Mike, I just saw Mike at that corner of the gymnasium and you have one of two reactions oh, let me run down there to see if Mike's still there.
Speaker 1:Or I was actually headed the other way and I'm the son of immigrants and our family came to Canada and as I grew in technology, I seemed to be the de facto guy that helped all of my cousins and aunts and uncles that had small businesses a hairdresser, a car wash, a laundromat, a restaurant.
Speaker 1:I helped them set up their constant contact platforms 15, 18, 20 years ago, and so that was one of those connections where I've been a customer. I know the platform. I've helped. I've seen it help my family grow their businesses and, to that end, I've been an operator in the software space for a long time through Microsoft and Hewlett Packard, some of the larger companies that really taught me how to do some of the great things we do. And then the figure it out experience is at Virtustream, a startup that two founders asked me to help them lead from no revenue through to high growth and an acquisition by EMC at the time, building value for our customers, whether they're enterprise or, in this case, small business, and been doing it in the tech space for 30 some odd years now.
Speaker 2:That's quite a background, you know, as you're talking about this, and your instant affinity for constant contact because of what it meant to you and because of where you've been and your familiarity with it. I know, and you know there was a lot more that went into your decision to come on as CEO than just hey, this is cool, I remember it. Um, there are all kinds of considerations about the quality of the technology and, uh, you know the its connectivity and how it fits into the ecosystem that it plays in, and the financials and all that. Clearly, those boxes were checked off. But if you don't mind, and if this is too deep in the weeds, we can certainly move on. If you don't mind, maybe talk a little bit more about some of the other underlying reasons that this became such an interesting opportunity for you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, when, uh, when you do your diligence on a company that you're going to lead, so many things come into, uh, into play. First of all, uh, companies have histories and and reputations and personalities and and you assess to the best you can are they congruent with me and as the culture I'm going to try and shape and evolve, inherent there in some form? And I look at Constant Contact 2025 is our 30th anniversary and you look at the customer base and we have customers that have been with us for we have customers that have been with us for 20, 15, 18 of those 30 years. That says something. Then you talk to some of these small businesses. What was really startling to me is they use words that I had heard in enterprise that the platform they use for marketing through constant contact is mission critical to their business. It's how they communicate, if they're a nonprofit to their community, if they're a small business, to their customers and their prospects. And that sentiment, that sort of personality and integrity of the business, resonated with me. And, of course, the technology. Is the technology relevant? Certainly, if we're here for 30 years, it's been relevant, but is it going to be relevant? And it is something that you can continue to shape and grow as meaningful and relevant to the market.
Speaker 1:And all of those things came up yes, yes, yes in the diligence I did with this company. We are a company that loves our customer and everybody says that. But I haven't been in a place where everybody understands the mission we are in it. We have a mantra. We're in it to help the small stand tall and compete against their larger rivals. And everybody in the company hears it, says it and believes it and that was fundamentally different and believes it.
Speaker 2:And that was fundamentally different, refreshing and exciting. Wow, you know, the statistic eludes me and I did look for it ahead of this call, but I just couldn't find it. But the effectiveness of email as a channel surpasses any other channel out there, consistently, constantly, and has for decades, and it gets overlooked and underplayed and the whole thing, which I think is one. It's a huge opportunity, but it's also a real shame. Here's this workhorse that's been around for years and just because it's not the shiny new thing and boy, there are some shiny new things out there maybe it just doesn't get the play that it really deserves. Boy, there are some shiny new things out there Maybe it just doesn't get the play that it really deserves.
Speaker 1:I'd love to hear your thoughts on that First. You're right, and the way we have this conversation is we say it's the end proposition. How do you evolve that and how do you keep relevance? Well, you've hit on a very important ROI assessment which is, at the end of the day, whether you're a big business, a retailer, a small business, a professional service, a landscaper, the number one return on marketing spend is email. That's why you get so many of them. And how do you keep that? How do you keep that relevance? Well, it's certainly with some of the newer technologies that you talk about that are cool. It's the data, the analytics, the segmentations, the automations that understand that how things have evolved are.
Speaker 1:An email is not just an email is not just an email. It is what is different about Mike than Frank and what compels Mike to open and then engage with the content in an email. And then it evolves to how else can you follow that through? Can you turn an email into a campaign and follow up with Mike if he's left something in his cart with an email that says, hey, you've abandoned something in your cart, can we help you or offer you a discount to follow through. And then it's acknowledging that the small business has almost everything an enterprise has available to them, and that was not always the case. However, what they don't have is the budget, the expertise, and we have to compensate for that with technology and meeting them where they are.
Speaker 1:If you started a business today, you have more tools available and you're going to start with social media, and we have to acknowledge that and we have to participate with you on social media, and you're quickly going to learn that a follower is not the same as a marketing list. You can email, sms or send a text to and we help you engage with your social followers so that it connects to your email. And so probably right, email standalone, without other value adds, is going to be less valuable than it used to be because of the relevance, but combined in terms of an entire campaign whether again, you're a small business, an enterprise or a nonprofit it just gets you. You know people ask this, mike, so a 30-year-old company, will you change the name? And I was just going to finish it with the technology keeps you in constant contact with your constituents and your customers, and so, no, we'll never change that name, because it's what we do, and, uh, and that's what the technology lets you do.
Speaker 2:Yeah, why walk away from a perfect brand?
Speaker 2:That's already part of the language, right?
Speaker 2:You know, one thing that's that's become clearer to me as a small business owner, a small business advisor to me and the people I work with here is that and I think you kind of alluded to this a small business owner 20 years ago had a limited number of tools at their disposal and that's what you had to work with.
Speaker 2:I'm really shocked, in a very good way, at how sophisticated so many small business owners are today with an understanding of what they can do, and it seems to me like they're just looking for the right guidance, which isn't that complicated to do, and the right tool set, because you can get lost in, you know, you can get lost in an endless uh like nonstop rabbit hole of neat things to try out down there, and in doing so I mean we preach this to the enterprises as well as to the small businesses. But it really just boils down to assessing value and optimizing flow, and you can do that on a really sophisticated level, but you can also do it equally as well on a very, very small level. It seems to me like constant contact kind of nailed that, that idea.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that's. That's the one thing we have to always remember and understand. We we internally, we talk about our customers. Why not our? Why? We are a very strong engineering company that plays to the stability and the security of our offering and we have to be On the flip side. Engineers love to talk about what they built and why they built it. We keep them honest in saying but what's our customers' why? No matter what your business is, you hit it on the head. What's our customers' why? And no matter what your business is, you hit it on the head.
Speaker 1:Some things are always the same. If you're a landscaper who started your business this year and I'm a landscaper who started my business 15 years ago, day in, day out, we're kind of doing the same thing. We're making beautiful landscapes and helping people shape their home environment, and that's what we do, except you being new to the business and me being 15 years old, 15 years into business, I might have started with a phone number on the side of my pickup truck that rang to an answering machine in my mother's basement, and you might start with an Instagram page and a QR code on the side of your truck. And so how we get there is different and the newcomer is way more technically savvy. The person 15 years ago had to learn marketing and technology, and that double whammy of new and new and hard and different when my day job is taking care of my customer made it more difficult. And today you're right on that. Our customer just needs to get to their business. They're technically savvy. They don't want to learn how to market. They want to market and we need to make a tool that's intuitive and that puts them on the journey.
Speaker 1:And my customer never asks for AI. Hey, how are you using artificial intelligence? It actually scares them if we use that word. But what they do say is how do we just get that done without knowing what to say? And that's where we deploy it. Just give me your website. I'll scrape your colors and your brand and your logo. So immediately, anything you do looks like yours.
Speaker 1:Type in a sentence and tell me what you're doing. Oh, I've got a you know I'm a landscaper with a fall cleanup special to rake leaves and winterize your lawn. Okay, and here's the content and the graphics that go with that. Do you like it? Yes or no? And every time you say yes or no, we learn. So it gets more. Your look and feel and all our customer sees is wow, that was pretty easy. I should market more often, and every time I market more often I get more interest, and it's a vicious circle. The easier it is, the more they do it. The more they do it, the more they grow, and that's their key word. Just help me grow, right, right, that's our mission.
Speaker 2:So I spent the last week at a really large retail conference here in New York and the entire place was just buzzing with AI-related terms. It is the shiny new thing and I think that's probably okay, but there's AI-powered everything you can think about there, large companies and high-level executives attending these things. The term AI still comes with a certain amount of let me just put let's call it trepidation. Okay, all right, that's cool, but what does it really mean? And I'm wondering for the small business owner? I think you touched on it a minute ago. You say the words AI. I think you'd have to be pretty brave as a small business owner to just embrace that term and go running with it, because everything is raised within margins and a heck of a lot of work being a small business owner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we had a panel of small businesses. We pull our customers a lot and we bring a sampling of customers and prospects in. As I say, I want to sit in that room and hear it, so I don't believe my own BS. This is how we understand their why. And I remember a product guy getting up there and I'm sitting in the audience and he's using the words AI and showing what AI did in the product, and I saw a bunch of blank stares and during the break I went in and said can you do me a favor, can you redo that demo? Can you use different words and say this is what you asked the platform to do and this is what came out Exactly same demo. And the audience was whoa, wait a second. So I didn't have to create all that. I just said that one sentence and that's what your software did. And that exposes the exact connection.
Speaker 1:A small business person is looking to run their business. They never have enough time, they never have enough budget. The people that work in their businesses are often family and always friends. Their customers are repeat, they're community-based and they know their customers and they see them at soccer practice or at church or at synagogue, and so that's what they're focused on, and if we could just help them connect without a lot of effort, the light bulb goes on and the usage goes up, and I don't think it's that much different in an enterprise. In an enterprise, people want to know they're dealing with a company that is advanced and advancing. They want to know if you're an investor. You want to know you're going to be as efficient and competitive as possible. But really no matter who your customer is, a Fortune 100 company or the Frank and Mike landscape architects, it's the same mission Connect with your customers and grow your business, and that's what you have to use the technology for.
Speaker 2:And so, now that we've defined that, I think I would still love to kind of just look at the other side of that, because I know that, no matter how you describe it, there are AI-powered functions within moment. Let's just call them features and functions that help businesses. I'd love to hear, as the CEO of this company, about some of the ways that you're deploying AI We'll call it something else, if you like and then some of the ways you think that businesses can really take advantage of what that technology does.
Speaker 1:Yeah, we look at AI in three buckets. One how do we deliver our product more effectively? Customer never really sees that. It's like the air you breathe. It has to be there, and I'll explain that in a minute. The second bucket is how do we use AI in a way that the customer does see and gets benefit from? And then the third is how do we use artificial intelligence internally to be as efficient and responsive and scalable as a business not as a technology, but as a business. So we do all three, some better than others, and the first one we do impeccably well. We were using AI in this respect before.
Speaker 1:Ai was a cool buzzword. We send 600 million emails in a day. One, that's a lot. That's a lot. And we come back to the ROI. If an email doesn't get delivered because it got filtered out in a spam folder, then it's like the tree you didn't hear fall down, did it really fall down? And so you spend all that time and that money and that effort creating an email campaign and then it doesn't get delivered. It's a waste. So we focus on deliverability and we have phenomenal deliverability. 99% of those emails get through. Why?
Speaker 1:Well, first I talked about the culture of the company and being a good citizen and high integrity. We don't let people have bad lists. If people didn't opt, if we can't verify that the people on your marketing list didn't opt in to be on your marketing list, we don't send the campaign. That makes a lot of people mad. If I get phone calls, it's often that why won't you take my list? Well, because we can't verify how you got it. And you can't verify how you got it and we have a reputation that we need to uphold. And we have a reputation that we need to uphold and so we use AI to ensure that we're not spamming, we're not facilitating spam. Second, we do that to ensure deliverability by looking for bad links, bad subject lines something you didn't insert but some script on your computer did and filter that out. It's the exact same technology a Google or an Apple or a Yahoo would do to filter out junk. Well, we do that before it gets there, so that those companies know that if it comes through our domains they're good and that's all AI-driven. That's how we do that much email every day and have such high deliverability rates, and the customer has no idea about that until their emails don't get through.
Speaker 1:Second, bucket is what we talked about earlier just making it easier. You don't have to worry about writing the content and getting the images and cutting and pasting your logo and making sure the fonts are right. We'll scrape all that and bring all that and make it easy for you so it looks and feels right. And that's the biggest part of where we focus, because our product really has to do it for you. Now that's the expectation it used to be do it with me or help me, and now it's can your product just do it for me. And and now it's can your product just do it for me. And that's the journey we're on. And then the third is always harder, but it takes a lot of diligence. No matter if you're in my finance department or my marketing department or my support department, are you looking at technology to give our customers the best experience possible, the lowest response times, the fastest turnaround, the most accurate answer? And that takes a lot of work.
Speaker 2:But those are the three buckets of artificial intelligence or technology used in our company. I think you've prompted me to start using a different phrase than AI for my own sake. You know there are a lot, of, a lot of glassy eyes when you start getting too deep in the weeds there.
Speaker 1:Well, technology has always been the enabler right. I mean, we didn't go from no technology to AI. So, whether it was using the cloud, or whether it was using automations before that, or whether it was using spreadsheets, instead of you, capitalize on the technology that's available to make you more effective, and that's what AI is for us.
Speaker 2:So I'd like to switch gears just a little bit here and talk about the company Constant Contact and what you have been up to the past year, and there's talk of, I would say, a bigger global footprint, deeper global footprint for sure, even from what I can see. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the expansion that you've taken Constant Contact through so far and where you hope to take it in the near future.
Speaker 1:Yeah, one of the beautiful things I inherit is a brand that's globally recognized. So we have that going for us. And what we haven't done over the last few years and and and the the 30 year journey was your typical success as a startup great product market, fit probably created a market that didn't exist for small business software grow, go public and define the space. And then there was a part in our history where we were part of a really big public company and that probably wasn't the most innovative and growth-centric aspect of our history. And now we have the good fortune of being private, standalone, really focused on our brand and our customer and what we do for them, specifically the small business. And so we have had a global presence at points in our history and we're getting to recapitalize on that.
Speaker 1:We're known as a brand. Uh, our technology and and uh. You know the cloud and and and automations help us um scale through different countries and deploy in different currencies. Uh, but most important is the community uh, people buy uh software like this from people they trust uh, or from a recommendation from people they trust, and one of the. You know I talk about our culture.
Speaker 1:One of the things that was so refreshing is we kicked off in the UK last year after a seven-year hiatus of not being there, and the first place we went were the partners, who were our partners seven years ago, and they showed up en masse. They tell us they missed us. They tell us they didn't have the service that we had given them from anybody else. They told us they still use the product, even though it was harder to get support from a different time zone, and we rebuilt around them, and so that gives you a little bit of momentum. Certainly, given our size, we have the good fortune of pretty good marketing budgets to do things like launch and relaunch and take over the tube in London for a week and wrap some buses up and let the world know we're there and then rebuilding teams.
Speaker 1:So we've had a great international launch or relaunch over the last year in 2024. And it is reigniting growth. We've had some good growth in 2024. We expect the same in 2025 as a company and it's all. One customer at a time, one small business at a time that pays us time. One small business at a time that pays us a small amount of money anywhere from $10 to $30 a month to run on our platform, and so that's a lot of activity. And the other thing is we've stayed really true to the small business. We haven't really pursued markets that are larger enterprises or midsize enterprises, because we know that the marketing is different, the selling cycle is different, the product is different, the support is different, the pricing would have to be different, and so we've really stayed true to our heritage and our roots.
Speaker 2:Can you elaborate if it's okay to even ask this question on some of your near-term plans for expansion?
Speaker 1:Yeah, a lot of it has to do with technology. You mentioned it before. There's this cachet that email isn't as relevant as it used to be. The truth is, it is as relevant as it used to be. It just doesn't fit into the cycle in the same order it used to be.
Speaker 1:If you started that business 15 years ago that I talked about, you wouldn't have a lot of options. You would have a telephone and an answering machine. Then you might be able to get access to a website and then from a website you would send some email and there wasn't much more as a small business that you could leverage. And now, if you're going to compete, you have to leverage automations. It's not just an email and there wasn't much more, as a small business, that you could leverage. And now, if you're going to compete, you have to leverage automations.
Speaker 1:It's not just an email, it's a campaign. You have to leverage segmentation and understand that marketing to one constituent is different than another. You have to use intelligence When's the best time to send an email. And if I'm sending an email to a global audience, do I time, segment it to audiences in different regions, and so making the technology just as easy to use, intuitive and do it for me, as opposed to do it with me as possible, to do it with me as possible. That's where the growth is going to come into and, of course, our connection to social and e-commerce is really, really an important part of the evolution.
Speaker 2:Growing one small business, one small customer at a time, is a tough way to scale, is a tough way to scale, and it seems to me, having worked through some of those same kinds of scenarios before, that unless you show up with a reputation, which you clearly have, and an awful lot of goodwill, that that's a tough road to hoe. It's just really really difficult. Otherwise, and to me, every time I look at someone who's successfully pulling that off, it's because of their reputation and the reputation is is earned through focus and Consistency and honesty and reliability and never turning your back on them.
Speaker 1:But I Don't want to shoot myself in the foot and open a market, but I'll say the small business is a more resilient and reliable set of customers than I've ever had in any business, from enterprise down to small business. First of all, when times are rough, like we had through the pandemic, small business inceptions go up and they go through the roof and the first thing you need to do if you're going to have a small business is market. That is their number one concern. If they're raising money, it's raising money and marketing, and if they're bootstrapping or just doing a side hustle, it's how do I get the word out? And so the market grows at 12% a year, every year, year in, year out, and and and.
Speaker 1:The small business is resilient. They weather hard times better than big businesses because they always have to have tight pockets and and uh, and they're passionate about their customers. As I said, their customers are friends and families and communities, and so we rely upon them and they rely upon us, and we found a good mix, for sure, and not that that's the only mix. There are companies that are doing phenomenal and going up market and I aspire to have their sort of growth and returns. But we're going to do that in the small business.
Speaker 2:This is probably something to address with your team, but I think it would be a lot of fun and really instructive to have a conversation with you or whoever you designate, to talk about how small businesses are really using constant contact and what they're seeing as a result. And let's just go through use cases. Let's even talk about some of the hurdles and challenges, because I think that, as a small business, look, nothing is more helpful than watching or listening to somebody who's going through or has gone through your same scenario, and constant contact has thousands and thousands of those stories to talk about.
Speaker 1:Hundreds of thousands of customers and we build community and we have a platform for community where real estate agents talk to other real estate agents about marketing agents about marketing. We offer educational aspects of marketing, not solely through our software, but as content and subject matter expertise, and we view that as our obligation. But yeah, it's, you know and you've said this, we've got the brand and we've got the history and we've got 30 years of momentum and that certainly helps. But small businesses I said this earlier as well any business likes to make a purchasing decision based on information or knowledge from someone they trust, someone who's an industry guru or someone in the same business, and we try to facilitate it as best as we can. I'd say it's probably something we're reigniting in a stronger way than we used to, but it's important to connect you're right small businesses with others.
Speaker 2:Well, that'll be something I engage with your team on, because I have a bunch of ideas to throw out there. That'll be fun. That'll be fun with your team owners. They have a bunch of ideas to throw out there. That'd be fun. That'd be fun, you know. One last question, and we can go anywhere you want with this, but in the news I see that Constant Contact acquired Tixify which I may not be pronouncing correctly to convert social media followers into marketable customer lists. And first of all, if that's true, I think that in itself is a money printing machine, because I think every small business wrestles with you know, I got, I got, you know 5,000 followers, but how many of those are actually here buying something?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and it took a little bit of time for people in general and small businesses to understand that. And you know there were times not too long ago where it was self-fulfilling, Having a lot of followers was the objective. And our small business owners tell us that even when they have a lot of followers, they do see traffic to their website go up, but they don't have any more intelligence than that and they can't market it to that audience in a very specific way. And certainly social media platforms want to do everything they can to keep the followers on the social media platform, and Textify was this great piece of technology, a company based out of Ottawa, Canada, and they engage with a social user in a way that helps them get leads. And if you can interact and engage, and then the reason you're engaging with this platform, if you're the follower, is because you're interested in what we're doing, so you follow me.
Speaker 1:An example we have is I'm a candle maker and you respond to something on my feed that says, hey, want a 10% discount on candles. Yes, I do. What kind of candles do you like? Do you buy them seasonally? Do you like scented ones or unscented ones? And here's your coupon what email address or cell phone number should I send that to? Now you're a lead. I know that Mike likes these candles that he buys. You're a lead. I know that Mike likes these candles, that he buys the seasonal scented ones at Thanksgiving and the holidays and Easter. And now I know that of you You're a lead and you want to give me that information because you're going to get a discount and you like candles.
Speaker 1:And now you're on a marketing list and I can do something with you and I can assess what works with you. I can do something with you and I can assess what works with you. You respond to Thanksgiving-scented candles but not to Christmas-scented candles because you don't celebrate Christmas. And we start to learn that about you and it gets more intelligent and the difference now is people have to take the journey from that to email and understand oh, wow, okay, now I see the value of email and the journey is a bit longer and that's why we've invested in this platform to just engage with our customer right there, where they are and when they've seen enough value and they're interested enough to turn that into a full-blown marketing campaign.
Speaker 1:We can do that in a real easy and natural way, but we're thrilled with it. We're doing a lot of great things with it. It's been part of our international launch as well. It's so easy to regionalize right down to an area code or a zip code and a community, and we're having a lot of fun with it. We're having a lot of fun with the founders. They're great. They're great gents as well.
Speaker 2:Is that a live in North America at this point?
Speaker 2:It is yeah what fun, something that we will go play with. For sure it sounds like it sounds like a game changer. Well, frank, I can't thank you enough for this. There are another dozen directions. I'd love to take this conversation, but I want to be kind to your schedule and suggest that you know, with as much wrangling as we had to do to make our calendars work for this one, that I think it'd be really worthwhile to try and do it again, maybe later in the year for follow-up to see how things are and what you're up to at Constant Contact. But for now, just really appreciate it. It's a great conversation. Thanks so much.
Speaker 1:I appreciate the time. We're fans of the Customer Land podcast, and so we'd be happy to be back. Mike, thanks for your hospitality.
