Know Your Numbers: Management Accounts, Profit Margins & Better Business Decisions - Marc McArdle

Hayley Baxter: Mark, welcome to the What One Thing podcast. Start us off, what led up to What One Thing? What's your journey been like in business? yeah, thanks, thanks Phil and Haley for for having me. my journey started, it was a a family business and my father set up some many years ago, over forty years ago, and I got involved sort of after school and tried the cottage thing and all that Just share with us, Matt, what your what your business is and what it what you do and how you help people. Our company name is McCarga, Computer and Office Applies, and within that there's a few different aspects to the business. So We have our office supplies business, which is a wholesale selling stationery to businesses around the the area and far beyond. We then have an online aspect of our business, which is focused on selling school supplies to schools and supplying them with all their requirements. And then the last piece is our IT managed services, which is the sort of the last string to the bow. I am currently in the seat of trying to run all those aspects and trying to keep an eye on all aspects is one of the challenges of the day-to-day activities. But look at we're in this seat for that reason, I suppose, and that's how we got here. It's interesting you say that because a lot of people struggle with wearing all of the hats within a single business. It sounds like you're almost wearing all the hats within three or four businesses. How do you find that as a day-to-day challenge? Did your dad help you with that with any kind of guidance, or do you feel like you just kind of push straight into the water? Dad would have been he he would have been just really when we just had the one the office of plays business when I got involved, we started to expand the thing out and we were lucky to have a a strong core team there who we can trust and rely on. and that Has been the backbone of the business growth. And I read a book called Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, and it kind of gave me this thought process that I need to free up time to let the business to run itself so that I can run it from a helicopter aspect. So I've learned to sort of trust the people, try and implement some KPIs for them so they can see what I want. them to do and then it also shows me that we're hitting the targets that we're doing, what needs to be done and they're not always monetary targets. They're literally sometimes it can be as simple as making sure the shelves is stocked. seems a silly thing, but it's it's important 'cause we can't sell space. We have to have products to sell. So yeah. So when you took over the business, which sounds like a mighty task to be fair, or when you joined the business, how was the business performing financially, do you think? It was always safe and healthy. it at the time had three full time staff, including Dad, and then I joined to bring it up to four and so forth and we're currently sitting with twenty two staff. so it's it's a different game which brings us it's it's different challenges and stuff and and like that. Every day's a learning day and I don't lay claim to know it all, so I I spend a lot of time maybe following it it seems a bit weird to some people, but you're following influencers talking about business and stuff like that, hence why we're on this sort of podcast. That's where the ambition is. These people want to give out the knowledge or the nuggets that they have and that's what you tend to find. People who are entrepreneurial or business owners, they they love helping. I think that's a phenomenal point. I mean, you're based in Ireland, our listeners I'm hoping are are are worldwide. But Business remains the same, the fundamental pieces are always the same wherever we are. What was happening, Mark, both emotionally and within the business that led you to your what one thing? COVID hit and nobody really wants to talk too much about it anymore, but COVID was actually very good for business. we learned that our product was very much a requirement. So People had to work from home, so they needed stationer work from home. They couldn't take their PCs home, they had to buy laptops to work from home, to simple things like needing a proper chair to sit on and home. So and the caveat of that is is we had to reduce our staff numbers for COVID reasons. So it was a it was a ill win for us. But post that event, a year after, we realised that oops, everything had gone up in price, margin had struggled. unknown to us because we were like probably most small to medium businesses, we rely on our annual accounts and just assume that that's what's gonna keep us healthy. But we got a bit of a shock the year after COVID that we had taken the eye off the rain. And to that for for some time I had kind of always wanted I've heard this buzz of managed accounts. This is a great thing. You need to get managed accounts. To know what set of managed accounts is is not something that I really understood. And it does sound daunting, but it's actually not. So you've had fantastic years during COVID. All of a sudden you have a down year. And I've been in this position myself. You only realize that it's a down year when it's April and the accountant comes back to you and says, That was a bad year, wasn't it? And you say, No, don't think it was. What was your thought process to try and not pull yourself back out of that hole, but to start on an upward trajectory again. So we the first first sort of firefighting option was we started looking at our margins and trying to fix them, but that was a challenge because we have a fairly vast product range and not all of them are the same. So you kind of it just became insurmountable or whatever that word is. And know, because our swings can be because we're buying a lot of stock can obviously affect margins in one month and stuff, so it wasn't true. so started to dig into it and took a bit of listening. A friend of Dad's got involved when he we heard it was he was someone who's a a senior person who had exited his business and like that, kind of wants to to spread the knowledge and he kinda looked at it and started throwing some questions at me and Them questions started to make me realize that what I needed to see in my managed accounts. So then I was able to go back to the accounts person in-house here and we were able to sit down and go, Well, you know, this is what we're looking for because as far as we were concerned, there were a lot of numbers that an accountant understands, but for us in our day-to-day business owner activities, that didn't make sense. However, talking to this particular person, he literally made it make sense because look at he came from the food industry and it's basically the same thing. It's make money or don't make money and he helped me understand what I needed to see there. So we built it out from that and and now I feed with a good hand on things we don't have to worry about when we bulk by in some months and margins are changing and stuff like that because we now have the manage set which we can look at quarterly, monthly, compare with last year's review the thing around and again It is as simple as sometimes just a percentage, a net margin percentage, gross margin percentage or whatever. And that's a simple number. It's often you're in it, like you're in the business, you're trying to do everything, you're wearing all the hats like we talked about earlier. You don't always say the wood for the trees, do you? Because you you're in it and you're just doing it. And I think it's interesting when you get an outside perspective, which sometimes can feel a bit vulnerable because you know, we've probably all got a bit of an ego or a bit of, you know, I do know what I'm doing. Phil always talks about being An engineer and we're really good at that side of it. And then suddenly you're like, well, actually, I don't really know how to run a business. I don't know how to fix this. I didn't realise those things were wrong. So do you remember any of the types of questions of what he asked you? I probably didn't really know, and this sounds very naive, but probably didn't really understand net and gross margin properly. And he kinda fluffed that out to get me a better understanding of that and had the importance of it. Even questions he was he was kind of asking towards me around I knew I needed to free up my time to to work on things and he kinda put a value on me employing someone to take some of the tasks off my table so that I could see then the value versus the return. So they were just simple we nuggets and don't get me wrong, th some of these this these mentors they think they they know it all but they don't know our specific industry and it's very hard to get someone who knows specifically your industry but it's just the pieces that they're good at if you can take it take it away because when I've thought about things pre this interview podcast, I've talked to a lot of different business owners and they've also planted other nuggets that have got me to where I was at that point and now this has moved it on and like what's the next thing we we we do a bit of work in some peer groups and stuff as well, which brings in more ideas and thoughts and but look it back to the the managed accounts, some people just are good with numbers and literally been able to look into them and pray at you and he would go away and maybe come back to me in a week or two to see if I had the understanding of it. And it wasn't like being back in school because I had a passion for this and I didn't Have to perform for the teacher or the parent teacher meeting or whatever that was coming up. This was just something they needed to get. And you know, it was it was interesting. The school system is very much built around theoretical and people who are really good at solving if X equals this, what is Y? What was an author trying to discern from this text? What we love as business owners is things that are tangible and we can move and we can make shifts on. It's really hard, I imagine, to admit that after you know forty years and I I've been in exactly the same position, that I'm not sure what our net margin is, our gross margin, I'm not sh even sure what these terms mean. What was the first thing you did to sit down and really start to try and mature that business? So if you now, Mark, were going into a business tomorrow and they said, Look, we've been really profitable, we've had some really bad years though, and I'm not sure why. What's the first thing that you would ask them to do to start on this journey? I would probably be looking at the number in between the gross and the net margin to see what's going on there, why it's costing them so much, why they're losing. So again, that's the the simplicity is people just get the calculator out and they work out their gross margin and send their quotes off or do whatever they need to do. However, I would probably look at that middle ground to see why there's such a gap. between their net and their gross to see what needs to be fixed there. That tends to be where the leakage is. So that's basically reviewing like your overheads, isn't it? So all of your cost expenses outside of your raw materials to sell your product. Yeah, because there's very little you can do with the raw materials. You have to buy them, you have to sell them, and that's it. But it's the other things that the next Obviously I'm an accountant so this is like my favourite conversation ever. But I do account reviews with business owners quite frequently. And it's really easy for me to sit there and go, Right, well, you know, look at this, you're spending too much money here. These percentages don't tie up. You need to go and reduce your costs. But how do you actually do that? What what's the practical side of that? Because it's very easy to s for somebody, whether it's a a mentor or a peer or an accountant, to sit there and say, You need to go and reduce your costs. But the the The practical, the reality, the emotional side of doing that is very different. So how did you approach that and what what advice would you give to people who are going through that process or need to go through that process? I'm nearly afraid that we're going to get too too nerdy in this conversation because it's what I ended up doing and going down this path, I started to understand the nominal coding system. And again, Hailey, to to me a new It makes sense. I wouldn't let claim to know as much about it as you do. When you say I started to understand the nominal coding system, we've got this business owner, the face is glazed over. Talk to me about what you did to get to the point of understanding nominal coding. It's a good question because it's somewhat a funny one. I basically asked someone how to find this out and they handed me a report and it had all these numbers on it. versus what it was and what the value was and then I was able to dig into it and go, Well, whoa, why are we spending so much on that? Let's cull that or let's figure that out. Now I suppose it has been expediated in this last while my learning thanks to AI. I've been able to use it as a tool to help me learn it. And a a a funny thing that happened us this year is our our managed accounts, as I say, they're brilliant. They make things seen but this year for some reason and I did spend some time getting fairly frustrated with it and actually chatter maybe my home life wasn't great because it was looking as if we were going to have a terrible year. it just didn't add up. Something was not right. I used AI to analyze the managed accounts, analyzed them, went through them. We were making profit but the managed accounts were saying we weren't But thanks to AI, I eventually figured out that there was a duplicate number in a cell which literally flipped the whole game. So it was just a typo and like that with that learning I've also now used AI to create a a widget so that it it reads my managed accounts and I now have graphs just show me my quarterlies, my monthlies. I can go into customer specific, I can compare months, all that sort of stuff. So and I'm still a feel like I'm still on a journey with that. I'm not fully trusting of it yet. Very recently I kind of compared it to make sure that it wasn't showing me different numbers and it did show something different. Then when I looked at it we had actually adjusted a number so I updated it and then it was live again. Yeah, so that's filling into that and that pipeline's gonna grow where we'll add other aspects into it and I'll potentially share it out to other people in the business. But again, because I'm not an accountant I need to make it simple. So yeah, nominal codes sound scary, but it's literally once you see them, dig into them, they make sense. So there's a few things there. So for clarity, so nominal codes are basically the categories, aren't they, within your accounting software. So things like if you have a cleaning expense, cleaning is a category, or in finance speak, it's a nominal code. You might have equipment or you might have I don't know, accountancy expenses, for example. Th it's those categories that really are nominal codes. So just to get everybody on the same page. Just to go into I think as really small businesses, certainly at the start of my journey, we only really had sales and cost of goods sold. And at the end of the year the accounting would say sales is higher than cost of goods sold by fifteen grand and your employee expenses were seven grand, so you've made eight. I'd think fantastic. And I think similar to Mark, it was only when we got into the weeds when things started to go the wrong way, that we even realized that we should be splitting those down into that individual cleaning expense and into instead of sales, into laptop sales and software sales, and then maybe drill down in software, software, Microsoft software, this, software, that. So I think it's really important for businesses to understand that's the first step is. Just to go into your accounts, it's not big, it's not scary, is a little bit boring. but it gets quite exciting when you see the numbers just to split them down into categories or as you would say, Haley, nominals. Yeah, exactly that. And sometimes I suspect that people don't realise that they can actually do that. I actually do think there's a bit of a downfall on the accountants part. in the world. I don't know where I get a hold up for saying that, but it does make me cross. So there's definitely a gap between accountants that produce year end accounts and accountants that actually help you support your business and know what's going on into it day to day. And People don't realise that it's very, very easy to actually go into software and set up different reporting categories or nominal codes. And it does make a difference because exactly like Mark shared, it just opens your eyes to things and it makes things more visible. It enables you to see trends of what's going on in your business. And then the whole point is you can then take that and actually start to make changes in your business, knowing that the data you've got is. Right. It's a little bit scary about the spreadsheet error. I will just say, if you're using software though, most good softwares nowadays have reports built in that are very reliable. So, Mark, taking it back to your journey, you had a great business, you went into it, COVID hit, things went a little bit wrong, you didn't realise, you then got a bit of a shock when you did get your year-end accounts. You got some outside support that opened your horizon start. probing you and asking questions about different things, you started to get underneath your numbers and look at what's going on in your business. And you you you talked about focusing on overheads. What changes did you make? Can you share that? Was it, you know, was it around staff? Was it around going out to suppliers and get like what were the practical things that actually you did to help improve things? Well just one point I wanted to go back on there before answer that question. most and I believe this is true, most small to medium businesses assume their accountant knows it all because they know the numbers. Haley doesn't know the IT industry, for example, but she knows how the numbers match up. And they're different to Phil wouldn't they claim to knowing exactly how the accountancy industry works. But we all just because an accountant holds the keys to the numbers and submits everything to revenues and different things for you, you kind of assume that they have all that understanding, but the business running aspect of things, believe it or believe it not, unfortunately accountants don't know it all and companies have to kind of realise that that they can't lay all the blame on them for getting the numbers perfect but not helping us get them perfect. I think that's a two way street as well, Mark, because I think the accountant assumes that we understand the numbers they're giving us. And we assume that the accountant understands our business and can see that they were struggling. Whereas I think sometimes the accountant might look at your, you know, one year after COVID numbers and go, Mark, made a ten K loss and assume that you knew you were going to make a ten K loss. And I think some of that is having that communication with an accountant and then working out off the back of that, is this the right accountant for me? You know, the business has matured. I need somebody who's helping me along this journey. Or maybe I don't, maybe I'm gonna engage a mentor, but I need to understand where the accountant ends in their responsibility and how much help they're gonna give us. Yeah, and I th I believe small businesses ask them sorts of questions off accountants. And because accountants have such a wide array of customer bases, they tend to have a a bit of knowledge on the whole thing. But if you get the right mentorship, I I think that brings it to the next level because there really are boots on the ground type people and they have experienced it, they've lived it and and and so forth. I think I would say to that mark, it depends on the account. I can't say quite anymore. Sorry. Yeah, no, I appreciate that and it's it's but it it's just like th th it's true, you know, y no account can know everything but everybody's day to day activities. And so that's where the mentorship from someone who's been in that, whether they be in retail mentorship, IT mentorship or Goods mentorship or whatever, that it it is worth something looking at and here in Ireland the the local enterprise office fund things like that for mentorships where you can get they will introduce you to mentors for a small fee. and funny, I was only looking at it yesterday, there was an email came out about it and they actually have them broken down into sectors as well. So that's of interest, I'm sure there's there's something on the other side of the water too for that. But Haley, to answer your question around how did we fix things after COVID? I suppose we all remember that prices of everything skyrocketed and that's what kind of caught us on the hop where we didn't adjust with that. And I had spent days and days constantly trying to look at these margins to see what was happening, to see where it was coming from. And it wasn't a case of you could go and buy elsewhere to get it cheaper and stuff like that, because it was just globally, it was everything was sliding in the in the wrong direction and we hadn't reacted properly to that. And probably that's a a more challenge. People would understand it very strongly in the retail market because it's tends to be price set type of stuff. And whereas other industries have a have ways of of work on the margins better. but that's what happened and as I say I spent days and days digging into tracking margins, stuck in my office just tracking the margins and things like that. That had to happen. It had to take that work and effort to manage it, to adjust it, but I'm now at a position where I'm confident that I can now just look at the overall number and see that it's good or bad. I love this. So it was a joint process of bringing a mentor in and I think probably just getting those nominals because you're a smart guy. I think everybody who runs a business is smart and all we need to do is have the information broken down enough so that we can see and we can pinpoint on a bit of paper. Because it might be, do you know what I'm making great margins, but I've actually got five members of staff too many. And so I will never be able to make a profit from this business because I've got too many staff or I've got too many company cars or I bought myself the Lamborghini. And stuck it on the expenses. But I think without those nominals, it's so hard to see anything inside your business. But you can't forget me doing these managed accounts is me working on the business, not in the business. look at that, that is now at the stage for me it's becoming challenging trying to keep on top of all that. There's so much going on, so I'm I'm trying to kick on from that. But that's a future journey for us and that's from what we've said here in this whole Podcast, it's all a journey. There's constantly new stuff coming, you're moving along. Never mind AA, you know, it's one tool in the whole big spectrum because we're constantly learning and and thanks to Alexei L podcasts getting this information out to people to to help them with their learning journey and eventually move their business. That person is listening to the podcast now, Mark. They now understand that they need to do their nominals because For me, my thought was that you went through and you coded here are our Dell laptops and here's how much we sold the Dell laptops for. Here are our printers, here are here are our staples, here's our paper. And then once you've not got the nominal codes, then you could look at the margin on each item. But that might not be right. No, for the for the the gross margins on products, it was more granular than that. It was literally product level. the nominals didn't really come into that equation and maybe it's because we have such a spread of products that we we deal in and but it literally was going down through the percentages on daily basis to see where was the slippage. And like on that it can be like say for example, inks and toners is something that we do and if they fail into the same nominal inks and toners, But some brands had some very massive sways than others. So hiding in a nominal, it wouldn't have shown up. We literally had to go down and see the individuals and it was it look at it, it was all on a my our account system. so you could highlight it and it could flag it and and things like that, but it was as granular as that, and that's why it was lock the door, leave me alone type of process. And the reality is to get to the level of detail where you understand the profitability either by product or by service level. There is a lot of work behind it to get to that point because even having a you know great categories, categorising things in a more detailed way than just sales and costs, it it still won't necessarily give you that level of detail. So like for example in my business or in Phil's business, it's like profit by client based on the service you're giving, but you're giving different services to different clients. So how do you how do you find that? And it is a big piece of work to do that and to understand it. It is like you say going one by one, product by product, client by client. But there's something in all of this. So you can have all of that information and all of that data. But the reality is you there's only like probably three or four different ways you can actually influence your numbers. You either increase your increase what you're selling it for, you pay less for what you're buying in. And just let's just keep it simple on those two things. So when you were going through and you said, Right, we're not making enough money, like which av avenue did you take? Was it a mix of those? Did you put all your prices up for everything? Did you do it, you know, was it cherry picking? I don't know. Yeah, no, but it was a c it was a cost price increase that snuck in on us and probably the worst people to price stuff is the owners because they're too afraid of what the customer's going to say, whereas some of the other team were i i within here were able to do some analysis on that and figure out that, you know, we were actually behind the curve, that everybody else was way more expensive and we were too cheap. When someone comes come to me and ask me how much we're going to charge something, maybe they'll go, look at the same as last price because I don't want to have a discussion with them. So this was actually more than just a a two-pronged attack. So you started off categorizing, getting the nominals in place, but then your real big work was to get yourself out of the business for say maybe an hour a day and to go through right, we sold this pencil case at this much, maybe not a pencil case. We bought it In at this much, where was our margin? We sold this, we bought it, and you went through each item and started to say, god, this has gone up massively, but we're still selling it for the same price. Then you managed to identify from probably your staff that it was possible to give that price increase. How do things now look today, Mark? in hindsight, if I had had my managed accounts in place by then, this wouldn't have been an issue. Because we we would have known, we would have been aware It was a year too late when we kinda came aware of it and even at that year it was obviously going to take us maybe it took us the guts of six months to react to it. thankfully we're here today. We did, we we fixed it and and got it resolved. The ability to know my margins at aka having a set of managed accounts has been a bit of a game changer, even as I say wanting to employ somebody I now understand through the trends of my management. Accounts that they can afford to add an additional person to the team because I know we're making the revenue to cover that, and the scope or the aspect of what they're going to bring is going to obviously replace it and so forth. So, again, it's giving me confidence that we're doing the right thing and giving me confidence that the future is possible. Yeah, and I think you summed it up there. So, knowing your numbers or having management information is not actually about the accounts, it's about the ability to make decisions, and that's the bit that sometimes people get. realize that they you know because they just think it's numbers and it's boring but actually it's that insight and that confidence to make those decisions and make those changes that actually make a big difference. And look at it it can be great to see them but you do also have to be conscious that you know, SMBs and that, you know, the the the the smart or the managed accounts might look great and they might do the fill and go and buy a Lamborghini or something like that with based on the managed accounts. But you need to grow a bit of a trend in them to see how is it going to work. It's you know one quarter versus another quarter annually, all that sort of stuff. So your first year of managed accounts is going to look good, your second year is going look better, but once you have a third and fourth year all of a sudden they're growing comparing and you're able to to see trends and and things like that and know that you're doing the right thing. I think that you actually start to enjoy it because you can look back on the last three quarters compared to this quarter and you can immediately nail down what's gone wrong or what's gone right? Where have we improved? and I think for us in in the IT business we we mainly deal with it off you know support contracts to customers. Has that number gone up or gone down? Has it been artificially inflated because I had this big project Or I had this big thing come in. And actually, although the numbers look better, the trends are going in the wrong direction, or vice versa. I I I know that I don't know the IT industry really, really well, but I probably 99% confidently can say that if you're an IT business and you don't have management accounts, you haven't really got a clue what's going on in your business. it's too intricate with all of your different services and the recharges and all that. You just you just you just don't know. And if you're doing well, it's by look rather than actually you know you're doing well. In my opinion. Yeah and funny you say that, Haley. My myself and Phil are in a a mentoring group together and there's another set of numbers that they start to toggle with, which they term smart numbers, and it's given a different dive into the same sort of information. And it brings what you're basically saying, it's bringing that to our visibility now. That's and I think you would agree with me here, Phil, like it took us now two years for those numbers to really add up and make sense to us and now we know what targets we need, where things is going wrong, that general health but they're no good in terms of they're not specific enough for the overall business but just in terms of the the growth aspect. It's like the gym, that you start going to the gym and it's a grind and it's hard work and you don't see any results. But then a couple of months in you might see that you can complete a 2K run, or there's some time and you think, god, this is working. You what this is actually really good for me. And you start to enjoy it off the back of the results. I know some people that have then gone on to do high roxes or all different kinds of events off the back of that, but it all starts at that initial, I'm gonna go on the treadmill and start walking, or I'm gonna stop every day or every two days. And I'm just gonna look through my numbers and look at what have we sold, what have we bought, what have we spent money on. I'm just gonna start categorizing those and just start to get a feel. And you do then enjoy it once you've got those numbers down. Yeah, look at if you're consistent and persistent, it all pays off. I love that. I think it's just a shame that there's a lot of accountants out there that don't you know, that are those year end they just give you the compliance, here's your numbers, here's the tax that you've got to pay. And it and it's such a shame because they whilst they it is a two way street, I agree with both of you on that. You can't possibly know everything, you know, that's going on in somebody's business. Y you know, they're you're in it, you're living it. But I do think that for the most part, a lot of them can do a lot more than they do. And look at Haley, you're probably a bit unique, hence why you're sitting on this podcast, you're trying to mentor, you're trying to encourage and stuff like that. And that's a thing, that's that's it. And the truth is that you can tell a huge amount about a business by the maturity of the numbers. And it feels like we came out from school and we managed to ditch all of that boring paperwork. And I think it's a transition in our minds to get back to it and to say actually this is enjoyable because it's tangible, because there's real money, there are real people behind these numbers. This isn't a theoretical problem, this is my business, and I'm gonna spend that 40 minutes a day, that 30 minutes a day going through and drilling out the numbers. And then, as you say, once you've got patterns, or if you can go backwards on it and look over six months, you can immediately say, This is a terrible month because this number's gone up hugely. Why have our cleaning costs suddenly jumped up from three grand to seven grand rather than saying why have our overheads gone up by four thousand pounds? God, the accountant should tell me later. We can look at trends to say some people are telling me that we're gonna be very busy in this month and I can now go back and look at the last two to three years of those months and see that what they're saying is true or it's fact or actually they're Just bluffing me, but it's for me it's important. But it's personal, isn't it? It's you like people that run if it's your business, even if you know you can be at arm's length from it or can separate it, the truth is it it's so entwined in your life, you it like you can't not get to grips with it, really. And if you're a business and you're you know, you're thinking, well, actually I'd like to sell in five years or ten years or eventually. If you don't have, as Phil put it, maturity in numbers, if you don't have management accounts every month, if you don't you're not gonna get the optimal price for your business. So it it's all feeding in to good things. Same with investment. If you want to get outside investment into your business, if you don't have this information and this structure in place, you're just not gonna get it. So to go on Mark's journey, step one, understand that you don't really know your numbers. Step two I think is probably as simple as just speak to your accountant and say, I want to go on this journey, can you come on it with me? And if not go out there, find a mentor And then start drilling down your numbers. I mean, even if you skip the accountant and the mentor, I think what you said, Mark, about just getting the numbers every day and just going through them and just looking at the margin on each individual item and just trying to work out: was this good, was this bad, is this where I want to be? Is a phenomenal place to start. And I really believe that anybody who starts that journey. will enjoy it so much that they will just start to continue on it and just get more and more nitty-gritty into it. If somebody's really enjoyed speaking to you today or listening to you today, Mark, how would they get in contact with you? And who is it that you'd love to speak to? Yeah well look at if they want to reach out then contact me on LinkedIn simple as Mark McCardle with the C. And my email address Mark at McArdles C A R D L E S dot A E. We generally cover the northeast area of Ireland, so any businesses that are looking to have their IT managed, we manage it. And even down to supplying them with business supplies and so forth, we do all that. So yeah, great to get talking with anybody in that those sectors.