Foreign.

Welcome to luminaries.

In our regular show, we've been talking about listener questions and answers.

So today in Luminaries, we're going to take a step back and look at news trends that are current in the world of consulting here in early March, a follow up to our our last quarterly look at the consulting news.

Ian, what are we talking about today?

Well, Mike, we've got big news happening in the world that's also having an impact in the world of consulting.

So first of all, we're going to look at some of the big changes that are underway in the changing political landscape, especially in the US Some consulting firms are already seeing some potential impact and lots of consulting firms are also trying to keep the business as usual.

So we'll take a quick look at that.

We're going to continue with this topic of volatility and take a look at the role that business risks are playing in the consulting world today and how that's playing out.

Right.

So two potentially dark and slightly stressful topics there.

We've got something optimistic and uplifting for our final topic here.

We've been looking into news about consulting careers and we're going to talk about consulting as a destination for people who've already made a start in another career, the pitfalls and also the unexpected benefits.

So if that's you, stick around.

So, Mike, let's get started.

We're going to try and find out what people in the consulting industry are making of recent events in Washington, D.C.

it seems like there have been one or two things happening in the world of the federal administration in the last couple of weeks, last couple of months.

Has any of it hit the wires of the consulting news feeds just yet?

Well, you know, we're so used to changes in administration here that consulting goes on more and more pretty much without change, given a change in administration.

But maybe not this time.

I think the big news for consulting firms is that major consulting firms stand to lose billions in revenue from potential cuts to US Government contracts.

So I know this is news to some people, but there's a Department of Government Efficiency doge established by the Trump administration that is targeting, okay, we hear lots of big numbers thrown around, but for consultants, and I'm doing this tongue in cheek, I'm sure you all hear targeting 65 billion in federal consulting spending for reduction.

So this actually translates into a tangible threat to revenue streams for some of the world's largest consulting firms.

So, you know, you think how much to do, right?

Yeah.

How much and who's going to potentially lose out Here, what does it look like?

Well, top consultancies including Accenture, BCG, Deloitte, EY Guidehouse, KPMG, McKinsey collectively earned over 18 billion from, from government contracts, up from 5 billion a decade ago.

So this has been no small growth.

And of course it affects everybody differently.

Just even the trends over the last several years have been very differently.

In 2024, Deloitte had 3 billion in contracts with the US government.

Booz Allen Hamilton received 9 billion from federal government in the last fiscal year.

McKinsey has actually seen some of this kind of forecasted for them as prime contractor.

Their revenue from federal contract dropped significantly from 54.9 million in 2023 or dropped to, sorry, 54.9 million in 2023.

And you're thinking, well that sounds pretty good.

But in previous years it had peaked at 142 million.

So you know, other people are doing it now.

Somebody like BCG has seen it going the other way.

In 2018, theirs was 104 million.

In 2023, 343 million.

And these are, these are firms doing kind of single figure tens to low teens of global revenues.

This is a big chunk like if you had to forecast to take for a 2, 3, 4% revenue hit in the current year, like it's not going to put any of these firms out of business, but that's going to be concentrated in the hands of a few partners and a few teams who are really going to feel the heat, I think.

Yeah, I remember having a bad, you know, a bad project and our partner saying, you cost every one of us a Lexus.

We're going a lot bigger than Lexus on this project.

Oh yeah, Tesla maybe.

Topical, Too much too soon.

And even if you're not at one of those big names, your work may well exist in the slipstream of some of the big initiatives that the big strategy firms and the big transformational firms are involved in.

And whatever size your employer is, if you've got any exposure to publicly funded activity as part of your consulting business, especially in the US then this is going to be a volatile couple of years.

Right, Mike?

Yeah, as the Chinese would say, interesting times.

Right, Right.

Yeah.

And, and this is all part of a larger effort by the Trump administration to reduce government spending by $2 trillion.

It's interesting.

Like one of the articles I was reading on this talked about, well, part of this is a move from traditional consulting services towards AI driven solutions.

And they were, you know, they were holding up palantir as an AI solutions company.

That's had big federal revenues here, 45% year over year by quarter 4, 20, 24.

And if you're a Palantir investor, you know this month that even Palantir's seeing some big changes.

So anybody having fun, go look up that stock for the last month or two.

Right.

So we've got changes in the pattern of demand, which I've already heard some of my clients talking about, especially the ones that have got work going on in the public sector, like they're expecting to see changes.

We've also got changes in some of the things that you have to do or be seen to do in order to be part of the federal kind of funding stream.

So, for example, there have been some different responses to this.

There's a big trend for people at the top of the federal government to take away or to silence or to delete some of the diversity and equity and inclusion reporting that's been going on.

KPMG has gone along with that.

They've deleted years of diversity, equity and inclusion reports from their website, aligning with the president's policies.

McKinsey, on the other hand, is an example of a firm that's tried to hang on to its diversity goals and sees its profile with potential recruits of a certain profile as being more important and more durable than its profile with the political kind of tendencies of the current administration.

It's really a really strange time that we live in that these kind of big quasi political statements are happening at the tops of consulting firms.

And it'll be, like we said before, Mike, an interesting couple of years, right?

Oh, absolutely.

Thankfully, these are not dark times everywhere, or at least not for consulting everywhere.

We're seeing a nice resurgence in UK consulting demand here, especially advisory services in AI, of course, data cloud services, cyber technology, risk management, and all of the big four firms appear to be gearing up for increased hiring to meet demand, according to the Financial Times there.

Yeah, and I mean, the Financial Times has been a skeptic about the consulting industry plenty of times in the past.

So I kind of rate their estimation that there is some upward signs in the industry as well.

So that's good.

Not only the uk, the Gulf states, the Gulf of Arabia consultancy services are set to grow there.

We've seen significant growth driven by diversification away from oil.

And major consulting firms have been helping to facilitate some of that national governments being primary clients.

So if you've got exposure to national governments in the Gulf region and you're doing better, probably than if you've got exposure to the federal government in Washington right now.

These are turbulent times, Mike, and consulting is surely affected by this turbulence just as we're affected by other things that have happened in the world.

And it might be interesting for us all to get a moment to think about that and think about what it means for the work that we do and the way that we do it.

As we're working on this week, we noticed an article on a potential growth in the risk consulting category, according to an analysis by Source Global Research, a great source for news and trends in consulting generally.

Ian, tell us a little bit about what they were pointing out, this fascinating article.

Well, I'll give an unpaid plug for Source Global Research.

I've been using them as a sort of intelligent source for what's happening in the consulting industry for years and years.

And their blog posts are really good.

They're trying to work at a very high level, talking about really big categories and really big trends in consulting.

And when they talk about risk consulting, they're mainly talking about the whole category of work that is done principally by strategy firms and IT firms, about preparedness and about cyber security and about contingency planning and business continuity.

And this whole category of business risks is a consulting industry in itself.

If that's part of the industry where you're at, then Source Global Research says that there are pretty good times for you coming.

You get to profit a little bit from all the volatility that we talked about in the first third of the show.

There's been slower growth in this category, but risk services are set to grow because of pressures on their clients and because of the advanced possibilities that there are now in risk management and security.

The risks are complex, involving new skills and technology, particularly AI, the kind of flavor of right now.

And there's a surge in demand for getting outside help in companies and organizations to think about what risks look like.

And lots of companies say that they're planning to increase their usage.

And Mike, that gets me thinking as well about folks who are probably more likely part of our regular listenership, which is people who are not risk consulting specialists, but people doing consulting work for their clients for which there might now be an added kind of risk dimension or a risk flavor given the volatility of the world situation.

Right.

Yeah, it really is, I think that anybody that has anything to do with decision making under uncertainty, which for most of us and most of our clients is pretty much all of us clients are looking at the potential impact on long term change programs and people are talking about the poly crisis risk.

How do you do risk Management in poly crisis, for example.

Now there's this interplay between we're still leftovers of COVID 19, the war in Ukraine, energy, cost of living, climate crises.

It's clear that not only these different crises and not only national, as we were talking a minute ago, but global environment impacts everybody and in different and unpredictable ways.

So how do we get our arms around this and how do we do it in a way that allows us, I mean this market had kind of really separated along the way from kind of advice, high level advice giving to, you know, more, if you would, offshore technical, kind of more lower rate consulting.

And now I think it's coming back together again.

Tools and how tools are used and where this inserts itself in the process, depending on the clients you already have or the ones you could acquire here.

Right?

And certainly if you're doing consulting work that involves thinking about long term time horizons, thinking about work that influences big investments that your clients are making, but big in terms of long term, big in terms of dollar investment.

If you're talking about doing any kind of consulting work that has a big cube of data involved and large amounts of the work that we all do in our different specialties now have big chunks of data with all of the security and integrity questions that go around with that, I think we're going to see our, our corporate clients, big and medium sized and possibly even small, asking all of us consultants questions about continuity, about security, about contingency planning.

I can see changes happening at the HQ level that might influence, for example, the way clients procure services.

So our ability to cover certain kinds of security and continuity risks might become a question when we're having much more mundane things transacted via the procurement facility that in the past have asked us much more mundane questions about safety or diversity or the environment that we've now got used to answering.

We're probably going to have a new set of questions coming along.

Right?

Right.

Well, Ian, you said in the intro that the first two stories are perhaps a bit dark and unsettling.

So maybe it's time to talk about something a little bit more uplifting.

People who are successful late starters in consulting.

Right, Mike, this is one of these funny moments when podcast life intersects with real life.

Just a couple of days I took a call from a friend of one of my, one of my kids who is thinking about a early to mid career change into consulting.

And I'm one of those parents that kids give the phone number out for.

When people have those kind of questions on their minds and at the same time, preparing for this episode, you and I had found an article in the Financial Times, them again talking about a trend in consulting recruitment, which is, to be honest, is not a brand new trend.

This has been a feature of consulting hiring patterns forever and ever, but it's been a feature this year.

The headline says what's on the journalist's mind here.

The headline says variety of work draws Mid Career movers into Consulting.

Consultants hired from other sectors says the sub headline bring valuable insider knowledge on what Clients really want.

And it's an interesting article.

And in the spirit of most feature journalism these days, it's a storytelling piece.

It's got some vignettes from lives of people who've made the jump and how they were feeling and what they were anxious about before they came into consulting, what they disliked a little about their regular jobs that brought them here and what opportunities they're finding and what challenges they're facing.

And Mike, I think some of them have found that it can be easy and comfortable.

Right.

If there's a connection between the consulting way of doing business and how you're currently doing your work, that can be a happy time.

It really can be.

It seems that this overlap between consulting, problem solving and other ways of doing business, when there is a big overlap, for example, coming out of medicine.

Yeah, that is kind of a natural fit.

So you were commenting and I think in answer to your, one of the kids friends there, maybe, maybe this has been going on for a while.

Right, right, it has.

And a friend of a family member who is a doctor in the NHS who's thinking of moving along.

I'm not going to say hello to them in case it outs them, but if you're listening, you know who you are.

It was great to talk to you the other day.

There are some really interesting overlaps.

There are some big challenges and some big differences.

But like you say, Matt, one of the overlaps is being good at spotting and hypothesizing about and investigating and then acting on problems and seeing working life as a series of problems to solve.

I remember when I've been hiring consultants that that transferable problem solving skill, or the nucleus of it, is one of the key things that I'm looking for when I'm hiring.

It's certainly one of the key things that we try and augment in people's skill set as they go through life in consulting.

It's funny, I remember now this goes back, back, I want to say, maybe five years ago, a little bit better than that.

But having a class of new joiners to a consultancy that we were working with.

And one of them being, you know, freshly right out of medical school.

And I kind of asked at a break, I thought, that's fascinating.

Were you thinking about consulting when you started med school?

Because you've obviously built up a great deal of skills here, but wouldn't have been the first job that I would have thought you'd have gone for.

And she said, oh, oh, actually I wasn't thinking about consulting at all.

I was looking for this problem solving overlap and the desire to do good and everything.

She said, I just found out I really didn't like being around sick people.

There you go.

Well, consulting is great as long as you don't mind being around A anxious overachievers who are your colleagues and B anxious people with big budgets who are trying to get by who are your clients.

Right, right, right.

Well, there is sometimes this overlap of problem solving skills, but there are differences as well.

Yeah, Mike, I think that there's a key difference and the article expressed a key difference between the way that some people think and write and the way that consultants have to learn to think and write.

I don't think it's unique to consultants, but we certainly learn a very persuasion oriented, a very, you might say, didactic approach to thinking and writing.

And we're trying to be persuasive and we're trying to get to a point and get to an action.

Anytime we're putting complex data together, we learn the skill of storytelling, we learn the skill of making deliverables.

For some people, I think that will come naturally.

For some people, that feels like a very, very different way to go about writing.

And it's an interesting test.

I think if you are contemplating and move into consulting, look at the kind of things that you write, look at the things that you produce and think about how you got there.

If you're hiring somebody from a non consulting occupation who is a potential lateral hire, it's a really fascinating thing to ask them to produce something, to synthesize or to organize information.

Not so that they get it perfect, but we can see if they've got that instinct for thinking about the audience and thinking about the point.

Right, right.

My maybe very rosy view here, Mike, is I'm looking back to the people I've seen who have successfully moved sideways into consulting mid career and I look at the ones who were successful and I think, ah, you were one of us all along.

You know, you were a consultant just waiting to have the door open for you.

Because I think that was a little bit my story as well.

All of a sudden I stepped in.

I thought, ah, okay, this turns out to be fun and you can get paid for it.

I didn't realize.

So your attitude to writing and your attitude to data, I think is one of the things that can set you apart as a potential consultant.

Right.

And I think some things that I found that have worked really well for some of these people making these moves kind of into consulting from a different thing.

One person summed it up by saying, you know, in industry, looking back, you know, I might have a year of experience five times over the course of five years in consulting, I usually have five years experience every year.

And so there is a difference in pace.

Now, I might argue that at least in some points of industry right now, that gap is getting closer.

But in some places, there still are places where you're kind of out there and it's a bit more of the same thing.

Consulting less likely to be so.

Right.

Yeah.

And maybe then there's two aspects of pace.

One is the rate at which information is firing at you and the rate at which you're meant to process it and produce deliverables, and how late you're meant to work to do that.

We'll come to that in a second.

The other one is just like you say, the pace at which projects and initiatives come and go.

And I think that's one of the big appeals.

Right.

Again, people who are successful in consulting are people who are easily bored.

And we like the fact that the thing I'm doing now, I'll have done it in six weeks or six months or maybe a year, and then something totally new will come along.

And that, that pace, that rapid turnover of work in front of us is, if you like it, it's a really, really big part of what makes consulting fun.

I think the other thing on my mind here, Mike, and it was picked up a bit in the article, is what does it take to be an expert?

And maybe again, people who've built up a couple of years or three or four years worth of expertise of some kind are going to perhaps hope that travels with them in consulting.

What do you think?

Well, it's interesting because you hear this so often, that you've built this great expertise and you can now go out on your own and sell that expertise.

But I think some people would be surprised, finding it's a little bit hard to get full credit for your expertise.

It's not going to.

It's like changing schools.

Not all your credits transfer sometimes.

Right.

And I think I was trying to set this expectation a little bit to this person I was talking to the other day, trying to say, if you're counting on that as your professional stock in trade, it could well be a big disappointment.

Never mind doctors.

I've met people who've done, who've joined firms with a PhD in something or a master's in something, and they really want for the project to come along that allows them to flex all of their postgrad school and all of their great skills.

And you know what?

You might go half a career and never see sign of anything that you ever studied.

So I think if that's a big part of your identity, you have to think twice about what kind of consulting firm you end up at.

I think if you end up with a fresh attitude to what your expertise is and you're interested in and open to new ways of growing, maybe not expertise, but at least growing some knowledge and some wisdom, then I think it's going to be okay.

Probably the people who are most likely to be experts are the people who are still six months into their career in consulting.

Everybody else is learning year by year how little of an expert they really are.

Yeah, it's a great point, Ian.

It is a great point.

I love looking out at some of the new joiners now going, my God, I'm sure glad I got into this business back in the days when they would still take me with some real wizards coming in.

And thank goodness I have looked at.

Some wizards newly hired in Dakota.

In fact, I remember saying this about one very, very bumptious new hire to the partner in charge of their team.

I said, she's really good.

You better promote her now while she still knows everything.

Yeah, the partner took it in good heart.

He knew what I was talking about.

There is some of that, too.

Yes, indeed.

Oh, gosh.

I think we're talking about expertise transferring, but there are, as we said, with problem solving and there are other transferring preferable skills that, that you develop outside and that are going to come in incredibly handy in consulting.

One of those, your ability to read and understand an organization.

So I think people get this in business oftentimes in various kinds of business.

Now, consultants might call that stakeholder management, but some of the folks I think, coming into consulting and people who are vitally important in consulting, very analytical ones, think of that as perhaps a little bit of a dark art.

Yeah.

For many consultants, that's bread and butter.

Your soft skills, your ability to read an organization and read a team and participate in a kind of low Key way.

But like you say, Mike, for some people who come in at the analytical end of the profession, what wouldn't I give sometimes for somebody who's got those stakeholder and people skills to add a little bit of that to some of the consulting projects that we see going on?

Huge.

Speaking of soft skills, not so much skills, there's a certain kind of knowledge, there's a certain kind of attitude that is sometimes worth hiring in.

And we talked about this in our last Q and A.

Actually, if you're a lateral hire from the corporate world, from a company or an organization that has procured advice from consultants, then you've got the big potential benefit of having a bit of empathy for the client, of knowing a little bit about how their world is, understanding how the client thinks and how the client works.

Again, Mike, is a dark art for many consultants.

They have to work really hard at it.

And actually knowing a bit, not just how contracts are procured or how IT stuff is done, but just having an instinct for how organizations function and how people and teams react and how they make decisions can be really, really useful as an addition to a consulting team.

Absolutely.

Initial relationships as well, within an industry, within a business, as well as that understanding of the differences that make a difference in how they work.

So nice.

Now there's a lot of benefits as well.

You know, the benefits of intellectual freedom, if you will.

I think all of us love that in consulting.

But there are challenges as well to people moving mid career.

Right.

It's funny, the one I'm thinking of right now is sort of the flip side of having good organizational and political skills.

I think if you know how an organization is, especially an organization that's shaped like consulting, like if you've been in a virtual team and you've spent time working at home on your desk, in your apartment with a laptop, and you've been on teams calls, that kind of environment is the way consulting is now.

Lots of people doing lots of regular jobs still don't work in that environment.

If you work out in the world with customers, if you work in a factory, if you work in a hospital, if you work in any kind of organization where you're normally present in order to do the work and the work is tangible and in front of you, it's going to feel different in consulting.

And I'm mentioning that because it's hard to get experience now when you're a mid career hire, you've done all of your gap years and all your vacation breaks, your opportunities to sort of dip your toe in the water working environment and feel what it feels like are not so available to you.

And it's maybe a little harder to convince a potential consulting firm as an employer that you will fit in and work and be successful in the environment.

Now, maybe I'm talking about a minority of people, maybe the majority of people already now have spent their lives on teams and zoom and putting numbers into Google documents and seeing the results come out.

But if you've never been there, it's kind of hard to explain what it's going to feel like.

Yeah, it's a great point, Ian.

And I think it's interesting that as you say, some of that has now overlapped, I think, from other careers and consulting.

Same thing, I think for another traditional challenge of consulting, that's work life balance and the kind of toll it takes on somebody that also has a caring role as part of their life.

But I do think that, as we've said just then about how you do work, that also, that pressure and that pace, probably depending on where you're coming from, may not be new to you either.

It's just definitely going to be there in consulting.

Yeah, for sure.

It's a question that lots of potential new hires will have.

It's a more complicated question because you've got to calibrate it with what you already know, what you've already experienced when you're a lateral hire.

Right.

So, Mike, besides figuring out what the work life balance is going to be like, besides figuring out what the working environment is going to be like, what do you think we can do if somebody's interested?

If it's not so easy, you haven't got college vacations anymore to go and get work experience.

What do you think people can do if they're interested?

Well, I think a great idea is to go ahead and try the career on, but you could probably do it right where you are to begin with.

Try being like a consultant there.

Wherever you find yourself in the corporate world or in the business world, you know, for example, take part in a change program inside your organization.

Take part in a big problem solving piece that has a tighter deadline and is really looking for a so what in terms of business impact and results, I think those kinds of things really, you can start to simulate that.

And a lot of us, I think there have been books written about how we're really all salespeople, how we're really all negotiators.

I think in all of corporate life there's a huge need for consulting skills across job roles.

So you can try Some of this on right where you are, you absolutely can.

It's great advice.

And that was in the article as well.

I think of all of the vignettes and the little tips that they put together.

That was a really, really good one.

Try the career and the incentives and the attitude and the mindset on first.

And it's a great way to learn.

Mike, we could probably do a whole episode about this.

I can think of some great interviews that we might be able to have as well.

So maybe we can come back to this for a full episode and not just shelter it here for the luminaries.

There you go.

It's a great idea.

So, Ian, we talked about trends and potential seismic changes in the business landscape and also career changes that can be impactful on the firm level.

How about takeaways from all of this for you?

Well, I'm sitting here thinking about the big picture.

Trends in changes in consulting expenditure, changes in the political landscape.

I think it's really important to look at overall trends to understand the context not only for ourselves in our consulting businesses, but also because our clients are all in the same context.

I'm.

I don't think there's one monolithic market for consulting.

I don't think any of our sources that we talked about today think that either.

But it is worth bearing in mind that although the numbers are large, there's not really one big marketplace in that way.

So the risks and changes in the way they're going to play out is going to vary hugely according to the kind of consulting that you do and who your specific clients are.

There are going to be some surprising and counterintuitive effects in parts of consulting that we haven't thought of, I think.

But remember, kicking off a consulting project is a great time to sit down with our clients and look afresh their business context and ask what's changing?

Because one day soon the changing world around us is going to be part of the answer to that question.

And we can at least help our clients, I think, to feel confident that the decisions that they're making today with our advice are likely to be the right ones when they're looking back a year or two in the future.

I think that's a great idea.

I mean, I think one of the most important things I would say, and I remember if we've gone through massive changes in the past, is to say every once in a while it's time to eat our own dog food.

It's time to practice some of our skills on ourselves, not just on our clients, but I think, I think it's a great point that you make, Ian, that anytime you're kicking off a project is a great time to do that with our clients.

And anytime there's this kind of magnitude of change going on around us is a great time to do that with ourselves as well.

Now, Ian, we also talked about not just these seismic changes, but we also talked about this idea about changing mid career.

Anything from that that you pulled out?

Well, it's interesting that the article and most of our conversation, I think was aimed at what kind of advice would you give to somebody who's thinking of making the move?

Right.

I wanted to think about this from the perspective of the hiring leader in the consulting firm.

We could ask ourselves this question.

What can I or we do to help our experienced lateral hires to integrate into our teams?

Because it is tough for them.

They have many things that kind of help them hit the ground running.

Kinds of knowledge and kinds of experience.

But in many ways they're in a totally new environment.

Also, what and how can we learn from them?

I did say that lots of lateral hires will find that their technical or domain knowledge kind of has to be set on a, on a jar in a shelf for a while because you might not get to use it.

But maybe there's something that we can learn that they can share with the rest of the team.

And if they've come from the world outside consulting, these are often really well connected people with super valuable networks.

And it's always good advice, I think, to stick around somebody who's networking their way into a new job and learn from the connections that they make and the people that they call.

So I think there's lots for a hiring leader to learn as well as lots for the new hires themselves to think about.

Yeah, absolutely agree with you, Ian.

And a way to make this a much better situation for your team and for these individuals working together.

I mean pairing folks up together that bring the complementary skills.

And know how I make this rather than everybody out there playing the sink or swim game and seeing who survives.

It's interesting as we, anytime we do a reflection over these seismic changes, I'm reminded as I have it, I think this is just that having gone through a number of them over and over, I remind myself the more things change, the more they stay the same.

Right?

Only different.

And that we don't throw out the law of gravity each time.

It's not everything is completely different.

There are fundamentals that we pull through and we notice the differences that make a difference or we work to figure those out in the context of, as you were saying, the context of our clients, in the context of the work we do, in the context of changing technology and people and processes and those things here.

Now, one thing that still holds true, that I don't think has changed.

I've often said that consulting is great in really good times.

Rising tide floats all boats.

It's really great in bad times.

Some people think counter to that, but I've often found that is a fabulous time to be in consulting because people have real problems.

2021 was a great year for most consultants.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Boy, I'm looking back to 2007, 8, 9.

I'm looking back to some of the 90s and the tech bubble and thinking, wow, this was great time.

So once again, I think if everything's flat, it's good to have a side gig.

But for right now it's a target rich environment.

Yeah, excellent.

No need to go looking for work at Blockbusters because the Blockbuster doesn't exist anymore.

No need to go busking, no need to even set up a podcast because Mike and I, we've got that covered for you.

Stick with the knitting, it's going to be fine.

Well, Blockbuster is a great example, Ian.

I remember them looking down their nose at a proposal from an early company called Netflix and thinking, netflix, what would we want to have any interest in that for?

And had a chance to buy them for pennies on the millions and blew it off in their heyday.

Well, there you go.

A little historical perspective helps us all.

Mike, it's been really good fun talking about.

Even though we've been talking about some of the tough stuff, it's been really interesting to chat through the consequences and talk through the implications of the different situations that people are in.

I think we're going to have a great time.

Next time we're together on the luminaries.

We'll see you all then.