Why CEO’s Need to be Selling

Running your sales program with a conversation-first approach delivers needed information to you. Naturally, this is important to your sales department. After all, utilizing a conversation at the beginning of the sales process tells your sales team almost automatically if it’s worthwhile to have another conversation.

So, why should a CEO be selling when he has salespeople to do that job? Because there’s important information a savvy CEO can glean from having conversations with prospects. Information about how things are changing for prospective companies due to competition or demand for their products, about new leadership within their companies, and about the adjustments prospective buyers have had to make to meet the challenges of impactful events — like this pandemic. In these preliminary conversations, a CEO can truly keep his finger on the pulse of prospective buyers and detect how his own company’s product, service, or even sales message might need to be changed to better meet buyers’ needs.

In this podcast, Chris will also explain his take on a different result that has surfaced due to the pandemic. He begins with, “There’s a bad, bad disease in our economy, and it’s called commuting.” Listen while Chris expounds on his conclusion that the massive collapse of the commute economy is real — and that the effects of it have huge economic value.

Chris Beall (00:35):

So you have this issue that has to be solved, but it’s very rare that the company’s issue of staying in business is actually tied tightly to individual rep’s need to make the number. Where that came from was as a way of assessing performance within the territory that had been granted, is actually a way to buy the territory. That is, if I make my number this year or exceed my number, then I get the territory for next year and I get a bigger number. Why do I get a bigger number? It’s assumed it’s easier to grow a territory than it is to [crosstalk 00:01:09].

So it was actually a purchasing mechanism where this independent business person called the sales rep, purchases the territory in addition to enough compensation for their own business to stay alive, and they do it through “performance” by making the number. So there’s an agreement that this territory is worth selling to you if you bring this much revenue.

Then maybe in clever schemes, some of it has to come from this product and some from this product, then you put all these cool features in the comp plan, so to speak, but none of those features actually have to do with solving real customer problems. The assumption is, the product solves the problem, and caveat emptor, buyer beware. Buyer beware doesn’t work very well in the B2B world where the buyer is increasingly less expert than the seller because products are increasingly complex and interdependent. So the buyer must truly be able to trust the seller. And when the seller corrupts out and says, “I’d rather make the number than tell the truth,” problems happen. And they are problems, not for the seller, they’re problems for the business, the buying business, and the selling business. The seller might make out, the person might make out.

It’s one of those things that as sales management and as business management, I think we should be acutely aware of. And it’s one of the reasons, by the way, I think CEOs should sell. We could do a whole episode on that. Somebody once asked me, “Why do you sell so much? Why do you spend hours a day on the frontline selling? I assign myself a kind of a soft quota. It doesn’t have anything to do with my compensation, probably does actually in some subtle way having to do with stock options and God knows what, but my quota is about $6 million a year last year. And this year it’s maybe $7 million and change. I’ve got a lot of other things going on. Why do I do that? I mean, isn’t it distracting me from the core of the business, which is … I don’t know what it is because I’m not that good of a CEO.

I guess sitting around and talking to people, I don’t know, doing stuff like this.

Corey Frank (03:04):

Staring at spreadsheets. Yeah, exactly.

Chris Beall (03:05):

Staring at spreadsheets. Yeah. I’m pretty fast on spreadsheets. The reason I do is, a business fundamentally is a means of solving problems for others that are inconvenient or too expensive to solve for themselves. That’s the purpose of the business. And unless you’re hearing the problems with your own ears and it’s coming into your own brain, very, very hard to integrate the information about your customers as it changes over time. And it changes over time even if nothing happens. It’s obvious. Competitors show up, your customer’s businesses change, innovations show up or substitutes are happening, there may be some other way of doing the job. Who knows what it is? You can have a pandemic show up. I know that sounds almost impossible, but what if the whole world kind of went home overnight? Well, then what?

So how do you learn as a CEO unless you’re out there selling? And the CEO has a real advantage as a seller. They can sell honestly. It’s really easy to sell honestly as the CEO because you’re not tempted by the transaction. You’re forced to take a holistic view. Unless the transaction is the one that’s going to help you make payroll and you’re on that edge. Then you got to be careful. These games are life or death games at that level, so it’s a different kind of thing.

It’s fascinating to me that when I sell something, people go, “Oh, you just sold that because you’re the CEO.” I don’t know. I can’t unbecome the CEO. I guess I could. I could quit and see whether they’d hire me back as a sales guy, but they probably wouldn’t. They just go, “Well, you only sold $6 million last year, and you did that because you’re the CEO, so we’re not going to hire you.” So I’d have to do something else. Go to work for you, maybe, or something like that. That’d be funny.

It speaks to this very basic question, which is if you’re using trust to dominate markets, you actually have got to be honest. And if the transaction temptation is too much for you, you’re going to get dominated by somebody who figures out how to be honest. It’s a huge competitive differentiator, is being straight up with folks. Then that means you’ve got to target well. You’ve got to target well and you have to be very efficient. So your sampling techniques to find out if you’re targeting’s any good, I’ve got to run really, really fast.

This is actually the core of the Market Dominance Guy’s thesis, is the reason you run conversation first is because it delivers information to you, and every conversation tells you almost automatically whether it’s worthwhile having another conversation. So it’s conversation first, not conversation lots, right? And a conversation as a sampling mechanism that allows you to reliably answer this question. Should we move forward or not in this relationship? That’s the question on the table at all times.

So now the question is, how short a conversation can you have? How frequently can you have it, given that you cost money and your salespeople cost money in order to get that question reliably enough answered? Not perfectly answered, but sufficiently, reliably answered that you don’t have a false negative problem that really hurts your business. That’s why I always talk about the flow rate of conversations as being important within the math of sales. But it’s also important for a completely different reason, which is, if you’re not sampling the marketplace continuously, you are ignorant of change.

Say your message stops resonating. This happened to us. When the COVID thing hit, everybody went home. Our standard opener was still okay. It needed to be changed a little, but our value prop, what we call the 27 second part of the pitch, and this is just a cold call. Not that important, but pretty important. And it went from something that people could listen to, to something that people couldn’t listen to. It went from, “Hi, I’m the guy tapping you on the shoulder at the gas station and saying, ‘Here’s the additive that will get you 10 times better gas mileage,'” to saying, “Hi, I’m the guy with the additive that gives you 10 times better gas mileage,” and saying it to somebody who’s just been on a rollover accident in a 100 car pile up. It’s the same message, just the context has changed. So we needed to change our message.

We changed it to talk about something that we do help with, we think, at least you could be curious about, which is the problem of managing a work from the home sales team. Totally different. “Your car is upside down, but I think I have a couple of hooks here and a jack and I get your car back up on its wheels.” Having done that your car is drivable again, you have the freeway to yourself. Would you like to be able to go faster? It’s actually a very different thing, but you’re not out there in the front lines as the leader and you’re just staring at spreadsheets or numbers, you’ll miss this stuff. And this is where the competition is.

Somebody once told me, a business fundamentally is a sword fight in the darkroom. The only time you see anything is when there’s a clash of steel and enough sparks to get some dim outlines. So you better be in the fight. You can’t be outside just listening to it.

Corey Frank (08:00):

Well, speaking of taking advantage of opportunities, we have talked before we started recording here about this massive amount of capital that is seemingly invisible to the economists and the journalists, and the politicians today that is pouring into the United States. I think now would be a good time to chat a little bit about that, Chris, because I think our listeners would certainly want to kind of see again that high mountain air, the second piece that has really kind of inspired you as of late to see the invisible, so to speak.

Chris Beall (08:34):

Yeah, let me share my screen here, because this is really kind of shocking, at least to me. So I got up a few weeks ago, I think it was three or four on a Saturday. And sometimes on Saturdays, I don’t know what it is about Saturday morning, but I’ll wake up sometimes and think, “There’s something really bugging me.” And I was listening to and watching all the doom and gloom going on out, and I thought, “I’m not seeing the world this way, but I don’t have any numbers to back it up,” so I thought I’d go get some numbers.

So the way I was seeing the world, and that I’m still seeing the world is that we had a bad, bad disease in our economy called commuting. And you would never have designed it [inaudible 00:09:11] ever. Nobody would ever say, “I’ve got a great idea. We have a lot of ways for people to interact with each other, with voice and with video and they’re pretty much universal that can reach into almost every home. Gosh, we got all this, but I have an idea. I think, let’s do this. Let’s take 3000 pounds of steel and put some rubber tires on it and an engine in it and then take 30 minutes or thereabouts each day and sit in that thing with some danger to ourselves and let’s sit in that thing and let’s all get together so that our three-pound brain can be near some other three-pound brains so that we can look at each other when we talk to each other, but we could even do that with video. So I guess maybe so we can smell each other or touch each other because those are the two things that you can do for sure up close and personal. And we can sit in conference rooms together, except some of the people on the other end of the speakerphone will feel left out.”

So you would never have designed it. So my question was, “Well, what if it went away? What if it’s gone away?” And I know a lot of people are saying, “Well, this is COVID and it’s temporary,” and so forth. I became pretty convinced that the massive collapse of what I call the commute economy is real and it’s done. And I looked at it from two perspectives.

So one is, what do CFOs really not like? By and large, they don’t like leases for office space on the balance sheet. And if you’ve ever tried to get out from under a lease, when for whatever reason, your business, you had … we did it back in 2014 when we left our San Mateo office and decided that having all those people together didn’t make any sense. That was pretty painful. It’s always painful to get out from under a lease. The liability is just not fun to have. And CFOs don’t like it.

The other thing CFOs don’t like is just waste, depending especially on headcount. So I just went out and started researching this question, which was so … are they really numbers that tell us that the commute economy had costs? And what about productivity? Are people more productive in the office? And I’d run into this, and not even a study. Just these guys at Prodoscore that I happen to know, P-R-O-D-O-S-C-O-R-E.

You should go check them out if you want to know whether people are being productive or not. They’d come in and tested us as a company. And by the way, they found out that John T McLaren, our Senior VP of Sales rep, he’s also the President now that I think about it. Anyway, John T was the most productive person they’d ever seen, is what they said. I thought that was pretty interesting. They have automation that measures productivity, and whether it measures it absolutely or relatively, that is even if it’s not an absolute number, it would be able to tell if productivity had changed up or down.

So they said that they had 100 million data points that showed that there was a productivity gain of 47% from people who had gone to work from home because of COVID. 47% productivity gain is insane. And there’s no consultant on earth who wouldn’t dominate the entire planet if they could offer a 47% productivity gain across any workforce, people seek 3%, right? 4% is a big number, but 47%? And this is measuring what people actually do. So, that was shocking.

But then I also thought, “Well, what about the cost of commuting? What if the knowledge workers just in the US didn’t have to commute?” So I went out to the government sources and here and there, and I put together this spreadsheet that you’re looking at. And it’s out there on LinkedIn. You can find it. It’s in a post that I did back then. And I’ll probably repost it, maybe we’ll repost it and make it easy to find, but pretty simple. It says there are 48 million knowledge workers, and they commute for 26 minutes on average each way, as we all know in bigger cities it’s a lot more than that. So I just took it up to hours and said, “Okay, well, $50 an hour, times 48 million knowledge workers, times 199 hours. What is that? 9 billion labor hours and $478 billion of labor that’s wasted commuting.”

And that’s kind of crazy, if you think about it, right? It’s hard to find $478 billion. That’s bigger than the bailout on the Great Recession of 2007, ’08, ’09, whenever that thing was. That bailout was $250 billion, $300 billion, depending on how you count it. Right? Then they have to drive all over the place. And I thought, “That’s no big deal.” And then I calculated it out, and it’s like, hey, just at the standard 57.5 cents of mileage reimbursement, that’s another $184 billion. And then I decided to just throw in something as an ancillary, kind of get a feel for it more than anything else, which is, so what percentage of those people have kids and those kids need some care when parents are commuting just when commuting. And the answer’s probably yes, that’s $33 billion.

So the direct costs are $695 billion, right? But the rest of the workforce also was delayed in commuting. So what if they were spending 25% too much time, actually 33% too much? What if they can save 25% of their commute time? Everybody who has to commute just by commuting on roads that aren’t full of knowledge workers. And I think that’s pretty realistic. We’re all seeing it now. And the answer is, there’s another $117 billion of savings. So the commute savings both directly from knowledge workers not commuting, no labor and mileage, then I threw a one childcare thing. I bet I could have much more if I felt like it. And then the impact on others from us knowledge workers clogging up the roads with our 3000 pounds of steel, and I’m not even by the way, getting into what comes out of those cars and all of that, just ignoring that.

Corey Frank (14:45):

So the rental costs for commercial real estate and all the office supplies, all those hard G&A that also contribute to this is incredible.

Chris Beall (15:55):

Yeah. And this number looked big to me. And then I went over to the productivity number and just looked at, well, how much revenue to companies make per employee? And for us knowledge workers, that’s about $200,000. So the revenue potential from work from home is $14 trillion just improve productivity, $14 trillion. And I said, “Yeah, but the companies only get to keep the gross margin, gross profit.” So gross margin average for US companies, 47%. So it’s only $6 trillion, and we add that to our $813 billion of savings. And you get $7.445 trillion of free money for the economy.

Now I hear people already saying, and some people say, “Well, it doesn’t get spread around.” Of course, it doesn’t get spread around immediately. It ends up, a lot of it in the hands of companies, and what do companies do with it? They tend to reinvest because they’re ambitious, and they reinvest in things like hiring people and they go out and try to expand their market. Some of them might even choose to go dominate markets. You never know.

So the fact of the matter is, it’s a lot of money. How much? Well, $7.5 trillion is just too much to think about. So 2008 stimulus, oh, I’m sorry. It was only $152 billion. So it’s 46 times as much money as we spent to bail out the economy in 2008. It is a little bit less than the total debt, $9.5 trillion of all US companies. The one I really like is the total 2019 government spending $4.4 trillion. So this is bigger than the US federal government, almost twice as big. And it comes into our economy, it’s already happening as far as I can tell. No economist has weighed in on this. I’m not an economist. This could be completely wrong for some reason I don’t understand, but I think we’re seeing it already. And I think it’s going to surprise us.

What is it going to produce for business? Well, the opportunities for dominance go way up. That’s for sure. Because as the economy gets stimulated, I suppose is the right term, by the $7.5 trillion a year coming in, I should have broken it down by the minute. It’s a fair amount of money per minute at that. I mean, here people are freaked out about $1.5 trillion of student college loan debt. So one year of these savings would pay that off six times. [crosstalk 00:18:16]

Corey Frank (18:16):

That’s incredible. That’s a hidden $7.5 … you found it in the virtual couch cushions of America.

Chris Beall (18:24):

Yeah. The virtual couch cushions of America. I think one of the things that we don’t understand about our economy is how it really works. So we measure it by GDP and all these old measures that kind of don’t really capture it very well. But one thing we know that economists and economic models are built to not do is they’re built to not recognize the impact of sudden change, because one thing that can’t happen in economies, except suddenly declared war and it has to be big and fast, is a sudden change. So the economic models make a lot of assumptions, that nothing has changed, but what if something changed that’s really positive and made a big difference like suddenly people like me can live in port towns in Washington because my fiance doesn’t have to commute to Bellevue.

Think about the economic impact on port towns, and I have a couple of people who, we do well in life and we’ll spend a lot more money here. What does that mean to the local economy? Well, I guarantee you one thing, it wouldn’t have happened without the collapse of the commute economy.

Corey Frank (19:32):

We started this conversation, and this is where we’ll probably end it today is with the Milk-Bone and the dog at a gate, and you’ve come full circle here in that for a company who is struggling thinking about, perseverating about moving their team to a work from home model, oftentimes the gate is open. The spreadsheet I think that you walked is through here, is just walk around the gate, come on in, the water’s fine.

The downside that a lot of the hesitancy that a lot of companies would push back on, Chris, is the culture and the continuity and the three-pound brain, there is some benefit from being next to another three-pound brain. And that’s my feeling of involvement, my feeling of social status, and things of that nature. And I think we had … a lot of those could probably addressed if they listened to last week’s episode with [inaudible 00:20:29], and the wonderful culture that he’s building with his organizations. But, what do you say to that just briefly when, okay, I can go around the gate. I see the hard costs. It makes sense from a P&L, from an EBITDA perspective, but man, there is real atomic weight from that three-pound brain being next to three-pound brain.

Chris Beall (20:48):

Well, we’re going to have to try it for a while, because going back to the office is expensive and dangerous. Dangerous in a funny way. And the plaintiff’s bar is itching to go after an employer who forces people to come to the office and one of them happens to get sick. I mean, they are armed and ready to go. Anybody who’s familiar with how the plaintiff’s bar works and how class action works knows what is about to happen.

So folks voluntarily coming back in, still, there’s some legal risks, just is because who knows what assurances you may have inadvertently provided, what warning labels you might’ve had to have, what mitigations you could have done that you failed to do and not knowing about them, by the way, might not be a defense, right? So you’re about to learn something auto manufacturers have known for a long time, which is that you’re responsible for safety if you offer something where there are safety issues that are different from what was expected. And since no one knows what to expect, this could be problematic for anybody who’s bringing folks back.

Secondly, every mitigation is untested. There are no tested mitigations. I saw a beautiful article in the Puget Sound Business Journal that showed a picture, an infographic, and it showed the 11 mitigations that you should consider before you bring people back to the office. And they were things like coming in with a new HVAC system that had different kinds of filtering in it and circulated air differently. Really? For a year and a half or two years of benefit? I mean, if you’re going to bring them back, okay, but really? New HVACs so the three-pound brains can sit next to each other, but not infect each other? Think anybody’s ever tested that? I don’t think anybody’s ever tested that, right? [crosstalk 00:22:35] Not one of these mitigations has been tested. Coffee machines that you operate with your smartphone. I don’t think anybody’s ever done laboratory testing or in real-life testing of the impact of that on respiratory virus transmission.

So this is just stuff people are going, they’re kind of waving their hands and saying, “But, but, but, but, but.” Now, remember there’s a finger on the scale, which is the other side of those big leases. So you should expect to see a lot of stories about how essential it is and possible it is to bring people back into the office. But I tell you from a scientific perspective, again, all 11 of those mitigations have got to be done and all 11 have got to work, and then you have to not get a little bad luck, like, well, it turns out they stood next to somebody in the Starbucks downstairs. It’s unlikely. You’re going to have to learn to live with it anyway.

Culturally, what do you do? I know in sales what you do. It’s simple. I’ll show you. I’ll show you. Let me go show you because I have it right up here on my screen right now. So here is an answer, and I admit this is a commercial. I apologize for it. But it’s an answer. For your sales team, nothing is more energizing than talking to people.

Corey Frank (23:50):

That’s correct.

Chris Beall (23:51):

This is our team today, and here’s an SDR’s talked to 25 decision-makers. Set one meeting, so they had a moment of excitement. It’s had 14 follow-ups. It’s Friday, people tend to be a little busy on Friday. I got two referrals, and had 5 minutes from 24 seconds after pushing the button on average before he talked to somebody, Josh Lyman did. And I’m sure during that time he was doing something else that’s useful.

It’s kind of funny. We talk about culture. Like culture is about ping pong tables or it’s about drinking beer in the conference room or whatever it happens to be, which I think people gave up a while ago for safety reasons. The fact of the matter is, people, as Deming told us, they worked for the pride of workmanship, and if they have good work to do, and they’re having fun doing it, and they’re being managed in a way that’s fair and reasonable and encouraging, then the core of culture is there. And that’s the number one thing is work culture actually can be about work, and it can be about what somebody loves to do.

If you’re in sales, you hopefully love to talk with people. And so here, my team today, they’ve talked to 168 people as we see down here. That’s a lot of conversations, right? Here’s what also is culturally kind of good about this. They didn’t have to make those 5,655 frustrating dials and navigate those fun systems. That was done for them. So that’s kind of pleasant.

And then another thing is, people like to be able to help and they like to be helped. If you need help, you’re stuck. You need to learn. If somebody notices you need help, and there’s a lot of ways to do that. So say your boss or your coach could come in and say, “You know what? This guy, Sean McLaren, he’s our chairman. Man. He’s kind of a lot of busy callbacks today.” By the way, Sean McLaren really is our executive chairman who really does talk to people. So today he had six conversations and set one meeting. That’s pretty good, but he’s having a hard time keeping people on the phone. I wonder if Sean’s got issues today? Is it a little slow? Is his voice bad? Well, this one can’t be correct. That’s a minute-long conversation. So maybe he just coded it wrong.

These are short. I have a feeling if I listened to one, and we’re not going to do that right now out of respect for Sean’s awesomeness, but hey, if Sean needed a little help, just thinking about his state of mind today, his mood or whatever, then we can help him. Right? Then here’s another thing is, it’s fun to do work that counts. It’s not much fun to do work that doesn’t count. So today this team, it’s 5,655, and now it’s gone up by a couple. It’s only three in the afternoon after all. Would that have been culturally marvelous for them to just gone to voicemail 1,825 times today or be navigated to voicemail 1,567 times, or been told by a gatekeeper, “I’m sorry. Corey is not in today. I’m not available.” None of that looks like fun, right? So culturally that’s part of it.

Now the rest of it is this, human beings actually don’t have a sense of smell like the other animals, the other mammals. So your dog can smell you across town. And I’m speaking literally here. I had a dog once that freaked out, ran off in a thunderstorm and she went all the way back up to our mountain home, which was 17 miles away of complex navigation involving roads and trails and God knows what. And she went to every neighbor’s house and sort of knocked on the door to check to see if we were there because we were out of town. Imagine that, right?

Corey Frank (27:29):

Yeah. Well, she knows that there’s a bunch of Milk-Bones on the other side of the fence. That’s probably [inaudible 00:27:33] that she couldn’t get to. Yeah.

Chris Beall (27:34):

Exactly. Well, what was she really doing? She was following a scent trail. She had mapped a scent map, not a trail. She had mapped the scent. She had only been up and down that road one time in her life, one time up, one time down. That was it. This is a dog who had never been to town before we moved to town. So she remembered how to get back to that complex mountain home by knowing the smell of everything along the way. So dogs are really, really good at this.

You go to the airport, they don’t have a trained human who’s going up and down in the security line, sniffing everybody. They have a dog, right? Humans are not the most brilliant in the world at smelling each other and figuring out if they’re sincere to be trusted. But we are geniuses, like dogs will never be, at hearing each other’s voices and seeing each other’s faces, and the voice and the face are the two ways that we express ourselves in terms of what really counts, which is, do I care about you? And if you want to have a great culture, let your people know you care about them and let them tell you they care about you and about the mission. And you just do it in natural ways, in the normal course of business, like getting on these zooms by just talking on the phone.

Everybody in your company who is physically capable of hearing and seeing, and that’s not everybody, I get it that that’s really tough for folks who have vision problems and hearing problems, but of the rest of, of the mass of folks at your company who don’t, they’re so good at interpreting sincerity and good intentions and meaningful direction from tone of voice, for the same reasons cold calling works, it’s possible and easy to project fantastic culture to a remote workforce.

And in fact, you have more time to do it during the two hours you would’ve been commuting, let’s break it down. I have a team in North America, personally of 28 people. So in two hours, how many five-minute conversations are there? There’s 24. That’s pretty cool. Think about that. That’s 24 times I can spend having five conversations. And in those five minutes, each one of those minutes pays seconds carrying 20,000 bits of emotional information, terabits of emotionally important information can be transmitted.

Having meetings where everybody gets to participate, this is one of the beauties of zoom, in a standard conference call, the standard conference room, participation is dominated by the physically most dominant person. They stand, they take over the room, they interrupt, they talk, they go to the whiteboard, they dominate. In a hybrid where there’s a speakerphone in the desk or the table in the conference room, you get a two-tier economy, two-tier culture. People in the room, and the people in the mushroom, people in the mushroom don’t have a shot. They don’t exist. They will never have the floor in any significant way.

On a regular conference call, just voice only, it’s tricky. You need a good moderator, but in a zoom call, it’s so natural. Everybody sees each other’s face. And normally the contribution level per person goes way up and people feel more included. So I think making an inclusive culture is actually easier, and some of the biases that we have about people are a little, shall we say muted in this environment and biases are not the greatest thing in the world. So I actually [crosstalk 00:30:58]-

Corey Frank (30:58):

Happened 10 years ago, then you could argue that the urgency to go back to the commuter economy would have been so much more urgent, but because the tech stack is so much more in place and plumbed and accepted that there really isn’t many excuses to go back to the way we were.

Chris Beall (31:17):

When you work the numbers, it says don’t do it. When you work to culture, it says don’t do it. If your work productivity, it says don’t do it. We solved this problem a long time ago. We would never have designed it like we had it. Clogged cities with roads you can’t get through on, people frustrated, not seeing their children, not getting enough exercise, not eating well, stopping at the bar on the way home, sucking down the lattes because they’re bored. Let’s face it, that was not healthy. It wasn’t economically healthy and it wasn’t otherwise healthy.

Corey Frank (31:48):

Well, if that’s the case, then I tell you what since we’re up against the clock here, Chris, by the next time we do this, then your background needs to be changed to the new virtual commuter economy. And I expect, I think all of our listeners expect a view of Discovery Bay for port towns, as opposed to the crowded streets there that we see behind you now.

Chris Beall (32:11):

Exactly, you’re going to be looking out towards a Protection Island, and I think we got a lot of protection that’s actually built-in. It’s tragic what’s going on with all the cases of people getting sick, people dying, but I do believe that this bunch of people worked hard to create a situation where we can work from anywhere and we can contribute to society no matter who we are. I believe there’ll be a next wave that we haven’t even touched yet, which is inclusiveness across society. There are so many smart people who don’t contribute, don’t get to contribute because they don’t live where the rich businesses are. And I’ve done some experiments around that about, oh, back in 1991 and ’92 that proved to me for sure that there is no difference in talent among all of our different communities that we have in this country or anywhere in the world.

And I think one of the side effects of work from home and work from anywhere is going to be that more people are going to find great careers as knowledge workers who are currently being left out. And I think that’s another wave that’s coming, and nobody’s seeing it coming.

Corey Frank (33:23):

That’s great. Okay. Well, we have a topic to discuss next time. In the meantime, I’m going to go search for my share of the $7.5 trillion that you say is buried somewhere in the aether, in the virtual couch cushions of America. So until next time.