You might not think of yourself as ‘a creative’, but if you’re an entrepreneur or a business book author that’s exactly what you are, insists award-winning jeweller Harriet Kelsall: you’re creating something that didn’t exist before you imagined it. And as she discovered the hard way, that means finding your own way to do what you do:
“What I need to do is what I do, not what everyone else does. That’s the thing that’s going to work.”
The need to find your own way becomes even more acute when, like Harriet, you face a challenge like dyslexia. This is a deep dive into practical creativity as brilliant and as packed with gems as Harriet’s own bespoke jewellery.
LINKS:
Harriet’s site: https://www.hkjewellery.co.uk/
Harriet on Twitter: https://twitter.com/HarrietKelsall
Alison on Twitter: https://twitter.com/bookstothesky
The Extraordinary Business Book Club on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1447064765612358/
This Book Means Business – the mentorship programme: https://alisonjones.lpages.co/this-book-means-business-mentorship/
Alison Jones: Hello and welcome to the Extraordinary Business Book Club. And here I am today with Harriet Kelsall, who founded her business in 1998 at her kitchen table, literally, and has grown it to be one of the UK’s leading jewellery design companies, with many national and international awards to its name, the HCBC Forward Ladies Retail Businesswoman of the Year in 2016. She’s one of EveryWoman’s retail ambassadors, is a Freeman of the worshipful company of Goldsmith’s and the City of London, two marvellously resonant names, chairman of the National Association of Jewellers, and a non-executive director for both the Responsible Jewellery Council and the British Hallmarking Council. She mentors creative startups and she’s the author of The Creative’s Guide to Starting a Business: How to Turn Your Talent Into A Career, which of course was a winner of the Startup Inspiration category award at this year’s Business Book Awards. And do you know the wonderful thing about this as well? It’s a particularly remarkable achievement because Harriet is dyslexic. Welcome to the show, Harriet.
Harriet Kelsall: Hello, thank you for having me. Good to be here.
Alison Jones: It’s great to have you and there’s so much there to unpick but let me start by firstly saying congratulations.
Harriet Kelsall: Thank you very much. I can’t believe I’ve even written a book, let alone that it’s actually been published and now won an award, so I’m still on cloud nine.
Alison Jones: It’s pleasing, isn’t it?
Harriet Kelsall: Very satisfying.
Alison Jones: Isn’t it though? And it’s funny because obviously as the Head Judge I was reading all the category winners and I picked up your book with a real sense of impostor syndrome, kind of “Oh, well I’m not a creative.” And what was wonderful was that almost immediately you put me at my ease: “Do you know what, you’re an entrepreneur, you’re creative. These are two really almost identical skill sets.” Which I thought was really interesting.
Harriet Kelsall: Oh that’s good that that put you at ease. That was something that I tried to do. But the thing is, the way I see it part of the problem actually with some creative businesses that aren’t quite managing to break through and become successful is that they’re thinking so creatively with what they’re creating, their pots or their cushion covers or whatever beautiful thing they’re making, that they almost forget to think creatively about the business as a whole. And that’s sometimes where things can go wrong because they try to fit into channels that everyone else does because they perceive them to be successful because they see that they’re well-trodden channels to market or whatever. And they don’t realise that if they use that creativity and think about their business like that, that’s going to really start to open doors for them.
Alison Jones: I’m guessing sometimes it’s even more polarised than that – it’s not that they don’t think about it, but there’s almost an antipathy toward they idea, that actually they want to be spending their time creating the craft, the artwork, whatever it is they’re doing and almost resent the time that they spend on the business. And what I loved about the book was the way that you almost reframed that as actually, this is just as creative as anything you’re doing in your day job.
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, that’s very much it. And people almost compartmentalise their creativity into what they’re creating with their hands. And they need to just unleash that. And interestingly it’s funny you saying, “Well I wasn’t sure if I was creative enough to read this book,” but actually I’ve found that a lot of people are reading it who are running STEM businesses or really very techy businesses that many people wouldn’t perceive to be creative. And they’re finding my book really useful because they’re finding that it helps them think about their business creatively even if their business isn’t specifically what you might think of as a creative business.
Alison Jones: Isn’t that fascinating? I always say to people, “If you find a niche, if you appeal to the niche then the people that you’re writing for know you’re writing for them,” but it actually weirdly doesn’t stop other people accessing it too. Word gets round, doesn’t it.
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, it’s funny. I hadn’t really made that connection and realised that the book would be useful beyond creative businesses because I was just writing a book that I thought I would have wanted to read when I was starting a business using the same kind of language I would have understood and so on. But when I asked Shima Barakat to write the foreword for the book – she’s the head of entrepreneurship at Cambridge University – she kindly agreed and then when she’d read it, she said, “Actually, this book is just as relevant for my STEM students and I’m going to be recommending it to them because this is just a way of thinking about business which is really, really good for all businesses. It’s a way of thinking creatively on any business.” And so yes, it was quite a surprise to me when she said that and I thought, “Oh yes, this is.” So that was nice. But since then it’s been recommended around in different circles which is great to see.
Alison Jones: And do you think that it’s just the way you approach it, that really clear, systematic… it’s so un-woolly. So many books about entrepreneurship are a bit “follow your dream, find your passion”. And you sort of take that as a given, and then you go onto the nitty gritty, which I found very refreshing.
Harriet Kelsall: Oh that’s good. Yes I’ve tried to just make it really practical because I’ve seen a couple of business books where as you say, it’s all sort of “Yes, it’s all lovely and do what you love and it will just work,” which of course is nonsense. It won’t, actually.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Harriet Kelsall: And so I just tried to make it very practical. And I’ve noticed this, as you say the wooliness gets really deep in some books or in some online resources where they’ll talk very broadly about pricing in a way that you think, “Yes, but how do I actually price it? What do I multiply it with, by, and why?” And you don’t ever get that detail. And us creatives, we’re very into details, especially jewellers. And so I was thinking, I just want to say it how it is and keep it really practical and explain how I did it, show how other people did it, and get into the details so that people can actually leave the book thinking, “Right, I can actually follow these instructions and I can use this to expand my mind creatively and find my own way through this and this will help.”
Alison Jones: Yes, and the way you bring in other people’s experience is brilliant as well. You’ve got a sort of team almost of collaborators and you show how they did it, how they… because obviously when you’re a jeweller, pricing your products is a massive issue because of the cost of your materials. Other people might not have that same issue. So it’s really interesting to see it from all the different perspectives.
Harriet Kelsall: Oh thank you. Well in a way it’s down to them that I wrote the book in the first place because the reason I was sort of driven to write it was that I’d met so many creatives that I’d been mentoring and they weren’t usually jewellers. There was a handbag maker and somebody who sews clothes who’s actually in the book and somebody who’s a parfumier, and all sorts of different creative businesses and actually not many jewellers. Some jewellers. And I just kept noticing all of these common threads that bound them together and actually showed me so many similarities, mainly in the things that they were doing wrong to not quite get the success they were looking for and also the things that I said that helped. And also in the things that they did that then worked and helped them put things right.
And so after this I found myself sort of saying the same thing again and again and I just thought, “You know what, this is helping and if I wrote it down it might be able to help more people.” And so really it was very much from other people’s stories that I recognised that what I was saying could be useful to all kinds of different businesses, because even though the business is different and yes, maybe you’re talking about clay, sort of low-cost material with a potter but maybe diamonds with the jeweller, actually the fundamentals are very similar. And there are so many things that bind these different kinds of businesses together and hopefully all those stories bring something fresh and hopefully keep the reader a bit interested and moving forward with the book. I don’t know whether it’s my dyslexia, but I find when you read a story, you’re drawn into it. And so you just want to know, well, did that work and did that turn out to be successful? And it actually keeps you going.
Alison Jones: I think that’s a really smart move. I find with books that are purely instructional, it becomes a bit of a slog. Even if the instructions are really, really good and useful, there isn’t that same narrative and emotional engagement to keep you going. So mixing in the sort of personal stories. And you talk a lot about your own failures which is helpful as well. And when you’ve got to your sort of status and your level of recognition, I think it’s a really generous act to say, “Here’s how I messed up, here’s the many primitive ways in which I…” and it’s brilliant. That really helps people…
Harriet Kelsall: Oh well thank you so much. Yes, I think I very much felt again that some business books just say it’s all lovely and we’re all going to be fantastic if we just follow our dreams and they don’t talk about the nightmares that they go through and the problems. And sometimes even the problems with success. They don’t talk about it…
Alison Jones: Yes, you talk about scaling, I thought that was interesting….
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, and it’s very misleading because the reality is that yes of course there are wonderful things in being a successful entrepreneur but the journey is tough. And anyone that doesn’t realise that might think that they’re not on a good journey that’s going to go somewhere good. They might sort of fall at these hurdles thinking “Well, I don’t see anyone else having these hurdles, it must be this isn’t for me.” And I do think we all need to remember, do you know what, everyone has hurdles and some of them are really big and really hard.
But there’s something that I must tell you, because I was just thinking before we spoke today, is that when I was writing a book, I spoke to a man that I know through my son’s school who is a published author and he’s got I think four or five books published in a completely different field about theology. And I was chatting to him and that day I had been writing a part of the book that was explaining that the thing that really separates a successful entrepreneur from a non-successful entrepreneur is that we don’t give up. When we find a problem, we find a way around it, we find a way over it, under it, or we change the problem. But we will not just give up.
And I’d been writing this section of the book and I was chatting to him. And he said to me, “Do you know what Harriet, with writing a book the thing that separates a successful author from an unsuccessful author is the successful author just keeps trying and keeps changing that book until it’s just right, whereas an unsuccessful author will actually just stop when it doesn’t work or it doesn’t get published the first time or when they find it’s a bit difficult.” And I thought, oh my goodness, that’s exactly the same thing that I’ve been saying in another context today. So Yes, I must tell you that. It’s quite interesting.
Alison Jones: Isn’t that interesting. The grit is essentially the good thing, grit is actually the single best predictor of success in pretty much anything that’s worth doing. In building a creative business, in writing a book, Yes and that translates into perseverance…
Harriet Kelsall: Well because I mean I’ve known great creatives who were really talented but who never really work out how to do a successful business. And conversely I know some people who I wouldn’t say their work is great – obviously none of the ones in the book, they’re all fantastic – but their work isn’t really great, but their grit and their drive has made sure that they’ve got a very successful business despite that. So you could say that that grit and drive is even more important than talent to some degree. Obviously you need some talent but, yes.
Alison Jones: Yes, but it’s kind of some of those multiplication things, isn’t it? If your implementation and your stickability is zero then it doesn’t matter what your timesing it by, zero is still zero.
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, exactly, Yes.
Alison Jones: You wrote the book… you said the stories came out of the sense that when you were mentoring you were telling the same story, you were hearing the same things. There’s two ways you can look at this. One way is, “Do you know what, I’m going to write this book and then I never have to say all this again because just read the book.” And the other one is, “Oh, I can scale this, there’s something here.” So how does having written the book change your relationship with the people that you mentor now and what you do in the world.
Harriet Kelsall: Gosh, that’s an interesting question. Yes, I think the… oh it’s so funny: “I’ll write it down so that no one ever asks me again.” No, it was very much I just felt, if I can only say this stuff to the people who are in front of me then that limits how many people I could potentially help, whereas if this advice really is helpful and it has seemed to be, then, yes, let’s see if we can help more businesses be successful. So it wasn’t so much about me wanting to be a successful author as it was about me wanting to really help lots of creative businesses flourish. Because I think we’re really, really good at creative business and innovation, particularly actually in this country. And there’s so much support out there – and I’m not saying it’s not valid and important, because it really is – for STEM businesses and so much drive for women in engineering. Fantastic, amazing, love it. I’ve got an engineering degree actually as well. So I get that, really important.
But there’s not actually very much support and help for specifically creative businesses. And I think I just wanted to address that and to try and really celebrate the fact that we’re good at creativity and if we can help these businesses become even better, then that’s great for the economy, isn’t it? That can only be a good thing because we’re naturally very good at creativity and innovation here in this country. So I think there was an element of that, which sounds very grandiose. It sounds like I think it sounds very important for the economy. But then I’m not saying that nothing else helps. But in my own little way I felt if I could help that I should. So yes, I think there was a lot of that going on. I’m not sure if I answered your question in there.
Alison Jones: No, you have absolutely on one level and I love the altruistic… actually it’s like any business, isn’t it? That sense of vision and mission and that kind of higher purpose thing can be really motivating and give you a sense of clarity about where you’re going and north star, which is fantastic. I’d love to know the more personal and professional stuff as well, in terms of how it’s changed your work and what you do and how you do it. Sometimes you plan that and sometimes it just evolves afterwards. It’s always interesting…
Harriet Kelsall: How it changed my work? Interesting. I think at the moment, because the book’s still very new, it was only published in September, I’m going around a lot doing talks about creative business. And the book has helped that happen even more. And it’s got lots of invitations to exciting ways to communicate about that, like this. And so that’s changed the way I work in that I’m feeling as though my voice is being even more heard, which is lovely in this area.
Has it changed the way I work in my creative business? I suppose inevitably, talking about this is going to take time away from my creative business. But for me, I find it quite inspiring. The reason I do mentor other businesses even though I’m also still trying to run my own jewellery business, is that I find it yes, you can say “Well, it’s all terribly altruistic, it’s all about them.” And of course that’s why you start and why you do it. But actually also, I find it really inspiring speaking to other entrepreneurs, hearing what they’re doing. And so when I can go and do a talk about this book and then twenty or so people come up to me afterwards and tell me what they’re doing and how they’re doing it and I just see this energy and excitement in what they’re doing and I think, “Oh gosh, if I can help unlock some of that, that’s a wonderful thing.”
And I just go away feeling re-energised. It’s as though I look back at my own creativity and it just reminds me how lucky we are to have that in us. So, does it change my work? I think it just gives me more inspiration. So whilst it takes me away from the business in some ways, it also brings me energy and inspiration in my own business as well.
Alison Jones: What a brilliant answer. I love that. You’re filling the well. That’s awesome. And it’s nice that the two can go together, yes, brilliant. And we talked about that the why you wrote the book. Let’s talk about how you wrote the book. I’ve talked to a couple of dyslexics who’ve written books. I’m always fascinated by the workarounds and the way that they sort of do that work that actually, flipping heck, it’s hard enough anyway, so just tell us about…
Harriet Kelsall: Do you know, I’m a bit embarrassed to tell you all of this because it really does sound a bit weird when I talk about how I wrote the book. It’s a good question.
Alison Jones: I’m all ears.
Harriet Kelsall: So, well one thing I’d say about dyslexic people that I’ve noticed – and interestingly I’ve found it fascinating that so many of the case studies I was interviewing turned out to be dyslexic, I didn’t realise that until I was interviewing them for the book, but so many successful entrepreneurs are dyslexic – one thing about what we like is I describe it a bit like layers of an onion. So when you’re dyslexic, it’s like you think around the outside of the onion in a surface way. And then you step down, layer by layer to the centre of the onion. And what that means is that we think about the whole thing and then we sort of narrow it down and narrow it down until we get to the crux of what we’re trying to say. And I think that’s why we struggle in straight lines.
So somebody gives me one thing to do at a time, I honestly find it almost impossible, whereas if somebody gives me twenty things to do at once, I find that easy. It’s bonkers, isn’t it? But that’s what we’re like. It’s like a three-dimensional mind. And I think that’s why we’re often good at music or design or computing because it’s easy for us to think about different things all at once, just very hard for us to just follow one line of text at a time. Because our mind’s just thinking “Yes, but what about this, what about this?”
So when it comes to a business, that’s a great thing because it means that you will think about your holistic business picture, and you won’t just think, “Oh, I’m going to make a marketing plan today,” and just go down that channel and then the next day say, “I’m going to look at pricing today.” You will quite naturally do those things together and weigh up how they play with each other and work out a solution that works for everything.
So when it came to writing a book, what I did was I just sat down and wrote a book. I didn’t do it like that, because I thought “This is what people who write books do, what people who write books do is they think about one thing at once, and so I’m going to try to be like that because I need to write a book,” so I just sat down and wrote the book. And it took me about a year, obviously not solidly because I was doing quite a few other roles as well. I mean, I’m bringing up two kids. But I came to the end and I thought, “That’s great,” and then I thought, “This book’s rubbish.”
And I thought, “I shouldn’t have done it like that. What I should have done is just done what I kind of wanted to do, which is just think about the whole thing and narrow it down like layers of an onion, and that’s what I do.” So I just sort of put it away, and started again, thinking “Yes, I want a bit about marketing and I want a case study and I want a bit about this.” And so I’d write a paragraph here, a paragraph there. And it was all over the place. Honestly, you’d probably cry if you saw it because it was so nuts. But suddenly, and at one point I remember when I was about six months into this, I just thought, “This doesn’t string together at all. Keep going, keep going, this is what I do, it’ll all work.” And then I somehow managed to kind of place it all together and then it all just fit into place. So it was probably not the best process for writing a book.
Alison Jones: That’s hilarious And the first draft, I mean a year of your life on that first draft. I mean you’re very like, “Oh, so I put it away.” I mean, you must have been swearing at this point…
Harriet Kelsall: Well I think I just thought… again, I think this is where the conversation with my friend who’s a theology writer came in because he’d said, “You don’t give up, you just do it again,” and I thought, “That’s what I did. Hopefully this will get me where I want to be.” I think it’s because I looked at it and I thought, “This isn’t going to help anybody. This isn’t interesting. This doesn’t hold my attention enough. I need more case studies,” because I only had like two or something in there at the time. “This just isn’t right and the chapters are all wrong, it just… too linear.”
Alison Jones: And probably not you actually. That’s the other thing, when you try and do something in a way that you think other people do because you think that’s the right way, it comes out sounding like someone else completely.
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, and I feel doubly kind of embarrassed about having done this because I did the same thing when I started my business. Because when I started my business I thought, “Oh, I’m a jeweller, I’m having this great success in my spare time with managing to make this really high-quality jewellery, designing and making it to order, and I’ve got this demand for this, but that’s not what jewellery businesses do. What they do is they have some jewellery and then they sell it, so that’s what I need to do because that’s what other jewellers do.”
So I spent probably six months trying to work out what I should do as a collection before the penny dropped and I realised oh, what I need to do is what I do, not what everyone else does. That’s the thing that’s going to work. So having done that 20 years ago plus with my business, I then proceeded to do exactly the same with the book. And so I guess what I learned in that year, that year of frustration we’ll call it, was yes, you just need to really do… even though yes, it’s a book and not a jewellery business, whatever it is that you’re a specialist in, you shouldn’t approach it in… you can read all these things about “You should write a book like this,” and “You should write a book like that,” but you should just approach it in the way of using a process that you know works for you in other areas of your life, I think. Probably worked for me I suppose. So, yes. It was a bit crazy.
Alison Jones: I love that sort of bringing the whole person, your expertise and the way that your brain works, the way that your brain is wired, and you just make it work for you rather than doing what you think you ought to do. I think that’s a really powerful lesson actually.
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, Yes. In a way it was because… and I wasted a lot of my time. And it’s what I learned in business as well actually. If you try and think “If I do that then that will make money,” and your core is not in that, it’s not going to work. You can’t convince the market to believe you when you’re not doing something that’s true to your values. And I guess that’s the same with writing a book in that you need to bring your whole self to whatever you do really. Anything creative, and as we touched on earlier, writing a book is a very creative process, just like making some jewellery or starting a business in many ways. You’re creating something that didn’t exist before.
Alison Jones: Yes, and you have now written a book that only you could write, because you did it your way. Brilliant, love that. Now I was about to ask you for your top tip for a new author and maybe that’s it. Do it your way, cue Frank Sinatra. But if somebody’s listening and they are mired, imagine they’re kind of three months into that first year that you just said, what would you tell them?
Harriet Kelsall: Gosh, yes it’s interesting. I think I would probably say, from the point of view of writing a business book, that for me the breakthrough was really realising that I wanted every single thing I was saying to be illustrated by a case study that wasn’t necessarily just me. “I know this because I did it,” isn’t very readable and interesting, whereas if one minute you’ve got a sculptor that illustrates a point that you’re making and then the next minute you’ve got a fashion designer that’s gone through this thing that you’re talking about, then you really nail those points. Because not only do the stories bring you through, but also it really does back up your point with sort of evidence effectively, of real-life situations where it worked.
So I think my advice would be to that three-months-in person, get more case studies and use them everywhere. Really find ways to illustrate your points because that was the breakthrough for me that I realised after that first year. And that was the thing that started to make everything come together.
Alison Jones: That’s a brilliant tip. And of course as a side benefit you then got a little cohort of people who are engaged in, have skin in the game with your book and are going to tell everybody about it.
Harriet Kelsall: Yes, and that I mean again, rather ignorantly that didn’t occur to me. But when I started doing these talks around the country about the book I realised, “Oh gosh, they’re up in Derby maybe they’d like to come around to this tour, the people who have been in the book.” And several of them did and came along and spoke at different venues with me. Because it was good for them too. And it was lovely because then they brought their followers and different kinds of creatives came along to different talks. And it hadn’t really occurred to me that that meant that the network would be wider. But you’re absolutely right. It really helped.
Alison Jones: Brilliant. Wonderful top tip, thank you. And I always ask people as well for a recommendation for a business book that they think anybody listening to the podcast should read. What would you recommend?
Harriet Kelsall: Annoyingly, I’m going to recommend three books.
Alison Jones: Three, my goodness.
Harriet Kelsall: I’m sorry. One of them I won’t talk about because I know it’s been recommended lots of times on here before, but that’s no reason not to recommend it. Which is “The E-Myth”…
Alison Jones: By Michael E. Gerber. If you haven’t read it, do.
Harriet Kelsall: Don’t need to talk about that but I really think everyone should read that. The other two I wanted to… the reason there are two is because they’re for sort of different types of business. So the first one I’d recommend is Jerry Robinson’s “I’ll Show Them Who’s Boss” which was a book that he wrote connected with a TV series that he did years ago where he went into family businesses and sort of sorted them out. But the book itself, even if you haven’t seen the series, which I don’t think I had when I first read it, is really brilliant for small businesses who are just trying to get over that plateau of “Well how do we grow, we’re doing okay but how do we actually become a grown-up business and get bigger and stuff?” And it talks you through the whole process of really easy-to-read language. And I’ve still got it on my shelf and I occasionally still look at it now and then. So I’d really recommend that one.
And then the other one I wanted to recommend is really mainly for anybody involved in retail or selling products or any kind, which is “Consumed” by Harry Wallop, which is a book where he talks a lot about.. I think we all identify as middle class now, pretty much. There’s not very many people who don’t think of themselves as middle class. And so he talks about the subdivisions of middle class and what those mean for customer types, because of course we as retailers or creative businesses making products for people, we’re all trying to reach those people but we’re probably not trying to reach all of them. And the way that he subdivides the groups is very interesting and it made me think about consumers in a slightly different way which was helpful to my business. So yes, that’s the other one.
Alison Jones: Do you know, I’ve not heard either of those recommended before, so thank you. Really interesting. I love the sound of the Jerry Robinson one particularly. Probably less about the retail, but fantastic. Thank you. Great recommendations.
Harriet Kelsall: You know, I bet you’d be interested in the retail one because it’s not only about retail. It’s about people.
Alison Jones: Yes.
Harriet Kelsall: So I challenge you to read them both and I think you’ll like the second as much as you like the first.
Alison Jones: Okay, challenge accepted.
Harriet Kelsall: It’s not like you’ve got much to read.
Alison Jones: It’s not like I’ve got many books on the to-read pile. Do you know interestingly I’m reading Hans Rosling, well actually I say I’m reading, I’m listening to Hans Rosling Factfulness at the moment. And it’s very interesting how he categorises the world as well. I suspect it’d be very, very different to your middle class kind of slices. But Yes, fascinating.
Okay, how did that happen. Another one for the list. Two to the list. And Harriet, if you want to find out more about you, more about your business, and more about the book, where should they go?
Harriet Kelsall: Oh great, probably my website which is HKJewellery.co.uk. HK as in my initials, jewellery.co.uk. And on there you’ll see lots of my work as a jeweller but there’s also a section on there about the book. And you can read a bit more about it. And then you can also follow us on our various social networks if you pop Harriet Kelsall into Twitter or Instagram, you’ll find we’ve got two accounts. There’s the business one and then there’s my personal one, so you can take your pick as to which you’d prefer to follow. Or both.
Alison Jones: It’s not an either or situation this, is it? Brilliant, I will put those links up on the show notes at ExtraordinaryBusinessBooks.com and you can check them all out there. Thank you so much for your time today Harriet, that was absolutely fascinating.
Harriet Kelsall: Thank you so much. I really enjoy listening to your podcast as well, so it’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you.