Approaching Normal

In this follow-up to their July 2020 discussion, “Four Regrets You’re About to Have,” David interrogates Blair on the extent to which he is a valuable and accurate predictor of what is happening in the marketplace.

Links

2Bobs episode 89: “Four Regrets You’re About to Have” based on Blair’s article with the same title.

Transcript

David C. Baker: Blair, today we are talking about, well, until we come up with a better title, we're going to use yours. [chuckles]

Blair Enns: I thought you're going to say until we come up with a better topic because there's such a backstory here.

David: It's going to be approaching normal. For the life of me, I don't see the upside in this topic for you because I'm just interrogating you on the extent to which you are a valuable and accurate predictor of what's happening in the marketplace. This isn't me saying, "Hey, Blair, let's look at your portfolio choices over the last four years." You're the one that suggested this. Is this some step seven and some self-flagellation program you have or what?

Blair: Let's just be honest with the listeners. We usually have a bunch of episodes in the can and we're recording this at the end of July 2021. Something's happened this summer. We've used up all the back episodes. Now, we're flying without a net here, if that's the metaphor.

David: There's a lot of we in your statement. [chuckles] You must have some friend in your pocket.

Blair: We couldn't record last week because I haven't been to work in weeks, and my brain isn't switched on, so we had nothing to talk about. We went to Twitter and asked for all these topic ideas and there were a whole bunch of great ones. We were about to record one and then another, but you first pointed out, and then I pointed out a couple of them. We've already recorded podcasts on these topics. We might be approaching not normal, but we might be approaching done for 2Bobs.

David: Yes. We think of ourselves as the Library in Alexandria. There's nothing else left to add. What else, dude? [chuckles] No, I did think as soon as I saw the topic idea that, "Oh, this will be good." because it forces me to think too about my predictions. I made a really bad prediction. I think most of what I thought, there are two that didn't work out very well. One didn't work out at all. You've made some similar predictions. This is an article- I don't remember when you wrote it. Was it about a year ago or so and you made four of them?

Blair: Yes, four regrets you're about to have. We recorded a podcast episode on it about a year, I think it was June or July of 2020. I was making some predictions. I guess I've asked you to make me eat my own dog food.

David: [laughs] Well, let's dive right in, Mr. Enns.

[laughs]

Well, you wrote this during a period of quite a bit of uncertainty. We had no idea what was coming, or how long it would last.

Blair: Yes, unlike now, where there's no answer, dude.

David: Your first regret that you said, in other words, look ahead, think ahead, what is it that you probably want to think about doing now or thinking differently and later, if you don't do it, you're probably going to beat yourself up? The first one that you said the future regret you might have is, "I should have taken time off." At the time, it was such an obvious statement because a lot of people didn't have a lot to do at the moment, but they're glued to watching the TV and doom scanning social media and figuring out what's coming next and there weren't in the middle place to do it. Talk about this first one. "I should have taken time off." How did you do on that, first, I should ask that?

Blair: Well, I did poorly at first because I know that I'm a sprinter and I have certain cycles where I'm able to sprint and then I lie down and recharge. I've built vacations and effectively, built the business around those sprints and then pandemic hits. These March vacations which are crucial to me don't happen. We don't go anywhere. We try vacationing at home, but it's not the same thing. You, I guess, I'm talking in the general you, but I'm really talking about me here and thinking that this translates.

You keep working, you keep going, but your productivity just diminishes. I wasn't able to recharge in the regular places, but there's one big place in my calendar where I'm pretty good at recharging and that's called summer, July, and August. I had a couple of weeks' vacation planned in the calendar. At some point, really early in July, might have even been June now. It feels like a long time ago. I just quit going to work. It's been the best thing I've ever done, David.

David: There is a diminishing return at some point. I don't know if you've looked a little further to the right.

Blair: I'm testing the theory that there might not be.

David: You sound like that guy from office space sitting in the restaurant.

Blair: Peter, sitting with Joanna. She's saying, "What do you do?" He starts to describe it and he said, "It doesn't matter. I'm just not going to go anymore." She says, "You're going to quit." He goes, "No, I'm just not going to go." That's me. I just haven't been going to work. I go in "to work for two reasons". Number one is the weekly staff meeting I dial in from home. Then if you and I are recording a podcast, I come into the office so I haven't been here in two weeks.

I walk in here and look at my desk. It's like, "What are all these papers doing at my desk? Who broke into my office and put all this work stuff on my desk but it was me from a few weeks ago. I am making up for the fact that I did not take enough time off. I have to tell you, this is fantastic. I am living the life. I should have discovered this years ago. Just don't go to work.

David: You know what? The next question is that she asked the guy across the table in that clip is, how are you going to pay your bills? He's like, "Yes, I don't think I'm going to do that either. I don't like paying bills either. I've never enjoyed it." Then he says, "Okay, why don't you come over to my place and let's watch some Kung Fu?"

Blair: Kung Fu.

David: Well, I'm most interested really in what's the lesson moving forward? Assuming that we have a somewhat normal life, business life moving forward, that there aren't any big lockdowns or something like that, what is the big message that we should take away in terms of time off?

Blair: I see people who have done a pretty good job. I see people who are in my state right now, just not going to work. I don't know if it's just the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon where as soon as you buy a Honda Civic, you see Honda Civics everywhere. As soon as you quit going to work, you see people who have quit going to work everywhere. I don't know if that's it but I think I'm seeing there's absolutely no science here. It's purely anecdotal. I think I'm seeing a pretty good barbell diversification of people who are still burned out who have not taken enough time and then people who are just taking lots of time.

Moving forward on this prediction, I think a lot of us have learned some lessons about how much time we need off and not just in vacation chunks. I have some family visiting and we were sitting around the, I was going to say fire last night, sitting around the smoke in the air last night. One of my family members was saying they used to start work at eight in the morning and everybody has a roughly 30 to 60-minute commute. He said now they start at nine and nobody goes into the office. There's that two hours of the day where they're freed up. Then he was saying that in his own work style, they've got kids at home.

He works in fits and starts, he lets work build up, gets a whole bunch done, feels great, takes a little bit time off. During the day, just the cycle. When I was talking about my cycle, I'm talking about the calendar year. There are spots in the calendar year where I know I'm going to sprint and then I'm going to collapse at the finish line. I have these beautiful places in the world where I might go to. One of them might be here in Canada for the summer where I collapse.

That's the routine that I've built. There's also the weekly routine and the daily routine. I suspect there's still a fair number of people out there who just haven't been able to make it work because they've got kids at home, et cetera, and are still burned out. I think there's a lot of people who have a new routine. Here's my theory. I think a lot of people have figured out that they work too much. Again, it could just be Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. I'm seeing myself everywhere.

David: Well, it's also complicated by the fact that they had the time to take time off but there really wasn't much that they could do that was as fun as before. It's like an endless vacation at your own home and you can't go anywhere. It just felt weird, right? It's interesting to me to think about the compromises that principals make in order to not have a boss. We've talked about that in different ways, and because it's so measurable, it's easy to talk about the compromises they make and their own compensation.

Many of them could just quit and go work somewhere else for probably a more typical work week, less financial risk, and a fair bit more money. We don't talk enough about the fact that they are not taking advantage of taking time off, which they could do because they're in charge. I think that's wearing people out more than the money thing. I think it's just this headspace. I don't know where I got the idea from. Maybe it was you or maybe it was another friend or something but the idea is like, why do you work on Friday?

If your business allows you to not work on Friday, then don't work on Friday. At least try it or maybe a half a day. I've got several clients that are going to four-day workweeks. Not fewer hours but just compressed into four days so that there are those four-day sprints and then three days off. I think we ought to experiment more with that. That feels like the most untapped area of entrepreneurial control for us right in front of our faces and we're not doing enough with it.

Blair: I agree. I think there's been, there's not a consensus but I think there are a lot of people, a lot of business owners who've just asked the question, why are we working so much? I'm seeing a lot of four-day workweeks. There isn't much work that gets done at when without pitching on Fridays. Half the team is off, the other half, we rarely schedule anything in terms of coaching or training on a Friday.

Started out as a summer thing and now it's just a thing, thing. I think I'm seeing that elsewhere, a realization that we're just a little bit too much of just logging the hours. I think because a lot of us have been forced to juggle work and home obligations, particularly kids, we found out that we can be just as productive in less time, so why are we working so much? I don't mean to dwell on this too much but another thing that's related, have you noticed that now that you can socialize again, you have less desire to do so?

David: Yes. What's happened for me over the last year and a half is the truth has surfaced in so many areas of my life. I now am so much clear about what I want in life, what I don't want. I know so much more about people, I think better of certain people, and less of others. It's not anything that we were doing wrong before, we just didn't have a reset button on our lives, and that's what it did. It forced us to think about some things in new ways. It's so healthy.

I don't want to minimize all the pain. There was really significant pain through all of this, that's not something we would wish on anybody but let's at least leverage the opportunity to think a little bit differently. That was the first one about working. We also did a great podcast. Remember, this is one where I interviewed you. There was, I forget exactly the phrase, but it was something like, "You take time off work in order to be productive." It wasn't the other way around, you don't just earn a certain amount of time off by doing great work. You can't even do great work until you earn it by taking time off.

Blair: Yes, that's a Strategic Coach principle where three different types of days focus days, buffer days, and free days. You start with the free days because most entrepreneurs, in particular, do not have enough time off. Time off is a requirement for you to be productive, it is not a reward for good behavior. My team's been really supportive of me not going to work, and it's been this joke.

My wife was my business partner. The areas she's responsible for, she's understaffed, she's hiring, she's working really hard. I have a little bit of a sense of guilt but not so much that I'm pitching in to help. It's like, "No, you need to come closer to where I am. I'm not getting dragged back into this work thing that you have found yourself in."

David: "This work thing that you insist on doing for our family, where does that come from?" All right. You're sitting there thinking ahead saying, "What are the four regrets you might have?" The first one is how much time you're taking off. The second one was in quotes here, "I should have produced some content or built my audience." In other words, taking the time off from client work, and thinking more clearly about something, developing a point of view, sharing that, not just to help with new business but also to just expand your brain. That was that regret. What happened with that?

Blair: You know what's interesting about that one, and the two that follow, and even the first one? They're built on the assumption that the economy had ground to a halt, and it had at the time of that writing, so we're all going to have this free time on our hands. What's really happened, some firms talk about this K-shaped recovery. I would say, there's a selection bias here by most of the firms that you and I do business with and talk to on a regular basis.

I've done a Twitter poll. I forget what the survey is, but far more than 50% have found themselves in good economic position. The pandemic, I'll just say it like it is, has been good for business, where they've been able to respond in a way where they've had a better year financially, business-wise across every meaningful metric than they expected to and maybe even better than the previous years.

My assumption was, "Okay, economic gridlock, you're going to have all this time on your hands." That just hasn't been the case. I don't know, from my own point of view, I'm supposed to be working on a book this summer, and I did a pretty good job of it getting to my first milestone. I hit that milestone, then I was supposed to keep writing to get to the finished manuscripts.

David: What was the milestone?

Blair: I'm not going to say.

David: The title?

[laughter]

Blair: I have a working title, I don't have the final title yet. It's a miniature version of the book, for reasons I won't get into because I don't want to jinx this book by talking about it more than we already have. I felt pretty good about my progress and then it was like, "Okay, I'm going to quit going to work but I'm going to continue to write." Then at some point, I realized, "No, I'm not even in the headspace to write," so I was just not doing anything other than talking to you and sitting through a weekly staff meeting. The assumption was that you're going to have all this time and I think that just wasn't the case. I found a whole bunch of time because I quit going to work but for reasons, I've already talked about.

David: I've seen people be more diligent about their own insight development process and taking marketing their own firm more seriously, but I don't think it's come from the fact that they've had more time or thought they would have more time. I think it's more, they realize that they didn't have as much control over their future as they thought they did. Because here this external event that seems so unlikely, happened, and they realized how quickly something could close down.

Now, in the end, it didn't quite. In fact, to expand on your comment earlier, I think most firms that got the PPP money, which is a US version of this. Most of them didn't even need the money, they didn't spend it and it's still sitting there. Anyway, but they're still taking this positioning stuff very, very seriously, but not because they had more time, but because they felt a little bit more vulnerable from all of this.

I've been in this, you have to, we've been in this long enough to know exactly what's going to happen next. I don't know when, but it's going to be three months or nine months from now. The next big concern is not where's the work going to come from, but where are the people going to come from? I cannot find great people.

Blair: I'm seeing that now.

David: It's like this feast and famine cycle. We don't pay attention to marketing until the work isn't there and then we worry about spinning the flywheel up fast enough. The same thing for people, it's like this is not the time. There's no better time to just start right now, obviously, but having a consistent recruiting strategy, I think that needs to happen no matter what the recruiting market is like. Anyway, I'm really off-topic here.

Blair: Well, back to content creation, as you're talking, it occurs to me. You've been as prolific as ever just telling a little bit of your story here. You're like shattering your record of a best year ever. You're in a one-person consulting business. You're doing the revenue the 10-person agency might do, and you're continuing to produce content at the same pace. What medication are you on?

David: Or not on?

Blair: Is it legal in Canada? [chuckles]

David: Well, it comes from two places for me. One is that I have felt the panic of not enough work in another life and I just never want that to happen again. I'm okay going down swinging, but I got to be swinging. If this whole thing ends at some point, I'm going to be okay with that if I did my part. That's a big part of what motivates me. The biggest part is just I'm just addicted to writing. I get grouchy. I get what it must be if somebody needs a fix if I don't write. I write mainly for myself and it feels good to do it. I appreciate the opportunity, but it's kind of a selfish thing because I don't know what else to do but that.

Blair: I've never hated you more than I hate you right now.

David: That's all right.

Blair: I used to be addicted to writing. [chuckles] One day I will be again, but it will be in July or August. We know that it's going to be the Tuesday after labor day.

David: We should also mention, we have a global audience for this thing. The way things have turned around in the US is the US is leading that turnaround. It's not the same in other countries. Part of what we're talking about is going to resonate with US listeners. In Canada, the turnaround is not as fast. It's not quite at the same level that it is in the US so just want to acknowledge that.

David: All right. The third one, future regret that you wanted us to think about was I should have upgraded my skill set or our team's skillset. I'm curious what you mean by that specifically. Maybe you can give me some examples of that. Then how did other firms do? That's really more interesting to me. How did other firms do with that?

Blair: Well, I think this is another false prediction that was predicated on the assumption that we're all going to have all of this time off. We're all going to have this downtime. It didn't last probably a couple of weeks after that post went out. Certainly, no more than four weeks. It was evident that even though there was some economic gridlock initially, so many firms were busier than ever. Not only busy doing what they used to do but busy doing things differently. They had to respond. In our business, we have 55% of our revenue was tied to me getting on a plane, now it's zero.

We had to make some pivots quickly as a lot of firms did. Maybe the nature of their offering didn't change, but the package did how they delivered it. Everybody was busy with, A, doing the work that they used to do before, or B, doing new work, and C, doing either A or B in a new way. I just don't think there was the downtime in the typical firm where it was like, "All right, everybody, instead of focusing on client work, because there is none, let's build our skills. Let's do some professional development work." Now, having said that, I run a training company and we delivered a lot of training over the last year.

David: Is that in part, because if there was any skill they really wanted to master, it was new business and sales and pricing.

Blair: Yes. There is that. I can take all of our clients and I'm fond of hasty generalizations. I can put them into one of two buckets. There's like emergency work and then there's refinement or improvement work. An emergency is like, okay, we're signing up because we need leads right now. I just haven't seen much of that at all. I saw a lot of, hey, things are good and maybe a lot of government stimulus money. That, as you point out, a lot of these firms got it. They took it because they didn't know whether they would need it or not, or for whatever the reasons were.

It turned out that, "Okay, things are okay and we have this money, let's channel some of this into training." I guess I have some of the governments to thank for the good year we've had in the last year, but what we saw is a drop-in private training where we would go into from, and obviously, it's done virtually now and train a large number of people, but we saw a big increase in single people from many firms stepping up and buying training. I don't know how much it's appropriate to extrapolate that across investing in skill development across the board. That's just a microcosm of what I saw.

David: Apart from the kind of training that you folks, your team does, what do you think some of the biggest gaps are in terms of skill development? As you look across firms thinking things like strategy, research, incorporating AI, account management, project management, there are just so many options. Are there any glaring places where you think there's a hole here where people could make up some ground pretty quickly?

Blair: Google's got these certificate programs now where if you complete them, they'll treat them as the equivalent of a four-year degree when hiring for Google. I think that areas that they're offering are probably the key areas where we're going to see a lot of professional development, where there just aren't enough people with enough skill. Data analytics is one project management is another and UX design is another of those three.

You and I have been serving this audience for like 20 to 25 years. We just never heard about project management in the beginning because PM stuff like that came from the software world for the most part. We had account management without project management in a typical agency ad agency design firm. You didn't have project management. Now project management is bigger. I think of account management as selling. I think project management as a detailed skill with specific frameworks upon which it makes sense to get appropriate training.

I'm seeing a bigger and bigger market for project management. We don't do that. It's not in our bailiwick, but I know a few organizations that do project management training for the agency world. I just see those businesses getting bigger and bigger. That's a super valuable skill. I wish my kids were still in that education phase of their lives would take some project management courses.

David: I'm writing an article right now. It's outlined the illustrations done. I haven't quite finished it. It's on the idea that AM's and PMs are always failed at something.

Blair: Oh, yes. I totally get that.

David: It's jarring when you hear that, but it's actually beautiful because it means that somebody has naturally landed in a really great place and they have not only the skills, but they have some personal aptitude for it. With the personality testing I've done, you can see that. It's so interesting to see. When you think about project management before the digital stuff, like through the advertising door that was called traffic.

The joke back then was there was no testing for whether somebody was good at it. The joke was, and George Johnson and Tony Mike, and she'd say this all the time. It's like the only way to know for sure that you've got the right project person is if you don't like them. If you like them, they're wrong. It's not a skill that's highly valued. Like it should be in that space. But then, like you said, on the software development side, you can't do that.

Now we have producers, which is their version of a PM who is bringing so much more to the table, but they're forgetting the am side of things and they're just ignoring it just as badly. It's just the flip problem. There's so much. I don't know why got, but this is really interesting stuff to think about how all that's developed, and I see more and more people really building their skills on the PM. There are better sources for that than there are on the AM.

Blair: Yes, totally.

David: The fourth regret you said was looking back, I don't want to say I should've updated my strategy positioning business model for the new reality. In other words, did something happen during the pandemic that surfaced how you could have a better business and you might not have looked at it otherwise? The one word I hear a lot, I'd like to know if you hear it, as well as people experimenting more and more with the Hollywood model. I hear that so much. I don't know if you do?.

Blair: Yes, I think we talked about that in the last year. I predicted that we would see a lot of it. It seems like mainstream now. I think core teams generally are smaller just because to do what you do, you require an increasingly diverse set of specialized skills, and it doesn't make sense to house all of those specialist skills in-house so the core team is shrinking.

Again, this is anecdotal. I don't have any evidence to support it but I think I'm seeing it, especially when people gave up their office space and we're working from home. It's like, "Yes, we don't need all these people on the payroll. I know where to find these people through various platforms, or relationships." I think that trend or prediction has borne out, there's always a backlash to everything. Do you see a backlash to the Hollywood model coming?

David: I do. Yes, I was letting my mind wander, which is usually a dangerous thing. I have to get at least, I can extend the leisure, can't let it get too far. I was thinking this morning, "I wonder if a point of differentiation down the road will be a firm where everybody works in the office?"

Blair: Totally. I know how I would sell against the Hollywood. I know the pros of the Hollywood model is like we're not limited by the people we have here. We can go get the best specialists but one of the implications of that is, well, everybody can.

David: Yes, and you tend to go back to the same specialist every time, this idea that you're assembling the right team every time is, not really, you're just using the same contractors again.

Blair: Yes. The prediction was, you're going to regret that you didn't update your strategy, your position, your business model, that's a bit of a business model but strategy and positioning. Of the things I was worried about for some business owners going into this pandemic was, I thought we would see a lot of people just waiting for things to return to normal.

I saw some of that, but a lot less than I expected to, but the ones you do see where you check in with somebody and they go, "Oh, yes, it's still not very good and we're just waiting for our clients to blah, blah, blah, or the market to blah, blah, blah." Every time I heard that I thought, "Oh, you're dead. You're done." If you're sitting waiting for things to change, and not making things happen, it's over for you. I encountered some firms like that, but not nearly as many as I thought I would.

David: The thing that surprised me, on that same vein, is I thought more firms would drop their requirements for a client fit and would take on a lot of really bad clients, and then immediately regret it because they weren't able to convert them to good clients. I didn't see a lot of that happening. It didn't happen as much as I thought. In other words, I don't see a lot of really bad fit clients on agency rosters that shouldn't have been there in the first place. They seem to have escaped that.

Blair: Do you think that's the stimulus money just gave everybody the safety blanket, and they didn't have to go to the desperate places that they might otherwise have gone?

David: That has to have been a part of it. I also think principals more so than employees really did an introspective look at what they wanted out of life. At the moment when they would be otherwise more tempted than normal to take on a shitty client for the money they said, "No." It was clear to them, that they just became more resolute about what they wanted out of life and out of business and that temptation was greater, but they just didn't take it, I think,

Blair: You watch people age and again, a generalization at some point, a lot of people get to this point in life, where it's like, "Yes, I'm not going to do that. I'm too old to, whatever, though. I'm just not doing what I don't want to do anymore," kind of like me not going to work and I feel like I saw a lot of that. There's this existential crisis and a lot of people looked at aspects of their business, their jobs, or their lives and said, "I'm not going to do that anymore."

You have a lot of industries that just aren't able to hire people because when things quieted for a while a lot of people went, "I don't really like what it is that I do for a living, I'm not going to do it anymore. Even if I don't know what I'm going to do next. I know I'm not going to do that anymore." I think we've seen that in different facets of life and business, that can only be a good thing.

David: What do you think about the expansion, contraction of service offerings? What did people do? What did firms do? Did they expand them and reach in different places or maybe they didn't, as you'd see it? Was that good or do they need to clean house again or do those service offerings that they added experiment with need to be more permanent?

Blair: Again, I have no data here and it's anecdotal. I probably better off asking you the question, because you've probably been more observant of the information that you have seen. I see a barbell where some people have retreated to core services, and some have expanded and I think of our own business. We did some retreating. In fact, not to jinx this, but the book I'm writing now is not the book I thought I would be writing for a variety of reasons, one of which was a realization that "This isn't a core offering," this book that I'm thinking of publishing, it's going to distract me for two years from more core offerings.

I think even us having to change our business model, we retreated a little to more core services or subject areas, and because we did that, I see it everywhere but I don't know. Maybe you'd have a less biased point of view on whether or not that's really going on.

David: I think principal's expected to get a lot of requests outside the norm, and that didn't happen quite as much. I've not seen as much experimenting with ongoing service offerings as I thought I would. I have seen more of the pre-experimentation, so they are thinking a lot more about what the early stage of the client relationship looks like. They're being a lot more intentional about that initial diagnostic that we've talked about, a road map. That's coming up a lot. They're really thinking way more about the onboarding process for clients and not so much what comes later.

There's also a little bit more awareness, I've seen this everywhere, about how to incorporate data from what the clients want to keep doing versus what makes sense for you to add. Video is an example of that. If you think about what clients are least likely to let go of, it would be video. Maybe that should influence what we add. They're being more aware of what the client wants when they make those decisions and not just what those opportunities are that come to them somewhat accidentally.

Blair: It's really striking, 18 months in when it feels like we're not on the other side of this, but you and I are fully vaccinated and we're leading what I would consider to be pretty normal lives other the fact that we're still not traveling. It's really striking, the positive implications, again, recognizing that there's been death and other hardships for people. I'm struck by the beneficial effects of the pandemic on people's businesses and lives.

Again, it's not all roses, but the positives that I do see, I didn't expect to see so many positive implications from the constraint of having to deal with this pandemic. We did a podcast on that on, on the theory of constraints or the idea that we all play the game of constraints, how having to deal with the constraint forces some creative thinking, and how you have to solve the problem, in this case, run your business. I could not have predicted that there would be as many positive implications as we've experienced.

David: Oh, yes, me too, and because we're so good at projections, maybe we should-- [laughs] You are right, we just completely wiped out that entire category of our podcast future, but we should take a stab at what is going to look like for firms two years from now. Maybe that's a good topic to cover.

Blair: Yes. Stating from where I'm sitting right now, I have no idea, but to your point, I've been saying for a long time, if you're an expert at what you do, you have an obligation to try to predict the future, and you don't have an obligation to be right. I'm really okay with our record on predicting the future.

David: [laughs] Thank God.

Blair: Because it's not about being right or wrong, it's about giving people something to think about and a point of view that maybe they haven't considered that they can balance with their own ideas and other point of views they're being exposed to. It also keeps you sharp. I think we do have an obligation to keep trying to predict what's going to happen, so do economists but they never do and they're never right when they do it. Then, there's always learning and how well we did. We're 50/50 on this one. It's hard to tell.

David: Yes, we're at least 50/50. I'll live with it too. Well, this has been a fun discussion. The one thing I want to come back and talk more about at some point is the whole work from home thing, how that impacts positioning, service offerings, recruiting. There's more clarity now. It still feels like the fog hasn't lifted entirely for me, but I still think there's lots more to think about there. We should do some public thinking about it.

Blair: Yes. Also, you and I have talked about when this pandemic is over and we can travel again, we're going to throw a party and call it a conference, but it's really hard still at the end of July 2021, it's still really hard to plan something for even the coming winter. Who knows what we're in for?

David: Yes, right. All right, Blair, thank you.

Blair: Thanks, David.

David: Don't quit your job. Sorry, you already did.

Blair: I'm not quitting. I haven't retired. People in the little village I've lived in, it's like, "Oh, you're retired." No, I'm just not going to work. I haven't quit. I'm not retired. I'm just not going.

David: Okay. We're going to put a link to that YouTube thing in the show.

Blair: Oh, yes.