Big Clients Vs Small Clients

Blair shares the tradeoffs creative firms have to deal with when pursuing firms of a particular size, and David gets Blair riled up again about procurement.

Transcript

David Baker: Blair, today we're going to talk about a topic that you suggested, I really liked this as soon as I heard it, the idea of big clients versus small clients and the trade-offs and all of that. It got me thinking to so many conversations I've had with my clients because if you get them talking about their experience over the years with clients, you just almost can't shut them up once they start.

They'll fill you with stories of great clients and terrible clients and they'll mix things in, like, how they abused the staff or the other end of it, how they were such great partners. One thing they don't seem to talk too much about is the relative size of those clients, and whether there's any connection between that size and their experience working for them. You've been noticing some patterns here. What made you think about this topic?

Blair Enns: I'm not sure there is one impetus, but I remember a conversation about a year ago with a client who was saying, "We're doing work for this brand that everybody would recognize, but we'd love to be working on this bigger, more famous brand." My response was, "Would you love to be working with their procurement department?" He thought about it for a second. Maybe they were just being polite but this idea of "I guess not." It occurs to me that there's this sweet spot when it comes to the size of the client.

We sometimes tend to think that bigger is better, and sometimes bigger is better. We'll talk about both ends of the spectrum. I don't know that going after the biggest brands in the world is necessarily the best move for the average independent firm. There's obviously a lot of qualifiers around that but that was the impetus for this idea that a bigger client isn't necessarily a better client.

David: Aside from that, and recognizing that there are all kinds of exceptions to this, what are some of the things that make big clients alluring, as a principal sitting here dreaming of their soon to be existent for the next four years, next month this will be existent, new business plan. What are the things that draw them to big clients? Whether those are true or not, what are the big things?

Blair: Well, I think the two big ones are this assumption that there's bigger money. Often the budgets are bigger, but that doesn't necessarily mean more money to the bottom line for the agency. We'll talk about that. It's big money and then it's big fame or awareness or prestige, whatever you want to call it. There's a lot of cachet to be able to say that you work with the biggest brands in the world.

I'm sure you've seen this pattern, every firm in Seattle or Washington state or even in the Pacific Northwest, it doesn't matter what they've done. Microsoft is on their client list and it's usually right up there, it's the number one client. I'm not trying to make a case "don't do business with Microsoft," I'm just saying this--

David: I'll make that case. I'll definitely make that case.

[laughter]

Blair: Well, I'm looking forward to that part of the podcast.

David: Usually, they just helped somebody below a sea-level put a presentation together overnight because they're in a hurry and now Microsoft is on the website as a client. It's just a little funny to see if you added up all the firms that say Microsoft was a client, you'd wonder how big Microsoft was. It's like, "Oh, my God, they're using 3,428 agencies. That's pretty amazing."

Blair: Yes, there's prestige with saying that you work with the largest clients and we see this all the time. You see it. I see it. Our listeners see it. You go to an agency website, and you look at the page that lists the clients, and you see these logos, and they're either really the world's biggest, most prestigious companies and you're really impressed. You make all kinds of assumptions based on that, or they're these obscure little things that you think of, it's like Blue Cross, Blue Shield in Southern Illinois or something, and you think, "Well, how good can this be?"

But that firm that's doing work for a medical or an insurance company, I don't know what you would call Blue Cross Blue Shield, but that type of business or something like an insurance company that you haven't heard of, they might be making way more money and doing better, more impactful work and have more fruitful client relationships than the firm that's got Microsoft and Facebook and Exxon or whoever the big companies of the day are on their website.

David: All right. Big money, notoriety, it helps the logo wall. Sometimes you don't have to land as many of them because they just self renew, you get in deeply and so on. What are the drawbacks of big clients? You already mentioned the procurement one, where you help somebody who was dreaming about a bigger client say, "Well, you realize that this comes with procurement." What are some of the other things that might come? This one really got me thinking. It's not like I'd learned anything new, but it just hit me in the face. I was like, "Oh my God, these people, they treat their agencies quite differently than really big clients do."

Blair: Yes. Procurement's the big one. I think the sweet spot is when you get just big clients, but not so big that procurement is driving the procurement process. Other drawbacks are poor margins. I was interviewing a procurement person recently, I think I talked about this in one of the most recent episodes. I said to him, putting myself in the agency's position, "I want to work with a client who says, 'Listen, I hope through this work that you do for us that you help us make a lot of money, and you make a lot of money, too." He said to me, "A procurement person would get fired for saying that." We'll unpack that later on in future episodes. There's some big stuff coming on that subject. You might be able to tell because I'm actually interviewing people on this.

David: I can see you smiling.

Blair: Oh, yes.

David: I can get you wound up about procurement easier than anything else.

Blair: [laughs] Don't you dare? No, I'm pretty chill today, David. I don't think you can get me wound up for anything.

[laughter]

David: On this subject of poor margin before you list some other things that come to mind, it's like they're even mandating margins. It's not just that they want you to make less. They want you to not make more than X amount on the relationship.

Blair: Yes, they want to dictate them to you and then they're always going to go down from there. You've got the involvement of procurement, which has an implication on all of the bunch of the things that we're going to talk about here under drawbacks of big clients. You've got generally poor margins because larger companies are more in efficiency-seeking mode than they are in innovation mode.

One of the ways one of the places they seek to find efficiencies is through their marketing agencies. They've got people asking the question. What kind of money are these people making on us? How much of that can we clawback? You also have less bravery in a large organization. This is an interesting-- I don't know how deep we want to go here. Do you think I'm imagining this? Do you think, generally speaking, large organizations, people are less brave, less willing to stand up and be the tall poppy or the voice that says what people are thinking but nobody else wants to say?

David: It's absolutely true. Nobody wants to be the officer on the horse that gets shot first setting up higher. Just brings into focus something that I think we won't have time to talk much about it today, but it's this idea that the bigger the company, the more important it is that you find an internal advocate, or even a maverick, who most of the rest of the people, his or her peers, would like to get that person fired, because they don't follow the rules, but they don't get fired, because they don't follow the rules because the results they bring.

You will find that the bigger the company you work for, the more important it is to have somebody who's willing to break those rules and get away with it because they have a history of result. The whole point is that one person who breaks the rules stands out from the hundreds of people who are terrified of doing it.

Blair: Yes, and that person either gets fired or promoted as you're saying. I'd never really thought of it that specifically before, but when you are working with these big companies look for that Maverick and tie your fortune to that person understanding that at some point, if they don't become CEO, they're going to be fired.

David: You can follow them to the next job.

Blair: Yes. You'll be out with them but maybe you can follow. Lack of bravery in large organizations. If you're an entrepreneur, and you love doing business with entrepreneurs, that describes you and me, the idea of going into an organization where bravery is a scarce commodity, it's a little bit soul-sucking. Speaking of soul-sucking on this list of drawbacks of working with clients that are too big, it's not universal. The larger an organization gets, the more likely they are to be a soulless organization. There's not this super direct correlation here. It's just more likely to happen.

You've experienced those soulless corporations, either directly in the work that you've done, or through your clients. All of our listeners they've had those clients on their roster where it's just about the bottom line. It's just about the margin and the growth targets at the expense of everything else and there's no Simon Sinek why. There's no big tapping into some sense of greatness or the pursuit of a vision that everybody can become inspired by.

David: There's just a bigger group of stakeholders that need to be kept at bay and so you just knock the rough edges off of those decisions. There isn't this smaller group of consumers that you can afford to be really tightly aligned with and you don't care too much about what the rest of the people think as these big companies seek market share, they take fewer risks because more people need to be kept happy during that pursuit of greater market share.

Blair: That same principle applies to the people within the organization, which we're just talking about. Large companies, large market going after the tendency to go after a lowest common denominator and then you have this lowest common denominator effect when it comes to the personnel decisions. When it comes to internal decision making, usually, there's so many people that have the ability to say no or to create obstacles or create trouble and there's so few people who have the real authority to say yes or to overcome obstacles. You get this inertia or entropy that sets in. What else? Also on this list of drawbacks of clients that are too big falls out of procurement, but it's this idea of these horrible payment terms.

David: Oh my gosh, you know what I'm seeing more and more of? It used to be, somebody would-- Sorry, I'm just taking over your thought, but it used to be when a client of yours insisted on 90 days, the hair on your arm would go up and you would think, "Oh my God, that's just rude. We're not a bank, we're a small firm." 90 days is nothing nowadays. There are large corporations that are insisting on six months, 180-day of payment terms.

Blair: Yes, that's criminal.

David: That's driven entirely by the finance department.

Blair: Couple more reasons why you might not want to do business with clients that are too big. The bullet point here says, incompetent middle managers. It's not that incompetence doesn't exist in small organizations. It's just easier to hide in large organizations and in a culture that we just talked about, there's a lot of decision-makers, there's a lot of defaulting to the lowest common denominator, it's pretty easy to hide incompetence.

You can get somebody who's the career person, they've been at the company for 18 years, they've got their eyes seven years out and they're just all of their decisions are about making it over that 25-year line or whatever that line is. You're just more likely to see that in large organizations and again, if you're an entrepreneur running an independent, creative or marketing firm, dealing with too many people like this can be soul-sucking.

David: Can I just insert something here? Among them big mysteries of the world, we could list things like, is there a god? Let's not talk about that one. Here's another big mystery to me and I'm in the US while we're recording this, you're in Canada. I used to work for these big companies, I would do consulting for them. I quit doing that a decade ago. I would walk out of these places and I'd be on my way through the parking lot back to my car just shaking my head at the level of incompetence I was seeing and wondering how in the world did the US become such a powerful economic force in the world with such incompetence at the corporate level. It just is staggering and that still remains a big mystery of the world to me. [chuckles] I know that's cynical, but--

Blair: Right up there with the existence of God, I remember you called me in one of those moments, walking out of those companies and you've said exactly that, I wonder how this country became the powerful country with the level of incompetence at middle management in its large companies.

David: Other people just take for granted that the bigger the company, the more competent a leader must be, and that must be true. I think I'm just missing something here. [laughs] It just is staggering, but yes, I just I couldn't help but talk about that as you talk about the drawbacks of big clients, incompetent middlemen and politics that might come up as people are thinking about the decisions they make that are not solely about what's good for the company, but what's good for their career as well.

We're going to talk in a minute about how you don't want your clients to be too small, but for good small clients, what are some of those benefits? They're the flip side of what we've talked about, but just list a few of them for us.

Blair: I actually want to back up to the beginning a little bit when we're talking about the benefits of big clients because there were a couple of points I wanted to make that I didn't get to. You alluded to the idea of longer-term commitment. You might sign these, like MSAs that cover multiple years. That's good, but another one is, especially in CPG or in Europe FMCG businesses, you get knowledgeable brand managers. You get these MBAs who they're educated, they bring some pretty knowledgeable business frameworks to the job and they're looking at the data. They're not shooting from the hip. They're making some educated decisions. That's one of the benefits of working in larger companies and also that they have experience in working with firms like yours.

Now that one's a double-edged sword. But on the benefits of small clients, the first one that I like is you're dealing with entrepreneurs, not always, but they're more entrepreneurial, therefore, they're more likely to take risk. I think if you are a creative person or a marketer and an entrepreneur, you're running an independent firm, these are really your types of people.

You get inspired by possibilities every day and you're keen to share your vision of what's possible with others. You can wear out a bureaucratic client or somebody who's got the next three quarters mapped out, but your more smaller entrepreneurial clients are kindred spirits on that subject of being always open to possibilities.

David: There's this connection, you may even talk about it, but you're both to some degree in the same boat. You're both small, independent. There's big guys and the big guys are the enemies, the big companies or that maybe it's the holding firms for you. You just talk the same language, you read the same business books and you talk about the same things. Yes, I can see that for sure.

Blair: They're more smaller clients that tend to be more innovative, willing to do something new.

Blair: This isn't universally true, but my point here is willing to spend an experiment. Now, it's not true that smaller clients are more willing to spend. They're more willing to spend and lose. They're more willing to take a risk with their expense and again, there's a size of client. Again, it's not a universal truth, but there's a client that's so small that are not willing to do that at all. It's more of a psychographic than it is a demographic. You come up with your crazy idea and the client who is equally prone to crazy ideas is willing to throw some money at the experiment.

In the best cases, even if the experiment fails, you've both learned something, and at some point, the client feels like it was a worthwhile investment. Now, maybe that's a little bit idealistic on my part. Do you want to rip that apart?

David: No, I don't think it's idealistic. I think it's true and especially with the advent of the quick fail way of thinking. They don't think a lot of money in exploring this idea and they haven't slipped into the slowdown, protective, defend our market share mode yet. They know that in order to build the market share they're looking for, they're not going to be able to use the playbook of the big company. They are going to have to out-innovate, out change and they're going to have to experiment with lots of things. You can be a part of that, not only in executing those things quickly and cost-effectively, but also bringing more ideas to the table. The bigger companies are not looking for as many big new ideas from you. They're looking for the safe execution of ideas that are not going to get them in trouble.

Blair: The big companies are in efficiency-seeking mode and the little companies are in innovation mode. We've talked about this multiple times before. This principle of mine that I call the inefficiency principle is that those are opposite ends of the spectrum and every individual, every department and every company exists somewhere on that spectrum. The larger the company, generally speaking, the more they tend to be on the efficiency-seeking end of the spectrum.

The small companies, it's in their nature to be innovative. They make quick decisions, they're willing to spend and experiment. Somewhat related to that is this idea of partnership. Now, agencies love to say, "We partner with our clients."

David: Yes. I was hoping you'd talk about this one because you've spit on the idea of partnership. I want to make sure you explain exactly what you mean by partnership in this case.

Blair: There's an article on my website, winwithoutpitching.com, called You Don't Really Partner With Your Clients. In that article, I define partnership in the truest sense of the word, is when you actually have a financial relationship where both parties have skin in the game. That means you are a partner to your client when you put compensation at risk and that's what I mean by partnership.

Smaller, innovative clients are more willing to treat you as a partner in maybe the definition that you, the listener, would historically use but also in the definition that I would use. I teach value-based pricing. It's almost two and a half years since my book Pricing Creativity has come out. Now, when I'm doing a talk or working with a firm, I very quickly make the point, "Listen, the idea that you're going to move from cost-based pricing to value based pricing, universally wholesale, just put that out of your mind. You really should adopt this barbell type approach where a certain percentage of your client relationships are these safe relationships, where they would never pay you based on value, maybe because it's driven by procurement, et cetera."

It's a pretty straightforward financial relationship in that it's a fee for service. Then you look for those small number of clients where you see an oversized ability to create value, and you have in that client somebody who's willing to partner with you and that you are willing to partner with, because you wouldn't partner with just anybody. Most of your clients, you wouldn't want to partner with, but you look for those small opportunities they're more innovative. They're more entrepreneurial. They tend to be independently held. They tend to have management has at least some ownership stake, if not fully 100% ownership. You look for opportunities to create extraordinary value for them, and you value price those ones with some compensation at risk. That's how you can have this balanced portfolio of low-risk investments and a small number of high-risk investments with essentially unlimited upside.

I love the small entrepreneurial client for that reason. I'm not going to make the case in this podcast or anywhere that all of your clients should be these small entrepreneurial clients. I think you need to have a balance and you need to think about how you're working with these clients differently and how your compensation structure is different.

David: Is it right to assume that those value-based pricing clients where both parties really like the idea are more likely to be in the middle, not too small and not too large, or is that an unfair assumption on my part?

Blair: Well, I think generally speaking, the smaller the client, the more likely they're open to value-based pricing. But you do want a certain size. You want this Goldilocks client that's not too big, not too small. If we go to drawbacks of clients that are too small, you can often get people who are really unsophisticated or inexperienced, they've got really small budgets, they're spending their own money and they feel like every dollar, unlike Microsoft, every dollar that they spend is like there's a critical decision to be made about every small project, and that can just wear you down over time.

I think as a general rule, this holds smaller clients are more open to value based pricing, the opportunity to create extraordinary value for the smallest clients just isn't there, like the amount of economic value that you can help create through your work, it's just not there. I would say starting from the low end of the spectrum and going up to a larger client, you want an established business.

I think you don't even want the leader in a category. I think you want to work-- I'm going to kick myself for using this word. I think you want to work with the challenger in a growth category. I don't like the word challenger. You tell me why don't I like the word challenger?

David: I haven't heard you explain why but my guess is you don't like the word challenger because it's sort of this broad-- there's no distinction in it. Any brand can be a challenger brand. It sort of ends up meaningless, but I don't really know why you don't like the word challenger or maybe you're just grumpy today.

Blair: Yes, I told you I'm unshakeable today.

[laughter]

David: That is a challenge right there. I'm making some notes to myself.

Blair: Yes. You gave up on that challenge like 10 minutes ago.

David: Just prompting you. Yes. Why don't you like the word challenger?

Blair: Yes, I think it's perfectly valid for a brand to say "we're a challenger brand" and to have that challenger brand mentality. There was a period of time at the beginning of the century where there's so many agencies going out there with this positioning of we're a challenger brand agency. I think there was a book written by it.

David: Another book just came out written by a client of mine in Austin, on challenger brands. As he was asking me and my thoughts on that, I just said, "Listen, the biggest thing you've got to be intellectually honest. Every brand is not a challenger brand."

A challenger brand, it has to be number three through six. I'm making some things up here, but it has to be number three to six and market share. It has to be spending at least 150% of what the IRS would consider the normal market spend for a firm in that NAICS category and I threw all kinds of things in there. As long as you're a little bit more scientific about it I think it's valid.

Blair: Well, I think it was just there are too many firms using that positioning for awhile. It's not that it's not valid. I think a lot of them were just using it as cover to say, "The biggest companies won't hire us, but if you're a small company aspiring to be a big company, please hire us." My glib reaction to the claims of expertise aside, I actually think that's the sweet spot you want to pursue.

I think you want a large, but still growing with lots of room for upside client. You want somebody who's willing to invest in marketing. It's still a growth play. If you think of it as a stock, if it's a publicly traded company or even if it's privately held, you look at it and go, "Is that growth or income?"

David: Marketing spend is an investment, not a cost in their minds.

Blair: Yes, and that's the key differentiator. Do they see this as an investment and then are they willing to invest in innovation and growth or are they holding onto market share and seeking efficiencies and trying to innovate in a nice safe way, but not spending too much money and not rocking the boat too much. I think you want as large as you can get while still growing the category and growing the share. I think that's the sweet spot, Goldilocks client.

Let's come back to procurement, one of my favorite topics. Ideally, you're not dealing with procurement, but if the company is large enough, but they're still growing and growing rapidly, procurement is probably there. They're probably involved. They have a say, but they're not driving the whole process. If procurement is driving the whole process, that is an efficiency seeking organization where you are not going to be able to do your best work and you're not going to be able to earn extra ordinary income through extraordinary value creation. It's just not allowed.

David: When you suggested this topic for this episode, I decided to do a little bit more reading on procurement. I was curious about as a company is growing, at what size do they begin to take procurement more seriously? It really opened my eyes to some things that I just made a few assumptions about before and hadn't really validated. I put on a disguise and went over and under the procurement side and started to read some of the stuff that they were saying, and they said that you really need procurement when you have at least 500 regular suppliers. Then when they tied that to a particular revenue size, they would say that generally it's about 500 million, but there's this movement to introduce procurement earlier, even as low as 150 million and above.

Then I took another deep dive over in an alley, and they were starting to talk about how procurement thinks differently based on the number of people in the department. They said that procurement departments of five to 10 people typically exists to support business processes. They're not driving the process. Then there's this little middle ground above that but above 25 people in a procurement department, that's set up to really drive all of that process. Layering that on what you just said, and all of a sudden, we start to have a little bit more definition. The fog lifts about what's the ideal client size. It's not like it's always that scientific, but it is kind of specific.

Blair: Yes, it's interesting. Yes. You've got my blood boiling now.

David: I thought you were unflappable today. This was so easy.

Blair: You said procurement department of above 25. I immediately imagined the death star and I'm looking for the exhaust port. I'm looking for, where do I place this shot to blow up the whole thing. What were we talking about? What's the topic of this podcast?

David: It's about how to rile you up. Then there was one other-- this was an article by Conrad Smith's. The title of it was How To Right-Size A Company's Procurement Value. This was one of the most fair articles I have read about procurement because he talks about how important it is to not view procurement as driving the process. You always view it as support. You need to understand where this company is and the growth chain and take a different approach to procurement based on what the company's goals are. I thought it was a really enlightened approach to procurement.

That's not the way you and I experienced procurement through our client's lives. We've got to really do a long series on procurement. But anyway, I just wanted to talk about at what size is somewhere in the say 250 to $500 million revenue, that's when procurement starts to rear its ugly head, and it becomes a more of a battle than a partnership sort of arrangement.

Blair: Yes, and I rolled my eyes when you said some procurement people are making the case for procurement to get involved at the $150 million range. We're making some blanket statements here, it depends on the business you're in, depends on whether it's direct or indirect goods. It depends on all. Beyond size, like growth factor and the growth goals of the organization and whether or not they're seeking innovation versus efficiency. I think that's a more important driver than the actual size, but I will grant you that I think there's a certain threshold. 500 million sounds about right. I'm not saying that organizations who are innovation-seeking mode should forego the pursuit of efficiencies at all, or not look at how they can't bring their costs down.

It's just not as important like the return on saving money when you're in growth mode, is nowhere near the return on innovating.

David: Is there anything different here about professional service firms, how they view this?

Blair: If you work with, say, law firms, as an example, you know that the small law firms are-- There's a certain size where it doesn't make sense to even work with those professional firms. It's not just law firms, there's medical practices too. It's when you have the professional spending their own money. You want this certain threshold of you want them to have dedicated marketing departments with dedicated budgets where every budget spend doesn't have to be approved by a partner who sees another dollar going out of their pocket.

But I think that's essentially the Goldilocks client. They are a challenger, so they're large, but there's still lots of upside for the category to grow, and more importantly, for them to grow their share in the category, ideally through innovation. They're spending money on innovation. They're investing in innovation and marketing would be in support of that innovation and a lot of what our listeners do for their clients, whether it's digital product development, whatever that's all seen under the banner of innovation or closely related to it.

Procurement isn't driving the process.

There might be a procurement department. They might have some involvement, but they're not driving the selection process, and they're not dictating terms to you right from the beginning. I think that's the sweet spot. It's actually large, but not so large that you start to run into those issues.

David: This makes perfect sense to me. It completely resonates with the experience that I have in talking with my clients. Blair, wrap this up with a bow. You've done a really good job of describing the ideal Goldilocks client. What are some other statements you can make that make this hit home for people listening?

Blair: Sizes and everything it's all cracked up to be, larger is generally better until you get to the larger sizes you start to give up all sorts of enviable things. What we didn't mention is, you and I both see firms from time to time, they have a declared positioning where they focus on small business and that's almost never a choice. That's a young agency that hasn't been able to grow their size of their clients. Then they look at the patterns among their client list and think, 'Oh, most of these are small businesses. We'll declare a specialization in working with small businesses."

There are some exceptions to what else next, but generally speaking, you do not want to go to the marketplace with a message that says, "We specialize in working with small businesses." It just means we haven't grown up yet, and you might want to push back on that.

David: No, I wouldn't push back on it. I would agree. If that's a conscious choice, you've got to run a very different business, but most people stay in that. It's more of a justification for what's happened so far.

Blair: Yes, or there's a legitimate but niche type of small business just happens to be small businesses that you focus on that might make sense. But just wrapping up the final thoughts here. The margin is generally in the middle, not too big, not too small. It's more unglamorous. If you're dealing with a brand manager, then you're dealing with a company that's got a portfolio of brands, generally speaking, you're dealing with a sophisticated buyer, but there's a ceiling on what that person's going to spend. They're not likely to be willing or even able to compensate you for extra ordinary results.

Go after the less glamorous businesses where you're not dealing with brand managers, you're dealing with heads of business units, VPs, et cetera. It's not like they haven't worked with firms like yours before, but they don't have this steady roster of firms where they're always doing things.

The margin's in the middle, in the unglamorous, and then I'll just hit this one point one more time, this idea of balancing out your portfolio. You've got some large clients and some small clients and ones where you do the work that money comes in, it pays the bills, it's fairly reliable. Then you look on the other end of the spectrum, you look for these small entrepreneurial type organizations, but large enough where you can see that you have the opportunity to help create extraordinary value. Then you put forward ways that those clients can work with you.

With you having some skin in the game where you have, if not unlimited upside, the opportunity for a massive upside, because that's where you'll have the most fun. That's where you'll do your best work. That's where you'll make your most money.

David: This is good. This is one of those episodes where I think somebody listening, who is in the space we address is just going to be nodding their head because this fits their world and the people who don't run a firm like that will wonder what the heck we're talking about. It's a great example, I think, of positioning. I like this one, especially because it feels like we're just in a bar talking with our listeners and swapping stories. This was a great topic. Thank you, Blair.

Blair: Thanks, David. I always appreciate when you interview me, and at the end you say with a surprised voice, "This was actually good."

[laughter]

David: Marcus, take that out. 

[laughter]