Chris Ferrell on The Incredible Growth at Endeavor Business Media

Jacob Donnelly: So it seems to me that you’ve been building towards today since 2004 when you were the publisher of Nashville Scene, then CEO of SouthComm, and now CEO of Endeavor Business Media. Can you walk me through your media journey?

Chris Ferrell: [chuckles] Sure, it’s an 18-year overnight success story, right? No, it actually began before that. In 1997, I got hired to work at Citysearch, which, I would say, it was my first media experience early days of the internet, where I had a job of explaining to people what websites were and why you wanted one. And I often joke that I was the only person who went from internet to print. And after that, I had an internet marketing company for about five years.

And then I got a call to interview to be the publisher of the Nashville Scene, which was our local alt-weekly here in Nashville. And it was on Village Voice at the time and they hired me to be the publisher. My brother, who was a journalist, called me up and said, “In the newsroom, we always wondered what the requirements were to be a publisher. Now, I know there are none,” [chuckles] but it was great. I loved what that paper meant to the city of Nashville, and just ask questions about everything because I didn’t know anything.

And we improved the way things were going and the company Village Voice was acquired by another company. I didn’t like that structure as well and approached some local investors about backing me to start a company that would do local niche media and that was the outcome. And, over time, we became the second-largest publisher of alt-weeklies in the country. At one time, we had eight of those, but that business model was increasingly getting under pressure.

And in 2014, I discovered B2B and bought some of the assets of Cygnus, and began to learn the B2B model as well. It was a lot of the same skills, but a much better business model than the local niche publishing. And so, anyway, that’s what brought me to Endeavor. I was trying to pivot SouthComm into being that, but our investors, for a variety of reasons, wanted to liquidate their portfolio. So I started a new company and then bought the B2B side of SouthComm from them. That became a core early part of Endeavor.

Jacob: And so you started with the alt-weeklies and then moved into B2B. We talked a little bit about alt-weeklies when we met at the Omeda conference. In 2022, do you think there is any business model or strategy that works with alt-weeklies or are they just going to continue with a slow decline?

Chris: I struggled to find one. And I hate to say that because I think alt-weeklies are an important part of not just their communities, but also the media landscape. At one time, it was a great training ground for young journalists where they could go and write long-form stories. We had a lot of people who came through the scene and other of our papers that went on to very prominent roles nationally and that they were increasingly– That was 10 years ago. Maybe 15 years ago.

15 years ago, a third or more of the revenue for those papers was classified ads and that has gone now. And so they’re much smaller business than they once were. And so the ones that seem to be doing well to me are ones that have a robust events business associated with them, the ones where they’ve got local ownership, strong local connections. So I do think you will still see alt-weeklies exist around the country. I don’t think you’ll see people rolling them up into big investment portfolios that I think those days are past.

Jacob: So you got your taste of B2B in 2014 when you bought some assets from Cygnus. You launched Endeavor in 2017. What was the thesis with launching Endeavor in 2017 and how do you see that kind of playing out over the– it’s almost five years now that you’ve been running the business?

Chris: Right, so in 2017, I sort of looked around. B2B is a very fragmented industry in this country. And in 2017, it looked to me like all of the aggregators had been aggregated, right? The big buyers had either been rolled up into large event companies or even rolled up into Informa frankly. And so there wasn’t really a major platform company that was available as an exit for the family-owned companies as people were getting ready to retire.

And so that was really my basic thesis that I took to my early investors and said, “If I can build an infrastructure that can bolt on one acquisition after another, I can build a company with scale as these founders or family-owned businesses as they start getting ready to retire.” And I want to do it in a coherent way. I don’t want to just randomly attach things. I believe in diversification, both the revenue streams and then also of the industry served.

In B2B, a lot of the success of a B2B enterprise is determined by what’s going on in the underlying industry, right? You don’t want to be the media outlet for a dying industry. And so I didn’t want to be one that was sort of wildly cyclical either. And so I was trying to find things that were stable industries that had good long-term trajectory. And so you’ll see, we’re in areas like manufacturing and utilities and dentistry and things that tend to persist over time, city services.

And so I was trying to build these buckets of brands that served audiences in these industries that I thought would be relatively stable. I also looked out and said there’s some big companies in this space, $100 million companies that serve a single industry, a Northstar Travel or a Randall Riley or a Hanley Wood. They were built around serving a particular vertical. And so there’s really no reason if you want to scale that you can’t do that in multiple verticals at the same time. You just have to be intentional about it.

And so that was my thesis so that we could build these buckets of audiences and then create really defensible space by having larger and larger audiences that were engaged with niche publications that were adjacent to each other and that, over time, we’d be able to offer more services to them than just the individual media brands could, and so we could assemble unique audiences for them from adjacent brands. And so that’s been the premise behind driving our acquisition strategy.

Jacob: And so you mentioned the aggregators becoming large enough and then getting acquired and you mentioned Informa. In 2019, you kind of reversed Informa’s strategy a little bit by acquiring a bunch of their media assets. And earlier that year, you bought a bunch of media assets from Clarion Events. Now, what those two companies have in common is a very much an events-first approach to their business, which is ironic because, six months later, COVID hits. Why do you think so many of those companies were willing and almost excited to get rid of their media assets and why do you think– or not why do you think, but do you think, now, they regret that?

Chris: Yes, so the opportunities with both the former PennWell brands and then the brands that we acquired from Informa, that weren’t part of the original model, but when it came along, I jumped at the opportunity because I saw those as really valuable audiences and brands that were deeply engaged with those audiences that we could build a business around. Really, the same sort of notion that we had around acquiring smaller companies.

Only I could do a much larger transaction all in one fell swoop and also bring on some really good talent. Both of those companies had been leaders in the space and had some really strong people there. And many of those people run departments or divisions for us today that came over with those two transactions. In fact, June Griffin, our president, came with the PenWell transaction and two of our five EVPs and several of our department heads came from the Informa transaction, so I knew I was getting good people.

I think that those decisions on the parts of those companies were driven by financial markets essentially that, at the time anyway, valued event businesses higher than they valued the media businesses. I think over the last couple of years that the financial players have begun to see that there is actually real value in the first-party data that we gather, specifically, in the digital audiences and digital engagement that we have. And so I don’t know that they regret those decisions, but I feel like we got a great value in doing those transactions and that really built the core of the company.

Jacob: A big, I think, secret or part of the success you’ve had with acquiring these businesses is your deep understanding of how to put debt to work. Can you talk about how you have used debt to acquire these businesses? And I guess as part of that, I’d love to understand, especially when using debt, how you determine whether a company is a good deal.

Chris: Yes, so in 2014, when I purchased the Cygnus assets, I didn’t really know how I was going to go about putting that money together when I started down the process. Everyone in Nashville referred me to this investment banker, Linda Costello, who was a master at raising debt. And so I hired her to help me raise the money and I learned from her along the way, how much leverage you can effectively put on a company, what types of entities, whether it be banks or subordinate lenders or unitranche lenders, what they will do in terms of multiples. And I realized it was all about ratios, right?

And then you ask for the right amount of money for the size that the lender wants to lend. And so if you can line those things up, what amount of debt that a fund or a bank is willing to do and what ratios they’ll lend to? We’ve had great success in putting the right amount of debt on a deal. The nice thing about the small B2B media companies is that they trade at multiples of EBITDA. Everything I buy, I buy on a multiple of EBITDA based on what the revenue mix is and the trends that they have. And then I use part of it as equity essentially from our profits and then layer in bank debt or seller debt that I need to complete the deal. And so it lets me use leverage to really ramp up the company quickly.

Jacob: And over the years, you’ve been buying these companies, at least since 2017. Have you noticed a change in the value of them from an EBITDA perspective? From a different business model perspective, where are those EBITDA levels falling?

Chris: For small companies, it depends on the mix of revenue, right? So print is valued the lowest. Digital is higher. It’s a little higher now than it was a couple of years ago. Events still tend to carry the highest value, but really only for large events. Smaller events are not really valued much higher than digital media is and then you factor in the size of the business as well and the trajectory of it.

Is it growing? Is it shrinking? Is it flat? And so on the low-end, you can acquire things for three times EBITDA. I cap out a couple of turns higher than that in terms of when I’m buying small companies. When you get to scale, the multiples go up considerably because there are fewer of those companies to buy. And so there’s a lot more competition for bigger companies.

And so there’s an opportunity for us to create value by assembling these smaller companies into a larger company and lenders are more comfortable with that. There’s less risk if you have 7,000 clients than if you have 70 when you’re doing a $100 million revenue than when you’re doing two. And so they’re willing to lend us more and they’re more comfortable with the debt as we scale because they know there’s some resilience built into that scale.

Jacob: I know we’re talking a lot about acquisitions, but because you have been so busy with them, what is it? Eight or nine this year? I want to learn as much as I can.

Chris: We’ve done eight so far this year.

Jacob: It is unbelievable. I guess one of the things I think about when it comes to these acquisitions and also hitting that scale is you move into multiple different industries. How do you decide to move into a new industry? So I was looking at your dentistry. You’ve got three or four assets there, but then I was looking at manufacturing, you’ve got a lot more. How do you decide to move into one of these new industries so that you do get the benefits of scale and that you can support it with new resources?

Chris: So we selected the larger verticals, if you will, early on. And some of that was driven by what was available in the PenWell and Informa acquisitions, to be honest, but we said this is where we’re going to carve out a beachhead. And then the acquisition we’ve been doing this year have been in adjacencies within those larger umbrellas, if you will. And so they’ve been new audiences that fit into our manufacturing group or new audiences that fit into our buildings group.

And so sometimes that’s driven by what our existing clients are asking for. So, for example, we went out looking for architects as an audience because we didn’t have architects. And in our buildings group, that was something that was asked about a lot. We had a brand that we had started called Smart Buildings Technology that was interested in architects. We had some lighting brands that were interested in architects. We had some school design, so we had a bunch of different brands that were interested in reaching that audience.

And so we went looking for an architectural audience and found some brands that were owned by a couple of entrepreneurs that were willing to sell and bring that in because it filled a gap that we felt like we had in our portfolio and just made that buildings group more robust to now be able to serve that audience as well. So that’s how I think about it. I wouldn’t want to buy a single brand to go into an entirely new area, right? Your comment in your email the other day about how we could go into retail.

I wouldn’t want to go buy one brand that was in retail because it’d be an orphan in our structure, right? And so I would want to buy a larger group at the time. If I was going to enter that, I would want to enter it in a bigger way so that I had a cluster of things to really make it a group and not just a single title. You can see, there are some places where we’re further along in the model than others. I heard you interviewed Tim at GovExec and they’ve done a similar sort of thing with government services to what we’re trying to do.

We’re trying to do it in a bunch of different buckets. And so, EB, you can see in some areas like manufacturing, where I have a lot of titles. I’m further down the road than I am and say health care, where I only have a handful of titles, but health care’s a really great space. And given the opportunity, I would acquire more titles into that vertical and build that out into a more robust division than it is today.

Jacob: So we’ve talked a lot about acquisitions and I’ve written about how it seems as if everyone gets very excited about acquisitions, but the real hard work comes after you’ve paid for the company in that integration. How does Endeavor systemize the integration of companies? You bought, again, eight in the first four and a half months of this year. How do you integrate these companies where you’re able to get them from a cluster of individual assets to one large company?

Chris: Right, we’ve done 21 total in 4 and 1/2 years. So we took a little pause there during COVID, but we built a system. In knowing we were going to do it, we made decisions that would facilitate that. And so one thing was selecting several major systems that were end-to-end systems because it’s easier to convert it over to three platforms, for example, than it is to convert everybody over to six.

And so when you give up a little bit in the specialty of having just a CRM or just a content management system in buying a broader platform, you may lose some functionality in some areas, but it definitely simplifies the conversions of major platforms. And so we don’t really give them by a choice. One of the things that I’ve seen go wrong in acquisitions and other companies is that they leave everybody on their platforms and you just can’t run a company that way.

You got to get everybody onto common systems. And so we do that relatively quickly. Within 90 to 120 days, we convert everybody over to our major platforms. Minor systems can linger around for a while. At one time, I think we had five different digital edition platforms we were doing, but they were all the same and it didn’t matter that much because they weren’t really managed centrally anyway. For our major systems, we do those migrations very quickly and then we just have a process.

We designate a sherpa for every acquisition who’s the point person for answering questions and making sure that people are connected with the right departments to get the work done that they need to and keep the trains running on time and make sure that we’re hitting deadlines for that transaction. And then everybody just has to follow the playbook and the timelines. We spend a lot of time orienting new employees, not just through acquisitions but also people we hire to the company. And so we have a dedicated onboarding process to help people understand the culture and how things are done, who does what, and things like that.

Jacob: So you mentioned before that print is the lowest EBITDA and then digital and then large events get the best. You’ve acquired a lot of print assets over time, but we’re continuing to move into a world of more and more digital. How do you think about when you acquire these media brands that also have print assets? Do you envision or do you ever shut them down? Do you just let them coast? Print is expensive. How do you think through that?

Chris: So when I think about buying something, I think about it in terms of the audience that it’s bringing to the table, but I price it based on what the revenue mix is. So what I’m willing to pay is based on their historical revenues, but why I’m buying it is for the audience. And so with that comes a conviction that we’re going to be able to move those print audiences into more digital audiences over time, and that we’re going to be able to offer more advanced digital services that smaller companies just can’t deliver.

We have a whole team that does webinars and a whole team that does lead gen and a team that does video creation and a team that does custom content creation. And so we can immediately offer those salespeople with the new print publications a whole array of products that they can offer their clients that they may not have been able to do before. And so we continue to do print because our clients still want it.

And I would rather them be paying us and having a relationship with us that we can then sell them into other things than for them to be going somewhere else. And so I don’t typically just shut down print. We definitely look at the profitability of it. One of the nice things about B2B is that there’s not really an obligation to publish a certain number of issues. And so, in some cases, we do a monthly magazine.

In other cases, it comes out 10 times a year or 8 or 6 or 4. So we try and optimize the number of print issues we’re doing for the revenue attached to it. I do think it’s not a loss leader for us, but it’s a low-margin leader, if you will, but people still have success. They still want to include print as part of their marketing campaigns. I just want to then sell them into other products that we can also do for them.

It’s also a good marketing tool for the sites and the newsletters itself, right? It lands on the right people’s desk. We’re able to gather information about where they work and what their job titles are and things like that as part of the free subscription that they get that gives us valuable information about who our readers are that we can match up with when they come online just because we’re matching up to their email address.

Jacob: So I saw on the site, I believe, that you now have nine million users across the whole portfolio of sites.

Chris: Closing in on 10, yes. [chuckles]

Jacob: It will be nice to be double digits. How do you sell against that audience? Do you do it at the publication level or do partners come in saying they want to target a certain audience and then it doesn’t matter what publication? It’s more just, “Here are the people that we have to show”?

Chris: Good question and we do it both ways, right? The historic way is at the brand level and that’s the way most everybody was selling when they came a part of Endeavor, but increasingly where we’re seeing the opportunities and the growth is the ability to create a customized audience, right? That’s the thing that we can do uniquely that nobody else can because we have these clusters of titles.

And so if somebody wants to reach industrial engineers, I can go and get the industrial engineers from IndustryWeek, but also from Plastics Machinery and Laser Focus World and Foundry and pull all of those together into an audience and then deliver a webinar to them if that’s what the client wants to do. So they get a unique audience. And so, increasingly, that’s where we see growth in the business and a real competitive advantage over other publishers who can’t assemble that same unique audience.

Jacob: So, now, with so many publications and hundreds of employees, how do you structure the team? Is it by cluster? Does each cluster have its own sales and marketing teams or are there some shared services? How do you structure the team then?

Chris: So we have operating units that are– mostly, the editorial teams and the sales teams that are in those brand units. And what’s interesting about this business is that many of those people more identify with the industry they serve than they do with the media industry. So if you ask them, they’re the oil and gas industry or the electric utilities because they are so deeply ingrained in those industries that they know and work with.

And they roll up to group publishers and then EVPs who are overseeing larger and larger segments of those audiences and then everything else is in a shared service. And so we have an event marketing team and a brand marketing team and an audience marketing team and a webinar team, custom content, production so that all of the rest of it is a shared service environment whose clients are really those brand units. So they are working with the operating units to deliver on the promise that they’ve made to clients.

Jacob: So I want to talk about the business models and revenue now. So over the past few years, there’s been a massive push to digital subscriptions. I know you offer print subscriptions, but has Endeavor jumped head first into the digital subscription business or have you just kind of kept your foot off that pedal?

Chris: Yes, not much. We have really one brand that has a significant amount of digital subscription revenue and it’s because it did when we bought it. It’s not something that we’ve really pushed. We are definitely interested in building recurring revenue streams. And so we have some membership type of products in certain groups, but it’s still a relatively minor part of what we are doing. Most of it honestly is marketing-based revenue. We do a little bit of continuing education and some research and then we do have some memberships, just a few little data businesses that we’re trying to develop, but the bulk of it is still marketing purposes.

Jacob: I want to talk about a few offerings because, to some extent, I’m just very curious about them. And for others, I think the audience will really benefit from how you think about it. First, lead gen, bread and butter of B2B business. You can’t provide leads to your partners. They’re going to go find them somewhere else. How do you structure your lead gen offerings? Is it just like, “We’ll give you 25 leads in exchange for $50 a lead,” or are you structuring it in a more advanced way and how do you price it?

Chris: It’s not going to be $50 a lead. It’s getting more than that. One of the nice things about B2B is that a lot of the things people are buying are rather expensive. And so a lead is really valuable. That’s one of the big differences between the old consumer stuff that I did where you’re selling concert tickets and beer as opposed to selling fire trucks and submarines. [chuckles]

So it’s not necessarily about the number that you’re delivering as it is the quality. And so our pricing structure is really based on how qualified that lead is, how much interest we’ve been able to determine that person has before we hand them over as a lead. And so we really liked when we were able to do multiple screens to determine their interest or scoring that they’ve downloaded this white paper. They’ve read this many articles. They watch this webinar.

And then, oh, now, they filled out the form requesting more information. Okay, that’s a really great lead. You’re going to pay a lot for that for us to drill down that far, but you also know, at that point, it’s going to be a productive phone call when you actually get in touch with them. So it’s tiered that way by the level of interest that they’ve shown before we hand them over as a lead to you.

Jacob: So I want to say that back to you, so you’ll have a partner sponsor a series of articles, plus, say, a webinar, plus, say, a white paper download. And you’ll track that person through their reading of those articles, they’re attending that webinar, or they’re downloading that white paper. You’ll have acquired enough data about those people. And at that point, you provide the lead because they’re aware of who that partner is in enough detail.

Chris: We can provide it anywhere along that journey, but you’re going to pay the most for the one that’s completed the entire journey. So we will do just a part of it if that’s what you want. If you just want to do a white paper, we’ll put that out there and you’ll pay less for just that then as opposed to the tiered level of interest. With a sales department, if you get 200 leads and all that means is that they opened an email, that’s not all that valuable, right? And so we will do that. You just don’t pay as much for it as if we’ve actually really qualified the person for you.

Jacob: And then you offer dozens of live events. It was on the event page this morning and the thought of having that many events a year–

Chris: About 60, I think. [chuckles]

Jacob: If I had any hair, I would be bald all over again thinking about that. What are the offerings? How do you structure these events? Are they trade shows? Are they small conferences? And then I’m also curious, how have they been going this year? Have you noticed any unique behaviors by sponsors and attendees that have changed since before the pandemic?

Chris: So we don’t have any giant trade shows and those have been priced out of my ratios for the way my financing was structured for me to really go after. So we have three types of events. We have, what I would say, our small trade shows, a million to two million of revenue kind of shows. They’re traditional trade shows with exhibit floors and conference attached and things like that. And then we have traditional conferences that are a few hundred attendees. Usually, the attendees are paying to be there and then there are some sponsors that will have tabletop exhibits or maybe a booth.

Usually, it’s a tabletop kind of environment. And then we have hosted-buyer events, where the sponsors pay the attendees to come free. Over two days, they’re sitting in boardrooms and getting presentation after presentation from the sponsors and maybe doing the one-on-one speed dating thing as part of it. And so those are really the three types of events that we do. This year, the attendance and revenue was up over last year. In some cases, it’s back to 2019 levels, but it varies by industry.

I was at our utility analytics event earlier this week and it was a conference in New Orleans. And it was probably 80% or 85% of 2019 attendance levels, but we did our Subsea Tieback tradeshow in Galveston in March. And it was within 50 people of the number of people we had in 2019, so that’s an event that in 2019 drew 1,300 people. And I think, this year, we were at 1,254, so that one was back. And so it varies a little bit by industry and by location, I think. Certainly, people are wanting to come back to live events and that seems to be headed in that direction.

Jacob: Are people waiting much longer to buy their tickets?

Chris: Yes, they are. And that, I think, is true across the industry if you ask anybody who does this. It’s a lot more nerve-racking because there’ll be very few registrations. And then three weeks out, all of the sudden, they’ll start to pick up. And then two weeks out, you’re like, “Okay, we’re actually going to have an event.” [chuckles] On the day-off, they’re still signing up. So, yes, definitely much later commitments out of attendees than we used to have in the past. You just got to believe it’s going to happen. [chuckles]

Jacob: You just have to believe. When we met, you talked a little bit with me about your market research business and I think I asked you this scenario. If I got 30 senior or heads of HR into a room for market research, how much would a partner pay for that? You said $30,000 or $20,000. Can you talk to me about how this business works and how Endeavor is thinking about expanding into this world?

Chris: Well, I’m very excited about their research business because I think I’ve discovered, it’s every bit as fragmented as the B2B media spaces. And I realized that we’re talking to the people who are interested in doing that research already, right? It’s the marketing departments that are interested in finding out about what their customers are thinking. At least on the B2B side, we have their customers in our audience already.

And so we can assemble audiences for them that they can ask questions of, either in real-life focus groups or virtual focus groups. We’ve always done some surveying of audiences for our clients, but the recent research company that we bought brought some expertise around doing live focus groups that we didn’t really have in the house before. And so I think it’ll give me the capability to deliver that across all of our portfolio.

And a lot of these small research companies, they have very skilled people in doing that. What they didn’t have was 180 sales reps out talking to all of these industries, all of these marketers. And so I feel like we’ve got the opportunity to really expand our offerings there over the next several years. I think, ultimately, research can be as big a business for us as media is.

There’s a lot of money spent on research and knowing what your clients are looking for and what they think, meaning it can be things. We can do research that’s consumer-oriented research for B2B clients as well, right? They want to test their ad campaigns before they go out to market on the consumer side. We can assemble those panels and test those campaigns out for them, so I’m excited about that piece.

Jacob: And it’s the same sales team that sells media that is also selling the market research?

Chris: So they’re the point of contact with the client. We have research experts in-house that they bring in. If the conversation goes that way, then we have people who are experts in that that can come in and really customize the proposal and talk to them about what they’re trying to do. So we don’t expect our salespeople to be experts in everything that we do, but they can begin enough of the conversation to determine if there’s interest and then bring our experts and help them out.

Jacob: So I want you to think a little bit forward next three to five years for Endeavor. Will the business look fundamentally the same that it does today, just perhaps more industries? Will it evolve into new areas? I just love to know what you’re thinking about it becoming a half-decade.

Chris: Three to five years from now, I expect to be about three times the size we are today. I tell people I’m notorious for moving the goalposts. [laughs] When I started the company, I wanted to build a company that was $100 million in revenue and we got there in two years. And, now, I build a company that has a $100 million of EBITDA and so that’s my goal. In three to five years, I want to cross that threshold.

I think we will still do many of the same things. I think what you’ll see is that we’ll have larger audiences in the industry clusters that we’re serving. We may bolt on some new industries if the opportunity arrives to acquire a company that has a strong foothold in a given vertical that would make sense for us. I would certainly be open to that, but I think you will see us continue to layer in products as well.

So like I was talking about with the research, we’re building out our own content studio. We are working on some data products that we can roll out across different verticals. And so I think you’ll see us not only continue to sort of expand the verticals we’re in, bolt on verticals, but then also we can layer in. Once you’ve got that relationship with the clients and the audiences, we can layer in additional products as well. So I’m looking for growth across all of those things.

Jacob: I want to end with the same two questions that I ask every operator that comes on the show. First, what is a mistake you’ve made in your career that you wish you hadn’t and what did you learn from it?

Chris: That one was thinking that I could fix broken publications [chuckles] for a lot of years. I really liked the alt-weeklies. I liked what they meant to their cities and I knew it was a really challenge model and I thought I could fix them. I thought we could solve the problem that if I had the right team that we could fix it. And it was just hard and we weren’t able to fix it and I think I’ve learned. I don’t buy fixer-uppers anymore. You’re just banging your head against the wall for too long.

Jacob: And second, what is some advice you would give operators looking to build and grow their media companies?

Chris: Well, the advice I would give them is that culture matters, that it took me forever. I’ve been a CEO for 15 years and it took me forever to realize that every company has a culture. You’re either intentional about it or not and it’s way better to be intentional about it. And I think that’s one thing we did right at Endeavor was from the outset, we said, “These are our values. This is the way we’re going to run the company.”

And if you don’t fit with that, then best wishes to you, that we want people who are going to embrace these values. And it’s made it a whole lot easier to weather challenges and deal with the pandemic and the vagaries of life and the challenges of a growing business if you’ve got a team that knows what you value and that has committed to sharing those.