https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-grangaard-65391814
This interview is all about turning around the shoe company, Allen Edmonds. Our guest was Paul Grangaard who has been the CEO of Allen Edmonds since 2008. Paul helped turn around Allen Edmonds and we were lucky enough Paul agreed to come on our show. It’s a great story.
Some other questions Paul answers:
What did you do the first 100 days at Allen Edmonds?
How did you identify what needed to be done?
When you started and to this day how do you communicate the main areas to focus on?
Where do you see the shoe industry headed?
Transcript
Dave Kruse: Hey everyone welcome to another episode of Flyover Labs, this is Dave Kruse from Madison Wisconsin and today we have Paul Grangaard with us and Paul is the CEO of the premier dress shoe company Allen Edmonds and so Paul has helped turn around Allen Edmonds and we’re lucky enough to have Paul agree to come on our show and tell us more about that and his background. So it’s a great story and I’m excited to learn about it. Paul, thanks for coming on the show.
Paul Grangaard: You’re welcome Dave, it’s my pleasure thank you for asking.
Dave Kruse: Definitely. So let’s start off, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and then eventually how you became CEO of Allen Edmonds.
Paul Grangaard: My exposure to shoes goes back a long way although most people didn’t know it. During the first 25 years of my career, I studied in Florence Italy in collage in 1979 and in those days you could walk up and down the streets of Florence and occasionally pass a true leather working shop, you could smell the leathers, all the stuff that was sold in the market was actually made very closely nearby; there are rumours now that a lot of that stuff that you could buy in the street, from the street vendors is no longer Italian made but it’s hard to tell. I fell in love with design, architecture and all the things that you pick up when you’re in Italy. I was very much excited and enthusiastic about my time there. I came back started working in the banking industry where everybody wore the same black calfskin shoes to work and I noticed that early on in fact, when I was trying to get some advice from my dad who was a banker in Minneapolis about what bank to go work at, I commented to him that the New York bankers all seem to wear the exact same shoes, I didn’t have those shoes so I didn’t know if I’d fit in. So anyway, I started my career in Chicago where it turned out ultimately those same shoes were pretty prevalent after awhile anyway. I worked in Finance, I worked in Europe again for 3 years in the mid 1980’s, this time in Germany, which also has less consistently than Italy, but a lot great fashion and a strong leather culture, leather working history with some other great brands and came home to Minneapolis in 1986 and worked in investment banking for the next 15 years and then worked in running the retail brokerage business at the same firm where I had been an investment banker; Piper Jaffray, headquartered at Minneapolis for 4 years and then I did private equity for 3 years for the firm that bought Allen Edmonds in the second year I was there and in the third year I was there, the CEO of Allen Edmonds who had taken over when we bought the company from the Owner & CEO decided to leave us and go do something else and I jumped in as Interim CEO and jelled well with the team that was there and really enjoyed what I was doing and it brought back this, affinity that I had so long ago, brought it to the floor I should say, because I basically spent 30 years in a focus group for our target core customers. So that’s how I ended up staying and it’s been 8 years since, it’s been a lot of fun.
Dave Kruse: Interesting. What type of jobs did you have in the banking, like what was your first job that you started out with.
Paul Grangaard: I was a trainee for two and half years in Chicago rotating through different parts of the bank so they would teach us all about various functions in commercial banking but I was heavily loving the energy in this great team there, you know, as a junior runt at the time but I learned an awful lot and I was going to business school at night at the University of Chicago’s night business program. I took my last final on a Thursday and on Saturday morning, the bank moved me to Frankfurt Germany where I called on Volkswagen and the German Subsidiaries of DOW Chemical and Hushpuppies and other shoe companies and some other great American companies that had German offices and then some other trading houses in Hamburg as part of my responsibilities. Truth be told we weren’t very competitive, the Japanese were lending money below the cost of funds for most American banks or at least right at it. They were dominating the lending environment at that time, big Japanese banks which ultimately created their credit crisis in Japan but drove a lot of other banks out of business in the 1970’s and 1980’s. So, they closed down the Frankfurt office a year after I left and I’m trying not to take that personally.
Dave Kruse: Yeah that’s right and so how did you’re investment banking experience help, you know with your role at Allen Edmonds, did you work on a number of deals in different industries or what did you kind of work on.
Paul Grangaard: I was a consumer focused investment banker and the majority of my work was either with food companies, many of which have some of the greatest brands; and they are all very familiar brands and also with restaurants, which is where there was a big change in casual dining going on when I was a restaurant investment banker, so there was a lot of action in the investment banking business, companies going public all the time. I worked with a bunch of names you would know, Applebee’s was one our best clients, you know, just so much was happening, Buca di Beppo was a company that I helped get started and formed and ultimately go public, Morton’s, just a lot of different types of casual and formal dining restaurant chains were getting started in those days and they were a bit of a darling of the investor community, so it was a good time to be working with them .
Dave Kruse: Interesting.
Paul Grangaard: In terms of how that helped me, I learned an awful lot about brand building, about the importance of knowing who you’re target customer is and what you’re trying to do for them, about the idea that restaurant’s are actually entertainment as well as food providers and the same can be true today about retailing, it’s an whole experience, it’s not just a transaction that’s going on in retailing stores. So, I learned a lot about customer service in those days and the importance of treating your customers right, treating your employees right, but the companies with the highest moral tend to get the highest scores from their customers, for the quality of the customer service. So, the importance of treating your employees right too also came through in those days and then I learned a bunch of arcane things about financing and evaluation; but are important as a CEO too.
Dave Kruse: Interesting. What was one of those arcane things you learned, or something around evaluation.
Paul Grangaard: It’s all fundamental but you know you business as they say not brain surgery and it’s one of those things when you learn it you wonder why you didn’t understand it, it’s just kind of common sense beforehand but the relation between a growth rate of a company from both a revenue and also maybe different from a profitability point of view and the multiple of earnings that is the cause of the evaluation, you know, evaluations tend to be earning times some multiple, and those multiples varied depending on how fast a company is growing, what’s the quality of the earnings. You know those are the kind of things that is easy to understand the concept but until you’ve actually worked with it, gotten your hands dirty, you don’t really have a great feel for what it truly means.
Dave Kruse: Yeah that’s a good point and when you see, you have some of those matrix showing growth versus profit and then the multiple and the impact that growth has on the valuation is just pretty amazing, it can be, especially if you’re growing quite quickly, because that’s why some of those highflying tech companies get those huge evaluations because in theory they’re growing quite quickly.
Paul Grangaard: Yeah.
Dave Kruse: It looks good at least on paper. Can they keep up is the question.
Paul Grangaard: But I also would say this is, if I could add, as I got into Management, actually there are two things that I often talk about to business school classes that I will share with you, number one; when you work in banking or consulting or accounting or even law, you get to go from company to company to company and it’s a little bit like a constant case study opportunity when you’re in those kinds of roles because you see different companies, you get a feel for who is more managed, whose maybe not as well managed, what part of management is particularly strong at different companies and you become hyper focused on the differences between companies and it’s easy for, I found actually with a lot of CEO’s that if they’ve grown up in the same company they maybe were very deep in their own business and its strengths and weakness but didn’t know that much about competitors and one of the things I brought down on Edmonds was the intense focus on where we sit in the competitive spectrum, who are competitors are, what they’re doing, and their strengths and weakness and I go back to my experience floating around the restaurant industry and the food industry as the reason why I had that drive and understanding. Then, the other thing I learnt in the investment banking business is about how to manage a team of partners as opposed to how to manage a hierarchy and we are very much a team of partners here at Allen Edmonds now, I’ve got great people, they know a lot of things that I don’t know. I can pull a lot of them things that is helpful to the whole organization, they work well together, we have basically a round table partner-type of management structure here and its way different that it was before here and it was key to our success and turning the business around and now almost tripling it.
Dave Kruse: Wow, well let’s get into that, that was a good lead. What was the state of Allen Edmonds when you first came, was that in 2008 when you became CEO.
Paul Grangaard: Yes right, yeah. We were no longer able to cover our interest expense but that was not an uncommon situation so our lenders were very patient, they weren’t pushing us into bankruptcy, they were pushing us into a recapitalization when I arrived. You know, if things had being going well all around us, they might have had the time to push us into bankruptcy but instead it was more efficient and expedient for them to work with us on our recapitalization and also to work with the private equity holders that had ownership at the time and was willing to put in the new capital that was required to recapitalize our entire balance sheet. So that was the situation, our sales were heading towards a runt. We were at a run rate that was literally over 30% below the run rate of the time of the purchase of the company in 2006 so leaving us 30% of your business in a manufacturing operation, you know, were the kind of margins we have in our business, that’s really tough, so that was the situation. The customers were not happy as well as the financial side we had alienated a significant amount of that core customer base that I’ve spent 25 years in the midst of and we needed to fix that as well.
Dave Kruse: Interesting. Did you disclose your revenue at that time ? I know these are private so didn’t know if you disclosed it or not?
Paul Grangaard: Yeah it was disclosed. We were doing a little over 90, when __20:00 __ bought it and you know the run rate had dropped down to below 60 so although we never did a whole year at that run rate because we started in late 2008 to turn things around and even though 2009 was the worst year in the great recession and was really a great depression for our core customer base of accounts, bankers, lawyers, business leaders, other professionals. We were able to turn it around and stop the haemorrhaging, so that we did about $72 to $73 million in 2009.
Dave Kruse: Okay and before we get into all the kind of stuff that you’ve did help turn around, what’s the current state, so you said you almost tripled you’re revenue since 2008.
Paul Grangaard: Actually I’m going to leave that where it is, cause I’m not allowed to talk about our current …
Dave Kruse: Fair enough.
Paul Grangaard: So you’ll have to piece those pieces together.
Dave Kruse: Fair enough. That sounds good. Alright, let’s talk about you know, when you first came in, you had your investment in banking experience, your private equity experience, you know the first 100 days or the first many days, what did you do to try to get your arms around the situation of Allen Edmonds and kind of make a road map for the future, what do you’ll look at.
Paul Grangaard: First of all we had, as anybody in that situation would, we had cost that we’d need to take out so we did have to do a lay off. We didn’t do as big a layoff as the financials said we should, cause we didn’t want to lose shoe making capacity and capability, we couldn’t go as lean as maybe the numbers said we should because we didn’t want to lose that kind of hard to replace shoe making talent. As I said, we did the recapitalization, which took a lot of the first 100 days and then the most important thing I brought was a renewed strong focus on the idea that it’s all about our product and it’s having the right kind of product for our core customer base and having it at the level of quality people except from Allen Edmonds and coming up with a product development process that would allow us to continue to keep fresh our core product line and ultimately, which we’ve done now, expand beyond the core dress shoe product line that had made us famous for 90 years. So it really got down to focus on product quality, focus on new product development, focus on our core customers and then there were things about our operation with respect to our own retailing stores that actually, that most people would assume, is that you’d treat your own retailing stores better than you treat external partners but we so concerned about making our wholesale partners happy that we allowed our own retailing stores to fail by comparison and we needed to bring the quality of our own retailing efforts up significantly from where they were at the time. And then there were management techniques, one was building this round table culture and another was building a strong amount of communication across the company. We worked hard to build morale even during dark days and team spirit and I did all of that in management philosophy and technique that I’ve passed on to anyone I learned from a friend, colleague and former boss at Piper Jaffray called the 6 Key Commitments. I would encourage anybody even from a collage graduate point of view, here in Madison to think about what are my five, six, seven key commitments in life and when you’re run the company it’s what are your 6 key commitments for the company. So the first one that we needed to fix was the quality of our leadership team and how much they worked together, so the first one I brought was strong decisive team-oriented leadership. The second one was superior quality products and service. We were short on both of those at the time. Number three, was balance dedication to both wholesale and retail and as I said counter intuitively that meant, bringing our own retail up to snuff. Number four, I mentioned, which was laser focus on our market positioning and on the competition. The firth and sixth, these last two were more cultural. We’d gotten kind of lethargic, and I think people realised that we weren’t as committed to excellence as we needed to be so why put myself out there if somebody else is going to let us down, I might as well be the first to let us down. So I wanted to say the people deserve high expectations. I read an article once, 10 years before that you honour people when you give them high expectations. It’s a good thing for a parent to understand too; cause what’s the converse of that is if you give somebody low expectations or mediocre expectations, you’re telling them, you don’t think they can achieve the level of excellence that you need. So we had high expectations and want people to know that so I wanted to pull that out. And the last thing, so I wouldn’t scare anyone since I was coming in from the investments industry and private equity, you know, as I hope you can tell already, I’m not a scary person. We’ll it’s the only type of positive culture; let’s have a lot of fun together and that was kind of a weird thing to say in 2008 but we’ve done it, it’s a very upbeat, young, energetic positive culture and that takes work, you just don’t have that by being friendly and saying hello every day, you got to work at it but it does start with being friendly and saying hello every day. I had a woman who was on our customer service team and I would pass her everyday coming in from the office and finally, I said to her, hey ! how are we’re doing, how am I doing ? about two months in and she said well we are doing a lot better now that somebody actually says hello to me on the way work.
Dave Kruse: So it’s the little things, sometimes.
Paul Grangaard: Yeah, never underestimate the importance of treating people as real people.
Dave Kruse: Interesting and those are some great 6 points. So I’m curious, you know it’s easy to write those down and tell people but how did you actually implement them and follow up on it, was it like a weekly or like a daily thing that you made sure people are staying on top of or like … especially when you direct reports, do you talk about all those items a lot or how do you make sure it actually happens ?
Paul Grangaard: It’s 8 years later, and I still, whenever I speak to our employees I still go through all 6 of them.
Dave Kruse: Really, interesting, okay.
Paul Grangaard: That’s number one and number two, it became obvious that we were going to make decisions that was part of why the team asked me to stay and to focus on product also became very obvious. We’ve restructured our new product development process to make it closer to the customer and closer to the production actually and tighten up the team work, you know that’s pretty obvious. I started personally returning e-mails to a lot of customers and talking to our customer service people and our retailing team about what kind of customer service we wanted to be known for. I’m very pleased and makes me really glad that I get more e-mails today about the quality of our customer service than I actually do about our products because people are just so blown away and that’s not negative on our products it’s just people so blown away by the quality of the people they interact with at our company that they just feel that they got to write about it. It’s true that people have a much shorter fuse for writing a note to someone if it’s a complaint than they knew if it’s something they want to commend and so you know when I read these, I know that somebody is writing because they are really impressed, not just a little impressed but really impressed, so I love it.
Dave Kruse: Sounds like, like you kind of mentioned, you’re a hidden product operations guy, your entire life, bet you had great training right, so you stepped in the right time and …
Paul Grangaard: Yeah, there ‘s a joke we tell, since you’re in Madison, you know, here in Wisconsin, Minnesota and we talked a little earlier off the air about my Scandinavian background, so people would always ask me you know, you spent your career in finance, I mean, how’d you know anything about shoes and the joke is how do you tell the difference between and introverted Scandinavian descendant and an extroverted Scandinavian descendant ? ….
Dave Kruse: How?
Paul Grangaard: The extrovert looks at your shoes when he’s talking to you.
Dave Kruse : Ha Ha Ha, nice. So you had a lot of good research over there, like you said.
Paul Grangaard: That’s a good joke __29: 55 __ that’s probably where I first heard it.
Dave Kruse: That’s awesome. How did you, when you’re looking at the entire company, there are lots of different areas that you had improved upon, how do you make decisions of how much to spend in certain areas, whether it’s a store upgrade or a better ecommerce experience, did you score each of the areas, do you have an ROI figure, was it more qualitative that than.
Paul Grangaard: Well business is a lot about having the right hunches, it was very unpopular with both our own store managers and with our sale accounts when we decided that we would invest heavily in building our ecommerce business and I would unpack for them the assumption behind it being unpopular and the assumption was that we had fixed market share for Allen Edmond and any shoes sold online was a missed sale in some physical environment and that we just didn’t believe that was true and we knew that if we built our ecommerce business we would build our brand, we would build brand awareness and built demand and our same store sales growth has been really strong over the last 7 years as the result of also growing our ecommerce business by leaps and bounds. So as Wayne Gretzky once famously said “You’re going to score more goals if you skate to where the puck is going than if you skate to where it is”. So we’ve invested heavily in that without a lot of ROI proof because we were starting from almost scratch on our ecommerce site, so it wasn’t like we could show what a investment in ecommerce would deliver in terms of return, now we can tell you what kind of return we are going to have on any e-mail that we send out because of our experience. Of course, there’d be stores that we don’t do a store if we don’t think it pencils out at a certain level of ROI. We pass on the site if that’s the case and when it comes to investing in product, we just have this, whatever it takes kind of mentality, because it is all about the product so if we’re not happy with the flow we are getting then we gotta keep working.
Dave Kruse: Can you tell us a little bit more about the kind of product development and manufacturing because I know it’s a special case at Allen Edmonds.
Paul Grangaard: It’s a huge advantage for us, when we get an idea we usually have a shoe made by our own people right where we were all located together within a week. So, you know, if there is somebody whose gotta fly over to China and be away from their family for 3 weeks while they look at prototypes and then come back and try to communicate across the language barrier, we just say, what do you think about this leather and this last, and this sole; and well I ‘don’t know, let’s look.
Dave Kruse: Let’s just try it out.
Paul Grangaard: So you know we plan out seasons, we do trend analysis, we’ve hired a couple of young people to work on our team both guys and women, we’ve got a woman who used to work in a major shoe company and is helping us be a lot better about accessing the right trend consultants and analysis and then we put it all together, we come up with a plan and we decide what were going to do, like just this week, this last couple of days, were looking at what’s going well for us and what we think is going well in the market place and trying to make some changes on the fly as to what we are going to offer for this fall and what we’ll even offer yet in May as a result of that, which is something, you know, we couldn’t do if we didn’t have our own production.
Dave Kruse: Wow and it sounds like we could really talk about,… well this isn’t fast fashion, of course it’s completely different, because yours is more of the… that sometimes are cheaper items, but the idea is that you can turn on a dime versus… really hard for everyone else with those global supply chains, where are you manufacturing locations. Do you just have one or do you have more than one.
Paul Grangaard: We have the big plant in Portwest and then we have another small plant that does different kind of shoe constructions across 543 also in Portwest and then we have a plant in the Dominican Republic that makes some cement blasted shoes, we just came up with a new dress sneaker, we don’t make that kind of a shoe in the United States and we actually admit that we don’t have the equipment or the experience of shoemakers for that so we make that down in the DR where we can compete at the right price level for that of low quality construction shoe, lower complications construction shoe, I should say and we do both shoes down there, because that’s another market that we put US labour into that, try to sell at US labour prices, we don’t even … we only just fall flat on our face. So, I have said in other environments that when I was a kid, I loved baseball and the worst thing that could happened was not that we’d lose the game, it was that we only showed up with 7 players and the town had kind of a strict rule that you couldn’t play if you only had 7 players and so we would have to forfeit, and I don’t like forfeits. So this big part of the shoe industry that’s priced below $200 is very hard for us to sell shoes that cost under $200, so we do them in the DR, it’s our own plant. We manage the culture and the treatment of the employees, they love working with us, they are very engaged, you know, it’s not like most shoe companies that go to negative plants in India and China and source from the same people as the competition and import from really low wage countries. So I’m hopeful that part of what we are doing by building employment in both countries is that we’re keeping people happy in the country they live in rather than having people on boats trying to get into Florida.
Dave Kruse: Yeah it’s not probably not too bad visiting Dominican Republic in the winter occasionally too.
Paul Grangaard: Yean that’s true although I get to go the pub, I got friends who go down there to play golf and I’ve never been to that part. I’ve only been to the City of Santiago, that’s Punta Cana, that’s the end of the island, I’m in the middle at a city that’s called Santiago.
Dave Kruse: Interesting, alright I know we are getting a little to the end of the interview here but I got two or three more questions. One is, what would you do differently at Allen Edmonds if you presented with another turn around, I mean it sounds like you handled it quite well but were there be things that you would have done differently, if you do it again next time.
Paul Grangaard: I love music and I’m a guy whose got song lyrics stuck in his head every time, free association. So I think the thing that comes to mind is Frank Sinatra’s famous song My Way, you know, Regrets, I had a few, but then again too few to mention. We did do some things in product that didn’t work that we wished we’ve done differently but you know product development like any kind of creative process is never a straight line, you don’t bet a 1000 in product development if you do you’re not stretching yourself. So I often say that creativity is like skiing if you’re not falling down now and then you’re not getting any better so I’d be hard pressed to say something major that I wished we hadn’t done.
Dave Kruse: Interesting.
Paul Grangaard: No is there something that I wished we had done, I think we really know what we were about, where we were going with a great team, it’s amazing now how well things have gone so far.
Dave Kruse: Interesting and that probably speaks about the team you had around you and your experience, just over many years being a part of so many different … from the outside looking in different companies what works what doesn’t, and I was curious, about you mentioned the product development, how do you test.. you know, it’s easy when you’re on the internet you know you can throw up a webpage and see how the response rate is but with a shoe how do you kind of role out a new shoe and test it to see if there’s interest or not.
Paul Grangaard: Well a couple of deeper layers to that question, when I get asked all the time, why we don’t do focus groups and there are a lot of studies that are done that focus groups actually behave differently when they know they’re in a focus group than they would if they were out in the market place or in their homes, so you don’t get very accurate information when you bring 15 to 20 people together and say what do you think of this and what do you think of that, you’re much better off understanding it out in the real world and the focus group strategy occurred back in the days when there was no internet, there was no direct social media connection with people so now what we are doing much more systematically and we are going to continue to develop this is, put things out there in the real world both by testing in certain stores, by putting some on our website, and seeing how people react to them and then ultimately I want to start sending e-mails to core customers, I got a lot of them, you know, hundreds of them saying would you buy this shoe, do you like this shoe, what you don’t like about this shoe. If you had two things you could change on this shoe, what would they be, and we are working on that level of customer interaction.
Dave Kruse: And because how your supply chain is, so local, I mean, you guys can just do that kind of A/B testing and if something doesn’t work out it’s not a huge deal where for other folks it’s just… they can’t test this fast and change it up so I can see that’s smart.
Paul Grangaard: Yeah we are not totally immune from introducing something and finding out that it didn’t work now that we got almost 60 stores, you know we put it in most of our stores, you know it didn’t work at all we got a lot of shoes that nobody likes to try to sell so we are very careful about that but we are able to, as I said earlier, to change on the fly, we can introduce something as we did these sneakers that just came out, first of all, you got to look at them, they are much higher quality than what a lot of people who are putting on the market right now and sneakers are the hottest thing in men’s footwear and even under dress business suits these days, so it’s good to have a pair. But we decided that we would do these with existing soles and existing foams from the sole supplier, the existing last of the sole supplier who we picked which is Vibram, one of the best rubber sole suppliers in the world out of Italy. There, we just brought them out in one size because to do them in multiple sizes that were so well know for, would have required for us to invest in new last and new sole dyes and we didn’t want to take that big a jump until we knew whether we could solve them or not. Now that we know that they are selling and we are getting criticized for not having the usual spectrum of widths that we have at Allen Edmonds, we’re going to make that investment.
Dave Kruse: Interesting, I’ll check those out. Cool
Paul Grangaard: They are called the Cheetah and Brisbane, I’m wearing the … actually I’m not wearing the Cheetah today, I was yesterday.
Dave Kruse: Yeah I bet you have pretty good shoe collection, and that would be half the reason to just take that job as CEO. Okay, so I got two questions and you can choose which one you want to answer here. One is, a little more on the personal side that we can end on is that what keeps you up at night around Allen Edmonds or two, who are some of your.., if you had some, some key advisors when you started Allen Edmonds and even to this day.
Paul Grangaard: And I’m going to pick one, I will pick the what keeps me up at night.
Dave Kruse: Alright, sounds good.
Paul Grangaard: Alright, what keeps me up at night, there’s a big shift going on in both how consumers buy products today, you know, we would call it retailing but it’s really its morphing into something completely different than what retailing has ever been for hundreds of years. I mean, retailing used to mean, you would go to a store look at something, they had it in their inventory in the back and would bring out your size and you’d buy it at a cash register and walk out, the whole thing is changing so drastically now in the form of, the way people pay, the environment they are in when they make a purchase, more and more frequently happening when they are on the roads and they are by themselves, when they are in their office so, you know, anytime things change that rapidly you can get pushed aside if you’re not in it, just like I talked about earlier our commitment to get into ecommerce in the first place was quite unpopular but if hadn’t I don’t know where we would be today so getting that right keeps me awake and then changing attitudes about what men should wear, you know the blue suite isn’t going away but it’s getting worn a lot less often and at first we were able to sustain significant growth at this company because guys were shifting from black shoes, to brown shoes and adding more shoes to their closet but there is kind of a pause right now in what’s going on with men’ fashion in footwear, tectonic plate shifts that keeps me up at night because we got to be on top of it so I’ d say those two things made a revolution in retailing and the change in fashion that’s probably the biggest change since I got here is going on right now.
Dave Kruse: Yeah, that’s enough to keep you up at night, hence why the sneakers or is to try out… makes sense, interesting, alright. Well this has been wonderful, so definitely appreciate your time and your knowledge Paul and I learned a lot and I’m sure the audience has learnt a lot as well, so appreciate it.
Paul Grangaard: Your welcome Dave, I enjoyed talking to you, thanks for asking me.
Dave Kruse: Definitely and thanks everyone for listening to another Flyover Labs podcast and we’ll see you next time.
Paul Grangaard: Okay great thanks.