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Hello everybody and welcome to the Off-White Coat Podcast. I'm your host, Jordan Abney, and today I have the CEO and co-founder of Kermit, Richard Palarea.

How are you doing, sir?

Rich Palarea: I'm good. Jordan, it's great to be with you today. Thank you.

Jordan: Hey, thank you for coming. So first off, I want to just let everybody know what is Kermit.

Rich: Okay. Kermit is a, it's a company based in Baltimore, Maryland. It's been around for 11 years now. You mentioned I'm the co-founder. I'm the CEO of the company. I have two other co-founders who started the company with me. Their background is really interesting. They were orthopedic sales reps for Zimmer Biomet, which produces lots of different implants used in surgery around the world.

But primarily they were, as I mentioned, orthopedic reconstruction. So, their specialty was knee and hip. They called on hospitals and primarily surgeons and have relationships with those folks, and they stood in the operating room and tendered medical devices to the surgeons during surgery. And I think probably your audience is aware of how orthopedic surgery works or maybe not.

There's no price tag on the box. The surgeon has a relationship with this rep and really trusts them to make sure that the rep has everything that the surgeon possibly could need in that surgery. It was an interesting journey. I already had another business that I was running, and I was doing cost reduction and spend management in supply chain and logistics, not just for healthcare, but for lots of different companies, lots of different industries, and they wanted to establish a company that would go into hospitals and help them reduce their orthopedic implant costs and take a portion of the savings as their fee.

And so, when their attorney who's helping them establish the company heard that model, she immediately thought of me. She had represented my business for the last 25 years, and I was doing the same thing just in a different industry. So, when I go in, negotiate shipping contracts, take a portion of the savings as my fee, my customers loved it.

They were CFOs, they were business minded and financially minded. They would say, this is an easy bet. I'll let you come in and do the work, and if you aren't successful, I won't pay you. And that's exactly the business they wanted to start. So that was 11 years ago. We pushed off the dock, we set up a partnership and I helped establish some early structure to the business. Kermit is the fifth business that I've helped start, I've exited one of those businesses, so I have some experience in that. And as the company started to grow, we were calling on hospitals. They would have us come in, they'd say, sure, we'll take the bet, help us reduce our costs.

And the first two projects we did were, we're quite successful with them. We saved the first hospital $3 million in the first year and the second hospital $5 million and I found I wasn't really being an effective leader of two organizations at once, and that's when I sold my other business. Had no intention of doing that. I was running that thing happily for 25 years.

But I really did see the opportunity along with my partners to literally transform something that's been done for 50 years without any technology. All of this is paper record keeping in the operating room by the salesperson who peels barcode stickers off the boxes of the implants, affixes them to a piece of paper. Uses one of these, a pen or a pencil to scribble down the price, and then they walk down the hallway to purchasing in the hospital and they turn that handwritten, big, messy piece of paper in expecting to get a purchase order or being paid a check.

We looked at this process and said, it's probably not enough to get the cost where they ought to be. Let's see what we can do about this paper-based process. And about a year into our journey, we built a piece of software. It's a cloud-based application that digitizes all that paper. It pulls it in, it compares it against the hospital's contracts. It tells the hospital what's okay to pay and what isn't.

And it transforms all that through data so that the hospital administration can sit down with their surgeons and collaborate and say, here's where the costs are going. And it looks like they're starting to creep up. I wonder why. Oh, we're starting to get charged for, I don't know, drill bits all of a sudden where we never were before.

So, it gives that visibility and that insight for administration and clinicians to collaborate on keeping the cost down, which really never existed before we brought the technology to the marketplace.

Jordan: Oh, that's super interesting. I've been in orthopedic surgery operations before, and the sales reps for one are some of the most helpful people.

Like I always am asking them what's going on, especially in my younger days. So really good friends to have. But you never saw how. The billing and everything worked. They'd go into the back room and then every, the doctor or the surgeon would go one way. The rep would go their other way and they'd collect, and so I could see where there would be gaps or issues with giving the prices and everything. I didn't realize it was like $3 million and $5 million and everything. So, I guess just saving a chunk of change right there.

Rich: There's a health system in our home state here that's an academic who we worked with for about four years, four and a half years. We ended up saving them $55 million. First of all, it's a very high-cost area. It's not just knee and hip. In the category that we manage, it's called physician preference items, or it's PPI, it's abbreviated as and it's just really expensive stuff.

It can be 60% of supply chain spend in any hospital, so it's a big number. But it's not as big of a problem as some of the other things, reimbursement and revenue cycle and some of the really big things that hospitals concentrate on. And so, it has been under the radar and has been pushed down to supply chain to manage.

And because it's on the cost or the supply side, it's just seen as an expense and these prices have been creeping up and creeping up, and I won't say that I do agree with you. I think that those sales reps are providing an extremely important role. They're there for the surgeon. They know, you know these implants better than anybody in that room, better than the scrub tech, better than the surgeon, better than any than nurses.

Their job is to bail the surgeon out. If the surgeon needs something, they've got to have it in a tray, they've got to have it sterile ready to go. But because we don't have this transparency about what things really cost, the surgeon is making the choice the hospital has to pay, and those two parties aren't talking to each other during the surgery.

Nobody's in there with the patient, just the clinical care team. We don't have that administrative oversight we need to, that we have in some other areas of healthcare or any industry where we're tightly policing. Did we get charged the right price? Let's send that through a process and make sure that's really the case.

Jordan: Yeah. The transparency is definitely lacking. I know for a fact they're not thinking about the surgeon's not thinking about the price when they're asking for a specific line. When you say the PPI the physician preference. What was the I? Items. When you're, so are those like the specific tools or lines or whatever the surgeon may prefer, but there are like cheaper versions of the tool?

Rich: Correct. It would be that whole category. It's not just the implants that end up in the patient but also the instrumentation as you're talking about. Those instruments are comfortable in the hands of the trained surgeon. You have to remember, these surgeons come out of residency. They're fellowship trained. Many times, they have a preference toward a product who, whichever vendor that they happen to meet at the time and choose, they go through that training, and they may have a preference toward Stryker instruments. They feel good in their hands, they feel confident they can get in and out of the surgery quickly, safely have a very good outcome for the patient. And so, they may not ever go try anything from another vendor. They may not try Zimmer Biomet or Smith and Nephew. Or DePuy Synthes from Johnson and Johnson.

But we have, it's a very competitive market. There are lots of offerings. There are the big companies who own most of the market share, who have gobbled up the small ones over the years. And there are lots of small, more innovative companies that are trying to gain market share. So, surgeons have a wide variety of choices, especially when you start to get out of orthopedics and get into some of these other areas like spine surgery.

There are a lot more companies that do lots of very interesting different things based on the region of the spine and the type of disease state we're trying to cure and all that kind of stuff. They have lots of choices is my point, but they rarely will venture out. They want to know what to expect when they show up for surgery.

They've preselected the implants; they've told the rep there's going to be a surgery. The rep brings the stuff in. It's processed in a sterile processing environment in the hospital. Those trays are wrapped and sent up to the floor where they meet the rep and the surgeon and the patient for surgery. And the thing is a highly choreographed dance that can't have any interruptions because they got to get the patient in and out quickly and also safely.

And yes, there's a proclivity or a preference toward a certain manufacture a certain style of instruments or implants, and that's where the surgeon tends to stay. So, it's a curious thing. We call this category PPI, that there is this middle P of preference. You would think that I would want my surgeon to pick the best implant for me, that it's going to give me the best outcome, but also if this is going to be something my insurance is going to pay for, i.e., I'm going to be responsible for it as well. I would like for them to be, somewhat cost conscious without impacting my outcome. I would want the lowest cost implant with the best possible outcome, and that would be the sweet spot right now. That doesn't really happen. There aren't any, there aren't a lot of decision support types of software applications that would really help a surgeon decide that. Everything is either completely clinical, here's the equivalent, or completely finance and economics, here are all the price points. Nothing really is in the middle doing both of those.

Jordan: Yeah, there's definitely a lack of transparency. And with the debt that I have right now, I would hope they'd be transparent. I would have to opt out of the nice fancy hip implant, and I'd need to just switch to the wooden leg or whatever that they used back in the old days.

Rich: Yeah, but think about that for a minute, Jordan. If you have a patient, let's say it's your grandmother and she's in her nineties and she has osteoarthritis of the knee and she needs a knee replacement. She's still fairly active. She loves to walk, but she's not playing tennis anymore. She's not running marathons. Why if we have a 30-year knee from Stryker, it's branded as the 30 year knee, meaning that it lasts that long, we don't need to revise it. Why are we going to put a 30-year knee in a 90-year-old patient? And so, some of these are just logical decisions that we want to make.

Knowing that the hospital is really embattled right now, trying to make their budgets work. In 2022, over 50% of the hospitals in the US posted an operating loss. 50% of them, half of them. And a lot of that came out of the Covid era, post Covid era the CARES Act money that was in and then dried up. But we have some other pressures on healthcare too that the staffing issues right now, that healthcare faces are tremendous, as you know. So, the ability for a surgeon to just look at something like that and say, I don't have to put the high end Bentley knee in every single patient. I can come down and have a great outcome and good longevity for this patient and a great rest of their life, but if I just step down in the implant style, maybe there's a cost difference in that.

So that's some of that transparency we're providing. After the surgery takes place, we've got all that data. We can sit down with them, with the surgeon. We have advisory services. These are former healthcare administrators, they're CEOs of hospitals, they're former med device reps. We bring all of that information to bear and sit down with these parties in the hospital and say, here's what's going on with your data, here are the patients that would've qualified for maybe a lower cost knee. We can show them that they can make that decision, or they can push it back across the table to us and say, we're not interested in that. They control that.

Jordan: Yeah, just the extra data has got to be very beneficial because sometimes, even, surgeons are just humans as well, and so you develop a bias with the tools you're using and everything like that.

And sometimes you don't realize they've increased the prices, or they've done something like that, so that's got to be very helpful. When you're talking about reaching out or like working with, do you work with exclusively hospitals or individual surgery services, like the individual practices? Or both?

Rich: Yeah. Our customer base is hospitals and large health systems. Anything from a community or a regional medical center even a critical access or a rural hospital is spending enough money to benefit from the change we can bring. All the way up to, some of the nation's largest health systems and everything in between.

We would like to work more with surgeon owned practices. For example, there's a big move toward ambulatory surgical centers, ASCs popping up that have some surgeon ownership in them, and we would love to come help those. A lot of those, unless they're part of a large group, probably don't do enough surgery. Those surgeons are taking care of patients in in those settings. And then they're also going to the hospital where they're operating on patients over there too. But there are lots of opportunities there. And there's been a large migration of cases from the hospital that are going to those outpatient settings because the way that the reimbursement rules are changing.

Jordan: So that would be a good little spot to put your hand in, because I know for a fact, they have the same issue where there, it's a little smaller scale and that's easier to manage, but at the same time, I actually was thinking about that the other day when I was looking at your company. I was like, I wonder if they work with the smaller personal or private ORs as well.

But yeah, I saw a couple of good stats for Kermit and everything that it was recognized as one of the fastest growing privately held businesses and everything. That was like, that's pretty awesome. So, when you were getting into analytics, I guess that's technically what it would be, right? Is the analytical side of it? Was your former business in, or I guess it was in cost spending, so what was it just all three of your ideas to get this ball rolling, like they had the idea of that there was a gap in this? And then y'all were able to build the cloud technology for it.

Rich: Yeah, these guys we go back to before 12 years ago, they were independent where they were working for Zimmer Biomet as sales reps.

So, what they were seeing every day, were opportunities where they could either have an implant, let's say that, let's say a particular implant that the surgeon had chosen was going to be, say, $5,000 for the case, but maybe they saw something in the case and they suggested to the surgeon they used a $7,000 implant.

So, there was always an opportunity to upsell in the middle of surgery or at the templating step where they were helping the surgeon take x-rays and films and planning and templating before the surgery. But there were also. Just a whole lot of kind of gray areas about how the utilization has tracked.

So, for example, We do a hip case and there's a cup that goes into the hip, and that cup has more than one hole for a screw, but only one screw is used. Why did we use the more expensive cup? Why didn't we just use the cup that has one screw hole? Those kinds of things they would say. These were opportunities to game the system a little bit.

And it doesn't take long before you can do that on three or four surgeries a day at the end of the week and the month you've made your number, or you've done better than that. So, what they came away from after doing that for about a decade a piece was, let's go back to the hospital and let's put on the white hat now and let's go rescue them and let's show them where all these tricks and traps are and let's show them how to better police this.

We know what the implant should cost. We know who's paying more than they should. We'll show them what the price is, and then we'll also democratize this billing game by taking the paper invoice out of the hands of the rep and we'll digitize that and make it more of an automated process. So, this was their idea, but nothing really existed at the time that they were introduced to me.

So, we all sat down and put our heads together. I'm going to give them credit for the idea because they came from the medical field. I did not my father was a cardiologist and I worked in his front office for a couple years. That's about as close as I ever got to any of this stuff. But when I saw, they walked in my office, and we had our first meeting and they told me this crazy tale about how they stand in the operating room and they do all this stuff.

And they left my office, and it was late in the afternoon and I went home for the day and I thought, okay, I can forget I ever had this conversation and go back to what I'm doing. I love my business. My clients love me. We're growing nicely, puts a lot of money in my pocket as a lifestyle business. But will I sleep at night?

We could have really changed something, we could have done something meaningful, and it bothered me, it really did. Jordan, I thought. These guys have an idea, and they're young but the idea has merit, and nobody's done it before, so there's a big uphill battle there. We don't have anybody to follow and emulate, so we're going to have to go out there and do it ourselves.

And yeah, I just came back that later that week and said, all right guys let's try it and see what happens. And that was it. A lot of the foundational stuff, how do you negotiate, how do you write an RFP? How do you manage analytics? What types of reports are important and what do you do with that data? How do you make it meaningful and actionable? A lot of that was the background that I had brought. And these guys knew med device. I didn't know anything about it. So, they taught me about knee surgery and they taught me about the primary items that go into a knee and what happens when we have to revise that and I spent, hours sometimes while I was eating dinner, watching surgery on YouTube, it wasn't pleasant, but I came up to speed on that, and that was very interesting education.

And I think one of the things we really pride ourselves on here at Kermit is even though we're a small organization, 30 people total, we are all experts in what we do. So, we understand this category sometimes better than surgeons, many times better than the clients we're serving. And it can be tough to try to come alongside a hospital who has people who get paid to manage this category and tell them in a gentle way, we're not here to make you look bad. We're here to help you and we can do it without you spending a dollar. Just trust us and we'll make you the star, and then we'll give you all the software you need to manage it. And I got to say it this way, Jordan, it's not for everybody.

We've had hospitals who just say, it's too much. It's too invasive. I'm going to take a pass. But by and large, most of the hospitals that we work with, they do give us a chance. And then once they do that, they build a trust with us. And we still have our very first hospital we sold, oh, 11 years ago. Still a customer today.

Jordan: Oh, wow. Yeah. I know that Baltimore it said something that like, you actually help like 40%, I think of all of the, and I guess that would be in Baltimore or in Maryland. So, I guess holding down St. Agnes, that was the place I did rotations at. That's in Baltimore, but I could definitely see where it would be very beneficial for one, just to have the information and have some like way, I know that they hired somebody in the hospital to record all that, so I could see where it would be tricky.

But I know it's a weird dance between the surgeons and the reps where the surgeons are just asking for it. Like not thinking about what the cost is of the things. And they probably have been told or something like that. That's not really on their mind. And most of the reps I've met have been great. But I'm sure that the upsell is hard not to hand, handle the piece of the knee with three screws, especially if you're getting paid on that. Yeah, it seems like it, it's like the right thing to do, just for data's sake. But you were mentioning the fact that you like had to decide what was important when managing the data.

How did you decide on what factors you leaned into or what you were actually trying to figure out the most with collecting all the data?

Rich: So, there's kind of two sides to that. There's, data and how you present it and what kinds of., what kinds of things do you want to lead the reader to be able to take action? And a lot of that is you really have to understand the category really well. The problem with this was that we thought as software designers, we would go back to our customers and say, okay, we've collected all this data, we've showed you what's okay to pay and what isn't. We've been doing, we've got like a year's worth of surgery.

Go crazy. Tell us what you want to see. We've got it all. It's going to be really easy for us to. Write some code and pull it out and put it in a data visualization for you, a graph chart, whatever, and they would.

Jordan: So, it seems like the hardest part for me. I'm like, I don't know how they even get there, but carry on.

Rich: So that, but that's key, what you're saying is actually what happened that I don't think we understood. I know I didn't understand it. I thought they would be able to tell us, oh, I know I am always trying to find these three numbers together and I never can. Do you have them? Can you show that to me and then let me twist the data around and play with it. I'll run filters and cubes on it, whatever. And no, they couldn't tell us. And what I realized was, nobody in the hospital is tasked with being an expert in this category. We need the surgeons to understand how to do knee surgery and hip surgery and cardiovascular and spine and all these different things and have a great outcome, but we don't want them hampered or worried about, is this thing on contract? Is it off contract? Is it being introduced in this? I can't think on my feet as a surgeon and have to deal with all that stuff. I'm just dealing with the patient. We know that the folks that negotiate this stuff, the supply chain folks, materials management and supply chain are doing, they're buying everything for the hospital.

So, if they're contracting for laundry, a linen, and food services and implants and capital equipment like MRI and CT machines and all this stuff, how can they possibly be an expert in this category where there are millions and millions of skus, in probably 30 different surgical specialties, you're probably not even going to find one or two people in the hospital that know all that.

The reason why we weren't getting feedback on this is the type of data we need, and this is the type of report that would be useful, is because these people that we were working with and are working with, they don't know what they need to see. So, what we decided to do was step back from the problem and say, maybe we're not a pure place services company that just goes in and gets savings and then washes their hands of it.

Maybe we're not a pure play SaaS organization, even though I think that the marketplace of investors wanted us to be just pure software and monthly recurring revenue, all of that. We are more of a technology enabled service. So, we have smart people here who then leverage technology to produce data and then come bring that data alongside the hospital and inform that data and say, here's what we're seeing as experts. It looks like this trend is starting to happen. We've got this surgeon who was using this knee for years and years has flipped to a more expensive knee. We can see that on day one of surgery when it happens, and we can trend it through, so we can bring that alongside to the hospital and say, not only will you have a discussion with them, let's find out what's going on, but we'll go with you.

And we'll talk the clinical talk, so you don't get tangled up in that. And you can tell the surgeon what we'll be the intermediary that will do the translation between both parties. And so, we have strategic advisors, every single one of our hospitals has a strategic advisor assigned to the contract. And their responsibility is to have these monthly business reviews using this data, pulling it down, and bringing all this really interesting stuff back to the hospital. Like I said before, they can determine if they find it useful, if they want to use it or not, they're already getting the savings, but if they want to go further and they want to be excellent, they have an opportunity to do that.

Jordan: Have you ever gotten any like pushback or anything once you've given the data? Somebody's, oh, I had to switch to a different knee for whatever and get mad?

Rich: We will have surgeons who will be skeptical about what are we inferring and what are these? What is this data really saying? And what they'll typically do is they'll say, like you said, that was a really complex case. We got in there and we had osteoporosis in the bone, and I had to go to a longer shaft and the case was just a mess. And you guys can't possibly understand what it's like to be a surgeon under that kind of pressure.

And you're looking at ones and zeros trying to get my cost down. And you know what we'll say is, yes but there were three implants that were wasted during surgery, and the surgeon will say, I don't recall wasting any implants. And what we do is we have actually a photograph inside of the Kermit application of the paper bill that was generated.

And so, we'll bring up the paper bill. And this is something that's very difficult for an administrator to do because they've got to go into all the paper records and pull that stuff back. It could take them weeks to find all that information. We've got it right inside of a cell phone, so we can pull it up, throw it up on the screen, and there it is.

And the surgeon says, wait a minute. I remember Jordan, we did that surgery and the rep wasted that. They dropped it on the floor. And I told the rep, you're not billing us for that. And the rep said, don't worry, doc. I got you. Turns out now we see the paper and the surgeon says, oh, we're being billed for that. Hold on a minute, put my white coat on, go downstairs and find that rep and have a little talk with that rep.

So now the surgeon is learning more about what's really going on. You said it best, the surgery is done, somebody's closing the patient. The surgeon goes this way to the next case, and the rep goes this way. And what we're doing is we're saying, surgeon, here's what happened this afternoon. In that case, a couple hours ago, all the billing is in, and this is what they did. And the surgeon says, no, that's not going to happen anymore. I'm going to help put an end to that. So, they're being informed and they're actually taking interest in that.

Jordan: Yeah, I could see where that'd be super beneficial because I've actually seen that. I've seen reps drop things or whatever, or even nurses or dumb med students bump into the table. And then I've also seen where they put an implant in, then realized that one won't work. And I'm like, 17, shadowing an orthopedic surgeon. And they open up the hip and then they realize they can't use it. So, then they're like what do we do with this? We're just getting rid of it. They were like, Jordan, take it. I remember, I, still have it. But then I realized that it was probably like $5,000, so they probably would've been in some deep trouble if they had Kermit.

But I know I'm running short of time and you're a very busy man. I wanted to ask you a couple more questions. Since your job is to find like unforeseen expenses, is there any unforeseen expenses or difficulties being the CEO of a newer company?

Rich: Wow. Okay. So yeah, it's not just as you said, I guess finding the opportunities for our clients, but how, if you're going to put yourself out there as a cost reduction in spend management firm, how do you eat your own cooking, basically, take your own medicine. So yeah, that's a great question.

I personally have always been very fiscally minded. I don't know, maybe it came from my parents or whatever, but every other business I've started I've run it as my own personal budget and my personal checkbook. So, I tend to try to watch things and make decisions that are good for the business, but also have some measure of calculated risk, because you're always trying to grow. Right now, for example, we're executing a growth plan that we put together and we started that executing that growth plan right in the middle of Covid, if you can imagine.

So, we had hospitals that had shut down their operating rooms, and the only way we get paid is if they do surgery and save money and we can show them where they save money. No surgery was being done and this was the time we said, okay we've grown the company from, zero to we were at the time between $8 and $10 million in revenue and we said we want to go to the next level on the other side of $10 million.

So, let's strategically hire the people we need. Let's author a growth plan. Let's start to execute that. And we did it off of the cash in our balance sheets. We're spending our money to do it, and it was the first time in 8, 9, 10 years that we had actually shown a loss. We had been profitable since the second quarter of existence when we first started the company, and now we're operating at a loss.

Most companies would tell you, that's perfectly fine. That's how most companies do it. But for somebody who, in a group of people who were used to being like really careful about spending and always seeing a profit and stepping it up every month, it was a weird place to be. I'd say that we're very fiscally minded.

We run from budgets and that's important and at the same time, we want to balance how we grow. We have not taken on any venture money or private equity money. It's all been funded by our own efforts. So, I think we're probably looking at that very carefully.

Jordan: Okay. Yeah, it's bad when you're managing costs for other people and then you look into your own and the data's turned against. But yeah, I can see where just having to keep all that cost spending together, that'd be tough for me. I'm trying to make all my personal businesses into my personal checkbook and it's not working very well. So is there any other news to share or any way that if this was a, somebody working in hospital administration, and they wanted to reach out to you. Is there anything you'd like to tell them or how would they get in contact with you?

Rich: Yeah. Thank you. So, the best way to find us is probably going to be our website, which is Kermit, just like the frog. Kermitppi.com. We also for any of your listeners and viewers who use LinkedIn, probably a lot of them do, we publish a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, so we have a newsletter that's available. We have blog posts. We have our own podcast that I host called Healing the Hospital, which is cool. We bring on both clinicians and administrators from different hospitals and some really heavy hitters have been on the show already just in its first season.

And all that can be found up on our LinkedIn page or at our website, and that's the best place to just follow us and keep track of what we're doing. And I would welcome a personal call or a reach out by email to me if anybody's interested in taking the next step. We would do for them a free look at their data. Won't charge them for. To take a look and tell them how much we think we can save them. Takes a week or two to sift through that data. There's no PHI involved, so there's no reason to be worried about HIPAA stuff. It's just purchase history data. We run that through the Kermit machine, and we can tell them, we can benchmark their spend against the best spend in the nation that we've already negotiated and tell them what we think we can save them no obligation.

Jordan: Awesome. And then the final goal, is it just surgeons, or are you trying to move into emergency medicine and all the other ones? What's the final goal?

Rich: Yeah, I don't know really right now, I think we're very concentrated. We're very concentrated on just making sure that every hospital in the US that wants to try this our way has an opportunity to do it. And that's a big, that's a big market to address. Especially if you're trying to get them one-to-one sales calls, relationship introductions and trade shows, which is how we normally do all that. But yes, I think there's tremendous opportunity for this software. We designed it in a way it's very flexible and we can rapidly prototype something and bring it to market. So, if there's an opportunity in pharma, for example, that we think that we could solve we can easily have an offshoot. If it's not too much of a strain to our core business and we would love to talk to partners who might be interested in doing something like that.

Jordan: Awesome. I know you're a super busy man. He's got another meeting within 10 minutes of now, so we appreciate you coming on and I'm sure I've learned a lot. Thank you so much for sharing your wisdom and people have to go check out Kermit.

Rich: Thanks, Jordan. It's been my pleasure.

Jordan: Yes, Richard Palarea everybody. Thank you.