Hey folks, it's Ray with Taste Radio right now. I'm supremely honored to be sitting down with the great Sharelle Klaus, who is the co-founder of Second Sip. Sharelle, It's great to see you. Hey, Ray, it's so good to see you as always. Absolutely. Uh, we don't see enough of each other lately. The last time we sat down and had a drink was, uh, about six months ago.
Yes. It was in a bar called Overstory, if I'm not recall. Yes. Overstory. Yep. Yes. In New York City. And, uh, part of it was to celebrate the launch. Of your brand, your newest brand. Yes. Second sip. Exactly. Yes. Yeah. So that was a beautiful party and we were loved, loved having you there. So thank you for coming.
Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me. Uh, as I mentioned, you and I have known each other for some time. You were also the founder of an amazing brand called Dry Soda, which Yes. Uh, people recall was one of the first premium soda brands on the market. Second Sip is a gin. It is a lower proof gin than. Is typically on the market.
This is 20% alcohol by volume. Most gins on the market are about 40%. Yeah. Alcohol by volume. And it definitely feels like a sophisticated option, albeit a lower A BV at a lower A BV. And I don't even know why I say albeit, because sophistication isn't necessarily specific to a particular proof. Right. As we've seen with a brand like dry soda and.
I think throughout your journey as a beverage entrepreneur, you've really understood what that term means and what premium means. Well, I think first and foremost it's what's in the bottle. It's how does it taste, right? And dry became very popular early on because we had really unique and elevated flavors, right?
We had a lavender, a lemongrass. Those weren't flavors people saw. And it tasted really good. And it tasted very different from anything else. It was, you know, much less sweet it. So it had this more sophisticated, and then from a marketing standpoint, we started out in high end. Restaurants, right? We were served in champagne flutes, so I understood the value of a drinking occasion and that ritual.
So ritual is really important in my mind. In any drinking occasion, I'm a total foodie, but a beverage is just an important part of that. So with second Sip, what came about is this idea that. I wanted to create a gin that I could have in a martini, which to me is the ultimate sophisticated drink. Right?
And there's no place to hide in a martini like your base spirit better be really, really good if it's going into a martini. And to me, martini's, the height of sophistication and, but I didn't. I didn't know if it could be done because perfectly honestly, I drink martinis and I can't have as many as I used to and still do my 8:00 AM yoga class, or continue my night as long as I wanted to, but I just didn't know if that could be done.
But I knew that I would only create this if it was good enough to be in a martini. And not just that I thought it was good enough to be in a martini, but that it was that top mixologists around the world would think it was good enough to be in a martini. So that's how the idea came about, was that same idea of how people are drinking.
The ritual behind it, and could we replicate that for someone but give them, because I always, it's all about more experiences and more options, right? That like our, our mantra with the dry was social drinking for everyone. And that's continued. That thread of my sort of goal in life has continued with second sip in the broader sense.
You know, is this part of a trend? Is this just something you felt was going to click with a lot of people or how do you evaluate that opportunity? So I've learned a ton of lessons with DRY and I knew that I wanted to apply those. And for me there was, it was a few things. It's my own personal experience, right, of, I know I'm not the only one that feels this, and it's my experience with these consumers with Dry, like, you know, we, I wrote the Guide to Zero Proof cocktails during CVID and I got to know.
Consumers even better. During that time, I really obviously 21 years of dealing with consumers and their drinking habits and how they're drinking and where they're drinking. But that opportunity also opened me up to all these zero proof spirits as well. And for me, the zero proof spirits just didn't hit like it was, it was a lesson.
It was like an intimates cake, right? It was like it was always gonna be less. Sent, it wasn't gonna be the full experience and I'm not really interested in anything that doesn't gonna give me, I don't wanna give up anything. So that was one piece. As I started thinking through this, the other piece is, and I think any beverage entrepreneur out there listening to this can appreciate this.
It's also not just about the retailer or the bar or restaurant and what they need. It's about your distributor. What does your distributor need? Because route to market. Is obviously the most challenging part of any beverage experience. I don't, I think you could talk to any beverage entrepreneur and they all have their challenges with that.
So I was like, what is an issue that the distributors are dealing with right now? And it is alcohol sales are softening. Right? And they're not, I think seen the repeat buy of the non A spirits. The way they wanted. Those weren't quite performing in our interviews with both salespeople and the upper echelon, the CEOs, not the CEOs, but the, the executives of the distributors that they, the promise wasn't there for the zero proof spirits, but they do need, they need increased drinking occasions and they need people drinking increased drinks, more cocktails.
So what better option than to bring back the three martini lunch? So to speak, right? That's the a, a new occasion there. And now, instead of zebra striping, people can have a cocktail and then they have to go to like a soda water. Now they can actually have two or three martinis and have that base spirit and drink more.
And so now you're, you're solving the problem for the bars, the restaurants, and you're solving the problem for the distributor. And like, so super interestingly, we just launched with Southern Wine and Spirits in New York and January is usually their slowest month right here. We are talking about a dry ish January and, and this opportunity to really create real volume in January for them, and they're so excited about that and that innovation.
So those are the three sort of prongs of how I looked at this. Is the consumer gonna wanna buy it? Are the bars and restaurants gonna wanna buy it? Am I solving this problem for the distributors and are they gonna get behind it? Because if a distributor's not gonna get behind it and you're not solving a problem for them, it's tough to get their attention.
So I felt like we had all three of those things. It feels like there's a lot of parallels between what you're doing with dry soda and what you're doing with Second Sip in that there were people who kind of gave up on soda because it was. High calorie, high sugar. It had ingredients that people didn't want, whether it was the, you know, full strength so to speak, or the diet versions.
There were ingredients that people just wanted to stay away from. And then we saw, yeah, brands like dry soda come to market and we saw, you know, these new better for you functional sodas come to market. People came back to the category or people were more inclined to say, yes, I will have this type of soda, or that type of soda.
It also introduced soda to a whole new generation of consumers that said, this is for me. This is a brand that represents me and my values and my culture. So I think there are two things that you could be targeting with. Second step one is bringing people back to. Drinking, bringing people back to gin, and two, bringing new consumers to the category, saying, well, you're not going to, you know, have a rough day tomorrow because you're only drinking half the alcohol that you would normally consume in a martini, but which is the bigger audience.
Where do you see the most opportunity between those two types of consumers? That's a good question. The consumer on-premise, in the bars that we're in in New York, 'cause we're in most of the top bars in New York. They're there for the cocktail experience and so they're probably having more now. However, our D to T business is all of a sudden just kind of gone uphill.
We've had a couple of press pieces and I've been communicating with some of those consumers and they are actively seeking out. Options for themselves to be more intentional with their drinking. And interestingly, I got an email today from a customer who she came to Second Sip because she tried all the zero proof gins.
And I was fascinated by that because to be honest, I never assumed that somebody that was going for a zero proof spirit would come to a low proof. I thought if you're going zero proof, that just means you don't want any alcohol at all. So that sort of opened my eyes. I was like, oh, okay. It's good to know that that's, there's a spectrum for people and I knew there was a spectrum.
I just sort of assumed if you were going zero post spirits, you were fully out. So I think that's yet to be seen Ray, like that's what the whole point of this is in our focus in New York. Um, we're just now launching in Miami is to really focus on this consumer and understand. How they wanna use this and, and what's gonna make sense for them.
I'm seeing how it makes sense for the bars. I'm seeing how it's making sense for our distributors, um, and now we're learning from our consumers. The other thing I wanted to point out that we haven't quite talked about yet, but that I think is super critical, is credibility in this spirit space. So, like I said, I came up with a concept, but can that even be done?
And who am I? From this, you know, woman from NA to come in and try to, to build something here. So that's why I partnered up with Leo Robes check, who was a friend of mine that I met actually doing a, a visit for Seattle commercial like years ago that they put us together and Leo is royalty in the industry and you know, he, he created, uh, the first Michelin star cocktail program at 11 Madison Park and has trained.
I'd like to say like 30% of the top bartenders in London and and New York right now. Number's probably a little high, but it seems like that everywhere we go, they're around. And then from him, we brought in Nick Strange Way, who is just a master distiller out of the UK who has created Gins for Beef Eater and Absolute, and his own brand.
He both, and it was the credibility of those three and the fact that Nick, we all came together and said, we wanna do this. But if it doesn't work, we're not gonna launch it. Like is it good enough to be in a martini? And we took it to the 15 top mixologist in New York and the 15 in London, and we had them try it and give us their feedback and we got a resounding yes.
And these are like martini masters, right? Like these are the real deal. And that's when we knew we had it. And without that piece. I just, I think the idea is great and all of those other pieces I had are great, but that's one of the reasons why Southern believed in us too, right? They saw we're in, within a few months of launch, we were in most of the top 50, like in the world's best bars we were in, in New York and on menus and getting this like repeat velocities and this repeat buy, and it's because of that.
So that, that is kind of the final linchpin of how this worked and why it works is because. It's really good and it tastes good, and we worked really hard to get it there. Yeah, I mean, industry credibility is really important. At the end of the day, the people that are really gonna judge your brand are the people drinking it most often.
The bartenders will put you on the menu. The bar managers will help you get there. The distributors will help you get on shelves at liquor stores. Taste is king. It always has been. How much of your experience with understanding how people perceive taste at dry soda informed you about the way to approach flavor and proof for second sip?
So in this situation, I know what I don't know. I knew what my favorite gins were. They're a London dry style gin. Those are all my favorites. And Nick and Leo and I all sort of gave our list of our favorite gins of what we like, but I left it to those two. I said, here's what I know, is that it has to deliver.
And they know that these guys are incredible at what they do and have incredible experience. And so this is an area where I'm like. I don't have to tell them that they knew that. And it was more like, are they were concerned I was gonna push them in a certain, like, oh, it's good enough, let's just, and I'm like, no, because I know how important that part is.
But more importantly, they know it and it's their names. Their names are literally on that bottle. So they wanted to make sure it was, it was really good. So we had an idea that it was definitely gonna be a. So Len and Dry is definitely more gin forward and how we got there is was very complex and complicated and not easy, but we did it just with that.
It was all about the martini. And it's interesting 'cause it works amazingly well on martini negronis and gin and tonics are awesome, but it was about that martini, so it only informed in the fact that I knew. Like when we brought Nick in, I said to Leo, I'm like, does he have the chops to really create this?
And he's like, of course. Like, this is the guy. And, and the fact that we all agreed if it doesn't work, we go our separate ways. Which, you know, it's not easy for an entrepreneur like myself, but so I just, I mean, I. I had very little to do with that piece of it 'cause I had to let them go. I will say the interesting thing that we told Nick was 'cause he went into this lab in London and worked on it, and then we took it to an upstate distiller in New York and did a small batch and then scaled it up in, in New York at, uh, New York distilling.
But I didn't give him any sort of cogs. Like there was no parameters and there was no parameters on the A BV. I said, just go see what you can make. And we got really lucky that it came in at half because that was sort of what I was hoping for. But it was like taste first, taste before a BV taste before cost.
Did you feel like you were much more prepared for the launch of Second SIP than you were when you launched dry soda? Did you feel like you had as much information and did you, you did as much research and as much product testing and market testing. First, second step as you did when you launched Rice soda, and did it matter?
Yes. I cannot tell you how much fun it is to do this brand after everything I've learned. Like it's, it's unbelievable. Like it's just been a night and day difference. So yeah, I was very intentional about the launch, how we launched, where we launched, and everything from that point on, like how we're scaling.
Which distributor we went with, like that distributor conversation was fascinating because. I had this concept, right, that I'm answering a problem for a distributor, but what I didn't know was, are they gonna get that? And after we launched, we were able to self distribute through, uh, park Street, which is a, so we had time to get a little momentum.
But it was interesting. We had five of the top distributors coming to us in Vine for us. And with Dry, I practically had to sell my oldest child to get that going like it was. Unbelievably hard to get a distributor withdraw. And here we had, you know, we had them all coming to us and we, that was a fully new and really cool experience.
I mean, I can't tell you how cool that part was, but yes. So I feel like it, not just the launch, but like everything that's gone into this and timing and patient. So we have, you and I talked about this just before this started, about what I got called by my earlier distributors at Dry. Oh yeah. And it wasn't a pleasant name, but it was around Relentless and something else along those lines.
And it's because I pushed so hard. I was pushing, pushing, pushing ahead expectations. But this time I come into distributors understanding their pain points and how do we help solve those so that together we can build this. So I'm quite confident I'm not getting called Albert anymore, and they were very lovely at our GSM.
What Rell is referring to is the last time we sat down for an episode of Taste Radio, which was almost, well, the episode was published almost eight years ago to the day. And yeah, the first line in the copy is distributors called her a, quote, relentless B, and everyone knows what the B word here is, but Rell Klaus paid little mind to their insecurities.
She was too busy building a business. And one of the things you've noted a number of times in this current conversation of ours is that Leo and Nick have been integral to the development, the creation and development of this brand. If I'm not mistaken, dry soda. You were. Running things solo. Um, you were a solo entrepreneur, solo founder.
If you had to go back and do it all over again, would you have launched with a co-founder? How much does the co-founder matter and what you're doing now and you know, in the, in all the time you were running the two, two plus decades, you were running dry soda. That's funny you asked that. No one's asked me that question before.
I don't think so. I enjoyed being there on my own and figuring this out. But that being said, I also had a lot of really brilliant people around me that I, that was one thing I brought in. I had great board members, I had great team members, advisors, so I just love that experience with Dry and it just brought so much.
It is interesting. However, I think this is super funny. I launched Second Sip. And two weeks later I got married and so I had been single most of my time with Dry and didn't have a partner, and then all of a sudden now I have a business partner. So I, I fully embrace that concept in this last year, but I really enjoy having.
A business partner. Now Leo is quite a bit more involved than Nick is as well, but Leo and I, we talk a lot 'cause he is very, very involved like day-to-day type stuff. And especially in this business, I have so much respect for this industry and I have so much respect for what I don't know. And I will say from this perspective, the learning curve is much, much quicker now.
Like with Dry, there was, I had to find out all of this stuff on my own and there wasn't someone to tell me. I was also. In my early thirties when I started dry and I thought I knew everything, whereas I am a much wiser, older woman now and understand the value of, of being able to have people help you with those answers a little easier.
I mean, I've, I've asked the question about solo founders to a lot of entrepreneurs who have launched their businesses by themselves, and it's, it's about 50 50. The response is sometimes they'll say, no, I, I wanted to run the show on my own. And then the other half of the time the folks are saying, oh, it would've been so much easier and so much more helpful to have someone by my side.
There's a loneliness that a lot of people, uh, mention when they talk about entrepreneurship, and I think I. If it were me, I would love to have someone advise me, but I think I'd wanna run the show on my own. Mm-hmm. At the same time, if I didn't really know how to run a business, it would be nice to have someone who could just run the day to day, and that comes up a lot.
There's some entrepreneurs that I just spoke with a couple days ago, they were like, Hey Ray, do you know anyone that could just run our business for us? Oh, that's funny. Well, I will say that to be fair, I wanna, I would love to give a shout out to David Clark, who runs our operations for us and who was with, was with me at Drive for years and is now running operations at Second Sip.
That he's been a really integral part to this whole thing. And so I do feel like in some. Aspects, he was a partner, even though obviously, you know, he's not necessarily like a co-founder. Having him by on my side through all of this has also been really helpful. And he's just as excited as I am by the whole thing.
So it's, it's, it's kind of yeah. How you surround yourself with people and, but yeah, I mean, I do like being the boss with students. Being able to focus on sales and marketing and promotion of the brand and partnerships and so on and so forth, feels like your wheelhouse. And doing that in an industry where you're not as well known as you had been in in na mm-hmm.
Could be a little scary, but what's been your. Approach, what's been most effective for your pitch? How do you get people interested almost from the get go? Is it from the liquid? Is it the branding? Is it the opportunity? What's really getting people excited and out of their seats? Well, yeah, so we're in the midst of actually raising a, a round right now.
So it's been, um, it's, I, I'm one of those weird people that really likes to raise money because it causes you to get. So focused on the value of your company and what you're doing and be able to articulate that and, and you also then see, oh, where maybe are we, we don't need to be focused on that, or whatever.
So I find those, I find conversations with potential investors to be some of the most valuable conversations I have, and I think really what is resonating right now is both. Well, I have to, I'm sorry. I'm gonna say three things. One, it is the taste right, is that it works like this product actually tastes good.
I think it's the momentum. It's really hard to deny how quickly we've grown and scaled in New York, and like I said, in these top influential, impossible, you know, bars to get into that. That really then help that halo then really helps grow it the rest of. The way and, and then I think it's, it's the timing, right?
The timing is right, that it's the customers are buying it. The repeat is there. It's, it's, I guess it's the momentum, right? Like it's just the momentum is here and I'm seeing it. So when we talked about the importance of operations, it's why David is critical to this company right now because of. We're talking, this thing is scaling faster than I expected.
And so like, you know, we're already having like distributor, you've gotta be ordering more, you gotta be ordering more. So I'm not gonna be a relentless bitch in asking them to order more, but like just getting them on the right cadence of getting that done. But it's, it's making sure that we are set up to be able to grow this thing as quickly as it's beginning to happen.
So I think that's it. And I think it's that because also every, everybody gets it as soon as. They think, oh, I do want two martinis, but then I can't have wine with dinner, or whatever it is. Right? Like it's just such a universal tension that we all fill and when people get that, yeah, it just kind of opens the doors.
Do you see Second SIP as as a lifestyle brand as much as it is, you know, an alcohol brand or a low A BV alcohol brand? Is this the gin? I think that people. We'll say, this is the gin I have in my house, or is this for, you know, a specific occasion type of gin. To me, lifestyle would mean that this is my gin, this is the one I always go to, versus, you know, occasion based gin.
Thank you for answer. I was actually gonna ask you. So tell me what you mean by lifestyle. So, yes, I think that's a the perfect question because yes, this becomes my gin. Second sip is my gin. That was why I said we are a gin company first. So there are a couple of other brands out there that are low proof, but they're like doing, they're doing all of it.
They're doing tequila, they're doing, you know. The brown spirits and all of that stuff, and that is that not something we're interested in doing. We're not trying to be the poster children necessarily for low A, B, B, we're like, we are a gin company. And that is something I have said from the beginning to every single person on our team and repeatedly over and over again to our social media, to our press people.
We are a gin company and we're just a gin company that you can drink twice as much of. So yes, the lifestyle, this becomes second step becomes your gin. To me, that's how you create a new category is that you be that thing for them and you're not, you're not the special occasion, you're not the just when I don't wanna drink as much.
This is, it's good enough to be your gin, your everyday gin. And that was not easy to get to and not, you know, I don't think we're seeing that in any other brands out there in the market right now. So how long was this in development? Second step. That is, yeah, it took us like a year. Okay. To get it all done.
And that's because I'm very pushy. Sherell. Throughout this conversation, I feel like there's one word that has sort of been through line for everything that you've mentioned, which is focus. You're focused on being a gin company. First and foremost, you're focused on the New York market. You're focused on being great tasting.
You're focused on that, on-premise opportunity and you know, making the bar the front lines for your brand. And I would think a lot of that learning, a lot of that emphasis on focus came from your experience building dry soda, where frankly, I think there were times when. I saw dry soda, maybe loose focus, and it was easy to, because there were just, yes, so many, so many places you could go.
There were so many trends that might affect how people would perceive the brand or drink the beverages. Is that the case? Absolutely. For sure. Like with dry. Again, that's sort of your, the, your first time entrepreneur, right? The, some of the different pieces And, and 'cause what's crazy is that I started that brand to be an elevated experience for people when they weren't drinking alcohol.
Right. And we very, because we had like a third of the sugar of a regular, a quarter of the sugar, of a regular soda and all that stuff, we became a better for you soda. And that's when our sales really took off. We experienced such, such high growth. Uh, but that wasn't why I started the brand and we wanted to kind of get back to that.
'cause then we started like we wanted to zero our sugar and we were trying to chase all these different things. So yeah, I mean, yeah. And that's painful to go through. I think it's almost impossible not to go through for a first time entrepreneur. So I stopped beating myself up about that. 'cause it did take a few years of like.
You know, you, you can be hard on yourself. But it was, it was one of those really critical lessons. Now bringing it in into here, who are we? What are we, and what problem are we solving and sticking to that. And so like, interestingly, we're just a few weeks after we launched, Leo came, ands, like, we're getting so many requests for an RTD.
Because we have, we, we do give to the press these like ready to drink freezer martinis and negronis and they're amazing. And I was like, I'm like, great idea. No. Like no. And here's why. And we will know when the time is right to start to, but like we are a gin company and this is the problem we are solving and we're gonna solve it this way and we're gonna, now that doesn't mean that I'm not open to sort of seeing these other pieces out there for interesting.
Like I didn't think D two C could be big for us. But maybe it can be because now I'm realizing that people are searching for this kind of thing and our sales are not what I, I mean they've went super high up really fast. So I have to be open-minded, but focused on what we are and understand if I'm gonna open up these other opportunities.
Like I said, now we've got a, like retail, I mean we we're in retail in New York, but now chain retail, right? Like if we are gonna start to open up that, we're still going to stay focused and make sure. We're not going nationwide with anybody tomorrow. Let me put it that way. I can assure you of that because I want to make sure that we have that consumer messaging, they understand it, and I can answer some of those questions you're answering, right?
Like, is there gonna be a lot of education needed and how is that gonna look? So, and I don't have all those answers yet. All you have to do is get, uh, John Ham to be your spokesperson and be like, I'm back to drinking three martinis a day for lunch. Do you know him? Can you help me out there? I wish I could say yes.
See what you can do. But the answer is no.
Yes. I, I know we need a little mad men here. Yeah. I mean, I, I think it would be a, a natural, well, I, you know, it also, I guess that brings up a good question, you know, who is this for? 'cause people know John Ham for madman. He, they, people know him for other things as well, but John Ham is. I dunno, 50, something like that.
I wanna say he's probably 50 years old. Have you identified a particular demographic or age group that you want tackle that you think is the right consumer for a second sip. So sort of yes. I mean, yes, we're definitely, you know, we're in the urban areas. We're in New York, Miami right now. We're also a woman and queer owned brand, so that brings, its, its sort of own like, focus on certain, certain areas.
For instance, we're very much focused all of our, our sort of charity or give back type stuff. We'll definitely be towards the L-G-B-T-Q group. But from a. Interestingly, I, right now, I think we're, it's, we're looking probably more millennial right now 'cause we're in New York City, we're in those bars. But the consumers that are starting to buy online, those are varying, and I think Gen Z is a very intentional drinker and we do understand that they do still drink, that, you know, that they are drinking, they're just drinking differently.
So I think, you know, we're very open to that. Target consumer first, but I think right now it's, it's a, it's cocktail culture. We're definitely in that. We are, you know, that's the natural sort of first group are these cocktail enthusiasts and you know, people that are going to these, you know, well-known bars and establishments.
So right now that's what it is. But I never love that question and in any of my stuff, because it's like, yes we do, but it's also like you're, you, it's always a little challenging to, 'cause you're not trying to. To eliminate anybody. But yes, there is a focus probably right now on, you know, a little higher income and it's more psychographics versus demographics, I think.
I ask because it, it might help you refine your communication, your pitch, you know, it would depend on what bar you wanna approach. What retailer. So I saw, I think you're sold at Raised Bar, which is a dive bar. Yeah. Uh, in New York City or divey ish type. It's a hip, brave bar. It's a hip dive bar. It was a, it was built as a, it was built as a dive bar.
So maybe that will inform our listeners about what kind of die bar it is. And you're also sold at Overstory, which is just right. Spectacular. It's like, I think the 11th best bar in the world or something. Exactly. Just got quoted. Yeah. And I do think there's a slight juxtaposition that I also just generally love, which is we do not wanna be too precious, which to be honest happened a little bit with Dry, right?
Mm-hmm. Um, and we also have these two founders. So, you know, Leo is, he's, I call him aspirational. He is, you know, kind of perfectionist, like bartender. Everything's super. Heidi and Neat. And he's amazing. And then we have Nick who I call the Gandalf of gin. I don't know if you've seen this picture. He is got the long beard.
Mm-hmm. And he's like the coolest guy was like ran the Groucho Club in London and like this is just knows all the super cool hip people. So there's sort of like, like I sort of like dive bar versus over story. It's kind of like, you know, or Long Island Bar, whatever. It's kind of like those two guys also bring this really cool, I think tension and juxtaposition to the brand itself.
Well, Cheryl, I think that no matter what brand or what company you decided to get into post dry soda, I think you were gonna come to the table with a lot of intentionality, a lot of passion, and a lot of excitement for a space that. Knee, a shot in the arm and I think it all comes together in second sip.
This is a very intentional brand at a time when people are looking for products like this. So I am thoroughly thrilled to see where this goes from here. And somehow I think we're gonna be talking again in the near future. We'll probably see you on Bev net Live before. Uh, let's hope before much time passes.
So thank you so much for taking the time right now to sit down with me. I know our audience is gonna get a lot outta this conversation. Thanks so much, Ray. You know how much I love you guys at Benet and all your support over the years, so thank you. Thanks again.
