Founders Podcast

Your Business is a Human, who Breaths, Eats and Drinks

2026-01-27 · 09:00 UTC ·Founders Podcast ·26 min read

Brief

Jeff Luther, owner of a real estate-dependent home inspection business, advocates for viewing businesses as living organisms that need care rather than machines to exploit. His central thesis emerged from a painful 2022-2023 downturn when rising interest rates decimated real estate transactions. Rather than making immediate cuts to his 29-person team, Luther borrowed money for over a year to avoid difficult conversations, believing he was being kind and courageous. This avoidance actually amplified both financial pressure and emotional damage. His breakthrough came when he applied his personal rules (don't die, be kind, do the right thing) to the business itself - realizing that if the company died, everyone's jobs died anyway. This reframing helped him make necessary but painful layoffs while maintaining dignity for all involved.

Luther's coaching methodology focuses on identifying truly critical tasks versus busy work that provides dopamine hits but doesn't move the needle. He demonstrated this with a client who was earning over $1 million annually but working exhaustively across client delivery and business development. By encouraging the consultant to spend more time preparing for and reviewing existing client sessions rather than constantly chasing new business, the client reduced workload by a third while maintaining revenue through higher fees and better service quality. Luther emphasizes that founders often think their business is uniquely complex when basic business principles still apply. His approach combines practical operational analysis with emotional intelligence, recognizing that leadership decisions affect real people's livelihoods and require both strategic thinking and genuine empathy.

Why it matters

Home inspection business owner Jeff Luther shares hard-won lessons about treating businesses as living systems requiring care and stewardship:

Key details

  • [crisis management] Delayed layoffs for over a year by borrowing money instead of having difficult conversations, increasing financial and emotional damage
  • [framework] Uses three rules for decision-making: don't die, be kind, do the right thing - applied to both personal and business survival
  • [case study] Helped a $1M+ consultant reduce workload by one-third while maintaining revenue by focusing on existing clients rather than chasing new business
  • [warning signs] Key indicators of founder over-dependence: employees lose critical thinking, no dialogue on problems, founder makes all decisions
Source evidence

title: Your Business is a Human, who Breaths, Eats and Drinks
author: Founders Podcast
contenttype: podcast
publication: Founders Podcast
published: 2026-01-27T09:00:00
sourceurl: https://anchor.fm/s/10542bd40/podcast/play/112378103/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2025-11-9%2F414058767-44100-2-f8d36d11aa95d.mp3

word_count: 5887

Hello, Jeff. How are you doing today? I'm doing well, Ash. Thank you. How are you? I'm good. Thank you. Welcome to the Founders Podcast. Great stuff. Do you have a favorite code? Something that motivates you, inspires you, you would like to share with our audience. Take a step. The ground will find you. Let's take a step. Take a step. Yeah. So in 2025, it's so not normal to expect from somebody that they will kind of take a step forward with all the cabinets going on. So I think that's quite relevant right now. OK, great. So, so Jeff, imagine you're in a room full of founders, you know, early stage builders. Do you walk in? You have the mic in your hand, you have the stage for yourself and they're looking at you with curiosity, saying who is this handsome chap walking on the stage? Spotlight is on you and you got a couple of minutes to tell them your story and tell them why should they should stick with us for the rest of the What would you tell? Them So my question would be my hook would be what if we thought of our businesses like a person what I mean by that I guess I'll people all right so people love stories right so instead of trying to explain my why I'll tell a story November of 2023 my my business started to deteriorate in May of 2022 when interest rates in the states rose and it continued to decline. The real estate my business is tied to the real estate market. When the real estate transactions go down, of course my business goes down. And I, I had 29 employees and I cared dearly about all of them. So I had to figure out what to do. And the first thing I figured out was that I was afraid and I was going to hide. So that's what I did. And I, I knew that I had to let people go. I knew that we couldn't continue our payroll in operating as we were. So I started to borrow money and instead of having difficult conversations, I borrowed money to continue to pay people and to continue to try to save jobs, thinking that OK, well, this will be short lived. It'll turn around interest rates to go back to normal, people start buying again, people start selling again. And I continue that for a year, over a year. And then realized that waiting was adding pressure. It was adding cost, it was adding I, I didn't know at the time, but the emotional damage that was coming was going to be far greater than if I had just had the, the difficult conversation. And the sooner you face the hard thing, the more control and the more dignity everyone keeps. So as I'm approaching, you know, as my runway is getting shorter and shorter and interrupt me at any time, Ash, if you have a question, as as my runway is getting shorter and shorter, I'm approaching the day that I, I have to do something about this. And I was like, Oh my gosh, what am I? What am I going to do? I've got to 1st. I have to pick people. So it's like picking your favorite kid. Although I do have a favorite kid. My youngest is my favorite. I committed to to saying that every time I got on the air, he asked me if I would. So now every chance I get, I say that he's my favorite. So I had to pick people, which is a horrible feeling. I had to pick jobs that we had to eliminate. And I was like, well, how, how am I going to do this? I've got to tell these people back-to-back to back. And there were people that we had recently hired that I wanted to keep, people that we'd had that were longer tenure that I didn't want to keep. And then I realized, OK, well, I'm really trying to treat these people with dignity and with care. And I have, I have three simple rules that I lived by. And there's some history behind that. But my rules are don't die. That's first rule. So that's important. And be kind. Just be kind. It doesn't take a big effort. Just be kind and then do the right thing. So I started going through these rules. I was like, OK, well, don't die. You know, I'm not going to kill anybody. Don't die and be kind. So now I have to be kind to these people, and I have to do the right thing, what I believe is the right thing. And sometimes the right thing's hard. And I kind of had an epiphany. I was like, OK, well let's think about don't die. If I don't make these changes, then the company dies. And if the company dies, everybody dies. Every job dies. So then it's all for naughty anyway. So as I started thinking about the company as a person as well, it made the decision much more clear for me. No, it didn't remove the emotion for me. It was still devastating, but it made the decision more clear. When you think about your business, you treat it like a eating, sleeping, breathing thing. It's a living system. It's not just a machine for people to go into to exchange their time for money. But when you see that your company is something that you're responsible for caring for, for feeding, for protecting short term and long term, then your leadership decisions change. And you're not doing it just for the company. You're doing it for all the people that rely on the help of the company for their own health. And I also realized in that, that our businesses are not, they're not a special exception to to basic business principles. You know, people say, well, I can't have, I can't have offshore folks answering my phones. It wouldn't work in my business. Well, people build businesses around that service. So there are other businesses using it. It works and sometimes we get short sighted. We think our business is so much different than every other business when really a lot of them are are the same. And, and, and you were, you were struggling to have these hard conversations, right? And that's why you kept postponing it for a year, which, you know, increase pressure instead of reducing it, right. From your experience, then what are the earliest signals that you yourself or, or any founder you know should be looking for so that they don't have to face what you have face or is, or if they're, if they're in the situation and they have this kind of signals and they they should know I'm a founder. I I already paying? I'm already paying for that hidden cost. How should I stop? Those, that is a great question. I'll answer it in two different ways. So the first thing, one of the things I learned, a painful lesson I learned in my business is when is the when do you know you should fire someone? And the answer that if you really get down to your core, get down to your soul, the answer to that is when you first start thinking about it, because there's a reason behind that. And to answer your question directly, there are all these things that we kind of put our head in the sand about. Like I was borrowing money, Ash, but I didn't want to look at how much I, I, and this sounds as dumb coming out of my mouth as it does hitting your ears. I realize it, but I wouldn't look at statements. I, I didn't want to look at the credit line to see where I was. I wouldn't look at profit. I didn't look at PNL report. I just kept looking at what my next challenge was. My next challenge was payroll. OK, how do I pay payroll? OK, I borrow money. All right, now how do I pay the, the contractors? Well, I borrow money. OK, now how do I pay? How do we get tires on one of the vehicles that we have That's a $1200, but that on a credit card, you know, you figure it out. So I was doing all of these things and not really looking at the root problem and, and what I ultimately did is I sat down on a Saturday morning. It was like 4:00 in the morning. I couldn't sleep and I sat down on like a Saturday morning and took out an ex. I took a Excel spreadsheet and went through my PNL and QuickBooks online and put numbers into my Excel spreadsheet all the way down to like the $9.99 I was spending on an app on my phone. All the way down to those little expenses and it took the better part of the day. Then I realized what my cost was. Then I realized the garbage I I found in that that I was paying for my ex wife's phone bill. I mean, there was so much stuff in there that I that I just was just paying. Yeah, yeah. And what what did you observed happening to the organizational culture when hard conversations are repeatedly postponed? I mean, you have gone through it, right? You must have experienced what was going on in the in the organization, what people were talking to each other when they look at you meet you or get those kind of signal, oh, something is happening, maybe this company is closing down, right? Performance does that, does that performance remain strong or what was the what was going on there? Oh wow, That's a really good question. And I'll, I have the benefit of having been through this before. In a previous corporate life, probably 25 years ago, I worked for Georgia Pacific and we went through a series of layoffs. And one thing I learned from that series of layoffs is that it was, it would happen on Friday. It was usually anywhere from 10 to 20 people. They were called in to the conference room. They were all let go at once. They had someone at their desk with a box. They packed their stuff up and they left. That happened one time and then about a month later it happened again. So that set the precedent that it was going to be the slow, arduous process. So every Friday, you know, we're all worried about it, talked about it, we kind of joked about it, but it has the as time went on, we knew that the that the cuts continued to happen. Well, then they didn't cut deep enough the first time. So I used that experience to, to really cut once and cut deep. And after I did it and it was, it was horrible. To say that it was like one of the worst things ever is an understatement. But it was horrible. And after I did it, I took, I had all the employees in the conference room and I got brutally honest. I went through the financials. I went through what I borrowed to save the company. I went through what the plan was to start paying the money back. I went through what our profit was. I went through what our profit was forecasted to be if the market continued to decline. I went through how long the runway was, if it really got bad and we had to borrow money again. And then I went through the jobs. Here are the jobs that are left. We cannot operate with anything less than this. And I, I tried, I guess really what I, what I, what my goal was, is to show them everything. So if someone wanted to leave or someone was uncomfortable, they had all the information. But I also tried to instill confidence so they could see every dark corner. And it was. It was one of the more embarrassing moments of my entire adult life. And if as a founder, then we we often kind of believe we are being kind by postponing the difficult session. You, you did that, you know, you've gone through the situation when does the and maybe these are not the right word to ask, but I don't know what are the words to use when when does the kindness quietly turns into a loss of dignity for everyone involved. Now that I don't know, maybe let me tell you my experience and then and then maybe we can get to that answer because I think, I think that answer would be important. What I had to come to terms with is I thought I was being courageous. I thought I was being kind. I thought I was doing the right thing. That's what I told myself on the surface, but the reality is I was being a coward. I was hiding from a conversation that I knew I had to have, and I was finding reasons not to have it. And a difficult conversation never gets easier by avoidance. To what type? What type of decisions reveal most clearly whether founder truly sees the business as something something they they are accountable for, not just operating? You know, I would say probably your decisions around around people. I think that we all get very sensitive around people in that we tolerate underperformers, we tolerate mediocrity, We tolerate things in one employee that that we might not tolerate in ourselves or might not tolerate in others. And I think that that we do that because it's easier. We do that because we avoid a difficult conversation. We do that also as founders, and I'm speaking for myself, but I think a lot of people would identify with us. We do that because we're scared that people won't like us. And by tolerating poor performance, tolerating mediocrity, that runs the risk of tainting the pond, so to speak, or poisoning the well, however you want to look at it. And then that affects the rest of the organization. And when you, when you allow that risk of the rest of the organization to be affected, then that affects everyone's job, everyone's livelihood. And I think that's one of the big things that I see in founders, entrepreneurs, owners is they they allow these behaviors to continue. And this is, this is a dilemma for every founder, right? You know, if you delay letting people go, who is affecting the performance and the growth of the organization? You're basically hammering your own feet from a business sense, right? And, and, and, and if you're not delaying it, you have not. And, and, you know, delay has a different kind of definition in every founder's journey because some businesses need people on board for a longer time to evaluate how they're performing, how they're helping the business to grow. Some businesses really quick you can figure out, OK, this person is adding quite a lot of value now. You know, we we need it for the growth of the business. One thing which I really, really like about your perspective is you talk about seeing a business as a living system, which is a very different perspective. And I have interviewed like 150 top entrepreneurs till date in last 3 1/2 years. Nobody has shared that with me before. So I am quite intrigued by this idea. Can you point to a real situation where treating the business has something to be cared for rather than exploited, led to slower growth initially? And the reason I'm saying that, so you have already shared an example of your own journey. Is there an example you can share with our audience, which is maybe not your business, but somebody you have helped and they figured it out with your help, your coaching that treating a business like a real person. Give them these moments of of thought, deep thought that they figure out how to reestablish their performance or the growth or or even get the business into the right direction. Oh my goodness, yes, I have a a recent breakthrough. I have a success story I can share for sure. Sure, one of the, one of my clients High Coach is an implementer and he's probably, he's probably one of the top in the world, I would say. And there's this constant, you know, as a, as an entrepreneur or founder, there's this constant fear of being gainfully unemployed. Every time you've, you finish a job or finish a contract, you're gainfully unemployed, right? You go and you find the next one. And he's been struggling with just this grind. He's, he's got sessions five days out of most weeks and is burning the candle at both ends. And he's like, you know what, how do I, how do I balance this out? And the struggle was he, he would do a session and then when the session's over, he's doing marketing calls, sales calls, doing all of his follow up. I was like, OK, well, what's, what's the goal? The goal is to continue to generate revenue. You know, I need revenue. All right, what's the dollar amount? Let's put it into real terms. So then we put a an actual dollar value on it. And I asked him to take a step back. Take a step back and tell me if if you finish a session and you get really quiet and really still and you go back through that session, do you think you could find some holes that you might not have found in that business while you were in session if you review it? And he said, yeah, of course, absolutely. I said, OK, well, if you have a session the next day, if you get really quiet the day before and you think about that company, that organization, think about what you have on the agenda for the session, do you think you'll have a better connection with that company the next day and be able to serve them better? And so, yeah, of course. So does it stand to reason then that if you increase your service level for these clients, you spend more time on these clients that you currently have, and maybe you change your fee accordingly and adjust that a little bit to compensate for that extra time? Then you can focus more on the current business, elevate your level of service with the current business you have instead of exhausting yourself trying to chase new business when you're tired and not at your best. And he's been working on that for a few months and it's been a wild success. And it was re evaluating his business, what he offers. And instead of trying to chase next and new, it's sharpening his tools that he has in his toolbox already with the business that's established in the current clients that he has. And it's worked out really well. But it just takes a different, it takes a different perspective, and it also takes a mindset where you're not focusing on the fear of what you have when you operate from a place of prosperity instead of scarcity. Would you be able to give us give our listeners some figures, like you don't have to share exact numbers, something around the percentage or, or some analogical analogy with some numbers like he was doing $100,000 in a month, then he stepped back, thought about it, came up with a new strategy, and now he's doing $200,000 a month. This will just give our listeners an understanding of how much value this particular strategy could bring into your business. If you, you know, sit down and think about your business deep, deep and get an understanding. Yeah, absolutely. His full year, 2024 was the first year he broke $1,000,000. So he did a million and he's on target to do, he'll do over a million this year, not by a huge margin, but in the past. Few months, he's cut his workload by almost a third. So he's dropping his workload, raising his fees to to keep the same revenue and working just as much. But the work is moving the needle. The work is focused. So I, I've time, I, you know, I'm a little premature and in the success story, time will tell the tale. But ultimately what will happen is, is he's serving his clients better. His retention goes up the the marketing dollars that he spent to to get new clients for his, his cost of acquiring a new client is going to go down because as he continues to service these clients amazingly, then it's word of mouth marketing. It's like, hey, look what this guy was able to do for our organization. I'm sure he can do the same for you. So that is, that's a great case study. Indeed, indeed. And, and as we were going through this example, what I've learned and you talk about it, you talk about maturity and long term stewardship, right? In this particular example, what I liked about is how you help the founder to get more mature in terms of understanding his or her own business, right? The quality, the way the amount of time this person was spending. Many founders hit a phase where everything still depends on their presence, as you explained in the example the founder was feeling before. So in real companies, warnings or signs suggest this dependence has become a liability rather than a strength. The signs where, oh, there's so many critical thinking when your employees start to lose the, the initiative or the, the ability for critical thinking, when there's no dialogue, when folks come to you with a problem and there's no dialogue, you just solve it. And that you know, it's, it's hard to pinpoint that has to that's you have to be self aware. You have to understand that when you're the only one making decisions, I think that's a red flag. Any, any of those, then you're becoming, you're becoming the crutch and you're working, you're, you're working yourself into a wedge that's really difficult to get out of. Basically, you're your founder, but you're actually still exchanging the time for money because you're spending all the time doing everything by yourself instead of creating an engine or a product which actually you can exchange for a value instead of exchanging your own time with your customers, isn't it? So let's take a step further than when a founder finds it out that they have these kind of signals coming around in their businesses, right? What are the, what is the framework you help them out with to overcome these challenges and then get their business back into the shape and you know, start growing more. Let's say if I come to you and say I run a software as a service business, I make let's say $10,000 dollars a month. But I am spending 60 hours a week on that business, right? I want to spend less than 30 hours a week, but I want to make exactly same amount of money. How would you help me? Well, the first thing that I would do and what I do with many founders is we figure out what you're doing that's critical. What are the things that are on your plate that are critical? And I know that sounds ridiculously cavalier and elementary, but a lot of times as founders, we have these lists, these things that we're going to do, things that make us feel important, things that get us a dopamine hit. But what are the things that are on your your list, the things you're accountable for that actually move the needle? Then I move from there is is doing follow up phone calls every day. Is that something that is really critical for us as a business owner? Probably not. It's a follow up phone call, like a customer service phone call or survey. Yeah, we want to be involved and we want to feel important, but that's something that we can easily have someone else do and report back to us that we could read that report once every week. So I start there and it sounds so simple, but a lot of us completely miss what we're doing. We get involved in the we're unless we're taking dirt out of a ditch, we're not working. So we feel like we have to do this work. That's where I start. And is there a, is there a framework or a tool or a, or a calculator on your website or your guide which you can share with our founders or listeners which they could utilize to help them out themselves? And then potentially when they understand it, they can reach out to you and seek for more, better help. No, I don't have any framework posted. I'm sure that one of my podcasts has a has a live problem solving that we go through in that same regard, but I don't have anything they could go to to do the framework to do the work themselves, unfortunately. That's that's perfectly fine. So talk to us more about your journey as of then. There must have been some valuable lessons learned, right? Some of them you have already shared. If you don't mind sharing, could you reflect on your experiences and tell us about a mistake or a set back that you encountered along the way that you consider maybe not a regret, but a lesson learned which you have put in your journal on the top that this is not going to happen again with me. And additionally, what advice would you give our listeners based on that experience? OK, so this one, this wasn't a mistake. It was something that I was glad that I did, but it was something that was really hard to overcome. This was in 2009 and remember I own a home inspection business, so our business is tied to real estate. So 2009 during the financial collapse, our business just fell off the table. It was real estate was in shambles and we had no business. So I had to really figure out what we were going to do. And one of my bright ideas I came up with now a lot of the homes that were being soldering foreclosure, meaning that the the people that owned them just gave them back to the bank and they walked away from them. So they were sitting vacant. No one was paying in the any of the utilities. So the power was off, the gas was off and the water to the home was all. So we developed a system where we could actually connect a generator to these homes. We could provide water to these homes and get them turned back on to do an inspection to make the house alive again. That saved our business. And the challenge was that we were working for these large real estate investment trusts that are very price driven. So they would buy real estate in bulk, not in the best of neighborhoods. And the homes were, were cheap or relatively inexpensive considering the market, but it saved our business. And then when things started to turn back around, we were known in that arena working with foreclosure companies and investors. And it was cheap work. It was very cheap work, Ash is what I'm getting at. But that took a long time to, to turn that reputation around of our company to doing the cheap work. So that's, there's nothing I would do different. I I was a it was something that I was almost built out of necessity, but it's important to know that there was some fallout from that. Understood. Understood. Great for Jeff. Thank you so much for sharing all the wisdom. Now let's move on to our quick fire round. I've got 6 quick fire questions for you. At any stage, if you feel that you don't want to answer a question, just give me a skip and then I can move on to the next one. How does that sound? I can't wait. Great stuff. Question number one, what are the top 3 strategies to generate more traction, more eyeball, more leads to your business in 2026? To to my business personally or blanket statement. In generally for founders. Oh my goodness. It depends on the business. For me, it's it's getting in front of people, giving something of value. That has always been a a revenue generator for us that increases sales almost, almost like a turntable, like a dial. We can turn it up when we want. We find things of value you to give, how we can make people's lives easier, and that always increases revenue that that's the best marketing tool we have. Got it. What book would you recommend to our audience and why? My goodness, probably right now I'd recommend The Alchemist because I just finished it and it was good. Yeah, I'm, I'm on to the goal right now. It's a business come fantasy or not fantasy fiction book. I don't know if you have ever read The Goal I. Think so. It sounds familiar, but I don't know, I can't recall that. Yeah, yeah, it's a good one. I'm on all all the way midway to it. So once I finish it, I would, I would let you know. How was it? What? What 1 attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? What 1 attribute sticks in my mind of a successful founder is that you cut out. I'm sorry. What 1 attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder? Oh my goodness, I'm the first. The first word that comes to mind is empathy. Interesting, interesting. Usually I would say 9 out of 10 people I interviewed, they say consistency, great compassion. Yeah, very few people said that empathy is something founders need, but I guess they do. Yeah, you know, it like seeing it through other the lens of someone else, even down to what a lot of times founders don't understand is a dollar or a pound in your case, right, is different. If for for some of the employees that you have a dollar means something different, a pound means something different all the way down to those things. And you know, some people were like, here's a good example. I have one of our inspectors that is he's amazing and he's he's a real go getter and he's he's just he's makes good decisions. He has good people skills. And I was talking to him one day about being manager of one of our teams. Do you want to be a team? And he said, look, man, I'm Joe 6 Pack. I want to go do a great job and then I want to go home and be done and crack a beer. I don't want to worry about all the stuff that you worry about. And that's crazy to me. But that's his world. And so I have to be empathetic. I have to understand that's where some people are and then be able to identify that those that are not like that. Now that's that pretty silly. I I totally get that. What's What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit? My favorite personal habit. Yeah, I'm going to say too, only to only to save my reputation a little bit. I love plants. So I have a bunch of, I have a ton of house plants and I like to propagate plants. I like to watch plants bloom. I like to water them. I like to split them. I love plants. So that's a habit that I have. Like every morning I have a cup of coffee and I look at all of my plants And sometimes, you know, I'll take clippings and put them in a, put them in a vase. So that's one. And I love to lift weights, Olympic lifting. I love the clang and bang. I love hearing a barbell hit the floor. Very interesting, very interesting. What's a new or a crazy business idea you would love to pursue if you had time? A crazy business idea that I'd love to pursue. It's not crazy, but, well, I mean, maybe it is. I do have this business idea that I would love to do stump grinding. It's like when people cut a tree down, you go in and grind the stump down so it never grows back. I thought about this years ago because in our business we rely on people. We have people that complain. We have people that call us back. Years later, I was like, you know, this stump grinding thing, you just go in and grind the stump down and it's gone and no complaints and no one ever says anything about it and you're just done. So I've thought about that. I know that's boring, but man, that's so simple. Yeah, boring business make money. Yeah, laundromats. Right laundromats. Yeah, yeah. So last but not least, what's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know? Oh my goodness. I had sudden cardiac death in June of 2021. My heart stopped in the middle of a CrossFit workout in front of my 16 year old son. I was shocked with an AED three times and the first two times didn't work. I flatlined. I was considered dead and here I am. My God, I'm literally sitting with somebody who who died and came back. You're like a modern world, Jesus. Yeah, with with fractional followers, right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for joining me and sharing your story and packing the years of building business and some of the ups and downs. People want to get in touch with you. People want to know more. People want to ask you a question. What's the best way to do it? You can go to my website, jeffluther.com and you can find me on Instagram, Facebook, JD Luther, 2 Point O. My podcast is all can No can't, and I have been challenged by my coach to do 50 powerful conversations between now and the end of the year. So I'm offering that obviously complimentary, just an hour, somebody to listen, no strings, no pressure, nothing to sell. Awesome. That's great. That's great. Well, Jeff, thank you so much for joining us today and sharing our inspiring journey. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on Founders Podcast. Yeah. Thanks for having me. You've been great. Thanks for the good questions that made me think. I appreciate that.