How Restaurant Operators Can Manage Through A Multitude of Continued COVID-Driven Challenges

Steve Katz:
Hi everybody and thanks for taking time out of your busy schedule to listen to today’s Hilco Global Smarter Perspective Podcast. As return listeners know by now, I’m your host, Steve Katz, and if this is your first time with us, well, then welcome. We’re really glad that you could tune in. Our discussion today is centered around something that we’ve all seen play out since the pandemic began. And that’s what I guess we’d call a sea change in the restaurant industry that extends from how businesses have needed to adapt to serve customers within a very restricted and limiting environment, all the way through to many other challenging situations that operators continue to grapple with. Not the least of which is with a limited and expensive labor force. So for that discussion, we have two guests from turnaround specialists, Getzler Henrich with us today, managing director Mark Samson and associate director, Charvi Gupta, both who have extensive experience in the restaurant industry, operational restructuring, performance improvement, and transition execution. So with that said, welcome to you both.
Mark Samson:
Thanks, Steve. Great to be here and thank you for having us.
Charvi Gupta:
Thank you for having us.
Steve Katz:
Absolutely so glad that we could get the conversation on the calendar. I know you’re both very busy, so it’s great to have you here. I think one of the things that has become so apparent over the past few months is that the challenges that it touched on and I’m sure many others continue to really be significant for the restaurant industry. And they’re likely to continue for quite some time well into 2022 at the very least. So, Charvi, to get us started, Omicron, any further COVID variants that are unforeseen coming down the line, are going to play a significant role I would think in determining the duration of how long restaurants are going to experience some of these challenges, but regardless, I know that most of the operators have indicated in some recent surveys that I’ve seen that recruiting employees is really difficult for them. Can you talk a little bit about some of the specific challenges that the industry is facing in terms of labor and then also how operators are addressing those challenges? And if you see things that they could be doing a little bit differently.
Charvi Gupta:
Yeah, sure. So if you just look at the recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, out of the four and a half million Americans that quit their jobs in November, 1.1 million were restaurant and hotel workers. There’s clearly this mass migration happening when it comes to labor in the restaurant and hospitality industry, as people leave for greener pastures. Most restaurant workers on the minimum wage, while there’s this push to increase the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and certain states have complied with the same, a lot of the states still have lower minimum wages. And even if you compare the higher 15 minimum wage with other industries’ pay, it is still the lowest. Another reason is the lack of benefits and stabilities that the industry provides. If you’re getting healthcare benefits, college education, sign-on in recruitment bonuses, childcare, college tuition, more stability in a blue collar job.
Charvi Gupta:
And on top of all this, way higher, why would you work in a restaurant? It just does not make sense. An interesting aspect is that the number of people getting hired in leisure and hospitality still outpaces the number of workers quitting. So low-wage workers might be taking advantage of their new positions and switch jobs, which could also mean that until the jobs, these workers leave behind, pay better, the industry could remain stressed. On top of that, the situation is exacerbated by the Omicron variant as you mentioned, chains such as Starbucks and Chipotle have started limiting the hours that they’re open. And some restaurants are even closing the locations temporarily, as most of their employees are quarantining because they’re either infected with COVID or have had some COVID exposure. Now, although the Omicron cases are going down now, if new variants keep coming up, these kinds of issues are bound to continue.
Charvi Gupta:
Now, we believe that restaurants can do a few things differently to manage the labor problem. Firstly, they can start by paying more wages and providing more benefits too. So employees should not look at these jobs as just part-time positions. For a lot of workers, this is more like a full-time job and the pay should be able to sustain their rent and monthly expenses. With margin pressure in every aspect, I know that increasing wages is very, very difficult to implement for operators, but that can be done through a variety of ways. First is just to tackle on the revenue side. Operators normally raise prices twice a year, based on CPI and seasonality, some refrain from increasing prices, fear of losing customers. I think it’s important for operators to increase prices from time to time. We are also increasingly seeing that operators are adding a small percentage surcharge on top of the usual invoices.
Charvi Gupta:
With the industry facing so many issues, especially in the last couple of years due to the pandemic, I think customers, in general, are not hesitant to pay a little extra if that helps. The question is how much can you focus on pricing and surcharges without having a real customer pushback. So along with pricing, operators also need to tackle the cost side. Majority of restaurants have already pivoted to self-service, kiosks, online ordering even in a sit-down restaurant, iPad menus, and such. I think these are excellent ways to tackle the wage inflation problem. Another thing restaurants can do is just adjust employee scheduling to be more efficient and therefore reduce costs. For smaller individual operators, scheduling can be an easy task, but for larger operators and chains maybe make sense to invest in good technology that can help you do so. And there are like many, many software out there that can help with this. Now the last thing is very simple to implement.
Charvi Gupta:
Think of employees and the progress from a longer-term perspective, having regular check-ins and employee reviews, where you have two way feedback with the management is an excellent way to gain trust, comfort, and the most important of all having a rapport. In fact, you might gain some critical qualitative guys that would’ve otherwise evaded you, right? If the staff feels good, they feel more included and understood, that just means that they’re happy, which would lead to better productivity, better sales, and finally low employee turnover. But at the end, like Starbucks who’s known for the best culture for employees in the industry is facing worker unionization in some 50 plus locations all over the country. Who really knows what’s really going to happen.
Steve Katz:
Yeah, it’s difficult. Obviously having that rapport with your employees in any business is critical. And I think in this industry with the employees having faced a lot of the struggle, right alongside the restaurant operators themselves, there’s certainly an important dialogue that needs to take place. So thanks for that. That’s very good insight. And Mark, we’re all witnessing the impacts of inflation right now on multiple levels and the food industry certainly has not been immune to that, what can you tell us about how food inflation is impacting the industry and how operators are adjusting or should be adjusting their approach to buying their menus and their costs to customers?
Mark Samson:
Steve, the topic of inflation is on everyone’s mind. You can just switch on any news channel and the headline is inflation. So every single business is impacted with this. And we’ve been fortunate enough to have several restaurants that we are consulting to during COVID. I happen to sit on the board of a few as well. And if you have a look at last week’s results, McDonald’s came out. And if you look at what has happened with inflation, in fact, in July last year, the inflation rate was supposed to be only 5%. By last week, the government had already announced 9%. McDonald’s came out with their results, 14% up on expenses, 4% on the packaging, expecting packaging to double in 2022.
Steve Katz:
Wow.
Mark Samson:
Same-store sales up 7.5% after they increased price by 6%. So if you’re comparing apples with apples and if you take 14% of the operating expenses, now we do need to distinguish an inflation between public companies, chain, let’s call it midmarket chains as well as independence, very important. If you take 14% on a $100 million company where their cost was $90 million, for example, I’m talking about not only food, but all their costs, that adds $9 million, that’s got to be found somewhere. So you’ve got to raise those prices. I need to also to say that inflation’s not only with restaurants, it’s in all retail. And when you look at supermarkets, Oscar Mayer, General Mills, Procter & Gamble two days ago announced the largest increase in products in 39 years, we are talking 20 to 40% increases. That’s going into the supermarkets. They, in fact, encourage the consumer to actually go to the law of substitution.
Mark Samson:
If beef is up, buy chicken. I want to give you a real-time example with inflation. So we have a client who, middle market, 50 locations, they contracted out for beef, a 100,000 pounds of beef a week. Now they had a contract price of 10, 11 logs. Because of pent-up demand, which they were by the way in 2021, non-urban restaurants were actually starting to beat pre-pandemic. So the pent-up demand, they had to buy 125,000 pounds one week, they’re under contract, they’re fortunate. So what happened there was they paid $11 for 100,000 pounds, but the 25,000 pounds extra was charged to them at $17 a pound, that’s for beef. That’s a 65% increase. Now, they were fortunate with their volume, they could take 50 cents a dollar, add it onto a burger or to their menu price, and they get away with it.
Mark Samson:
But now let’s talk about the independent, the independent mom-and-pop. And I have to tell you because this is an association with 300,000 members, these restaurants, mom-and-pop, and independents on a weekly basis, suddenly their cost has gone from 11 to 17. This was during 2021. How do they pass that on? So they, unfortunately, couldn’t pass it on. And if you look at the urban, 10% of restaurants throughout the country closed permanently. According to this association, 100,000 restaurants actually got government aid, 200,000 didn’t. They are talking because of inflation and because of the end of the PPP, as many between 50 and 80% of these guys could actually close. So on that basis, that’s real-time what happened with inflation. Now, we also got together with some of our other clients and said, how are we going to combat?
Mark Samson:
As Charvi mentioned, in terms of looking and raising prices, we said, don’t raise prices once a year, because you’re only going to get away with your 2%. So we actually looked at their menu and we looked at their top-selling item. We came to the Quesadilla, they were saying this chain was selling 6000 units a week, small chain, 50 location. So I said, what are you charging? He said $8.99. I said, what are the 800-pound gorilla guys? I won’t mention names, but they’re not the guys with a thousand stores and 500 stores, what are they charging? “Oh, well we haven’t checked.” Well, let’s go and check. So they go out and they check and they see $10.50. I said, guys, we raise prices by $1, that’s 6000 times, $1 that’s 6,000 times 52 weeks, that’s $350,000 straight to the bottom line. So I just love to micromanage and also take your cue. Starbucks results came out yesterday as well.
Mark Samson:
And they’ve raised prices several times during the year. And I can tell you that in the past, the minute Starbucks raises prices, its national news, it’s on TV. Everybody sees, we’ve picked up the phone to our own clients and said, “Hey guys, raise your coffee price.” Why? We don’t raise it. While Starbucks is doing it, you do it because “You don’t get brownies for losing money,” take advantage of the situation. So it’s very important to micromanage your prices up. A lot of smaller restaurants, they’re scared, but there’s pricing power at this moment in time for them too. I believe most restaurants have only raised prices 4%. We just heard McDonald’s raised 6%. I believe that without hurting your customer, you could go up at least 10%. But one thing that I do advise when you raise prices in a restaurant or bakery-cafes, make sure your employees are educated about it, why they’re raising prices? And the customer will be fine, especially in community places.
Steve Katz:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I mean, it’s kind of going back to what Charvi was saying earlier in terms of just the rapport and understanding what’s going on and how everybody’s been impacted. So they’re pretty much in a situation where they, as you said, really need to raise prices to be able to recoup their costs and customers. I think if it is explained correctly, we’ll understand. So let’s shift gears a little bit, two questions. The first talking about the operator-landlord relationship, I’d like to get a little insight on how that’s been faring during this period from a cooperation collaboration standpoint? And then two, you touched on PPP and I’m curious from your perspective, did PPP do its job as intended?
Mark Samson:
Great question. We’re also, once again, I’m pretty fortunate that since COVID started and not that I hadn’t done it before, but I’ve personally restructured plus to a 100 leases on my own, some of them have been inside of bankruptcy, some of them outside of bankruptcy, some have been permanent closures and it’s so important that the landlord and tenants have a good relationship. I do need to tell you, and I’m not on either side, landlords or tenants did not cause COVID. So when tenants go to run to the landlord, it’s not right, but same the tenant also didn’t cause COVID, so you’ve got to play nice in the sandbox. So, I can tell you that in 2020, when the negotiation started, landlords didn’t know what to do at that stage. Everyone was in shock, but I can tell you that the bottom line was in 2020, we achieved most landlords, abatements, deferrals, and percentage of rent.
Mark Samson:
So that continued through to 2021. So most of the deals were sort of done and abatements were as much as 50% in some cases, deferrals and then a percentage of rent. A percentage of rent, very important because you did well, the landlord did well. They did ask for a little base rent, but that happened, and that was pretty good. And it worked all the way through to 2021. What happened is that when Omicron came about, now I can tell you from our client’s perspective and who we see is revenue suddenly dropped again, 15-20% in January, which we’ve just finished. So everyone said, well, “Hey, I want to go and get another negotiate with the landlord” and the landlords they’ve already taken their lungs and they said not happening. And the reason because of that is because now I’ll touch on PPP because you got PPP money, you were supposed to pay your lending and you were supposed to pay payroll.
Mark Samson:
And if you did that, according to the formula, well, you got forgiveness. And if you were a small operator, you got anything from $500,000 to a million dollars because you got it twice. If you were a large chain, not a public company and you had less than 300 employees, you received 10 to 12 million dollars. Did PPP work? Yes, it did. I can tell you that if there wasn’t PPP money, most restaurants would be out of business because if you take the urban areas where it’s remote working, my famous 4-Wall EBITDA, they are not profitable. There are certain restaurants that are profitable. So the PPP money worked. But now yes, the other side of the coin. So I got the PPP money, my clients and some of the tenants, they got the PPP money and some of them just decided I’m not paying the landlord at all.
Mark Samson:
Why? Because some landlords didn’t give property deeds. They said you got PPP money. We don’t care that you’re not making a profit. We want all our money. So what did the tenant do? We said, well, “Right now, I’m doing 70% of what I used to do or 40.” And they gave them some money from PPP. But what they did was they held back on the PPP money thinking if this landlord’s not going to play nice with me, he’s probably going to kick me out. And that is exactly what’s happening. So landlords are now going to court.
Mark Samson:
They are winning in court because it’s an airtight lease. You owe the money. But those tenants who didn’t have personal guarantees, they didn’t get forgiveness for their full PPP money. They got forgiveness for the payroll, they got part forgiveness for the rent. And now what they’re doing is they’re taking that extra money. They didn’t have to give it back to the government.
Steve Katz:
Right.
Mark Samson:
They converted it into a long-term, cheap money loan. I know one client that’s accumulated $900,000 of non-forgiveness now, but it’s rolled over into debt. They’re going to take that 900,000, find a new location and open up in the new location.
Steve Katz:
That’s really interesting. Really interesting. Thanks, Mark. And Charvi, what about innovation? Right. Certainly in this cutthroat environment, given the constantly changing landscape, innovation has to be essential, I would imagine, in terms of making the right choices, given the resources, but it can’t be easy, not a lot of money out there unless you’ve been fortunate enough to be advised properly to invest that money, as Mark said. How do you advise businesses approach innovation right now? Not just to stay afloat, but ultimately to get ahead, given that they may have limited resources.
Charvi Gupta:
I think instead of really thinking of hardcore innovation, initially, restaurants need to focus on automating their back of the house and front of the house, to really streamline operations, establish controls. And just from an overall efficiency perspective, investing in a good inventory management software ensures that products are hand and in order. It helps avoid inventory stockouts, the surpluses. Operators are able to know when to substitute ingredients and parallelly ship purchase orders. And they’re also able to understand delivery patterns and unpredictable consumer traffic. And then as I mentioned before, through employee scheduling systems, operators can help increase labor efficiency and therefore decrease costs. In fact, a modern POS system can assist with cost-effective operations by automating and managing payments, P&L, ordering, reordering, and vendor management, all in a very, very low cost in a streamlined manner.
Charvi Gupta:
Finally, with digitalization, the data that is gathered can all be siloed. On what day and what specific time did we have the most traffic, how much waste was generated in a particular employee shift versus the other, holiday season was success, but which sauce did people like more? Was it the lemon cilantro vinegarette or the hot honey mustard? Having this kind of data month over month, year after year can be a huge asset to plan inventory, menus, shift times, and even assess employee performance.
Charvi Gupta:
In fact, data needs to be analyzed and extrapolated for cost reduction and revenue-boosting opportunities. Then in today’s world where delivery is huge for any restaurant business, one common issue is that third-party delivery apps, such as UberEats and GrubHub take exorbitant commissions from the operators. On top of that, there is no direct line of communication between the restaurant and customer. So there are these companies such as Lunchbox or Vendorbox that can help operators develop, manage and market their own online ordering platforms, as well as get connected to delivery people. Most of these companies bill a small monthly charge for their work instead of restaurants having to pay large commissions to third-party apps and restaurants can have a more direct line of communication with customers, promote future offers, or even correct mistakes with the previous order. We’re also seeing a lot of ghost kitchens these days.
Charvi Gupta:
So a ghost kitchen is a model in which a restaurant only has a digital footprint and no brick-and-mortar presence. You only have a few back-of-the-house staff preparing food and fulfilling online orders. And these are huge cost-saving models, is basically all the front of the house is pretty much online. For operators with strong brands, especially chains and even startups with minimal capital, I think these kitchens are excellent, low risk, low capital models. So now going back to all the hardcore innovation that’s been happening in the industry, we are seeing robots in the kitchen with White Castle and CaliBurger, working with a robotic kitchen assistant, Flippy to make burgers. In fact, Buffalo Wild Wings is testing Flippy too to fry wings. Then you have Piestro, which is an automated pizzeria, and that is partnered with pizza chains in high-traffic areas.
Charvi Gupta:
And Piestro eliminates the retail footprint and labor costs associated with producing a pizza. And so pizzas are made at a fraction of the cost of traditional pizzeria. And sometime back, Sweetgreen, the salad place that we all love, acquired this company called Spyce, which uses a robotic kitchen and conveyor bells to prepare and serve warm bowls and salad. Then we are also seeing automation on the delivery side with GrubHub, working to roll out delivery robots on college campuses. Dominos using drone delivery. On television yesterday, it was so fascinating to watch robots serving food and also bartending at the Winter Olympics in China. So it’s definitely an exciting world out there, soon it’ll be commonplace to see robots frying pizzas and drones delivering them. I think it’s all super close.
Steve Katz:
Yeah, it’s exciting. I haven’t seen Philippian action, but I have noticed more restaurants not using services like GrubHub, but focusing it on getting their own food delivered by their own people now. So let’s see what happens. I’m sure there is a lot of innovation coming. Mark, I’m going to come back to you for a second. You mentioned it earlier, Getzler Henrich is a strong advocate of the 4-Wall EBITDA assessment for operators, how often and why should those types of assessments be conducted? And as a percentage of revenue, what do you look at in terms of indicating a healthy operation from those?
Mark Samson:
4-Wall EBITDA or targeted 4-Wall EBITDA is the Bible of the industry. Because if you don’t know what your 4-Wall EBITDA is, you don’t know what’s going on in your business. Just to define 4-Wall EBITDA, it is the four wall op of the actual operations, all the direct expenses in the operations, excluding corporate and regional support. So every single business should start off with their own theoretical 4-Wall EBITDA because your turn-on investment. So you want to make about 15 to 20%. Why 15 to 20%? Because if you have a contribution of 15 to 20%, you leave enough room for corporate and regional support, royalties if you have to pay it, and then leave yourself with the magic 10% net profit in a person. So basically the way we do it and we are very adamant in how we do it is forgetting about a single operator.
Mark Samson:
We’ve got to change 39 stores, 40 stores, 50 stores. We take the 4-Wall EBITDA and we put the P&L side by side. This way, we have a look at the 4-Wall EBITDA as a percentage. We look at the ratios of labor, we look at the comps labor, we look at the occupancy ratio and today you got to look at utilities. Just want to make a point. If you watched the news today, you saw that Britain, that the utilities bill has gone up to every person in the country, 50%. And we are also having huge utility costs. So your labor is your labor. We know that there’s nothing we can really do. We’re going to have labor increase. The McDonald’s went up 10%. Okay? So if you are going up 10%, you’re going to have to raise prices at least about 2-3% just on the labor side.
Mark Samson:
So if you compare your 39, 40 locations and you look at the labor ratio, you’re going to see who’s up and down, and you’re going to be able to very quickly say, how come you got a better ratio than the other? And you compare. With your food, your food side you compare because the magic number for food is 25 to 28%. So if you find that a location’s got 33%, you’re going to ask why? Now with three reasons actually, waste, “Look after the bad inventory, the good inventory would look after itself,” he coined that phrase. But I use it in retail, in the clothing world, as well as in this industry. But so it could be a waste. It could be stealing at the cash register because that will lower your cash and so you’ve got to have your controls in place. And then your vendors.
Mark Samson:
Do you have a good rapport? Have you got secondary vendors? Secondary suppliers? Are you buying efficiently? Okay. So that’s the reason why you look at the 4-Wall EBITDA. Now we get to the utilities. We understand it’s out of your control. That’s going to come and it’s going to hit us all pretty hard. Now let’s go to occupancy. Occupancy depends. If you’re urban or non-urban area. In an urban area, you can pay anything from $100 a square foot to $300 a square foot. In a non-urban area, you’re going to pay anything from $20 a square foot to say a $100 a square foot. That your percentage should always in non-urban areas, an ideal percentage of occupancy cost is somewhere between 4 and 9%. And in urban areas, as much as everybody loves to get 10%, they’re going to be more in the right line of 12 to 15%.
Mark Samson:
Okay? So now you’ve got all your ducks in a row. You’ve compared all your locations and you know exactly which locations are underperforming or performing. Well, now the next step is two things. Once you see that you’re not getting your desired EBITDA because one store might be making a 4% EBITDA, the other store 18. So the 18 is good, they’re doing well. Now you’ve got to attack the unhealthy EBITDA location. Now it’s either going to be raise prices or something wrong with the traffic. And so you’ve got reasons on how to do it. So raising prices, one of the problems that we found in a lot of chains is that because of online, they like to sell their product at the same price and that’s wrong because why should you sell a burger for $13 when you’re paying $200 per square foot rent, even though sometimes the volumes there so makes up versus selling a burger for $13 where you’re paying $30 per square foot fully.
Mark Samson:
So we like to see that they can switch on and off and say, “Hey, you’re only making 4%, you haven’t got enough traffic.” Therefore, you need to, unfortunately, raise prices. So that’s the reason why we like to do it that way. The last resort and this is where I say, when you go to your landlord for a reduction in rent, make sure you know that you’re running your establishment well, because if you are not running your establishment well, I promise you, the landlord knows which stores are doing good and bad. They get revenue, they’ve got their own supervisors, they got their mall managers and they will tell you and you’ll have egg on your face when you go and you say, “I need a reduction in rent, he’ll say we walked into your store the other day and it was dirty, it was filthy and your staff was not,” therefore make sure that you’ve got all your ducks in a row and that you’re running a good operation before asking for landlords.
Steve Katz:
Yeah. Important to look to the inside and understand everything. That’s a great way to piece it together and really make sure you’re on top of it. We’re running a little bit tight on time, but I do want to close it out with just a discussion about what happens when landlords have made adjustments, they’ve undertaken some or even all of the steps they should, based on what they’ve seen on 4-Wall EBITDA and maybe what an advisor such as yourself has presented to them, cashflow or the profitability just are not improving. What’s left? I think I know what’s left, but I’m just going to let you hit.
Mark Samson:
Obviously, if a store’s losing money and there’s no hope of getting it to 4-Wall EBITDA, positive EBITDA, then you, unfortunately, need to close it, right? So you can close it in a number of ways. If you’re an independent and you have no liabilities or personal guarantees, you basically give the keys to the landlord and you run away. But life is not that easy and simple. So you’ve got to look to say, if you’ve got 30 locations and five or 10 are non-performing and you can’t do anything with them, you’ve got to look at, okay, what is the liability, public companies, Starbucks and these guys, we know that they’ve closed 300. They took advantage of COVID to get rid of it, but they had balance sheets that they could buy their way out of leases. But the smaller locations, they’ve got to do the exercise. If it’s going to cost your chain more than say a million and a half dollars, you need to look at Chapter 11.
Mark Samson:
Why Chapter 11? In Chapter 11, basically, you file Chapter 11 and you close the stores you don’t want. You reject those leases immediately. You assume the other leases, and then you better your balance sheets, and life goes on and it’s a smart way to do it. But it’s easier said than done because you must know that you have a plan because you don’t want to file without a plan because 80% of people, that file Chapter 11, don’t come out of Chapter 11 or you can do an orderly liquidation as well outside of Chapter 11. I would like to mention one thing because if this is going to be, the restaurant world’s going to hear this. There’s a new rule that came out. It was an old rule called subchapter V and subchapter V in the old days before COVID, if you had debt less than two and a half million dollars, you could file chapter V and you could do a plan, but that was just a meaningless number.
Mark Samson:
Congress raised that number, which expires at the end of March this year to seven and a half million dollars, which means if you’ve got unsecured debt less than seven and a half million, you can file subchapter V, no committee, a US trustee and we were fortunate enough to do one last year between 90 days in and out. And it’s for those mom-and-pop locations, 4, 5, 6, or 12, even larger with less than seven and a half million dollars. They should look into that, it’s a wonderful, wonderful tool.
Steve Katz:
Okay. That opens up that opportunity for a broader audience. So more good information. Well, listen, really terrific insights from you both, really appreciate it. Thanks for joining us today.
Mark Samson:
Thank you for having us. Can I just mention one more thing?
Steve Katz:
Sure absolutely.
Mark Samson:
There is a wonderful article that was written by Hilco Real Estate on malls, landlords in terms of what’s going on with landlords and I encourage people to read that article. It’s a really terrific article.
Steve Katz:
Yeah. I just read that myself. It is good advice and Charvi, thanks so much for joining us also.
Charvi Gupta:
Pleased to be here.
Steve Katz:
Okay. And how can people best get in touch with each of you Mark?
Mark Samson:
Well, I’ll give you my email though, which is msamson@getzlerhenrich.com and I’ll spell it out. It’s M S A M S O N @ G E T Z L E R H E N R I C H.com. And to give my direct line is 631-553-8228.
Steve Katz:
Great and Charvi?
Charvi Gupta:
Yeah, so my email address is cgupta@getzlerhenrich.com, which is C G U P T A @ G E T Z L E R H E N R I C H.com. And my phone number is 929-215-1526.
Steve Katz:
Great. And now no one will ever forget how to spell Getzler Henrich again, right?
Mark Samson:
And thank you for having us. We enjoyed it.
Steve Katz:
Absolutely. And listeners, I’m guessing that our discussions raised some questions on your end. So don’t hesitate to reach out to either of these two valuable resources for their perspective. I know they would welcome the call and we hope as always that this Hilco Global Smarter Perspective Podcast provided you with at least one key takeaway that you can put to good use in your business or share with a colleague or client to help make them that much more successful moving forward as well. Until next time, for Hilco Global, I’m Steve Katz.