And after seeing so many organizations from the inside, what separates banks that consistently execute versus those that continue to struggle?

yeah so ironically uh wsi was founded by who's now a friend of mine dan monahan he's the founder of wsi based out of toronto ontario in 1995. so we both started our web journeys together me as a community banker and him as an innovator Started WSI under the auspices of we simplify the Internet because this thing called the World Wide Web was confusing and he had this vision to say, let's build a company that helps small and medium-sized businesses figure this thing out and we've merged.

Now, WSI today has hundreds of offices in countries around the world.

We are one of the unique ones in the WSI ecosystem that specializes in community banks.

as a matter of fact i don't think there's really anybody else in the ecosystem that does what we do from a banking perspective but we've had the pleasure of working with close to 50 banks over the years building websites hosting them in a secure azure environment and being a former banker myself it gives me some relatable cred, I guess, to the banks that we host for because I get the need from a bank's perspective as it relates to security, confidentiality, privacy, uptime.

Even though we're not providing the actual online account access, we're not giving transactional data, we are the conduit to get to that.

If the bank's website's down, online banking is no longer available, that cuts the customers off.

endorsing that, right?

And you touched on this a little bit when you were kind of introducing the idea, but what is marketing doing or maybe not doing that tends to lead executives to see it as more of a cost center than a growth driver.

Yeah.

So I think it's the metrics that we're tracking just by our nature as marketing people.

We tend to understand...

The importance of, even though we can't always put a dollar amount to, some of the softer signals of things like impressions and visibility and engagement.

Those are important.

If we do some social posts or we share some content or we send an email and we get a lot of opens and clicks, Those are good signs that people are enjoying our content, that it's something that struck a chord, that's helpful, that's going towards that relationship building and that brand credibility creation process.

So how do you reframe a typical marketing expense, something like, say, a $50,000 digital campaign for marketing? a C-suite member who you're asking for approval for this, how do you reframe that as a direct investment in the bank's balance sheet goals rather than just another line item