What are kind of the wins that you see people getting, but not spending enough, at least at this point in time, right? Like 2025, 2026.

Well, I think it depends on your trajectory as an organization, right? And your point about brand, I mean, let's just be clear about this.

You have a brand if you've invested in it or not, right? I mean, so the question is, what's enough? What's your baseline level that you need to have formalized in what way to give you a platform to then do demand generation? You know, and that's basic things like kind of your assets, you know, your logo design and your website, all those kind of things.

Because I just, it's, I don't, you can't kind of shortcut that to a level.

And I'm not going to, there's no kind of hard and fast, you need X, Y, and Z.

A brand consultant or a fractional CMO will give you advice on that.

But, you know, it's what, I mean, Jeff Bezos is attributed in saying, although I think I've heard it, said before he used the truth in saying which is your brand is what everyone says about you when you're not in the room and that's exactly true so how are you understanding what that actually is and how you're aligning with that so once you once you presume you've got that baseline which you're happy with well then it's about okay what's your kind of um and it depends what kind of business you are depends what kind of um you know the speed of your your buying cycle and your and your just your um and the churn of your customers and how do you need to demonstrate effectiveness in that.

Yeah, yeah,

So, Joel, give our listeners an insight of what it was like to be my assistant.

Mate, it was great.

I felt like, you know, at times I felt like I was sort of the top dog, but no one saw that.

It was more just through my eyes.

But I'm sure this is a story you've probably told before is when you did the great thing of taking me, or no, sorry, Laura McGoldrick actually took me to the Warriors Awards dinner.

It was the night of nights at the Viaduct Event Centers in Auckland.

And then you were sort of introducing me to everyone and I was shitting it, let's be real.

fucking producer on this

Well, is it All Black levels yet? Are they, is it threatening-

threatening-Not in, um, not in Christchurch for sure.

Like, there's a, a big problem in, uh, in Auckland and Christchurch, which are the two big rugby union places.

At the, the elite schools, they, um, they, they want their players playing rugby union.

So from a young age, um, even if you're, you're not a good player, like even when I was 11 or 12 years old, I was nowhere near gonna be a good player.

Yeah.

But the All- Warriors have a record of one in five wins, losses [laughs] there.

So yeah, I, I, I think there's a, there's definitely, th- there's, there's, uh, there's room to...

What made you guys step in that direction? What's been the

feedback? I suppose going back to the DNA of Think Tank when it very first started, most of our original founders came from a corporate institutional background where they had seen all the pain points that you're talking about where clients made all the repayments, done nothing wrong, they all comes in short for some reason or the lease isn't renewed and then all of a sudden, The bank's sitting there saying, hang on, you need to debt reduce or you need to sell an asset or you're outside your covenants.

You're not servicing as per our metrics, even though you've made all of your payments.

So that was where that philosophy came from.

Let's create a product that's set and forget in nature.

No annual reviews, no revaluations.

Small business operators want to concentrate on running their business, not having to jump through hoops every 12 months, two years to actually keep a loan facility going that they've never missed a payment on.

I guess if someone was to invest in commercial, where is the place to invest and what would you be looking for?

and guggenheim fellow who will be performing and he's here with us to preview the events and also with us is another one of the performers steve cardenas guitarist and new school jazz faculty welcome thank you thanks and can we can we get started can we start off with some music absolutely we can do that what are we going to hear

Well, we're going to hear one of the songs that will be performed tonight.

It's a tribute to Jeff Beck that we're doing, and Vernon Reed, Eric Gales, Greg Koch, and this is one of the songs that we'll play.

It's Charles Mingus' Goodbye Pork by Hat that Jeff Beck covered.

Okay, great.

¶¶ . . . . . .

Thank you.

right right since right since you're you're 37 now that's great so tell us about this festival this is the first year of the brooklyn guitar festival what what gave the the idea that this was a new festival that needed to launch