How do these fit into your overall corporate development strategy and what role do they play?

Yeah.

And so I, again, I think I I'll take it from both sides.

So on the buy side, the five C's really become a checklist that you should make sure you have really solid answers for and or solid capabilities.

Right.

So as we think about competitive positioning, if I have a roofing business, do you understand kind of where you sit in your market and why you win? Right.

Which seems fundamental, but, you know, writing that down and helping to explain to a potential buyer that, I currently win, I'm the low bid contractor on commercial jobs.

Where'd this model come from and how much difference do you think there is from buyer to buyer, whether it's a strategic buyer, financial buyer, platform company, tuck-in acquisition and so forth?

or you and your clients, what are you doing with AI that's cool to look at the finances and KPIs and stuff? Is that one of the systems? I'm going to put me on mute and sit back and listen.

Sure, no problem.

Yes, I think two things I'll mention there.

One is, you said the key word, you feed the system your financials.

So that that presumes that you have financials to feed it, right? So that's a lot of what we're talking about here on the clean and trusted financials is you've actually got a good set of books and a good set of numbers.

So that's the first thing.

As it relates to kind of how can I leverage AI, I think the AI does do a great job of finding, one, you can use it to actually help visualize the numbers in a way that maybe you haven't been able to do before.

All right, number five, C, please.

And then what the model is in terms of not only what are the projects that are going on in Canada, but also is there a chapter model similar to theirs here? And what is the community of RGS Canada look like?

Sure.

So RGS Canada has been incorporated as a non-for-profit in Canada since the 1980s.

So we've been around quite a while.

And much like people's awareness of Hunting New Brunswick had great participation in the 80s and early 90s and then started to see a bit of a slow decline in engagement and membership.

With respect to RGS Canada and RGS USA, so it's a very integrated history.

When I joined the board of RGS Canada a couple of years ago and wanted to get more involved in conservation activity from a volunteer's perspective, what i came to learn is memberships purchased through rgs canada essentially paid for the people to receive the coverage magazine from rgs in the us and that was about it and so we didn't have a lot of on the ground activity happening we had very little income coming in from members membership was dwindling and you know Professionally, I love to scale organizations, have had a bit of a career at it, wanted to get involved.

Like, how does it all work?

We spoke to Mark Sims, a professor of astrobiology and space instrumentation at the University of Leicester, and Beagle 2 mission manager, about the mission's origins.

Beagle 2 was a result of Colin Pillinger saying we should fly a lander on ESA's Mars Express mission.

It was a unique opportunity at the time, while NASA was planning its various rover missions, the M- um, Mars Exploration Rover missions, which landed shortly, uh, after Beagle 2, in actual fact.

And were obviously a, a roaring success with Spirit and, uh, Opportunity.

The idea was to build a small lander, uh, European, but British-led, to do science on Mars and look for potential signs of life by looking at carbon, uh, isotope fractionation.

So despite all the odds and despite all the trials, uh, Beagle 2 was built and got to the launch site, only just.

It got there, you know, weeks before it was due to launch.

And remind us again, we know it was intact, it was on the surface, and what that one crucial failure was that prevented the rest of the mission from happening.

We spoke to Mark Sims, a professor of astrobiology and space instrumentation at the University of Leicester, and Beagle 2 mission manager, about the mission's origins.

Beagle 2 was a result of Colin Pillinger saying we should fly a lander on ESA's Mars Express mission.

It was a unique opportunity at the time while NASA was planning its various rover missions, the M- um, Mars Exploration Rover missions, which landed shortly, uh, after Beagle 2, in actual fact.

They were obviously a, a roaring success with Spirit and, uh, Opportunity.

The idea was to build a small lander, uh, European but British-led, to do science on Mars and look for potential signs of life by looking at carbon, uh, isotope fractionation.

So, despite all the odds and despite all the trials, uh, Beagle 2 was built and got to the launch site, only just.

It got there, you know, weeks before it was due to launch.

And remind us again, we know it was intact, it was on the surface, and what that one crucial failure was that prevented the rest of the mission from happening.

Yeah.

Right? And people are trying to figure it out.

You're starting to see, you know, there's now this, this race and this kind of which is the best model.

You know, currently, Claude is, is-- seems to have a, a lot of favor and traction.

But you know that the folks at, um, ChatGPT, OpenAI, and the folks at, uh, xAI are, are working on, and, and as well as Google, you know, they're working on their, their next model as well.

So I think it's a little bit of an arms race.

So I, I think obviously we'll see improved models, but I really think, you know, things probably won't look that much different as people just start to try to figure out kinda how they apply, right, at, in really interesting use cases within their businesses.

Do you think that some of these software companies have unfairly had their valuations clipped as a consequence of AI?

How do you see the private equity world and how are you consulting your clients on AI today?

Yeah.

So I think there's kind of two pieces.

I think, you know, when we talk to private equity firms, they're looking at use cases around AI to try to, you know, vet potential acquisitions faster, trying to be able to kind of turn due diligence efforts and or LOIs around quicker and able to analyze the data that they're receiving from their portcos uh faster uh so there's kind of that level uh piece as it relates to the portfolio companies and again both this this would apply to companies large and small a lot of folks are still searching for good use cases uh as it relates to ai right i think everybody has probably uh you know has their uh claude subscription or their their open chat gpt subscription which i think is great and i encourage all my clients to do that uh because i think there is a lot of uh work you know there's a framework out there called wins which is kind of words images numbers and sounds and so if you're able to you know if part of your job involves manipulating one of those four things, AI can absolutely help you do that faster and more efficiently.

You always need a human in the loop, right? These tools are fallible.

And, uh, you know, prone to hallucination.

So you always want to check it, but again, we use it in our business to, to help us, uh, you know, kind of prepare deliverables and things of that nature.

You have to organize it properly because you have to give the AI a basis of what to run on, you know? What are some uncomfortable truths that, you know, founders, business owners, and leaders really need to hear about this digital transformation that we're in?