Tim, maybe you could start us out with the first one, growth and return on invested capital.

Uh, yes, sure.

Ultimately, the value of any investment is driven by its cash flows discounted at its cost of capital.

And the nice thing is, is that we can decompose a company's cash flows into two strategically debatable concepts, which revenue growth and return on capital.

So if you're just gonna talk about cash flows, you can't really have a debate, right? But if you translate that into revenue growth, are we growing as fast as our markets, as fast as our peers? Is our return on capital above our cost of capital? Is it increasing, decreasing? How does it compare to our peers? Then you can have a real strategic conversation, uh, by, uh, with, you know, that, that, that links these things together, right? It's not that we ignore earnings.

We do look at earnings, right? But if you do a good job with growth and return on capital, you will also do a good job with earnings.

But you can have attractive earnings, particularly accounting earnings, uh, if you're not earning a attractive return on capital or if you're doing things to earnings just based on accounting things.

Tim, what are the executives that you've worked with thinking and doing in this regard? And maybe you could share some examples.

What's in that first binder that is core to the counsel that you give to people today? What maybe haven't we learned? over 30 years, despite it

being out there and available? Well, first let me say, despite the fact that it is now actually close to 900 pages, there's no fluff in this book.

We are pretty rigorous about trying to edit it.

There's nothing superfluous.

You're not making people want to read it.

But on the other hand, I tell people that it's more like a cookbook than a novel.

You do not need to start at page one and go to page 900, right? What I typically recommend to people is you read the first four or five chapters.

But talk a little bit about where some of those challenges came from.

How about we talk about the cost of capital side? How do you go about determining the cost of capital for a company? And how does that potentially differ between companies?

Yeah, well, the first thing we do is we tell companies that you can't really do much about your cost of capital, right? Your cost of capital is for the most part determined by the industry that you're in.

And it is what it is.

And don't waste too much time worrying about that.

And for most companies, large companies, you know, your cost of capital is somewhere between seven and a half and nine and a half percent.

And yet your return on capital varies over a much broader range.

So don't get hung up on getting it to the nearest decimal point or changing it a lot.

Yeah, I used