Mm-hmm.

One of the interesting things that happened was, uh, we talked about when it could be important to speak to even a director level, meaning someone that could help the vendor understand the culture of the company and understand how they work internally, that would be helpful to figure out who to speak to.

Another thing was sometimes you need an executive because they have a wider breadth of how to approach getting this solution in front of the right people.

But sometimes, uh, pretty much everybody...

Sometimes it's a good thing that the, the CEO comes in and says, "Hey, I saw this thing.

Take a look at it."

Um, where can people find you and, um, info about the VIP awards? The links, of course, will be in the show notes, but if they, someone has a last-minute application, where do they go?

Uh, this is another thing I'm really proud of is how we changed and explained the nomination process, 'cause, you know, it's confusing.

Tell us what that is and how it came to be.

When I left nrf and I did that for several reasons I i've been commuting to DC for five years from the New York area anyway.

I thought I can't figure out what else I want to do if I didn't separate, and so I we worked at I told them in April and I left in October, and so we had a nice long transition and I could finish out shop.org and stuff like that, but I left.

with in mind to have a break and figure it out.

But that said, I had this thing already in my head about why do we have this separation? Why are there, are these two different cohorts, the haves and the have nots, you know, and I've always been, even as a practitioner, I was always very partnership oriented.

I would tell you it only bit me in the butt once.

I believe that if you trust people 90% of the time you're going to get the right outcome, okay? So I've got to work 100% of the time, but I wouldn't change how I behaved.

So as you developed vendor and partnership, so what do you do? How do you interact with the vendors and the retailers? What's the mechanism to bring them together?