Assessing Feasibility for Food Hubs

hello everyone and welcome to assessing feasibility for food hubs uh this is the third in a series of webinars uh that cooperation works has put on this year around assessing feasibility for various cooperative sectors and this is in very large part thanks to the efforts of margaret bao who has been just fantastic in organizing uh the series and connecting with folks so thank you so much who's on the call today um and this is all possible because of her um so for those of you who may not know although i do see a lot of cw members here today cooperation works is the national network of cooperative developers so we have members all over the country who assist folks in creating their cooperative businesses so definitely check out our website and reach out to a cooperative developer near you and because we have such a content-filled webinar today i'm going to go ahead and hand it off to our two hosts today jim matson and dylan timmerman so please take it away and thanks hey guys how's it going i'm gonna share my screen here so hey um jim did you want to start this off or do you have anything else go ahead okay hey guys so i'm dylan timmerman um content manager at matson consulting i'm here with james matson jim our managing member and principal we're gonna do this put we put together this food hub feasibility webinar for you guys um if i can get it to change slots uh okay there we go so um just a little background matson consulting um started in 2001 focusing on local foods issues um jim has a long background he'll get into that working around the world on these types of things helping business development working with the usda specializing strategic planning feasibility studies business plans grant work all kinds of things from mom and pop individual businesses to you know federal government state government all kinds of things anything in between and we really like to focus on local food systems development that's how we like to approach these projects um and jim of the matson we did the uh usda rural development running a food hub and also the i believe the co-op feasibility guide jim what's that car right yeah the the original one back in 1999 so yeah um here's just a little screenshot of a couple of things we've done um this may go out later on so there's a link to some of our feasibility study resources including for uh food hubs and other different things jim hi jim matson i figured a good halloween based photo was a good way to start the day i cut and pasted my head on this on facebook uh this morning and a lot of my friends are saying what happened what was the accident but now i spent 30 plus years around the country internationally former peace corps volunteer um actually applied for margaret's position back 20 some years ago as well margaret and i met applying for the same position they hired the right person i'll just say that with it um and this is kind of kind of what we do local foods work with it we're based out of making south carolina work around the country in fact there's a lot of familiar faces on the phone call so i'll say hi to lots of folks i know and um we typically do about eight to ten feasibility studies a year for different groups on things so we pretty much always have food ca food hubs ongoing since the pandemic stuff has hit uh basically the calls have been predominantly about um food hub work and meat slaughter um so those have been the major ones we've done recently with things and so we you know that's working lots of work today we're focusing on the food hub slide but yeah lots of efforts we actually have a publication being released today from the rural co-op development center at va fares that they're doing on some meat slaughter plants and doing some of the research that's been done on that over the past 15 20 years and looking at the processes of that um yeah i started working with jim back in 2015 after i graduated my undergrad started just doing research and writing helping out with grants business plans got into more of the food hub work and kind of the community development type stuff and i went and got my master's in city and regional planning from university of north carolina focusing on land use and environmental planning also did some work up there for a credit union that was working in durham on kind of some local food and farm kind of getting financing to those groups and helping that area's local food system and i came back to mats in mid-2019 and i've kind of been the lead on a lot of these community development focused projects and with that's been a lot of food hub work and so that's where i find myself doing putting the most of my efforts here with matson with the first piece and then dylan's gonna do most of the talking but start off with the first bit of uh how to scare away your consulting we thought a little bit about background stuff before we hit the food hub but our phone rings at least once a week if not a couple times a week saying hey i found you doing some research you know online or using the ouija board or what other method and hey i want you to do a feasibility study for us and we need to get started and so these are some things we thought would be a thing that happens when our phone rings with our response with it so on that first call you know there's 24 people on the call everybody's talking uh we get put on the internal email list to the group while it's making decisions it's really nice to know whether there's going to be donuts at the meetings or not but when you're working on projects for everywhere that's the last thing we want to know so i think one of the things is kind of when you're facing up in your business it's a little bit of a of a dating process from the consultant standpoint as well as trying to find a consultant that fits you so our thing is to find somebody who's going to be your key contact it doesn't mean you don't want to have people involved in the process but you want to have one person or at most two people that are sort of reaching out to work with your consultant and they're the ones that can kind of speak for the group as a whole because the other thing that's really scary is that you have a project and you have a meeting and as soon as that meeting is over you get three calls from the other people the group saying yeah we don't want to do it that way i can i can tell you from my side my schedule suddenly becomes very busy when i get those calls so um and of course the next one is we have no money but we want to do everything under the sun in fact i would say that uh i lost i lost the phone number for cooperation works because of this issue about a decade or so ago um about the 12th time i recall me and wanted to do a project for about you know three thousand dollars and have it done tomorrow and um do about fifty thousand dollars of work i moved offices and suddenly forgot to have cw's phone number on my rolodex when i moved uh just as an example but no but i think part of it is is when saying that with money money is always an issue and trying to figure out what can be done and what the group can do ahead of time or with part of that process to answer a bunch of the questions for feasibility studies the feasibility study does a really good job answering one question well it can answer two questions okay but the more questions you get you're kind of raising to the power exponentially of both what it costs also the time it takes and a lot of times the theoretical value of the of the study so i'm kind of making a little bit of joke with this but i think part of it with money is putting in some background time figuring out what's going on and sort of where the group is heading before you make that call and reaching out you know folks the other thing is is that yeah we want it done in two weeks we have a grant that's due um we have to get funding our loan is our loan is coming up and if you can give it for two weeks typically for us a feasibility study is taking about 500 man-hours within there almost everybody will work with the question is will you be able to meet your timeline and i would say in 97 of the time the delays are happening as the clients are having things happening on their side you know y'all are all doing development work so you're aware of that people get busy with crops weddings divorces sicknesses and other things but thinking about that we often put a feasibility study timeline of you know you can get a decent one done in about three months working back and forth and getting good involvement at all levels often it takes about six to allow some digester and community involvement and those other pieces in time within them yeah the favorite one we we know the answer of this already you know i'm sure y'all get those from the entrepreneur well we just need to put it on paper and we figured out this is great but in order to get these stupid people from usda to fund us for a grant we have to have this dumb feasibility study so just write it down real fast we'll give you everything and it'll be done um that's a great way for me to you know suddenly be busy now i would say you know for those that are on the co-op side we know co-ops are sort of screwed over on the grant rules for uh vapgs and so even though the co-op has been doing this for 20 years you still have to do a feasibility study under the rules those are a lot even those are pretty easy to prove they're feasible if you're already doing it so that would be one i said you can do a little bit quicker but still what we find a lot of times is just putting it on paper and doing that outside of you really helps folks plan in fact on a lot of clients that we work with they tell us that the grant funding we do and our and our group ends up doing about a little bit over 10 million dollars a year federal grants for folks and for a lot of people what they say is the money was really nice don't get us wrong but the biggest thing that helped us was the planning and figuring out where we were going so with that being said i was going to do a quick quick highlight um i was standing in new orleans about march 15th of this year at a national um food hub conference for the good food network at the wallace center i don't know if any of the other folks were at this that meeting with it as we say as the world was coming to an end and we were i was literally in conversations with folks at cabaye valley as they got told they were arriving at google and google was closed um we also were meeting with folks from the philly common market and chatting with them when they were delivering to universities and they were closed so there's been a big change on the food hub side with the pandemic side and the world of the year this year has been pivot right after after copenhagen i think the first word be copic you know but um on the food upside a lot of them face a lot of shock because they literally had product in trucks that were starting to rot and what to do with it um after that shock for the first couple of weeks people that were set up with the labor the expansion this year has been both in you know setting up kobe 19 protocols for folks as well as working on uh particularly csas and the farm to food box program the usda program on that a lot of folks on the local side have been you know they know how to handle food they know where to find it you know if you had any meat through june you know you you could you couldn't get rid of it fast enough some of that has slowed down a little bit on the meat side the past couple of months but we've seen a lot of hubs i think one of the groups uh lulu's local with some of their groups they saw a 650 increase in sales so far this year you know so anybody that could have outreach direct to consumer that's where most of the groups have gone and some groups are now facing the dilemma that as restaurants and whatnot have come back how do they replace that or how do they come up with it so a lot of groups have been it's finding you know extra food that's always been you know a lot of hubs have been more of the issue where does the food come from not where's the market's been for it in in most cases that's been the bigger issue but for us this year the theme has been really like i say running on the retail on the csa side and boxes to people and trying to do direct to consumer there have been some work on the health and wellness side for funding out of some things from the cdc um and then there have been some additions for people at local schools being able to accept some local food and having a little bit more um inventiveness than they may have had in the past and some of the school level some providers so i just wanted to hit that as a little bit of kind of what we've been seeing in the market with growth and new people coming on and with that being said uh dylan was going to kind of dive in and sort of walk through a little bit of you know how we're working through a food particulars of a food hub feasibility study a little bit of background on some of the numbers i know this will be review for some of you that are already working in this area but i figure some people haven't so a little bit of background on a few of the numbers and then a little bit of what do we face when we're kind of go through a food club feasibility study and what makes some of that process different than what we might face and working on some other types of studies take it away dylan yeah so pretty much yeah jim summed it up there food hub feasibility what to know before starting um yeah let me go so uh pretty much the basics what do you mean by a food hub the usda definition business organization actively managing the aggregation distribution marketing source identified food primarily from local and regional producers to strengthen their ability to satisfy wholesale retail and institutional demand um you know may seem straightforward but when we get into looking at what that looks like on an individual business basis it's just so broad there's so much debate over that you know here's a little diagram that kind of shows the idea of what a food hub does coordinating you know that from aggregation from the different farms some sort of distribution network to an end customer but really when we get to starting one of these feasibility studies our first goal is trying to figure out what what the client wants their food hub to be like what is their it what do they imagine when they think of the food hub and it's a lot of function over form here's just a little excerpt from one of our things in many cases food hubs share information with end users where how the food was produced providing greater connection between producers and consumers and food hubs really when you look at it differentiating them from someone in the traditional food supply chain it's about that connection building between local producers and consumers keeping the dollars within the local economy trying to support local agricultural producers that may not be able to access some of the traditional supply chain and consumers like wholesale accounts stuff like that um and we have experience working across the country on food hubs of you know all different types different scales we're working on one all the time and so really this this presentation boils down to you know us kind of showing some of the rules of thumb that we see that crop up and how we kind of address those and here's just kind of some averages that are kind of pulled out from some data some national data from the national food hub survey average sales 2017 exceeded 2.4 million per food hub the average food hub had 16 paid employees and they were working with 78 producers and you see that's just kind of the direct impacts but when you look at all the producers that they're working with you know each of those is its own business supplying you know supporting its own employees everything like that so really food hubs are about looking not only at what you know the impact individually but how that expands throughout their community um i was gonna make a comment on that one yeah the data on that um the national study there was a little bit of bias because they had a couple hubs in there that were very large and so it boosted some of your numbers particularly on the employee side yeah you know over that a lot a lot of hubs that we see are running 10 or less employees and when we get to some of the later on averages you'll see some ranges and it really puts it into perspective the just the discrepancies between small and large on the food hubs so yeah good point jim um starting with kind of the um i guess the form parts of food hub you know here's just some organizational structures you know every food hub they have to choose from the beginning how they're going to organize themselves in a way that works best for their mission what their what their current capabilities are and the type of activities they want to perform so here's some examples here an independent entity just kind of a food hub organized on its own get the most flexibility in their operations but they have to bear you know pretty much the full cost of all of everything they want to do and trying to find labor everything's starting from the ground up whereas you have like a divisional entity um we see this good enough plenty of times with non-profits where you have an existing organization that wants to establish a food hub as part of its efforts maybe you know they're focusing on community development decide foods the way they want to go so they but things with that so you get to benefit from existing management personnel contacts the brand name funding sources especially for a non-profit that's starting the food hub but you know the food hubs may be doing different target customers it's different operations that require adding new staff stuff like that that can sometimes get a little out of the out of hand for an organization that's not really prepared for that and then shared use entities so this one will get more into partnerships we'll touch on those a lot throughout this but you know find a food hub that's able to find some partners that it can share assets with so you know some ways to minimize those startup costs which can be pretty high so you know maybe their shared resources shared maybe there's a shared building that has some cooler space that the food hub can take part in stuff like that so you know cheaper startup costs sometimes but kind of missing out on the independence operating structures so moving into how the food hub selling direct to consumer wholesale and then hybrid some sort of combination of both of those activities and these can look you know in inside each of these they can look very different direct consumer typically fresh produce dealing with families or box orders drop-off locations things like that so csa online farmers markets buying clubs mobile markets are kind of the popular forms of those and wholesale there we'll get into products later but you see a lot of a lot different product differentiation adding in more meats dairy shelf stable items stuff like that and then looking at wholesale you know you have like grocery stores and restaurant orders but then there's also institutional wholesale so schools and hospitals things like that and those are you know when you get into business practices and ordering and things those can be very different once put into practice so and then hybrid you know comp combines those we see that often you know have somebody doing some some box sales but also selling some larger bulk orders to some restaurants or something um yeah and i was gonna make a lot of times that what's interesting is people will start even being direct to consumer at wholesale they will kind of evolve into being a hybrid and then at some point in time it scales often because of management capacity because you burn out your managers when you're doing both of those um they may switch back to direct to consumer or wholesale and it's kind of interesting often they will start as a direct consumer and may end up as a wholesale or vice versa so there doesn't seem to be a direct path but it does seem kind of interesting so people always ask which is the best way and it really comes down to your local situation and sometimes what your local market or what you like doing yeah and that's yeah they don't you know not always planned for sometimes they'll start out with the idea of hey we want to be direct to consumer but then hey here's a big wholesale customer in the area that we can suddenly serve and that's you know when you get looking at financial decisions you know sometimes that can make some sense um yeah and then kind of legal structures um so here's just some data from the wallace center and usda rural development on some of the breakdowns in the uh food hubs by legal structure so we see privately held the majority of them 46 [Music] non-profit food hubs their second most cooperatives and then publicly held definitely the smallest amount don't see those as often things like a uh like a city has like a little a market a farmer's market area that they're wanting to set up a food in or food hub in or they own a building that they're looking to make make use of somehow and we get into talking about cooperative food hubs here but um really with cooperatives and non-profits it's a lot of times about that mission and that's really you know goes into the core of the what makes the organization and how they set it up um jim do you have something to say sure that was easy to say probably interrupting just what dylan was going to say but from a functional standpoint the co-ops are not any different than the other uh entities on that a little bit on where the returns are going but food hubs typically aren't making and we're talking more about this later but aren't having very high returns coming in so really that becomes a fairly small you know issue you know a lot of it as dylan says it's just the mission of where people are starting from begin with and we see a lot of the co-op principles getting adopted in by organizations that aren't that weren't established as a cooperative with you know doing that from the beginning but they want to bring in these sorts of these ideas like maybe having some you know producer membership getting more buy-in that's a lot of it what a lot of what it comes down to is looking for that buy-in and they're realizing hey you know implementing some of these cooperative principles is really one of the ways that we can build buy-in from both the producer and consumer end um sorry i was jumped ahead of myself um but you know that we look at the when we're thinking about that the three cooperative principles the user benefits user owner user control um you know that's that's really what it comes down to with this and we'll i think um we're actually working with um a group right now that's looking at how to implement some cooperative principles into their organization because they're looking for more producer buy-in in their sales program and so that was one of the what they're looking at is like hey how can we implement cooperative principles in something that's just formed as a traditional non-profit um so moving on into kind of more the function of the food hubs product type and this is kind of early on in the food hub process you know that's what we gotta narrow down most food hubs you see here are like ones nine out of ten fresh produce that's traditionally the most common thing it's usually the most available in an area and then as we go down the list meets poultry eggs next most common and then we get down and down we get into processed things see those less often less often and with produce um one of the you know lower requirements for storage on a lot of things there's a lot to do with what pre why the products are chosen and it's really based on you know who are the producers in your area that need your help who who needs the food hub is it a local meat producer then you're gonna have to think about what that plays into in terms of your startup for your food hub equipment stuff like that if you're only focused on produce then you know it it really leads thinking about the product type leads down the road in terms of equipment facility needs labor needs it kind of builds on itself so knowing this at the start is pretty pretty important and then oftentimes you know with especially with value-added items processed items those kind of get built in later on we see a lot of producers who are like hey we'll start with you know fresh items that we don't have to do anything with but then maybe we want to do some cutting some freezing some light value add and you know what does that look like later on in terms of adding new equipment staff but also building you know new clients and you know can't talk about product without talking about seasonality especially with fresh produce so you know seasonality the it impacts the sales and it impacts the pricing so you know things are going to vary and this is going to vary not you know throughout the country but also within one region you know even if you're looking at a food hub that's sourcing from you know 100 mile radius the growing seasons and the product variety from producers in that large radius are are going to vary so it's really important to think about that and think about what producers are producing what and when and also thinking about season extension opportunities um you know which involves both in-house and on the producer end kind of thinking about what what do the producers have already are they already running greenhouses are there producers who are already doing some you know freezing or light processing or something like that or is that going to be something the food hub has to take on internally um you know something to think about and yeah here we get into just kind of a pretty much a big listing of different services kind of summarizing some of that function type thing and really bringing home in my opinion the idea of the food hub being that connection between local consumer and local producer and that being the real differentiating factor between when we think about food hubs versus a traditional food supplier or something like that and these are some common uh services that we see again these you know very dependent on the food hub and the needs and the of both the producers and the consumers for you know some places for a food hub to be more to be successful it's going to have to take on some of the things like on-farm pick-up or maybe some food safety training and stuff like that for producers or if it's in a market where maybe the local community is not doesn't know about the what what the local farmers have to offer there's not a strong uh sense of local food in the uh on the consumer side then maybe it's it's kind of necessary for the food hub to think about doing a buy local campaign or doing some of that outreach um maybe building those partnerships and i was going to comment i think the the arrow from the trucks going forward is a little misleading and we probably stole this with this one but it probably should be both way because one of the key things that food apps can help compete with some of the big boys are also getting information from the market back to the folks that are producing and that can be one of the valuable roles of finding out that local restaurants really want some bok choy or you can provide a type of meat they're not providing or you can get apples into a program that have you know heirloom or other characteristics that somebody like cisco doesn't have time to do when they're thinking about you know pellets and serving things and this sort of thing so sometimes working ahead of time with buyers about what they want several food hubs have been really successful coming up with salad mixes where they can customize them for different restaurants and so each restaurant has their own mix and the food hub has been working with the you know the producers to pre-sell those islands or getting food and dehydrating it in the summertime and having things in colder climates to have some stuff for local salad mix soup mixes and that sort of things in the winter and finding out individual products that can work that way so that's another of the services where you can compete economically by you know not being at the place where the big boys are even finding you know some of it's been finding you know fruit the right size to go into nursing homes you know they don't want necessarily huge things but they want smaller things that you know their residents are going to eat and they get good value for so they appreciate it so even things as small as that of finding the right size of a product and yeah jumping in to kind of moving to partnerships and this is a really big one on the on kind of the food hub services and thinking about you know what is it going to take to make the food hub successful in those kind of outreach realms um kind of partnerships are really kind of the foundation to figuring out what's being what's already been done in the area because you don't want to duplicate it that's one thing you can you start a food hub you want to make sure that you can take advantage of the ongoing efforts the things that are already being done and bring those into the fold because there's the last thing you want to do is compete with those things alienate yourself before you even get going and a good with partnerships it's really it's opportunities to find ways to kind of reduce those startup costs too um is there a partner is there a partner who has access to some cool cold storage that you can get to you know is there somebody who's out there doing farmer outreach and training that the food hub needs to bring in to help with its producers stuff like that and um really the building those partnerships we got we've been able to watch this firsthand uh with our work in alabama here recently on a food uh with auburn down there we started this process of a food hub forever feasibility study and kind of to get that going they were able to build they were able to put together a food system summit basically that brought together um local local food hubs in the state state ag different government players farmers federation um some native tribes um you know buyers you know all types of people to come together and say hey this is what we've got going on what do you have what do you have going on we want to start up a kind of a food hub network here and then from that meeting they've been able to have regular there's been on they've established this kind of this collaborative that's been able to have regular meetings every month they've been going through you know the visioning process they've got themselves getting all the members to figure out the key goals the project areas they want to do and so really they've been able to establish this core partnership of a whole bunch of people that are then they're then going to be able to leverage to help develop these food hubs as well as other local foods um you know things activities going on so it's you know and especially with funding you never know who you know that can find some funding for you that you couldn't get yourself so um producers suppliers so largest expense for a food hub is going to be product supply and everyone wants to pay their producers as much as possible keep them as happy as possible but it's important to remember that you can't pay producers if your organization folds under itself you don't want to start something up with grand promises that then leads that then has to close you know part way through the season and leave the growers worse off than when you came in and so this data here is from the 2017 15 and 13 uh food hub surveys kind of showing the the range of producers that the their food hubs have been working in so you know that average has been fairly consistent the median you know fairly it's fairly consistent you can really see in that range there the the just that food hubs really span just span the whole spectrum and when thinking about the number of uh producers you're going to be working with you know really the exact number isn't going isn't going to get you what you need it's really about um you know what size are the producers in your area how much are they willing or able to sell to you if they're already engaged in some things um you know and there's a big difference between getting you know 10 20 small producers versus getting one or two large scale producers that can provide you what you need and you know those have a lot of impact on your operations too you know you kind of want to have fewer suppliers giving you what you need for consistency especially for like wholesale orders and things like that and i was going to comment sometimes it's worth when organizing to organize a subsidiary cooperative that you may have some smaller scale producers that you organize them into a co-op and then that co-op provides a delivery into the hub itself so sometimes it's even finding that second layer that helps to work and can do some of that quality and training of that but not everything is always done with one end yeah and if you're able to you know differentiate in your growers it's you can really kind of target the types of assistance that certain growers within your your network are going to need that others may not so like jim said and you can help you know build small collaborative networks within those um getting on to personnel labor you know product size product and size it's all going to affect your personnel needs and the type of hub you know direct to consumer versus wholesale and really the scale of it it's all going to impact the type of labor you're going to need and you're going to be thinking about you know volunteer labor versus hired employees seasonal labor versus permanent you know if you're running year round or if you're only open a few months out of the year and then also hourly versus salaried employees so and the second food hub benchmarking study found that the highest performing hubs pay more for their labor but you know they get more performance out of that labor but um really when thinking through your financial model um you know we do we do a lot of work with that we sit with we sit with our clients and it's really kind of about you know how do you see this growing you know how maybe you know maybe we don't start with any salaried labor but you just got to build it up and it's it really you know it is not one way that works we uh where saw some jim sent me some back and forth with some food hubs the other uh not too long ago and you know one food hub is under a million in sales and they were looking they were looking to employ a salaried sales director and then there was another hub that was they they were said that they took them until they were 3.5 million in sales seven years in before they got a salaried uh sales director so you know it really comes into how you've planned for these type of things and you know there's not a not one size fits all and here's just you know thinking about paid staff versus volunteers which typically is more of a direct to consumer thing once you get into wholesale you know there's oftentimes you uh you know the bigger orders there's a lot more needs involved larger facilities you're probably going to have you know supervisors things like that but stuff to think about you know consistency in size and scheduling for paid versus volunteers but you know then lower cost and you know this here was what i from the beginning when jim mentioned that the the kind of those averages we pulled out were kind of skewing towards the large here's the uh 2018 um food hub benchmark study which i think was like 48 different hubs and they had to they provided like a very detailed financial operational information and uh the study kind of put together a benchmark hub that was based on those top performers there and so you know here in the orange box you kind of see what their benchmark cub was looking at and their you know 4.28 full-time equivalents um and each uh hey mary yeah 4.8 full-time equivalence you know the big difference color is the turkey it's sort of brown average employees sort of it's it's great grayish brown somebody giving the direction needs to meet we we want thanksgiving you're making me hungry muted now okay 38 38 000 um in labor costs per worker equivalent and the number that i find really interesting is uh the sales per worker equivalent 365 000 over that i'm just thinking of that thanksgiving yeah yeah oh okay so moving into kind of some funding things um so funding also this is extremely varied by organization and this here is from the national food hub survey looking at dependency on grant funds um you can see here um 2013 the majority not at all depended on grant funds and then as we've grown here the especially the highly dependent has jumped uh noticeably also note the uh different between 2017 and 2013 the number of food hubs reporting on there only 97 and 2017 versus 188 for 2013 um but still most are either somewhat or not at all dependent on grant funding and when you look at that in terms of um legal structures of for-profit versus a non-profit the non-profits are making use of foundation funds more often whereas for-profits are made more often making use of federal and state government grant programs and then with cooperatives it kind of fall they kind of fall in the middle they seem to be using about equal amounts federal state funding as foundational funds and i will say there's been some knock down on federal funding for numbers of projects particularly with the lfpp program the local food promotion program when they knocked off their minimum their grant from a hundred thousand to five hundred thousand somehow because they didn't have the capacity to manage all those grants um it really knocked down a lot of the numbers of food hubs that could be funded so a lot of people were being had grants in 2017 but those numbers have really dropped since then because that was the year they made the change over so i will say the exact number of hubs have dropped even though the amount of federal funding is the same and um funding here's another it's another opportunity where we often see um the partnerships coming into play um for example we've worked with a a food hub in alabama and they're kind of set themselves up as having like a sister organization that's a non-profit and so they're looking to go into this and making use of that business or that array that you know that relationship between the organizations and kind of using the non-profit to get grant funds that maybe their llc food hub would it be eligible for vice versa um and we're gonna get into some more on the finances here in the next few slides it's going to be some kind of minimum typical cost comparison type thing so you know these aren't going to be you know exact costs for each of these but are more kind of based on typical realms where we see things and really just kind of give the uh kind of show the differences between direct to consumer or wholesale in terms of the finances so these are some kind of minimum startup costs that we've seen and obviously these vary due to a large number of things including what the food hub wants to do location things like that but you know direct consumer typically lower infrastructure needs um whereas you get in the wholesale you're doing larger volumes gonna be more produce more or more product purchase gonna need more space more labor vehicles things like that and then when you get into processing that especially depending on the type of processing really jumps in terms of the equipment and labor because those those equipment needs can could go really high especially if you're going from something like maybe just a little a cutter or a grater table jumping into like a processing kitchen which we worked on one of those in missouri a couple years ago and you know it's the expenses for that and thinking about that in terms of how you're going to phase in something like that is really really mark drives up those prices here's some just some more comparison tables here looking size scale like i touched on in the previous slide typically you're going to need larger facilities for wholesale just to handle the the order sizes and um you know delivery vehicles but then as i said you get direct to consumer and you're doing maybe some box drop off or something like that and maybe all of a sudden then you need to buy some vehicles so you know things like that can definitely vary and here's another one looking at staff and then some sales levels like i said with the paid versus volunteers typically direct to consumers especially earlier on volunteer labor is pretty common in those and then these sales numbers here we'll jump into those in a little more detailed on these and this kind of when we do these feasibility studies we look at them we look at them kind of you know where are we gonna where what do we need to reach break even what what is a p what is a growth period going to look like for you and then what is kind of that viability level that kind of where are you going to be stable at and these are some numbers that we have for direct consumer the 314 going up to 556 and we put those down it's kind of minimum numbers they think i think those are sort of that you know obviously labor being expensive can really change those numbers you know and by viability what we're sort of saying is you have enough money to replace your truck and equipment as it's amortized and get a couple percent return yeah so you know when we're not talking about uh you know uh google or amazon levels of returns on these things definitely yeah there's a wholesale one as jim said you know but and there you know it's gonna much larger is pretty much the uh the main takeaway from there when you're looking at wholesale versus direct consumer on these boot hubs typically um financial success so here was another interest some interesting data from the food hub survey and so when we're looking at some expenses here this is shows the business efficiency ratio which was operating expenses divided by gross revenue so an er of over one was expenses were higher than revenue er of less than one revenue was higher than expenses so you know on average we see that most of the hubs had revenue that exceeded or close in value to their expenses um looking at 2015 versus 2017 median values were pretty close but the average was higher in 2017 because when you look at those range values you see 2017 had one that was a 7.18 and if you look down lower in their for profit there was at least one 6.67 so those comparing that to 2015 really uh skewed those averages there yeah um and then but looking at it by structure you see the cooperatives have the best efficiency ratio in both years across those metrics so and here was here's another one from the benchmark study that was the 48 hubs and the model hubs is their top 25 percent uh performers there on the right so you know these are based on real real hubs real numbers but they're as jim said these are you know biased in terms of the larger ones and given the small sample size too but um you know really what we see here looking at for the model hubs compared to the all hub hubs you know slightly smaller percent cost of product you know the overhead managed to get that down and really all of these things make kind of make the difference between generating a profit or not um you know all of them are using they're all using some grant funds but a little bit less on less on the model hubs because it's always better to use money that you've earned through sales than to use money that somebody else has strings attached to but really you know when you look at you can't just look at the annual sales when we're looking at how to make a food hub profitable we've got to look at ways to kind of on those expenses on the overhead kind of reduce those things and that's going to have that's going to have a big impact as well is the thing you know not always about annual sales some more expenses here just kind of highlighting the payments to producers payments for product is by far the largest expense for a food hub um you know typically through over three quarters of your three quarters of your expenses are going to be that and then looking at kind of these other payments you know general and administrative variable costs you know variable labor stuff like that unforeseen and bad debt is always important to have in there and to keep in mind um like we can't we can't stress that enough when we talk to clients that's yeah we'll get i'll get into more of that later um you don't know what's going to happen and you have to be able to account for those type of things if you want to maintain your business and stay in operations um and so looking at the kind of growth issues so you know startup is one thing but a lot of food hubs you know they don't make it that far or they have to do some serious changes to their operations a few years in or something to kind of adjust and you know adapt to the realities once they've been in operation they find themselves so cash flow is one of the key ones there like i said you know can't just look at your annual sales you got to take into account things like the seasonality how how long is your you know how many months out of years your hub open for and is what's your cash flow look like how are you going to be throughout the year are you able to account for you know periods where your cash flow is going to dip off without having that negatively impact your operations and cash flow is something also to consider during the success period a lot of people think about it for the winter but for a lot of food hubs the most difficult period of cash flow is mid-summer because what happens is often they're paying a lot of their producers back in at 7 or net 14 and they're being paid back by their vendors and net 30 to net so you can literally grow yourself out of business so checking ahead of time and working with some community capital organizations and things like that to get some of those you know working capital loans in place and those are often the some of the hardest money to get to be honest i'm sure y'all are familiar with that for other projects but getting that ahead of time after you've had just a few years experience be able to get that and working with some you know and that's a good a good area to find some annual investors or some circumcision some community groups to help to you know loan against your receivables yeah and expanding um it's got to be managed process this is why we like to do our which is why like i said we like to look at the food hub not just in the startup we like to look at you know we want to look at where we're going how we're going to grow what is the growth strategy and you know and then like jim said you know it's you've got to be managing this at all times even good and the bad um and so when we look at expansion you know we have to ask ourselves a few questions when we're doing these feasibility studies is that going to involve new operational practices are we going to be scaling into wholesale is that the plan how do we plan to to implement that um what about labor growth you know how's that going to look when you want to get a salaried sales director or something like that in there or you need managers are we going to be putting in value-added processing kitchen or something like that how is that going to be implemented in a manageable way um yeah and game changers nothing can be anticipated fully so you know we obviously the biggest one here we've had kobit but you know there's always different things that pop up um it's like the adoption of fisma you know there's things that pop up that impact not only the consumer market producer market but the you know the regulatory environment that the food hub's going to be working in and it's you know you can't you can't really predict how you're going to adapt to things that you don't know you know what they're going to be yet but it's always something to be thinking about and you know we saw jim mentioned this earlier at the beginning some of the changes that we've seen for food hubs and how they've had to adapt to covet you know local food suppliers stepping into the traditional food supply chain um taking new grant opportunities box food stuff like that disruption of the market and kind of you know seeing a decline in restaurant customers having to look elsewhere selling to other food hubs things like that um and you know there's there's a lot of opportunities during times um you know times like this you know as well that kind of you know maybe things get put in place that wouldn't have been put in place if some of these events hadn't happened so and regulations as i touched on you know these things not only do they change you know they change over time but as your business grows you may be facing new regulations that you wouldn't have at startup so that and that can be not only on the food hub side but also your producers so again for example with the food hub in alabama working on currently direct to consumer you know small scale producers that don't have a don't have the safety certificates often times you know and they're looking to go into wholesale and so part of that project is going to be hey what what is it going to look like on a regulatory side for the food hub facility and the growers how are we going to be able to scale the growers up with the food hub to be able to meet the wholesale market because if you want to go to wholesale but half your growers can't surf those markets that's not gonna not gonna do you very good when you do that um and here before we get into kind of some best practices these are just a couple just a couple things um when you're working with a client you're not you know there's always going to be some head butting on little things that you know just you know may not be that important all the time and it's and because these studies are so broad and they involve so much detail so much data gathering and they take so long there's a lot of things that you know in those mix you've got people who want to see certain things changed and so one of the most common ones we get are labor rates gas prices getting stuck on individual product prices you know for like gas prices for example those those are changing every day they're different from across the street one place to another so you know we pick we pick a number that is representative of the time and the place at the time but you know when we go to present that in you know five months to to them they're like hey that's not the gas price that i saw you know coming in today and we you know you can't do that all you can't go back and forth on that constantly and with labor rates too you know those those those are going to change those are going to vary people are going to have different ideas on you know what they think you should be paying and ultimately there's a decision maker in with within your client organization that has to make those calls along with the consultant as we look at what's actually going to be feasible for you you know you may want to pay everybody a living wage right off the bat but hey it may not be that may not be a thing that we can do here so i know some best practices that we have learned here this one is the the first one here the oxygen mask rule you know you can't i think i've been kind of harping on that all along you know you have to secure your oxygen and for the food hub that's you know your profit margins before you can assist others with their oxygen so those community benefits you know given that living wage for giving the producers more um you know your your ideal profit share things like that um the food hub the food hub being profitable that's kind of the springboard to achieve the broader mission related goals of your organization and just to go through some others here don't sell commodities product differentiation you know it's really about the local the what do you have that you know they can't just get in from whoever's supplying their grocery store from you know their product from chile or whatever you know what what do you have sweat the small stuff um you know tell a authentic compelling story about your organization have everybody in your organization needs to know about what's going on all the goals you need to you need to avoid things like having you know silo thinking within your organization having people who just so focused on their one task that they aren't able to communicate what the other people organization might ask and also with the small stuff because margins are so low you literally if you screw up one order you have to do 9 or 10 to make up for it so sometimes it's slowing down the growth to make sure you're not making you know horrible mistakes as you go forward and there's a rush to get it out but like i say making that small mistake you can literally you know kill yourself i mean a good example of that maybe grasshopper in kentucky that had you know make a couple million dollars that they went through on their operating stuff and they kept putting things in uh the back of trucks in the middle of uh you know kentucky heat in the summertime and they did a very good job of making their produce you know not a very good job of providing things for farmers we've seen other groups have started in the back of you know literally vocal station wagons so you know that made it work so part of it is is figuring out those details at your level it's not that i'm you know advocating starting super small but really figuring out the small details and how you can handling them and i would also say on the small stuff you know figuring out the ways you don't burn your stuff out because there's you know again key assets that's part of that cooperative there and how you can train that next level so you don't have a great manager or operator leave and then suddenly you're you know you have no idea how to do anyone else has any idea how to do this stuff yeah um yeah be there all year for your customers um you know you got to make sure the customers even even for something like a you know maybe you have a direct to consumer little csa that only operates a few months out of the year it's important to kind of build those relationships you know have your social media uh to let the let them know what's going on in the off season even you know made pictures you know that's how you get people coming back and especially for food hubs and for local foods in general um it's you know important to kind of continue to build that connection to make sure the consumers you know they they remember they keep when they think about a product they think i can get that from somewhere at local a local grower um i get this change yeah get buyer commitment you know yeah be clear with buyers about volume order expectations um get commitment from your buyers because again thinking back to your producers you don't want to promise them sales and then you know you then have to go hey we don't have buyers for that or you buy the stuff from the growers and then you turn around and just are sitting on a whole bunch of product that you can't get rid of neither are ideal situations to be in um i think farmers first good prices for producers but again thinking about the hub has to be able to be financially self-sufficient um think about ways to build their capacity to grow be successful you have to have the farmers want to work with you you have to build that producer buy-in you have to think about what do they need in in addition to just an outlet for product what do they need to help them grow that's how you really support the local producers in the local food system is by seeing it expand um make friends and also before that when you start doing a startup it's really unreasonable to expect to get 100 of the product from your producers yes you know that's something that comes up a lot the people are planning on that you know they already have other outlets they're finding ways they've also heard lots of songs and dances on other projects before yours so part of that building that trust is you know don't expect to be getting all their product get you know maybe forty percent fifty percent of the product and then how can you build that or how can you find maybe markets for products they may not be doing currently i think appalachian sustainable development robbins robin does a really good job of working with this and training farmers and one of the things they've come in on some of theirs as a specific example is working with people that make saying to their farmers instead of be growing 13 acres of stuff maybe you need to be throwing eight acres of a higher value product that we can get rid of for you yeah definitely um and make friends um like i said i i keep harping on the same things and in these slides but the partnerships making friends in the community with groups who are already doing things that are related to the food hub you know distributors produce groups trucking companies food banks these people are you know the the food hub can take advantage of what's going on already and we see that that is that's that's the way to build a success in a community local food system don't buy what you don't need especially as you know you're thinking about where you might be down the road that doesn't mean you need to buy that now infrastructure is expensive you need your investments need to match your stage of development and your capacity um don't poison your customers that's yeah food safety it's very important you need to make sure not only on the food hub end but the producer ends that your products are high quality they are clean you know going through all the proper regulatory measures um to make sure that you know the consumer is you know not put off by the idea of local is means low quality you know um and that may be saying having to say goodbye to a particular producer and somebody that's harder on the co-op side to do that but saying goodbye to a producer that can't you know doesn't meet standards consistently because that can ruin it for the whole group so we really recommend a sliding scale of both training but also sanctions of people that aren't following the rules so starting with smaller sanction and ramping up over time and it may be telling somebody you can't work with them as well yeah and supply supply supply consistent reliable and quality products you know that's kind of that's what it has to be on as any brand likes to present the food hub is no different in that measure so i think that's our bed where i guess i'm open for questions and comments with it alex i guess yeah thank you all so much that was really fantastic and i know a couple people had to hop off but share that even what they were able to stay for is super informative and already really helpful to their projects so thank you so much to uh jim and dylan a couple of questions did come through uh while you were presenting um one is from john who did have to um hop off unfortunately but uh much earlier earlier on he asked if i privately owned uh you all men corporation uh or llc or partnership yeah that's the usda definition which i don't like very much so they they sort of separated into privately owned non-profit and cooperative so i would assume privately owned includes corporation llc it's anything that has profit and of course we know that co-ops can also be you know for-profit and not-for-profit as well so we've i i've argued with them more than once that's not that's not the correct way to divide things but if you can convince the federal government i think you're doing better than um we also had a question from margaret well i guess kind of a suggestion uh she also had to hop off though which was if you feel comfortable naming names if you could share some examples of food hubs that you think are doing an outstanding job or examples of someone that really does some things well yeah i think there's some people all around the country and that's part of we want to focus on individual because there literally are hundreds of hubs and part of the thing that we've heard on food hubs is once you've seen one food hub you've seen one food up and so there's really you know trying to focus on different different levels of people that are trying to you know so what i would say when you're looking at a study trying to focus on the area you're looking at i will put out a little area that we found that kind of has worked and lots of stuff which was uh one that we love that we worked with was trying to do some food into schools and instead of trying to sell directly into schools trying to work with like parent-teacher associations you know of course you have to be back in school for this to happen but work with them and doing csas through that where they're doing that as a fundraiser to raise the money and they already have a great distribution thing and a funding area and that's just been stuff that's been able to raise a lot of money for ptos where instead of selling chocolate or really bad candles you're helping with you know good healthy food and other things on it you know the other thing i would say is also working with some of the second tiered stuff we work with a lot of the folks out for several years out of california northern california who are trying to form second-tier groups of coming together like a second tier co-op and i mean literally we worked with some of the folks for three and four years trying to bring together and they had so much trouble sharing their list and selling other things but when the pandemic hit because they had done all that background work they've been really over the last several months with gwendolyn and the folks at uc davis to really pull that together and have the sales on so i know i know we're preaching to the choir on the co-op side but sometimes that background work and that time and discussion that seems like failure can really be what kind of lays the groundwork for those future successes thank you um we had a question come in from pamela uh what tribe or tribes were involved in the planning of the food hub um i'm just curious because they're working with a few tribes there in minnesota and uh they're uh [Applause] people are looking at existing infrastructure um like processing facilities and the place that can be shared right tribes have been good i i mean one folks are some of the folks like the uh from the cherokee out of oklahoma with stuff i mean you get an interesting thing with some of the indigenous groups because you can have matrilineal organizations working with that so you know and uh working with future areas the tribes have a nice thing to their access to some different funding sources with that um the the other issue that they could have within it is sort of a sharing and figuring out uh some of the tribes if they have a casino business it's been a great feeder of trying to create jobs and working the food you know through the casinos and that's been a wonderful outlet both been in california as well as running some of the stuff in the lower midwest as well with several groups on that there was a one of the when we did um one in missouri they were working with a tribe that had a casino as well as a cattle ranch and they were working with them for on some to do they were going to do some processing and they had a tempest blood so design processing yeah yeah and the ones we were working with though where though not we but the who were involved in the food summit in alabama was the porch band of greek indians i was trying to i had been looking and i was like who i'm working at the same time but i would also say some folks like the hmong producer groups up in minnesota we were mentioning that um you know have also been very active and very involved in fact there's some issues about some mergers and other things that they're ongoing now with that thank you um so we have about 15 more minutes those are the uh questions that have come through the chat i invite people to either continue entering questions into the chat box um or folks are unable to unmute sorry folks are now able to unmute themselves uh if you just want to unmute and ask a question directly too i guess i have one i we work with startup food co-ops uh we're mostly planning retail storefronts or at least that's what we're hoping they're trying to do but a lot of times they have the idea that they can uh incorporate a food hub operation alongside their retail and have you seen that done successfully what we find a lot of times is if they're trying to do the retail store operation along with the food hub it's hard because of just different skill processes of working with that wholesale versus that retail level if you're you're doing it we found it working better often with partnerships or even within the same organization doing some divisions that are very that have pretty strong barriers with them because you end up with kind of an internal sometimes an internal conflict with that now what we have found is a nice thing that adds on is bringing some people in if you're example for some special event areas and things like that so maybe if you're doing a market to bring in somebody that may be if you're not offering able to offer you know specific cuts of meat they would bring in like a butcher trailer or something like that for training or even able to bring in some folks that may be from a slightly wider area for like seasonal things like some some crafts or other cooperatives tied in i mean it doesn't always have to be we're talking about food hubs but tying some of that excitement into the into consumers about you know wreath making and craft things and other areas that may not be specifically food but keeping that excitement in or even some processed food if you're not quite there of your group about partnering with some groups to do that so i know that helps a little bit stuart but you know on a lot of these things what we find out is one of the limiting factors once they're up and running is management capacity and time it was hard enough to find a manager that can do a good job of just running the grocery store let alone a wholesale operation well and not just the manager the back the back office people if you think about it for the food hubs a lot of these times you know groups do not have a lot of money to pay people they're already having to do you know maybe for-profit accounting you know non-profit accounting cooperative accounting and if they've got a partnership with a government maybe even doing some government and reporting accounting so you're finding you're trying to find an accountant that have all those skills and you have you know thirty five thousand dollars to pay them so that's another area that can be really tricky is getting that back office thing in with a skill set to handle all those different areas as well dylan did a great job we put everybody's sleep perfect yeah now turn on if too bad you can't turn on everybody's video that we can see who's actually snoring i'm sure everyone is giving their full attention well we still have about 10 minutes or so for questions oh we just had one come in through the chat uh what are some sources of information for feasibility studies that you would recommend particularly free ones um actually there's a there's a lot online but one of the first places i would look is though that's a great question actually we have something to our website because you know a consultant if you don't self-promote you're not a very good consultant but another great place the wallace center the national good food network has a lot of places for food studies with that um they've linked to several with them and there is a a toolkit a local the local food toolkit that was done out of usda funding don tell me folks of carolina excuse me at ams also have a lot of that they also have a lot of multiplier and implant data for those that do the real development stuff and they your economic development wants the fancy multiplier number that's a great place to pull that out as well now that's a really good question and there's a lot of studies out there so i mean i would before i did anything i would search and they were literally online you could find you know 75 different studies very quickly and so you can kind of focus on ones that are doing sort of some of the program areas you're looking at uh esther has a follow-up uh just double checking that was the local food hub toolkit and who was it by local food toolkit local food toolkit and who is that by it's it's a usda ams the ag and marketing service with it um don tellmany is one of the researchers on that out of colorado state those are there but there's there's a lot of good studies out there on that one too awesome thank you uh looks like we've had a couple more questions come in uh through the chat so from diane what's a general range of costs that people might expect if they were to hire matson consulting for a feasibility study sure uh and what i always say when someone tells me they want a feasibility study i say it's like buying a car you know you know you want something and do you need a you know an old clunker or you're looking for a you know a sports car within there so the more questions that run typically what we think of as level is we're pricing our studies we we discount stuff for co-op work to based on an hourly fee of staff time of 50 bucks an hour um other folks are paying 58 an hour so when we're doing co-ops it's a discount on our site because we kind of believe and went to support that and it takes about you know we average we think a typical hub study takes about 500 hours so we start saying it's about 2500 dollar you know 25 thousand dollars doing a full study with stuff the more questions you ask the more complicated it gets so it kind of goes from there typically up that's sort of the range that when we're charging with stuff um you know sometimes for studies if it's something we've done and people are turning things in for a usda grant and it's already been done the food the group is up those hours go down so that's that's sort of the range where we look it's sort of that 25 to 35 000 it's probably a good range you know by including travel so thank you um from corrigan we have a question do producers generally get a better price for selling through the food hub compared to trying to sell it directly or do they sell to the hub at a discount because the hub handles distribution etc for them typically it's less than if they're selling themselves because you've got to pay that you're going to pay your your staff to do that but they're also then they're not having to take that time away from farming and other stuff but it's like any wholesaler you know so that's why partially producers are usually keeping some of their stuff you know you're not going to get 100 of their because they already have markets and they're selling them for you that's finding other markets or other areas in there and back on pricing we found that you know hubs that kind of come in that if they charge def we've not been able to find one that can make money charging less than uh you know we're keeping less than 20 percent of the retail price um often with a startup hub that will run as high of about 30 you know 30 maybe slightly higher to be able to cover the cost you know and a lot of the hubs you saw the average was about 25 26 you know of the retains thank you um from carolina common enterprise not sure who from there sent in this question but what have you done to evaluate the feasibility for slaughter operations about about 30 different studies working on it that was actually some of the first work we did back to the 1999 slaughters uh people killing hogs in the field stuff and and usually i'll tell you my short answer for that is uh mobile slaughter doesn't pay for itself on on the larger animal side you can do it for some ruminants and small animals and that you know it's really hard and again finding that key finding that key people and cutters to do it and multi-species plant yeah have no returns to scale and the level of smaller processes that's my my 20 my my 20 second steal on uh on slaughter stuff within there but no there's a lot of areas going on slaughter and it's a it's a huge issue trying to find that within there i'm not trying to flip it but all the sort of 30 studies that we've done i think about five have moved forward so it's just it's a tough business you know even if you find ways to do a feasibility study where they can make where they can make money on paper it's just the seasonality issues some of the other issues are really hard the other thing is with slaughter if you find a really good manager there's a corporation that's probably willing to hire them for about twice what they're making that you can afford to pay them that's my optimistic speech for this morning but no i think it's a big area and it's a lot of a lot of interest and a lot of work and there's some you know some good things that are happening as well thank you um well we have a few more minutes for questions if anybody has uh anything else they have left to ask sit comfortably in silence for about 20 seconds while people gather up the courage yeah see dylan doesn't bite at all i sort of chew around the edges but dylan's really a nice person oh well everybody's thinking i just want to appreciate my appreciation for the very thorough presentation you gave us today thank you thanks for being here and we're happy if it makes sense i like to share the you know the pdf of our of our slides if that's helpful for folks to have some of that data and background some people don't have to write down the contacts on that yeah i would really enjoy that i'll send you this this version since it's a little like minor differences but i'll just send you this version so you've got it great that sounds wonderful um well thank you so much jim and dylan this was super informative um i've already gotten some good feedback coming in through the chat both privately and to everyone so um this is just great oh it looks like there might be one more question that's come in are there big costs to get slaughter facilities certified by usda and have you worked on any human kill facility that sounds a little more halloween macabre than i wanna figure that out there are some and there definitely are some groups and i like i said i go back to sort of the tempest bloodstove stuff with that there definitely are some groups that have worked with that and principles with it as well as some of the new zealand you know kill and chill areas with that um but no they're definitely definitely a cost and there's payment costs and all that slaughter is a whole another area and you get the area that it changes by state whether you're running atomic and state or direct pricing for federal or state inspection so that's the the only thing that seems to be more complicated than uh the meat slaughter is when you get into liquor regulations but um i don't know that's a very very quick one with that question with it and i would say on our side just that baby as a close out with stuff to say reach out i mean we are that's that's what we do we answer the phone to try to talk to people and figure out what we can do to help that's why you know i got into this you know back 30 plus years ago and that's what we try to do to figure out what we can do to help people well thank you again so much uh this is really informative and great and i will be sharing out the video with folks later today um so just once again thanks so much can you do a react applause thanks for having us there we go this is really wonderful and i'm sure people will be in contact to follow up on some stuff so thanks to everyone who is able to join um stay in touch for our next webinar