Great questions, really appreciate being on with you first and foremost and being able to talk to your students and your colleagues and grateful for the opportunity. So how did I get where I am today? First, let me start by saying we're not quite where we want to be. I think there's a lot of growth and a lot of opportunities for us. A little bit about our business and what we do is we are a family office, primarily, which means it's our own money rather than a fund structural that we have looked at raising funds and raise funds specifically targeted towards certain deals that we've done. I come from a sort of sales background. I sold satellite dishes and pest control in all kinds of things door to door. I had served a mission for my church in the country at the Dominican Republic, came home in the summer of 1994, and met a good friend who had also been in the Dominican Republic, serving who had started a company selling pest control for Terminix next door. He invited me to do the same for him in his business, do that alongside his business, and it was a great way to sort of learn how to sell things. I became one of their number one salespeople, and sadly, that business wasn't able to pay me. They went out of business that first summer, and it was very, very painful for me. But the nice thing that came out of it was the relationship and this friend as a favor to me because he had really struggled allowed me to start my business within the walls of his then business that he kind of hit the reset button on and started that next year. And that company became a Blackstone portfolio company called Vivint today, two different publicly traded divisions, And so he's been a great friend and a great mentor to me. And as I watched his business, I decided, these guys were selling, all kinds of products services to the home, door to door. Why don't I try to do this on the Internet? So in the late nineties, some years later, decided that I would do that on the Internet, and that's what I started a company called Clear Link. My last name is Clark. My wife's maiden name is Earl. We put those two together that became Chloral Inc and grew that to a company that started out selling satellite dishes, door to door, pest control, and a number of other home services. And today has about 2000 full-time employees. It's owned by a publicly-traded company called Sykes, and we sold that business in early 2011. So, quite an exciting ride for us. But the challenge became for me as, when I knew that I wanted to sell and we wanted to sell in 2008, but all of you listening know what took place during that period of time, the world fell apart, and so did all of the offers that we had to buy that business. The good news for us at that point was that the business grew substantially two to threefold in the course of those two years. But I found myself without a job because I had hired a partner that I brought into the business through acquisition to be the CEO of that company, at Clearlink. And during that period of time, I figured I better learn to do what I was going to do with the next chapter of my life and learned how to invest professionally and institutionally. And so that's when I set up an office in New York City and was there every other week for two years, kind of trying to figure out what I wanted to do, whether that be venture or growth equity or private equity, or all kinds of different types of investing, hedge, fund and so forth. We fell in love with growth equity, knowing that the most challenging time for any business is in its infancy. Sort of from idea to a million dollars of money, meaning real profits. So for us, I had two years to kind of practice and craft our strategy. And so when we closed Clearlink and sold in January of 2011 we immediately started allocating into these growth equity opportunities and the first, the first of which was a company called Contour, a camera company. That time was the same size of a company that you probably all know very well, which is called GoPro and it was a challenging deal for us, but ended up being a marvelous deal, several years later and then the other one is a company called Pet I.Q. that now, nine years almost 10 years later is billion-dollar private equity, play that we partner for seven several other private equity companies but is publicly traded on the NASDAQ and has been a great outcome for us, along with several other portfolio companies. So that's kind of a little bit of the history of where we came from, where we're we've been what we're doing today and how are our offices evolved? And now we're just getting into the funds business where we're raising funds primarily focused on different categories, and we'll make certain announcements and they are forthcoming in the next couple of months about how we raise those funds and where we'll be allocating and what our focus is. So that's a little bit about our experience and about our story.

It's a really good question. We have primarily focused on good operators first and foremost, right, because we're betting on horses is that we are on the race if you will. And so we want to make sure that these are people that sort of they get their own business very, very well. They know their numbers. They know the market and operate businesses as much as we have. I think part of what we do that makes a special in has created an asymmetry for Clark Capital is that we are operators first and then investor second. We're not, Wall Street pros that have been on Wall Street pushing balance sheets and PNLs back and forth. We've actually been building and operating in our own businesses. So we operate under that thesis primarily that it's about the people and it's not us scratching a check, closing our eyes and then beating up operators in a board room. It's really about us, locking arms, and moving forward with these entrepreneurs. So that's a little bit about sort of how we look at, in sort of a broad sense how we look at portfolio companies, that its first about the team and then it's about thesis internally for them, generally, companies that have done, at least five-plus million dollars of EBIDTA. We started where we were looking at companies that were doing a million of EBIDTA, real profits. Now it's sort of that five million and beyond because we've increased our check sizes, but it's really people that get it that, for example, in this Pet IQ company that the Founding Partners, one was the COO of the then publicly-traded Nicholas Companies with Jack, Nicolas the golfer. He had some real experience in public markets in operations and was a real pro. His partner, the now CEO of PET IQ was the CEO of one of the Polaroid licenses. He had been a senior leader in the C suite at Albertson, so they really knew retail. We felt like they had a really good chance of making their business work because they had done it on certain scales and on a very large scale and other businesses. But they were all so scrappy in the sense that they had built other businesses of their own. They had taken their licks. In fact, they had lost real dollars and businesses to what took place in the great recession of 2008. So I think they had some scar tissue that really helped them learn from some of those challenges, and they needed to make this work. I don't think they had options. So today, to look at that business that they took from nothing, essentially, when we joined and started writing checks to where it's a business that will do close to $800 million of sales this year, that speaks volumes of the kind of people the scrappy sort of ditch diggers that we're looking for as part of our portfolio. So we've been industry agnostic, although we've found a real focus in, retail, consumer retail. We have life science within our portfolio because there have been interesting opportunities, but we've been quite opportunistic looking for, overlooked segments of markets like pet health was not a place where dollars institutionally were going. They are now. We've educated the markets a little bit, and they'll continue to invest in pets as a category. But we were really category creators there. And so we look for those opportunities, there are often times overlooked by so many others. So that's a little bit about, the stages, and the domains and kind of business model that we leverage here, at Clarke capital.

Yeah, I want to see sort of, the general health. I mean, this is, their balance sheet and PNL in, sort of a condensed form. If we can look at that and understand sort of the trailing, if it's a business that's been around for a bit, we want to see a trailing 36 on both, PNL and a balance sheet to kind of understand where they've been. I want to see per forms and where they're looking to go and really, where it's about more than just money, right? Everybody's money is the same color. How can we help a business like that? Why would they come to Clark Capital specifically to help them? And how they see us acting is a partner. I think if you talk to the heads of our portfolio companies, by and large, they would say that we've been very, very active and very, very helpful. In fact, for companies like Pedicure Contra, we've been out on the roads in their roadshows, helping them raise capital, allocating our own, co-invest dollars and have participated in almost every follows on. Recently and I'll just give you a sense of a company that we recently acquired. A company called brand lists that were previously a Softbank portfolio company where they had raised and allocated, about $300 million in the span of two years. Well, with some of the challenges that the market had brought to a Softbank buying through, we work and some other things that have been very public. I think they had made a decision to perhaps pull capital and shut down some of those businesses in a very private way and without sharing any of the details beyond that, we were able to buy that business, for a substantially lower number than one might think and was very well collateralized, with all kinds of inventory on the balance sheet at the same time. It had a, prior to them closing their doors had a valuation of about a half a billion dollars and certainly, we were able to buy it substantially lower than and they are now on out in the markets raising dollars for that and we'll look towards opportunities that are in front of us. But that's where we've been able to be successful with struggling businesses, too, and pivot a strategy and, tool them towards some real success. And we saw that with companies like or a company at least like a contour, very, very challenging deal for us, that one drove itself off of a cliff. We had to pick up the pieces, bought it out of receivership, and we see Brand, let's very, very similarly, that there's an opportunity there. But again, back to your question of what we look for in a founder's first email. We really want to see the numbers. We really want to see what a plan is for the future and how we might be helpful. Sometimes we discover that on our own, sometimes our founders leading us towards that. But understand what that plan of forecasting looks like, coupled with what they've already done, what they've been able to do. If it's just a matter of adding money, meaning adding water to a deal. Yeah, we're adding some influence or some relationships, those are the things that we're very, very happy to do. If It's just about dollars by inventory or dollars to see a new customer base. That's really, really interesting for us rather than okay, we're starting from scratch, and we're, hitting the reset button on something. If we can advise in a meaningful way, that becomes a very, very attractive deal for us.