I have a very strange background. I have an undergraduate degree in acting, and I have a law degree. I spent the 1st 10 years of my career in a direct selling environment. I would call on lawyers and law firms across the United States, selling them various things for my employer, and one of the things that we branched into was to sell marketing services & website development services. I became fairly knowledgeable about digital marketing and digital services early on in the development of that sort of market. This was late 1999 early 2000, so I've been involved in that for quite some time. I actually built my first website in 1997 which was also pretty foundational to my understanding of how the Web works and, the types of business that you can drive from having on Internet presence. Back in those days, a lot of dollars were flowing out of channels that had worked previously, like the Yellow Pages, right telephone directories for big places, especially for law firms to spend money and generate clients would say that was pretty foundational to my development. So, over the years from there, from being a sales person, I became fairly knowledgeable about the concept of search engine optimization or SEO. I moved into a corporate role in-house with that same business that was selling websites to law firms. The SEO team so became the first leader of that internal search engine optimization team. Um, so from sort of be to be on the SEO side, over time I wound up joining Sears and expanded my purview into more of an e commerce B2C, retail environment and took on a lot of paid paid channels as well. So I expanded the footprint from being more of a B2B guy into more of a full stack digital marketing.

Yeah, so I lied. Three major functions at a company called Kourou Footwear were a direct to consumer e commerce brand that creates shoes that help eliminate foot pain for people across primarily the United States. But we do have customers worldwide. We've been in business for over 10 years now, so I just joined the firm in October of last year. On the three team functions that I lead, marketing is the primary one. So how many people find us and buy from us? I'm along the way. There's the conversion journey, So I also lied to get commerce function there. So all of our website improvements, site stability, side speed plate conversion rates, all of those issues sort of fall under my my team. And then I recently took on, um, we have a fairly robust call center operation where we deal with customers who prefer to call in and ask questions or engage with us and chant or have customer service concerns via social media. So all of that sort of rules to be as well today, um, in today's day and answer is really no business travel at all, which is great, and it blessing and a curse. Um, and we have been working from home very consistently since the arrival of Kobe in 19. So we're, um, fairly remote at this point, although we all sort of do miss being in the office together and those serendipitous moments of inspiration or collaborate.

I would say that. So the primary challenge is really, um, I'll say this most direct to consumer announcement most There are variations of direct to consumer businesses that have a growth at all costs. Mindset, right? Those tend to be funded by venture capital backers, and the whole goal is to get as big as you possibly can cause there's an exit strategy, right? Were primarily self funded, and so profit is a primary goal and objective of ours. And so understanding the piano in the way that all of the different drivers of the business affect the various pieces of the piano. And how that all results in an income statement or profit within a given period, and further understanding how each of the marketing channels where we spend money where the activities that are actually driving results. So I think, especially when you're primarily digital, is we are It is tempting to try to learn from others who have come before, right. If you do very much investigation, research, learning, listening, you'll come to find out that many, many, many director consumer businesses leave very heavily on social right. Instagram is a primary discovery engine for so many different brands, right? It doesn't work for us because of the nature of the product that we create. We target instead things there may be a step further up the funnel. It's not about a spark of inspiration for you as a consumer that these shoes are the coolest things in the world. The shoes are specifically does not a physical problem. And so we tend to do much better at targeting key words and phrases that our people are doing research to find out. What do I have? What is how do I self diagnose for this problem? What are the ways that I can eliminate this pain? It's just it's debilitating and I don't know how to deal with this right now. It's going we prevent. This is an option to sort of bring them down the phone. But understanding where paid social fits and paid search, pitch and shopping, engine fits and SDO fits. We have a very balanced, um, mix of traffic that hits our website at any given period of time, Um and so understanding the where those levers are what the big dollars that we can spend to try and break out of the what's been the no historical norms for us. Let's say attribution is really one of the bigger challenges of understanding, you know? So we literally just completed a test last week where we turned all paid social, offered to fix. What was the impact of the business? How did it affect how many people visit our Web state through a direct type in traffic or nest CEO, after a branded search and understanding, the way all these channels work together is really critical for me and for all of us inside of crude.