It's great to be with everyone and a great opportunity Thio to share some of my story with you. I, uh I started out like, probably many of you, which is I actually picked a a major in in, uh, in the university that I was weak at as, ah, in my high school days, which was English, just communication in general. So I actually became an English major on and graduated successfully is an English majors, and, uh, and always had a vision of going on and getting a master's degree in business. And so I I pursued a master's degree in business from Brigham Young University and and graduated from their program on while I was in that program. I I was very fortunate and was hired on at a small software company called Power Quest. And as part of that experience wore many hats. As you do in a startup. They hired me as a product manager, even though I knew nothing about product. I built the original website. I did their press releases. I wrote some of the marketing and documentation materials, so I think right off the bat, my career started out, you know, really Well, because I got thrown into a lot of different responsibilities, Had to stretch myself very rapidly. Uh, you know, in a lot of different skill areas, uh, in that product and marketing arena. And so I was very fortunate. I rose due to just, you know, a lot of hard work and a lot of good mentoring from my boss, John Christensen at the time who mentored me. I was able to rise quickly in that company. Uh, and so just I think I was very fortunate getting promotions, you know, you have to director level and then vice president level. And, you know, I think I got confident that I knew what I was doing was leading larger teams of 40 50 people within, you know, just a few years of joining on, then about, I don't know, six or seven years into my journey, the company ran into a little bit tougher financial times because of, uh, some of the dot com and and other things. So we hired a now outside CEO that from IBM on and also a very experienced, uh, engineering and product person from HP General manager. And what I realized early on is that I knew nothing. I thought I knew a lot growing rapidly in this company and leading teams. But I realized very quickly how much I didn't know, and I was very, very grateful on my biggest lesson. And the and I attribute most of my success and the rest of my career to these two gentlemen, Paul Win and Don Kleinschmidt, too, who mentored me in a way that showed me really what it takes to think strategically. Thio understand how to build things at scale on just so many different lessons of of product management, good leadership skills. I was benefiting from dozens of years that they had from IBM. Paul Win was Seasons executive from IBM and had run multiple companies. Don clients Nets had had done the same was a general manager at HP. But what I learned early on in my career is that if you can find some mentors that are powerful, that really have strong riel world experience that have have achieved great results in their career, not just philosophy. I've worked for a lot of leaders who, philosophically or very smart on DTA talk a great talk, but they don't know how to execute at all. These two leaders knew how to execute. They were very strategic. So they shaped my career. They completely transformed the way I thought about the rest of my career and from there went on to multiple other positions at different software companies. Toe where I am today, a za cto of O. C. Tanner. So you know, just quickly, you know, from from that startup we were acquired by a large company called Symantec that merged with another company called Veritas. From there, I worked for another smaller company that had just been acquired by AMC called Mosey Eso. I had some great experience at Mosey, and then from Mosey, I went to see a technologies. Uh, the other thing that's attributed that can attribute to success in my career is that I haven't worked for just one company. I've worked for a few companies. I've been very fortunate because I haven't had to change jobs more than three or four times in my whole career. But yet I've worked for what seems like eight or nine companies because of different acquisitions and mergers and sell off. So my division at C. A was sold off into a private to a private equity company. Very different learning experience. I was traveling extensively, not seeing my family a lot. And so that's what I finally did, as I find accepted a job in Salt Lake City with O. C. Tanner to get a little bit more stability in my family life, uh, and Thio apply everything I had learned at the tech companies to O. C. Tanner. So that's Ah, in a very, very short, you know nutshell. I think if I had to sum it up, you know, get get a broad array of experience, have some great mentors in your career and continue to learn Andi have a voracious appetite for for learning and especially learning different disciplines. Reading a lot of material become the best of what you dio on. That's I think you probably heard that many times, but it's true eso Hopefully that that's that's kind of a little bit of a summary of my of my 25 plus your career in in a in a couple of minutes.

so the responsibilities My current responsibilities at O C. Tanner include really R. O. C. Tanner is a very diverse company. We have we manufacture symbolic awards for to recognize employees, years of service anniversaries as well as different recognition events within companies. Eso we have ah whole manufacturing division of our company, which has has been around since Really, uh, in the beginning of the 19 hundreds were a 90 year old company. And then in 2000, we started branching into software and building recognition software platforms. So my responsibility is leading the group that builds on supports, if you will. This, you know, really defining what it is through our product efforts, our product management efforts and then our engineering side building those solutions. So I'm prime primarily responsible for product you product strategy, our user experience team as well. A czar, our engineering team or software engineering teams so very different than than some of the other parts of O. C. Tanner. So that is my My responsibility is to ensure that that we're understanding the problems of our clients very carefully and we're building solutions to address those onda. Hopefully you know their solutions that they're willing to pay for. They're pervasive in the market. Um, you know those air and solve a really hard problem for them? Eso You know, when I think of my my top priorities, you know, I would say my my top priority is to ensure, uh, you know that we hire and retain great talent because success at any company really is derived from from having great talent in the organization. And so I I view my top responsibility of maintaining those relationships with, you know, and building upon the great people. Resource is that we have in O. C. Tanner. So that's that's priority number one hiring great people on den, ensuring that we have a great culture. Eso that folks want to be part of O. C. Tanner. We have a great legacy at O c. Tanner for people from for people staying, uh, you know, for long periods of time. And I certainly want to build on that legacy. Even though the tech space is typically known for high turnover, we're trying to really focus on our people, make sure that they have good life work, balance eso That's priority number one. I would say you know priority number two is ensuring that we can differentiate ourselves in the marketplace view as my responsibilities, chief technology officer, over a product and engineering. We need to deliver solutions that are unique in the market that help us compete effectively in a global market. Okay. And so I spent a lot of my time in a strategizing working with our teams to understand what, uh, how we're building what we're building. So we think of things kind of in three horizons we took. We take a model from that was developed years ago from HP called the Three Horizon Model. You know, So we kind of segment are everything we do, uh, into three horizons Horizon. One is we extend and defend our current capabilities, like, you know, basically iterating on our current products, making sure that our customers are happy with the product horizon two were working, and that's where you put about 80. Maybe 75. 80% of your engineering resource is horizon to Are those things that air Probably the next revenue generators for the company that there may be just a year or two away from really starting to take off. Uh, you know their high potential products that you've been working on or solutions. And so we spend you know, 15 or 20% of our engineering resource is on those on those efforts. We try to identify those they need to be differentiating. They need Thio Thio help Define O. C. Tanner long into the future. And the horizon three is that playground where you can experiment with Maybe, you know, 5% of your R and d resource is or even, you know, less orm or depending on how aggressive you wanna be to really go after. Maybe Cem Super cutting edge areas that might, you know, revolutionized the company in the future. It's more that risky innovation playground where most ideas will fail. But if you can hit on one or two, that is great. It could be the next revenue generator or the next, uh, you know, definition for the company long into the future. So so that that's really the second big thing that that I think about is how do we differentiate? Uh and then the third thing, uh, you know, as I just think about this kind of on my feet here, the third thing is. You know how doe I How do I help our organization, uh, achieve efficiency at scale? I think one of I think one of the things that I try to focus on and I have tried to focus on in my career is how to bring order to chaos. How to bring good, consistent, continuous improvement into the organization. And so, my I really focus a lot with my teams on ensuring we have good good practices and really good principles that we're driving towards. What outcomes do we really look? Are we looking to achieve and are we making progress towards us? Do we have good measurements in place that it helps us identify good, continuous improvement on DSO? As I look across, you know, those air in a very in a very rough way. Those air kind of three kind of big things that I think about in my position on lastly what? What? One of the weekly work hours like? Ah, you know, rarely do I work 40 hours a week. Um, you know, maybe a couple of weeks a year, I work 40 hours a week. Uh, in in most weeks, it's between 50 and 60 hours a week. Andi, I would say that largely that self imposed. I am very passionate about what I dio. I guess I consider myself a little bit of ah, you know, addicted toe work. A. Sometimes that's not always healthy for for my family, but But, you know, it's important to understand who we are As individuals on DSO, I often find myself working 50 to 60 hours a week, uh, doing what I dio and, uh, and loving it a same time, you know, working through lots of big challenges in the positions that were in so eso, That's I'd say I'd say I, on average 50 hours a week, is where I'm at.

Yeah, in this particular job. Uh, I think one of the challenges you know that we've worked on at O. C. Tanner is, uh is we saw a problem in that large clients were asking us to develop a lot of unique capabilities that were unique just to them, as opposed to, you know, the broader set of clients on what this has what this resulted in over a long period of time is kind of becoming almost order takers almost like a custom engineering shop. And over time, it's not a sustainable model. You can sustain it for quite some time doing that where you're building and one offs for for clients. But over time, it's very difficult to have a product that is has broad market appeal and that, architecturally, could be sustained with so many different, unique custom pieces of development. And so one of the big challenges coming into O. C. Tanner is is having a product that had been built over the course of 20 years, 15 20 years, and it was very complex, very difficult to test from a Q a perspective because of so many different configurations and so many different nuances. Uh, and so one of the big jobs that that we've been working on it, O. C. Tanner, is how do we standardize? How do we How do we deliver capabilities that the mat that the majority of our clients want instead of just one or two clients want and really focusing our engineering efforts on building those capabilities and building them robustly and on a new architectures and new framework so that we can, uh, scale and run much faster in the future in developing innovation? Because what happened with all the custom one offices, most of our roadmap was consumed with chasing these one or two features for one or two clients. Now our road map has shifted into developing differentiation and solutions that air benefiting the majority of our clients. And so that's been a big challenge. And we're continuing to work through that, uh, and approaches. You know, I think I've mentioned there in overcoming those which is it's really saying no thio some of these one off requests and we've kind of had to rethink at the at the company how we when we talk to these large clients, how we tell them No, you know, we can't develop this for you specifically, This is how we're going to develop it and it's gonna benefit all of our clients. This will, you know, ultimately, you tell them this is going to benefit you in the long run. Eso that's been a you know, that's been one of the journeys that we've been on, but it's it's challenging when there's a lot of history and DNA in the company. Uh, you know, moving into kind of a different way of thinking, saying no more often and then building, you know, for a broader set of clients. Uh, so, you know, like I said, I think specific. If I looked at specific examples, I think I've shared some, but but really it would it would literally be, you know, one large client coming to us and saying, We've gotta have this feature. And so when I first came to O. C. Tanner, it seemed like our roadmap was full of Hey, we're developing a feature for X y Z Bank or X y Z Chemical Company, or X Y Z. You know, different company, and we're developing it for just that company. They could. They were the only ones that could use that feature. And, uh, you know, you could see a lot of problems emerging from that. And so that's how we that's how we've turned it around. I think in the last five years I'm happy to say that we very, very rarely do anything now that's unique to one client. If we have a large customer that comes to us and ask for something, we step back and we look at how can we build that in a sound architectural way that benefits all of our clients? And if we can't do that, we almost always say no now So that's one example. I think Steve Jobs was a great example to me of someone who knew how to say no a lot. I think he's famous for saying that, and I I agree with that. I think you've got to pick your battles very, very carefully in the workplace and go after those strategic items