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This is the fourth installment of the season-long SAM Summit Series. During the winter, the program created an ongoing mentor/mentee dialogue between industry leaders and a group of up-and-comers. Monthly conference calls each covered an important management topic, with a pair of advisers sharing their experiences for an hour with the group of 10 participants.

Here, we excerpt parts of the call about capital planning and project management, featuring two folks who have extensive experience in it—Jody Churich, Powdr and Woodward EVP/COO, and Kris Blomback, Pats Peak general manager.

Once again, many thanks to MountainGuard for supporting the program; to our facilitator, Paul Thallner of High Peaks Group; and to Dr. Natalie Ooi of Colorado State University’s graduate Ski Area Management Program for providing follow-up exercises and feedback to the participants.

Paul Thallner: Thanks to Jody and Kris for joining us today on the call and to everyone else for joining us today. This conversation is on capital planning and project management. Two highly related pieces of the puzzle and we’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences for the benefits of our mentees. Could you both share a story of a moment early in your career when you learned an important lesson about project management or capital planning?

Kris Blomback: Sure. I’ll back it up a little bit. When I was a wee young lad I took a political science course and one of the first things I had to do was fill out a form for the first day of school. They asked us to write down what most of your political beliefs were, and what I wrote down was, well, I am a free market capitalist, self-reliant, fiscal conservative, and my family had a pretty strong military background.

The professor gathered up all the pieces of paper and shuffled them around and he came over to me and said, “Mr. Blomback, your charge is going to be to defend communism, state control of the economy, communal living and all those other good things that are the exact opposite of what you believe in.” That was a formative experience because when it comes to capital planning, I think ski areas in general are 800-pound gorillas in their local towns, counties, and for that matter, even states. I know that both Vermont and New Hampshire have tough environmental and regulatory controls on a lot of their projects. What I can say is that that course taught me to anticipate the concerns of other people that may not have the same enthusiasm for a project.

I’ve been fortunate to work for a company that’s pretty aggressive in capital spending to remain competitive in the ski industry. When I first got my role as general manager, I didn’t necessarily apply those lessons learned from that first political science class.

I had a lot of enthusiasm for a particular project to get more water for our snowmaking operation. I probably got a bit of poor advice from a consultant and I ran head first into a buzz saw of opposition for the project. We were also advised by the state agency that we could do a lot of these things without a permit.

What it taught me to do was to step back, slow the process down, punch out a timeline, figure out the pros and cons of a certain project, who is going to be in favor of or against this project, and try and address their concerns in advance of sticking a shovel in the ground or undertaking any sort of project. Those types of things—where people can become your opposition, where groups can become your opposition—can really cause you to start spending a lot of money with lawyers and legal fees, additional studies, and consultants. That was the project that I cut my teeth on.

The second project, when we did a large expansion on the backside of our mountain, was the culmination of bringing all those events together. One thing we did was to hold several open houses, well in advance of cutting even a single branch or tree. We invited the local community to come to our ski area, we had some nice glossy maps on the wall and basically said, “Hey folks, we understand that we’re a big entity shoehorned into a residential area. We want to be a good neighbor, we learned our lesson from the first project. Does anyone have any concerns or issues? Our engineers are here to listen, to understand community thought process.”

I have to say, the second project went off incredibly smooth. I have had people that were actually former opponents come up to me and say, “Thank you very much for being inclusive, thank you very much for listening to the larger community.”

That project faced no hurdles, whereas the first project was like trying to run a marathon in wet concrete. It was expensive, but it was a lesson well learned. We don’t necessarily embark on the same types of projects that Jody would with a lot more resources at her disposal, but for our small, family run ski area it’s a lesson that I thought was prudent to bring to the table. Make sure you do your homework, evaluate what other people are going to think about your project, and try and anticipate some of their concerns going forward.

Paul: Jody, can you share a story from early in your career when you learned a lesson about capital planning or project management?

Jody Churich: I can. Kris, I find your story amazing, because, quite literally today, we’re going in front of an appeal county council for Woodward Park City. I can certainly attest to Kris’ great advice to look at future planning as a long haul and to do your research and homework heading into it.

With this Woodward Park City project, we have spent the past 16 months doing our homework, working through work sessions with the county planning commission, holding homeowner’s associations’ open houses, inviting the public into the work sessions to learn about our project. I believe that preparation and preplanning is crucial.

However, the beaurocracy that happens with local land development is such that there are a lot of neighbors involved and stipulations that come out towards the end of a process. So, we’re facing the same thing as Kris: opposition coming out, and it gets expensive because legal gets involved and persevering becomes challenging. What I can say is that land development is part of growing your business and you have to go into it knowing that it’s a long process and that preplanning is crucial.

I can tell you a few lessons that I learned back earlier in my career and it takes a little bit of a shift. One thing that has been a really valuable piece of advice is that if you have tax laws that take accelerated depreciation, that has been where our company has really doubled down and taken advantage of those opportunities. In a really asset heavy industry such as the ski business, we’ve looked at how we can move the needle during those times of opportunity.

I can tell you, looking back, one of the key capital projects that I had early in my career was when we identified, at one of our smaller resorts, that we were missing a whole demographic of our customer base. Snow play and tubing were a cornerstone of this resort’s business and I noticed that young children didn’t have lift tickets on and were just sitting there digging in the snow. I went to our management and asked why we had these customers that we weren’t serving with a full-fledged experience, and what could we do about that?

So, we took a look into what could move the needle and really strengthen the growth of that business, and we developed a low barrier to entry, customer-facing product. Through the development of a master plan and an investment, we found a whole new division of revenue growth and a whole new customer base at the same time. What’s now called Planet Kids is one-third of Soda Springs’ business.

I think if you can find a brand driver, a differentiator for your business, you can find some light-asset costing products to really create some value for your company. That’s just one example, I have many more, but I will start with that one.

Paul: As I listen to both of your stories I am reminded of some of the challenges getting projects set up, whether they are large or small. The first challenge is understanding what the problem is that you’re trying to solve. Jody, in your case, how do we give all the customers who show up the kind of experience that enables them to have a good time and want to come back. And, of course, the capital projects, providing water for snowmaking equipment and all the pieces that go along with that. There’s a lot of homework that has to happen in order to get people on board, those are all really important pieces of the puzzle. I am thinking about this concept of defining the project. I think, a lot of times, we focus on the big end-result. Creating new snowmaking potential, for instance. How do you break down the problem into manageable pieces so that you’re not paralyzed by the big project or the big challenge? How do you break it down in such a way that it enables you and your team to move forward?

Jody: We think about it in two very different buckets. You have your maintenance and your priorities against what your franchise spends on your maintenance—the things that really hold your business up. The second bucket is really about growth. How can we create growth, or needle movers, if you will, for the company that has areas of high leverage for growth. That’s how we define our priorities in those two realms.

Kris: I’ll take Jody’s comments a little further. I agree you have capital priorities and you also have maintenance. One of the things that’s been impressed upon me by the ownership is the experience, and there’s a lot of capital projects at a ski area that are difficult to assign a conventional return on investment—to work it out on an excel spreadsheet, so to speak. Our ownership firmly believes that you are buying an experience, you are not buying a commodity.

So, there are a lot of things we do at our ski area that I really could not prepare an ROI on, and are more for market retention and experience. One example of that is we built a new plaza area that serves as the main entrance to our facility. It was north of $350,000 to $400,000, and by the time this thing was done it was a gorgeous post and beam clock tower, new granite steps, and all that. When we started this project, I knew that the entrance was a little ratty. But when the ownership asked, “Well, what you do think?” I told them that there was no way I could sit there with a straight face and guarantee that there would be any kind of return on investment for the project, but it feels good. It feels like it was the right thing to do. It turned out that it was one of the better things that we did, because the feedback that we got was that people really loved the new look, the new experience. How it related to ticket sales? I really couldn’t answer that.

Paul: It’s sort of like how you frame the problem is oftentimes how you come up with the solution. Creating an outstanding guest experience enables you to see those opportunities, for example the entrance way needs help, versus let’s squeeze additional revenue out of what we’ve already got.

Keeping with the theme of broadly looking at projects. With any of these large-scale undertakings, I am curious to know how you deal with tradeoffs? The kind of decisions where the end result may end up being not quite how you imagined, or the pathway may not be as straight as you would have hoped. How do you deal with tradeoffs and what is your thinking when you have to give up a little to get a lot?

Jody: Tradeoffs are huge. I will go back to strategy. If you can identify your key consumer needs and wants, it becomes really clear where you can double down or really put your capital against a strategy. It becomes clear when you can say, “Hey, my competitors are excelling in this part of the experience. Can I double down and create growth or value for my company in that area? Or is that an area where I should not be in an arms race for?”

If you can identify what is most important to your consumer, then you can build strategy around it and those tradeoffs start to fall off. You can decide to put in bubble six packs, or our company may be better positioned to excel in other parts of the skier experience. It’s worth the trade off to spend the time to figure out the right strategy. You need to determine what the key attributes of your strategy are going to be so you’re not just always trying to keep up with the Joneses.

Kris: Keeping up with the Joneses is tough. It’s always a tough little arms race in New England and I am sure it’s the same for Jody out in Utah and California. We’re a very capital-intensive business and the tradeoffs are significant in terms of what you’re trying to accomplish, and it’s not an exact science all the time.

Paul: I’ll come back to this in a little bit, but I do want to make a bit of a transition from talking about the projects themselves to talking about the teams. The folks that comprise these project teams and that are necessary to pull these big projects off. A lot of the mentees on the phone are recently elevated into leadership positions or have a few projects under their belts and are looking for more. I am curious to know, from your perspective watching other people lead projects, what do you typically notice about the role of successful project leaders or managers? What are some of the characteristics you notice in people who really hit the ball out of the park?

Jody: I can jump in because we just came off a really significant project with a license partner for Woodward, building Woodward Riviera Maya. Although it’s a step away from the ski industry, it still falls into the same type of scenario.

When you’re working with a second partner, especially not your home crew, the role of the project manager is extremely critical. I had the same experience when we built Woodward Tahoe at Boreal. You have to have a bridge between your general contractor and your operating team because your team already has their day job, and then you add a big capital project onto it and it can be like a second job for them. What I think we in the industry have fallen prey to is spreading our teams really, really thin.

So I think it’s crucial to have a project manager overseeing each project and having a regimented financial budget, timeline, and scope of work so that all parties are communicating against the same exact plan. What tends to happen with every big capital project is there are curveballs and there are times when you’ll have to cut parts of your project out for efficiencies or you’ll have to double down in different areas. So, when I look for successful people, organization skills and attention to detail are the things that come to the top when I am looking for a project manager.

Kris: As a project manager I will echo what Jody just said. Sometimes we can spread ourselves a bit thin, but unfortunately that’s also part of our seasonal business. It’s boom and bust. Your staff gets spread real thin in the fall and they retract a bit in the summer to catch their breath.

As a general manager in the industry, I am always looking internally for problem solvers. I think most general managers or CEOs are acutely aware of all the issues plaguing the company. We’re looking for problem solvers.

Sometimes I think there’s a sign on my desk that says, “Dump your garbage here.” I try and stop people when they do that and ask, “What have you got constructively to bring forward? I am aware that XYZ is falling a bit short, what’s your solution?” I am always looking for folks who come into my office with an issue, but they’ve got solutions as well. We’ll talk about some of those solutions, and gradually that person will start earning credits with me, if you will.

Usually it will start out as a small project, work its way up to a medium project. The biggest thing that I care about when I am looking at project managers to lead a capital expansion is basically owning it and showing up. When I say that, I am talking about people who take all aspects of the operation into consideration, and when they make a mistake—which is going to happen, because they’re human beings—I don’t want them shirking from the responsibility. I want them to own it and make sure that they have learned from it.

We’ve got a saying at our resort, “Scoring the Touchdown.” Anyone can make a play, but can you bring it across the line for the touchdown and really do well with it. Taking full control of the project, making sure that things don’t go awry, and if they do, that you’re not blaming other people. You sit there and you take the heat. I can assure you that you’ll get far less heat from me if you step up and own it than if you try and hide it. Step up and own the project and any issues that arise from it, and that’s what I’m looking for in my project managers.

Paul: I know some of the questions I have been getting in are along the lines of, “So, how do you know?” Giving people an opportunity is not strictly role based, i.e., this person is in this particular role, therefore he or she gets the next shot at an opportunity. There are always intangible factors that signal to you that a person is ready for even a small project.

Beyond being a problem solver, what do you look for in folks early in their careers that signals to you that this person may be in the pipeline to be ready for more significant challenges?

Jody: I would say some of the key areas around that would be how they manage a budget, how they communicate, how well they plan. A big part of project management is the pre-planning, and it takes time. Are they capable of working with multiple entities at the same time? All of those things are really crucial. If you have people who are big visionaries but are perhaps less detail oriented, they probably wouldn’t roll to the top for me as a project manager. I am looking for people who can see the big picture and boil it down to steps and process. I think process is huge in project management.

Paul: Do you typically hire for those skills or develop them internally?

Jody: That’s a really good question. I think leadership in general varies from business to business. In general, the operations side is where we’ve typically seen that type of project management person come from. As far as having a disciplined program around it, for us it’s more training in the field. However, I do think that’s a really important area to focus on as far as leadership training goes.

Kris: We like to hire on attitude before anything.

If you break down a project, I would say 9 times out of 10, the root cause of a project going awry is miscommunication. We look for project leaders that have a mastery of communication and the directors that sit at our senior team level do a very good job of that. It’s very important to communicate your thought process, especially when you’re working with other departments because communication is the lubrication that makes everything work well. If you’re a poor communicator or if you make a lot of assumptions, that can get you into the weeds really quick.

To dovetail that with a little bit of what we do at our ski area: A number of years ago, we were looking at our operations staff and, let’s face it, the ski business is a seasonal business, entry level jobs don’t pay a lot of money, and there’s a lot of turnover. So, when a staff member comes back for year two, year three—that person is, in general, showing a commitment to your organization. You should be doing an assessment on that person in terms of evaluating if they can be a supervisor or a manager.

An eye-opening moment a few years back was that we were setting these staff members up for failure when promoting them because we were not giving them the tools to be successful. If you were working in lodge maintenance and you are working with your fellow employees, and the next season you are promoted to supervisor but haven’t been given the schooling or the tooling to learn how to interact with people, well. Again, it goes back to communication. How do you speak to employees? How do you frame issues that you want to deal with?

So, we set up an HR boot camp that we do every fall. We bring in Laura Moriarty from Tahoe Training Partners and she does a three-day workshop with our staff. The feedback that we’ve gotten is incredible. Our staff has gotten a lot out of it, such as skills to deal with difficult situations and how to communicate effectively.

When they’re encountering a difficult situation, even to this day, however many years I’ve been in a management position, I still get presented with difficult situations where I have to step back and say, “Alright, I got a difficult conversation coming up, how do I want to handle this?” Sometimes I have to sleep on it overnight to decide how I want to handle it, but that’s where we’re at.

Paul: That’s really interesting. The mentees will know that during the three previous calls, themes are emerging about the hard skills and the soft skills. Whether it’s leading a project as a whole, or leading a ski area, or any of those things, so it’s great that each of you talked about both hard and soft skills.

There has to be some practical core competencies, but then also the art of communication with folks, building credibility with team members and the rest of the organization, not being afraid to call people out, or have those challenging conversations, which many people actively avoid in their worlds. So, it’s really interesting for me to hear this theme of the hard skills and the soft skills coming together once again.

Moving on, I wanted to ask a little bit about some of the nuts and bolts as we dive a little bit deeper into the practical side. Kris, you mentioned communication. Are there some best practices or other things that you’ve noticed that distinguish good project managers from great ones?

Kris: I am a big advocate of email. I ask a lot of our directors in our company to give us a five-minute recap at the end of the day. Take a breath, take some time, decompress and say, “Alright, I need this, or I need that.”

I would also say along that line of communication, your documentation of everything is key. So if you have issues, you can reference that. But I will stress that the most important aspect of communication is as soon as you detect the slightest bit of a hiccup in the process, stop the email and contact the person you may be having an issue with and work out your issues face-to-face. I see it on social media, I see it on emails, and I see it in texts—you miss the body language of communication and it can lead to misunderstanding. My advice is to stop with the emails in difficult situations and discuss the situation face to face, because otherwise it can take on a life of its own.

Paul: I think many of us have been burned by email, not being able to pick up the subtle nuances of conversations. Email is great for informing and scheduling in a lot of ways, but nothing beats a face to face conversation to convey a lot quickly. Jody, what best practices have you noticed, or would you share with the mentees?

Jody: Having the right temperament is a critical quality. I would say for best practices, really setting the roadmap at the beginning of the project. The focus and alignment of all the key stakeholders at the beginning of the project is crucial.

So how I look at each project is: what are the short term, midterm and long-term planning goals? It sounds very process-oriented, but you need to set your milestones and your key priorities. Once you’ve set your key priorities, you need to set your check-in points and your pain points, and make sure that you’re overcoming them and not ignoring them. And then it just becomes executional and tactical at that point.

I will put an asterisk because in project management, things always come up that you can’t plan for, which is where value engineering starts to take effect. As long as you start your project with clear focus and alignment, you can start to come up with solutions and mitigate those issues pretty quickly if you’re all starting on the same page.

Paul: Sometimes those little things that start off small, and if you’re not careful and if folks aren’t all on the same page, they can snowball. With that in mind, we talked about the beginning of certain projects, and then the execution phase is dependent on the complexity of the project being done. How do you close out a project effectively?

Jody: We go as far as, obviously you wrap your marketing around it, you set your project out in motion, we have check-in points as far as how is it moving the needle, how is it being received by the market. There are certainly metrics that we revisit and make sure we’re still on track. So, we certainly circle back to see if the strategy is working or do we need to turn the dials and modify.

Kris: There are a lot of variables that go into measuring the success of a project when it’s complete, especially with the variability of weather. But usually once a project is complete, we’ll decompress and figure out what worked and didn’t work so we can learn from the experience moving forward. We’ll do a little Monday-morning quarterbacking at the end of ski season and say, “Well, how did that work out for us?”

Paul: Great. More than just ROI, but asking how this went, as a team, asking how we performed, how we could perform better as a team, or as an organization, if it’s a bigger project. All great questions to ask, because there are so many levels and layers to project success beyond just getting it done. So, asking those questions at project completion will only help the next one run more smoothly.

We have a question from mentee Brandon Swartz: “For a department that cannot effectively drive revenue, because it is operations based, it can be hard to get funding for a capital project because it is difficult to map out ROI. For example, those projects that focus on guest or employee experience at a lift station. How do I get these projects to be more in the limelight?”

Jody: It goes back to what Kris said, if a main value of your company is guest experience, you need to articulate your project in such a way that explains how the guest experience will be improved. At our company, guest experience is ranked very high as it relates to thoughtful capital planning, and I think Kris and his resort do this too.

So, I think it’s important to clearly think through your strategy around why this would be a game changer for your company, what are the levers that we can pull, can we market that we’re improving our service in a certain way. If you just come with, “Hey, I have an idea for a new lift maze.” That’s not enough. But if you think through your strategy and the guest experience, I would welcome those types of proposals.

Kris: Every spring our directors get together. So once April rolls around, any director can bring forward any project, and since this meeting is like clockwork, the goal is that they spend the season looking to their employees for ideas for capital review. We say that the sky is the limit, ask for anything. But what you have to do is justify and explain why your project takes precedence over another project.

So, come April we’ll probably have $2.5 to $3 million in projects, and once we balance the cash flow for the upcoming spring, summer, and fall, we can say OK, we feel comfortable that ownership is going to give us $1 million for capital projects and we have $2.5 million in proposals. We have to go to each director and they are tasked with justifying why their project should receive funding. We don’t necessarily look at it from an operations basis, or if it’s the rental shop or new ski school uniforms, or whatever, every project is equally weighed and debated.

Sometimes after the directors hear the overall concerns of the company, they do a little bit of horse-trading behind the scenes. They’ll say, “Maybe this project can wait a few years,” and we whittle it down to a number we can present to ownership and have them throw their holy water on it.

It’s a difficult and capital-intensive process and capital-intensive business. And when you throw the weather into it, unfortunately, it’s the nature of the industry when you start having ski seasons like we’re having on the East Coast this year dealing with extreme cold, capital expenses are the first ones to go out the door. My magic wish list of $3 million of capital expenses is dwindling quickly because I’ve got my burdens that I’ve got to pay, which is my payroll, health insurance, property taxes—all of the non-glamorous stuff that makes the business tick. When winters like these occur, we just add the projects to a wish list and sometimes they take a couple-three years to get to the top of the list and sometimes they fall off because something better comes along.

I would just say, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. Do your homework as to why you think this project should be funded, and if you do your homework you might be surprised. It probably won’t be right away, but I promise, we’re listening, we’re watching.

Paul: This is a really good segue to another question from mentee Nate Ellis: “When it comes to capital projects, what tactics do you use to keep projects staying within the larger resort plans and avoid projects that enhance things, but don’t stay within the overall resort plan?”

Jody: For us at Powdr, we ladder up our overarching projects to our strategy. Business strategy sets the template, and we’re focused on what is going to ladder up and be a credo to that strategy. Because what can happen is if you start with one-off projects tactically, it doesn’t ladder up to the greater growth goal. So, we like to make sure that our business plan—our business strategy—is what’s driving those decisions, which is built by looking at your areas of focus. So, creating your business strategy around the areas that you want to grow or show improvement in, really has to ladder out to your capital projects and plans.

Paul: Can you share an example of how a project can connect to the larger strategy?

Jody: Sure. One overall strategy for Powdr is youth development, so a lot of our thought is how Woodward can play a bigger part in our resorts. Woodward Tahoe is an example of how a capital investment connects to overall strategy in that it’s focused on connecting the resort to youth at Boreal. It’s also progression based, and Boreal’s overall business strategy is focused on learn-to and progression. So not only are we able to connect to Powdr Corp’s overall business strategy, which is youth development, but we are also pivoting against the local resort’s business strategy of learn-to and progression. A big capital expenditure, like a Woodward Tahoe, meets those business goals.

Kris: I think Nate brings up a very good question about how you stay focused. I will circle back to our roundtable of directors and what we do in the spring. There are some pretty strong egos at that table, and that’s both a good thing and a bad thing at points. Sometimes it will circle back and be hauled back in if it doesn’t pass the sniff test, if you will, as to whether or not it’s a core mission statement as to what we are as a company. For instance, we’ve had some projects proposed over the years that collapse under their own weight because they don’t advance what we’ve been trying to do over the years.

Paul: Another question from Nate, “Where does capital funding come from? Where do you typically get it, since it obviously doesn’t just show up out of the ether?”

Jody: I mentioned it at the top of the call that we’re in an aggressive accelerated depreciation right now. Every company is in a different position, whether they’re in one like we’re in right now where they go out and take out lines of credit, or whether they ferment it in-house through profitability. How you create your funding depends on how big your company is or not, but generally your working capital is coming from money your borrowing or money you’re creating on your own from your operations or profitability.

Paul: Sometimes, as Kris was saying, that money tree is a little more fruitful in some years than others. Sometimes the lending environment is not the most predictable with interest rates that impact fundability. I want to take a minute to think of a time in your past, when you were a bit greener in your careers, that was a key turning point for you that really helped or gave you a lesson that you would like to impart back to our mentees.

Jody: I can say that being willing to take a risk, uh, carefully, is one of the biggest “ah ha” moments for me. Big, big projects are expensive, as I am sure you can all imagine. But being creative and looking for the less-than-obvious opportunities for me has been career-defining.

In the example I brought up earlier today, Planet Kids at Soda Springs was not the obvious capital expense, it was created out of a vision. I think those are the critical moments when you are willing to double down on an opportunity that you have created with your team and with your market. I would say that Woodward Tahoe was also a pretty big risk. It was new in the region, it was new to the ski industry and it came with a reasonably high price tag, but it was a needle mover for the company. At the time of inception you really don’t know, but being willing to take that risk and be visionary is where I’ve seen the biggest payoff.

Kris: I would say, slow the process down a little bit. When I was a younger manager it was a Chinese fire drill when I first became GM. Like a lot of others who have been promoted in this business, there was no textbook. I didn’t have a strong mentor above me at the time. I was an old lift mechanic from way back, and when the owner threw me the keys he said, “Good luck fixing people.”

Paul: My goodness!

Kris: I know, right!?! It took me a few years to get to the point where I had the patience to slow things down and think through the process, whether it’s project management, HR, cash flow—it’s always something coming at you and you have to learn to not take things personally and you have to be able to step back from the fire and take a large view.

Whether you’re in management or you’re doing project management or capital planning, step back, slow the process down a little bit, look at all aspects of how this project could go, and have the confidence to do it. Somebody has seen something in you guys that they want to nourish and ensure it flourishes. Someone has confidence in you as a manager and I hope that you have the confidence to step back, take it slow, understand where the company is going, and get the project to where it’s going.

Paul: Enjoy the ride.

Kris: Exactly.