Ben Frank, Founder at Rotabull

David Litwak:
Hello, everyone. Thanks for joining us today for how I got here focus wire and Moses podcast about travel and transportation. Today with us is Ben Frank from rotable. rotable was founded in 2019, and is the easiest way to sell aircraft parts. I’ll let Ben elaborate a little bit more on what that means. But thanks for joining us, Ben.

Ben Frank:
Of course, thanks for having me. So,

David Litwak:
we like to start every episode, every episode with the same question. So you know, let’s start by having you tell us how you got here.

Ben Frank:
Sure, and so it’s give the short version, which is, you know, we work in aviation software broadly, it’s not something that everybody’s super familiar with. But I had studied this in university or something, I guess, as close as you can to aviation software, that it’s actually a major. So I went to engineering school, studied aerospace engineering. You know, I wasn’t one of those kids who wanted to, to necessarily be a pilot or an astronaut from, you know, from when they were in the crib. But I, you know, had some interest with it, some interest in it, in high school and college and knew I wanted to be an engineer and more broadly, found myself kind of in the plane world and really enjoyed it, did a few internships, did a job after college, in, in actual aircraft engineering and airline consulting. So I had some experience in the industry. And, you know, I think after a few years doing that I knew I wanted to work in, in aerospace. But I, you know, wanted to be in New York, which is, which is where I live where my family lives, rather than traveling around all the time and being consultant. And that kind of led me to start my own thing with, with a classmate from university, who’s now my business partner who I’ve known for about 10 years. And when we started out, we were actually doing a different aviation software business. So, David, we’ve actually talked about this. But there was another business called sere, which, you know, we can get more into this later, but essentially sold aircraft usage data, something that’s not really relevant to rotable anymore, but was an interesting business in its own right. And that’s how we got started. And about two years in it kind of morphed, morphed itself and roadable, as it currently exists kind of came into existence, we changed from a data product to more of a SaaS product. And you know that that’s where we’ve been at for the past two years is kind of just growing the SAS product that’s, that’s targeted specifically at the aircraft aftermarket. So it’s everything about the way that aircraft are maintained, and the way that airlines source parts and repairs in order to keep them flying. And we, you know, we aim to be the backbone of that ecosystem. So, you know, we started out we were two people now we’re about 14. And you know, nothing is we haven’t created yet. So I think that takes us to watch I shouldn’t say that now that Coronavirus has happened but that’s kind of takes us to today in my mind.

David Litwak:
His he also wanted to delve in you mentioned CRM remember that that’s about when we met? And if I’m mistaken, you are selling a lot of that data to major financial institutions? I’ll say, and I’m curious kind of you started with the data play move to SAS tell us a little bit about that transition?

Ben Frank:
Yeah, it seems totally out of left field. When I when I say it now, you know, it didn’t feel that way. Because it was incremental, the way it happened. When we started out, we actually had an idea. We wanted to, to make software that reduced waste in the aftermarket. So we saw manufacturers, airframe manufacturers, in the fixed wing and helicopter world, who were, you know, they don’t just produce planes, they produce spare parts also for a lot of their for their planes. And you know, they had massive amounts of inventory piles of parts sitting around, but still, you know, had trouble getting these parts to the right operators are in reasonable amounts of time. In reasonable service level, 714 days, whatever it is. So they’re spending a ton of money on the aftermarket, but still not really making their customers happy, and not making as much money as I could. And so we have this idea that, okay, we could do something around stocking strategy, and we could build this beautiful system to try to help manufacturers optimize what kinds of parts they were going to make and who they were going to supply them to and where they should stock them. As it turns out, that product was just totally not something anyone needed or wasn’t really specific enough, I guess you could say. It was it was a beautiful idea, like I said, but it just, you know, I think he was trying to do too many things and didn’t have a clear enough target user. And so we sold zero copies of that. No one ever bought it, no one ever even came close to buying it. But in order to, on the road to making that we collected a bunch of datasets that we thought were gonna allow us to make this model of spare Park demand. And one of those data sets was aircraft usage, you know, where are craft going? When are they going in for maintenance? When are they flying more or less, you know, what airports were they sleeping overnight, those kinds of things. And we, we had this very authoritative, very clean data set of what all these aircraft were doing. And it turns out that even though the product was not the end product was not saleable. This data set was very interesting to a lot of people. And so we ended up finding customers for this data set itself in insurance companies who were looking to track their their asset, portfolios, investors who were looking to track things that, you know, they might invest in other examples, operators who just have their fleet and want to know, where is it maintenance companies who wanted to know? Okay, who was who were the aircraft that are coming to my airport, who can I sell my services to? So you know, that that was really the data play. And I think, the way that turned into roadable, like I said, it’s kind of gradual. We, you know, after a few years, we kind of said, there’s customers for this. But there’s also a lot of competitors offering this, this is probably not a great long term business for us to be in for the next 20 years. And this data is getting more and more commodity just as a data product. And there’s a lot more we can do if we try to reimagine the original vision here and take another stab at it. And so rotable kind of was the second attempt at that original, that original product, but like a little bit more specific, you know, just did one thing for one small group of people. I think that’s why it was, I’d like to think maybe that’s why it was more

David Litwak:
successful. Can we can we delve a little bit more into kind of what rotable isn’t? So it’s like, it’s basically an aircraft parts. marketplace, right? So you talk about the aftermarket little bit here. So if I’m, I this is me guessing here, as I think I’m as naive as maybe some of our other listeners are, I assume that means after a plane has been sold the market for all the parts to then replace things on the plane is that what aftermarket is?

Ben Frank:
Exactly. So you know, you buy in a 320, or you lease a 320, or whatever it is, you know, you’re going to spend, let’s call it a million dollars a year, and just, you know, parts, whatever. Maintenance and inspections and new bearings and new seatback screens, when a kid punches a pencil through the back of the seat back, whatever it is, right? You’re going to need lots of things. And and that’s like what I’m calling the aftermarket. So roadable is a system for sellers in the aftermarket. These are distributors manufacturers repair shops, to to get their goods to the airlines with, you know, with less pain, I guess you could say

Kevin May:
and hype and how, how has that done before

Ben Frank:
with a lot of a lot of paperwork, a lot of faxes, a lot of blood, sweat and tears. You know, it’s sort of one of those very cool niches that still kind of kind of ran, you know, like, it’s the same way that it did in in, you know, in 1992, or whatever. If I’m Delta, and I wanted to, to get something, let’s say a bearing, I’d go and I’d send 10 rfqs, let’s say to a bunch of different vendors who I think have that bearing. And they’d get back to me and maybe a day or two, and they’d say, Hey, I have this thing, or I don’t have this thing. And here’s the price for it. And then I negotiate with them a little bit and ask them for some, you know, some diligence paperwork to kind of prove that they actually have the part versus that they’re just going to go buy it from someone else and sell resell it to me. If they give that to me, and I’m okay with their paperwork, then I’m going to pick out of the vendors that satisfy my requirements, and I’m going to give them a purchase order. And then they’re going to acknowledge the purchase order, send me a sales order, send me a dude, they’re going to initially issue a pick ticket internally, they’re going to send me an invoice, then they’re going to send me a credit card authorization form or a credit a credit application. I’m going to fill that out I’m gonna send it back they’re gonna ship it send an air waybill, all this different stuff and that’s only like about half the steps but all these things are like email attachments and faxes and yeah, you know, just kind of takes four to seven days to work through all the the group of the stuff.

Kevin May:
It’s, it’s astonishing that you would you would assume, and this is pads, my naivety about the the minutiae of the aviation industry that the the main manufacturers whether you’re a Boeing and Embraer or an Airbus would have some kind of system in place like this for the aircraft that they manufacture.

Ben Frank:
Yeah, so bullying, the bigger OEMs, it’s a little less chaotic than than it is with other vendors just because you’re right, they made some IT investments, and they have a portal where you can go and you can sort of look for stuff and send in a request for a quote, a little bit more seamlessly. At the same time, most of the stuff you buy on the airplane is not from Boeing, once you own the airplane, most of its from distributors, or the actual component manufacturer, so you’re going to go get the avionics from replacement parts from Talas or Honeywell or whatever. And you’re going to go get the paint from PPG. And you’re gonna go get the, you know, whatever, from whoever made it.

Kevin May:
Okay, and I just lost one from me for a second. I mean, you had the original product, which was the data product, as you called it, and then you went into into the current, essentially, the marketplace, how, what’s the, what’s the kind of timescale we’re looking at between the first one and you realizing that maybe you should pivot into something else? Was that a few years? Was it? What was the timescale?

Ben Frank:
Yeah, it’s probably a couple years. roadable didn’t have. So we started in 2016, mid 2016. And then, you know, roadable has kind of gradually come into existence over the last couple years. With a really, with a really gathering steam in the last year, when, when there were started to bring on, really grow the team, and really expand outside the US and take take some steps to really grow it. So I would say, it probably took a couple years for us to start looking at other things beyond just the Core Data product. Okay.

David Litwak:
So I what I think is most interesting about kind of what you’re doing, Ben, is, you know, there’s a lot of us who kind of start in the b2c world end up in b2b, but it’s a lot easier to be like, well, I take trains, and there’s a system behind the trains, and you end up learning about the system a little bit, and the hence you get a Silverado or Amadeus or something like that. But usually, the types of people create businesses like rotable are someone who literally worked in aircraft part maintenance or something for 20 years, and American Airlines or something like that, to even know that the problem exists. And I feel like you’re two to three or four layers deeper than any of us are into, like a part of the industry that barely gets talked about, you know, so I, you know, it’s there’s a lot of questions I think I have about that. But you know, I’ll start with one, which is, like, how did you like, come to even like, know that this problem really exists? And like in Do you like, what are your suggestions for other people figuring out other problems like this that aren’t just, you know, already obvious to everyone else? Who just travels normally.

Ben Frank:
And this is my, it’s my favorite type of problem for that reason, is that it’s, it’s kind of like the secret duct tape that does hold it together hold the industry together, not the only secret duct tape. I mean, they’re all over and other little areas, but I think this is one of those things that really is a totally critical piece of infrastructure, the parts supply chain, you know, and there’s delta is buying a billion dollars worth of things, you know, and it’s, it’s, it’s real, it really adds up to something, but it’s not. You know, it’s not something that most people interact with. You know, strangely, actually, a lot of people go to business school, ask about this and have some familiarity with it, because there’s this company transdigm, which is a manufacturer of certain types of legacy parts, which has been featured in a lot of business school case studies. For some reason, I can’t tell you why. So, whenever we talk about what we’re doing, and we’re making software for the maintenance, repair and overhaul industry, to anybody who’s been to business school, they always they always start talking about transplants, I think, I think some people know know a little bit about this, you know, for just random reasons. But I think you’re right most in the travel industry, it’s a little weird. And I guess my recommendation would just be that you have to, you have to see it to know about it. For me that came from the experiences I had as a consultant. An experience I’d had as a pilot and as an engineer, like in different just seeing different angles. You know, I think there’s really no shortcut to that. You can do customer research, once you have an inkling that you that something might exist, but you can’t. It’s hard to just pull it out of thin air unless you’ve seen it I guess.

David Litwak:
I think I want to quickly and you said you were a pilot, like I must have missed that. If you’ve mentioned before you were a pilot.

Ben Frank:
Yeah, amateur, just put it out there. I was never never did that for work. But it was, you know, it was kind of in college. When I got really interested in aviation. I started flying at a nearby airport as well. planes in hell. copters and that was kind of one of the ways that I learned about the industry and got involved with it. And, you know, you got to take the plane in for maintenance, and you have to have someone sign off on it, and they have to do things to it. And so I think you just get started to get some exposure from all these different angles.

Kevin May:
How did you? How did you come up with the will? How did you go through your own customer discovery? Did you talk to manufacturers first? Or did you talk to airlines first?

Ben Frank:
We started with the sell side? are we are we exist on this? The seller side, I guess you could say, and that’s the manufacturers or the distributors are the repair shops. You know, airlines also sell stuff because they have excess inventory of parts that they sell all the time. But we really started with the smaller businesses and it’s much easier to get access to talking to smaller businesses and building for them because they don’t have I don’t know a Riba in Salesforce and SAP and all these things that, you know, enterprise sales, people spend years jamming down the airline’s throats, these these big enterprise SAS solutions, you know, the distributors and the managers don’t have any of that stuff, you know, they’re did tend to be a little bit smaller businesses who were much happier to talk to you, and have you helped them. And you don’t, you don’t need to take them out for golf and steak dinners or

David Litwak:
anything. So it’s just, you know, to recap that you started with these kind of small parts manufacturers. And what’s interesting is, I think you’ve seen this kind of pattern with a lot of people in business travel, we so we interviewed travelbank, we also interviewed Duke from travelbank, we also interviewed the founder of Oreo kind of founder and president of Amex GBT. And one thing, I think I noticed is that, you know, travel banks go to market strategy was seemed to be very similar, which there was like, there’s not these big enterprise customers have 45 different dependencies. And if you, you’re talking about a two year RFP, or whatever, and so, you know, was that on purpose? Or did you, you know, like I did, what do you just kind of stumbled into that?

Ben Frank:
I think it’s, it was on purpose to go for smaller sellers, before anybody bigger. And the reason is just exactly what you said, you know, it’s, it’s that there’s sort of a sales reason, and there’s a product reason, I think the sales reason is, it’s, it’s easier to talk to these smaller businesses, you know, they don’t, they’re not doing necessarily form formal RFP processes, you can reach them in a direct outbound strategy, you can reach a decision maker at a trade show. And it’s just shorter cycle, you know, versus like you said, a two year, a two year process with IMAX or with Boeing to do anything, there’s also a product reason, which is just that, you can produce something useful to them in less time, because they don’t need to integrate with, with everything under the sun. Now, we did take a very integration heavy approach to the product early on, because we sort of said, from day one, the product actually does need to integrate with their inventory management system, to provide them the value that we want, and to have the stickiness that that we think it will need. But, you know, it’s still much easier to do that with a smaller company than it is than it is a bigger company.

David Litwak:
So I wanted to go back to something you said before, so Sierra was, you know, rotable, v1, and you eventually, you know, you did a admirable pivot, you know, kind of to selling the data after the after the original failed product. And this is basically kind of a second pivot. One quick question, then a follow up question. Are you still selling that data to anyone?

Ben Frank:
Yeah, so, you know, I don’t want to sound too defensive here. I won’t, I wouldn’t call it a failed product. No, it’s okay. It’s totally fair. I mean, if you could, you could call it that. I think it’s fine to call it that,

David Litwak:
what it’s worth, I meant the first one, you said that the one I’d gotten is you sold zero users or something like that, and then came out of it. That’s what I meant, but go on, we can call a failed product. Okay.

Ben Frank:
No, sisir we’re not doing anything with that. Sears still exists, and, you know, still has still as a business with customers, you know, with a team supporting it. And, you know, it’s not necessarily it doesn’t have the kind of really exciting and vision that something like rotable has, at least to me, but it’s, you know, it’s very much still still, you know, going concern.

David Litwak:
So, yeah, my follow up question to that was, I think it takes a lot psychologically, to change tack like that. And I know this from you know, mozia is nine years old. And, you know, we started back in the more traditional thing that we’ve had to shift our business towards doing a lot more on demand in the world of new mobility and stuff like that, and You see, people are industry sticking with the same thing they’ve done for 15 years and kind of like head and sand thing? Well, this is where I make my money. And I’m going to continue going further down this pathway. And I think it’s, it’s not a business, you know, even it’s not a business challenges, I feel like it’s almost like a psychological challenge or anything else to kind of pull your attention away from something that is making some money, and it diverted to someplace else. So I don’t know how you thought about that. But I’d love to you did a pretty about abrupt about face here. So yeah.

Ben Frank:
Yeah, I think there’s a moment when you go through that, when you ask yourself, you know, do I really want to, after getting this off the ground, even if it’s not, where I might hope it would be in my wildest dreams? You know, it’s somewhere. And it took me a while to get there. And so do I really want to go back into the thick of it and start from zero again? Or do I want to go to Puerto Rico and, you know, whatever, just like sit on the beach somewhere or run

David Litwak:
a lifestyle business or

Ben Frank:
something? Yeah.

Pick your equivalent place, whatever, whatever does that for you? But I mean, I think the that’s sort of, you know, if I’m being honest, like, definitely, I think there’s a moment where, where, you know, at least I had that thought, but but I think we were, I was pretty interested in pretty excited about this problem. And really felt like it was an opportunity to build for a group of users who had, who hadn’t had anything built for them in the recent, you know, in the last 10 years, and, and to really build a Greenfield app that I think had a lot of potential. And so, you know, I didn’t have to thought about Puerto Rico for too long.

Kevin May:
Okay. And Ben, I’m interested. I mean, the aviation industry is so big, it’s so diverse. There’s so many, why there are so many parts, there are so many airlines, there’s so many storage facilities, there are so many maintenance facilities in locations in thousands of places around the world. How have you considered and thought about expansion? Where do you Where do you start from that, you know, usage your team have? And forgive me, if I’ve got the number one team of 14 people, I think you said a little while ago? How do you think about scaling up? Where do you go first for that?

Ben Frank:
So it’s both, you know, there’s two sides to this, that I think are, are a great benefit of being in the aviation industry, and then a great challenge, which is that it’s so International, right. And so to really succeed and be a lasting business, you need to be everywhere. Because and I’m sure you see this in other, you know, non maintenance, aviation businesses and travel businesses, too. You know, we can’t just have point of sale in the US and succeed and be a winner, we need to be everywhere. And so that’s, that’s part of the challenge. But I think where it helps us actually, is that when it comes to software, it’s a little easier, because there’s a global standard deviation, mostly businesses trade in dollars, there’s some you know, there’s a little bit that happens in other currencies, but parts, you know, airlines are used to paying their base expenses for fuel for leases in dollars. And so, you know, occasionally in euros or pounds, so that helps us also, almost everyone speaks, you know, very good English and uses English for business. So when it comes to internationalization of the product, you know, we get a huge head start, because most of our users are doing the same thing, no matter what country they’re in. Yeah. With, with, you know, someplace in Asia being a little bit different, but I would say for the most part that holds true. As far as physical presence, I think there is definitely we run into the problems of providing on the ground support and, you know, fast response times and, you know, having a network that extends to different places, and that’s just, it takes time to build the network. I think today we are, we have a reasonable density in the Americas and in Europe. In both in the UK and continental Europe. You know, I think with Asia, it’s still a little bit more, it’s still earlier for us, although we do have some, so I guess I don’t, we haven’t so far had a had a, you know, a, we don’t have a war room where we have the map, like a map or it’s colored and it’s like, you know, we’re going here first and then we’re going here and then we’re going to expand to here, it’s not so it’s not so methodical, is that yet, I think more it’s like, you know, we you know, we wait till there’s a critical mass and a country who’s asking us and then hey, we need you to support this thing or this, this currency or this you know, local address format or whatever it is right and then we do it and we, you know, we we get some local references and you know, get them to to help us out there.

Kevin May:
And going back to this 14, you know, 14 person team if you had 100 people on your Team, would that be that expansion would be would it be for sales? Would it be for tech support? Or would it be for something else? I mean, what does? What does expansion give you? Does it just allow you to have, as you said, people on the ground in markets that you just frankly can’t reach at the moment?

Ben Frank:
Yeah, it does. I mean, once you get started to get bigger, and people are paying you more money, right, they start to expect things, like, certain kinds of SLA is, you know, that requires, yeah. Are all the listeners gonna be familiar with? Like, what SLA stands for? Yeah, probably. Okay. Yeah, I would say so. Okay, I saw no acronyms. So I just wanted to,

Kevin May:
I guess I like to do it with it’s fine.

Ben Frank:
Okay. So that, you know, that cost money, that’s reliability engineers, then, you know, they’re gonna want fast support in their language that’s, you know, support. Yeah. expense. And, you know, it goes on and on, right. So you just think has a cost, people start to expect things as you get bigger, but I think probably, if we were to have 100, people, it’d be a lot. And, you know, in product, product and engineering, there’s just, there’s just so much to build. And, you know, we’re like any software business, right, there’s just, there’s just too much to build. And then, of course, you know, in some in sales and marketing as well, because we’re an extremely lean team. And, you know, you just can’t canvass the world with a couple, a couple people. So I think, I think that’s, that’s kind of the way I think about it at the same time, you know, 100, people would, the business would probably crumble, crumble under its own weight at this point. So, you know, I think we’re, we need a few steps before we’re there.

Kevin May:
And just the last one for me for a moment. I mean, it’s, how did you, how did you come upon the come upon the business model? And did that have to change over time? And I’m assuming it’s a it’s a SaaS product? Is it? The kind of a renting service? How does it work on a commission? And how did you come up with that? And did you have to tweak it with any resistance or anything like that?

Ben Frank:
So it is, it’s a, it’s a kind of standard SAS monthly or annual fee model, where customers are paying us a certain amount for a subscription, which varies based on you know, their tier of kind of how much business they’re doing through roadable. And, and then there are a few kind of other optional services they can tack on and things like that. It’s It’s nothing too crazy. We did it iterate on it, you know, a couple times, actually, first, first to raise the fees and to lower the fees, and then actually to raise them again. So I think that’s something that probably continues to evolve forever. You know, it’s like never like, like with airlines, right? They have huge staffs of people to, to change the pricing every hour, or, you know, it’s it’s maybe not for us. But it does continue to evolve. What was this? How is this promozione that did the pricing change a lot

David Litwak:
over time. I mean, we’re not technically SAS. So we’re technically per transaction. So we just, you know, we do some tinkering about way I can’t say we have legions of people trying to do as much revenue generation as we could otherwise, though, this crisis is definitely made us think a little bit more along in those direct in that direction about how to maximize profit, which brings me to, you know, kind of what’s going on in the world right now. Needless to say, all of our businesses Well, I think Kevin’s business and writing about all of us in crisis might be the only one thriving at the moment.

Kevin May:
But couldn’t possibly comment on that at the moment.

David Litwak:
But, but, you know, for the rest of us, right, obviously, businesses way down or non existent. For if you’re grounded, you don’t need spare parts anymore. So I’m kind of curious about how you’re looking at this, you see a lot of SaaS providers in the, in the business I you know, giving free months to, you know, their clients to try to help them get past things I mozilo certainly been the beneficiary of, you know, a lot of our software providers doing that to us. I’m curious what your what, you know, two things one, one, what is your outlook on the on the market and to like, how do you see this impacting the part of the travel industry that you deal with most, you know, specifically, you know, all these small mom and pop you know, airline parts manufacturers, maybe not mom and pop but you know, smaller than Boeing, let’s put it that way.

Ben Frank:
Yeah, I mean, it’s just it really is a crisis for a lot of this whole ecosystem. Because all the cash that’s going into the airlines, well, little cash just going into the airlines, and what little cash remains is going to the workers, you know, as as it probably should, you know, and is going to is going to not the vendor base, other things other than the vendor base. And so, for our customers who are, you know, the vendors to the airlines, you know, they they still have to supply I parts, but you know, they’re not really getting paid, or they’re getting paid. net 30, but really 90 days, you know, or whatever it might be, and they just have to extend credit to the airlines, you know, and and sort of just if they want the sale? And so, you know, I think it’s really, it’s tested a lot of these businesses and you know, not all the businesses will survive, although I think most of them will. You know, it’s we’ve definitely had to, we’re definitely chosen to extend, extend certain, like, preferential pricing and pricing for for during this time, because I think you just don’t get around it. Right. I think if you want to keep your customers and you want to be to be good to your customers, and they don’t have money to pay you but still need the product. You know, you I think there’s really only one, one thing you could that you should do. And so, we we did have to do that for or have chosen to do that for for a good number of our customers. And, and probably will do that for a while. Because, you know, I think, strangely actually, roadable, you know, is is something that is sort of more useful during this time. But less interesting to to companies because they don’t have, you know, they’re not looking to buy stuff. So give me an example of that, you know, if you get a sale from an airline today, and you’re trying to fax them a credit card authorization form, so they can give you payment information. So you can process their sale. You know, the seller can’t go to their office and use the fax machine. Right. So are they going to process that sale. So something like roadable, which allows you to do stuff digitally that used to do an online way is actually much more useful when you’re working remotely? The problem is, no one cares. No one wants to, to hear that if it costs money, right. And so I think other industries have said like, this is like two years of digitization happening in a few months. I think Satya Nadella or someone from Microsoft said that when they were looking at the Azure sales going, you know, going through the roof. And it’s really that’s what we’ve seen as well, which is that there’s there’s just so much digitization and adoption technology happening just completely by necessity. So also, at some level, we don’t want to miss out on that, right. And if the thing that we have to do is, is offer the product at a reduced price. I mean, that’s it that’s a low cost to pay for for, for those customers.

Kevin May:
And just last one for me, really, I mean, in this kind of vein around Coronavirus, how we use a business and you talked about what you’re doing with extending payments and things like that. But what if you had to do yourselves as a business to kind of just kind of get through it? because presumably, because you’ve had to do those things with your customers, there becomes a point where things get a little bit lean, perhaps from the cash flow from for you. What if you had to put in place, whether it’s from a leadership perspective, or a business model perspective to get through this indeterminately? long period?

Ben Frank:
Yeah, so we’re we’re lucky where our sales don’t directly correlate with light volumes, which is the case for most of our customers. So we’re, we’re not as exposed to the to the direct forces, as many of our customers but of course, we still do have to be responsive to it. So you know, there’s there’s no, we’re in a position where we don’t need to make any kind of layoffs or, or do anything, or do anything drastic, we’re in a position of a relative, relative the luxury of relative strength. And, and so I think we are we’re being very conservative about our, our expenditures, because we don’t know how long the impacts are going to last. But we’ve avoided any kind of,

you know, drastic, drastic action.

David Litwak:
Very cool. Well, Ben, thank you for your time. That was a super insightful look into I think a part of the travel industry we don’t often hear about. This has been how I got here with Mozilla and focus wire, our podcast about innovation and travel and transportation. And thanks again, Ben.

Ben Frank:
Thanks for having me.

Kevin May:
Great. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai