← The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner
The New Best Way to Make Money Reselling Online?!⏐Ep. #245
00:21:58
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- [00:00]
A
Five pallets of toddler T shirts. 4,300 units are selling for 5 cents each. $200. That changes everything. No one's paying attention to it yet. This stuff sells for nothing. And there's multiple brands out there that are selling this product for pennies. Literally, these deals are up there all the time.
- [00:19]
B
This was on the side of the road in Germany. It's basically a big vending machine with lost packages.
- [00:23]
A
That is amazing. I want some of those.
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B
People would buy that.
- [00:27]
A
Oh, all day long. Mystery boxes really sell. And you're selling an opportunity. You can track the entire stream of any auction. You get all the analytics. You even know who they're selling to. You get everything. It's just a game changer. Dude, it's amazing.
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B
What does this app cost?
- [00:41]
A
It's free.
- [00:42]
B
How do you start from scratch on. All right. If you've never heard of whatnot, you might be living under a rock. It is the Live Selling app that just raised a round of funding at a $12 billion valuation. Live selling is here to stay. It's not going anywhere. And of course, Shannon Jean knows all about it. So we talked about how to go from zero to live Selling pro on whatnot and comparable apps. We also talked about bin stores buying Amazon returns, Costco returns pennies per item, putting them in vending machines. Oh, man. Headache worthy stuff. You're going to absolutely love this episode. Please share with a friend.
- [01:20]
A
I want to talk about lower dollar items. This is. We're looking at the Hanes liquidation site. And Hanes makes all kinds of, you know, everybody knows, probably underwear to sweatshirts to T shirts to activewear, all kinds of stuff. And they have this massive liquidation site. There's like, right now they have a truckload of men's, women's hoodies, sweatshirts, joggers. They say, which is a lie, that their MSRP is $442,000. And, you know, I always say cut it in half. So, you know, maybe it's 220 grand, which I think that's still too much. So let's cut it in half again and say it' you know, 100 grand. Right now it's. The bid is $5,000. So 1%, those 39 cents per unit. Okay, wow.
- [02:06]
B
Because instead of competing with, like, we don't really want to price this against Target. We want to be closer to like, T.J. maxx. Right?
- [02:11]
A
Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, ebay and whatnot and, you know, all those kinds of places. Typically, I would steer people away from this because it's like this deal here, it's 13,000 pieces, right? It's massive project. It's 24 pallets or so of this product. And I've done this before. I did it with NFL license gear, and it very profitable, but a ton of work to sort ship all that kind of stuff. What I think changes the game now is the growth in live selling where you don't have to take pictures. Number one, there's two tracks here. You should be wholesaling this stuff to other sellers as well. If you buy this product and it'll sell for like under a dollar, okay, It'll be less than a dollar per item, I'm sure. And I've watched this each week, so you should be finding other retailers that you could sell it to for $2 an item. People that want to buy it, screen printers, Screen printers, all want to do this. Or other people that say, wow, I can't take a truckload, but I could buy a pallet, you know, and so you could, you could. You could sell a couple of pallets of this stuff and get your original investment back. But live selling, and maybe you're supplying the live sellers. If you don't want to be on Whatnot or TikTok Shop or Poshmark Live or ebay Live, it eliminates the prep. It eliminates having to set this thing out, take a picture, take 12 pictures, create a listing. Do all that takes so much time.
- [03:33]
B
Yeah, I never thought of that. Like the time you would normally spend to take pictures and list it on ebay. It's just time. You're going live, selling it.
- [03:40]
A
You're in front of the camera going, I've got 12. I'm selling boxes of 10. Here's the. Here's the hoodie there. You know, we're going to start the bid at eight bucks. And they just go from right there. And you watch it. If you go, you. It's another again, don't watch Netflix, watch auctions. Go download the Whatnot app and start watching people every night. And start watching people sell a pair of shoes every 25 seconds, every 30 seconds over and start crunching the numbers.
- [04:05]
B
On which they're making.
- [04:06]
A
Boom, boom. Okay, Got these shoes that are customer turned. Here's a. Here's what the shoe looks are holding it up. And then it's like, boom, sold. Okay, great. We'll go to the next one. Da, da, da. And then the next day, somebody comes in and there's all this product. They put it in a, you know, a plastic bag and out the door. It Goes that changes everything from this, especially this kind of product. And no one's paying attention to it yet. It's very. Because this stuff sells for nothing. And there's multiple brands out there, not just Hanes. This is just the example I'm using here that are selling this product for pennies. Pennies on the dollar. Literally. You know, like, here's five pallets of toddler T shirts. 3,300 units are selling for 5 cents each. That's an opening bid. There's only one bid, 200. It's going to sell for not much more than that. So that live selling. And the way you start to learn about live selling. Let me see what else today. Oh, yeah, this is another one that we're. We'll keep talking about live selling when once you get registered on the Hanes auction liquidation site. And if you want the link, just go to shannonjean.com auctions and I'll get you the link. These are men. These are scrubs. Brand new scrubs. I didn't even know Hanes made scrubs, but when I logged in today, they're like, hey, Shannon, do you want to buy scrubs? Of course I do. So you can just make an offer. There's all these loads, 300 pieces, men's three pocket vina. You know, over, over and over. You get the sizes, you get the whole thing. You get. I don't think that's a upc, but it's their model number or something like that. How many all these loads? 300. 300. They say their retail is 30 bucks. Maybe they're worth $8. So you can come in here and just say, okay, I'm going to pay 2% and I'll buy 350.
- [05:42]
B
And 2%'s like an acceptable offer. Like, like that's in the ballpark for what? People accept that kind of stuff.
- [05:48]
A
Yeah, 2%, 3, 4. Especially for apparel.
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B
It's so insane in any other industry. It's like, hey, how much would you offer? 98% less than what you're asking.
- [05:57]
A
Deal. I'll take it sold. Yeah, but they just want that stuff out of their warehouse. Dude, they've got. Yeah, somebody's calling them going, hey, look, there's 10 truckloads more coming in. You, you, where's it going?
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B
It's gotta go.
- [06:10]
A
It's got to go. The holding costs are so expensive. This is why fba, Amazon, fba, they're like, hey, Janet, we're shipping your stuff back because it's not selling. You're going to pay Us and we're getting rid of it because it's in their warehouse. So you can submit these offers. These deals are up there all the time. You can do this for Home Depot. You can do everything. It's amazing. It's amazing. But what I'm really excited about is for live selling we're talking about is this is a new chrome extension. It's called the Whatnot Spy. It's made by a company called Resale Bot. And I know the blog developer. That Resale Bot app is amazing. I used it when I sold 7,000 handbags up on Poshmark to keep all my whole closet, my store running. But you can track all the entire stream of any auction it pulls out. You get their sales tracking, you get the fee, you get up these updates, you get the total sales revenue, what they're giving away. You can monitor multiple streams and you get all the analytics. So you can like just do this backward so you can go, well, this guy's selling shoes. Well, I'm going to go, well, this guy's selling Hanes sweatshirts. Is Shannon really full of it or is that real? You go find somebody, you search for Hanes, go to Whatnot, launch this app. The, the. Is it a, what's it called? Whatnot Spy. Launch this app, pull all this data, you find out, you even know who they're selling to. You get the buyers, you get everything in a spreadsheet that you can download this thing. Super game. It's just, it's just a game changer, dude. It's amazing.
- [07:35]
B
What does this app cost?
- [07:37]
A
It's free. Okay, it's free. He sells a product called Resell Bot, which I highly recommend. And if you're going to get into it, but right now this is just a free extension.
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B
Walk me through an example of how you could like really reverse engineer someone else or how you could monetize with a tool like this.
- [07:51]
A
Yeah, so what I would do, like I'm intrigued with this Hanes product, but I don't have the data yet to say is it worth buying 9,000 pieces or whatever because it's such a massive load. Now I know from a wholesale level I could sell pallets, but that's not. Let's just say we're going to just do live. So. So I would go to Whatnot. I would search for Hanes. Cause I know other people are doing this on whatever level. I would, I would bookmark those sellers and then get, I would turn on notifications, get alerts when they're starting to sell. I'D go up, I'd launch the whatnot spy and I'd start scraping data and I'd let their show, maybe their show is an hour long. And I would, at the end of that show, I'd have all this data. Is it really selling for eight bucks like Shannon says? No, maybe it's selling for five bucks. But I, I've seen it. It's. It's going to sell for more. But you'll have the data. Then sort it. Okay, what's the average sale price of this brand new Hanes T shirts or toddler shirts, whatever SEC category you're going to be in. And it'll tell, it tells you the decision. It will tell you what to bid. So it'll say, all right, this, this guy sold in an hour. He sold 200 pieces and the average price was $6.80.
- [08:58]
B
Is.
- [08:58]
A
Well, then you go back to your. Where are we at? No, that was that. You go back here and say, okay, sold for $6.80 on average. I'm going to pay. If this is 40 cents, there's going to be freight. How much with the freight? Okay, I'm into this for, you know, $83. The freight's going to be the most expensive part of all these deals. I'm gonna do it for Buckety three. What are the, what other fees? Handling fees. Okay, I'm gonna do them for $3. You're gonna make five bucks a piece, net.
- [09:23]
B
So what do you do as a, as a brand new whatnot seller? Because I think a lot of whatnot is having like, followers, people that are notified when you have a live event. How do you start from scratch? On what?
- [09:33]
A
Yeah, yeah. You don't go buy a truckload of Hanes to start from scratch. You sell stuff you already own. You start holding shows, you do giveaways. But the, the best thing you can do is start surrounding yourself with other people, selling on whatnot finding. You know, we have people in our mastermind that are doing whatnot sales and we do workshops and it's like, hey, here's how you do it. Here's what you learn. You have to build an audience. You have to build a reputation. It's just like similar to ebay, if you open it up, an ebay account, they're going to limit you, right, because they don't know you. So you want to start small. You want to sell stuff. You don't want to go buy things. Just go register for those accounts today. Start a little bit, start buying, start getting some things. You should definitely buy 10 items and leave good feedback and they'll get view feedback so you can start building up a score and slowly building your credibility. You have to start today. You can't buy and then wait. Right. So that's, that's what you have to do.
- [10:27]
B
I heard that whatnot is trying to make a name for itself by being a lot more seller friendly as opposed to ebay hate sellers, basically. Is that what you've experienced?
- [10:35]
A
My experience with ebay is they don't hate sellers anymore. They used to, but now they, they're very seller friendly. And there's ways that you need to connect with. Like if you're selling on ebay and let's say you're selling in the apparel category or the luxury goods category, find the manager. You have to find the manager, the category manager and connect with them. Otherwise you're nobody. But you connect with them on LinkedIn and don't ask them anything. Just say, hey, I'm here, I'm selling, I'm great. Just want you to give you a heads up if there's anything ever I could do for you. You'd like people to speak at a conference or share their experience. I'd love to help. That's how you start to level up.
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B
If you don't do that. EBay, are they going to side with you? In many cases they are.
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A
They are very. Yeah, they're very buyer centric. From dispute. Right. Just like Amazon. Because they. Yeah, they're going to tell you there's.
- [11:19]
B
A lot more buyers than sellers, period.
- [11:21]
A
They're going to tell you, Shannon, you may be right, but it doesn't matter. You're going to. There's a, there's a level of the business that you do that you have to eat. It's just inevitable. If you've never been in business for. You're not going to win every time. It's not going to happen. And you're going to give up and you're going to let your ego, you're going to get your ego out of it and you're just going to have to understand that this is a business decision and two out of a hundred sales I make are not going to go well. And I may just have to give them the money back and not even take, get the product back and that's going to impact your profit. But you don't have time to fight those battles. Every day I see it where people get so wrapped up and they get so angry and they fight, but you just have to let it go. Just take a Deep breath. That person doesn't know you. You're an unknown. They don't know that it's Chris or Shannon selling stuff. They think you're somebody. A huge company that's not going to, you know, they're not going to miss it. You just let it go and keep moving on and go sell 98 more items.
- [12:13]
B
Yeah.
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A
Do you.
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B
Well, what was I going to say? Do you do anything with like sports cards, Pokemon cards on whatnot, like live breaks or anything like that?
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A
I don't, but I know there are people, we know people that are doing that now, which I think is a great opportunity. Yep. Yeah. All that stuff.
- [12:28]
B
So Whatnot seems to be more seller friendly.
- [12:30]
A
I think so. It's similar to what Poshmark is very seller friendly too. No returns, Whatnot, no returns. That's a big deal. Now just because they say that doesn't mean you're not going to get returns because if people complain enough, you're going to solve a problem. Just go, yeah, go ahead, send it back. You know, it's not worth it.
- [12:46]
B
It's just the culture.
- [12:47]
A
It's the culture. They're trying to grow quick. They're trying to make a name for themselves. You're on the ground floor with Whatnot. It's similar. Like Makari was similar, but they've really scaled back. They had a hard time. But Whatnot is where you need to be right now. I also think you should learn to sell live on Poshmark. They do lots of different things. You don't even have to sell it. They have ways to piggyback your live items with other sellers now, which I think is really cool. But you're. And I'm not saying that you need to get up and sell it. You may need to hire somebody to be. To be your streamer, to be in front. Someone has a certain look you got, right?
- [13:21]
B
Yeah.
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A
Or your wife or your kid or whoever. You know, you can be the brains behind the operation, but you need to have somebody that is good at talking and jumping around, being on camera, maybe some music in the background because you're trying to get these people excited. You, you're trying to do the opposite. You want them to buy with Emotion, which is a huge mistake.
- [13:40]
B
You want Buy with Emotion. Copyright Shannon Jean.
- [13:43]
A
That's right. And so you flip the whole thing. You invert. And so with that live selling you're getting going, it's like an auction. It's an auction and people get crazy at auctions and they don't want to let it go. And I want that thing and it's only one more dollar and that's perfect. Over and over and over. I want to go back and look at that. Okay, so the, the, the exercise auction sold for 535 bucks. It was, I was totally wrong. So. But still it's amazing.
- [14:07]
B
Is it, is it true that Amazon's starting to get into live selling? Have you heard about that?
- [14:11]
A
I haven't, but I wouldn't. They have to, right?
- [14:14]
B
Yeah, I heard that they're, they're going to be working directly with big brands like Nike. Like basically using individuals to sell big brands like Nike Live. I love it. That could change the game.
- [14:24]
A
That could totally change the game. Amazon's offering their, their customer returns directly on their website. Now. You can buy, you can go buy a pallet of, of stuff. They don't even know what it is. They just give you a rough. It'll be in this category and you can buy it and then they have like, yeah, some long term window to deliver it to you. Pretty.
- [14:41]
B
Can I show you a video that we just. I just posted on my Instagram like an hour ago.
- [14:45]
A
Yes.
- [14:46]
B
I want, I want to get your real time thoughts on this. So we just posted this like an hour ago. I just want to get your. I know you haven't seen this yet because we've been talking since it was posted. I want to get your real time take on this business idea.
- [14:57]
A
Okay.
- [14:59]
B
All right, here we go. This is in Germany, but it needs to be everywhere. This was on the side of the road in Germany is basically a big vending machine with lost packages. You can buy packets full of returned items and lost packages. You can buy these vending machines from Facebook, Marketplace or any number of other places, but sell them for other uses. Why not put those two things together? You're not selling products, you're selling mystery intrigue. It's no different than people breaking packs of Pokemon or baseball cards. Full business plan here in today's.
- [15:25]
A
That is amazing. I want some of those. That is. Yeah, that is wild.
- [15:31]
B
People would buy that.
- [15:32]
A
Oh all day long because you're selling the mystery. This mystery boxes really sell and you're selling an opportunity. And it's almost like a portable bin store. Right? The bin stores are, you know, $7 an item, $6 the next day, five, whatever. And they sell that thing you sip down. You don't have to staff it. You, you just bring and fill it up. Who's that kid on X? Ethan Cohen that's got the, the, the bar, you know, vending Machines.
- [15:57]
B
Yeah, yeah, he'd be perfect.
- [15:58]
A
Dude, those things would be amazing. You split the revenue with some places that you sell it. You put them in specific areas, like maybe like Laundromats or some kind of place. And you could have different ones. You could have. This is a $10 one. This is, you know, $30. These are all the way up and you have a golden one, like a hundred bucks. Maybe a hundred bucks is your peak. I don't know. I love the idea.
- [16:17]
B
You could get an iPhone in there. You could get a pack of hair ties.
- [16:20]
A
Yeah.
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B
You just don't know.
- [16:21]
A
You don't know. You don't know. But you can't.
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B
Either way, they're enjoying it.
- [16:24]
A
They're enjoying the to, I would think. I don't know. If you could just stuff it and then. Well, it looked in there. They were just stuffing them un. They didn't know what it was in. They didn't know what was in it. Yeah, I think. I think you could actually adjust that and know. You would know. The seller would know what's in there. So it would. Because you don't want somebody spending 40 bucks and getting a pack of hair ties. You want, you know, you want to make it like, I did okay. I did okay.
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B
Yeah.
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A
But how much.
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B
How much do the, like. If you were to buy a pallet of Amazon returns that are in like the poly mailers. What's like the per unit cost you might pay for that? A buck? Three bucks? Five?
- [17:01]
A
Less. Less. Really? Less? Yeah. Like, it depends on the. It depends on their category. They have like, they call small.
- [17:08]
B
I was going to say that.
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A
Yeah.
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B
If it's electronics, it might be 30 bucks.
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A
Yes, but the smalls are. Yeah. No manifest. These bin guys, they don't look at manifests. They just like per item costs. And it's. It's pennies because they have to handle it. Right. And then there's. And all their costs. That's how they can sell it for, you know, $6 on day one. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, all the way out the door. So it's less than a dollar.
- [17:31]
B
See, I would just put like, like on the glass on the plexiglass, over the item. I would put like electronics, clothing, shoes, just so they knew the category and then there was a price attached to each category.
- [17:42]
A
Yeah.
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B
And then I would even have like, upsell options. Because if they. If they buy one.
- [17:46]
A
Yeah. Buy three for.
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B
Right. Because if they buy one and it's. They're not like, thrilled about it. They're not going to buy Another one.
- [17:53]
A
Yes.
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B
But if, like, if before they pay, it's like, listen, it's one for 10 or three for 20.
- [17:58]
A
Yes.
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B
You know, they're probably going to buy three.
- [18:00]
A
Of course everybody will buy.
- [18:01]
B
Not just that. Not just that. But then they have a higher likelihood of one of those three being a banger and they come back and buy.
- [18:07]
A
And they'll forget the other ones that weren't a banger.
- [18:09]
B
Yes.
- [18:09]
A
Because that's human nature. Because they were. Everybody. Yeah, everybody.
- [18:13]
B
One person buying out the whole thing.
- [18:14]
A
It could be everyone wants to tell about, share what the good deal is. Everybody wants to. And they will fool themselves into thinking that, too. Well, I didn't pay. I didn't get this, but I only paid that. This was a great deal, though. I got this. And they leave out that they spent $60 searching for that item. But, but that's okay. You're. That's, that's part of the fun. It's like on the, it's like being at the carnival, you know, and buying the. Spending 20 bucks to win the big stuffed animal that the, that the carnival paid $4 for.
- [18:43]
B
Yeah, that's so.
- [18:44]
A
I love it.
- [18:45]
B
What I just showed. You can buy that directly from Amazon.com now. Like a pallet full of returns.
- [18:50]
A
Yeah, but you can, yeah, you can buy, you can buy the, those to get your money down, you need to buy contracts. And that contract could be like, I'll take a truckload a week or whatever. And at this price point in these categories, that's, that's how you, that's how these guys really drive it down because they make a commitment and then, then they can say, okay, great, we got. Chris is going to take a truckload every week. Shannon, we've got 500. Just imagine. Do you know e commerce returns are 20 to 30% and going up?
- [19:19]
B
Yeah.
- [19:19]
A
So just imagine. And I will tell you, Amazon is not the greatest for my type of business. It's not the best seller because they just take everything back and it's just like, oh, it's chaos. But they're like the opposite of Costco. The quality of Costco is so much higher. But for that kind of business or a bin store business, I think it's amazing. If I own bin stores, I would own those machines because you see the line outside the bin store, right. They start lining up because you open up on Thursdays or whatever, there's hundreds of people waiting because it's a treasure hunt. But if you, in your line, I would have 10 of those machines.
- [19:54]
B
Oh. Or go Find a bin store and put machines out there.
- [19:59]
A
Yep.
- [20:00]
B
And it's symbiotic. Right. People will come just for the machines that end up walking into the bin store and vice versa.
- [20:06]
A
Yep. And you have. Make sure you have cameras out there so you can show it when the guy picks up the Xbox.
- [20:13]
B
Yeah.
- [20:13]
A
You're just like, boom, that's money. Right. And you have a TV showing it right above those. Those. Those devices.
- [20:21]
B
Not just that, but it's probably a good idea to plant your own Xbox in there to ensure.
- [20:24]
A
Absolutely. You, of course, you seed it. You have to seed it because you want that excitement because that's going to drive people to it. And you want your kids as you're driving down through town, the kids to their parents, dad, can we just go buy the bin box machine, please? Last time, so. And so I knew a friend of a friend, my cousin's buddy won an Xbox and I want to win one.
- [20:44]
B
So these people that own these bin stores, are they. Are they mostly just buying from Amazon? Is that the strategy?
- [20:50]
A
Or Target? Target. They. Yeah. Because on B Stock, you can buy contracts as well, because B stock has all these relationships. So if you go to, like, you can buy contracts from just about every vendor. Target, Home Depot. So if you level up, like you're buying pallets. Pallets, pallets, Then you start buying individual trucks like we talked about. Truckloads. The next level, if you're really doing massive volume, is you can get contracts to say, yeah, I'll take a truck a week or five trucks a week or whatever it is. That's how you scale it. Because they're going to give you better prices because it's just repeatable for them, and they just factor it in. And their biggest. Their biggest problem they have is there's 10 more truck. Hundred more truckloads coming in behind them. You are solving the problem. Always great to get together. If you want to learn more shannongene.com auctions you can download. I have a free auction starter guide. There's. And I'll give you every link to every auction we started, we talked about today. I have a $5 mastermind. We've got about 1800 people in there, so come hang out. It's only five bucks. You can learn everything you want to know about being a reseller. And then you could turn around and help other people that are changing their life too. It's fun. Have a great time.
- [21:53]
B
Beautiful.
- [21:54]
A
Awesome, man.
- [21:55]
B
All right. Thank you, Shannon.
- [21:57]
A
Yeah, thank you, Chris. Always fun.