SmartSpace Software plc share price, company news, analysis and interviews

Smartspace Software PLC (LON:SMRT) Chief Executive Officer Frank Beechinor caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their full year results, the progress of SwipedOn, plans for growth and the key investment points.

Q1: Today, you’ve issued your first set of full year results, can you give us a summary of the key operational and financial highlights that were announced earlier?

A1: As you know, last year we disposed of our Redstone subsidiary and since last July we’ve focussed basically on changing the business. So, our primary focus has become a SaaS-based software company where we supply technology products into smart buildings and help customers to optimise their corporate real estate.

We changed our company name back in July to Smartspace Software PLC from RedstoneConnect, we introduced a new management structure, we’ve made a number of new hires and we’ve basically built out our software development, implementation and sales capability, that’s kept us busy through last year.

In addition, we made our first acquisition, we bought a business called SwipedOn which I’ll tell you a little bit more about in a second and we’ve signed a distribution agreement with Evoko. They’ve got a significant international network of resellers and partners, they sell meeting room panels and we will be proving a software solution through that network.

We also, between the summer and the end of the financial period, that we’d signed a major international bank, we’ve also gone live with another UK bank and we’ve signed a major hospitality client for our hospitality platform.

So, we’ve been very busy on our client acquisition front, SwipedOn has made tremendous progress, they had around 2,200 customers when we took over and at the end of the period, that had risen to 2,713 and it’s actually risen further now to over 3,000 so the momentum has continued. The acquisition costs of clients there is to lifetime value is a ratio at a very healthy 5.1 which any above 3 is seen as good performance in SaaS businesses and our average revenue per customer has actually risen by 8% as well. We’re making very good headway with that business and it seems to have gone from strength to strength under our ownership and very high customer satisfaction and we regularly score on the Net Promotor Score scale 60 or above. So, all in all, operationally, some great highlights and great results from our perspective.

Financially, the business is very different now in shape to what it was when we had Redstone, I think we previously we had revenues in excess of £45 million, this year the market was expecting sales of £6.3 million for the rebase business which is all around software and smart building implementation.

I’m glad to say that we’ve brought in the revenues in line with expectations, we’ve made a loss for the period because we’ve invested very heavily in software development and our implementation and sales capability but again, that’s in line with expectations and cash at the end of the period was also in line with expectations.

Q2: As you mentioned, SwipedOn, your first acquisition, it looks like it has been doing well. Can you give us some background to the trading?

A2: As I say, when we took over about 2,200 as of 30th April, that has actually risen to 3,063 so we’ve grown the customer base for 34%. The model is actually very simple, we use digital marketing to attract customers using Google AdWords we’re targeting and we aim to try and get about 500 trialists every month with the view then obviously with the intention of converting between 24%-30% of those.

We’ve hit a number of milestones, we just had our busiest ever month in March which is post-period end but we signed 160 new customers in the month. Our CAC:LTV ratio has actually increase to 8.6 as well which shows we’re getting greater efficiency from a marketing spend, particularly using programmatic advertising so basically, it costs us about $860 to acquire a customer and they’ve got a lifetime value of $7,358.

We have two intentions for this business, one is to increase the overall customer numbers which are moving on as you’ve seen with the numbers I’ve just quoted. The second intention then is to increase our average revenue per user (ARPU) per month and we’ve introduced some new pricing just recently and we’ve already got an 8% uplift in ARPU already. The second part of that strategy is to start to introduce a number of add-on modules and we’re currently working on the first of those, we’re going to call it Deliveries which basically helps receptions manage incoming parcels and couriers. The combined impact of an increased base and increased ARPU will have a transformational impact on that business.

The other significant highlight is the international spread of that business, of the 3,063 customers, we have 1,1103 in the US and 725 in the UK. The other thing that’s quite interesting is without actually having a localised product and without having a large dedicated marketing spends, we’ve already got our first customers in Holland, Singapore, Germany, Denmark, Sweden and Ireland. That’s actually showing some real potential or us and that’s just shipping the standard English product that hasn’t been localised into languages.

So, all in all, the business is performing really well, the guys there are really well motivated and continue doing great things and we’re working really well together which I think is an important message to get across to investors. Very often in acquisitions, they don’t go well and people are worried about if they go off the boil post-deal, in our case the opposite has happened and that momentum has continued beyond period end.

Q3: Can you give us an update on activities post review period?

A3: In terms of software, as I say, we’ve invested really heavily in the last 6 months into our workplace platform and that cumulated in the release of version 2 of the platform in March 2019.
So, we’ve invested well in excess of £1.5 million in enhancing our software stack and that obviously doesn’t stop because technical innovations are our best form of strategic defence really, we always want to be better than our competition.

The other thing that we’ve done as well is set up a small office in the US, based our of Austin, we’ve got 3 employees, it’s only been going just over a month and we’ve already picked up our first customers there which is very encouraging.

I think there’s some great opportunities in the US, in fact we learned last night that we’ve picked up our second customer which was actually a city council in California. They’ve sent a really interesting analysis where they sort of outline their rationale for selecting us over the competition and it was very clear that we had some great differentiators compared to the local vendors in the US that we were competing against.

So, I think that’s been a really good result for us as well and we obviously want to continue building on that, we did it primarily as a trial to see if there was an appetite for our offering in the US market.

Q4: On outlook, what plans do you have for the company over the next period for growth?

A4: Well, the next period now is to make sure we hit our sales numbers, we’ve got some ambitious numbers in the market, we’re aiming to see a dramatic step-up in our SaaS revenue, it was only hundreds of pounds last year and I think the analysts said at our brokers at N+1 are looking for a big step-up in SaaS revenue i.e. into millions. As you can imagine, the fact that we’ll have SwipedOn, 100% of that revenue, is SaaS whereas the other part of our business, it’s partially SaaS and partially licence so we should see a big step-up there.

Obviously, we want to continue to drive on with sales, we want to establish a channel partner network for the SwipedOn product suite and we obviously want to exploit our relationship with Evoko using their 400 partners globally to create a good route to market for us, not just in the UK and Europe but in the Middle East and in North America as well.

Q5: Just in summary then, what are the key investment points in your view for those people who are thinking of investing in Smartspace Software?

A5: I think the big thing really is the fact we’re a SaaS business and again, that brings with it good visibility of revenue and high margin and obviously, being in software is a big help in terms of margin contribution.

The second thing is that we’re in a really exciting market, for years people viewed real estate as a fixed cost that they couldn’t vary. What they’re learning now is true optimisation of that space by bringing in desk booking, better use of meeting rooms, they’re either getting more use out of the space that they have or they’re actually making do with less space.

There’s 2 or 3 bits of research by people like Verdantix and they’ve indicated that the market is growing at 20-25% CAGR, not just in the UK but across the globe so, I think we’re nicely positioned in a very exciting market that’s only set to grow really.

We think we’ve got technology that’s very different to the competition in the sense that we’ve got a single platform, seven modules and we cover the whole breadth of functionality that people would need to optimise their corporate real estate.

So, exciting business in an exciting market with some great growth opportunities I think is the message.

Smartspace Software PLC (LON:SMRT) Chief Executive Officer Frank Beechinor caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their latest trading update.

Q1: You’ve just announced a trading update, can you just summarise for us the key highlights that were in the statement?

A1: I think the main message we gave the market was that our revenues and EBITDA are in line with the market expectations, we will be publishing the full accounts towards the end of April. We didn’t want to give too much detail in this update, just to let people know that everything is on track I think is the main message.

We elaborated a little bit on the SwipedOn business, and we mentioned the fact that we’ve actually grown the customer base there by 22% since we took the business over back in mid-October. So, we’re making very good progress there which is obviously an important for our ability to build SaaS revenue quickly.

So, generally, things are progressing and on track I think is the main message.

Q2: With your current share price at around 88p, N+1 just initiated coverage on SmartSpace Systems with a near term intrinsic value of about 119p – 152p. What views do you have on your current valuation?

A2: As most public company CEOS’s say, we think we’re undervalued, and we’re not valued fully by the market and I think it’s particularly true in our case. We’ve made good progress behind the scenes, we’ve announced a few contract wins in the autumn and the SwipedOn deal and I don’t think the current share price reflects the intrinsic value of the business by a long shot.

There’s a couple of interesting comparators, there’s a business in the states called Envoy, they did a fundraise back in November and they came to have 10,000 customers and they’ve got about 3.5 times more customer than we have but that business was actually valued at $200 million. If you take one of the bi competitors in the UK, Condeco, they’re privately held but a significant PE investor and they did a fundraise in the autumn as well and they valued their business at £140 million. When you consider that they do have turnover of £29 million, so much bigger than us, but equally there’s lots that are pushing on for £4 million.

So, when you look at those comparators, you think we really are undervalued so we’ve got to take into account the general sentiment in the market, everything in the lead up to Brexit. There is a malaise in the market that’s nothing to do with us and what we’re up to because speaking to other CEO’s and brokers you realise it’s a common trend.

Bottom line really is I think we are undervalued, we’ve got a long way to go and we’ve literally only set out on this journey 6 months really. So, it is early days and for us, it’s very much about playing the long game and making sure we deliver value to shareholders in the long run.

Q3: Final results for the company should be announced at the end of April, what should we expect from these results?

A3: Obviously, just a bit more detail on what we’ve just said there. The market expectations are set by Cantor who were our brokers up until December and they were looking at sales of £6.3 million and an EBITDA I think of £2.3 million, something like that, and that’s what we’ve said we’re tracking against in the statement, so we’ll obviously flesh that out.

The current expectations then are based around N+1, our new broker and NOMAD who started with us in December, and they just issued initiation guidance on us in the last week and they’ve actually upgraded their numbers from what Cantor put up previously for this current year.

So, I think in the update, we’ll just be giving a lot more detail around what we’ve been up to.

Q4: Overall, just how excited are you over the longer term prospects for Smartspace Systems?

A4: Hugely so. I’ve been involved with this business for a while as Chairman and then as CEO in July, I went into that having the basis that I knew it was going to be a hard slog for 2 or 3 years, it’s very easy to galvanise yourself for a hard slog when you’re generally enthusiastic about the market, the company, the products, the people we’ve got.

I’d love to say it’s an amazing brilliant strategy that was perfectly well executed, I think in our case it’s just circumstance of timing. We happen to have an interesting set of technology with an interesting position in the marketplace at the very time that the whole marketplace is coming to light and understanding fundamentally that corporate real estate, there is flexibility. In the old days, you took your rent and you said this is a fixed cost, we can’t vary it, whereas we’re giving people the tools to say well, instead of having 1 employee, 1 desk, if we can help you to get to 1.2 employees per desk it then means you don’t take one more floor in you building or it means you can rent off some of your space. You can bring flexibility where none previously existed.

So, I’m hugely excited. I’m just back from a trip to the US and there’s fantastic opportunity for us out there, we’ve got customers on the ground there already and I think that market is fantastic.
With the SwipedOn business, we sell in 39 different countries and we’ve got some very interesting traction in Europe, visitor management is just part of our portfolio, that has implications under GDPR because a lot of people look at their visitor book and don’t realise that’s another type of data storing on people that actually you should be keeping securely and should be seeking consent. The solution there of course is to go electronic.

I suppose my challenge, and something I’ve got to be mindful going forward, is everywhere I look I see opportunity and at a time where we’ve got to have focus so we’re not short of opportunity is the bottom line. We’ve got a very strong pipeline and it’s now down to us to get on and convert it and we’ve just hit the market at the right time so hugely excited I think would be an understated way of how I’m feeling about the business.

SmartSpace Software PLC (LON:SMRT) Chief Executive Officer Frank Beechinor caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the progress of SwipedOn, two new contract wins, new Board appointments and what to expect in terms of news flow.

Q1: Frank, it’s been a busy few weeks since we last spoke to you regarding Smartspace Software’s interim results and the acquisition of SwipedOn in October. Can you update us on how the integration of SwipedOn is going?

A1: Yes, very good. The guys have settled in well, the employees seem happy, the management team is very happy and focussed on the job in hand which is basically growing the customer base and additional functionality.

When we announced this deal originally, one of the things we said to shareholders was that we are keen to accelerate growth by getting more customers and have more modules to sell to those customers. All that work is progressing very well.

We’ve settled into a management routine with them, as you know they’re in New Zealand so 12,000 miles away and half a day in time zone but that seems to work quite well with management calls on Monday morning and Thursday evenings are our time. We’ve been able to work closely with the business in that respect.

So, all going well, we’re only a couple of months in now and I think most investors will be wondering ‘have we found any funnies since we bought the business’ and the answer to that is, we haven’t. That’s always the expectation around acquisitions so what we’ve got is what we signed up for before we did the deal. So, very happy and hopefully, from what they’re saying, the people down there are very happy as well and we’re all working very well together.

Q2: You’ve announced two significant contact wins, Evoko and a contract with a leading international bank, can you provide some details on both of those for us?

A2: Evoko is quite a strategic one for us because it’s giving us access to an indirect channel, it’s got a few hundred dealers around the world who we want to sell our technology to. This deal we announced relates to the current generation of products which is called the Liso and we’ve created an Evoko branded version of our Calendar Add-On products that integrates with Liso.

What it means is a company who might already have 10 Liso panels installed, it allows them to drive them panels from the employees desks via an app. So, it sort of turns what is a semi-intelligent panel into something that’s very very useful and obviously gives us access to install a base of customers around the globe as well as new customers coming down the line.

Of the few hundred dealers they have, there’s probably about 20 or 30 that you would class as system integrators where they have the in-house implementation expertise combined with the ability to resell etc. and they’re the ones we’re going to focus on. So, strategically very important because it’s a fast-track way of building a channel that’s in the market that we actually want to access so a really good deal for us.

When a deal gets sold, we get paid a fee per month per meeting room and we obviously can’t disclose that under the terms of the RNS as per agreement with Evoko. If we get it rolling correctly, then the address book market is significant, it runs into hundreds of thousands of installed sites plus any new ones that are added. So, very excited about the Evoko deal.

The second deal, obviously, was the one we announced the other day, a major bank. We’ve been part of a process for quite a few months, we’ve already started work on deploying and it’s a big deal for us. They’re in about 350 locations across 54 countries and they’ve got significant numbers of employees, I think in the RNS we quoted 86,000 employees, over 2,000 meeting rooms.

The deal structure is quite straightforward, we get paid a licence for the platform then we get paid professional services fees to do the implementation and the build because this business has got quite a few demand that are unique to them. The last bit is that we get paid a SaaS revenue for each component part that they use so if the employee uses an app, we get a fee per employee per month and equally, the same holds for meeting rooms or desks, whatever part of the platform that’s rolled out across their network.

So, a great deal in overall terms, a great validation of our tech and it’s a great alignment between us and this client in terms of our partnership going forward. We’re working very very closely together and getting on really well and we’ve got a really good team of our guys on theirs. As you would imagine, it forces us to implement process that we wouldn’t have had to implement had we not had a deal of this size at this stage. It will be good for the business in the long run because as we sign up other deals, it’ll mean we’ve got a more evolved deployment methodology etc.

So, yes, a great deal with us and very positive, not just in terms of revenue today but also in terms of downstream revenue because it’s a 5-year deal as we put in the RNS.

Q3: Now, you’ve also announced some strategic board updates, a new CFO with Bruce Morrison joining the company and Spencer Dredge moving to Chief Operating Officer. Can you give us a bit more insight into these appointments?

A3: We’ve been trying to do a lot since we disposed of the IT infrastructure back in June and at the centre there’s just really just myself and Spencer originally. Spencer’s done an amazing job in term so of that disposal and he’s got a really good skill set around making things happen and getting deals done. What we wanted to do was bring someone else into that senior team and we felt that by appointing Bruce as CFO, he can slot into that finance role quite quickly whereas it would be very difficult to replicate Spencer’s skill set if we were to bring someone in a COO into the business.

So, what we’ve been able to do really is increase our capacity at senior level, so we’ve got a lot on the go in the coming year in terms of our plans driving the core business along. We’ve already indicated to the market that we’d like to make some more acquisitions but this group of the 3 of us now will hopefully give us the ability to make that happen.

Bruce has got a lot of experience that he’s going to bring to bear, he’s spent 12 years or more with Bond International Software when they were making the transition from licence to SaaS-based revenue. So, he’s hit the ground running. It’s very exciting for everyone, big change obviously for us as a Board but I think it’s a good evolution.

We’ve also appointed two advisors to the Board, I think we’re very lucky to have with us, one is a chap called Ben Kepes who’s based out in New Zealand. Ben is very well respected in the whole cloud computing and SaaS environment, he’s a common speaker at conferences in West Coast US and New Zealand and Australia he’s been actively involved in SaaS businesses and growing those from start-up right through. He’s also well respected around the investor community, again in West Coast US and in New Zealand.

Having someone physically located in other parts of New Zealand, he’s in Christchurch, about an hour’s flight away from where our office is in Tauranga, Ben gives us another set of hands down there so if the business there needs support, he can parachute in quite quickly rather than wait for one of us to get there from the UK which is at least a day and a half away. So, I think that’s great and we’re very flattered to have him on board.

The other hire then is a guy called Steven Rodriguez and Steven, again, comes with a great pedigree, in his previous life he was at senior level at various HCM businesses including Ceridian. The role that’s relevant to us really is he spent about 5 years as a COO of Asure who are one of our big competitors in the US and he’s got great market insight, great knowledge of what it’s like on the ground in this market in the US.

For us, we can see from the growth that we’re receiving, we’ve already got some customers there for Smartspace, SwipedOn is the US’s fastest growing market. So, having someone in country, knows the industry, knows the space, I think is great so we’re again, delighted to have Steven on board.

Q4: Finally, in terms of news flow, what should investors be looking out for for over the next period? Should we expect a trading update in February as I believe Smartspace Software’s year-end is January 2019?

A4: That’s right. Normally, we put out a trading update, normally, I think it’s mid-February, obviously we’ve got a less complicated business than we had in the past when we had the IT infrastructure business. Then, as you would expect, we’ve got our noses down and tails up chasing new business and our search for acquisitions will continue so as and when we can do deals and we have deals that are announced, we will put out the news into the relevant channels.

So, hopefully an exciting time ahead and a lot of stuff on the go is the general message I’d give people.

Smartspace Software PLC (LON:SMRT), together with its subsidiaries, provides software, technology, and services in the smart buildings and commercial spaces market in the United Kingdom.

Smartspace Software PLC (LON:SMRT) Chief Executive Officer Frank Beechinor caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their acquisition of Swiped On Limited.

Q1: You’ve been very quiet since the restructuring of the business in July, can you tell us what’s been happening?

A1: As you can imagine, we’ve been very busy behind the scenes, we’ve achieved quite a lot so far even though we haven’t jump from the rooftops about it.

We’ve rebranded the company, we were called Redstoneconnect, we’re now Smartspace Software. We’ve made some new hires, so we’ve brought in some new senior people in the team, so we’ve appointed a new Chief Customer Officer who is going to be responsible for implementation and we’ve got a new CTO joining. We’re very busy on the sales front, got quite a few things on the go, a lot of existing customers and then there was the news this morning.

For the last 3 months we’ve been working on this deal down in New Zealand with the acquisition of SwipedOn which is a management solution. When we did the restructuring and sold the Redstone business back in June, we explained to shareholders that we wanted to use the proceeds to make some acquisitions. So, we haven’t wasted any time really, we’ve just got on with it and the news broke this morning.

Q2: It is clear that acquisitions are a part of your strategy, can you explain a bit more about the rationale behind this?

A2: I think the first thing for people to understand the approach to acquisitions is that we’re not going to be buy and build play, we’re making targeted acquisitions, we’ve identified two or three businesses in three broad categories.

The first category is working up, looking for a competitor in our space who will extend our geographic reach and increase our sales and customer base.

The second category is to buy something in a space where we’re weak functionally in our current platform. We’ve identified two, one is in analytics and the other in visitor management.

The last part of acquisitions that we were looking at was actually an entry-level solution, I’m very keen that we’re active at three levels within the market; entry-level, mid-market and enterprise.

We’ve got a very strong presence in enterprise now, we’ve a growing mid-market but we don’t actually have a presence at entry-level where people can go online, pay for their system on their card and start using it almost straight away. As you’ll probably see from the SwipedOn announcement, that actually ticks two of those three boxes.

So, the view is that if we can find the targets at the right price, we might make another one or two acquisitions in the not too distant future and the end result then will be a business that we focus on growing and getting integrated etc.

Q3: As you mentioned, you announced the acquisition of SwipedOn today, why did you select this business?

A3: For a number of reasons really. We ran the slide rule quite a lot of visitor management solutions, we found a few closer to home, I mean you can imagine 12,000 miles isn’t exactly on our doorstep, but they were with a number of challenges.

There was one business that was actually located on the continent, easily accessible from here but they’ve done a recent funding round and they were talking about a valuation of £20 million which you’re not going to pay, and they were dissimilar size from the SwipedOn business. We looked at some UK-based businesses but the problem we found there was the technology wasn’t great, they didn’t have a great management team in the sense of having the experience, they had the enthusiasm, and they didn’t have the geographical reach, they sold predominately in the UK with a much smaller customer base.

So, we settled on SwipedOn really for three key reasons; the size, the space and its geographical reach. It’s active in 39 countries, very strong management with good experience, the guy who heads up sales there was one of the first employees in Vend which is one of the big SaaS success stories out of New Zealand and he went and worked in two other businesses as well, both SaaS businesses. They’ve got a very strong CTO there, the business has got 19 staff, so they’ve got a strong development base which allows us to build out from.

The last reason we selected them is they really bought into our vision because we want to be a dominant player in the workplace optimisation market and they’re having good solutions in this space. Their aspirations of doing that the other way but felt they couldn’t do it on their own and for us then, it’s about combining the two. Ultimately, we want to be a global business so the geography, to a large extent, is academic and being a SaaS business, we can manage it closely here without the need to be onsite.

So, that’s what led us to the final decision to go with SwipedOn.

Q4: I was just going to say, why New Zealand? It is, as you say, 12,000 miles away.

A4: We could only go one times on further to get further and we’d be on the way back to the UK again! In an ideal world, that business would just be down the road from us but at the end of the day, it’s about finding the right business, they sell globally and it’s their expertise we’re interested in.

We want to use that business to build out these products at entry-level and they’ve got the appetite to do that. The cost of labour down there is about half what you pay in the UK and finding good talent is relatively easy so being able to scale a team there is very good. The software itself actually sits on a server in Amazon in Ohio and they transact, as I say, in about seven or eight different currencies. So, they’re capable of taking customers anywhere, in fact as it happens they have about 600 customers in the UK out of their current base of 2,200.

Q5: How does entry-level SaaS fit with your business model?

A5: Very well really. One of the things I’m worried about and it’s a comment one institutional investor made earlier this year when we indicated we were getting out of the Redstone business, one of the problems with that business is we had quite spiky revenue. You get a big deal in, then you spend time implementing it and then you’ve got to wait for the next one and as a result, you end up with a revenue line that could be sporadic and if a deal didn’t come or we lost a deal, that had a huge impact on our numbers.

My ambition for Smartspace Software, if I was to paint a picture of a good month for us, we’d be great to sign up one enterprise customer, be fantastic then to have maybe 10/15 mid-market customers, some of who we sell direct and some through our channel partners, and then at the entry-level we’d probably have another 100 or more signing up that month where no human got involved with the sales process.

I think by having something at the entry-level, it gives us the robustness around the revenue which I think is really important and secondly, it also gives us really good cross-sell and upsell opportunities. I’ve just come back from New Zealand and just the other day I was there when a deal came in from a major French manufacturer, but it was for a single site and you can see what happens there, one site guy buys it, they like it, it’s not a big commitment and then you find very quickly other sites in the same business. Those represent great opportunities for us to upsell to a mid and enterprise solutions as well.

Ultimately, it’s about robustness of revenue and that being dependent on a small number of very big clients and I’m really keen to spread it out as quickly as possible.

Q6: So, where do you see Smartspace Software going from here?

A6: We want to be global and space optimisation is a really interesting market right now and it’s not just in the UK, if you look at the research by people like Verdantix, they’re looking at 25% compound growth in Europe and in the US and in the Far East as well.

What we’re finding is more and more people are becoming very conscious of the need to optimise their space, a typical desk in London costs about £28,000 to run and these businesses are reshaping and changing to fit with the current times. We’ve got examples now of clients where they operate in an agile ‘hot desk’ environment, they’re actually averaging about 1.8 employees per desk, there’s one customer I know that saved on £3 million a year just by optimising their space.

So, we really want to be the number one player in this space, it’s very fragmented from a competitors perspective and I think we have an opportunity now to really have one really hard push as being the leading vendor in this space, helped by the fact of course that our technology is very much at the leading edge. We hope, we think this is better than a lot of the other suppliers out there.