Summary
It takes twice as long and it costs twice as much, these are words to live by according to our guest this week.
Since its launch in 2015, MadeComfy transformed into a fast-growing and multi-award-winning disrupter of the Real Estate and Hospitality market and became an official partner of Airbnb in 2019.
This episode provides actionable tips and tactics that can be implemented by your accommodation space to help you put more heads in beds. Covid, points to a structural shift that will require adaptation by the travel industry. We will all have to step away from being gathers and become hunters in order to adapt. Joined by Quirin, the fearless CEO of “MadeComfy” who in just 4 years has grown his business to great heights, discusses his background and how his life pre-covid and post-covid has changed, what he and his team are doing, how they adapted and continue to stay ahead of the game as we soldier on towards recovery.
Show Notes
- Crisis preparedness for the hospitality industry.
- The future of local tourism, get in front of the staycation market
- Generating revenue during Covid and restrictions
- How to price your property
- Why you shouldn’t remove your listing from OTAs just yet
- Smart effective ways to get more bookings
- Getting the most out of your team.
Being able to do more with less and utilizing the tools are our disposal to make the most of our efforts.
Bart: Hi everyone. Hello and welcome back to the accommodation show, we help accommodation owners like you get the knowledge and skills that you need to grow your business, improve your guest experience and increase your profitability. Today we are starting our 2021 series and today, we are talking with Quirin, who is the CEO of “MadeComfy,” welcome.
Quirin: Hi Bart, thank you so much for the invite, I’m super grateful and excited to be here.
Bart: I saw you at an event speaking, I loved your content, I loved the fact that you were talking about how travel is changing, how the look of your guests is changing, It’s a great topic for us to explore and discover today. Before we kind of get into it, I would love to hear more about you and a bit more about “Made Comfy” and what you guys do in general.
Quirin: “Made Comfy” is an Australian short-term rental hospitality brand, we are about four and a half years old from now and we focus on short-term rentals in urban locations, semi-urban locations and It’s been growing a lot from the beginning until covid hit and we all had to rethink. What are we doing? Why are we here? And how is the world looking like after Covid? But yeah, we were managing 10,000 guests a month pre-covid and we are now getting close to that again, We’ve got a team of around 50 here in Melbourne, Brisbane.
Quirin: I’ve got two kids, a 12 year old that’s just about to start high school and a four and a half month old daughter. I’m married to my business partner Sabrina with whom I have a lot of cultural diversity just between the two of us and also within the company.
Bart: So effectively you’re a family business?
Quirin: No, I don’t think we’re family business. We are separating family life and work. We have some team members here that after six months came to us, “ like, I didn’t believe you guys are actually a couple,” I think we run it in a very professional way, Sabrina has her area with customers, operations and branding, I focus very much on the daily, tech, capital raising, legal, HR.
Bart: I think that will be really nice, for everyone to get a bit more context around the business and that sort of side of things and one of the things that struck me when you said we do 10,000 guests a month, on average is that 300 a day? Is my math, correct?
Quirin: Yeah
Bart: Across the months, I mean obviously you’re going to have your peaks and your troughs, you know on the weekends, but just 300 a day, I guess that’s an awful lot, over different things that you need to look after to manage and your business is quite… Is it all over Australia? Is that right? You guys aren’t International at the moment. It’s in every state. How does that work?
Quirin: We are mainly on the East Coast so far. We’ve sort of followed the strategies or focus on where the demand is coming from on the property side and also the guests side and you know in Australian there happens to be a lot around Sydney Melbourne, Brisbane and Gold Coast where you have the vast majority of travel and yeah, we will open it for other locations in 2021 across Australia. I’m a bit of a strong believer before you go national, you need to have rural business in your local market and there needs to be a reason why you go International not just for the sake of it. We’re not there yet, we definitely have the ambitions for that, but definitely not going to happen especially during Covid times. The focus is on domestic travel and really focusing on the Australian essentially.
Bart: Getting into sort of the nitty-gritties of getting ready for 2021, one of the things that I’ve realized getting ready for 2021, is it a little bit too far of a stretch or are we planning for christmas next year is nigh on Impossible, but we need to know where we’re going to double down or what we’re going to try to improve but I think what I’m realizing is almost quarterly planning is more important than ever rather than that, that the whole thing holistically, where are you guys at in terms of figuring out your plans? And I don’t know if you want to talk about how covid affected the slowdown of the business and now the pickup and then also the future risks. I’m going to leave it a little bit open for you to sort of take us through your head space and the businesses’ head space to deal with Covid, where it’s been and then get ready for 2021 and we’ll talk about guests.
Quirin: Let me break it down into what we went through and then how we planned because a lot of what we went through impacted how we now plan and look at things. We were caught by a big surprise, coming to the bush fires where we thought that this is a one in at least a decade event and we were all looking forward …when then in March the borders shut and things happened really quickly. We have been growing strong like doubling in size for some years now. I remember when Sabrina and I sat there and we talked about what’s going to happen, like the worst case, we heard about big hotel chains struggling, airlines struggling, airbnb’s struggling, everyone was struggling.
We are still like a small business, how are we going to even get to through this and there was a lot of preparation for the worst case, worst case for us was hard lock down for six months, surviving that and getting into 2021 with hardly any changes and that was something we had to prepare for, It was for us very clear the business we’ve built, the team we’ve built, the culture we built, all of that was crucial for a rebound and there was one thing we needed to cut our budgets by around 60% next to some capital that we were able to raise and we knew that the last thing we do is to let people fully go making them redundant and our mentor, we fought a lot about how can we really generate revenue because the best thing is still to generate revenue so you don’t have to cut the cost too far.
We came up with a plan. Previously, our sales and marketing efforts were mainly on the property side and we pretty much within two weeks turned it all into a guest focus where we understood we have properties in urban locations. All full for pandemic purposes, people that require furnished properties, it’s not like we charge for the rooms. We have fully furnished self contained properties and we started looking at who would require that and sort of have a list, like the government, healthcare workers, service workers, the construction workers, there’s still lots of people moving around that might not want to stay where people can get quarantined. That’s what we thought, let’s focus on that. And yeah, that was something we got only very quick traction on and really helped us to keep the team, we then had to plan by the week and be very close and open and transparent with the team as well.
Bart: That’s a really great one. Planning by the week was kind of where you saw it because things were changing so much and now that things have changed again, do you still have that feeling of, “hey for 2021 we’re going to have to have a lot of that methodology of planning?” I’m almost thinking like sprints that you’re doing short little bursts of, “we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this, we’re going to do this.” It’s all within a bigger plan, but that bigger plan might not be as set in stone as what you’d normally have it. How are you handling that?
Quirin: I think there are two things, so you need to really understand where you are heading to. We decided not focus to on properties for the near future, to focus on the guest side because if we are able to generate demand of guests and tenants, we will find properties, a lot of properties are vacant and available, because the long-term market was impacted heavily by that, that was one bit, we clearly defined a three step strategy for my country, what we need to achieve by when and that is a strategy until the middle of next year. And that’s our goal style, in the tech world, we talk about your roadmap that you put together where you have years of general…. this is where you want to be by then.
You then have your sprint one or two weeks where you say, “hey, let’s focus on that,” and see what happens and you then will focus on areas where you get more traction where you get less resistance or you adjust this lightly, but importantly, you have a way to get feedback from your market, from your customers, from your team, you have the open communication loop, then you identify data that you can use because there’s no one here that can tell you kindly where things are heading to.
The news is like a few weeks old, usually by the time it gets really out. So seeing these demands early is a very important bit. For example, what we look very clearly at guest demand, the number of enquiries we are getting from certain locations, understanding where our guests are coming from when they inquire, to understand that and we see that usually one or two weeks earlier before further booking, that as something we identify amongst some other things.
Bart: To me it sounds like being data-driven is one of the things that got you through and is getting you through and you’re taking a lot of the assumptions out of the equation just saying, “hey, okay, we’re going to try these different bits and pieces, we’re going to see what the data is telling us and we are going keep on looking at data and that that will guide us to our North Star.
Quirin: Data definitely, making sure you’ve got a team, being humble, being supportive of your team. Understanding where people are stressed and where things are just difficult, especially in Melbourne where we are working through that, that’s incredible, keeping that in mind. It’s not just data, making sure that you look after you team and understanding that everyone wants to be successful and to have a great day and data helps you to understand what is a great day, what is not a good day compared to,” I’ve got feeling,” or whatever the front page of the newspapers like and it’s difficult. Sometimes it’s quite difficult to get data in our industry, but we all have guest reviews and we all have inquiries, there is a lot of technology that these days you can use, .even if you don’t have a tech team and things that are sort of out of the box solutions that can do certain things good enough to at least have some kind of Indication on things and that is an important thing.
Bart: We’ve talked about sort of what happens especially with Covid and how you guys had to adjust and reduce your costs and even been more mindful and now we’re kind of at this really interesting stage where I think a lot of business owners are super busy right now dealing with all the Russia’s do Christmas and January. And then when we look at next year and planning ahead, I think a lot of you will start to do that as it naturally happens after you’ve just sat down and had a Christmas dinner and whatever else it might be. Where are you guys at? How are you looking ahead now?
Quirin: Keeping in mind that we all went through the same and we had to cancel and dealing with all those cancellations, just keeping in mind what can happen, just because it is looking great now doesn’t mean it’s written in stone that it’s going to be so great. Thinking about your cancellation policies, preparing on what if something happens. How can you really be guest positive and still for those of us that also manage properties, property owners, how can you balance that? So having a plan for that is important, looking at pricing is important. It’s very difficult or easy to under or over price at the moment. One border opens and suddenly you think like, “ oh shit I could have actually charged a little more here,” but that is something that is changing like weekly at the moment. I don’t have a solution to that. I’m more on the conservative side at the moment. I think there is a lot of hype around the vaccine and things are going to be normal .
If we say, “ok, there is a strong demand in local travel, “ there are a lot of Australians discovering Australia, by the time you feel comfortable going to Europe or to the states, that might still take some time. We don’t know currently that when you’re vaccinated that you are not able to infect others. I think until we know that, it’s a little bit of a guess and before Australians leave Australia, International travelers will come back here given how well we’ve managed this and what kind of freedom you can live with here from a Covid point of view. We don’t require masks now, social distancing is lighter than its for example in Germany or Europe where in most locations you can’t really go out so that’s in my eye still continuing into 2021 and its an advantage for Australian being prepared for that is good, but not banking on a large number of international travelers that will come here. It’s important not to get too positive into it.
Bart: There’s a few points. I might go back to in terms of those three main areas that you sort of identified for 2021, and in terms of those plans that there’s some things that I know within our community, we talk about an awful lot and we want to try to get the point across as to how important it is to look at different areas. I’m going to leave the things going bad until the end. I’m planning for that, which is I think no one really wants to talk about that particular part, but we have to and I think that it will be great to bounce a little bit about that with you. But before I do the local travel part, I definitely agree that we can see that everyone is traveling locally. We can see that there are markets that we’ve never had in Australia before like the cash stock market people that used to travel abroad and now they’re looking for opportunities and places to stay in Australia.
There are opportunities there. The pricing was the one that really stood out for me and I think that there’s a lot of people right now that have their properties and they just don’t know how to price it and how far ahead that they should be looking to set different prices. There’s people that are leaving the OTAs. There’s some people enjoying their OTAs. It’s quite confusing and quite hard. Do you have any tips or recommendations in terms of what people should do to get right or as close to right as possible what they should be looking at?
Quirin: I think that’s a good question. It is not an easy answer which is why so many people are struggling with that, it is I think, in my eyes, it’s all around finding, understanding what property you have and what people are your target audience, developing your persona, this is something that is important to put together. What is the persona of a specific traveller that will be staying at your property. Then when you find that and we do that for example, we go down, we give these people a name, we say for example it’s Arthur typical traveler profiles, Arthur, he’s in his mid 30s, usually he’s an auditor working for an accounting firm and he books where is most convenient and he has certain expectations by doing that, by looking at your property and understanding who your persona is, it helps you to understand where they are coming from because one thing is saying, “ I don’t like the OTAs, I want my guests to book directly,” you have to be found somehow and that’s why this is important. You might have some very established business.
There is a good friend of mine Pete Smith, for 16 years he’s been building his brand, he is also very clever on how to market to those people but he is also relying on OTAs if you know why he has the OTAs, but he has a very clear strategy in understanding what his persona is and what kind of guests he is talking to.Understanding that is very important. When you know what to put on [inaudible 00:20:51] is understanding your competition, your market. I think these days it’s much easier to market your property than it is international travel events, to market in Australia, it is easier than to market in the USA or internationally where you may be more reliant on the OTA to find some travelers, be thinking about that, who are your competitors? And where can you find yourself a guest who will help you, it has all types of tools to understand, how do you position it? How do you describe it? What are the important things to highlight to people, when you know your persona and who your competitors are and what your properties’ advantages are. And once you’ve done that you also will have an understanding of what price to set by looking again at similar listings in the area doing market research. Any kind of marketer is doing that market research as part of understanding what your price range is and once you’ve done that, it’s really understanding what are demand drivers, there is some software that helps. You’ve got “Real House”, [inaudible 00:22:04] for example for the short regular-sized a few tools that help you set for the demand side, they don’t take away from your research but they help you with identifying some ups and downs. That’s something to look at. And yeah, the thing is to literally collect your own data, look into how did I do last year? Where could I price a bit more? Was the price too high or too low and things like that. Then the last bit you put in there to generalize that. That is sort of three steps how you can approach it and then have a good grasp of not being too off with your prices.
Bart: I think that’s terrific advice.Those tools can be quite useful if you use the data in the right way. Sometimes they will be inaccessible for a smaller operator, but by doing a lot of local research, understanding what your competitors are doing. Just looking at the OTAs can do quite a lot for you. I do have a left of center question, so historical data, there are many companies out there that want to use that historical data and do algorithms and help you predict where you should be pricing the following year where you have opportunity, would you agree with me in saying that that data now because the demographic and the traveler is completely different and the demands are completely different, the historical data might not give you as much insight or some of the findings that you might find from that historical data might be completely wrong because you’re not dealing with the same marketplace at all anymore.
It’s a completely different kettle of fish that you’re dealing with, so if you’re looking at previous data, which is a completely different set of circumstances, It’s going to lead you in the wrong direction and potentially make you completely miss pricing property because you should have doubled the price of it, but you didn’t because your data is telling you that you were empty last year.
Quirin: It’s important only to track your own spreadsheet and your own report. It is easy to misinterpret data and to fall into certain traps, understanding data is important for that. When you get a data set and you’re thinking, where is this coming from and what time and what has changed. If your business is heavily reliant on business travel, you may be more impacted by Covid at the moment. If you are in a regional location where again school holidays haven’t changed. There are a few things that are definitely like last year and you can look into what that holiday inns in New South Wales is definitely pricing or in Byron Bay and maybe Queensland prices. It’s really understanding the data you have, what has changed, what hasn’t changed and then you can apply it.
You can apply your assumptions. That’s why it’s important to look at things weekly or daily for your booking trans. If you get too many bookings, this may be an indication that either something has changed and the border is open or that your pricing is slightly off. If you are below your target audience a month out occupancy and month out. Maybe your price is a little bit too high, a lot of that is still tweaking things, being close to it and there’s no set and forget in pricing
Bart: I would say that now that whole pricing or looking at your pricing is more important than it’s ever been because there’s so much opportunity, If you do get it right, to completely transform your business and your revenues if you can get that part right, in the past it was a little bit more of a given and it was quite flattened structured and you can have growth opportunities. But here it’s literally within one day to the next things can change quite dramatically and there’s a lot of reports out there about what consumers are doing and how everything’s changing for example right now a lot of places are booked up all the way up until February, March and then there’s people saying hey the demands going to drop off after that, but then there’s other people saying that it’s going to only get more because there’s people that aren’t able to book at the moment. Looking at that pricing all the time is important. Remember, you don’t want to get booked out too far ahead because it just means that your pricing is just too low, you need to keep it high and keep that stock available. So you can get the people with bigger budgets to book with you.
Quirin: There is also this kind of thing, you have a feeling what revenue you as the owner is happy with, like we are allowing bookings12 months out but our prices in 6 or 12 months out are quite opportunistic, the upper side where we say, okay, if we get there we are fully happy and if it is little bit off well, at least we did get bookings that we are probably fine with, that kind of balance between being a bit too greedy and it always lets you make a little bit more and it may be easier for hotels when you have the same room type many times was of having like a short-term rental, which is a unique thing that it’s only once when it’s not booked, it’s a bit more difficult. I’d say for the short term rental side than hotel but you always have a bit of a stock that you use if price is cheaper for going out to just test how your man is and then just that there’s something a little bit more difficult with houses in the properties.
Bart: Let’s touch briefly on preparing for the worst. That is something that in this series we haven’t really touched on and I think that it’s one of those where, being an entrepreneur business person you kind of put that to the back and it’s all about growth and being optimistic and not finding yourself over to dig yourself into a hole. What are your strategies around planning obviously cancellations, you’ve put your policies that you’re changing. What else needs to be done as a business owner to make sure that you are resilient to potential local lockdowns or changes.
Quirin: One thing that this business has taught me is that you have to be opportunist and you have to be optimistic otherwise, it’s really… Why do we do it? And why do we enter a space where it’s uphill pushing for a long time but you also have to be a realist and you have to have a plan, being optimistic. You can’t plan being optimistic, you have to have a plan for the best and have a plan in the drawer for the worst.
A lot of the viewers here would have had scenarios that simply got thrown at you where it is very difficult and you are getting at the edge of what the business can do and having being prepared for those moments, I think is an important thing and it is very naive if you just think everything will be great and I’ll just deal with the problem when it happens and of course it’s not great to plan for that either but it helps when everything looks like really dark and it’s difficult to say like, “hey there is a way out,” and it is not the end of things and I think that it is in business much as it is in life, to just be prepared for things that are unlikely or it’s just a question of time until that happens. Now in our current situation, I think we are now in Australia the control we have and the situation we are in, I think the worst case is by far more likely now than it was maybe six months ago or three months ago, maybe even two months ago before Melbourne opened up and news of violence on the border to get to Victoria. There’s a lot more stability. The vaccine is coming and we know it is definitely working. It is the question of time now, the likelihood of the worst case again, full lockdown fully across Australia. I don’t think that this is going to happen. But if there’s a lockdown in the area or any kind of border closing, it’s just important to have a plan in the pocket which means like how to deal with calculation. How do you work on your cash flow? Having a cash set aside, understanding what government support you get, how you communicate with your team. Having that stuff drawn up somewhere, helps and gives you a better night of sleep.
Bart: The things that I think about is, one having a great solid cancellation policies that work well for your business, that work for their consumers as well. I’ve seen a lot of people offer free cancellations and then we take it very hard which is unsustainable in the long run. You want to make sure that policy, whatever it is, if you can rebook or not, but you’ve got that figured out and put a bit of time and effort into it, which is good business practice anyway. The other one is the cash flow element. You want to make sure that you’ve got enough cash, but then what that also might mean is you might forgo opportunity cost on the sort of doubling down and growing your business and expanding and hiring people and getting new cleaners and full-time staff and all the rest of it or renovating or whatever those bits might be. So it might be that you need a bigger buffer of cash before you actually start to take risks or what do you think?
Quirin: The one piece of advice I got from birth, I value a lot, from Cliff Rosenberg, it always takes a couple of the times and it costs twice as much as you think and it is somehow valid. It means four times as a double, double, double and it is four times the money that you really need as what you planned for it. Having that in mind I think is an important thing that being optimistic on the cash side is not a good thing.The other thing having someone you can talk to and someone that can give you advice or just a different opinion or challenge you on a few things when you might be too opportunistic or maybe too pessimistic, having someone you can talk to or couple of people that understand you, I think it is important and it’s helped me having the people I can really talk to openly like without having to prove anything, any strength, the person shouldn’t tell you what to do but just there, “okay take me through your thought process,” and that does help a lot of the times.
Bart: Sort of a mentor space, the people you surround yourself with as well. From a personal point of view I’ve actually found quite important to look at and as part of my plans, I will also be looking at that and just seeing who are my people who is my community because there’s huge value in having the right people surrounding you when things go bad or when things go well and I think that should also be part of the plan as much as you plan for staff. But also the people that you go to and you get advice and help from.
Quirin: You don’t have to always know everything. So one thing that is important, understand the strength of your team. When I look at Nina our CMO, she knows pretty much anything in marketing significantly better than me and all sorts of performance marketing and things like that. I don’t think you have to solve everything, you can also be open and ask them, look, “this is where we are, how do you see that,” and having them also to work with you on the plan and of course, depending on your size you have more than one of those but you might have some people that have worked with you for a long time and also have a lot of experience in the industry, don’t feel you are just alone in this and understand specialists in your team, draw on their knowledge and their their passion and willingness to walk through that with you.
Bart: I think that you want to invest effort and time in finding the right people just like you’re finding these experts right? You’ve got them as part of your team, you might have people they don’t have as part of your team. You might need someone that’s great with data or someone that’s great at other parts of the business, cleaning or whatever it might be that you don’t have in your particular business, but then if you’re conscious that you want to go out there and surround yourself with the right people. It’s a long process. It takes time to find the right people who have a lot of messes as well and you have people that are claiming to be experts in something and then you kind of go, “hey, this is it working for me?” I think that it’s part strategically, putting together the right plan to find the right community, the right people it’s worth it. it’s going to solidify your business to help through these turmoils and I think that now is a great time as well to look and maybe get rid of some of some of the bits that you don’t need in terms of advice as well, you know, unsubscribe from a lot of those email lists.
Quirin: I think it’s actually so much easier now with Zoom, Hangouts and stuff like that.Its so much more common, even if you are regional to connect with someone like we do here, like we haven’t met in person and we are still talking, I think we will be connecting much easier thanks to Covid that more people tolerate and accept and know about how simple it is to just do a video call with someone than it was 30 years ago.
Bart: That’s right, what I love about it is not only can you connect with people in Australia, but you can go International as well. I think that’s a resource which is heavily underutilized as a community but it is also about finding the right people which is the tricky one, it is really saying who to take advice from…
Quirin: Go on that dance floor, show your move and people will talk with you, networking, you have to be out there, it’s a little bit daunting of course and it is time investment and sometimes its really going maybe nowhere, but in the sum of things you will connect with people you find, people you like and it’s something you would enjoy after a while, connecting with people and it is a really global, a large industry we are in, it is huge and there’s so many passionate individuals in it.
Bart: The one thing that I really like about, I’m not a big person kind of being at conferences face-to-face and having to mingle with the room. I find it quite tricky but doing it in this format, I find that it’s a lot easier to meet people that you actually want to be talking to and sort of getting straight in and talking about the things that are important to you. That was unexpected but great, I really like that. Quirin, is there anything else that you wanted to cover off today? And I have a quick look at my notes and we talked a little bit about the international traveler. You’re right, don’t plan for it right now, but it will become obvious when it is time to start to plan for it and so switch it at the time, see what the opportunities are from that particular market. Changing travel profile…we kind of covered on that.Is there anything else that you really wanted to cover ?
Quirin: Understanding really well where your traveller is coming from, it’s become easier now.I was talking at dinner the other day with Peter Morris and the head of Astra about that, we all in the same boat OTAs, property managers, property owners, we all want the same thing. We want people to stay in our places and have a great time and property owners, we want them to regenerate their return at the amount they expect, so we all want the same thing and our process fixed in between and don’t write off certain dead platforms because of what happened in the past. I know personally that I’ve not met anyone within booking.com or airbnb or homeaway that does not want the best.
But of course, they have their own issues and restrictions and growth pain and other pains like we have, so being open minded about that we are all in there for the same thing. We all we need each other in some form and that kind of optimism seeing the goods and assuming good faith in every one, and in that case in the next couple of years we are going to have an amazing time in Australia, us always covering Australia a bit more and having a lot of awesome guests in our properties and all of us got a bit of smile during Covid as well and a bit of a thicker skin and what can come after this stuff should guide us, should things go south, but let’s hope that this was the biggest impact in our careers and that things can only go up from there.
Bart: I like that, just stay positive and look at the bright side of things, make sure that you see people in a positive light because we are all trying to help each other and we are all battling the same battles every day, so we might as well be working together rather than against each other be it a big company or a small one, let’s figure out a way that’s going to be best serving for everybody. Beautiful. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it, Quirin. What’s the best way for people to contact you, reach out if they want to reach out, is there anything that we can do for you as a community?
Quirin: One of the easiest ways, connect with me via LinkedIn, that’s the quickest way. I’m not too much on the other platforms, so LinkedIn, send me an email, it’s my first [email protected] and I’m super happy to help anyone, I try to help at least and if there is anything that we can help in anyway, we are very open and supportive in general and I personally really just wish that all of the ones listening do have a great summer time catching in those bookings and being prepared for a very exciting 2021.
Bart: Yeah, I remember in 2019 exactly the same time of the year I was like, “yay 2020, lets get rid of 2019,” you are a good man.
Quirin: I think 2021 will be good, I’m quite confident that it will be good…
Bart: It can’t be much worse.You’re a very humble man. I appreciate your time for doing this, for spending your time here talking to people and trying to help them out. It’s very noble of you. I know that you’re not doing this out of any self-interest. This is great. I look forward to our conversations over the next 6-12 months. I’m sure we’ll connect again maybe on here or another platform or whatever we might do. Thank you so much, and we will catch you on the flip side, thank you.
