Business/ Art Podcast EP.2 with Susie Italiano
Transcript:
Tom: Hello and welcome to the Business Art podcast, a new podcast created by BAP to try and open up the conversation about how money and art are interacting. My name is Tom, and on every episode I'll be having a chat with someone from the arts world about the work they're doing and what their experience of money and art is. I'm really excited this week to welcome Suzi Italiano. She's got 15 years of experience working within senior teams in theatres and charities including the Yard Theatre, Improbable and the Park Theatre. She's also on the board of Upstart Theatre with me, but is now freelance as a financial consultant. I will add her website into the copy of this podcast. Overall, though, I think the most accurate description and how she is now known a lot of the time is as the finance fairy godmother and she really lives up to that title.
Susie, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast, very excited to have you here.
Susie: It's a pleasure to be here, thank you for having me.
Tom: Yeah, I would love to know where; we're recording this on Zoom, where are you Zooming in from today because I know you sort of do a lot of travelling across the summer.
Susie: Yes, so my husband, my dog, and myself; we hop on our motorhome about once a year, and we spend the summer somewhere in the mountains. And at the moment, we're in France, just across the border from Italy, so we're only a couple of hours away from my mum, my niece, and my brother. Yeah, if you hear birds chirping or cicadas doing their sound, that's why. I'm literally immersed in nature.
Tom: Oh, my god, I love that. You won't hear birds chirping in the background of me because I'm still in London; but if my dog barks, then she may make me want to join it.
Susie: Yeah, that's nature as well.
Tom: So welcome to the podcast; we have chats kind of about how money and art are interacting right now. You are a very experienced kind of financial manager and consultant now as well and I'd love to sort of just start by saying I don't think I'm going to think you know we've worked together a few times now I've never met someone with such a sort of genuine passion and lovely enthusiasm for financial management and process and I say that with a lot of respect. Where do you think that came from you know like where does this passion come from and what keeps it going all the time?
Susie: Yeah, yeah, you've seen me like happy dance in my little square in every time a client is happy, so yeah, and that actually comes from somewhere that connects me with your question. That um uh, so my first job was in the UK, and I was in the UK for about a year and a half, and then I got my first job was as a dancer. You know I always trained as a dancer; I never had it in mind to become a professional dancer. But when I was in my advanced class, the choreographer of the dance company that was connected to my school he was also my contemporary dance teacher and he called me and said, 'Susie, one of the dancers fell ill, she's gonna be fine, but we have a show in two weeks' time. Do you want to learn her part and do the show?' And I said, 'Of course, I want to be the main character of this teen Disney movie, sign me up!' And so I did that for a while, and since then, of course, I realized that dancing Wasn't my thing, and I moved on, which was great. But since then, I did learn that dancers often when they quit either they become like teachers or choreographers or if they switch paths they end up doing like often they end up doing something that is finance or math related because it has to do with always wanting to find balance um and there being just one correct way of doing things and always searching for everything being nice and neat and square, and so when um after quitting my very very short dance career I happened to uh to have an internship in a finance department, something in my brain switched and I was like this is exactly what I find satisfaction in, and you know when I used to dance, doing pirouettes was my favorite thing to do. When you managed to do like three clean pirouettes and you felt your muscles just wrap around your hand, everything worked so well. You felt a very specific kind of joy, and it's the same joy that I find when a spreadsheet works so well and it spits out the exact number, and everybody understands what's going on, and the data is so out there, clear, and accessible. It's the same quality of joy that I would find when I was when something worked very well when I was dancing. I don't know why, I don't know if it's something that other previous dancers would, um, empathise with, but that's that's that's where it comes from for me
Tom: Oh my god, that's that's so brilliant, that is absolutely not the answer I thought we were going to get here. You know, the relationship between dance and financial management is a brilliant place to start as well, yeah.
Susie: You would think that they're so separate, but actually they have so much in common,
Tom: It makes so much sense as well. I think there's something very similar in, so. I mainly do fundraising work, and a lot of fundraisers previously were writers or storytellers in some way because, actually, fundraising Is the ability to get somebody to believe in something, and then the money you know it's an act of storytelling. And so you tend to see that people who are writers and work with story quite a lot end up sometimes in fundraising either as a second job or something later in their career; so interesting how like different art forms map on to different functions sometimes, and that makes so much sense with dance. Um, just out of interest, do you do any kind of like dancing movement for fun now, or are you sort of kind of like 'oh dancing was a thing, you know that is another part of your life'?
Susie: Yeah, I don't do dance anymore; I did take a tap dance class a while back but didn't continue with it although it was very fun um I do yoga a lot and I found the same quality of when I'm doing this there's nothing else that I'm thinking about other than just like moving my body and like trying to do this position um so I found I found in yoga what I also did did fine with dancing but I don't dance anymore, I do other creative stuff
Tom: Amazing I love that um so what what's your favorite dance move? I would love to talk about today, it's a little bit about how financial management relates to art. So um just to kick us off on that kind of vein is what relationship do you think good financial management has to good art and creativity? And why is good financial management really important for arts organisations trying to make great art?
Susie: Yeah so I'll start by saying that in especially in the UK and in other Anglo-Saxon companies there is this the the dichotomy of leadership of executive uh directors and uh and artistic directors and I think that there's uh there has been at least maybe not so much recently but there has been this um concept concept that the artistic director does the art and the executive director does the finance I would like that to be an outdated view of of the responsibilities of of the two leaderships um good financial management means that you actually I'm going to go back to what you said about uh fundraising being a bit like storytelling I would argue that financial management also has a lot of storytelling within I think that in an organization where financial management is uplift uplifted as much as art is uh means that you are really considering what resources you have in the organization and where the organization is headed and you have it very clear within the leadership but also at all levels of staff you have clear um how you want to interact with the organization and how you want to interact with the organization and how you want to invest those resources to get the organization where it wants to go so the budget exercise building a budget and then maintaining it and maintaining proper financial systems um is a little bit like forming the DNA of an organization all the information is in there it tells you everything about what the priorities are of an organization and what what they care uh what they care about what they prioritize and um and where they want to go um and so maintaining those systems and keeping track of the those systems uh is just a healthy habit um and it should be shared across leadership at all levels of of an organization.
Tom: Yeah, I really hear that um thing you just mentioned about the separation of ED and AD, and that very traditional kind of one does art, one does business. But it's becoming a little bit more defunct now because I think part of it is that there is more of a need as the fundraising climate changes and as the funding climate of the UK changes quite rapidly for the art to have a closer relationship with health and well-being. And I think that's a really important part of how it's been resolved, you know. No longer do we have scenarios where an AD can go, 'I want this vision,' let me just find somebody to make it happen, actually, the two things often need to be in dialogue as they have been at you know different times in, in recent history, as well when funding climates have been really challenging, um, and yeah I really hear that thing, you know. We've seen a big move to having sort of creative director roles who are kind of these both AD and ED co-CEO with the head of programming things like that beneath them. I mean personally I think it's really important that artists remain kind of in the leadership of art organisations in some way. But I do think that doesn't mean that um there's not um a question to be asked about when you know artists who are largely you know maybe directors or theatre makers and those kind of things are coming up and doing their development through their career where are the artists being given the financial management skills and the kind of HR management skills and those kind of things actually like to sustain having artists at the top of organisations, I think we really need to consider like the skills development pipeline to allow artistic directors to be really effective a lot of the time as well because absolutely you know I'm I'm never going to argue let's not have artists within Arts organisations, but I am going to argue, kind of, there's a real problem with skills development, a lot of the time, in terms of how people are coming up and what their what their development is, especially small-scale organisations.
Susie: That's so true, yeah, absolutely.
Tom: I know you've worked in quite a lot of different organisations that I have um you know and that's one of the problems that we've just talked about there, but what are some problems or challenges that you're seeing repeatedly or that you have seen repeatedly in arts organisations and what kind of effects do you think they have on the art?
Susie: I'm going to echo what you said about, um, the upskill in financial management as you say there isn't like a clear pipe pipeline for artists to develop their financial skills. They often find themselves into leadership positions without ever having looked at such a management accounts, without having been given the tools to understand what those mean and what to look after, um, so I think that yeah wherever an uh an artistic director or a creative leader, let's call them, is curious and interested in in learning about that, they will always be the easiest person to work with um and to and to lead the ship where it needs to go. Um, I would also say that the arts sector in general is very bad at standardising processes um because uh well I think there's two elements here. One, I think that they're the like the word standardisation is seen as boring at best and uncreative and uh kind of like unflexing at worst um but actually for for some things and I agree that if you're doing a creative process like standardising it might be restricting it a little bit when it comes to administrative processes and financial processes, the standardisation, it just means clarity. It means that there's a clear, transparent way of managing the information so that when it gets to you, you're completely confident that it's correct and everybody understands it and everybody understands their role in getting the information there.
Tom: Could you just give an example of what you mean by standardisation of processes? What might that look like?
Susie: So actually, the messiest process that I found in companies is the process of basically coding purchase invoices. What does that mean? It means what happens from the moment that, for example, an artist sends you an invoice that you need to pay, what happens from that moment up until the moment that the invoice is paid and that cost becomes part of the organisation's costs. So is it clear what a budget manager should do to authorise that spend, to code that spend, to make sure that that invoice is processed in the accounting system, that the accounting system clarifies what the cost is, and then that becomes part of the profit and loss report of an organisation. Many things get lost in there. And if you don't have clear what you need to do, for example, as a budget holder to authorise or query that invoice, things just get missed. And that can come out as an overspend in the budget or like a very, very late payment of a freelancer invoice, which obviously isn't acceptable in this climate to pay people very late. So if you have a clear step-by-step process of what to do from the moment you incur a cost, from the moment you have to sign it off and then present a report about it, it just clarifies and streamlines the process so much. Everybody at every stage has confidence in what the process is. And I think we're very bad at it in the arts, I think, because it's one of the things that is very important, but it's not urgent. And because everybody is under-resourced, it's hard to, like, set these guidelines black on white and follow them. Yeah, it's just difficult to maintain that kind of system.
Tom: Yeah, and I think people like me and you who have been doing this for a while have probably can perceive the common systems between organisations that in the background, it should always look like this. But actually, the team that are doing them often haven't been kind of exposed to what things should look like, especially at the small to mid scale, and therefore don't know this kind of standardised system that can go through it. And I remember when one of my first jobs in the subsidised art sector, because I worked in the commercial sector for a couple of years when I finished university, was at a company called Out of Joint, which became Stockroom. And I would say, one of the most incredible things that I got out of that was being there as the operations assistant was um, I had a manager. I had a manager, her name was Kate, she's incredible, she does listen to this, she's great. She was so great at kind of sharing knowledge about what a kind of bookkeeping accounting system should look like, and developing my skills. And actually, as an artist, as well as doing fundraising over creative practice, has been one of the most incredible time-saving skills for me to have, just to be able to go actually, When I need to do a report about something or report on some funding I've got, or anything like that, I can really effectively and really quickly do that because I did that operation assistant job earlier in my career and spent maybe like six hours a week learning how to code things properly and those kind of things. And so, I would you know, I do think there's a a certain appetite for that kind of thing that I would really encourage artists that maybe earlier in their career to go searching for because it is a really useful skill a lot of the time.
Susie: I will just recommend to you and anybody listening, a book called The Checklist. I don't remember the author, but Phelim McDermott, the artistic director of Improbable, gave it to me years and years ago, and it's basically it's a manifesto about the importance of checklists, and the fact that sometimes, the more senior you are, the more confident you are in your job, the more a checklist is seen as something maybe a bit demeaning or something that 'oh, I know what I'm doing; I don't need a checklist.' But actually, they've done studies, for example, there was a study in a hospital where they found that would be like infections in patients because nurses would forget to change, you know, the tubes or whatever, and so with just like implementing a checklist that everybody had to follow rigidly every time, the infections just like halved because there was a clear process and people were were like needed to follow it step by step. And so for systems that need to be kept, where if one point of view is that it's not just a checklist; it's a checklist then all the other things after go wrong, it's quite important to to clarify what those procedures are, um, and that just keeps the ship running.
Tom: Yeah absolutely, I know that checklists are not very uh exciting or sexy a lot of the time, but I do think that process can like I think what it does is like cuts down on the brain space you're having to use on like figuring out problems all the time to better spend that brain space on developing and and those kind of things that we find more important a lot of the time.
Susie: Yeh. And going back to your original question about what what things don't work, things don't work but they're not going to work; they're going to work when things live in one person's brain rather than out there so ideally anybody within the role would be able to immediately see what their responsibilities are without having a massive, massive handover like things should be clear enough in the procedural documents for people to be able to uh to take things on uh without every everything being so um unclear and living in someone's brain.
Tom: Yeah absolutely. I'm conscious that I interrupted your point a few minutes ago, but um we were sort of on a roll with um what are there any other kind of um problems and challenges that you see often and what kind of effects they have other than this kind of standardisation of process?
Susie: Yeah, um yes, I would say yeah. So we talked about the lack of financial training. um for artists but also in general for staff um uh I think that also at trustee level I would like there to be a bit more of a of a formal financial training because what I what I've also seen often is things being missed in the statutory accounts because the trustee level is not there to be a bit more of a formal financial training because the trustees just counted on the finance person knowing what they were doing and they weren't investigating or querying the accounts enough and so think like big things were missed between the management accounts and the statutory accounts being filed at HMRC so training at all levels I think would, uh, um, would help that a lot, um, and also I see often that, um, and I don't want to be too technical but often when management accounts are presented to leadership or to boards or to whoever, the balance sheet left a little bit aside. People focus a lot on the profit and loss report or the income and expenditure report, that tells you everything that you earned and everything that you have spent, but they don't, they some, some organisations don't even present a balance sheet, and that tells you a different side of an organisation's financial position, so you might have a fantastic profit and loss report that shows a very big surplus, but then if you look at the balance sheet, your cash levels might be very, very low and you might have a big, big number in creditors, and that just means that sorry, debtors, and that just means that you're very bad at being paid, and that's an issue. Like, you might have earned a lot of money, but if people are not paying you that money, it means that you might not be in as good a position as you thought.
Tom: Yeah, absolutely! I'm always interested in this thing about the financial management skills of trustees because actually over the last maybe like five years or so there's been a bit of a renewed, quite large movement about getting more artists onto boards and those kind of things. And I think we have when you're on a board, you have a legal responsibility to the charity that you're on the board of; and so actually, there's a big question about bringing people onto boards - yes, it's important they speak to the art, but also we need to be enabling and equipping people to properly understand the finance that they are then responsible for. You know, a board is not necessarily just sort of an advisory function; it's quite literally that the legal responsibility of the charity sits with the trustees. And so I think it's important sometimes that we are properly equipping people to take on these roles in ways that are really effective, and I think that's you know really important. With everything from how you present management accounts to the training people are given, you know, with boards I'm on, we always make sure there's quite a comprehensive written narrative as well as presenting the spreadsheets, because actually giving somebody a spreadsheet and with no navigation through it is not going to help them really understand it, so yeah, I really hear that point.
One of the things that we've talked about a little bit is this skills gap that we often see, and I think both of us work with a lot of organisations that would be considered kind of small to mid-scale. And often we see organisational leaders like executive directors, artistic directors, producers who have managed budgets for projects but then it's had come into a leadership position of a small to mid-scale charity for the first time in a CEO position, maybe the first time overseeing a charity. And you're doing things like annual accounts and management accounts, and it's a very different process to managing just a project budget of this amount of money, spend it down to zero, done, and it's a very different mindset as well I think psychologically of how you manage a charity annually instead of on a project basis. With this challenge in mind, what do you think the sector needs to do in terms of developing the kind of small to mid-scale leaders that have financial management skills in order to kind of manage the project.
Susie: It's a great question, I've been thinking about this for a long time as I have developed a career throughout, you know, leadership positions and and now consultancies and in small charities. I think, I mean, the one of the biggest problems that I see, you know, young leaders stepping up into these leadership roles, as you say, it's like it's not only the show's budget that needs management managing, you're now the leader of an organisation made of many different departments. And all of their all of these departments, their heads will advocate for the department's budget and you will you soon realise that you're in a position where you know what the what the idiom goes, the you steal to Tom to go to get to give to Philip, how does it go, I don't remember.
Tom: I think it's like take from Peter to give to Paul or something, yes, I think it's like, I think it's a nursery rhyme with birds for some reason, but maybe that's really untrue, so if anybody's listening, please correct me.
Susie: Anyway, you guys know what I mean, like you soon realise that all of those departments are almost in competition with one another for the resources, and so you will need to find clarity and how you make those decisions at a holistic level, not only at a granular level. This is what this department needs, this is what that department means, this is what this programming needs. You will have to look at the organisation as a whole, not only in the current year but also you need to project its financial position and its direction for future years. So as you say, it's a massive mind shift, mindset shift. And also, you do need a lot of upskilling to understand how to... how... how do you do those project projections, how do you decide. How do you know what the impact is financially and artistically for each one of these decisions that you need to make them, and how do you communicate them with the team in a way that is accessible to everybody can... like make peace. Solutions, I think. Oh, sorry, you go.
Tom: I would say one of the things I've always thought about this is that I think one of the things that we do in the arts a lot is kind of silo the finance function a lot of the time. So, we take the finance function and go, this one specialist is one group of people; the only people that are going to touch finance, and actually it's quite sort of ineffective in terms of creating a culture of fine, you know, financial good financial management in the organisation, and giving other roles skills that they may need one day. And those kind of things. It happens with fundraising a lot; people go, 'The fundraiser will do fundraising,' and actually fundraising is most effective when the whole organisation has a culture of fundraising, because it again develops people's skills that they may need later in their career. But you know, it's always been a really personal thing that I think about quite a lot.
Susie: Absolutely, and I think that one of the one thing that I did at one of my previous in one of the theatres where I previously worked is we would share the management accounts every quarter and on occasion of the board meeting we would share like the the bird's eye position, uh, with all staff, um, and we would explain the context of of what that is. And from that moment on, people would just like understand a little bit better what we meant when we said that we just didn't have the resource. To give you a practical example, I think that what many theatres and specifically venue-based theatres have have had to deal with over the past few years is that they had... um, so the through the CRF funding during Covid, they got like massive funds, so for those years, they would show they were showing like big resources, the big reserves, sorry uh, brought forward but actually, the years after they would have this massive gap in their income where the funding wouldn't take place and in the meantime, overheads blew up because of obviously salaries increases, utilities, um, you know, every theatre that has a venue knows what I'm talking about, and that everything got much much more expensive. And income shrunk, um, more often than not. So, uh, and so it's important for staff to understand these like big picture, uh, variables and and influences in the organisation's overall financial health, so that they would understand at a granular level why they would need to maybe you know find Savings or uh, spend less on that so we can spend more on the on the other thing, you know. It's important to start talking about finance at all levels.
Tom: Yeah. And I just love us to zoom out a little bit because I think we often have a lot of people who are like 'I don't know' conversations in the arts based on what the sector can do, but just zooming out a little bit I think there's maybe structural changes that are worth kind of visioning and talking about as well that in terms of like making financial management easier and more effective. For example, I've had it quite wild that charities often report into both Companies House and the Charity Commission, and you kind of change this a little bit with a with a structure called a CIO where you're mainly reporting to the Charity Commission but because you don't have a company number because you don't report in a Company's House it's really difficult to get a bank account so I think the easy structural thing that might change in the world to make financial management easier for a lot of arts organisations is if it was suddenly just easier and more effective to get bank accounts for CIOs that were good, effective, accessible bank accounts and that would relieve a lot of pressure, I think we see a lot more CIO’s because you're cutting down on kinds of the effort you're doing on your reporting, and those kinds of things, you know, in terms of those kinds of things structural things that you know where the shape of the sector changes, what is maybe a change you would bring about if you were kind of in charge of everything and could go, this, this, change that feels difficult but could be easy could actually alleviate some pressure, be useful for people?
Susie: Uh, well, Tom, I will. Break a spear, uh, for HMRC because coming from Italy, I know how a nightmare it is to submit the accounts, like, so much so that in Italy we have, um, we have a figure that's kind of like a mixture between an accountant and a tax advisor; we call it a Commercialista. And there's nothing that you can do without this figure - you pay them tons and tons of money. Um, and that is because basically the Italian government updates the accounting rules every few weeks, like, everybody who is a registered accountant or Commercialista, or whatever tax advisor, whatever you want to call it, receives like monthly updates on the changes in law and so, if you're if you don't keep on top of those, you don't know how to declare this income or that other income. So it's virtually impossible for a small theatre company, for a small company in general, to submit their accounts in Italy without going through this figure and putting everything in their hands and trusting that they are up to date on the latest regulations, um, and so, and paying them a lot of money to do that. And so, switching over to the UK is actually in my view a pretty simple way, in that potentially if you know what you're doing as a as a company director, if you incorporate limited company, first of all, you're not going to be able to it costs like 15 quid to incorporate a limited company very very easy you do it in 10 minutes um and then if you know what you're doing you can submit your accounts for free um now the bit is do you know what you're doing and so perhaps if there was like a magic wand that I could that I could wave um to show you something structural is just to make make that a little bit more transparent um the the biggest difficulty that I uh encounter in people that want to learn how to submit their company's accounts is that the language is a bit yeah it's difficult to understand like they use something called um like uh cost of raw materials which simply means direct costs um but people like raw materials like I don't I don't buy raw materials to build a show I just I just like pay my performers and the set designer um and so I would make that even more accessible or i would create like more resources for um small uh small companies and their directors to be able to just like submit like understand how to prepare and submit their accounts uh without necessarily having to pay hundreds and hundreds of pounds to accountants who might not even might even make mistakes um like I know of many many theatre companies that had to pay tax because their accountant didn't defer their restricted income. Sorry if that's too technical, but that essentially means that they paid taxes on income just because they received it in advance, but ended up spending it anyway in the following financial year. In a nutshell, and so yeah.
Tom: Yeah! I think it's kind of like the level of clarity that you get in language, and things being clear, um, you know. Oftentimes people go, 'I can't form a company because I need an accountant to do that', but actually, I've been doing my own accounts for my company for years, and that's fine; sometimes, uh, for example, a few weeks ago I checked a few coding things with you and then I was like, okay, well that makes sense now, and we/I can progress and actually the process of doing it is not the difficult part; it's understanding the kind of legalities and kind of requirements are, and actually if we had a culture of being a bit more open, a bit more clear about what all of these things mean, I do think we would see the formation of you know, more people feel confident to access that kind of space and become a company director and run their own charity if they wanted to, and those kinds of things eventually
Susie: Yeah that's right; and in fact, that's why like you made me think about something, I don't see myself as an accountant per se; I'm not fully qualified anyway, uh, but I see myself as a help desk, like I love it when clients just say, 'I don't need you to take over everything and do everything for me. I just want to understand.' I just have this list of questions and I want to go through them with you and just reassure myself that I understand what the process is - that's what my bread and butter is.
Tom: Oh yeah, and Susie is the most incredible help desk I will say that. Um, I just wanna... I'm conscious of time so I'm gonna bring us to just the last question; I like to end a lot of these things on a bit more positive note and so my question for you is, um, what are some examples of you know art that has happened because of good financial management going well and supporting incredible art, you know? You don't have to name companies or anything like that, but just some examples of, you know, art that has happened because of good financial management, and also feel free to plug yourself here too, and what you do, because you do some incredible stuff.
Susie: Yeah, I mean I love it so much when the artistic directors are in the budget uh building process, like they're heavily involved, they want to be part of the discussion with the head of head of department In just building the budget, just that just means that they uh they their their their artistic strategy is embedded in the process and I love that it means that they are not fearful of looking at numbers; they don't need to be experts in accounting; they don't even need to be the ones building the spreadsheets but they are the person asking questions and just guiding the head of departments in the direction that the the company should should be going into. I love when that happens, and I've always find it i've found it very empowering for the head of departments to have the conversation with the artistic leader as well as the executive of course um and yeah it's always been a very empowering process for everybody involved uh whenever the artistic director is involved in the financial forecasting and decisions for the future. Of course its -Oh sorry, go on.
Tom: So our message to the world is artistics directors come in involved in budgets they're actually quite fun so
Susie: Yes it is fun it is fun and it sets an intention like people think that budgeting is about how do we not, but it's setting an intention for the future, it's saying well this is the direction that I want to go; it's my responsibility to steer the ship, the ship there, the only way that I can get there is to make sure that the resources that we do have are allocated as efficiently and effectively as possible and the only way that I can know if that's true is that if I have the conversations with the people who are responsible for holding uh for holding those figures.
Tom: Yeah I love I love this idea of an artist director kind of steering the ship via the budget, I think that's a really useful image to understand um the role of the artistic director.
Susie: Yeah and and of course to add to the uh answer to your question is I love it when people come to me and say 'I've just Incorporated a company or my company is growing into something a little bit bigger, I want the processes in place. I want to know exactly what to do because if we think about like the budget being the direction, then the processes are the engine. You know, like you're building something solid that you can count on, that's not gonna you know blow up if you go a little bit faster or if your if your ship becomes a little bit bigger. You build you're building something that runs uh solidly and that people feel comfortable with. So yeah, building the processes and understanding the procedures when it comes to um the management side of things is something that I really enjoy, great.
Tom: And I think that's a wonderful metaphor to end on the idea of um processes engine, um yeah. So just wrap up, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us today; it's been lovely to have a chat with you and chat about art and money.
Susie: Thank you Tom
Tom: Um, uh, have a lovely time doing van life.
Susie: Thank you so much for having me; this was fun.