Chroma Technology: Paul Millman, Founder

Samuel Edwards: HI, I'm Sam. Today is December 1st, 2016 and I'm here with Paul Millman to talk about the culture of employee-ownership, the structure and the culture of Chroma Technology Corp. Paul, would you like to talk about yourself a little bit and what you were doing before you helped start Chroma.

Paul Millman: My name is Paul Millman and I am currently both president and CEO of Chroma Technology. Before Chroma Technology, I worked for a competing thin film coatings company where we learned the trade and then he fired me and so it was my firing that was the catalyst for us starting Chroma. We had discussed the possibility of starting another company but it had gotten nowhere and weren't going anywhere with it until he fired me and that catalyzed us and we started Chroma prior to that. I spent seven years in the restaurant and bar business 00:01:00doing everything from waiting tables and bussing tables to tending bar and eventually to managing a nightclub in New York which was probably the worst I've ever had. Prior to that I was a teacher, a school teacher. Well prior to that, after being a schoolteacher, and before being a bartender again, I was in sales in the furniture and gift business. And prior to that I was a schoolteacher. Prior to that I was a graduate student at Antioch (University) New England; and prior to that I was a bartender; and prior to that I was involved in student 00:02:00politics in the sixties and the underground press.

SE: Ok. How did you come to working with Omega? What attracted you to selling filters?

PM: Absolutely nothing other than the fact that it was a job and I needed a job and moved to Vermont in May of nineteen eighty-eight and I needed a job and there were no jobs in the restaurant business, at least none that I could find that could support a person. And I went to the state of Vermont employment office in Brattleboro and as I was walking out of the counselor's office, after he told me that there were no jobs as a bartender, he said, "I see you have sales experience," and I said, "Uh-huh," and he said, "have you ever sold a 00:03:00product that you thought was worthwhile in terms of the human species?" And I said, "No," and he said, "Would you like to try," and I said I needed a job. And so that's how I got the job at Omega. I was not intending to work for an optical coatings company, I was not intending to get another sales job, but it paid the bills and although it was a rather low paying job, it allowed me to stay in Vermont in the summer of nineteen eighty-eight and then at the end of the summer I decided to stay here and continue that job.

SE: So if you had no experience selling optical filters but some sales experience, how long did it take you working with Omega to be as proficient as you were with Omega.

PM: About a year probably.

SE: How much did you add to their sales in the few years that you work for them?

PM: When I started there they had total sales of 1.1 million and when I left 00:04:00they had total sales of 3.35 million.

SE: How many other sales people did you work with?

PM: There were no other salespeople. There was a customer service person who did who did deal with customers and to the extent that she dealt with customers was also in sales because I believe that customer services is sales. That person happens to be the woman that I live with Wendy Cross. So there were the two of us.

SE: Okay, so leading up to getting fired from Omega, what were the tensions, what was happening in Omega that was, you know, growing those feelings of not wanting to be there. I know that Dick didn't, wasn't enjoying being there, and hence resigning after you got fired, but for you, what-- why did you not want to 00:05:00work anymore.

PM: I never didn't want to work at Omega. It was a job: I thought it was a pretty, it was, as jobs were in Brattleboro, Vermont in 1990, it was a pretty decent job. I'd gotten raises; my salary was not wonderful but it was better than most people in Brattleboro at the time. It certainly allowed me to live reasonable lifestyle. I wasn't planning on leaving the job until they fired me.

SE: So up until then, what was your relationship with Bob Johnson?

PM: I had an ambiguous relation with Bob Johnson. I think most people do. I think there was some mutual respect. We periodically work together on projects but we were not friends. And I think he had some appreciation that my efforts 00:06:00led to greater sales although I don't think he believed that salespeople are necessary to sell. I think he thought that products sold itself. So it was somewhat respectful and somewhat aloof, somewhat detached

SE: So when he went to fire you, how did that change your relationship?

PM: He became the enemy, and a target for ridicule and disdain.

SE: So, you know, after you were fired and you guys, you and the other founders are starting to develop Chroma and the business plan for it, how did you and the other founders, you know, so you got fired, so how did you and the other members 00:07:00detach from Omega and fully employed, of the six of you, I guess including Lindgren

PM: So, Jay quit, he'd already quit: he was going to travel in North Africa. Frank also had already quit he was going back to making stained glass. Dick quit after I got fired. Wendy and Wim stayed working at Omega because we didn't have any money to pay them and so they stayed working for a while until I believe to July or August. And then Wendy quit and then Wim finally quit. Rusty was an 00:08:00independent contractor so he didn't have to quit, he just was doing odd jobs for Omega. I think that's all of us.

SE: What year did you get fired?

PM: 1991.

SE: Was that the same year that you and the other founders put together Omega--not Omega, I'm sorry--Chroma?

PM: Yep.

SE: How long did it take after completing the paperwork to incorporate Chroma to get your first product made and sold?

PM: Incorporation was in June and I think we shipped the first filters in October.

SE: What was the first couple years of sales and production like?

PM: In numbers? In volume?

SE: However you might describe it.

PM: First, the first fiscal year, which was mostly half a year, our sales were 300 and something thousand dollars. It depends on who you talk to. It was either 318 or 328 thousand dollars. The second year was over one-and-a-half million. It 00:09:00was a very heady time, I mean it was great. We were having a great time. We knew that we were special: the world told us that we were special. The scientific community welcomed us with open arms. It was a wonderful time.

SE: When you and the other founders were planning the company did you expect to gross over million in your second fiscal year?

PM: No, no. Not even vaguely.

SE: In those first two fiscal years who else, did you have to hire anybody else while you were just beginning?

PM: The first year we hired three additional people in the first year.

SE: I think I wanted to back up actually to get your experience in employee ownership and then why when forming Chroma that you pushed for it so heavily.

PM: So the first time I heard about employee ownership in those terms was actually at Omega. Bob Johnson presented the company with the possibility of a 30% ESOP (Employee Stock Ownership Plan) so that means that he was going to sell thirty percent of the company to an employee stock ownership plan and I had not heard of this before and the idea of employee ownership immediately struck me as worthwhile. It didn't strike many of the people at Omega as worthwhile and it never happened and I think it largely didn't happen because there was no 00:11:00enthusiasm on the employees except for me that I thought was good idea. Employee ownership fits in with my upbringing and my background and what I believe. I was born into a family of Communists and I am a socialist and employee ownership was the most rational way of coming, of bringing socialism to the world. I don't believe in state socialism, I believe in employee socialism.

SE: So that naturally informed choosing Chroma to be employee owned.

PM: That made me want Chroma to be employee-owned: it was not even among the--at that time, the discussion was really among four of us, not all seven of us were involved: Jay was overseas; Frank was working at home; Wendy was still working 00:12:00at Omega; Wim was still working at Omega, although he was part of the discussion. So four of us were discussing how to get started, basically, and the question of ownership logically followed because there were seven of us: who was to own; who wasn't to own; how they were to own; how to raise money; how to raise capital to start the company was a big issue. Whether capital should command ownership was a big issue and I was at least the strongest voice for employee-ownership in the discussions among the four: Wim, Dick, Rusty and me.

SE: How did they feel about employee-ownership through your argumentation and persuasion?

PM: My memory, and others may have different memories, but my memory was that I was for it, Rusty was opposed to it; Wim was ambivalent and dick was ambivalent. Now although I think that it appealed to Dick, I don't think he thought much about it but I think it appealed to him. I think Wim was more ambivalent about it. Rusty I believe was opposed to it Rusty, I believe he had access to wealthy people: I don't know whether they were his parents, or people that he knew, but I always assumed that it was his parents and they were willing to fund the company to the, my memory is to the tune of a million dollars but they wanted a major equity stake in order to do that and I was really opposed to that.

SE: Where did the disagreement continue? Did Rusty end up being part of the company?

PM: Rusty was initially part of the company: he bought shares. Everybody had to buy shares so shares were a dollar a share, and everybody had to buy at least 1000 shares in order to show the banks and others that we might be borrowing money from that we were serious and Rusty in fact bought shares. Now most of the people--Wendy, Frank, Rusty and Dick, I believe--borrowed the money from me to buy the shares. Jay had his own money I believe and I don't remember whether Wim borrowed the money or Wim got it from his family but we all bought 1000 shares. When Rusty left, we bought his shares back at one thousand dollars and then of 00:15:00course it was my thousand dollars so I got the thousand dollars, but no interest.

SE: We can pick up with: how long was Lindgren part of the company?

PM: Maybe six months, maybe less. He did some work, he did some electrical work, he was an electrical engineer. He wasn't part of the everyday happenings at Chroma at the time. Of course they were building the equipment, I was not building the equipment--I was painting walls because they wouldn't let me near the equipment and so I painted walls and columns and answered the telephone all at the same time. And we started getting phone calls almost immediately after opening the doors. But--and Rusty he wasn't-- he must have been there for the 00:16:00entire set-up period where they really completed the evaporation systems because he would have been integrally involved in making sure that those functions.

SE: And so in the first couple years, maybe even the first decade, what kind of clients were you working?

PM: We started out working with scientists, mostly biologists, and then we started working with companies that distributed microscopes and other equipment to those biologists so they would resell what we made. And then by 1994, we were working directly with the manufacturers of the microscopes and that was a big 00:17:00deal because they never worked with independent filter makers and in 1994 we started working directly with Nikon in Japan and that was a very big deal. We already working with other instrument manufacturers but not the microscope companies.

SE: Were there any are people that you worked or any scientists that were working on special projects for which you were making lenses for? (Correction: Filters).

PM: The first major customer was the company that was a division of AMICO, the oil company. They had a division called AMICO Technology and they bought a license, a technology from the University of California at Lawrence Livermore, that was, enabled a fluorescent compound to be tagged directly to DNA and by 00:18:00doing that they were able to develop genetic tests that were done on a microscope. And so that was the first, our first major project and we worked with through them, we worked with a lab at UCLA of the lab of Dennis Layman who developed one of the very early targeted drug therapies for breast cancer for breath cancers that had, that contained the HER2 mutation that was the cause of the breast cancer. And we were developing a special filter set so that he could look or the mutation and that was very exciting because I think we made a dozen 00:19:00different filter sets to see if they worked and finally made one that did. Over the years worked on many projects like that.

SE: So throughout the nineties, Chroma was based out of the, was it the Cotton Mill down in Brattleboro.

PM: In an old warehouse in Brattleboro and we just kept taking space: we took space after space after space and finally were everywhere building. And it was disjointed space, it was disconnected space, it was not clean space, but it was a lot of space.

SE: Why did the-- the comments you just said, obviously you would want to move to a place that was clean that was cohesive. What were some of the other contributing factors to move here to from Brattleboro?

PM: There was no to build in Brattleboro. And Brattleboro Economic Development people were mostly concerned with helping out another company and they were not particularly concerned about us until we decided to leave. Then they got 00:20:00concerned about us but the reason we moved up here is because they, Bellows Falls was very inviting to us and they helped us obtain the space, they help make this space buildable when it appeared that it wasn't because of rotting timber about 38 feet below ground. They were very helpful in getting us, getting this current building built and us moving into it.

SE: What advantages did you get explicitly in this building that--you're had until now and you're no building an expansion but what advantages did it have explicitly?

PM: This building? It's surely cleaner than the Cotton Mill was and over the years we've made it even more clean. We made it into a building that has pretty 00:21:00decent workflows, it's a much better place to work than the Cotton Mill was: air is cleaner, among other things and it's all in one building, it's not in disjointed space. In the Cotton Mill, we were on three different floors. It was just crazy to get around.

SE: Up until moving here, Bellows Falls, how many employees did Chroma have?

PM: I believe when we moved to Bellows Falls we had 56, I'm not sure of that. We can check those numbers. Two numbers stick in my head: 56 and 38. And I'm not sure which one is the right one.

SE: Was the move up here partly because you had enough employees to need a larger space?

PM: We had enough business to need a larger space. We needed more evaporation 00:22:00systems, we need more manufacturing space, we needed more inventory space; we needed more of everything. We need more office space; we needed and we got and we've been here since so 2003

SE: So over that first 12 years before he moved up here, with an increasing employee base, how did employee ownership permeate the culture? How did you see that play out in every day work?

PM: Well, first we had to figure out how it worked and we contracted with a consulting company on employer ownership. A company called at that time called the Industrial Cooperative Association, it has since shortened its name to the ICA group and they provided different model: we could be a co-op or we could be 00:23:00an employee stock ownership plan or we could make up our own model. The employee stock ownership plan among other things was too expensive for us. It cost thirty to fifty thousand dollars to get established and we didn't have that kind of extra money. Coops were too--our major objection to coops was 'one person, one share,' 'one share, one vote.' Because we didn't think that it recognized experience and longevity seniority, so we on the cuff made up our current way of doing things which is fundamentally a stock bonus plan. In the first at least three years, we said we will take 4000 shares of Company stock and divide it 00:24:00among the employees and that's what we did the first three years. And then at some point whether it was year four or year five, I don't remember, we decided to standardize the number of shares that each employee got and we must have settled on 200 shares per employee because that's what we do, that's what we bonus now. Someplace in the recesses of my mind I thought it was 250 at the time.

SE: So for that first decade, before you moved up here, how did you see employee ownership be part of how people act and people worked in the company?

PM: Oh god, we used to have town meetings to make decisions. And that was, that was at very least frightening. We used to-- there was a lot more interaction of 00:25:00decision-making, there was a lot more diffuse decision-making there was a lot more anarchy. So it was, it was, it was--if you had a responsibility to do something and you had an idea about how to do it you did it and there was no vetting of ideas. At the same time there were a lot of decisions that nobody knew about except the people who made the decisions. So there was not as complete transparency as one might think. You know, decisions have been made every day and I was spending money on marketing and advertising and sales and travel nobody ever bothered to ask me what I was doing with it. So it was a great time of people's involvement but it was also without controls and that was 00:26:00bad. I think we actually-- I can't-- I don't know this for a fact but I do believe that we got involved in some deals particularly around insurance that would benefit one person in the company and he did benefit from it and he was the person who made the deals so I always suspected there was less than honorable approach to deal making.

SE: As the company grew, how were those decision-making processes changed and shaped to be more equal or more efficient?

PM: Oh, we tried all sorts of things. We tried a kind of a representative body where representatives of each of the work groups would get together and they 00:27:00would plan scheduling and they would plan projects. I wasn't on that group so I don't know what exactly they did. I do know that it became chaotic, it wasn't always the same representative and I think that they had questions about what their authority was, what it-- mostly they were involved in production. When we-- in 1999, oh no, I think maybe it was 2000, the first person left, so the question was how to buy back her shares. At what value? And that precipitated a 00:28:00major argument, largely between the person who was the company's controller at the time and me. And it was carried out mostly in emails and the argument was about how to value the shares and I thought we needed some form of evaluation that had some relationship to market value. And he argued that shares should be valued by book value which is how coops are valued and then when we finally got around to valuing the shares for the first person that left we did value them at book. And we thought we would continue the discussion and to see if there were 00:29:00other forms evaluation that we wanted to entertain but we never did. The irony of course is when the person with whom I was having the argument left the company, he sued to have the evaluation be more than book value. He was not an honorable person. So when it was not in his interest--when it was in his interest for shares to be valued at that book, he argued for that. When it was in interest for shares to be valued at market, he argued for that. I think in the world that exists in my mind, employee ownership only works if there is consistency. Not sure I care about what you're consistent about as long as you're consistent and as long as what you do is in the interests of the greater 00:30:00number of people. Employee ownership doesn't work, I think most things don't work, but I especially think that employee ownership doesn't work when people only see their interests. It is in our individual interest, those of us who founded this company, to sell the company. The company is worth more in a sale to a venture capitalist then it will ever be in the methodology that we use to buy back shares whether its book value or ESOP value the value--the value in the marketplace is probably four times what even an ESOP value is and that makes it 00:31:00probably eight times what our book value is so it is in our interest, those of us who founded the company and those people who have been here the longest, to sell the company to somebody who wants to pay us all that money. It is not right; it is not in the interest of people who want to retain quality jobs that afford them quality lifestyle; so therefore whenever the issue comes to the surface, I, although tempted, argue against selling to an outside interest. There are many reasons why one doesn't want to sell to an outside interest largely because they end up screwing up the company terribly. Very few acquisitions that I know of by venture capital companies are private equity 00:32:00companies actually succeed. There have been--we've had a brother and sister companies in our industry, not the filter industry, but the biotech industry, have been gobbled up by big companies and most of them are gone at this time.

SE: So in the way that you were describing the difference between self-interest and collective interest with the founders, how have you seen that collective interest grow within the employee owner base as the company's grown.

PM: I don't know if it has and I don't know what it's gonna be like when I'm no here. I one said to a colleague here, younger colleague, that she had to believe that she wouldn't want to sell the company and she said that, "I can I cannot 00:33:00tell you what I will feel when I have as many shares as you have." And my response was, "I already have that many shares and I believe that we shouldn't sell the company." So it's hard to know what people really believe when they're torn between self-interest and collective interest and maybe we didn't do a good enough job explaining to people about that, maybe I didn't do a good enough job transmitting that, that kind of thinking to people. I'm sure that there are many many many many people at Chroma who feel the way I do but I'm not sure how much, I'm not sure how much it philosophically goes beyond Chroma. So once I said to a 00:34:00group of employees in a work group, "what if somebody offers a million dollars," a hundred million dollars, I'm sorry. And one of them says we should sell. This is somebody who has been here for I don't know 10 years at the time. So hundred million dollars was probably worth two million dollars to them, three million dollars, maybe. I said pointing to one of his co-workers in his work group but she hasn't been here for as long as you've been here so it's not worth to her what it's worth to you and he says, "Well we should, we should do something to make it worth more for her and then sell the company." So there was not the philosophic underpinnings to his thinking. I don't really know how widespread it 00:35:00is I like to think it's fairly widespread. I do know among the people that I speak with, it seems to be cherished but I think that I speak with a relatively small number of people and I don't know what the others think. I'd like to think that we've created something that is the model for how things ought to be but it's only a model about how things ought to be if the people who live in this model would do the same thing if they have the opportunity to start their own company. So I don't know.

SE: I think that's a good answer. I think that covers a lot of the bases. So I kind of-- transitioning from employee ownership culture, I want to talk about how the company structure developed from when it was just the original six founders you know excluding Lindgren and how developed over the year.

PM: Well it was gradual. Imagine when there were six of us, we all had very specialized areas of responsibility. When it was customer service, I was sales; Wim was developing the software that ran the manufacturing systems; Jay was a specialist of design of coatings; Frank was the guy you went to if you need something done fast; and Dick had managerial experience at Omega. So we had a group of specialists and so everybody respected everybody else's domain and expertise and then. As I alluded to earlier as we started growing, we started having meetings at which things were discussed and ostensibly decisions were made but we also made decisions without meetings and individuals made decisions. 00:37:00Right after the attempt--so what I didn't get to in the discussion of the disagreement between me and the controller was that he actively tried to create a palace coup and to rid the company of me and he did this in very underhanded and very secretive ways. He would slither around like a snake and try to gain allies in this effort. What he did, what he underestimated was the bond between the six founders. We were not the same kind of people; we live very different 00:38:00lives, but there was a bond among us that was impenetrable and continues to be. So when challenged the founders stuck together and there was no way that he could win that vote. So what we did was we said--we had a board of directors that did not function. I should note that at the first board of directors meeting, shortly after we found the company, we had to elect officers and I was not elected president and even Wendy voted against me. Dick was elected president I became president after that millennium and we were very, very consciously concerned about authority. We were very unconsciously concerned about 00:39:00authority also and we did not like people who had too much authority and did not like people with power. We were after all children of the sixties all of us in some way or another, the early part of the sixties on the late part of the sixties, and not trusting people over 30 and letting the people decide and one man, one vote and blah blah blah--all were us and so although-- we had a board of directors who didn't function but after the attempted coup we decided the board of directors would function and would be the leadership of the company and the six founders were made permanent members of the board of directors as long 00:40:00as they were as long as they continue to be full-time employees that they would be three other members of the Board of Directors voted on by the employee owners. So the founders retained the majority status on the board. That precipitated a period where the board was also managing the company and that was craziness. And as was our history we got another controller--why is it always controllers--who decided to mount a coup in the company.

SE: A second coup?

PM: A second coup. This time he tried to enlist my support in the coup and he was going to overthrow Dick as president and institute another founder as president. Subjectively, I believe his intent was to make that other person 00:41:00president because he felt that he could control that other person. And then at the meeting where this was all to happen I didn't vote for it. And that caused him great consternation. He left under a cloud later on but the board was not the place to manage the company and it never has been. And so in order to create some kind of management that did not include Jay or me because Jay and I were the adversaries in some fashion about how the company was to be led. So this--we 00:42:00had to have an organ that didn't include Jay and Paul and we created a steering committee that had, I believe, seven members, only two of which were full-time jobs, all the others were had day jobs and worked on the steering committee in their non-day-job hours and that was crazy. It had the effect of beginning to show us that management had a place at Chroma but it wasn't fully-fledged management.

SE: When was that committee founded or when was it was it you know actually making a changes to the company?

PM: I think it was around 2005 or 2006. It may have been 2006. I think--I want 00:43:00to say Dick retired in 2007 and he was a member of the original steering committee. And then when it became apparent that you couldn't have a day job and also do this working that we actually needed full-time people to do management work we created the second generation of the steering committee and it contained four people: a sales manager, an operations manager and two production managers. And it moved us forward: it began to show how thought-out decision making in production would work. Of course, sales was not included in there. Was the sales 00:44:00included? We had operations managers and then--we did have a sales manager but the culture was that I did sales and so I think there was--ok now sequence, the original, the original group did not have a sales manager. They wanted the sales manager. The person that we approach to be sales manager didn't want to be sales manager so the operations manager became the sales manager and the sales manager, the one that we wanted for sales became the operations manager. And that sales manager I got along well, I liked him I thought he was immensely talented and I thought that he was, had a future at Chroma. He had a hard time 00:45:00concluding decisions and carrying through on them and eventually he left. My understanding of why he left was that he and his then wife wanted to live out West and they move to Colorado or something like that. I know he's still around the industry somewhere, I have not seen him, he was a smart, a very very smart guy and I think that had he stayed he'd have been an important person in leadership of the company.

SE: So in directing the role of what the coordinating committee has done in the past, who or what does that structure look like now? How is the management structure developing?

PM: Management structure evolved to this year where we have now 5 chiefs, as it 00:46:00were, however we're looking for another term. We have a chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief technical officer. These are all positions, not people, mind you. A chief customer officer and the chief operations officer. We have three people fulfilling those five roles. That the chief financial officer and the chief operations officer are filled by one person; the CEO and customer, chief customer officer are both me; and the chief technical officer is another person. And we're looking in the not-too-distant future to add to the number of people we have in most roles so that eventually we actually have five doing five jobs. And I will retire next year, 2017, or the year after that,2018, and 00:47:00somebody else is going to become CEO and I suspect it will be somebody from that group and so will have to fill in other places.

SE: So between the chief positions and the work groups themselves, what is the structure between those two?

PM: There are, at this point two production managers, we will hire a third; there's an engineering manager; there is an IT manager but that's basically managing one work group. There will be a quality manager as opposed to a Quality 00:48:00Systems Director. Quality manager is an activist position, it's somebody that makes sure we do things right instead of just tells us the right way to do things. I didn't understand this for a very long time but director of quality systems develops the quality system doesn't mean that person actually makes it happen.

SE: So are both of those positions going to be there or--.

PM: Both of those positions will be there but one will be a superior position manager, the manager will be the superior position. I think now we also have a subsidiary and they have an Operations Manager up there; we also have overseas sales offices and they have general managers there. I suspect we'll continue to 00:49:00develop some additional layers of management but not too many because for the most part what we really like about Chroma is that the work groups manage themselves and we think that's real healthy I think it's healthy both for their, for people's sense of self, it's healthy because people who do the work tend to make the innovations that make the work easier and better. I don't ever think we'll have a structure where every department has a foreman or supervisor or something like that, it just feels uncomfortable.

SE: How does it tie into the culture and experience of being an employee owner at this company? Or how do you thing it ties in to the experiences of workgroups?

PM: So. many years ago when I was vice president and was in charge of sales and 00:50:00there was, and that was undisputed, I was working late, we were still in Brattleboro at the Cotton Mill, and there was a thin-films technician who was making head up, had orders for two different mirrors and he didn't know which one to make first so I said, "I know the customers, you make that one first because that customers more important," so he says, "you can't tell me what to do; I'm an owner here too." So structure affects ownership. We recently had somebody say when we introduced the c-suite and the structure to date, somebody said, "Does that mean I have a boss now?" Well they always did, they just didn't know it. We didn't think it. It changes the way people think, it changes the way 00:51:00they operate. One hope that it changes them in a liberating way so that things that they shouldn't, don't have to deal with. Things they should have to deal with, they deal with. There's no guarantee that's how people think.

SE: So we're actually at 51 minutes, are there any final remarks, comments about the topics we talked about that you want to cover before we finish?

PM: I have a friend who is the CEO of a trust company, local trust company in Vermont and that trust company is employee owed. Somebody once said to him and before that he and his entire team has worked as the trust department of a bank--they all got fired, set up their own company, sounds familiar. And they're 00:52:00incredibly successful but somebody once said to him, "What's the difference between leading the trust department of a bank and being CEO of an employee-owned trust company?" And he said, "I have to explain myself more." Employ ownership is more difficult. It's more difficult for a number of different kinds of people. It's more difficult for people like me who think they know the answers. It's more difficult for people who think that they have technological sophistication that others don't have. These things are true: it is a more difficult way to do things, it's the right way to do things. There is, 00:53:00he's since died, there is a very, very, very very very large formerly employee-owned defense contractor in San Diego, the company's called SAIC. And the man who started the company, Dr. John Byster, got it into his head that it ought to be an employee-owned company. So he set up one of the most magnificent, one of the most complex employee owned companies in the world. 10,000 employees-- this is not a hundred thirty. They had an internal stock market where employees could buy and sell shares and it made his ownership less valuable. So somebody who I think was probably questioning his sanity as people have probably questioned mine, said to him one day, "Why did you make this 00:54:00company employee owned?" And he said, "Because it's fair." And that says everything. John Byster says it better than I could with fewer words than I would. It's right because it's fair; it's more difficult; it's more complex; it is sometimes more emotionally draining: but it's always fair.

SE: Thank you very much Paul Millman.

PM: You're welcome.