Really clear compared to before. Yeah, way better. Hey, just, real quick, we are live. Just put that out there. Oh. And, um- Hold on. Let me see if I can turn this so at least we're not staring at the lights above me. Okay, there we go. Is that better? Yeah. Yeah, you look good. You look better, though. Man, I look still too dark. Keep going. I mean, I'm orange. That's true. a person's skin color. I'm just that dark. I'm like I think I got, like, a big tan going on. This is great. You look well tanned. Yes, you do. New Year's resolutions. Either of you the type to set New Year's resolutions, business, personal, both? Both. You know, I Yeah ...to be honest, I didn't. I used to be really good about that. Between maybe being busy and working, I didn't. I mean, I think New Year's Eve, as the fireworks were going off, I was laying black PPF on a four or a F8, it was like, "Eh, it's another year. Here we go. No, I do personal ones every year. I did this year decide that I was gonna drop baked goods simply because I love them too much, and I know I need to cut them out of my diet. Business, you know, I had made a decision that I was gonna do my best to make sure that I responded to anybody and everybody within two hours from now on as a go forward model. Let's start with the baked goods. Yeah. You're in phenomenal shape. Yeah Anyone who's hugged you knows that you don't have an ounce of fat on you. What is the move for baked goods? Is it just like a feel better thing, like makes you feel better? Yeah. What is the mo- Yeah. It's training, feel better, you know, for sure. I mean, yeah, okay, when you guys have hugged me, sometimes I have maybe felt a little more solid than others. The fact is that when I'm competing, then of course my diet's a lot more strict and I have a much more regimented schedule and everything that all goes along with it and so my physique comes along with it as well. When I'm not competing, like right now, then it's not as true. So I put weight on, and I don't tend to eat healthy nearly as much as I normally would. I just think that, you know, I talked to a lot of friends. I was with Ryan Burroughs from Auto Paint Guard over the holidays, and Alex Jones also was here. You know, with Ryan, you know, he's got a pretty strict diet. He's in incredible shape. He was telling me that, you know, dropping a lot of things like bread and stuff like that made him feel insanely better right afterwards, and I'm like, "Wow, okay. You know what? I can understand why that would play a big effect on you physically." I'm gonna see. I'm gonna do it myself and see how it feels. Great. Chris Hardy already doesn't drink, and I'm still trying. Right To catch up to that. Now he's dropping carbs and baked goods. It's like, man, you know, come on. I'm just trying to make it. I'm trying to separate us a little further there. Oh, great. How about you, Erik? What did you do? What was yours? I'm definitely going to make an effort to work out maybe every day. Could be a thing. It's something that used to be a part of my life, then definitely fell off little by little. You know, that's kinda my one real big one. You know, I have work goals obviously. To me, that's the one where I'm like, "This is a non-negotiable." I feel like this year. 'Cause it has to be a non-negotiable eventually. You know, like, Chris, like what you were saying, I found out a few years ago, like I had, you know. I, let's see. My early thirties, I sat in a desk for a few years straight, and I instantly became like super back pain, popped my knee, like just I thought I was falling apart. Fast-forward a few years later, I did change my diet, and I cut out sugar, and I, for a long period of time, cut out like carbs and everything, and all that stuff went away. Yeah. It was just like the difference in being in like needling back pain, can't move or feeling great and being able to like literally jump in the air and land and not have any weird feelings. With all that knowledge and experience, the self-discipline just hasn't been there in the last couple years. Sure I have to do it. I have to eat right and then you know you have to exercise. Like exercise. Yeah is a non-negotiable. If you wanna live a long time, you have to exercise. No matter how Sure Pretty you may look, if you don't exercise, it doesn't usually work out long term. For sure. You know, I wonder with my. No, but good for you. Yeah, definitely. Thank you. Good for you. Yeah, working out is huge, especially as we get older. I wonder if with my New Year's resolutions, because I realized a while ago that, like, why am I waiting for the new year to make this resolution and then try and stick to it? I wasn't always following through with that. I mean, in all honesty, I probably make a new resolution every Sunday or, you know, every couple of days of like, I need to fix this or change this. I The question is, do you do it? No. Do you stick to it? No, I don't, of course. I need to be better about that. I feel like my New Year's resolutions, especially the older I get, I probably come up with something new every week. Like, you know, let's do this this week and just do it small because if I were to take my New Year's resolutions, it'd be curious if we put on paper our last 20 years of New Year's resolutions, how far did we really go with those, you know? Did we really make it and change ourselves? Did we last a month? The classic is the working out, right? They always say that the gym for the first week after New Year's is packed, and then Right By March, it's empty again. Yeah. Gyms actually bank on an 80% attrition rate. I bet. Where people are still paying their auto payments. Me I feel like what we're describing is something that really translates into productivity of work because it transcends not just from like physical but also to work because, you know, like we all have those things, whether it be work or health, that we know we need to do that you're like, you know it, you know it's an issue, it's a big bottleneck with the business or with work. It's like being able to spot it, act on it, and follow through with it. Actually, you know, that could be a year, that could be 5 years, it could be 10 years, it could be a week, it could be a month, it could be anything. I really think, like, when you can identify it and do it and stick with it and, you know, 'cause we all kinda know what we need to do, but Right. Doing it can just drag on over years sometimes. For sure. Maybe that's the good part of a New Year's resolution, is that it's forcing us to think about what we need to change or be better at. Yeah, Chris and I actually had a conversation. We were talking earlier today, and we were talking about this one thing in particular with me, and that is that if I have a task that's in front of me, I literally have this, like, obsessive thing that I have to get the task done right now. I can't let it wait. I know part of the reason why I can't let it wait is because if I let it wait, it's probably not gonna get done, or it's gonna get done last minute, it's not gonna get done right. Right? I like the idea that if something is required of me, just get it done right now and make sure that it gets done properly. Mr. Hardy, you said your other resolution was to get back to people, I think as far as like work, everybody and anybody as quickly as possible. Why was that an important thing to make happen now? I was listening to some. Look, talking, you know, num- Your audio cut out. Wait. You still there? I can't hear you. Just probably got a call. Maybe you got a call. Can you guys still hear me? Now we can. can hear you now. Hold on. You're back. Something's gone wrong with this. So sorry, guys. We can hear you. Probably gonna have to leave and come back in. That's all right. Maybe it was on a delay. You know what I mean? Yeah. Sometimes that can happen. Well, I guess we can continue on. I mean, you know, Chris Hardy, it's funny when he said that today in our conversation. This is super important in business, and it's something I wish I was better at, is my procrastination has to be one of the worst personal and business-related things that we can do. I'm guilty of it. You know, you put something off, you think you can finish it in 30 minutes, and it takes 2 hours or it's longer. Chris Hardy is very good about that. Like he told me today that he's committed to just getting it done and getting it done right away. Don't put it off till the last minute. Yeah. I'm sorry, guys, I dropped off for a bit. It seems like with this app on my phone, if somebody's calling me on their side, even if I swipe up to get rid of the call, it still somehow messes up with the signal. I apologize. Trying to answer your question. Look, talking to a lot of individuals within not only our own space but our customers, our customers' customers, and personal connections. I think that a lot of people's pet peeve is that they try and connect with somebody, and then they don't hear back from them for 24-48 hours later. They're wondering whether or not they even got the message, things of that nature. You know, so many things have come around now where you can see that a message has been delivered, and yet they're still not responding. You're kinda like wondering why, what's up? Like, have you done something wrong or is there some sort of personal reason why they're not responding to you? I just don't like making somebody feel that way, and I don't like it when it happens to me either. I'm like, "Look, like I'm pretty good at getting back to people right away." I feel like a lot of, especially the staff that work with me say that I get back to them right away, but I know that it's not always true. I'm like, Look, you gotta do better. Like, you just gotta do better for everybody around you. Yeah. I mean, we're definitely in a time where it feels like, you know, everything's at your fingertips, so you kind of expect people to be at your fingertips as well. What could have been a week before, now it feels maybe more like it should be, you know, a couple of hours or a day at most or whatever it is. With the amount of people out there that can possibly reach out to anybody, it can be a lot, you know. I think everybody has to kind of adapt and do what they can and figure out what streams they wanna communicate through. Because when you're getting reached out to from, you know, eight different places, Instagram, Facebook, you know, personal messenger, getting phone calls to two different numbers, you know, there's emails and, you know, like it makes it obviously more difficult at high volume. Everybody should know- Yeah. Yeah. For me, I'm gonna I guess I should quantify that I'm specifically more referring to phone calls and text messages, right? That's the two most instantaneous ways to connect with me. Look, do I look at my emails? Of course. Do I have the notifications on? Of course. You know, a lot of times what will happen is a call will come in, and then I won't accept the call because I'm on one. Mm-hmm. Then another call will come in, and another call will come in. What's going on is then I'm literally never getting off the phone. Now what I've decided to do is, okay, no, hang up on the first conversation before grabbing the second one. Take a look at your phone, confirm that there's either text message you haven't responded to or that you have those names in red. It's amazing how often I'll see a name in red, but, oh my God, yeah, they called me on my last call. I totally was thinking I was gonna call them right back. Then there's a really good example of how I could easily drop the ball and then not respond to them and have them wondering why I didn't get back to them, and then in turn, you know, maybe missing something that I should have been involved with. You know, just need to make some adjustments in order to make sure that I'm accomplishing as much as I possibly can. You know, Mike Burke- You know what I do? Go ahead. Sorry, Chris. Go ahead. Well, no. What I've been doing, because I have the same problem, where especially a big problem I have is I start to respond, and then I get a call that comes in, and then it literally falls, like, way down the list. I've been trying to tell people, like, "Hey, I'll get back to you. If you don't hear from me, ping me again." Just saying, like, I, you know, I'm not saying that I'm the busiest guy in the world, but bug me. You know? I like, I promise I wanna get back to you, but, and I do these blanket statements where somebody says, "Hey, can you give me some feedback on this?" I go, "Slammed today, but if you don't hear from me by tomorrow, bug me again." I go, "I promise I wanna respond to you, but I wanna give you the full response that, you know, it deserves. Sure. Yeah, I was talking to Mike Burke earlier today, right? I mean, now they're, I think they're approaching 60 or they're past their 60 store locations. He's on the phone, like, more than I am. Yeah. Like, from the minute that man wakes up to the minute he goes to bed, he is like, you know, doing all this like, you know, guidance in terms of like, hey, you know, all this business, right, guidance and stuff like that, how to build, how to grow, how to train, how to market, all that stuff. I'm like, "Man, like, I think I'm brutally busy, but how in the world are you dealing with this?" It's funny because you know, when Mike Burke and I first started interacting with each other 3, 4 years ago, 4 years ago plus now, actually, if I text him, I'd get a response within 10 seconds. Sometimes now it's a couple of hours later, and there's just a really good example of how you realize that things have changed in terms of people's schedules and how you might actually personally perceive that change in thinking that, "Oh, well, why isn't he getting back to me right away like he used to? You know, like, is there something up? Oh. That's, I just, you know, again, this is a big part of what I'm sort of mentally dealing with right now in terms of figuring out how to make sure I look after people as best I can. He takes an hour to get back to you? That's crazy. It's like five minutes with me. I don't- See? I'll tell you right now, Erik Devash, he takes his calls the minute he calls him. Yeah? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Mike Burke. He doesn't even expect anybody, including me, to take Erik's call. Oh, man. We're falling down the list. Yeah. Priority has definitely changed. Yeah. Yeah. We're seeing transition of communication, which is pretty awesome. I mean, look what we're doing right now, you know? Yeah. Mr. West. Yes. Is it okay if I refer by last names here 'cause I feel like Chris? Let's do it. I can do Christopher and Chris. Yeah, that's true. We got two Chris's. Yeah. You mentioned you're doing a lot of traveling. Obviously that came to mind when you mentioned getting back to people. I can only imagine when you're on the airplane, like, what are you doing so much traveling for? My Middle East trip to the UAE started out as a fun trip. I wanted to go see the F1 race in Abu Dhabi. I've gotten older, I'm trying to find some hobbies that I enjoy. Traveling to find a race every year maybe is pretty fun because they do them all over. I went to Abu Dhabi to watch the F1 race. Awesome experience. Super fun. While I was there, I decided to do a couple visits in Dubai and visit some shops. I went by NVN, who is a phenomenal shop that I did a little shop walk through and visited another couple shops. It's just one of my favorite things, and I mean, I know I work for XPEL full-time, but a big part of that was I love still getting out and interacting with shops and learning and talking with the installers. Wherever I'm at, I try and still make that happen, and it was super fun. I mean, Dubai, you know, crazy money. It is really neat to see those shops. For anybody who doesn't know, what is your position with XPEL? Director of Automotive Films. Kinda what does that entail? I do. I work with R&D a lot on our films, from the paint protection film to the window tint with XPEL. It's really neat. I mean, when we say R&D, research and development, we really do have a full team of, you know, engineers and chemists and all that when people say, "What are you working on now?" It's literally we're testing different things, you know, windshield films or tint or PPF all the time, seeing how we can make it better, what we can change. There's criteria, you know. Coming from being an installer myself, there's valuable feedback that we can give to the guy who is the chemist to say, "Hey, this is really important to us as an installer. How can we fix this?" They go, "Oh, I didn't realize that you wanted that. Okay. Well, we can change this and tweak this." So they're constantly working on stuff. Then a new role that I'm taking on a lot is working with all of our XPEL shops and the operational side. Having visited so many shops and having my own shop for so many years, it's very fun to interact with all these installers in our shops, you know, that we have in Texas and Las Vegas and Boise, and making them an integral part of the whole XPEL community. Meaning that it's not a competition with our other independents that are dealers for XPEL, but we all work as a synergy for that local area, and I really enjoy it. I like what you said, especially at the end, because you really painted a picture of, like, you know, you can spend your energy working against your competition, or you can spend your energy working with your team. Well, 100%. to do better. 100%. If we as an install shop are overworked, I wanna be able to call instead of telling a guy, "No, I can't service you, we're booked out three months," I wanna call the other XPEL dealer down the street that I know does phenomenal work because he's trained with us and we've worked with him and say, "Hey, do you mind if we send this guy to you? I'd rather take care of him and make sure he's protected or tinted or whatever than just saying no." It's a great synergy that we have. It's funny because I get it where I had a shop for 18 years, and if I heard that XPEL or whoever I was carrying was opening another person in that area, I used to lose my mind. I mean, I'm calling Jeff Phillips, I'm calling Ryan Pape, I'm like, "What are you doing?" It takes some mind changing to understand that it works out. It really does. I know it's hard to believe, but it's okay, but we can all be a team together. Chris, I feel like that's something that you've said often, like I've heard from you often. Do you want to expand on that in any way? Yeah. I mean, I've touched on this subject. Which Chris? Sorry. Mr. Hardy. Yes. Yeah. I've touched on this subject before because we brought this up where some people have been like, you know, like some of our competitors have tried to throw us under the bus by trying to make it sound as though XPEL's plan is to take over every single market and basically wipe out the independent shops and somehow just own the entire market ourselves. That's the farthest thing from the truth. You know, number one, everywhere where we have a shop, that shop does a lot to help out all of the independents around it, and I mean a lot. We do an insane amount of marketing, which is localized marketing. It's not store-specific marketing. We obviously carry a lot of product in those shops, so those stores can actually quickly go to those stores and grab product if they need it. Those stores can also quite often call on those shops to say, "Hey, you know, I lost a guy to COVID last week. Is there any chance you guys have got an extra one available?" We manipulate our staffing in order to try and make that happen. We also tend to be the highest priced in the marketplace on purpose so that, again, they're not utilizing our store because we're the cheapest. We're trying to set the bar actually higher than everywhere else. What was really an eye-opener for me is, at some point, somebody got to show me the current sales penetration in marketplaces, not only where we don't have a shop, but where we do have a shop. I looked at those markets, and I saw the drastic number per person per year, which is what our goal is, right? We have a target that we have to try and achieve somewhere between $0.75 and $1 per person per year in the U.S. and in Canada as our initial goal, right? The goal will change, of course, at some point as we continue to add on product lines and PPF especially continues to do its upward momentum that it's currently doing. But regardless, that's the initial goal. You can look at those markets like the Houston, San Antonio, Boise, Vegas. Now, of course, we're gonna go into Scottsdale. We have Montreal. We have Calgary. You know, you can look at these markets, you can see how much higher we are in penetration per person in those markets. Now, me, right away, of course, as you know, being I was a partner with David Glendenning for so long with the shops up in Canada, you know, I was like Chris West. I'm like, "Oh," you know, right away, I'm like, "Oh, well, that's because XPEL came in, and they just took over the market, and no wonder they're the highest penetration. They're probably doing $6 billion a year out of that store. I find out, actually, the store is not doing that much in volume. They're doing good. They're doing respectively good, that's for sure. What was amazing was to watch how the stores that were already in those marketplaces are actually doing insanely better now that the XPEL shop is there. I'm like, "How?" Like, how does that even work out? You find out everything that's going on behind the scenes to make it happen, and I'm like, "Oh, yeah. Okay, I get it." It's funny because when I've had an opportunity to sit down with some independents, you know, and show this fact to them, the fact, not just conjecture conversation, but true facts. Here's the numbers. Here's where they were before. Here's where they are now. Look at this for yourself. They're like, "Oh, wow. Okay. Hey, any chance you guys wanna open up a store in my city then?" It's amazing how that's starting to change. Yet our competitors were purposely calling some of the shops that had converted to us going, "Well, how are you gonna feel tomorrow when they open up a store right beside you, and they try and take all your customers away from you?" It's like, that's the farthest thing from the truth. Proof is in the pudding, farthest thing from the truth. Let me add some things too because I know it can sound like, quote, “Team XPEL.” You know, you got Hardy, you got me, and we're just going XPEL. But I mean, I've used 3M, obviously, I used SunTek for many years, and I have nothing bad to say about other films, you know, really. But I know that as XPEL or as a business owner, I won't even say XPEL. As a business owner, there's so much. You can have the best film in the world and install and offer that doesn't mean you'll be successful. So XPEL, at least for me, I really love that and recognize that that's important. When I sit in meetings and talk about how we can grow to help our independents, it isn't about making a better film. Granted, I always want a better film. It's what other ancillary things and supporting things can we do to help a business grow. Mike Burke, of course, great business coach, where we talk about the marketing, you know, the TintWiz app, where you got CRM, invoicing, all that. Those are the things that can help make a successful business. Where at XPEL, we're looking beyond just product. Product is important, don't get me wrong, but there's so many additional things to help make a person successful. That's what excites me because I love the product side. I'm obviously installed a long time. I love the business side. It's how can we help people grow beyond that? Yeah. Jordan just left a comment, just basically resonating what y'all are saying from his side of things, 'cause he has a dealer down the road from him, and what he's saying there is always what he's said. It's not just he's saying that today. It's something I've heard from him before. You know, what you're describing is just a way that you're, you know, a way that you are misviewing what it means to have a dealer network and what, you know, how you can empower your dealer network and so on. It's just frankly probably not something that people have seen in the past. Being nobody's done in the past, you just don't know what to expect. I think the proof is in the pudding. It would be unbelievably shortsighted to go with the other example that you gave Chris Hardy, that people would put in people's ears. It would be unbelievably shortsighted to think that you'll just buy up all the locations and own the world, and that would be end of it. No, yeah. You know. Yeah, you know, then there's the other benefit that of course Chris would be personally involved with in his current role, right? That is that we get a lot of insane real-world testing out of our shops without biased opinions, right? 100%. Chris will not let our shop installers, like, you know, give him a smoke and mirrors conversation about how they do or don't like a film or how it's performing or something like that. He can personally sit there and work with them in any given location, whether it's the cold climates of Calgary or it's the super hot climates of Scottsdale or Vegas, you know, to wherever the market is. He can work with them and figure out that film and then go, "Hey, let's try this out. Okay, let's what if we change this look? Well, what if we change this?" Then work with the R&D and make those modifications and then bring real-world tested product. 100%. Not independent shop re-reviewed product to market. I think that is giving us a major upper hand in the current situation that the other manufacturers can't claim to have. Isn't that critical that you keep that, like you said, that direct, you know, hands-on? Because I feel like the disconnect between a manufacturer and the real world of shops is sometimes a complaint that I've heard from shops and there's no better way to stay connected than literally staying connected and doing that. Oh, for sure. You know, I don't know how many of our shop installers with XPEL are listening to this, but to be honest, they kinda are guinea pigs a little bit, where we put them through some trials and tests to you know not only the film side, but also the business side, seeing what marketing works well. Because we're not trying to keep that a secret. It's not a secret sauce just for my shops. It literally is like, "This worked for me and my Vegas shop, Chris Hardy, why don't you do it all down the East Coast with everybody? Right. Yeah, absolutely. You know, you look at, I was talking to Tim Ham, right, from Felony Film today. You know, you look at the growth that Georgia experienced this year. Georgia had, like, nearly 100% growth. Now, a lot of that has to do also with this incredible rep, Zach Locker, that did an amazing job this year, for sure. You see the growth that Tim Ham experienced this year, which was astronomical. If you go look at how many shops we have in Atlanta, there's almost more shops per person in Atlanta than there is probably in any other market. Oh, wow. Yet every one of them has seen awesome growth for the year 2021, and it's not slowing down, and they're still, you know, booked out and completely on high demand. You know, it's just a result of, like, everything that Chris West and that team is doing in the background to make that possible. It's, you know, the conversation about opening. I just had a call from an XPEL customer who's pretty well-known in the Midwest or I guess West region. He's, you know, a little bit up in arms about some shops getting opened up in his location. There's some conversations that is hard to wrap your head around, and I told him as an owner myself, I would've been irritated, but now my eyes have been opened a little bit to, like, we have an Arizona market where we literally have installers right across the street. I mean, literally just walk across the street, and they're both XPEL installers, both killing it. Just like the gentleman that posted a second ago, they don't even consider themselves competition. They're both booked way out. They're like, "I'm so busy, I don't even have time to worry about that." If I look back at all the times that somebody was set up in my locations in Alaska, we continued to still grow. If you have all the pieces in place from your quality to your service, you'll be fine. Right. Yeah. That's an important thing to look at, is do you have all your pieces in place? Because like you're saying, if you have a fear of loss and you let that guide you. Right. Fear of loss won't guide you anywhere good, but you also can't just pretend that everything should go right and it's good if it's not, because it probably will be something there anyway. Well, man, I see guys waste so much energy on worrying about the guy that opened up down the street instead of going back and saying, "Okay." In fact, Chris Hardy and I just had a conversation with Phenomenal Films and- Phenomenal Model. Mark Friedman. Great guy out of New York, yeah. Mark Friedman. He said something that resonated with me where he said, "I wanna make a power play." It's that attitude that I loved, where it was like a power play to everybody around him, meaning like, I know that this guy's doing this, I know that this guy's doing this, I'm gonna make a power play to grow my business and show where I'm at. Because, man, when we get so focused on the other guy, like we lose sight of where we're going. Yeah. He, you know, I agree with you. That was an amazing conversation we had with him. I mean, we're not gonna share what his power play is gonna be, 'cause that's unfair to him. Oh, sure. The reality is he's got some very key things that he's locked onto that is gonna make that successful, and he's gonna do it without worrying about everybody else that's around him. Right. 100%. Yeah. That was beautiful. Most of our clients. Look, Erik, you've been around a lot of our clients at this point, right? Through either Window Film Conference or things like that, and obviously some that have attended some of these, you know, some of these podcasts. 99% of them, if not more, actually really enjoy each other's company and get along very well with each other. You know, you saw what we did for Chris West's birthday up in New York City. You know, you saw what we did with the races down in Texas. I mean, I don't know if that's even plausible or possible with other brands. I hear from some of my friends that work for other brands, they couldn't ever carry something like that off because everybody sort of like, has this, like, animosity towards one another. In our community, in the XPEL community, I think that that's very few and far between where there is any of that at all. I completely agree from my perspective, and that's why I think it's so incredibly important for everybody that's an XPEL dealer to go to the conference, because that's where you're gonna be around all the XPEL dealers and people like what you're saying, that is accurate, and I can only imagine what it'll be like this year. Well, this year is gonna be crazy. Hats off to Robert Bezner, the gentleman who's in charge of our marketing team. Like, unfortunately, the gentleman who was in charge of our event planning, Tyler, had an opportunity to go back to Facebook, which of course was an amazing opportunity that he took. That left Robert Bezner high and dry in carrying off the most important thing of our year for us in terms of event, which is, you know, dealer conference. We are way over the highest number we've ever had in attendance already, and we're still got quite a bit to go. I know there's a lot of people that are still booking. My suspicion is we're probably gonna end up 50% bigger than the biggest conference we've ever had, and we have this amazing breakout sessions are lined up. As a matter of fact, Chris West is gonna hold one himself, which is a dealer roundtable. But we just have so many great things happening at dealer conference that we've talked about dealer conference before and you know, I think that it is the one genuine thing that an XPEL dealer can do for their business over anything else that they can attend is dealer conference in terms of how it's gonna have a positive impact for them. Oh, yeah. It's, I've almost said like, I wish it was open to all businesses in our industry. Obviously, it's, you know, XPEL only, but it's that important. As I look back to relationships that I formed that helped me grow my business or start new businesses, they actually were all created there at that conference. Yeah. It makes sense because when you think about the other opportunities that you have to get together, like maybe SEMA or the Window Film Conference in September, they're not in any way oriented to, you know, what's gonna be going on at the XPEL Dealer Conference. The breakout sessions, the speaking, the networking. Right. Like, everybody's together, and the whole point is to communicate. Whereas trade shows, you're talking for a little bit, and you're potentially moving on. Right. one way or another. 100%. Is there at this point, it's what? 30 days away. Can I ask the question, is there any chance that COVID's gonna mess this up? Is within knowledge. Like, I don't know if that's. Is that something y'all are like still kinda like, "Shit," or is it good to go pretty much? From everything I'm hearing so far, it's 100% good to go. Look, Ryan Pape, our the most amazing CEO probably on the planet, is like full gung ho that we're putting on dealer conference. In fairness, he was doing that last year. The only reason we didn't do dealer conference last year had nothing to do with XPEL. It had to do with the fact that the hotel told us, "Hey, we need to change the way that you're allowed to interact inside the hotel. So you need to go down to 50% occupancy within the rooms. You have to have all your meals are within the conference room. You can't go and have like the buffet style that you were gonna do before. The competitions, you have to be six feet away from each other." Well, how in the world is that gonna carry out with people being able to watch the competitions? You know, and then on top of that, your group could be seated together, but you had to be more than six feet away from the next group. You know, as big as those conference rooms were, we were like, "Wow, we had over..." I don't remember. It was a big number. For sure, over 500 people registered or something like that to attend conference. We were like, "This room is not even gonna be able to fit 250 by the time we put in all these restrictive measures." We pulled out. I heard that unfortunately, LLumar just canceled their dealer conference, and that's a shame. You know, I mean, that's a very great competitor of ours that both Chris West and I are big fans of. You know, both him and I are really good fans of Eastman and 3M, right? Those are our two main competitors. Those are the two guys that those are the two companies that we always have to keep our eyes on in terms of, "Hey, what are they doing? Where are they innovating?" To hear that they had to cancel their dealer conference is a shame. I'm sure that there's a lot of their dealers that are disappointed in that. You know, look, at the end of the day, they made the decision that makes the most sense, and I respect them for that call. You know, even SEMA, right? I mean, how many people pulled out of SEMA? Yet, I think that a lot of people were pulling out because they saw the initial numbers in terms of attendance, and it was very low, right? Very low registration up until like a month before, and then it skyrocketed. Well, a lot of people already pulled out by then 'cause then they didn't have any penalties. You know, we ended up doing SEMA anyways, and I think that it was an incredibly successful SEMA for us. I think that all of the reps felt like it was probably one of the best, if not the best SEMA ever because there was a lot of traffic, but it wasn't overwhelming traffic, right? Going back to dealer conference and whether or not we're gonna cancel, everything we're hearing is that no chance. If the hotel's not restricting us, which this is Texas, it doesn't sound like they're gonna restrict anything anytime soon, if ever again, we're carrying forward. You know, hopefully, people act as best as they possibly can. You know, I was talking to Ray Van Dexter from Dynamic today. You know, he's got COVID. There's four of his employees that caught COVID. You know, back to Ryan Burroughs at Auto Paint Guard, COVID, you know, with four of his employees. I do hope that of course, if people feel like they're sick or that they might have been in contact with someone with COVID, they're not irresponsible when they attend conference, you know, with the possibility of getting everybody else sick. The other kind of maybe wishful thinking on my part is that Omicron is not seen as negative a detriment to people who catch it as the Delta variant has. There's not been as much hospitalization per positivity rate. You know, and so with that, maybe it's a much weaker form of Delta of COVID. Look, guys, I had COVID, you know, the Alpha version last September, not this September, but the year before. I blew through it like nothing, but I have a lot of friends that didn't. Like, that caught it and had a really difficult time with it. We had a lot of community members that did. Had some big problems, right? Some of the men got up in hospitals and stuff like that. The Delta variant definitely had a negative impact. So far, again, fingers crossed, and let's hope that this is true and accurate. So far, the Omicron doesn't seem to be that bad, and I think that conference is happening. Chris has the ear of a couple of people that I don't, so he might know even better than I do. No, it's happening. I haven't heard anything that it wouldn't be. Personally, I think that it's kind of a personal decision if people wanna attend or not. I think we're far enough with COVID now. For the industry, I think we need it. I mean, we kinda look forward to it every year, and we missed it. The competition is completely sold out as it does every year. It's like I got people calling me like, "Can you squeeze me in still?" I'm like, "Man, I'm sorry. It's done." 'Cause it's not my call, but I can't even pull the drawstrings to make it happen. Slots are full. Yeah. You know, the other funny thing is. Sorry, Erik. I know you're about to say something, but real quick. Every one of these guys has got a business that's currently running. Yeah. They're taking in clients. They're interacting with people on a daily level right now. Yeah. I think that it's kind of interesting that, you know, every client we have is open and up for business. Sure. You know, like if they're interacting with people already, then is there really that much of a difference between. I realize, okay, you're going to a large event with a lot of people in the same rooms and what have you, but you know, you don't know where that client just came from who's interacting with you right now, dropping off their car, and you're doing a consultation with or whatever. They might have had 20 people over last night for dinner for some New Year celebration or something or at a party. Like, you know, I think that again, at the end of the day, like Chris is saying, we need this. We really are at that point where SEMA was one of those, right? We needed SEMA this year. Thankfully, it went on, and I think we need dealer conference as well. I'm glad it's gonna happen. You know, if you have obviously staff to go to it and the venue says, "Go for it," I feel like anybody who doesn't wanna go just wouldn't go. Right. The only people that'll be there are the people that wanna be there. Right. Like, it's a pretty easy, like, you know. Position. decision, right? Yeah. But- Yeah, they've already made that judgment call, "Hey, I'm going- Right. COVID or not. Right. Like, "I'm just gonna go and have a good time and enjoy myself. Yeah. Let's see where the chips fall. A short 12 months ago, I believe, if I have my years right, Veloce at this time hadn't been announced that it had been acquired by XPEL. PermaPlate hadn't happened, and probably another 15 acquisitions that happened last year hadn't happened either. Right. I think it would be fair to say that XPEL not only grew their dealer network but just grew as a company. Right? Like exploded, I would say, not grew. Exploded. Yeah. Exploded is the word I was going for, not grew. Sure. Yeah. What things from the corporate side of things, from your side of things, do you see changing as far as XPEL goes moving forward, maybe because of the growth? What things do you see absolutely not changing and you carrying through, even so the growth is so tremendous? You wanna take those first, Chris, or me? No, go ahead. Okay, let's address the questions, right? Number one is this is a massive growth. I think the latest number is close to 800 employees, and, you know, 16 months ago, 17 months ago, whatever that number is, you're probably talking 450. We're probably talking nearly double the amount of staff. What's, I think still true to this day is that the staff are realizing... And we don't like the word acquisition, as you know. We really prefer the word merger, right? With the merger with PermaPlate, the merger with Veloce, the merger with Filmwraps, the merger with Aviza, [uncertain], I feel like they may have been wondering like, "Wow, is this gonna be corporate life now? Am I really going into that corporate world structure, everything's meetings, everything's cross the T's and dot the I's and don't fall out of line at all in any way, shape, or form, you get written warning? Now, you know, if you talk to, like, Regina or George or Zach Burke or any of these people, you know, I mean, anybody, I think anybody that's been part of that whenever mergers happen, they recognize real quick that we're still just operating like a family. Is there a little bit more corporate infrastructure? Yes, of course, there has to be. But have we lost sight of still acting as that mom-and-pop designated, you know, supplier to those individuals? No, we really haven't. You know, I think that that's most true, especially on the sales side. I mean, look, they're the people that are interacting with the clients every day. You know, it's the customer support team is too. The sales staff is that first line of interaction, and it's the most important interaction that goes on with the customers. If at any point in time they're giving a more corporate feel to the client. That's just not what we want. That's not what we're looking for, that's not what we train for, that's not what we hire for, and that's not something that we would tolerate. You know, we need to make sure that we keep that in our sight, that same feeling, that same mentality, that same belief that ultimately we need to act as a brotherhood, sisterhood within each other, within our competitors, and of course, most importantly, with our clientele. I don't see that change. I don't. I can see, as I said, a little bit more above me, a little bit more corporate infrastructure and stuff, perhaps a little bit more meetings. Chris West is certainly involved in a little more meetings than he ever thought he was gonna be. You know, it's just so that we can get, you know, items crossed off the list and knock projects out, but not because we're changing the way that we're doing business. I think that that's what I'm really trying to get to, you know. I think that a lot of our operations assume that we're changing the way that we're doing business is just not true. You know, talking to Mike Burke once again, you know, he was, like, pointing out the fact that he was like, "Hey, like, I kind of feel like you're getting a little too corporate. You're not doing as many events. You're just doing." I'm like, "Whoa, wait a second. We weren't doing events during COVID because most events were being canceled. If you go and look at our current event calendar and how many events we've been doing, you know, it's been one after another after another. The marketing department is, like, slammed 24/7, putting a lot of stuff in place. You know, Harry and the Veloce merger, you know, same thing. Like, a lot of all this stuff is going on behind the scenes to still do everything that we did that got us here and then that much more. Only now we've gone on to some even bigger and better things. You know, you've seen the Penske situation where, you know, we're a title sponsor of INDYCAR. You know, we just announced the title sponsor of a NASCAR race coming up in Texas next year, and I think it's a multi-year deal. Okay, maybe that is, you know, a little bit more of the league that we were in before, if you will, but it still hasn't resonated to the point where we've lost touch with where we were in the first place and what got us here. I know about it. I can't mention everything because I don't want to steal Rob Bezner's thunder, but I was talking to him earlier today and hearing about all the things he's got lined up for 2022, whether it's publications that we're involved in, whether it's the influencers that we're involved in with it. There was a lot of that conversation and I'm just like blown away going, "Wow." Like, this is gonna be our best year ever in terms of our strategy. My two cents on it is, you know, there's a lot of concern about, okay, XPEL's huge. They make a bunch of money. They're corporate. They're just taking over. They don't care about any of us small guys anymore. I like to remind people that I owned a shop for 18 years in Alaska. It's pretty small. Chris Hardy still is involved with the shop and owned one. Matt Moreau owned shops. Mike at Pro-Tect, our VP of sales, he owned Pro-Tect in Las Vegas for 15 years. On an executive level, you have people that do understand because they've owned shops. Now maybe they aren't tinting every day or installing. I don't even install as much as I used to, of course. We do come from that background and understand that that's an important part of the business. Secondly, if we look at the acquisitions or mergers like Chris Hardy says, PermaPlate, which is an in-house dealer program, I would much rather have in-house dealer programs be XPEL and DigiCut. In Alaska, I fought DigiCut for a long time. It wasn't the best film. It was bad patterns. If XPEL were to buy them and now be the in-house dealer, now I actually have an in. I have a relationship for the overflow for if the installer gets sick or gets fired or quits, now they immediately go to the XPEL dealer. I don't look at the PermaPlate as like damaging the industry that we bought them or acquired them. If I look at some of the independent mergers and acquisitions that we've done, it actually helped that area because the person that we acquired was actually territorial and wouldn't allow other people to open up. Well, now that we acquired them, we said, "Sure, open up. Go ahead. Be XPEL." It was a plus for that area. I can think, and I'm saying this truly having owned my own shop, of any of the acquisitions that we've done that haven't benefited the surrounding people. That makes a lot of sense, especially like you said, if somebody's territorial and now they're no longer territorial, instead now they become support. Right. a source of more exposure for the area. 100%. Yeah, you should see that as a perfect example. I mean, I like the fact that Chris highlighted that. You know, the gentleman that we're talking about, I won't say his name, but was very territorial and for a good reason. He was an amazing, massive account. Massive. I can understand him really demanding that from XPEL as a reciprocal thing for him purchasing so much product. Yet we did the merger. I could try and stay away from that word acquisition. We did the merger and immediately it opened the door for a bunch of people who had been asking for XPEL shops to become XPEL shops for years. We turned them on knowing full well that that business that we're turning on might cost us personally to do so. Like, that was an internal business with the labor and part component combined, which is obviously more profitable than just the part component on its own, right? Mm-hmm. Full retail price versus wholesale price of just product. It's a massive difference in revenue possibility, and yet we turn them on and gladly did so. Already those shops, I can think of three shops that we turned on actually, and all three of them are like out of the gate, like crazy busy. We love it. I'm okay with it. Love it. Yes. Because I oversee that store that we bought, and I'm 100% on board. That's why we are here, is to support that entire market, not just look out for ourselves. Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. Is there anything that XPEL's doing just like that really stands out, like this coming year that kind of excites you? Doesn't have to be necessarily related to your position or anything like that, but just something you know one of them doing that kinda- Okay. I'll give you one. Looking forward to 2022. We are looking at how to address the labor problem. I don't know. You know, I probably could go into more detail, but I'll just leave it at that to kind of dangle the carrot, because if I go into too much more detail, I'll have a bunch of people calling me like, "When's it happening? When's it happening?" But as we've gone on. I already have those calls. Right. Me too. Because of what Chris told them. Right. You know, as Chris and I have gone and talked to guys, and they get frustrated with, "You opened a shop down the street from me." We say, "Well, aren't you busy?" They say, "Yeah, I'm booked out three months." "Why does it matter to you?" They go, "Okay, fair enough. Why don't you help me grow mine, so I'm not booked out three months?" Which means that we have a labor problem. This is one thing that I love about XPEL that I alluded to earlier, is we aren't just looking at giving you the best film or creating new products. We wanna help on that. We have some ideas that we're brainstorming of how to help the labor problem because we have it. That's the good part about us owning our own shops, is that I have a labor problem in our shop, so I know everybody else does. How do I solve that for everybody? That's. I'm excited about that. He's being very cryptic, which he needs to be, because otherwise my phone will blow up more than his maybe, 'cause I interact with just as many clients as he does. Yes. That's one thing. You know, there's some definite real exciting product launches that are coming out. There's some soft launching that's already happened, but I don't think that we're allowed to talk about it openly as of yet. Chris West can make that decision, I can't. That Chris West was personally involved in really exciting stuff. Not only have our own internal store has been testing a lot of new exciting products. They have actually been in the hands of quite a few independent shops now as well. I think probably on average at least 50 in the U.S. alone and probably that many in Canada also for that matter. The response rate has been unbelievable. So that's exciting. You know, the fact is that this I can talk about for sure is that our VISION, right? I mean, VISION being our flat glass lineup. Mm-hmm. You know, look, the Harry Rahman thing, you know, it's no secret that he was, you know, him and Fiza were a huge, obviously they're the creators of Hüper and stuff like that, then, of course, it was an acquisition from one of our awesome competitors. Then, you know, Harry left and went and started Veloce and then merged Veloce with XPEL. I mean, look, the fact that we merged the Veloce clientele in with XPEL was beneficial. That's true. I know that the real reason for the merger wasn't the clientele. Mm. It was to get Harry, you know, and that was the only way we could get him. Much like Chris West, we had been after him for years. We had had him on a contractual basis to be exclusive for XPEL, and then we're like, "Man, we need to lock this in and how do we do it?" Figured that out, right? Well, Harry's the stuff that Harry showed me. I was in San Antonio a couple weeks back, doing. Actually it was kinda cool. It was my first time doing an investor's meeting in San Antonio. So I got a chance to see all the new Vision lineup that's coming out, the new packaging, the new products themselves, the new marketing materials are coming, you know, the data sheets, everything and anything. You know, it's not quite ready to launch yet because we wanna put all those pieces in place before we do a launch. My guess from Harry's perspective is that everything goes well. You'll see that all roll out within the next 60-90 days at the most. It's a game changer. I can't talk about who, and there's a good reason why. Let's put it this way, one of the largest flat glass operations in the U.S. got a chance to see what I got to see about a month ago as well. He was personally invited to take a look at it, and I can tell you that he placed a six-digit pre-order of this product. I don't know if Chris West is even aware of this. He placed a six-digit, and I can't say how large is the six digits, but it was large, pre-order, with his full intention of, helping us launch. He is maybe the biggest player in the U.S., I don't know, one of the biggest players in the U.S. per store for another brand. I can't talk about, like, who and obviously what brand or whatever, 'cause that would be very inappropriate to that brand, not only to the brand, but also to that shop. Knowing that he was that impressed with it and knowing that he was making that commitment to say, "Hey, I wanna give you a check. Here's the check. Here's the amount I'm writing the check out for. I wanna get in first, and I want all this product designated to me when it comes out. It was awesome. I think that's where you're gonna see probably the biggest splash for 2022 for XPEL. Look, we know how much we dominate paint protection film market already, right? We know how amazing our window film has now started to penetrate the market in terms of market share. Obviously, the coating is the same. I mean, it's just insane the growth that we've seen in those two product lines. I think it's absolutely, literally the word unbelievable. But flat glass hasn't done that. Yet flat glass was started, you know, back in 2014, the same time as automotive window film was. It was that we needed to have that merger with Harry, and of course, Carol Lockwood came along with that package. We needed to have that happen in order to make those waves that you're gonna see. 2022, the waves that XPEL's gonna create in the flat glass market is gonna take everybody by surprise. Yeah. To add to that, you know, if I were to look at three things that would help us make a successful business, you know, I mean, there's a lot of things, but let's say that XPEL can help with its product. We get you good product, we get you new innovations. We're on that. We're working on it. We got an R&D team. I mean, we just wrote a purchase order for $1 million worth of equipment. To look at everything, I mean, it's really cool. Our new headquarters, this is the cool part too. As you come to get trained at our new headquarters and our warehouse, you get to see all of that as you come in and see where R&D is doing all that. Anyway, product. We have sales, right? We have, you know, Harry's working on how do we get sales and big commercial jobs to our independents. As sales reps, they're going out to our territory managers and saying, "Hey, let me get this dealership and let me give it to you." There's sales. Now I'm talking, excited about getting labor. If XPEL can help you with sales, product, and labor- Mm-hmm ... as long as you follow up with a smile on your face and a fair price, it's a home run. I love that you're leaning into fixing labor because it's so easy. Everybody knows labor is an issue, right? Like, but it's easy as maybe a film manufacturer to say, "Well, it's not my issue. The dealers will figure it out. We sell film, the market will figure it out. They're gonna buy the film one way or another. Yep. Like, when you lean into it and you go, you know, "Hey, this is a big issue in the industry. We're a big company with big resources, we can find a big solution that fixes this or at least gives our network some headway with it," I really, like, really sincerely commend leaning into those big problems and trying to solve them, you know, however that ends up looking. Well, that's what we love doing. We could sit back and just say, "Hey, we got a good film. We got a good marketing presence," and focus on that. It's like, no, let's keep trucking ahead. Well, how do we help people be more successful? That's where, again, having our own shops, and it makes us invested into that as well and helps us refine and learn those processes to help everybody. Yeah, it's exciting. Yeah. I got a chance to see that, the new warehouse, which has the training facility as part of it, has the clean room. I actually got to see some of the, I don't know if you realize, Chris, maybe you do, but there's a lot of that new R&D equipment that's actually been delivered. Yes. Yes. Yep. I'm looking in that room with those investors when I was there, and I was just blown away. I mean, some of the stuff looks like it belongs in like, you know, I don't know, some scientific movie lab, you know? Like, it's crazy the investment that XPEL is making, obviously. Erik, it's, you know, we really could say, and I've said this for a long time, that if you're at the top, that's not the time to be complacent and sit back and say, "We made it." You. I mean, it's almost more incentive to really keep going full trajectory. I mean, our sales staff, and Chris Hardy would know better than I. Did we. I think we doubled in the last year, close to. Close to. Right. From our R&D team, double that. We've been bringing on new. It's just, it's. Oh, you mean staff-wise? Yeah. I thought you were talking sales-wise. No. Yeah, staff-wise, we more than doubled. Which is exciting because you know what it means? If you're an independent shop, now aren't dealing with a sales rep that is over five states. He might be just in your state or even your city. So that's a direct relationship. It used to be that you didn't get that much attention. The attention is to focus on these guys now. Yeah. I'm a perfect example of that. When I came to work for XPEL, I handled 15 U.S. states on my own. One of my competitors has four in just one of the states that I used to deal with. I had to openly tell clients, "Look, we're gonna have one disconnect, and that is that you probably will not physically see me in your shop ever because it's just not reasonable to be able to carry that out." Because of our marketing, which drove so many clients to shops, that was the reason why they quite often selected us over somebody else, was because, look, instead of me showing up at your store trying to get you to spend money with me, customers showing up at your store trying to spend money with you, and that was obviously a lot more attractive. Sure. At the same time, like Chris is saying, XPEL being at the top doesn't wanna just be complacent and sit back. Like, I think it's fair to say that one other brand did that, and we now see where that brand's currently at. Again, it's an amazing brand, but I think that that's where they were and now where they are now as a result of that. I think they're aware of that, and I think they're trying to tackle that. Right, in fairness to them, kudos to them, they're working on it. We know that that was something that we were sort of like, call it slacking or lacking in, right? What we needed was a little bit more of that one-on-one interaction with that clientele. We are continually looking to divide up territories and create more reps. The reps have to be localized, right? There was a time when all the reps were in San Antonio, and whatever city or state they looked after, they would fly out to maybe once every few years to go say hello, right? Now the requirements are that you have to live and work within your territory, and that allows you to communicate and interact and get to those shops much faster. I can be on the phone with Mike Burke at seven o'clock in the morning because the guy's always up at 5 A.M. working out. You know, I can be like, "Man, he sounds like he's having a bad day." I'm like, "You know what? I can get in the car and be there in less than three hours." I've done it many times. You know, we would like to see that. I couldn't do that with everybody, right? I could do that with Jason Carr here at Guardian or, you know, obviously it's Myrtle Beach. I could get to Charleston in two hours, but for the rest of my territory, you know, it was a haul. Now, you know, we're looking to make that as a continuing change so that those people can get that kind of love that they deserve. Am I right in saying you're adding to your, like, shipping facilities as well? Yeah. Look, I think I had mentioned on the last podcast that we did. I let the cat out of the bag that we had gained an operation in Charlotte, right? We already have one in. We have shipping that goes out of Vegas. We have shipping that goes out of California. We have shipping that can go out of Idaho. Obviously, our main one is in San Antonio. We have Calgary. We have Montreal for Canada. We really didn't have a solid East Coast operation. We have been looking at East Coast operations literally since Sun Stoppers joined us. It was one of the concerns that Sun Stoppers had brought up, right? Which was that they were dealing with Eastman. Eastman was in Martinsville, Virginia. Most of their stores were located in Charlotte. It's a couple-hour drive. This was something that they wanted to know that we were gonna try and tackle for them if they came on board. We made that commitment to them. It took us a long time to make it happen. You know, we were looking in Florida. We were looking in Atlanta. We were really close in Florida, actually finalizing a deal. Fell through at the last minute, and thankfully it did. We're opening up in Charlotte, right? We're opening up in Sun Stoppers backyard. We're actually just down the street from one of their main locations. It's a beautiful facility. I got a chance to meet the director of the operation just a few weeks ago. We actually all went to Mike Burke and I went and checked out this warehouse facility and met that individual at the same time. Mike, with being the guy that he is, he invites him to his Christmas party, which is happening the next night. We all went to the Christmas party and hung out. Anyways, my point is that, look, we gained our occupancy permit. The problem is that a fire marshal came in after we thought everything was already signed off on, and after determining the products that were gonna be housed within the unit, said that he didn't feel comfortable with the sprinkler system that was in place. I don't know, there's some terminology, ESFR system or something like that. We had to go back to the, you know, drawing board. We had to get an engineering team together to come up with a better sprinkler system that fire marshal would pass, a lot more pounds per square inch or pressure or whatever the heck the terminology is. Carlos Alvarez, you know, thank God for him. You know, he's got his foot on the gas like everybody else does within our organization. He's like, "Hey, this ESFR system they want, this is gonna pass. This is gonna cost us $100,000." We already signed our lease. How do you go back to the landlord and renegotiate now on a price you've already taken occupancy for, right? Like, the landlord's not responsible for it at this point. It's gonna be a big bill. We don't care. We're going forward with it. We're making it happen. There's product there now, but it's sitting on the floor on pallets. It's, you know, obviously supposed to be up in racking system with everything else going on like normal, like all of our other operations are. It's not. Is it running? Kinda not really. Not really. We need to get that sprinkler system done, then we're gonna put the racking in, get the fire marshal to sign off on everything, and then we will start shipping. My anticipation is within 60 days it'll be up and running and fully operational. In all fairness, I got to give credit to the logistics side of XPEL. They do pretty dang good. I mean, 10 years ago at my shop, we regularly would have missed orders. It would not ship on time. Stuff would be backordered. At XPEL, there's guys that just work on estimating. Mm. future inventory 6 months out, 12 months out, so that we aren't backordered. The warehouse runs in 2 shifts from, I think, 7 A.M. to midnight. Yeah. I remember asking Carlos one time, who runs all of that. He's the Director of Operations for that. I said, "Hey, can you put a hold on this order?" He goes, "When did you put it in?" I said, "An hour ago." He goes, "That probably shipped in five minutes. Yeah. They turn it and burn it that quick. It's crazy. Yeah. We've had some pain points obviously with year-end, but everybody does, right? Because we had a lot of operations that had record years in profit this year. Of course, they were, you know, they're talking to their accountants, their accountants are going, "Man, you need to get your tax percentage down. You need to go spend some money." We had a lot of accounts making some very last-minute, very large purchases in order to get those invoices in on time. Of course, with COVID and FedEx and UPS and shipping companies, look, they've all had their trials and tribulations with labor. Right. Obviously COVID outbreaks, things of that nature. Are we saying it's been perfect? No. I think that if you could take COVID out of the equation. Then our fixed operations team is running at 100% perfection. Add COVID in with all that messed things up a little, we're still running at like 98% perfection, which is incredible in this current situation we're dealing with. Words of wisdom for shop owners, for 2022. What do you got? Okay. I just was with the shop manager for Austin, and she's just come new into this role, and she's starting to adapt and learn. As we've gone through some trials and tribulations that have really stressed her out, tonight I really wanted to emphasize, and I think this is pretty important, that as we run our businesses, we come into these trials and tribulations. You know, over my tenure of owning my business, I remember like being curled up in the fetal position, thinking like, "It can't get worse than this. We wrecked a GM Chevy Silverado. I'll never get that account again." Or, "This customer left me a one-star review," or, "We had to repaint this car." You could go down the list, right? I told her and I said, "After all of those years, it really wasn't... It was okay. We still, you know, I had my morals, I gave good service. I offered the best install I could, and it all turned out okay." That I'm gonna probably do that one because it was like, you'll be okay. Just keep your head up. It isn't the end of the world, and I know you'll sit there and go, and we can go down the list, tax burdens, all that. Mm-hmm. Just keep doing what you do and do the best at what you can do, and I promise you in a year you'll go like, "Wow, I made it out of that okay." Well, you know, "It wasn't as big of a deal as I thought. I think for me, look, every single XPEL shop that I'm aware of has had the best year of their life. I don't think that they've ever had a better year, period. Most of our shops have grown a minimum 30 and 30% plus. I would say that the vast majority of them actually have grown over 50% this year, right? For me, my words of wisdom is just keep your foot on the gas. Like, it's not gonna slow down anytime soon. The inventory levels are. I mean, I got to see the final numbers from how many vehicles were actually delivered into the U.S. last year over the year before, and it was actually 80%, which is kind of interesting, right? Because you kept hearing that no inventory coming, no inventory was coming, no inventories. It's not true. It was an 80% of the penetration that they had in vehicle sales from the year before, meaning delivered to dealerships. Yeah. happened in the year 2021. They're anticipating obviously a higher number than that for 2022. What you're seeing, of course, is that these clients are spending more for their cars. They're not getting all the rebates and the breaks that they were getting. They're not getting the super cheap interest rates. I think that because of that, they're feeling a lot prouder and of their purchase and like they have to take better care of it and that they have to, you know, understand this might be a longer value than they had previously anticipated. So Yeah. That's translating into incredible sales, right? You know, keep your foot on the gas and, you know, to go along with that, something that Chris talked about a little bit earlier that sort of coincides is that, look, when you're at the top, don't become complacent. Don't sit there and just assume that it's always gonna be this good. Instead, continue to invest in yourself, continue to invest in your people, continue to invest in your marketing, right? That's something that we realize all the time, that people are just not spending enough time in their marketing. They're They're like, "Well, Chris, I'm currently booked out six, seven weeks. What do you mean spend money in marketing?" Yes. You don't do it when it's dead. You do it all the time, right? You keep that momentum going, and I think that's important. Look to diversify in terms of finding more locations, building bigger locations, maybe not even bigger, but maybe another location and look to invest in more staff and ramp things up even further than where they were before. Both great advice, obviously. Chris West, like what you said, things go wrong, but the next day it's always less of a problem, and a week later it becomes less of a problem. Probably a week later you're on to two problems ahead from that one anyway. Right. Exactly. Yeah. I know for me, you know, I used to get super stressed out. It's just kind of a comforting thing of saying like, "It'll be all right, man. If you're doing, you know, the right stuff, you'll be okay. Just keep doing good quality, working hard. It's. You'll get through those tough times. Yeah. Yeah. Mr. Hardy, to your point of the advertising being consistent, it should be something that's consistent throughout the entire year. I think you know, you do what you have to do. Like, if you find yourself in December and January overspending to try and acquire clients because you're dead and you wanna stay busy, to me, that's kind of a waste of resources if you forget about it. You can't handle the business come summer because you didn't maybe invest in adding staff and so on, and then you get through the summer booked out like crazy, but then you're back in the winter, you're dead, and you're going, "Okay, let me throw more money at marketing because now is the time to waste money at marketing." Like, it's like a kind of silly vicious cycle that is easy to step into. Whereas maybe now is the time you can spend time investing into finding staff and getting those staff onboarded and training them, and you're gonna make a lot more money when the customers are ready. 100%. You're exactly right, Erik. It's cyclical. You take your slow months to build your staff. You're gonna eat it a little bit. You're gonna have to pay a little bit more. Now you're ready for summertime. You don't wanna train them in the busy season, that's for sure. Of course. Right. Erik, what words of wisdom do you have for us in 2022? Oh, yeah, yeah. Let's hear it. Besides that you need to get the Tint Wiz. Besides being on Tint Wiz, tint wiz or die. No, I'm just kidding. Like grow or die, you know. My advice would really be focus on, to me. First of all, you gotta know where you're going, where you wanna go. You gotta make your life happy. Everybody's business is gonna look different, and so on. Ultimately, the one that really stands out to me is, focus on profitability instead of just top-line revenue. It's easy to chase top-line revenue and keep adding more top-line revenue and so on, and find your profitability diminishing and so on. You know, to me, you wanna make sure that your profit margins are ones that are something you're happy with, or at least are getting you to where you wanna go. Maybe size is important to get to scale and so on, but you also wanna make sure your systems are in place so that what you're doing now, if you double it, you can also double your labor and, if you need a facility, you account for that. Because, you know, you don't wanna grow in a direction that puts you in a bum spot as far as your facility goes or something you're not. Just focusing on that profitability, because you can really narrow down what's profitable, what you enjoy, what there's a market demand for and so on, and you can grow that instead of just growing everything, which kind of can exponentially grow problems. I know when I had an auto shop, it was first of all flat glass, right? It was like, well, after enough time, I said, "I have to do something with these automotive leads." Right? Did I have to do something with them? No, I didn't have to do anything. I could have focused on what I'm doing, but I felt I had to. You open the auto shop, and then what do you do after that? You add PPF. You add, "Oh, let me do the blackout trim. I can do roofs, and I can do trim." Next thing you're doing, "I'm doing color changes. Why not print the wrap?" When you're doing so many things. Yes. You end up running into so many new scenarios and so many newbie mistakes in a sense, so many problems. At the end of the day, I know I found myself in a scenario where, you know, like you said, curled up in the. You don't know how this is gonna end. Right. You've built such a monster for yourself. You're going, "I don't really know." Like, knowing that and not wanting to walk into it, I think is important. People should take advice, all the advice, do what's right for them, but don't blindly just grow to grow. Because Oh, people, I remember starting out, just like you said, I started. Somebody said, "Hey, do you know where I can get this done?" I went, "Oh, I'm gonna do it." You know? Mm-hmm. Before I knew it, I had way too much space, too many employees. I was doing stuff, I didn't even look at the margins. You know? Like, am I really making that much money on this? I was like, "No, it's just more revenue. You know, it's more business." Fast-forward 10 years later, got rid of space, got rid of employees, got rid of services, and focused on the stuff that, well, like you say, was profitable. Hey, let me, Yeah. Jeff Phillips texted me about Christian Alvarez with Disciple Tinting in Texas. Poor guy just had his shop burned down, total loss. Nice. Wow. When we're talking about loss, you know, and it was an industry if anybody does know him to reach out. Wow. We always, you know, help each other out. Brother, I mean, I haven't been through that, thank God, but well, you'll get through it, man. I saw he posted that he was. You know, first of all, nobody was hurt, which is amazing. Good. Because everybody was gone. The next thing I saw that, you know, obviously, at the moment, he's just basically shifting over to being mobile only. That's what. Tragedy, but what a pivot, you know? Right. I mean, I love it. Instead of just saying, you know, sitting at home drinking whiskey saying, you know, "It's over," he's like, "Nope, I'll go to mobile and make this work." I mean, that's a testament to surviving right there. The community was Yeah, good on him. starting to help with ideas on how to. Because he was asking how to stay contaminant-free mobile and so on. You know, and then Dean Mitchell, obviously, you know that gentleman, Tinters for a Cause. I mean, it's like. Yep. It obviously what a- Everybody helping. Yeah. -cause. Yep. Yeah. It's Tinters for a Cause is gonna be amazing. It's something that I'm working with them on, as is a lot of other individuals. I know actually, Erik, that you're also involved. I'm actually staring at the format for setting the thing up, and we've got some legal counsel involved and what have you as well. That's gonna be an awesome program. I'm really excited for the fact that Dean thought of this and brought this to the table. You know, it's gonna take us a bit to get it up and running properly because, of course, there's a lot of legal ramifications that we've got to contend with for a nonprofit organization. You know, with the tenacity that Dean has. Yes. For sure. I can be sure it's gonna happen. For sure. Yeah. You know, XPEL as a team, I mean it so sincerely, you're leveling up the industry from the way you know, you handle your dealer network and empowering everybody to what you're talking about with R&D and facilities to, you know, Tinters for a Cause, even, you know, Dean being part of XPEL and so on. Like, that's it's using your resources and using the network to level up and make things better. I really sincerely applaud you all for that because that's what the industry needs. It doesn't matter what brand film you sell right now, it's an industry, and it really Sure. It's important that you know, there's people that there were companies before XPEL, and there'll be other companies with XPEL, and there'll be other companies maybe doing things after XPEL or, you know. For sure. It's everybody's job in the industry during their time to do what they can to, you know, do the best they can, and that's what you guys are doing. Well, at the end of the day, I mean, we're all people, right? I mean, I just got done telling somebody who's left our company now the other day that I said, "I want you to be happy, brother. I care about you. I don't care if you are selling computers, if you're selling another brand, if you're with us, I want you genuinely to be happy with you. Yeah. You know, as you said, like, we are one community, and regardless of what brand you're with, the idea that we can come together and work with each other and not try and hurt each other and not slander each other and understand that there's a mutual respect that should be had amongst all, you know, that's the way that we should all interact with each other. You know, in inside XPEL, which is what I can talk about, obviously firsthand, it's clearly like that. You know, one of my best friends on the whole planet, Brett Miller from All American Paint Protection, you know, his brother Brian unfortunately passed away due to a very tragic car accident. You know, I was scheduled to be in Chicago the day that they had the funeral for him. You know, I was supposed to be traveling with a couple of other XPEL employees within management and to meet up with some really important clientele. I actually was very open with everybody about what had gone on and how I felt that I think I'd needed to be there for Brett. Everyone, including the prospective client who's currently with another brand, said, "Oh man, this meeting can wait. Please go be with your brother right now and help him through this trying time and help him get through this." You know, I was so in love with that prospective client already for saying it, that they felt that way. That they weren't like, "Well, hold on a sec. We've had this meeting scheduled for five weeks now and, you know, what's going on? Like, "You should be here instead." It was the exact opposite. The fellow staff within XPEL said the same thing, "Hey, look, we're good. This we can postpone this for next week, no big deal. We'll pull it off next week instead." I don't know. I just feel like within XPEL at least it always feels like that to me. It literally always feels like a family. I can't say enough about that. Like, you know, you talked about that earlier with people wondering as we go so much larger in the corporate world, are we gonna lose that touch? I don't think we're going to ever. Is there anything we didn't touch on that either of you wanted to get out there? No, we've covered a lot. I think I'm good on my end. Chris knows a lot more about. Because again, he's got this upper hand on me in having all the, his hands in the, in the pie of so many things going on in the background. It's exciting. I'm exciting. I'm always like, "Spill the beans, Chris. Tell me what you're working on." No, it's exciting. You know, I've said this before. I for a long time told, like Hardy said, I would told XPEL no. I really loved my freedom, and I loved being unbiased, that I could go to any shop or whatever. So now coming on full board with XPEL, I'm super excited. It hasn't been. People ask me all the time, they're like, "So how is it?" It's super exciting. I mean, there's no part of me that questions like, is there some conflict? Is there some moral dilemmas? Because I was a shop owner, and I can wholeheartedly say that yes, XPEL has grown big, and we're trying to contain that and understand and grow that dynamic. But everybody from Ryan Pape on down is still thinking about the small guy. There's the big guys, the small guys, there's everybody in between, and that isn't lost. I know that that's a concern sometimes. There's some growing pains. Like Hardy said, when you have 700-800 employees and you're quickly trying to hire people here and there, it can seem like they don't care. I promise you, at least for me, I'm there saying, and I know Hardy's the same way, we're still in everybody's corner for sure. Yeah. Yeah. You know what, Erik? You know, I love this platform of yours. Yes. I get a lot of amazing feedback on this platform of yours. Yeah. Thank you. I commend you wholeheartedly on the fact that you keep doing this. You know, I don't see how you're benefiting from this other than giving back to the community. I applaud you for it. I think it's awesome, and I'm really glad that you're, you know, that you're continuing to do it. 100%. Thank you. Thank you both for being on here. I could go talk for a little while how I benefit because I get to talk to people like yourselves as well as interact with the community, and really that is, you know, community support. I feel it. I definitely feel it, and I'm definitely like, it's a big part of my life. I don't have in real life friends. It's like everybody in the film community- Right. through the computer for the most part. I really get a lot of value out of it. One last question. If there's somebody out there, maybe they're not an XPEL dealer, maybe they're an installer, maybe they're a zone or whatever it is, if they were thinking, "Wow, one day maybe I'd like to work for XPEL, how could I find out if XPEL's hiring or like what kind of jobs exist and so on?" Where would somebody kind of go to know? Great. I'm actually glad you brought that up because to be honest, we are so understaffed, meaning I don't want to say understaffed. We are growing so quickly that literally positions, whether it's at our stores, whether it's in marketing, whether it's I mean, if you go to the XPEL website and check under Careers, because trust me, we would love to have passionate, qualified people that can grow with us. I tell everybody like you almost wanna check weekly. Positions pop up that fast that we are growing in need, that it's just check weekly. Would you say so, Chris? I would. I'm gonna add a little caveat to this. Okay. Uh-oh. It's a little tiny thing. I need people to also understand that we have to respect the relations that we have with existing XPEL dealers, okay? We have had quite a few people inquire with us that are employees within one of our shops that we currently service, that makes things very uncomfortable for us. I need that person to understand that if, you know, that shop, whether small or large, is an important client of XPEL, and we don't wanna feel like we're doing something underhanded to them. You know- Oh, of course. 100%. Yeah. Yeah. I just want people to know that, like, hey, yes, please keep your eye out, you know. If you have an interest in joining XPEL, we would love for you to obviously apply with us and see if you can come on board. If you are working within an XPEL shop already- There's some conversations. Please do me the favor of contacting or having that conversation with the shop owner first prior to contacting us. Yeah because we don't wanna be put in that awkward situation. We won't let it happen. Sure. That totally makes sense. That just means a lot of opportunity if you're not in any way related to XPEL, there's a lot of opportunity there. Oh, yeah. I could see, you know, I could see it being like an, you know, how do I get in touch? Who do I get in touch? Maybe, you know, xpel.com, go down to Careers. Careers, yeah. Check it often if it's something you're very interested in. 100%. We openly want more people like myself and Chris that have that background. Tad is another one, right? Like you mentioned, you know, you got Michael Mayall, you got our Vice President or our Senior Vice President Matt Moreau, like all these individuals that come from shop owner/installer backgrounds. This has been, for us, what we think is a major winning point that we wanna continue to expand on. We're looking for people within the industry. We enjoy that opportunity with that person, probably more so than any other opportunity in terms of employment. Yep. Beautiful. Well, that's even more opportunity in the industry being created, so thank you. Yeah. All right. Erik, are you gonna go look at their careers section? Is that what I'm hearing? I mean, there's people in the comments. People wanna know. People definitely wanna know every time it comes up, and now I'm curious. Yes, I'm going to do that after out of curiosity. Right to see what exists. Marco. Marco Cazorla, you probably know him. Yes, I do. Also said you can go to Indeed and search XPEL, and that they're hiring for tint trainer and PPF trainer, and you could let him know as well, so. Perfect. Way to go, Marco. All right. Marco is a rock star, for sure. Yes, he is. Did he send you the image of the three of us? He did. Oh. What I said was, I was like, first of all, I was like, "Holy shit, your editing skills are on point. I know. Right? Like, that didn't look edited at all. Somebody commented. Your head in particular did not look like it was cropped in. Right. I thought both of you, all of us, all three of us. I couldn't figure out when us three were together, and I was in a muscle shirt. I was like I thought about it like, what if we could all get the shirts in time to wear those shirts during the live stream? Oh, that would be really cool. Really throw people off. Oh, we gotta set that up now. Yeah. Marco killed it. Yep. Marco's a man of many talents. Yeah. Marco's unreal. Yep. Yeah. I don't know if you followed like, the tinter battles when they were doing the voting, to be a competitor. Marco's gonna be a competitor. He was voted on, and there was a lot of memes being created, and Marco mastered editing photos very quickly. Is there any other comments in there that 'cause I can't see them through the phone, but do you think we need to address? Yeah, as I scroll through that, let me address that. The reason I stopped putting them in the comments, 'cause I realized maybe an episode or two ago, I could distract the person talking every time I put up on screen, I could see a pause in their voice, and they're like- Oh, gotcha. Like, I just feel like the conversation goes a lot better. That's the main reason. Sure. lot of support, not many questions that weren't addressed. I know somebody had asked earlier regarding the 5-mile territory radius, if you're still doing that, and I believe Dean Mitchell jumped in and answered that depending on where and maybe said market penetration. Yeah, it's kind of funny. I've actually had a few clients say that to me, that specific designation. I'm like, "Look, I don't know where that came from. Yeah, I've never heard that either. I do know that one of our reps in particular, which was Keith Baxter in Florida, tried to stick to this 5-mile idea, and I think he did quite successfully with it. For the rest of the U.S., that number was not the number that we worked off of. The idea was, hey, where are you located? Therefore, who are you closest to physically? What we would do is we would determine what does that distance between look like. Let's just pretend it's 10 miles. Well, we would box that out on a program called Power BI, and it would show us in that 10-square-mile radius, what is the population density. Let's say the population density within that 10 square miles between the two shops is 100,000 people to make this really easy. If we were only selling $10,000 a year to the existing shop, that's $0.10 a person. It's not even. That's we need to be 10 times higher than that to get to that $1 per person. We would know that by bringing on another shop within that distance, it was not going to affect the shop that's already there at all. Zero. Well. Hold on. Let me just keep going, Chris. If the other shop, though, mind you, was doing $100,000 a year, well, they're already at $1 per person in that geographical area, so bringing on another shop is probably going to affect their business. It may not take 100% of it away. It might not even take 50% of it away, but it probably is gonna affect it somewhat. That's where we had some difficulty. Now, there's still more caveats. What if the first shop was only doing paint protection films? We need to sell window tint and ceramic coating and flat glass film in that market also. If the new operation offers those services, we gotta bring them on, even if you're already at $1, because you're not satisfying the entire product SKU, right? That was understood as well. Further go along with that was that in the past, there was some reps who were being territorial for customers who weren't. What I mean by that is they were looking after a shop and not bringing on new locations, but that shop was not being exclusive with us. That shop was maybe purchasing somebody else's coating or somebody else's tint. Well, then immediately I said, "That makes no sense. You wanna have a one-sided marriage. You wanna have me married to you. You wanna get pissed off at me if I set up another shop in the area, but you don't want me to land base you 24/7 for the fact that you're carrying a competitor of mine? "It isn't working like that." That's not fair. That's not logical. My marriage doesn't work that way, neither is business. This idea of it being specifically 5 miles has a lot of caveats to go with it. Could it be 5 miles? Yeah. It could even be less. It could be a lot more. 5 miles in rural Pennsylvania is gonna mean nothing. You know, 25 miles might not mean much in rural Pennsylvania. Again, like, you've gotta be, you know. The true answer is that there is a method to the madness, and when it's properly explained, it makes complete sense to everybody that we talk to about it. Sorry, Chris, go ahead. Oh, no, I was just gonna laugh 'cause the five-mile thing, when I had somebody bring me that, present the same question, and I was like, "Well," and we had just had a discussion about how the Huracán that he had in, the guy had trucked up five states to visit him. So I was like, "Well, wow, you get a lot of customers like that?" He's like, "I get customers from all over." So I was like, "Then why do you care if a shop is four miles from you because you're a destination spot? People, they're coming to you for your quality. You're not, nobody's driving by your place seeing." Because he's in, like, a little back alley anyway. Nobody's even driving by him to see that, "Oh, oh, he got. Let me stop in and see what he offers." There's more to the discussion a lot of times if you pry further that a radius isn't the real issue. It's, you know, "Oh, he's taking my clients," or, "His pricing is too low. Right. I personally like to vet that out more and say, "Let's solve those problems. The radius isn't really the big, the problem. Yeah. Go ahead. Was there anything else there? Me? That's it for me. No. Yeah, Erik. That's it for me. If I don't use the bathroom soon, I'm gonna just jet right now, so. All right. Well, let's wrap it up then. Thank you. It was a great time to catch up at the beginning of the new year, and I think you gave a lot of wisdom and thank you for doing this as always. Thank you, man. Thank you so much as always for having us on here. Chris Hardy gets to go on every couple weeks. I haven't been on for, like, 2 years, so I was super excited. Listen, you might be more important now in the expo world than with Mike Burke and the five-minute phone call response, but I take the cake when it comes to Erik Devash. Press the bat signal, and we'll be on Tint Wiz live in a few minutes. Just anytime. All right. Thanks, everybody, for watching. Thank you for booking this. Good night, everybody, and hey, Happy New Year to everybody, and I hope you kill it. Yes, 100%. Good night. Have a good night, everyone.