hiring to demand services to aging out of the ownership group demographic within our space. Actually, the way that companies are structured in our industry, which is making them very attractive to fnancial buyers, because of the risk aversion and the debt, the fact that there's not a lot of debt on the balance sheet or space to it. There are a lot of things that have come together at this moment and that's really all fueling the M&A pace that we're seeing now. Randy Wilburn [5:35] I'm glad you mentioned that, because I remember how much of a source of pride it was when I would meet with frm owners, and they would mention the fact that they were debt-free. And you know, you don't think of that in this day and age, right, because everybody's taking out loans and doing this and doing that and leveraging the value of their companies. But a lot of design frms, that's never been a real practice of theirs to do that to take on massive debt in any way, shape, or form.
Jamie Claire Kiser [6:02] I think the qualifer of massive is needed.
Randy Wilburn [6:05] That's true. Any debt? I think a lot of these frm leaders in the design industry take the Dave Ramsey approach to debt so that is probably appropriate. So what are some of the other factors and well, I should say this, how did the pandemic that punched us all in the gut at the beginning of 2020? How did that play into the decision-making process of frm leaders to consider M&As?.
Jamie Claire Kiser [6:39] So there's a lot of different ways that this has played out. One of the things though, that I think that is worth mentioning, the cultural kind of things that we saw during COVID are certainly not to skip over. But the infux of PPP funds changed the balance sheets in our space, unlike anything that I've ever seen. All of a sudden companies that had operated on the tiniest margin of working capital possible, but had a balance sheet that looked totally different than it ever has before, with the cash on hand. When you have money in the bank, you have the freedom to decide kind of more of your destiny and some competence to make moves. And you're also able to stabilize and think about how do we grow. And I think that initial PPP investment especially prevented those knee-jerk reactions, that in our space we may have seen a lot of people out of work. If the work dries up, if a project gets put on hold, most companies don't have enough working capital to support extra people on the payroll. And the PPP funds, I think what they were intended to do in that it allowed
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