people to keep folks on the payroll. Thank goodness, because work came back roaring, and many companies grew during that period. We may have had to learn how to do some gymnastics, but the demand and the need came right back. But I think for M&A specifcally, though, what it did was clean up things. Companies were able to pay off their equipment, some of their debt, they were may be able to make some investments that will fuel growth. And once you start doing that, it changes how you run your company. And that liquidation that we saw, we're still seeing, I mean, as we get the data from your end for last year, companies are in a really good position and that's when you start getting comfortable making some investments. Randy Wilburn [8:16] When you couple that with the fact that maybe they didn't have some of the burdens that they had and running like a full-blown offce, because a lot of their employees might be working from home and a lot of other factors with remote work and all that it defnitely changed the playing feld for how design frm leaders ran their companies. And so you had to almost be willing to pivot and embrace the differences that came out of the pandemic. Jamie Claire Kiser [8:44] That's right, and the cultural facets too. I skipped over those initially, because I really do think that what gave people the, I guess the comfort in extending themselves more than they may be had, as business owners do stem from a lot of the societal factors that were going on as well. I mean, the great kind of migration, as it's been dubbed, are people moving around during COVID and being able to work from anywhere, if you can get comfortable with people not being in the same offce as you, that is such a game-changer for how you run your business. And once you start realizing just how to communicate and manage and just work across teams and people that aren't in the same offce, all of a sudden you have access to any labor pool that you're comfortable accessing. That is the start of thinking about, do we open an offce like, what do we need an offce for? We need people. Do you want to hire them one at a time? Are we going to bring in a group of people that know how to work together? This is all part of that M&A kind of thought process? Totally agree. Randy Wilburn [9:37] It's exciting. I mean, as I said, you and I have joked and others have said that the constant refrain that we always hear in the design industry spaces. That's not how we've always done things, and nowadays that phrase has been kicked to the curb. It's been thrown out of the window. Firm leaders are just saying, you know what, this is a paradigm shift for us, and we have to think and do differently than we have in the past. And speaking of that, I want to ask you, as you mentioned it and that
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