attitude, by the way, that pervades our company. A, company first attitude. This is not about any one person. The company has got to stay healthy and then we'll all do fine. Also some situational things like the length of tenure with a firm and the time span until retirement. The final thing, establish the procedures for continuously transitioning ownership. I'm about to go into how we do that. We do that annually in January and the decision-making process for all the small details in the annual, what we call the churn of ownership annually. So how do we do it? We have developed this and tweaked it since about 1998. We deal in our stock in and out of our company's treasury. We're actually not selling shareholder to shareholder. Late career shareholders sell off some of their holdings each year and we call those divestors. And those shares are then offered out to the early and mid-career, members of our firm who are growing in our firm in their value and they are the acquirers. And in between those are the static members who have gotten a large enough share of the pie. But they will work to make the pie more valuable still to create additional, value within our Firm. So here is a diagram about this and I'll talk about this, but I also may come back to it later. 00:20:00 John R. McAdams: You can tell this person is later in their career because of the gray streaks in their hair. For shareholders who want to sell some stock, I'll sell 500 shareholders. I'll still sell a thousand. Those shares are sold into the company. And you see that the cash coming the other way. The company pays that investor that money. Congratulations, you've helped to build all this wealth. Here's, here's your payoff. You're into your payoff period in here. The company then takes that stock and bonuses it, bonuses it to acquirers. And so the acquirers get it, but the acquirers do not have to pay for it. But the acquirers have some skin in the game. That bonus of stock is a taxable event. That stock, every share of that stock has a very defined value down to the cent. So 100 shares of stock, sometimes. What was the other number? $62.72. That's income. And actually, that gets added to the W2 at tax time. So you receive your W2 and it will show all the withholdings of tax. But it has as an income number, a higher number because the value of that stock bonus is, is in that number. So the shareholder, ah, the, the acquirer does have to pay for the tax. We do this because it is 100% tax efficient. An alternative is we could give somebody $10,000 worth of stock and how do they pay for it? I mean shareholders, I mean employees don't have stockpiles of investable cash. So, well, let's give them a bonus in order for them to pay the company back. $10,000. We got a bonus on $15,000. That is so tax inefficient. So really around a conference table one day a couple of decades ago, we said, why don't we just give them the stock and then, then it's done. This is a very tax-efficient system. All right. Another way to look at this is here's a diagram, of annual wealth accumulation. These shouldn't be in equal one thirds, but they are. That doesn't matter, too much. But at the bottom is a divestor, or the group of divestors, I should say. And those investors
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