SUCCESS STORIES IN THEIR OWN WORDS

I was literally thinking that this investment, which I knew was expensive, was going to be a great investment that we could amortize over several years of growth and it would be something that would benefit Right Sleeve alone. You have to keep in mind that my understanding of the promotional products industry, like other players, was actually fairly limited at the time. I really only saw the world through Right Sleeve’s lens and didn't really think too much about the broader industry. And I think that that's a product of my naivety and ignorance because subsequently when I opened myself up to the industry, I was able to learn from all of these amazing other people. But yeah, to answer the question, I thought that this would be a Right Sleeve product only. Why would I ever want to share something with my competition? It was kind of my attitude at the time and we ran it that way internally for the better part of about four or five years. Marshall Atkinson So let's talk about making that transition from selling products to selling a service. Mark Graham Yep. Marshall Atkinson And how did one thing kind of help the other? Mark Graham So they're there. If I take a half step back in terms of talking about this transition, 2009 was a very interesting year for us. We entered this global competition, a technology competition that was hosted by Dell Computer, in Texas -- or at least they had offices in Texas. It was around this competition for businesses that use technology to differentiate themselves within their industries. And we entered this thing because we thought like, “Hey, why not? Maybe we'll get some PR out of this.” And we didn't think we'd win at all. We were this little company out of Canada, who did we think we were? And, shockingly, we actually won the contest. There were winners in the US, a winner in Canada, and a winner in, I think Europe, and South America, and we were the Canadian winner. We flew down to Texas to Austin, we had a meeting with Michael Dell. We had meetings with all of their executives and we got a huge amount of PR from this. And I can tell you at that point, we knew that there was something bigger than we had created that was beyond Right Sleeve and that we now were exposed to all of these really successful software and technology people that also served as mentors for sort of this next stage of our business. And that's when we really realized that there was an opportunity to switch. This software was internally focused on Right Sleeve to something that we could sell to other people like Right Sleeve and the promotional products industry. Marshall Atkinson That's interesting. So it's the epiphany moment when you show what you created to somebody and they go, “Oh, hey, that's really cool.”

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