know, my part of the industry certainly is I think all screen printing is, is service. And, but especially as a contract decorator, my role is to be the fixer and the person who kind of makes sure that, you know, everybody's okay. So yeah, maybe that approach does help a little bit of, you know, having a little bit more of a nurturing personality. It may kind of. Give a little bit of an advantage that way, but I certainly do not think that that is something men couldn't tap into. I think men certainly could easily tap into that because it's just about opening up a little bit and kind of really coming at it from that service. The first perspective is like, you know, tell me how I can help you. And that's something that you do really, really well. So there's no reason you can't teach all of the men to do exactly that because you do it perfectly well. Marshall Atkinson Thank you, Monica check’s in the mail. Yeah. So you're a certified women-owned business, right? So why did you apply for that and jumped through all those hoops? And then what does that actually bring you? Monica Maglaris Okay, well, the whole process of being certified for anything is, is quite interesting. It's not for the faint of heart, proving that you're a woman is. Interesting to do know, proving, proving that you're a woman. And then, by the way, we got actually certified as an LGBT-owned business first. And we did that very early, like 2004. So proving that you're gay before gay marriage and things like that was a very invasive process. And it, you know, it was, it was very strange, but. What happens is basically you get, you know, you get certified that you're a woman-owned business scaling the business, a black-owned business, Asian-owned business, and you then try to compete for contracts in set aside programs. So the federal government, uh, has mandated a certain amount of money to spend in what they call diversity dollars. And those dollars are set aside strictly for minority-owned businesses. And by the way, if you are a veteran, thank you for your service and you should be first in line to sign up. To become a certified veteran-owned business. It's extremely important. You guys should be the first up right there at the top of the list. And you are, so you should, if you are a veteran, definitely get certified, go through the process, it's worth it. And so after you're certified, you're going to compete for these diversity dollars. And you're basically going to go to large corporations who deal with the federal government, which most of them do. Because it's almost like a trickle-down system where the government, a lot of certain amounts that they want to spend with, you know, diverse companies. And then also large corporations had that same set-aside program as well. So what we're talking about, it's actually billions of dollars that are out on the table there. So if you're able to be certified in some way, Uh, you should definitely do. So, even if you're in your, uh, disadvantaged community, for instance, that's a huge part of supplier diversity. So it's not just about, you know, your sexual orientation or your gender. There are so many things that encompass diverse spend and.
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