Governance Bites #149: How good governance leads to growth, with Josh Gould

In this episode, Mark Banicevich sits down with thebigword CEO Josh Gould to unpack how effective governance drives sustainable growth. From defining what growth-oriented governance looks like in practice to identifying the behaviours that separate high-performing boards from those that hold organisations back, this conversation is packed with practical insights. Josh shares the critical questions directors should ask, how to balance risk with bold decision-making, and why culture and long-term value must remain front of mind. A must-listen for directors and leaders seeking to turn governance into a genuine growth engine.
Joshua Gould is the Group CEO and Director of thebigword, offering over 20 years of C-level leadership across the technology, defence, and healthcare industries. His governance experience includes serving in an advisory capacity as a Board Advisor for AI Research and Development and as an Export Champion for the UK Government’s Department for International Trade. As the former CEO and co-founder of TBW Global, he directed critical language services for NATO, the U.S. Department of Defense, and the UK Ministry of Defence. Joshua specialises in corporate strategy, M&A preparation, and the oversight of AI-driven business models. Recognised as European CEO of the Year, he manages global operations across 80 countries with a workforce of 15,000.
#Governance, #CorporateGovernance, #BoardLeadership, #BoardOfDirectors, #Directors, #Leadership, #BusinessGrowth, #SustainableGrowth, #Strategy, #RiskManagement, #Boardroom, #GovernanceMatters, #LeadershipInsights, #BusinessStrategy, #DecisionMaking, #OrganisationalCulture, #LongTermValue, #ExecutiveLeadership, #BusinessSuccess, #Podcast, #YouTubeBusiness, #ThoughtLeadership

Transcript

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My name is Josh Gould. I am the CEO [Chief Executive Officer] of thebigword, and I run a language services business that we do a lot of technology for regulated industries, such as healthcare, all the different types of public sector that you can think of, whether it be courts, whether it be police stations, whether it be prisons. So governance is huge for us and, in fact, governance is a big part of how we get awarded contracts, or actually lose contracts. And today we're going to talk about how good governance leads to growth. Absolutely. I mean, for us it's a direct relationship. The way government bids work, and healthcare bids work, Mark, is points win prizes. So you fill out an RFP [Request for Proposal] and the procurement officers will actually assign points to your responses. And so we say points wins prizes, and you'll get a point score for your price, but that will be maximum 30% of the points you can get. So if you're significantly cheaper, maybe you'll get five points ahead of the next cheapest person. So really, it's all about your technical bid, and governance plays a massive role in that, because when you're spending the taxpayers' money or you're charging the government, the governance in and around that is very, very significant. And in the US [United States] there's FAR [Federal Acquisition Regulation] regulation. In Europe and the UK [United Kingdom] they have the similar regulations. And all of that plays into the governance structures, and how we manage that. So there is a very, very direct relationship at thebigword between governance and winning bids, and these bids are millions, sometimes tens of millions of dollars, and pounds, and euros. Hi, welcome to Governance Bites. My name is Mark Banicevich and today I have the pleasure of spending time with Josh Gould. Josh, thank you so much for your time. You were saying earlier that you've had a very long day today, so I really appreciate you extending that day, to have a bit of a chat to me about governance. My first question on the topic of how good governance leads to growth is: what is the role of governance in creating growth? So for us, governance plays a number of roles in growth. If I take the more direct way, which is what I've just been speaking about, and that is we actually include our governance in proposals, so that we can demonstrate to the end users and the clients how governance is going to translate to good quality products and services, and how we're able to stay within the regulations within a regulatory environment. We are not a regulated business; however, we sell into the regulated businesses such as healthcare and public sector. So that's very direct. But then there's an indirect way, and the indirect way I find the most interesting. If you know anything about public sector and healthcare, I think the direct way is quite obvious, but the indirect way, it is holding people accountable. I had a meeting a couple of hours ago. In fact, it was about 10 hours ago now. It feels like a couple of hours; you know, time flies when you're having fun. But I was having a meeting and we were reviewing in a governance structure all of our capital expenditure. So if you're not familiar with "capex", or capital expenditure, this is your money that you're investing on big asset-based programmes. So like a building or a piece of software. And we have an entire governance structure around that. So we monitor how much we said we were going to spend, and it reports back to the treasury and the CFO [Chief Financial Officer] of the business, what our expected return on investment are, what all the checkpoints are within the programme and project. And then once we've released, in our case it's software, what is the uptake on it? How's it performing against what we said it was going to do? And we wrap this around a governance call. And I like to call them governance calls, because otherwise you get people come on and they say, "Why am I doing this meeting every other week or every few weeks?"I'm not asking you to make a decision and you don't really need to know this." And I used to get a lot of that. Now I call them governance calls. We are coming to govern the business. We are here. We have invested our investors' money into these big capex programmes and I need to ensure that everything that you promised me has been done, and the rewards for those investments are being carried out. And then the capital expenditure programmes are within the regulations and the laws. And we can get our ISOs[International Organisation for Standardisation certifications] through them. And have our cyber security operate within them. And what I'm finding now, Mark, and I know this is a very long answer, is these meetings have grown huge arms and legs, and they've started to be mimicked by our client base. And I'll give you a really good example of it. We used to have an ISO 27001 [2022, Information security, cybersecurity and privacy protection]. And this is a security-based ISO. We then decided that we wanted to become Cyber Essentials Plus, and do that with the Microsoft Azure platform. That was a big part of our own internal governance and cyber security defences in and around data, data security, etc. What happened when we started reporting on this and writing about it to the UK government, is they started putting in their RFPs, because they said, "Well, if thebigword's doing"that, this is a good standard, we like it." And now everybody has to comply with this Cyber Essentials Plus standard. So you start to find that what we do from a governance perspective becomes what the clients then expect us to do, and our industry to do. And therefore it takes away the ability to set up a competitive company in your bedroom, because yes, today you can go and set up an AI[artificial intelligence] based version of what we do. It won't have the human in the loop like us. But are you going to run an ISO 27001, ...? We have over 50 ISOs. We have so much cyber security in and around what we do that all is within a governance structure, and it costs millions and millions of dollars to do. So it actually creates what I call a moat around the business. Barriers to entry. Which is really hard to compete with. Yeah, right. So you've actually used governance there as a competitive advantage for the business, and to set the bar that everyone else has to leap over to be able to enter. Wow. That's right. What does growth-oriented governance look like in practice? You've given some really good examples there of how you've used governance as a competitive advantage. But in the boardroom, when you're having your board meetings at the corporate level, what does that growth orientation around the board table look like? So boards' jobs are not just to hire and fire the CEO. I know that's the common misconception. The board does a lot more than that. One of the most important jobs of a board is to decide how to invest the company's money, and the investors' money. So within the boardroom, it's not like, "That's a great idea, Josh. We love it."You want, you know, $2 million to go and build that cool piece of AI, go and build it." That's not how it happens. I wish it would. That bit I would like. But it doesn't happen like that. What will happen is they will insert a governance structure in and around every single investment. So this is reporting that we will have to do back every single quarter to the board: this is how much we spent on this thesis and on this investment. And we then have to, within a very typical governance structure, you would see much lower down the business, in a, it's almost in a, you know, very mundane, kind of boring, reporting structure. We then go

back to say: 9:31

this is what we said we were going to do, when we were going to do it by, and this is what we were going to return as a result of that investment. And I do the flashy presentations that are sexy, they're cool, and as you can imagine, I can do that. I'm just joking. That's for the people who are not watching the video. And then my CFO will come and walk through these reports and these governance reports, and that's governance in action, and they're holding us accountable, and we are checking lots of boxes. Or if you're from the UK, ticking lots of boxes. Does it comply with our Cyber Essentials Plus programme? Does it comply with the SOC [Security Operations Centre]? That's the folks that watch our systems all day, every single day, in a security operations centre, which is called a SOC. Does it comply with British laws, British banking laws? Does it comply with US laws? For example, we have sales tax here in the US. But sales tax isn't applicable to a lot of services that we provide. But if I was to sell one service, and that then was chargeable, it would make everything sales taxable on that invoice. So these are the type of things that really good board members are asking, and they're looking for, and they want to see examples of. And you know, to some extent a board meeting at the very top is a bit of an audit. So you've got that combination of, as you were saying before, the oversight of the investment, making sure that the money is being spent well to grow the business. But also keeping the company within the swimming lanes to make sure that it's meeting all of its obligations and keeping the company safe through that growth period. Yeah. Right. And then in the boardroom, you have a lot of covenants that you've got to meet, as well. So we have covenants with debt holders on the company, and this is what you've got to do. So we only take debt to deploy it into growth, in whatever programme we're doing. Whether we want to acquire. We acquired a company called Clarion, which is a sign language business. We took debt to do that. There are covenants that come along with that debt. And every single quarter when I go back to the board with my CFO, we have to demonstrate how we are meeting all those covenants. And that again is within what looks very typically like a governance-style audit. Yeah. Right. What differentiates boards that enable growth from those that unintentionally hold it back and constrain it? What's different about the boardroom? I think, well, ultimately growth requires risk. So you have board members whose view on life is to manage money. And what that means is, as long as you're beating the interest rates or, you know, within reason the market, then you're doing a good job. And those board members typically aren't very good for companies. They exist because, think about who invests in companies. I mean, in my business, I've got a really great investor, Susquehanna [International Group]. They're a very large bank. They own, you know,$5 billion worth of companies within our portfolio. But I mean, I think they have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of money flowing into and out of their accounts every single year. So they're a good investor. But you have businesses where they'll take money from a pension fund. And that pension fund isn't trying to get double-digit growth. In fact, if it does get double-digit growth, it probably will have a governance issue because people will say, "Well, your risk profile wasn't correct." Yes. So those people, though, do end up in boardrooms quite often, because they're the adults and the sensible people that keep people like me in check. And they're the counterbalance to people like me. So if you end up, and I've seen this, great CEOs with great vision, great enthusiasm, they're getting paid a lot. So what they'll try and do is appease their board rather than dispute and be the other counterweight. And I think when CEOs start to try and just appease their board, that's typically when you see growth decline. Yes. That's a great answer, thank you. What questions should directors ask to test whether the growth strategy is credible and executable? Because, you know, as you say, the visionaries that will come in and say, they'll have these great wild ideas. And what are the sort of questions that a director can ask to differentiate those ones that are wild ideas and can't be executed from those that, "Yep, that's  going to work?" Yeah. So I invest in other companies and I become the boring person who's just trying to manage money from time to time. So I'm in this position, and I do look at it under a governance structure. So for me, a governance structure should always

have a section that says: 15:10

provide the evidence, or show your workings out. And you know, so the kind of things that get asked in the boardroom are:"Okay, so you say that if you spend," I'm making this up now, "$2 million on sales personnel,"and you're going to build a proposal writing team, and a marketing team with"that money, and a few BDMs [Business Development Managers]. Show me in your"other geographic regions how that team looks, and how many meetings they get,"and how many proposals that converts to, and what's your conversion rate from"proposal to signed client." So they're asking those questions to say,"Show me the evidence. Write it out, explain it to me." There's no voodoo magic. You know, if you've never been in a boardroom with, you know, billionaires or billionaires' advisers, you always think that there's this crazy process that's almost like Hollywood. In reality, the meetings look very much similar when you're in a room of people who may be worth $1 to $2 million and are risking all their cash on a $50,000 bet to start a new AI company. The main difference is, though, between them, is the people who do this for their job every single day and they're managing money. They're typically, their ups and downs are narrower. So they're not getting devastated and angry when things aren't going to plan, and they're not getting overly excited when you just close. You know, we'll close a deal, and it'll be $10 million. And literally I want to run down the street with my top off waving it around my head, and I'll call the investors and think they're going to be the same, and they're like, "Good job, nice work," and then that's it. Yeah. Then you've got to get on with it. You know,"What is the margins? You promised that they were going to be, you know, over 35%. What are they going to be?" And then, how quickly can we deliver it? And is this going to need a capex investment or is this going to be done out of opex [operational expenditure]? And you know, why can't we use the software? Straight into the questions. Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. But that's the job. A board director is a governor of the business. A CEO is a governor of the business. Yes. And what do governors do? They do governance. Yeah. That's most of my job. I only make, I was thinking about this the other day, about 10 bets a year. And that's really where I make a good amount of my bonus. But where I make my basic salary and, you know, my money that pays the bills, that's more around governance. It's very simple governance, sometimes. It's, how many people are in the offices today, how many man hours,(or human, I think I'm supposed to say today) human hours are we getting out of the workforce today? Are people being paid on time? You know, this is the type of stuff that CEOs do all day, every single day, because we're a force multiplier. Our goal is not to be a superstar. Our goal is to make sure that we create the environment for lots and lots of superstars. Yeah. Yeah, brilliant. You've given me a great answer to this already, but I'll ask it in case something else comes out. How do high-performing boards deal with uncertainty when they're backing growth initiatives? Well, it's a great question because I think in my lifetime, (I'm in my 40s) we've never had such uncertainty. I was reading something today that was saying that private equity really came of age in around 2008, 2009. So you did have PE [private equity] and VC [venture capital] before, but it was very much an extension of what old-fashioned banks used to do to invest money. So they've never been through a crisis before. And we're now in a situation where the debt markets are completely frozen. And if you're not in the private equity world, you probably won't understand why that's a big deal, but simply most private equity uses leverage or debt to buy companies. So if they're buying a company for $100 million, they're probably using $60–$70 million in cash. And then they're going to borrow against the profit of the company to cover the other $30–$40 million. When you can't do that any more, then you can't buy companies as a private equity business. But you also can't sell your companies, because most private equity companies are sold to other companies doing the same thing. So, you know, when you sell to another company, whether it's private equity or not, it's got private equity behind it, or public equity. And it's the same thing. So a lot of it, unless it's public markets, is leveraged, and leverage means debt. And we're in a situation right now where we've got the Iran war. As of this recording, we're in the middle of a ceasefire, a shaky ceasefire. But oil isn't flowing through the Strait of Hormuz, which is essentially going to create 1% to 3%  inflation, is what most economists say, if it continues in this way for the next few months. I think it will, regardless of whether the war is over or not, because it takes a lot of time to normalise. So you've got a situation where you've got inflation, you've got psychological uncertainty, because we're all trying to figure out whether this is a world war. We've got war in Europe, we've got now war in the Middle East, and I don't know what's happening in New Zealand, but we're hearing that China is preparing for war with Taiwan, and America. So that creates psychological uncertainty, and psychology plays a massive role in boardrooms and investment committees. And then you've got the credit markets freezing up. So Blue Owl [Capital], which I believe is the biggest private credit business in the world[not the largest, but top tier], they are having major troubles, is what I understand. Apollo [Global Management], I haven't heard anything too negative about, but they're another one. Then you've got Blackstone behind that. You know, these are like $100 billion funds. - Yes. - that lend money that keep the businesses, that you and I buy from every single day in the supermarkets, going. And a lot of those businesses will be doing well. But when they can't go and borrow money, so they'll go and borrow money, say, half a billion dollars to go and buy another company. And then they won't pay that money back, ever. What they'll do is pay the interest rate, try and grow that business, and their own business, eventually sell both together. So you have to keep borrowing money to pay the old money back and resetting. It's like moving your credit card debt around and getting the 0%. It's a version of that that happens in the business world. And we're seeing that that is frozen, so people are getting stuck, and it's a bit like the game of hot potatoes, and someone's going to get stuck with the potato in the hand, and they're going to get burnt. So you have all these different things and it's really making investors very, very nervous right now. The world of private equity hasn't been through it in its current guise, and this is making companies act fairly erratically. But what they're actually doing, is they're slowing down investment. They're not building as much software. You know, the AI folks aside, they're not buying real estate, they're not buying machinery. They're saying,"Let's just, you know, do the equivalent of, if you've had an iPhone for two years,"it might be time to change it and upgrade, but why? Let's just keep it another year, or another year." And all of a sudden, you've got these iPhones that are five, six years old and everyone's wondering,"Why did I change my iPhone every two years, it was unnecessary." Businesses are doing that right now, and it's changing the mindset, to bring it back to governance, of governance. And what people are now starting to do is say, "We have to have much stronger governance in place to ensure fiscal responsibility." Governance in boardrooms was typically about risk management. I think it's now moving more towards, it's still risk management, but it's moving towards the conservative end of risk management. And therefore people are talking about the structure behind the governance a lot more. That actually leads really well onto the next question about, how should boards balance risk oversight, with this need to take bold decisions to grow, and particularly given that framework that you've just underlaid of where we're sitting right now, the current paradigm. So how should boards balance that risk oversight with that need to take bold decisions and say we want to grow this business? I think it's really difficult, and I think if people are being honest, there's very few boards that want to invest in growth right now. Or let me rephrase it: they all want to invest in growth, but they're not willing to, because there's too many variables that are out of the control of the businesses they invest in. This is exactly the time that people should be investing. You know, everyone used to tell me, "Josh, you've got to buy low, sell high." Well, it makes a lot of sense when you're talking theory, but when it comes to reality, investors don't want to buy low and sell high. They want to buy high, a really good asset in a very safe asset class, and sell higher. Right. And that's how most big investors work. But the problem is that's really difficult right now. So within, you know, looking at growth and looking at how to invest in growth, people are saying, "How do we achieve"the growth with less?" In other words, how do we do more with less? And I think it's very interesting, because I've long said businesses in Europe and the US, which is my main areas that I work in, they're too inefficient, and no one's asking the right questions from a governance point of view. You know, if you bring out a piece of technology, that's automation, it's using self-driving workflows with AI, like thebigword has done, we have been able to grow our revenue in the last few years by over 30%. And we've actually kept our workforce completely flat. Why is America only becoming 1½% more efficient each year? Europe is about the same, 1½% efficiency. We are spending trillions of dollars right now, as you and I sit here, in building these huge AI programmes. No one is really asking,"Well, we've been building them for two years. Where's all the efficiencies?"Why is employment so high?" And that's really a lack of governance. You know, because what we've done, is we spent all the money on the programme and we spent all the money on the humans. Yes. And no one's asking the question,"Where is this efficiency? I'm two years in, where is it?" And I think that that's a major challenge. Now I think, to go back to your question, I think they're going to find it. They're going to put these structures in, and they're going to say, "We have been"investing for two years in this AI. You've been promising me all these things"and I'm not seeing the results." And you know, that's why I'm quite bearish on the employment situation. I think you're going to see unemployment rise by 1% to 2% in the US and Europe. Hopefully in New Zealand, you know, that's going to take it to 2% or 3% [actually, currently 5.4%], but here we are already hovering around 4½% unemployment. And I think you're going to see that, and that's going to be a challenge. But again, boards apply governance in these uncertain times. They say,"OK, let's game each scenario out. Let's look at the products that are going to fit a market"where maybe people have less money to spend per unit. Let's look at the technology"that we've built, and let's create a strategy." And that's the role of a CEO to do, and then the board itself will just play that out and go through the difficult times. And the good news is, because a lot of people will be thinking,"Wow, he's pretty negative, for a CEO, on the economy", the good news is there's always a boom at the end. There's always a boom. Look at World War Two. World War Two, we had these war economies that really look a lot like the COVID [coronavirus disease] economy. And at the end of the wars, the countries like the UK and the US were bankrupt or near bankruptcy. But there was that flip, where they went from bankruptcy to near bankruptcy, to a major boom and excitement. And I think that's what AI is going to do. First of all, there's going to be a little bit of a shock to the system, and then people are going to realise, "Wow, I can use this for my own benefit." You know, everyone can do it. My cleaner can do it. Yes. My assistant can do it. My 12-year-old is already learning to build AI apps using AI. And they're going to create opportunity. They're not just going to be sellers, they're going to be buyers. Because when they're selling, they have to end up buying. That's how businesses operate. You don't just sell, you have to spend money. Yes. So I really am excited. I think that the next, 2027 is going to be a really difficult year, I think, for most businesses. If you're in regulated industries with high governance, I think you've got a much better chance of it not being difficult. Because you typically don't get the huge ups, and you don't get the huge downs. It's more Steady Eddie. But I do think that '29 and '30 is going to be really exciting. Well, that's great to hear. Moving on to the

relevance of people: 31:01

how does the board oversight of culture influence the organisation's ability to grow? Sorry, can you repeat that, Mark? Yeah. How does the board oversight of culture, the culture of the people in the business, influence the organisation's ability to grow? Having just spoken about the value of AI and reducing the need for people, we're still going to have people in business, right. So how does the board's oversight of culture influence that? Yeah, I don't think anyone really believes that AI is going to replace all people. I get why Elon Musk wants to say that, because then people invest out of fear into his stock and, you know, his company that probably has crazy valuations. So people say that, I get it, and these are very wealthy, very successful people, so the assumption is they must be right. But I don't think anyone that really invests — like, I spend millions of dollars of my own and my investors' money on AI — believes that that is going to wipe out people's jobs. I think what it will do is it will change people's jobs significantly. So there is this cultural challenge right now. And I was having — I probably shouldn't be sharing this on a public podcast — but I was having a debate with my Chief People Officer about how much information we share with our own staff. And he was saying,"Well, I might be being too open about AI and the threats, the risks, the opportunities." And if people get all this information, and they feel that they can't do anything about it, that creates more panic than it creates safety. And I actually don't agree, because culture is very important in a business. And thebigword's culture,(and I can't speak for others), but thebigword's culture has always been real honesty. And honesty is not popular and it's not easy. In fact, it can be really difficult to work for thebigword because of that clear communication and honesty, because you can't live in ignorant bliss. Imagine if every politician came along and said what they think rather than what gets votes. They would never get voted in. We've seen what that's like in the last year or so, haven't we? In the US. Yeah. So luckily, CEOs are not voted in, not by their own workforce for the most part. So we can afford to be more honest, more open. We don't have to tell everyone what they want to hear to get our votes. And I think that that is a cultural shift for countries like the UK. Less so America, because in the UK people have a very sanitised way of speaking to each other. Yeah. It's, we don't want to offend, we don't want to be aggressive, we don't want to disrupt. Whereas in the US, actually, that is culturally normal. However, in thebigword — and like I say, I can only speak for my own culture — it's always been that open and honest. And it's very, very difficult at times when, you know you've got all these people who work in a call centre,

but I'm honest with them: 34:21

we are developing AI agents that are going to do some of what you do. Here's the good news. A lot of the self-driving workflows that we've built, a lot of these AI bots that we've been building, are actually driving the unit price down considerably to a point that I don't think anyone can compete with us in the market space. It's also improving the quality. It's also improving the distribution of work to people. It's also making it easier for our interpreters who are human and translators who are human to work with us, and pick up work, and charge us, and get paid quicker. And therefore, I think our growth rates are going to far exceed the shrinkage in work available because of AI, - Yes. - for humans to do. But I cannot guarantee it. All I can show you is what we've done in the last three years and what we're doing now. And there was real fear when we had that conversation that people would leave. Because why wait to see? But what I hear as I walk around the offices is, "If I left, I would only be going to another company trying to do the same."But I wouldn't be as confident in their ability to outgrow the problem." Yes. And the other thing is, is I hear people saying, "I'm building this cool app. Would you invest in it?" And these are like, you know, my assistant is building an app at the moment. And they're building it with AI. And it's awesome. And I said,"Well, why don't you just build something that thebigword needs? And rather than something"that you've now got to go and find a buyer, we've got all of these needs in our business and all these things that we're trying to overcome." So it doesn't matter who you are and what job you've got, but if there's a value to thebigword, we'll invest in you and we'll invest in it, and you can become an intrapreneur rather than an entrepreneur. Yeah. The difference is that an intrapreneur is an employee of a company but acts as an entrepreneur. And an entrepreneur doesn't have the safety net of a company behind it. But they also don't have the opportunity to grow as quickly as an intrapreneur. So I encourage culturally, thebigword to be a culture of intrapreneurs. You don't have to stick to your job description. Yes, you have to do your job. But you can do other things. And right now, everyone should be asking themselves,"How can I compete against the machine? If I do a mundane, boring admin task over"and over again — like moving a file around or renaming a file — a machine can do that." Yes. "But if I learn how to prompt the machine, or if I learn how to figure out"whether the process can be improved..." Because a machine will only do what you tell it to do. Even if it's artificially intelligent, it can only improve it within the parameters of the data that you're feeding it. But if you can think outside the box, and that's what we're really encouraging, and that's the cultural shift that I think is going to happen over the next — not just few years — I think it's going to be a 15-year evolution rather than an AI revolution. Yes. Yeah, that's awesome. I'm going to wrap this conversation up with one broad question. In your career, what's the best governance advice you've received? That's a really good question. And I'll tell you why it's a great question, Mark, is, I don't think anyone's given me direct governance advice. And that in itself is a bit of a travesty, because I've just told you how much time I spend governing and how much it is a huge part of my job. And I work for a board of directors who govern the business with me. And yet I've never really had much governance advice directly. But indirectly I've had plenty of governance advice, because I sit through a huge amount of structural audits like ISOs, which are governance. And one of the advisors once told me that he really likes to come to thebigword because we're not checking the boxes to try and get the rubber stamp. We're trying to actually figure out how the ISOs can improve our business and help us win more. And we really know the return on investment. So I think through the back door, that's advice, and I'll use that as an example to give you and your viewers today. If you are looking at governance as something you've got to do, you're looking at it wrong. You need to know how it's going to make you more money, how it's going to make your business better, how it's going to help you hire better talent, how it's going to create better products and services. And if you don't know that, go and find out. I love it. That's great, Josh. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I look forward to catching up again soon and we'll see you next episode. Thank you for watching this episode of Governance Bites. We have more episodes on YouTube and your favourite podcast channel where I interview directors and experts on various topics relating to boards of directors and governance. We'd love to see you back, and please like, subscribe and share the videos and podcasts.