Hustling Your Way to CEO with Rich Daly

Great to see you, John. Thanks for being on.

You know, John, I grew up in a working-collar area of Queens. The area transitioned through the difficulties and prejudices of the '60s, became a minority area starting around when I was nine. But I thought I had a great childhood. A lot of people hear my story and say, 'Oh man, you had such a rough childhood,' but I was an ambitious hustler at a pretty young age. I was mowing lawns at six, cleaning up gardens. I had forged working papers when I was nine using this guy Jimmy Golbach's working papers. I became a Newsday Carrier of the Year, and then I was busted at 11 because it was my picture and Jimmy Golbach's name. When I got into high school, I realized that hustling probably wasn't going to get me where I wanted to go, so I hit the books. I went to Christ the King in Middle Village, and I became at the top of my class, first of my class several times. I tell people it really wasn't that impressive because I was the only guy not stoned in the '60s, and Christ the King was a horrible drug abuse school. The brothers were really trying to keep kids alive. So I was able to get a full scholarship to college. I was very fortunate in that I had some great mentors, some great breaks along the way. I'll also say I had the intestinal fortitude, because I got knocked down many times. The most important thing is to learn from it, but the most important thing is to get up and go at it again.

We're going to get into a background here. So my wife's best friend became her maid of honor. I've been with Debbie since I've been 16, and we dated for seven years, married 47 years. I was at her best friend's house also in Cambria Heights, Queens, and I met her father in my senior year of high school. I had the full scholarship, I was working on Jamaica Avenue in Queens, and he came upstairs where he had part of his business in the basement of the house and part of his business in a store in New Hyde Park on Long Island. He said to me, 'I like you, come work for me.' He was an amazing human being. He was an Italian Jew who left when the Nazis came into Italy. His brother was killed by the Nazis. His brother was a professional mountain climber and he was helping Jews escape into Switzerland. He didn't have a bitter bone in his body. He taught me an understanding of people and an understanding of life that very few people have. This guy did not have a bitter bone in his body. If you could picture him, you'd have to be old enough to picture this -- he kind of looked like Don DeLuise, and his standard line was 'Ivey, mamma mia.' But he was pro-people, pro-energy. This little picture framing store in New Hyde Park would have lines out the door every Saturday, because it was almost like a sitcom to go to. The husbands would come with the wives, and people thought I was a meal's son. Through there, I really developed a great understanding of people. I'll give you an example. I went there and the store was a mess. I said, 'Okay, let me clean up the front of the store.' He said, 'No, you can't clean up the front of the store. Let me tell you a story. A friend of mine, we were down on Delancey Street where he moved from to New Hyde Park. He built a beautiful men's store and he's going broke. He said, 'Emil, you got to help me.' So Emil says, 'Okay, you really want me to help you?' He calls a lumber company for plywood, covers up half the windows, spray paints 'Due to Death of Honor Sale' on the window. He starts taking the men's goods and throwing them on the floor, puts '50% off' on the window, doesn't change a price. The guy sells everything out. So it's understanding the mindset of people, trying to put yourself in that position. Everyone wants to bargain if you're on Delancey Street. So I get there, the only pictures of my house, John, were on my parents' pride and joy, a black and white Zenith console TV, and our little 12x14 living room. There was my communion picture and my sister's communion picture on a Woolworth frame, literally oil was framed on top of that. So I knew nothing about art, nothing about picture framing. I go there, I'm in college now, I got long hair, I wear my jeans. He's teaching me the business. He says, 'Okay, what did you pay for those jeans?' I said, 'I know, six, seven, eight bucks, whatever it was.' He comes back with paint from the front of the store and starts putting paint on my jeans. He says, 'Okay, listen. When the woman whose husband cheated on her and a psychologist told her to take up art lessons, and she can't pick a frame, I'm going to call out Richie the Artist.' I'll have whatever frame corner I have on this ugly picture, the top left, you look at it and you think, then you say, 'Oh, definitely the top left.' It was amazing because you know, I looked like a young artist with the paint on my pants. As time went on, I actually became passionate about certain artists, Norman Rockwell in particular. He was an artist but an illustrator. I actually took art classes, even though I was a computer science major first. I was told there were no jobs in computer science then, so I became a marketing major. I was at New York Institute of Technology. The only people who taught marketing at NYIT were people who couldn't sell. I confused marketing and sales back then. Then I heard there were jobs always in accounting, and I said, 'I love accounting, what is it?' But going back to Emil, I took the art classes and started using things like the focal point and blend, actually started putting different picture corners up on the frame because Emil's taste became not as good as mine. We'd go on the back and he's saying, 'You're making me nauseous, stick with the plan.' But he would never cheat anyone. He trusted everyone. He loved young people. A young couple would come in, and we had pictures on the wall. These pictures were made in China on a conveyor belt. We paid two dollars for 24x36, they still sell them today. Somebody would paint the tree, somebody would paint the water, somebody would paint the art, and at the end, a little house. At the end, there was somebody with an American phone book putting names on the artwork, and it would be 'local artist.' For 24x36 framed, it was 40 bucks. Emil would say to a young couple, 'Do you like it?' 'Well, we're not sure.' He said, 'Okay, take it home, hang it up, see if you feel anything with it. Hold hands underneath it. Does it make you feel better?' Then they would say, 'Wow.' 'Do you want to deposit?' 'I don't need a deposit.' 'Do you want my name?' 'I don't need your name.' On occasion, that picture would not come back. I said to Emil, 'Hey, what are we doing?' He said, 'Look, the world became a horrible place because people stopped trusting people. You will do better in life if you trust people.' I believe in business there's a trust dividend or a trust tax. I make our customers trust us. Even if they violate the trust on this side, we don't stop trusting them. It served us extraordinarily well. Emil's life lessons, about not being bitter. How could you not be bitter about your brother being killed by the Nazis? We used to have customers come in, and there were some Holocaust survivors, and they would make me bring the moldings up from the basement to show them that it wasn't made in Germany. It could be made in Sweden, it could be made in France, but it couldn't be made in Germany. Emil had a 180-degree perspective: 'Life goes on, and the way we fix it is to love each other.' His cliché was, 'Richie, the most important thing in life is life.' I had some tough times in business, and some people who wanted to crush me, but remembering that perspective, and then when we achieved some modest success, remembering that perspective and giving back, particularly to kids in need, has really been just a great vision for life.

Well, let's go back to that. I grew up very young. I had certain circumstances in my life that forced me to grow up very young, but again, I don't look back and say it wasn't a great childhood. Somebody once said to me on a professional level, 'You know, you were never a little boy.' They were implying that I didn't have a good childhood. I said, 'Listen, don't screw this up for me. I had a great childhood, so don't convince me that I didn't.' But there were very real issues. My mother was a blue-collar Queens woman. If you had mental health issues, you were toast. My mother was a manic depressive. Her doctor told her to get a new hat. It was the local internist. When I was 12, she would have successfully killed herself if it weren't for a neighbor who had a key to the house and didn't like the conversation at the garbage cans in the driveway, which was almost a meeting place. So I knew I had to be serious. I started by hustling, hitting the books. That made sense. When I was in college, I'd already heard that computer science majors worked for Grumman and made 25 grand a year and didn't get mugged. That sounded great to me, and I was naturally good at math. At the end of the first semester, the head of the school, the dean of computer sciences, said, 'You'll be the best educated people on the unemployment line.' That immediately got my attention because I wasn't there because I had some passion; I needed to have a skill set, and then I needed to figure out how to make a living with that skill set, and hopefully I could figure out how to make a living on my own with that skill set. I went up and said, 'What do you mean?' He said, 'Look, this is 1971. How many computers is the world commercially really going to need?' We were talking about huge mainframes. The government was starting, it was IBM punch cards. He estimated that on a commercial basis, only the largest of corporations would need them. So he estimated the world was going to need for business three to four dozen computers, and the rest would be the government and NASA. I wasn't in a position to argue with him. I was immediately at the placement office. Because of Emil and my growing up hustling newspapers, hustling lawns, shoveling snow, I was naturally an extrovert and a pretty good salesman. So marketing sounded like sales, so I'd go do that. A semester of that, I realized this just isn't going to work. So I go back and say, 'Where are the jobs at?' The placement office said, 'Well, accounting is kind of like the science of business. There's always jobs.' I became an accountant. Again, math, naturally good at it, a 4.0, yada yada. I decided, though, look, there's no way I'm going to risk doing this. I had a full scholarship, I was on a path to graduate in three and a half years, taking 20 credits a semester and working full-time for Emil, 50-60 hours a week. So there's no way I'm going to leave the chance of doing this and then not getting a job. So I go to the placement office, I say, 'Okay, I need a job.' They said, 'Well, the accounting firms recruit on campus.' I said, 'Okay, great, when do they come?' They said, 'Whatever it was, February.' I said, 'Okay, put me on the list.' She said, 'Well, you have to be graduating.' I said, 'Well, I am going to graduate, I'm just in my fourth semester.' She said, 'Well, you have to be graduating only interview graduating students.' I saw in her bed next to her desk she had this needlepoint. John, this was the god-awful needlepoint I'd ever seen, because if you pull them too tight, instead of it being a square, it becomes a diamond. So I looked at her and said, 'I see you do needlepoint.' She said, 'Oh yeah, but it's not real.' I said, 'No, no, no, this is pretty good, this is really good. You know, I can actually fix that.' She had a few more stitches. I said, 'Okay, I'm going to come back tomorrow. You finish this tonight, let me take it and straighten it out for you.' I bring it back to the shop, and Emil says, 'Oh my God, what is this?' I said, 'Neil, don't ask questions, this is going to be perfect.' I spent heaven knows how many hours blocking and tackling it on a board to straighten it out. Then I put a beautiful frame, I put non-glare glass on it to cover up all the miss stitches she had. I brought it back to her. She said, 'Oh, this is fantastic. What do I know, my gift.' But I need one thing: I need to be on that interview list. She said, 'Ah.' I said, 'Look, just put me on the list.' So Arthur Andersen was the firm. I go there, and sure enough, the guy sitting behind the desk lived in Syosset on Long Island, and he's the head of HR for New York Arthur Andersen. He's looking at my paperwork and says, 'When are you graduating?' I said, 'Well, it's really not when I'm graduating that matters. It's the fact that I've really done my research, and Arthur Andersen's the Marine Corps of public accounting. I know it's the firm for me, and I want to be an intern because I want to have a job locked up before I graduate.' He says, 'Okay, but we don't hire interns in public accounting. There's not that much work in the summer. But how do you get on the list?' I said, 'Let's not worry about the list. Let's talk about Arthur Andersen and the Marine Corps, and I want to enlist. I'm signing up.' Finally, the guy gets me to tell the story about the picture frame, etc. He says, 'You know what, this is pretty unique. I'm going to give you a full-time job now for when you graduate. I'm hiring you right now. You don't have to do the interviews in the city. I'm locking you up before the other firms get you. And you don't even need to maintain a 4.0, just don't screw up.' What it turned out, John, was that I was just the Trading Places guy. He was so tired of the better schools' kids going with an MBA and getting one year experience so they could legally get a CPA and then leaving. He went back and told the managing partner, and on the bottom of the form, he wrote, 'Will either be a diamond in the rough or complete unadulterated disaster. There's no possibility of anything in between.' That's how I got into public accounting. I went there, and the guy who made partner the fastest was a guy, Al Goldstein, in seven years. I graduated in three and a half, so I could actually be there in six and a half years. I laid out a chart for myself where I needed to be over a period of six and a half years to make partner. Coming from my background, a partner back then in '74 made like a hundred grand, which was an unfathomable amount of money. And you were a partner, you owned something. So I thought, 'Okay, this is going to be my way to be an owner in something, and I'm going to do it in six and a half years.' I went in and learned two things there. One, I was told the only way you could ever get fired in your first two years is to say you did something you didn't do, to say you verified something, what they called a tick mark. So all of my street smarts and hustling from Queens, I had to now put a filter in front of, because I wasn't going to do anything that I didn't absolutely do. This was my chance to figuratively get to the other side of the tracks. The other thing was that I wanted to be recognized. Your first year at Andersen or any firm, there's all this crap work, proofreading, weekends, inventories in Topeka. Everyone would hide from HR on Fridays at the end of the day because they didn't want to get stuck going to the printer till two in the morning to proofread something for ITT. I would go to HR and tell them, 'You people are derelicting your responsibilities. I have no work tonight, I have no work this weekend. There's got to be a crappy inventory somewhere.' So I wound up having the most chargeable hours in the New York office. And when I realized, I was a guy who had a street-smart accounting background. The people who taught us had accounting practices during the day doing write-ups at delis and hardware stores versus if you went to Wharton, you were learning about how to do a merger for ITT. But when I was with these people, there was always a manager or at least a senior accountant, and you had all this down time on these crap assignments. So I would be asking them, showing them what I'm working on, asking them, 'What about this? How does this work? How does that work?' It accomplished two things -- I tell young people this all the time. It made me better at what I needed to do. It's three things actually. It differentiated me within Andersen as a wildly ambitious guy who literally had the most chargeable hours in the New York office in 1975. And finally, it established me with these senior accountants and managers as someone they wanted on their job, because it wasn't going to be someone who would complain about an 80-hour week. It was going to be someone -- and by the way, I was getting paid overtime at straight time, so I wanted the money anyway. Last thing, I needed the money regardless, because I was making 15 grand a year off the books where they kneel, and 12 grand a year on the books at Andersen. I realized I was working to no longer be in an area where you could easily get mugged, and I now realize every two weeks the government was going to mug me for the rest of my life. I wanted to go back to the cash world. So it was through that that this guy Gene Herman became a mentor. He showed me at the end of the first year the diamond in the rough activity. In essence, he won his dollar bet. I found fraud in a major corporation, Tiger Group based in Chicago, for the unit on Long Island, Tiger Lisa. It was basically a Rule of 78s kiting scheme. They sold a business to Tiger on an earn-out. They were literally leasing virtually every commercial plane in the world because they were upfronting the profits. As long as they wrote more paper, everything was great. I couldn't get the Rule of 78s to work. I went to the library, got every book on it. The senior accountant was yelling at me that I was incompetent. Three years before me, someone put a check mark, a tick mark, next to it saying it worked when it didn't. There was a guy in between us who went to Vietnam and then went to work, and those guys weren't going to take any crap from anyone. So I got Steve screaming at me. This guy John says to me, 'You know, you seem like a smart guy. What's the problem?' I said, 'I can't get it to work.' And by the way, I was now doing the Rule of 78s at least five different calculations, none of which worked. So he said to me, 'You know what, I can't get it to work either. Let's go to the CFO.' The CFO started screaming, 'I am so tired of getting you incompetent --' paraphrasing to avoid profanity -- 'he's incompetent, naive kids. Just put the damn tick mark next to it.' John said, 'Dick, he's not naive. This doesn't work.' Two days later, Wall Street Journal, it used to be the second column from the left, second article: 'Tiger Group Restatement, Fraud in Leasing Unit.' So the street smarts and the intestinal fortitude, and that line about the only way you can get fired, because everything to this point was to get me to Arthur Andersen. If I lost that, I was lost. So everything to that point got me there, and I became a rock star. I was the kid who found the fraud. It was a big, big deal. The partner on the account was let go, even though he wasn't on the account before that. A lot of heads rolled.

Yes. Whether it be hustling as a kid, a needle in terms of quality of people, trust, don't cross that line. Arthur Andersen, don't cross that line. I grew up in an environment where crossing that line was SOP. I went to school with kids whose dads were made guys. I went to school where if you needed a part for your car, you didn't go to the auto parts store, you told one of your friends what you needed, and he got it for you that night or for somebody else's car. I called it 'midnight auto parts.' So I feel very blessed with that background. It also helped me keep in context dealing with people from every background and every aspect of life, which you can see through your career and through your life all the way to now.

All right, so let's quickly get to that point. At Andersen, I didn't get promoted a year and a half early, and on my chart, that was a problem. Touche Ross, which became Deloitte, was in the building next to ours. I had a friend, Joe, and we would meet in the restaurant in the basement of the Huntington Quadrangle. Joe would always come over and say, 'You should be working for me.' When I didn't get promoted a year early, I went to another firm that didn't work out, then I met with Joe and he told me the timeline I could get on to make partner. So I wound up with Touche, which ultimately became Deloitte. That background through Joe put me on the meaningful but challenged accounts. I got put on a proxy startup, 38 owned by John Pickett of the Islanders. At a point in time, it was clear they never filed a tax return, the numbers were on a million dollars of revenue, I booked two million dollars of adjustments, and they were losing money. It was an accountant stream. They asked me to go there in a financial capacity. I said I wouldn't do it without equity, because I'm going to own something. After debates, we agreed to an ability to get equity. I learned the proxy business there. They stumbled into it. It was a terrific need for society based on when street ownership versus certificate ownership was becoming the way to go forward, back when the exchange couldn't settle 10 million dollars a day in trades. Think about that: 10 million dollars. It's crazy what Broadridge on our technology is doing: 10 trillion a day right now, trillion versus million. We skip right over a billion. Then when Pickett ended up getting divorced, we had an opportunity to sell the business because of something I had won with the regulators. The New York Law Journal was asking, 'Why is every company in America required to use the Independent Election Corporation of America?' It was disclosing the names of underlying holders who would agree to give up those needs. We built a technology, it worked, and it served the entire industry. When we didn't agree to sell the business, part of that agreement was that through that period I became COO, and the original four founders became co-CEOs. So I was the only non-founding owner. The original four founders became co-CEOs, and it took a majority of them to override me. Not exactly a Harvard management structure. Two of them didn't agree, and weren't even on speaking terms with the other two. When we were agreeing to sell, three of them agreed to hang in there, but two of them who had 51 percent of the voting agreed to hang in there, and that meant my going back to being CFO, which ultimately led to my leaving. I went to work for our largest client on Wall Street, running senior vice president of operations at Thompson McKinnon. I was the youngest member of the board of Thompson McKinnon after I was there a year. But at Thompson McKinnon, which was a white house at the time that got taken over by Prudential, I learned what my old company should have been doing and other opportunities we had. That's when I decided I'm going to let my non-compete work out. I still owed half a million bucks from my buyout of my equity, and I didn't want to lose that. Around September after my non-compete was up in '87, I met with a guy who ran System Swami. After I left, he left because he couldn't take it. The industry started to approach me. Dick Grosso came to me and said, 'Your former partners are going to embarrass themselves in the industry, and your name keeps coming up.' I didn't want to tell Dick what I was doing because I didn't want to lose my earn-out. I knew once it was known that I was going to reappear, I could kiss the half a million goodbye. But I started writing the code with my backer effectively in November. We had gotten through the '87 crash. But I was like, 'Okay, I want control of destiny.' Running a Wall Street operation is not giving me control of destiny. For example, I reduced the cost of running that operation by 8 million bucks. There was no more 8 million to take out. I raised service levels, and a guy on the repo desk lost 8 million in about 15 seconds the same year. So my one silver bullet got offset by a silver disaster, or silver loss. So I was committed to do this. Artie told me in February that his cancer came out of remission, and in April he passed away at 61. Artie introduced me to some folks, but he introduced me to the wrong individual. Very wealthy, very successful, but viewed his contribution and mine as the same. I needed three million bucks to get it off the ground. It was a million and a half bucks each. My deal with Artie was he was putting up three million with Nick Brady, I had 51 percent, they had 49. Same deal Artie had in establishing DF King, it was fantastic. I met with the group that wanted to buy Independent Election, this guy Chuck Leonard who was at Dun & Bradstreet when they made the offer, which I very much wanted to happen. I asked them about doing it for the three million, and they said, 'No, let's buy Independent back.' We offered 115, and they turned this down. Then ADP had an offer on the table. ADP approached me because clients directed them to me. The last thing I wanted to do was work for a company that didn't have a great reputation for paying people. I met with the president, he said, 'I'm going to change all that.' In addition to VNU, I was meeting with Venrock and J.H. Whitney, the first VC in New York, Jock Whitney's firm. When that didn't work out, I was trying to get the VNU deal done. I had a solid offer from ADP on the table, which was based on the Whitney/Venrock model of what it would be worth in five years. Now I was down to 18 with another 17 to get my management team, and in five years I said it would be worth 25 million bucks, and my piece of that would be about five million bucks. So ADP said, 'How about we get you the 6 million, but on an earn-out, and you're capped at that.' That was a bad trade I made. At the same time, they indemnified me for legal fees. That was a great trade I made, because Paul Weiss advised them there's nothing here, 100 to 200 grand, and it will go away. But it didn't go away, because I was very quickly winning clients. I was a service animal. Let's just say the clients' perception was they weren't, but I had ADP behind me. So I went from being David and Goliath because they threatened to sue me before I did anything with ADP, and that could be a problem. It was Debra Voish, then subsequently resigned. Paul Weiss was threatening Rule 11. I had a top Paul Weiss litigator. So I went from being David the Goliath overnight. I went from the slingshot to a very powerful warhead. I knew that keeping ADP engaged, I had to sign up clients, which I did. I think ADP spent something like 7 million in legal fees. We never saw a judge. I think the total was something like 9 million. We ultimately bought them for a fraction of what I offered two and a half years earlier. Now we're at the point where I started the business. The software development was in COBOL. My partners originally accused me of stealing their software. Their software was in assembler. Paul hired an MIT expert whose quote was, 'If Rich Daly could convert assembler code to COBOL code, he'd be referring to Bill Gates as his poor partner on the west coast.' Because back then, assembler code was the absolute bane of corporate America's existence. They needed it, but it was inflexible. You make a change on line seven and line a million something blows up. It was very machine efficient when machine time was what the cost of computers was. Now machine time is a joke. It's the people that write the code, that manage the code, that's where all the expenses are. Then you add the cyber problems on top of it, which is why Rich Daly couldn't start this business again today, but was able to spot it back in 1989.

The myth of overnight success in this case was probably 40 years to really get it to become Broadridge, to get it to become, I think between 2010 and 2020, the 11th best performing company in the S&P 500. When ADP, I had a terrible technical glitch in 1993. We were growing like a weed, and it was a Wall Street Journal C1 story: 'ADP Gets an E for Effort.' That was the Business Week article. It was 'Proxy Snafus' in the Wall Street Journal. I was feeling, I was 40 years old that year, I was feeling really down on myself. By the way, my earn-out was completely paid out. I always thought I was going to leave when the internet was up and then start something I completely controlled with that money. But I tend to fall in love with the people and the business. I was so down, I made my wife cancel a 40th birthday party. What I learned in there was that I still thought it was all about me. Once you start a business, it's about the team. Through that experience, when we brought people together and talked about what we needed to do, I looked around and said, 'Well, these young people,' now I'm 40, but I'm hiring people out of school, 'these young people are hurting as well, because we know we're doing a good job, and yet the world is saying we're not.' So culture absolutely is critical. I believe ultimately and unconditionally in the service profit chain. If you want to have a sustainable business model, you got to start with your employees, or what we call associates. They need to be the highest engaged in your space. They need to feel that they're important. It's not just comp. As a matter of fact, comp without them feeling engaged is a waste of comp. Those highly engaged employees will meet or exceed customer expectations regularly, and those customers will stay with you longer. Those customers will tell other customers and become apostles for you. It gives you far better pricing power, far better renewal power. Broadridge's renewal rate over this long period of time is 98 percent. That means the average life of a customer is 50 years. When you read the analyst reports about Broadridge today, Dave Target at Evercore talks about his best safe haven because of the recurring revenue model. The recurring revenue model is also tied to the retention of clients. That's what makes the model so strong. Engaging people started at ADP, but at Broadridge when we had complete control of this, we took it to the next level. This isn't Nirvana. When I started running a business, my dad was a no high school degree, fixed cash registers for 52 and a half years, and the last 25 he was waiting to get laid off. It didn't create a happy household. So I thought, 'When I run a business, I'm never going to lay anyone off.' Well, it doesn't work. Not everyone belongs in the company. But everyone should trust management to tell them where they stand, to tell them that they need to get their act together, or to tell them that they're performing above average, and to give them clear feedback. Managers need the intestinal fortitude to have clear feedback. We also use a Gallup scoring system to rate every leader and how well they engage their employees. We've transformed many leaders, including myself, because I tend to talk about what we need to do versus celebrating what we've done. I had to force myself to call what I used to call an obligatory 30-second celebration before I went back to my to-do list. We had to tell certain absolute technical geniuses that if they couldn't engage their people, we would have to take them out of a leadership role. So I'm telling you, I know this works, and I'm still stunned that most businesses are too short-term. You'll hear people say, 'Well, we had to have this riff because we wouldn't have made our earnings. We have a fiduciary responsibility to shareholders.' But when someone quits to take a better offer, it's 'Where's the loyalty?' Management stops being loyal before employees stop being loyal. I can unconditionally tell you that. Everyone has a responsibility to provide for their family and to protect their family and themselves. So management, if you want to get your act together, you have a responsibility to engage people, let them know where they stand, do competitive analysis of compensation, and without question, not treat people the same. I'm not saying diversity really matters. Growing up in the environment I did, I realized there are good people and bad people, and it has nothing to do with their race, their creed, or their gender. Nothing. The only bias I have is against negative, lazy people. I know they don't belong in Broadridge. Maybe they should work somewhere where there's a job for them. Helping them identify they don't fit is the right thing for them and us, and letting the top performers know they're top performers. If the news right now is we're heading into a tough economy, they shouldn't be worried about their job. We don't want them to be worried. Anytime a company announces they're going to lay off two percent of the people, 99 percent of the people are worried. It's human nature.

John, if you're going to keep this up, you might as well say I'm so tall and thin as well.

Thank you.