Mr Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Indian Hotels Company Limited, recipient of Rotary Club of Bombay’s Ramkrishna Bajaj Award for Good Governance
Mr Puneet Chhatwal, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of the Indian Hotels Company Limited, recipient of Rotary Club of Bombay’s Ramkrishna Bajaj Award for Good Governance
Thank you. Good afternoon, distinguished guests and members of the Rotary Club of Bombay. Obviously, it’s an immense honour to be here today and to receive this Ramkrishna Bajaj Award for Good Governance, and that too, as Anand pointed out, on the occasion when Taj was also honoured with the world’s strongest hotel brand as well as India’s strongest brand across all sectors. So, it’s a very special occasion for us, and this, I think, is a moment of collective pride. The reason I say ‘collective pride’ is that there are hardly any consumer brands from India that have made it globally, and we should really be proud that at least in hospitality, with a few of its brands, we have left a mark on the world map, and Taj has been doing that consistently and in a very big way, whether it’s in New York, London, Cape Town, Dubai, or our wonderful palaces. We were talking to some guests during lunch in India, and including the safaris and this very special hotel itself, for all of us who are gathered here.
I think good governance, as I read somewhere, is in the Rotary four-way test, and actually, that four-way test can be summarised in just one word: trust. And as Anand just pointed out, trust is one of the pillars of what Taj stands for: the T-A-J stands for Trust, Awareness, and Joy. And I think that is where everything begins and ends, with trust. And the Ramkrishna Bajaj Award also represents these values, together with the core values of the Tata Group. All these are embedded in the ethos of Indian Hotels Company, as the founder Jamshedji Tata named it over 122 years ago, celebrating 120 years of Taj. But the company was called Indian Hotels Company, which we have started using of late; nobody used it as IHCL, but the reality is it’s not me who founded it, it’s the founder of the Tata Group who coined the name IHCL.
I think being recognised for good governance is a very good initiative of the Bajaj Award. If I were to turn the clock back 40 years ago, I doubt if I would have thought that I would be leading Taj or this group and working for Tata’s and getting an award from Bajaj. I was telling Mrs. Godrej, “So now Godrej and Birla can follow, right? That’ll be special.” But she said, “That’s not needed; you’re always there in our hearts and minds.”
Let me just elaborate a bit on the transformation of the Indian Hotels journey. Some found it very difficult to believe that this could actually happen. Because, of course, if you’ve been in existence for 120-plus years, and when we embarked on this transformation it was 115 years, so it was very difficult to tell people it could be done differently and sustainably, so that the success is not a one-off, especially at Rotary. I’ve tried with Nepean Capital, with Gautam, and never succeeded; hopefully, he’ll change his mind too.
But let me just tell you a bit about the journey. We said very simply that we want to be South Asia’s most iconic but also most profitable hotel company. Now, iconic we always were — nobody ever doubted that we were not iconic — but the profit part was missing. If we added 20 years from 1999 till 2017 or 2018, if we took the pluses and minuses, a minus comes out for a 20-year term; if we took 10 years prior to that, the journey was consistently minus from 2009 till 2017.
And then, when you set out to say this, first of all, forget the board, forget the customers — it’s very difficult to make your own people believe that this is possible and doable. And I was very blessed that two of them are here actually — both Farhat Jamal and Renu Basu — who have committed to this journey, who have been part of this transformation and part of this journey. So we said we will Reimagine our brandscape, Restructure our portfolio, and Re-engineer our margins. These three Rs were created by December 2017, much before the three-hour movie was conceived or came to life. So maybe they copied us and did it even more successfully on the screen. And then we said, while doing so, we will not forget our ESG+ plan, which we had with Paathya, which is like walking on the right path, and which is also linked very closely to the Tata initiative, which is called Aalingana.
Now, we have launched, as Anand mentioned, many new brands. Some were the need of the hour. Like, when hotels were locked down, our revenue became zero. We didn’t know what to do, so we started home delivery with Cumin, which evolved into a QSR. Now it is all-day dining, like we have a Shamiana here. Now all the all-day dining of the Ginger brand will be called Cumin, and we call it very affectionately the Cuminisation of Ginger. During COVID, also, homestays became popular. So, we have a portfolio of almost 200-plus amã homestays. Anybody finding it difficult to manage their villas, you’re most welcome after this meeting; we’ll help you out. We’ll also hopefully make some money for you.
And, while doing all this, just kind of like you rearrange your room, like we rearranged this banquet hall for a different meeting. For lunch, the setup is different, the seating in the front. We started rearranging what we had and started putting everything that belonged in the right place. So you will see all the distractions gone. So all of you can do me a favour: please don’t call The President The Taj President, or don’t call it The Vivanta President. It is just The President. And there is nothing by Taj or Taj Khazana; everything was just taken off. So The Taj becomes purer and not diluted and is not all over the place. And that’s, I think, one of the main reasons why it started getting recognition.
The Taj was always good, but there was confusion around it. And you cannot have the same standards all over. So I think we started rearranging and reimagining the brands because the ideas were great. But when they were launched, something went wrong somewhere, and we just lost track. So a lot of people might think, what is so new about Ginger? Yes, it has nothing to do with the Rs 999 positioning when it was launched. It’s supposed to be a value proposition, but you should feel as good in a Ginger as you feel in a Taj at that price point. And it should be as interactive as the spaces are in any kind of luxury property.
So, I think we did that quite successfully. And during this entire journey, which I was telling one of our associates last night, I was here with Bernhard Steinrücke (Director General of the Indo‐German Chamber of Commerce), that there is something in the water or coffee, that the customer-centricity of our people, associates, was and has always been the core strength of the brand.
If you go across the world, especially now post-COVID, it is very evident. Rates in most great locations have more than doubled, and service levels have gone to one-third of what it used to be before. Except for, I would say, Asian hospitality and within Asia, I would say brands like Taj have actually gone up in service. When we started the journey, we called it an aspiration, which was called Aspiration 2022. Then came COVID. We could not aspire for anything except survival. So we called it a reset, and then we said a call to action, which was Ahvaan 2025. And we achieved all the goals of Ahvaan that we had set out a year in advance.
Throughout this journey, governance remained core. I think that we are pretty similar to all Tata Group companies in that governance is the guiding principle that helps you navigate challenges, difficult situations, pandemics, etc., and makes you actually stronger and even more resilient. There were six key pillars of our journey. One, I already said, we moved from a branded house, that is Taj, to a house of brands. And we doubled our portfolio in five years’ time. We added 180 new hotels in this six-year period. Of these, 90 have actually even opened. It’s not just signing, signing, signing. It’s also opening hotels, which is not easy, especially when you also have to go through a lockdown. Everything gets delayed. And delay also causes other challenges. What happens if your house is shut for 12 months or 15 months or 18 months? The pipes and everything need to be looked into a bit more carefully, causing further delay.
We built a robust business model. We started the journey saying we’ll have a balanced portfolio of 50-50 – 50% owned, 50% managed. Unlike all analysts, even if they try to penalise us for making the statement, I don’t believe in a pure asset-light model. I think you need to own some of your assets, your crown jewels. And you should not give them to somebody because at some point, every relationship goes south. And if you end up losing those assets, it’s the beginning of the end of your brand. Then you can’t talk about the next 50 years, the next 100 years, or the next 150 years.
Take an example of a very iconic hotel in New York, which was sold for $2 billion. It had an iconic brand, and it had an iconic restaurant. But where did that money take you? It was the beginning of the dilution of the brand and its standing. And our margins in our sector were very low. That’s why it was very difficult to make money in this business. We were averaging 13.8% between 2008 and 2017. And the first time we gave a guidance, we said we’ll do 25. So nobody believed us. Then when we did Ahvaan, we said we’d do 33. Times had changed so much, the belief had changed so much, that everybody said, no, you can easily do 35. Why are you saying 33? So I’m like, we are not a tech company or something. We have the highest margins today. And we did hit 33% last year. And we are quite confident of maintaining that kind of margin going forward. And a dramatic turnaround in profitability.
So, for two years in a row, we’ve clocked more than Rs 1,000 crores in profit after tax. So our EBITDA tripled. Our PAT went up by 25%. And we see no reason for that to change. We had nine consecutive record quarters. We see no reason for that to change because even if the demand were to get balanced with supply, which is not happening soon, the demand is going to outpace supply. Our not like for like growth. That means the new hotels which are coming in on a different model will keep adding to our profitability and will keep adding to our margins. Because most of the newer ones are on an asset-light basis. At the moment, we are driving operating leverage through owned assets like this one. This hotel actually hit Rs 700 crores in revenue last year. So, this is an absolute record. And I’m glad you’re here.
The team here has made a plan for the next three years on how we could touch Rs 1,000 crores in top line. You need a lot of hotels. A lot of companies are getting listed at that kind of revenue with 10, 12, or 15 hotels. So this is really like one of the big pillars. At some point, I’m told this hotel used to be 60% of the company’s revenue. Today, the growth has been such, and the contribution of others has been so phenomenal, that it barely makes it to like 10% plus. So it’s how resilient our portfolio has become and how we have grown from strength to strength.
Then we also strengthened our balance sheet. We were a well-known company for having a lot of debt, and every time everybody said we accumulate debt, we accumulate debt. And then we started reducing it till COVID came. We got it below Rs 2,000 crores, and then COVID came and it mounted back to Rs 3,600 crores. Today, we are a net debt-free company. Actually, the amount of debt that we had is much less than the cash that we are sitting on. So, any of you who have good ideas for deployment for a good hotel project, especially in BKC, I think we need a Taj. But unfortunately, we are not going to do anything out of pure ego because the prices have to justify a project. So we can do BKC, but it comes at a price that is very, very unaffordable or with all other challenges. But we are looking. We are looking, and hopefully, we’ll get there.
In terms of value creation, which I would say is the last pillar that we had, we did put a lot of focus on it. So, when Farhat Jamal was mentioning November 2017, we were around Rs 12,000-13,000 crore market valuation. As we speak, I don’t know where it stands today, but definitely we are above Rs 85,000 crore. So, a six-and-a-half-times increase in six and a half years is pretty good for our sector. See, we are not a start-up or something where you get valuations that are unheard of. Actually, if anybody has that kind of money to put in a start-up, please let me know. I’ll not have losses, make a profit for you, and give that money to us. But I don’t know how that model works. We only know that in hotels we have to sell a lot of tea, coffee, beer, and a lot of food to make very little money. This sector is not as rich as it feels, like as it looks — all the chandeliers, etc., all this is wonderful. But the top five listed companies, which have managed companies or brands like Marriott or Hilton, when you put all of them together, including us, we barely achieve 60-70% of the market cap of TCS alone.
So that tells you the size of the sector. Within this sector, some of the things that we’ve been able to achieve are pretty phenomenal and are today a benchmark, not just for the Indian subcontinent, but for the rest of the world. So moving on to our responsible corporate citizenship, I tried to fill in a lot more than I thought. So I think it goes fine. I think the good thing about our group, and the group that we all belong to as companies, is that it is not just about financial performance; it’s about our responsibility to society, to the environment, to Paathya, whatever we did. And I think I’ve said it in this forum once, when I presented our company during COVID times, with the help of a lot of companies, some also present in this room, we were able to raise so much money, and we served six million meals to the frontline workers.
Now, six million is a big number. At the same time, Rotary was also doing all this service all across, and we were doing it in our own way. We kept our kitchens open, and we hosted almost 120,000 bed nights. We call it ‘bed nights’ because that’s what it is called when your hotel almost transitions into a hospital kind of service, whether it’s for quarantine or for people who could not go home. Our focus on this has never gone away, including now when it comes to doing the same service in Kerala, Wayanad, where all this devastation has happened.
We are at the forefront on our own but also together with the Tata Group in mobilising resources, funds, putting all the plans together for the rebuilding of Wayanad. This is just a part and parcel of our day-to-day work, and it also defines who we are. And at this time, it would be appropriate to again go back to the founder, because he said in a free enterprise, the community is not just another stakeholder, rather the purpose of the existence of any business. And I think we are very proud that our ethos, our conduct, our way of working, our way of treating all stakeholders resonates very well with the philosophy of the founder.
Finally, I would move on to the role of leadership in governance. As a leader, I firmly believe that governance is a shared responsibility, but it always starts at the top. The say-do ratio has to be very good—what you say and what you do. And if the top is not in sync, the rest will not work it out. That’s, I think, one of the key principles. If you look at the major businesses in India, whether it’s the Bajaj Group, the Tata Group, or Godrej, I think this is something where people have lived those values themselves, and that’s how it gets into the water or the coffee or whatever we have in these groups, and it becomes a part of your DNA. So you start exuding that without knowing that you’re actually doing it. So it just becomes a way of life.
It has also been my endeavour to foster a culture of integrity, accountability, and transparency. Initially, Renu Basu thought that this was a crazy guy – so I was like, communicating too much for a CEO or MD in the company and too open about things. So, when I first saw her, I said, “Oh, so you are the lady who gives discounts to everyone.” She was not very happy with my predecessor. She says, “Okay, here it goes again, all over.” But actually, those kinds of comments were very much like, “How can an MD or CEO talk like this?” Or going to everybody’s office instead of calling people, waiting for me, talking to everyone — whether it’s the express tower lift people who manage the lifts or take you up and down, or the simple workers coming to you. So initially, it was quite a culture shock, but that is the kind of openness that also creates accountability, especially if you’re serious about doing business. And this is how you carry people with you. The top-down approach does not work in a culture party, yes. But if you want to have sustainable success, it is my belief that it must be inculcated in everybody and deep down, and the will to make a difference that you want to do it. It’s not because you’re pushed to do it or you’re incentivised to do it.
And I realised very quickly that I was really blessed to lead a team that was really dedicated. And all we had to do was to instil again that sense of pride. Somewhere it was lost, because yes, you are good. Your service is good. Your food is good. Your properties are good. But one of our very famous CEOs used to say, not of Indian hotels, but within the Tata Group, “Yaar tere log bahut ache hai lekin inhe dhanda karna nahi aata.” So all that changed and evolved. And we continued this journey despite that down period of COVID. We kept signing. We kept opening relentlessly. And the results were very evident as soon as the pandemic went by.
In closing, I think this award is also a testimony to all the people who helped us on this journey, all the stakeholders. It’s a validation of whatever we did. And it has also now become a Harvard Business School case study. This was launched four or five months ago. It was taught. Actually, I was very proud that recently this case was taught to senior executives of the Mahindra Group. And I was on a video conference with them, and a few of them had actually worked for Taj and had gone on to work there. So it was very interesting because it’s not only being taught globally, but also that big groups are happy to take a case study from our group. And it is the second time — the first time was post the terror attacks of 26/11 but that was about the people, how people conducted themselves. This time, it was about the people but also about the transformation and a new business model that has evolved, which is not based on copying anybody else. It’s not based, as I said earlier, on a pure asset-light or an asset-right model or all these fancy terms. Even though I used them in the past, I realised that change is inevitable and it’s the only constant. And this will keep changing and evolving.
I would like to really thank the people on the dais: Mr. Bajaj, Rotary Club of Bombay President, and Anand, for this recognition. It will help us to continue on this journey. Actually, not only help us, it puts more pressure on us to perform better. So we have had nine consecutive quarters, as Anand said, of record performance, and I repeated it. I hope some more can come so that we can coin for Indian hotels the term which came in the 70s. All of you would be familiar with being the first superstar of hospitality.
So thank you!
ROTARIANS ASK
My question is: you have added hotel companies in the West and also here. What do they do better there, and what do we do better here?
There is nothing like something is done better in the East, something is done better in the West. I would say the whole culture of treating guests as God is better in Asian hospitality. And systems, processes, and attention to detail are very good in the West. My mantra has always been the combination of three: that’s American marketing, European management, and Asian emotional intelligence. If you make a Bloody Mary out of that as a part of the management mantra, that’s the best-tasting one.
You’ve talked about how you have enhanced your revenue streams. But you must have done a lot of cost-cutting to be able to make the kind of profitability that you did. So can you tell us a little bit about that?
I don’t believe in cutting costs; I do believe in optimising costs, and sometimes, you know, a challenge is an opportunity. So when I came, I saw that we were overstaffed by 30% in every place — in corporate offices, in hotels, etc. We are very good, as a race I would call humans, at starting. We are very good at collecting. Joanna always keeps telling me, “When are we getting together to just clean up the wardrobe?” It seems I occupy more space with clothes than she does. So we are just collecting, collecting, but we don’t stop doing. So there were so many URLs I found out with things that we had not done in the last 10-15 years. We were very small without scaling up. We had an organisation by brand. So a Gateway, a Ginger, a Taj — everyone had their own brand organisation with only 10-15 hotels in each of the brands.
So suddenly, when you become loss-making, then what you do is you don’t hire important people because you just give the job to somebody else, whether that person is right for that job or not. So the person becomes unhappy, and the organisation becomes unhappy anyway because the job is not getting done. So we didn’t do any cost-cutting; what we did was, if I would call it for lack of a better diplomatic word, we stopped the wastage. As emerging as India was 6-7 years ago, and in many parts also not rich, maybe poor, but just take one example of how much change you would have at home.
Since my childhood, if you went to a little shop, you never got the change back; you got some kind of sweet, a toffee or whatever. The change does not count, and you have it lying all over. You’ll have it where the Gods’ pictures are; you’ll have it somewhere. A tray, if you empty out your pockets on a weekend — 20 bucks, 50 bucks, 100 bucks — it will all come. Contrary to, I would say, economies that have not become totally devoid of paying with cash. So if you live in Germany, everybody takes out a little pouch and they start counting, and they give you exactly the number of cents now, and the pfennig before, in the past. Because there is also a saying, you know, in the old days in Germany, there was a saying: “Wer den Pfennig nicht ehrt, ist das Geld nicht wert,” which means, “The person who does not respect the pennies is not worth the money.” And so it’s just a cultural conflict.
I think we can all stop wasting; we have a lot of wastage. And it’s good to see today that the food was good, but it was not wasted. It’s a very simple buffet — one side non-veg, one side veg. It’s the same, you know, multi-flavoured noodles on both sides, and the rice is the same on both sides. It’s not like so much that God knows what happens with that food later. So I think we stopped the wastage, and when we scaled up, our costs per hotel automatically made us look very efficient. But did it ever go down in absolute terms? The answer is no, only during COVID. And that was also because all the travel had stopped. All your expenses for airlines, trains, hotels — whatever that moment was, that was not happening.
So it stopped, telephones with WhatsApp calls, etc. So all those bills, I think, went down. But the idea was never to cut, and honestly, you can’t cut, especially in our group. You can’t take away — even in COVID, we did not fire any employees. We rather took a salary cut, the top management, of 25% to pay for the contractual employees. That means if somebody had a limousine contract, he laid off the drivers. Now, how do you support them? So through the Taj Public Service Welfare Trust — there is some legality in it from a tax point of view — you could pay up to 49,999, not 50. So we took those cuts, the top 100 in the company, and actually paid for people. Similarly, we did not take away jobs from anyone. I think in India, if you take away somebody’s job, you take away lives and livelihoods. Unless it’s a consistent case of fraud, manipulation with money, etc., that is not good. We were maybe a bit smarter, so I would tell you about some things we did.
We used opportunities with some other groups which were thriving even during COVID, like let’s say TCS as technology, and Zoom, and Microsoft meetings — everything just went through the roof. So, we were actually able to promote a few people, give them higher salaries, and they went to TCS. Similarly, some people went to Tata Consumer, some people went to Tata Digital. So that also became an opportunity to rotate and provide people a platform to grow. And some of those who retired, like Mr. Jamal, superannuated, we engaged him. He is still engaged in training and mentoring some of the general managers, but we did not replace him because he had a portfolio of 50, and there were two others who had 50 each. Then 150 got distributed over two because we did not need three. Actually, we still have two. We don’t need two. We should have only one Chief Operating Officer because there are no two similar people. But again, to be fair to them, they’ve also put in their heart and soul and did everything. So we tried to manage it that way. In an ideal world, you have only one person who heads operations. There’s one person who heads sales and marketing. There’s one person who heads your legal team. There’s one person who is your company secretary. You cannot have a few of them. So we did not replace some of the people, and that helped, especially with the very high costs that Mr. Jamal had.
My question to you is, if “Picture abhi shuru hui hai,” toh 5 saal mein kaisa dikhega?
This is a nice one. Let’s start on a lighter note. You see my photo from 5 years ago and now. So firstly, I became seven kilos heavier. So, I hope I’m not seven kilos heavier in five years. I think, you know, I’ll give you two examples. One is a consultant who said this from HVS — that’s Hospitality Valuation Services. We were going through a phase when you start doing well, and there’s another very famous saying which I translate into English from German only: “Jealousy is the GST of success.” So there was a lot of jealousy going around. So I was like, what is happening? People are attacking right, left, and centre, not just with anonymous letters but passing comments, judgments, you know, for no reason. We have not done anything to them, but there was a lot of jealousy. So, I asked him, “What is this?” He was two years senior to me in college. He says, “See, Puneet, this is how it is. Jab tak haathi soya hua tha, sab theek tha. Ab haathi jag nahi gaya, khada ho gaya, toh sabko kamre mein takleef ho rahi hai.”
So we said it’s not that. When I was growing up, there was a very famous movie called ‘Haathi Mere Saathi.’ So we have woken up three more Indian elephants. So today, if you see, that kind of advancement that happened from international brands into India is being put on a very strong competition test, not just Indian hotels but the other three or four major groups also. So that is where firstly the movie starts. So, if you leave your house open, if you leave your land open and say, “Hum toh sirf Taj hi karenge.” There was a time before me where somebody thought of a monobrand. India is a heterogeneous country. Tatas have been known for nation-building. You cannot say, “I will not go to a district capital or a state capital,” because every place cannot afford a Taj. It’s just not possible.
We were just talking during lunchtime — somebody went to Tawang. I think Dilip was there. So Tawang is the last or the first village, depending on who’s talking about it, coming from China into Arunachal. Now it’s good to be there. It’s good to build those states too, but you can’t have a Taj there. So that’s why it is a Vivanta Hotel. So I personally feel just to give you a flavour of… I think India in the next 15 years could have at least 1,000 Ginger hotels. Every district capital and every metro like Mumbai could have easily 20 to 30 of them minimum. We have four today. Three are in the Andheri area. I mean Santacruz, Andheri Teli Gali, and Andheri Mahakali, and then one in Goregaon. There’s nothing towards this side or in the middle. All the four are performing at north of 85% occupancy. And at a very good rate. If you took the average of all four, the rate would be around Rs 5,000. So that’s the kind of potential that we are sitting on. Now if we get a few more like this, which we are hoping we would — even a Land’s End is 400-plus. A Taj Palace in Delhi is 400-plus. So this one — you need both. So one does not exclude the others.
I think there is a huge opportunity because of the infrastructure development, the renaissance of the train stations, the Udaan scheme, with all these doubling of the number of airports in India, the number of six-lane highways that are coming. All this will create demand for hotels. The only sad part is we have not, despite all the positions that I hold, and we have tried very hard, we are not getting, as a sector, that kind of positioning at the government level. If we had infrastructure status at the centre level, if tourism and hospitality got included in the concurrent list of the Constitution… When the Constitution was written, there was no need for tourism in India. That was 1947. If you got people food and jobs, that would have been good.
So, I mean, going in this is something that is going to happen. So I always say it positively that the indirect biggest beneficiary of the government spend on infrastructure is tourism and hospitality. However, if we position this sector a bit more and get its industry status at the state level… You know, I don’t mind sharing here. In all this time that we had a lockdown, this is the only sector that paid all the excise fees and all the statutory power costs, etc., because this is the way those contracts are given and done. And you are not allowed to open the bar, but you are paying all the bills. So I think, and also that the restaurants were only open till four in the afternoon. I don’t know how many would remember that, as if COVID is like a ghost that comes out after four.
But after going through all this, I think the opportunity is huge. And even if nothing happens, still, this sector will keep evolving, and the demographic dividend that India has will need to create a lot of jobs. And the biggest multiplier of jobs is hospitality. It’s not just the people you see here. It’s the milk supplier, the egg supplier, the limousines, the airport representatives. It creates a lot of jobs. And all over the world, if you look at the top — now we say very proudly, a fifth-largest economy maybe, and there are those bets going on whether it will be 2027 or 2030 that India will be the third-largest — the other side-effects or the other opportunities or the other strengths of all these top economies will also come. People will have higher per capita income, which means higher disposable income. They’ll spend more in hotels, in restaurants, and in buying goods. Consumption will keep increasing. So, I think the potential is huge unless something again like COVID comes in the way. This sector is going to thrive.
What is it in you — what were the trigger points that basically happened in your life that enabled you to achieve this kind of success that you have?
You know, my wife would like to believe it was her, but since childhood, I think there is a credo that goes very strongly with this, which as a Carlson Fellow like we have with Rotary also, one can use. It goes like this: “Whatever you do, do with integrity…” That fits in well with today’s theme also. “Wherever you go, go as a leader. Whomever you serve, serve with care. Whenever you dream, dream with your all, and never, ever, ever give up.” And I think that’s the spirit that I would say has kind of driven me. This is like the mantra. And that never-give-up attitude, because I always believe that there is an answer, there is a solution to any challenge that is thrown at you. Only you have to think harder. And most of the answers I get, honestly, with this audience I’ll say, I get them in my sleep.