Transcript: Episode 137: $600,000 Trash Can

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[00:00:00] Susan Barry: This is Top Floor episode 137. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/137. 

[00:00:13] Narrator: Welcome to Top Floor with Susan Barry. This weekly podcast ride up to the top floor features tangible tips and excellent stories from the experts and characters who elevate hospitality. And now your host and elevator operator, Susan Barry.

[00:00:32] Susan Barry: Welcome to the show. David Lund started working at a hotel when his planned surfing trip went awry. Four decades later, he is The Hotel Financial Coach teaching hotel managers and department heads how to embrace their numbers and make business decisions informed by financial data. David's book, The Prosperous Hotelier, is a guide to hotel financial literacy for the hospitality professional, and it's a good read.

[00:01:03] Today, we are going to talk about railroads and secrets, but before we jump in, we need to answer the call button. (Phone dialing sound plays) The emergency call button is our hotline for hospitality professionals with burning questions. If you would like to submit a question, you can call or text me at 850-404-9630. Today's question was submitted by Joyce, and here is what Joyce has to say.

[00:01:34] As a director of sales, I have to know my numbers and then she has like star report, pace, all that stuff in parentheses. But I find my general manager's obsession with the expense checkbook over the top. How much time should I be spending on expenses? Joyce took this question right out of my mouth. This was something that came up for me all the time when I worked in a hotel, and I was good at numbers, so I could have literally spent my entire week working on my expenses and done a great job, but I obviously couldn't do that. So what do you think, David? What's your answer? 

[00:02:11] David Lund: You know, uh, the general manager has every, um, right to expect his department managers to be on top of the checkbooks because you know, at the end of the day, he's responsible for the GOP, right? And delivering on that. And if you're running the sales department, you probably got a very substantial budget and if you're not on top of your checkbook, there's a good chance, um, we not might not maximize the profits because of it, you know And not just being on top of your checkbook, it's making sure that everything is getting recorded. Because the last thing we want is to get old invoices when we've just finished the year. And then all of a sudden in January, we get stuff from last year. Um, that causes a big problem for the GM, need to explain it to the owner, costs is a problem for the controller, the director of finance and, and the whole ball of wax.

[00:03:01] So I say you need to spend whatever amount of time you need to be on top of your numbers and, and that's kind of top heavy. It's going to be more in the beginning, but if you spend the time and develop your system, um, get your people, um, you know, to help in the ways that they can by delegating certain things, then it's going to be so much easier for you, um, in the long run.

[00:03:24] Susan Barry: That makes a lot of sense. I think the trouble comes in when you end up overemphasizing expense control to the point that people are spending two, four hours trying to save $6 when they could have devoted that time to generating top line, in which case that $6 would not make one bit of a difference.

[00:03:44] David Lund: Exactly. And you know, we just don't want any surprises. We want to minimize the surprises. So, um, being on top of your checkbook is the only way you can really do that with your expenses. 

[00:03:54] Susan Barry: Excellent. You got your start in the hotel business with Canadian Pacific, which later became Fairmont. I don't think that people really understand the influence of the railroads on the hotel business. And I know you're a little bit of a hotel history buff. Can you give us a quick history lesson about how those two things go together?  

[00:04:18] David Lund: Yeah, absolutely. So in Canada, where I'm from, we embarked on a transcontinental railway in the 1880s. And Canadian Pacific built it. It took four and a half, five years, and, um, it was really about, you know, nation building because Canada became a nation in 1867.

[00:04:39] And, um, the railway really tied the country together, really created a lot of prosperity for, especially the people in the west. It opened up the west so that people could do commerce there, move there, all those wonderful sorts of things. So the chairman, the general manager of the Canadian Pacific Railway, his name was Cornelius Van Horn.

[00:04:58] Susan Barry: Wow.

[00:04:59] David Lund:And he was, yeah, quite a dude. 

[00:05:02] Susan Barry: I feel like I need a dog named Cornelius Van Horn. 

[00:05:05] David Lund: Yeah. So the way things worked in those days, the first tracks that were laid were from Montreal to my hometown, St. Andrews, New Brunswick, so that he could go to his summer cottage at Covenhaven on minister's Island. It's still standing there today, but, um, you know, that's how much sway he had.

[00:05:21] And then he built the rest of the railway that went West. And when he did, um, he saw how beautiful the country was and what he said was, and I'll quote him, he said, since we can't export the scenery, we will have to import the tourists.  

[00:05:35] David Lund: So what he did is he created a whole string of hotels along that transcontinental railway and, uh, places like the shadow front and places like the bad Springs, Lake Louise, the Empress, the Palliser Hotel in Calgary. I mean, I could list, you know, two dozen hotels that were part of the railway system. And, um, many of them are still operating today as Fairmont hotels. They're an integral part of the Canadian story and landscape and their unique, uh, architecture as well.

[00:06:07] Um, the railway company was run by engineers and accountants. So, um, you know, Canadian Pacific became a large conglomerate and then in the 21st century, uh, sixties and seventies, they had coal, they had, uh, forestry products, they had a railway, they had an airline, they had hotels. All that's kind of gone today. It got split up at one point late in the 1990s, but it was a very successful company. 

[00:06:36] Susan Barry: And those are magnificent hotels, like some of the most special properties, at least in North America. 

[00:06:43] David Lund: They truly are. And I grew up in the shadow of one of those hotels in my hometown. The Algonquin Hotel was a Canadian Pacific Railway hotel. And, um, it's really how I got into the hotel business by I used to walk by the hotel every day on my way to school. 

[00:06:57] Susan Barry: That's awesome. So I know you started out sort of in operations, food and beverage rooms, but you ended up in accounting and finance. How did that happen? 

[00:07:08] David Lund: Well, one day, about 10 years into my career, there was a, I think it was a savings alone scandal or some kind of a, of a meltdown in our economy. And the hotel was slow. We're doing layoffs. And a friend of mine who was a bit older came to me and said, uh, I heard you're getting laid off tomorrow. Um, he said, but I got a tip for you. They're looking for, um, somebody in accounting. You should, you should go look at that opportunity. And I laughed at him.

[00:07:33] I said, you gotta be kidding,?me in accounting. Come on. And he said, no, I'm serious. It's a great opportunity. You should go check it out. And I had, you know, quite a bit of respect for this person. So I followed up and, and that was the turning point. And I ended up In accounting and, you know, two short years later, I was a senior accountant and assistant controller.

[00:07:57] Four years I was a controller, something like that. I was a little bit different because I'm not really an accountant. I don't have a designation. Um, I completed about half of one, um, early on in my accounting cycle sort of thing. Um, but I knew the operation and I could understand what the people in the, in food and beverage especially, were doing it and um, that really kind of set me apart in a way. 

[00:08:24] Susan Barry: So after a storied career with Canadian Pacific and Fairmont, what led you to start your company, Hotel Financial Coach, I think 11 years ago? 

[00:08:36] David Lund: Yeah, 2013 actually, um, I was the regional controller for six hotels in California and the controller of the Fairmont, San Francisco, Nob Hill. And, uh, we had some new owners and basically one thing led to another and, um, you know, they wanted to make some changes and I was at the point in my career after 31 years, I was ready to do something different. 

[00:09:00] Susan Barry: In your coaching business, you encourage hotel leaders to really get to know their numbers, both as a way to manage the business and as a step toward getting promoted.

[00:09:12] I totally agree with you. I was really lucky early in my career to have leaders who forced me to know my numbers, probably before I wanted to. And at the same time, I have worked with a lot of general managers, particularly in my consulting career, who want to keep the budget a secret or the, you know, the hotels perform as a secret.

[00:09:37] I think it's so strange. Like I remember fighting with a general manager at a hotel who refused to share with the sales leader what the cost per occupied room was. He insisted that she did not need to know that information. What what's driving that? Is there a good reason for that? Or why would a general manager want to keep that information a secret?

[00:10:02] David Lund: Yeah. So flat out, there's no good reason for that. But what I would say is driving the shift is ego. Number one. Number two is most GMs are not numbers people themselves, they come from sales or operations, and a lot of them don't really understand what's going on with the numbers. So they use that as a way to hide out, you know, in a sense, because that way they don't have to talk to you about what it all means.

[00:10:26] You're going to ask questions, you know, so those are the two things and they need to really get over it because they're the general manager and their job is to lead the entire team. And if you can't have the currency around the numbers being the focal point of the discussion, you're lost. So, get over it. 

[00:10:48] Susan Barry: Well, and your, your job of developing the people on your team and bringing their skill sets up and all that stuff is just amazing. To me, it always felt like it, the more my teams knew about the business, not just the hotel business, but our business entity, the more they bought into the things that I asked them to do and the strategies of the hotel. You know, if they didn't know the why, then who gave a crap about the how and the what, right?

[00:11:21] David Lund: Yep. But there's a real, also a legacy thing here happening, um, you know, money has a lot of power in our culture. It's like that three letter word I'm not going to mention. We don't want to talk about it very easily, a lot of us. And a lot of owners, a lot of companies are still in the closet when it comes to the numbers and they think that it's not something that people need to know.

[00:11:41] It's, it's, it's private, it's, it's secret. Um, But again, how are you ever going to get better if you don't know what your numbers are? Right?

[00:11:50] Susan Barry: It's true.

[00:11:51] David Lund: I remember talking to, uh, an owner at a conference one time a couple of years ago, and he said, I've got 25 hotels. I didn't even give the GMs the numbers. And I said, well, you think you have a better chance at improving the results if they did know what the numbers were. And he just looked at me like I had three heads, but he knew he knows what he's sitting on. He's just not comfortable getting out of the closet. 

[00:12:13] Susan Barry: There's something else there too. You know, one thing that I ask when I'm consulting on individual hotels, which is pretty rare these days, but if I do, and I work with ownership groups, I always want to know what their strategy is.

[00:12:28] Like what's their deal thesis. Are they looking to dispose of the hotel in five years? Are they trying to refinance, you know, whatever the case may be, because that makes a difference about how you approach the day to day strategy of running the hotel. And you're absolutely right. There is such a vow of silence and secrecy among owners. I wonder if they think, if the hotel team is clued in on the disposition strategy that they're going to run for the hills, which couldn't be further from the truth, I think. 

[00:13:00] David Lund: I also hear that, you know, nobody needs to know how much I make, or if you're the GM, like, you know, there's a line in the A and G section called general manager's office, and it's usually one or two or three people and you can quickly figure out what people are making. And I, to that, I just say, we need to get over it. We have responsible adults, you know. Or they're going to see the financial statements. They're going to see the emperor with no clothes. I'm sorry. That's the only way we're going to run this hotel effectively. Sorry. It's no other way. 

[00:13:30] Susan Barry: How does a functional understanding of the hotels P&L help someone in their career? Or how does it hurt to not have one? 

[00:13:39] David Lund: Oh god. Well, you know, we all start out in the service end of things. Um, and our job is to look after our guests. Eventually it's look after our colleagues, but when we get into the upper echelons of management, uh, we also have a budget to look after and, um, you got to be able to talk about your payroll and your expenses and your revenues if you have revenues.

[00:14:01] So that's the currency for advancement. If you're good with your numbers and you're good with your guests, you're good with your colleagues, you're going to get promoted really quickly. But I've seen it time and time again when people, you know, ignore the numbers or they think it's the accounting department's responsibility, whatever it's, it's putting them at a deficit, definitely. I've seen it time and time again when people excel with their numbers. They really go fast and far.  

[00:14:27] Susan Barry: I think now is a perfect time in the industry to that. You know, there's a ton of opportunity for quick advancement because labor is still very, very tight. And so if you are cooling your heels and feeling like you're ready for a promotion, start doing some math problems in your spare time.

[00:14:46] David Lund: Yeah. You know, like you'll get recognized right away. If you are on top of your departmental finances, um, you're going to shine. You're going to be a standout. 

[00:14:55] Susan Barry: We like to make sure that our listeners come away from every episode of Top Floor with a couple of really practical, tangible tips and ideas that they can try in their businesses or in their lives. Aside from reading your book, what are a couple of things that an early career hotel manager can do to better understand the numbers? 

[00:15:19] David Lund: Get a copy of the P&L. Get a copy of the balance sheet. Um, look at the budget, look at the forecast that comes out every month, um, make sure you're on top of your, your daily numbers, the pace, you know, where are we months to date?

[00:15:32] Are we going to make our revenues? Find someone who you see as a handle on their numbers. Doesn't have to be the financial person. Maybe it's the salesperson, maybe it's the director of HR, maybe it's the director of rooms or housekeeper. Uh, find someone who's good and say, Hey, can you, can you help me and just help me get an understanding of what you do with your numbers?

[00:15:52] You know, people love to talk about themselves and what they do. So that's an easy one, but you have to be willing to ask, but you know, that's it, like you just get into the thick of it. 

[00:16:03] Susan Barry: I think what you just said, “You have to be willing to ask” is something that I wish I could put on a billboard on every street in every city in the world, because this is what happens. People think if they ask a question, it makes them look dumb and it actually makes them look smart. The more questions you ask, the more engaged and intelligent you look, bar none 

[00:16:24] David Lund: Yeah, with anything.

[00:16:25] Susan Barry: True fact.

[00:16:26] David Lund: Yeah, absolutely. And none of us know everything. And, uh, um, you know, people love to share what they know and they love to help other people. Um, it's one of the things we, we, we do as human beings. 

[00:16:40] Susan Barry: Okay. So this question is a question that I have to ask because I am so nosy and curious. I remember seeing these sometimes come across, but it would be like fraud alert or scam alert or be on the lookout kind of stuff for hotel scams. And, but I've been kind of out off property for a good long time. So I'm curious if you've got any, they're probably much more sophisticated now. What are the smartest hotel scams you've seen? 

[00:17:10] David Lund: Well, it's an age old one, but, um, if you're not doing rooms for verification every day between housekeeping and the front desk, um, if I'm working on the desk in the evening and, and let's say you come in and say, you know, how much for a room tonight?

[00:17:25] I'm going to say, well, it's, you know, 225, uh, you might say, Oh, it's a little steep. I tell you what, I have a special, you know, I'll give you a room for a hundred bucks cash, but you need to be out of here by 9 a.m. Oh, okay. No problem. That's, that's the oldest one in the book. 

[00:17:40] Susan Barry: Oh, I've literally never heard of this, David. I feel like such an idiot. Wait. So this is the room is vacant and clean. It gets sold for cash. The cash gets pocketed. And how does the room get cleaned? 

[00:17:52] David Lund: Well, it becomes up on a discrepancy report from housekeeping the next day. And chances are nobody's going to investigate that too far. So that's how it is. So I learned that from one of my first girlfriends, um, in the hotel business, she was a clerk in the housekeeping department and she had to do this every day. And I said, why are you doing this? It makes no sense. But then I talked to the night auditor a couple of years later and I knew exactly why she was doing it.

[00:18:17] Susan Barry: Gotcha.

[00:18:18] David Lund: Um, and most hotels don't do it anymore. So that's the easiest one. Another one is double billing on a buffet. So let's imagine you and I go to breakfast and we pay cash. Our waiter just has a check right now that he could take to the next deuce and, and, and they want to pay cash that he just keeps going. And that is such a popular scam, especially in resorts where they're busy and they do a lot of buffets.  

[00:18:49] Susan Barry: Look out for that on Easter Sunday. 

[00:18:51] David Lund: Yeah, absolutely. Buffets, man. Okay, if you're not doing cover counts and comparing it to your point of sale system, every single meal period, you're going to get taken and tell you right now. Um, another one that's a bit more sophisticated is, um, collusion with a vendor and purchase orders. So I've experienced this one firsthand where, you know, the maintenance director in one of our hotels, and I'm not saying maintenance is bad or whatever, but this was a bad maintenance guy. Um, he would do a PO for HVAC filters.

[00:19:21] You know, $3,500 for, um, 100, uh, HVAC filters, not for the, the, the spring season, you know, we're switching over. Um, meanwhile, the vendor at the local store, hardware store, this was in a remote community. So a lot of our stuff was coming from, you know, the hardware store, he was supplying him with satellite equipment for his house, you know, and, and we found a long, long, long list of things that had.

[00:19:51] Been done exactly the same way and we were able to unravel the whole scheme, but it's so easy to do if there's collusion. So that's where you really have to have a separation of duties when it comes to the receiving, um, sign off of the invoice and paying of the, uh, accounts payable. And in today's world, we're all looking to save money and take shortcuts. And if you take shortcuts in your controls, your accounts payable purchasing controls, you're going to get taken. 

[00:20:19] Susan Barry: The such a good point and so timely because many duties have been compressed on property and hotels. Always refer to this as the separation of church and state where, for example, you can't have a sales manager be responsible for managing rooms inventory because if you do, then all of a sudden, a lot of, uh, discounted rooms go to their group and they are making a bonus on that or whatever the case may be.

[00:20:47] So listen up hoteliers, pay attention to all of your controls for sure. David, we have reached the fortune telling portion of the show. Now you are going to predict the future and then I will come back and check up on you later and see if you were right. What is a prediction you have or maybe even a wish you have about how artificial intelligence, how A.I. will impact hotel finance and accounting? 

[00:21:19] David Lund: What I would love to see, like right now we have a departmental P&L in our hotel business. That's the standard. But what I'd love to see is I'd love to see in addition to that, I'd love to see a P&L by market segmentation. How much are my transient rooms making, how much are my groups, how much are my corporate customers so that, um, I can figure out obviously, you know, what is going to make the hotel the most profit in what season based on the demand that I have and based on my marketplace, what if I can fine tune that, I think I can make a lot more money by understanding profitability by market segment. And we don't do that now. 

[00:21:58] Susan Barry: Oh, that's such a good idea. But you know, I think we may be getting closer to that as the new property management systems come alive. They are, uh, pegged to a guest versus pegged to a room. And so there's an easier or maybe easy is not the right word. There's a more simplified way to track revenue contribution based on an individual guest. And so her segmentation could be tied back to that. I think that's such a good idea. Oh, I hope that happens. That would be really fun for nerds like us to investigate. If you could wave a magic wand and create a new product or service for the hospitality industry, aside from this a segmented P&L, what would it be?

[00:22:44] David Lund: I think that, uh, you know, if we were reinventing the hotel business today or inventing the hotel, I should say, um, I would get rid of the PMS. And if you take a look at vacation, um, rentals, they don't have any deposits. They don't have any gas ledgers. They don't have any city ledgers and billings and stuff.

[00:23:04] They just take the money from the guests up front. You should do the same thing. That's what I would do because the PMS is a bottleneck for so many things. Now I know we use it for so many things, but if we were Silicon Valley and we came up with the idea of hotels today, I can tell you right now they would not include a PMS.

[00:23:22] Susan Barry: That is very interesting. And I think very true. What is next for you and what's next for your company? 

[00:23:29] David Lund: Well, um, you know, hot on the heels of publishing my first book, I've got two more books ready to go. I'm working with my publisher to, um, cross that path, uh, hopefully sooner rather than later. Um, I'm also pivoting my business.

[00:23:44] I still do a lot of workshops and coaching, but I also have some intellectual property that I'm pivoting towards. I have a complete uh, hotel accounting policy, uh, manual and internal control review programs, 550 policies and 300 control points. Um, very comprehensive. Um, I have my video course, I have my book.

[00:24:05] So I'm really kind of pivoting so that, um, you know, as the saying goes, I want to make money while I'm sleeping. So that's kind of what's next for me. And obviously continuing to um, produce my weekly blog or video from, from my followers, um, and just, uh, really enjoying sort of the position that I've been able to create in the last 11 years, um, with my business.

[00:24:32] Susan Barry: Okay, folks, before we tell David goodbye, we are going to head down to the loading dock where all of the best stories get told.

(Elevator sound plays. Elevator voice announces, “Going down.”)

[00:24:45] Susan Barry: David, what is a story you would only tell me on the loading dock? 

[00:24:51] David Lund: The title of the story is the Russian. 

[00:24:53] Susan Barry: The Russian? Okay.

[00:24:54] David Lund: Yeah. I was the director of finance in San Francisco and we had um, 200 rooms of Russians come and stay with us, including the president at the time. 

[00:25:05] Susan Barry: The president of Russia?

[00:25:06] David Lund: Yes.  

[00:25:08] Susan Barry: Oh, okay. No big deal. 

[00:25:08] David Lund: Yeah. Yeah. He was greeted in the lobby by Arnold Schwarzenegger and a bunch of other politicians and stuff. It was really cool, but, um, they arranged for billing. Go figure, right. And I said to the GM, I said, we don't want to give a foreign country, Russia billing. Can you not get an advanced deposit or whatever you go?

[00:25:27] David doesn't work that way. And I say, well. It should be careful. Um, anyway, so we'd arranged that they would pay their bill and they wanted to pay the bill in cash, um, at like 3 PM on the afternoon of departure. And they left in the morning, they were gone. Oh, three o'clock rolled around four, five, six, nobody shows up.

[00:25:48] And I think we're getting burned. And then all of a sudden at like 6:30, I get a call from the chief of security. And he said, they're coming up from the boat. They had parked a warship. In San Francisco Bay, and he says they're going to come up and pay the bill. I'll meet you. I'll meet you in the general manager's office.

[00:26:05] So sure enough, I go down the general manager's office, like 45 minutes later, these two great big guys come in the office. And then there's this little lady. She looks like Audrey Hepburn. She's got the pill, pill, whatever suit on and a little hat, and she's carrying a little handbag. And she opens up the handbag and she pulls out $700,000. No, it was $630,000. 

[00:26:28] Susan Barry: I'm having a heart attack as you're telling me this story. 

[00:26:31] David Lund: She plops down $600,000 and then peels off 30 grand more and I gave her the receipt and they were gone. And the whole time I'm thinking, this is a setup. We're going to get robbed tonight because who has that kind of cash in their hotel these days? We might be lucky to have six grand in the hotel, not 600,000 and they know it, right? They know the money's there. We're a soft target. We can't defend ourselves.

[00:26:57] Susan Barry: You are so smart. I would never think that far ahead. I would be like throwing money in the air. Hooray! We got paid!

[00:27:03] David Lund: So I had a raise for Loomis to be there up until 5 p.m. to take the money to the bank, but I can't take the money to the bank at, you know, 7:30 at night. So I go back to my office with this money and I'm sitting in my office and I'm going okay, there's nobody there, like what do I do with this money? I thought, Oh, maybe I should take it home.

[00:27:22] Susan Barry: No!

[00:27:23] David Lund: No, I'm not taking that money home because, you know, that's not, that's an invitation itself.

[00:27:26] Susan Barry: For death!

[00:27:28] David Lund: So then I'm looking around my office and then I look behind me and there's, I have a trash can in my office with coffee cups and paper, you know, not much else in it. So I emptied it out, put the money in there, I put the paper and the coffee cups back in. I changed out of my suit, got into my bike clothes and I biked home. And, uh, came back the next morning and, uh, all was fine. 

[00:27:51] Susan Barry: I am speechless. I don't even know how to react to this story. It may be the best story I've ever heard ever in the history of this show. What in the world? So did anything happen? Did any suspicious characters come sniffing around, do you think? Or you think you got lucky?

[00:28:10] David Lund: No, my imagination got the best of me. I was assuming we were going to be robbed. Nobody tried to rob us. So scratch that one off. Um, but I remember telling the GM the next day and he was just like, well, that could have been a career-ending move. 

[00:28:27] Susan Barry: Right. Or what if someone had come to take out your trash without even realizing it? And they're like, huh, the lobby attendant no showed this morning. She has moved to Russia. 

[00:28:37] David Lund: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I thought about that at the time and they, they came during the day, um, twice a week and, and the housekeeping folks, you know, were kind enough to help us with our trash. But, um, so I didn't, I wasn't worried about that. And I slept like a baby that night and get up the next morning and bike to work. And sure enough, the money was still there and got Loomis and they showed up at 10 a.m. And. The money was gone. 

[00:28:59] Susan Barry: David, I am not going to sleep tonight having heard this story. How did you sleep at night? I would have had a heart attack.

[00:29:06] David Lund: I think I probably had a couple of scotches and then went to bed. 

[00:29:09] Susan Barry: Well, David Lund, thank you so much for being here. I know. Everyone probably ran off the road hearing that story about the Russians. And I really appreciate you riding up to the top floor. 

[00:29:22] David Lund: Excellent. Thank you, Susan. It's been a pleasure to be here with you.

[00:29:26] Susan Barry: Thanks so much for listening. You can find the show notes at topfloorpodcast.com/episode/137. Jonathan Albano is our editor, producer, and all around genius. He even wrote and performed our theme song with vocals by Cameron Albano. You can subscribe to top floor on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you like to listen. And your rating or review will go a long way in helping us give you more of what you like. 

[00:30:02] Narrator: Thanks for listening to the Top Floor podcast at www.topfloorpodcast.com. Have a hospitality marketing question. Reach us at 850-404-9630 to be featured in a future episode.