Mark NonProfit Donation Consent Made Easy

Mark nonprofit donation consent

hey everybody welcome to the official dugan better podcast i'm your host patrick kirby and of course we talk to people who are going to help small medium-sized non-profits figure out their stuff one of the things that i think our small medium-sized non-profit friends can't figure out and like just it's the most difficult thing in the world is our board of directors what on earth are they thinking sometimes what on earth are we doing with them sometimes i'm really glad that we got our guest today who's going to help us figure out a perspective not from you but from your boards something that i think we don't spend enough time uh talking about and thinking about it's gonna be a great episode today so i'd like to introduce mark buzan who's the founder of the society of non-profit board directors and actually the host of an upcoming event the non-profit board summit mark welcome to the official do good better podcast thank you patrick such an honor to be with you it's going to be a great uh show today because it is talking about a um an angle that i don't think we as the nonprofit executives or we as the nonprofit fundraisers acknowledge or talk about uh whether we're allowed to or whether we just don't take it upon ourselves to do that and as from the perspective of the board director but before we get into that uh somebody's kind of scrolling through and they're like i love this topic i'm really interested but i don't know who mark is so let's go start at the start 5000 foot view uh kind of who you are uh how you got to where you are today yeah thank you very much patrick uh so uh as you indicated uh there's there's quite a story behind my past frankly as uh that led me to wanting to really understand board directors perspectives and found the society of nonprofit board directors so my i spent the better better part of 20 uh years working in non-for-profit organizations and i got my after getting my starting career i worked for a member of parliament up here in in canada and um where i where i started off really going on going through things was first off doing the natural progression after working on problem and led a little lobby in the government relations and and i would like to joke it was only as the non-profits or the associations would hire us for hacks and uh and and and so so i got exposed to a lot of interesting perspectives first in that very very first role that i left i i kind of quote if you people didn't see me doing the air quotes my first real job after leaving parliament was working for a very small uh industry association where it was literally just myself and the executive director and i was employee number two in this they'd ever had in this organization so i was following him very in-depthly in his relationship that he had with the board itself and sometimes it could be very precarious sometimes there's a lot of things it was just a very interesting dynamic and seeing very much from their perspective of where things going and then advancing on to a variety of different roles uh as as an independent and then up to being an independent consultant and then eventually coming back as an executive director president ceo so i spent a better part of that in public policy and and first and and then later with uh not-for-profits particularly in my background although i've got a lot of charitable experiences it's been mostly on i'd say on the not on the association side of the nonprofit family and often i'm i think i'm guilty of this i'm very guilty of this i kind of think of myself as a reformed executive director uh i saw one side of the story yeah i saw one side of the story you know what this i saw the staff side of things we're in it every single day this is we we live and we breathe we're passionate about this you get it we let it come to the come to the office put up with our i get my car my cappuccino machine and i'm at work and i'm i'm at work and i'm doing this kind of stuff and and the board is kind of like the it would be particularly i started figuring this finding this as i got i send it to the top job if you will uh at one organization whereas the executive director it started out fantastic and everybody the executive directors they have what we call the honeymoon phase where nothing can go possibly possibly wrong and then that's the best isn't that the best phase it is the amazing because they the board they they take everything you say they lap it up and it and it's for somebody who's got an ego and a minute they have an ego like this this was amazing it's incredibly dangerous after a while you saw lapping it up and then a year and a half later 80 percent of my board changed and that board didn't come in didn't have the same familiarity with the issues and the reasons why i was hired like this and i immediately went from hero to zero patrick because i had a number of board members who literally could you couldn't even breathe and a lot of my executive directors are probably really nice that kind of managed the the the the micro managers on this and that drove me absolutely crazy sure i left that organization and only to go into another one and find out what frankly uh the exact op the exact opposite thing whereas like dr phil is like you'd have to literally jump on the hood or their car to get their attention kind of on some really really big issues now ultimately because of my knowledge and pointing like this right much i kept on saying we've got to do this we've got to do this we've got to do this and that just ended up just cheesing them off frankly and well let's just say i say is i ended up on the wrong end of an argument right now initially what happened after that experience was of course of course they're you know either shock the eye your disappointment you know what are you going to do and and inevitably you go out to people that you respect and you and i say you know this is what happened and how do you do how do we get around this and and um what one of them told me there's this gentleman up here in in canada my respect enormously he's really well known in in terms of uh of hr placements for ceos and that's james jack jackson and i asked him a little bit about what happens and he said very calmly says mark i don't think you're cut out to be an executive director interesting ouch ouch says you're far too entrepreneurial for this so i i i because i respect jack i said uh thank you jack and i you know he says you could go off and do your own thing and manage and work with work particularly with boards and that well like i hung up the phone and i said that guy gonna be crazy i'm not gonna go out and do something like that was but after speaking with a number of people particularly board directors get their perspective i said you know what maybe i've been missing maybe there was something to this after all he wasn't that so crazy after all maybe i should listen to him and that led me down to a path frankly of a from my own little journey if you will of okay realizing okay maybe in retrospect i shouldn't have done that i shouldn't have done that i missed that i didn't see that tone from their perspective of things to getting a a really and fast forwarding a few years later realizing okay because i come from an association background i mean i'm a little bit more biased i happen to believe that one of the best ways you can learn is from your peers that's why through human history we've had um you know guilds societies that's this just that used to be the way that you would learn a trade or whatever that made you from everybody else i looked around and i said well age is from strictly from a business building perspective but also from more altruistic spirit how why do we keep on in non-profits keep on repeating the same damn problems all over again over and over and over why do we keep on having the same dialogues and all these different dialogues about where boards go wrong with this and it's usually in my i i was quite amazed a a few things one if you look at a lot of the dialogue out there it tends to be driven by former executive directors executive directors consultants who've been executive directors and i don't want to ask you because i'm one of them as well but i i i found that really intuitive nobody ever bothered to ask well what about the other side of the coin here usually isn't it true and then in an argument or a disagreement there's usually two sides to to avoid the two different points of view and i mean that's why we have arbitrators just to to negotiate kind of things it seemed to be that the voices of the executive directors be and i think this is largely because they're in it every single day they do it all the time they're dedicated to this whereas board directors this is i i say this is off the corner of their desk right this is not their for their full-time passionate thing most of them if they get cheesed off you know i said you know what screw it i'm out of here buddy and they don't lose anything out of it right but the non-profit sector frankly loses big when that happens you know it's funny that uh when you are a fundraiser you're um you're programmed to ask really good questions and listen to the donors right you're you're you're listening for their perspectives you're trying to understand where they come from so that you can match whether it's a program or service or some sort of fundraising opportunity so that they feel really great about where they're coming from and ironically those who are helping run the organization that you're trying to raise money for who can give the best direction are the people that we're asking better questions and listening to the least yeah ironically this is kind of where you're setting this up for is that we never really come to a understanding from where the board is rather we just assume that they're going to fit the mold you never want to put you know from a hiring standpoint right you go to an hr person you put you try to fit a square peg round hole doesn't work right never works out and yet i think we do that a lot with our board members because we got to check boxes right so we've got a banker we need to check might not understand our our folks we don't do it they're going to be in because they've got this as a background and they become a background or an expertise rather than a person that we need to understand from a personal standpoint isn't that that's funny truth yeah because that's that's but you know i've yet to in my many discussions maybe one of these days i'm not having spoken to these i swear i'm going to say one of these days i'll maybe i'll do a formalized study on this but everything i've been doing is really just i'm giving anecdotal having speaking this i've yet just met a single board director who says i do this because i have a passion for doing the minutes or or i do this because i have a passion for hearing committee reports right yup nobody consent agendas man i get out of the bed in the morning for those nobody does that nobody does that yeah we keep on ramming that down their throats and like this all of this um the reason why and i challenge anybody who's going to go out and do this is don't be content with what i call the motherhood statements oh i want to give back or not that no no come on cut the crap why are you really doing this yeah why are you really doing this everybody on planet earth a human being this is a natural things does as they say from a psychological reason does things for one of three reasons okay health wealth relationships okay this i think you're not going to get wealthy from this i'm not going to maybe get healthy from it maybe mentally i don't know but that's kind of that's kind of dubious frankly it's on the relationship side of things and part of relationships is your own feeling about yourself about feeling good about yourself don't you feel that you you want everybody wants to be around somebody who makes them feel good about themself really and where am i going with this is when i really push them and i says come on you really seriously you take time away from your friends your family your hobbies your business your career surely you got better something something better to do with your life than sit around a boring boardroom and look at financial reports committee reports and eat stale donuts and drink uh coffee on a saturday all of your saturday right surely you've got this what gives come on really and after the chuckling is done i like this because i put it a little bit light to kind of open it up there they say you know what i feel because i want to feel part on i'm i'm part of something bigger than myself yeah i want to feel like i've made a mark i've left a legacy i've made an impact and my little contribution has been part of that it's the same that's the same answer that donors give the same answers that donors give and we don't treat our board members the way that we treat our donors because they're part of the team they're we've got our horse finders on they got a mission to do and you've got a job to do well if you're not going to do that what's the turnover rate what's the rate of people who are going to develop an ire for what your ideas are because you're not investing the time to have them feel like they came up with it as well the same way that you have a donor reach out and gonna give you a thousand dollars for example and you reach out and say your impact for that thousand dollars to develop this and helped us promote this and did this with our uh clients or those that we serve are you doing that with your donors or with your board members to say you're the hours that you put in here developed this program that helped this many individuals did you personalize it or do you just group it together and as a as a collective and it's part of a line item that's either red yellow or green on a budget line that you just throw up there because you've got to get through the motions in order to get this whatever task you have at a board meeting done isn't that the truth i mean this is look the the the dialogue i watch out there i find sometimes honestly rather troubling honestly troubling about the viewpoint sometimes about a few if you read the reddits of the the subreddits sometimes if you read the blogosphere about this i'm and i'm not going to say look i'm personal witness that wherever where i can tell you where boards can go bad you know you know they they can go bad i'm not going to tell you that yeah but there's two sides of the fen there's two sides of the story here and one of the things that is just so amazing you alluded to it there is you only have to look on linkedin or or elsewhere like this about the whole story about the the our culture is shifting on a corporate culture shifting about the importance of getting the right people into an organization right creating the right kind of a culture that's inclusive that people feel right they feel appreciated and that's fantastic that's great we need that kind of work like this because that makes for a better workforce yet the most important role one of the most important advisory strategic rules nothing yeah usually the most i i personally maybe it's out there but all of the job descriptions quote job descriptions for board roles or volunteer roles is it's a listing of everything that's going to be expected of you that's fine to import that out but you miss out a huge opportunity to be able to attract that we want the as jim collins in his book um good to great says that you want the level five leadership those that those type of people that really push it forward they get it they want in there you gotta you we've gotta we we do a piss poor job part in my language if i see this of doing of a sales job on this role right there's there could be a potentially look you're saying look you're going to be part of something really big you really want to have and that's the the call out i put the board directors to get involved at least with the society and with our where their summit is saying look do you really want to be content with just plodding along yeah or wouldn't your life isn't your life much more meaningful when you said you know what i played a small part of that role and my ideas were taken forth on this and they were considered and move forward on this or i was part of that that dialogue to move this organization this movement forward that's what motivates people that's what gets people really excited behind you to be able to do all those other important listening there we don't do anything about that to communicate that important uh check or even the very least of it doing a little check in and say patrick how's this working out for you yeah you know one of the things that uh i find fascinating because i've i've gone i've experienced great board members some awful board members and like everything in between right we all have they're just they're people they're humans and they either get along with people and you don't um one of the things that i found interesting and maybe people who are listening to this kind of can relate is that if there's an executive director who's got a relationship with the board chair and maybe board or directors but everybody underneath maybe the the fundraising person that doesn't have a relationship i was i experienced where the expectations because i wasn't the ed was not to engage and have any relationship with board members outside of the board meeting where i'm coming in and expected to do x y and z and the minute that there was a friendly tone struck or a personal accord with one of the board members that made our executive directors you know sort of ears perk and go whoa whoa whoa not your role not not your duty is to sort of be a part of the friends circle you're in a professional capacity here don't don't cross a line and i think that's a curious thing that i'd love to ask you about is what what have you seen as an expectation is it is it the employee's role to understand and get to know some of the board members or is it solely the executive director who's sort of puppet mastering sort of the agenda itself because i think there's a delicate balance you don't want to get too overly friendly but in order to understand and get to know your board members on a deeper level you have to be somewhat of a personal person to understand where they're coming from and asking a little bit deeper questions and how is your day that's a that's a tricky question and these it is a bit of a sticky wicket isn't it right uh because look i'm gonna i'm gonna give a few points but my own perspective of frankly of uh of being a former president ceo i would say often in my board you have one employee it's me mm-hmm that's it yeah it's me i'm the one that list and the and and the proverbial buck stops with me you're not happy with so-and-so like this you need to go through me and i will and i will handle it and that would be my my my job more or less to be able to relay that because you don't want us in a situation where the executive director or like that is being overminded whether intentionally or not right now should there be no rapport no contact uh probably not i don't think that being that that's that's healthy either and and that strikes me frankly of a little bit of honestly if you've got an executive director's bit but on the control freak uh perspective my advice to them is somebody there is be careful about that be careful about how you how far you do that certainly there has to be a degree of that there has to be anything like that but i think play it out and depending on the situation per se board directors i also encourage you to understand that a role that there should be a a friend i might in my view a friendly relationship but not as close that you should try to establish with the with your executive director right what uh we get a lot of a horse blinders on as leaders in the nonprofit world right because we're concentrating on one thing and it's probably fundraising or if the programs are a little um ketty wampus and uh and we get into board meetings where we forget that those we're dealing with are human beings and they're not part of the team too any tips and tricks on how we can maintain our relationship composure even though there's something pressing from the board to do and not be and not be so business oriented i mean i know this process is features and right you have to do that but there's a human element to making some of these broader decisions and if we forget that while we are having a conversation i think it goes a little bit away from either mission or personal centric or the reason why these people are on there any tips and tricks on how you can as an executive director maintain that in the back your brain that these are people too yeah then that's an excellent question i i i thought often after what occurred to me is this is where i could have you know done better in that because i just my nature have been very efficient and run through the checklist like this be careful about that um one is really important to to to take the time where is needed to invest in those relationships and getting that uh i think that that that preferable time down in the bar if you will after before cleaning like that is actually really really really important more so than i if i look back on that as uh is more more important than than you realize taking the time to get to know them but it's also important very important to always try to consistently remind yourself that nobody joins a board because they want to get into the minutia if they did that's that's a red flag honestly you don't want you don't want people like that like that you need to give them the top details frankly and keep it on a strategic level the reason why people will serve on a board as i said just be part of bigger uh be part of something bigger than themselves but the interesting thing that often asked when i uh a follow-up question i asked him is what would cause you to leave yeah what would cause you to leave and the interesting thing with board most board directors at least the good ones is that they're not going to make a big hullabaloo like this they'll probably just finish up either they'll just politely desist system like that or just not for not renew their term like this and say thank you and we'll all never know know the real difference behind that right they'll say i feel like my time and talents were not being utilized time talents and expertise and my and my expertise were really being utilized i wasn't being consulted on these things the big on the big thing and i didn't see progress on the mission now the two of those things are really good important to put together because if you don't feel like you're investing your time as a expert and that's primarily what we go towards boards for we're looking for an advisory type of role as because you're as an executive director you cannot possibly know everything you know a smart leader knows okay i don't know this this and this but you know what i'm gonna go and get the people on my team who do yeah and i'll get my counsel and advisors and say okay here's the situation what do we you need to be really approaching it from that perspective don't get into the details and say and ask for that there i think the most board directors if they feel that they're regularly consulted that they're valued and they're putting forth on the these inputs are there um you're going to have a much better quote-unquote boss yeah as a result of that um one of the things that i think is interesting that you brought up is you're almost describing um how an hr department would approach a an employee in the sense that um a lot of employees probably leave because they didn't feel valued or they didn't feel like their their talents were being used correctly is there a role if you're big enough for an organizat director is there a role for you to think and connect with your hr department about how you are interacting with your donors not necessarily to build the process and procedures but like hey what things are we doing to maintain talent within our organization and how can we apply that maybe to a board member to to see what that looks like do we almost engage with that absolutely absolutely you know one of our uh one of our our big speakers daryl upsell um is uh at the summit now if you don't know about who daryl upsell is uh you need to you need to look him up daryl is the probably the is the guy that unaid agencies go you to un uh you know amnesty international at the international level and say we need a ceo can you help us this guy's recruited in 62 countries and you know or sorry six in 205 organizations around the world he goes to geneva he and he puts these people in place there right so he's speaking and he he has even said that a number of these bigger organizations will actually go out to the particular effort of saying we need you to help us build a pipeline of of really well-connected people to join our board right and as a result of that they put the time in to get you know people like from being secretary u.n secretary general like big names to be able to serve on this because they know the concept of the fact that if they put that concerted effort in of having the right people around their advisory board amazing things happen on the fundraising things phone calls get answered and we all know that the best donations are individual uh donation gifts and that there uh that the greatest ideas on that doors get open for other problems or are these these are these are really critical things because they're cognizant of the fact that now admittedly that's going to be work talking embassy international is a behemoth in the nonprofit world but how do you model that on on a smaller scale you nonetheless have to have a really i said the very least uh the executive director and and and the c and and the board chair need to have a really good relationship wherein you're at least conscious of this fact yeah you're conscious of this fact now one of the things that with one of the organizations i help manage it's learning disabilities association canada we made a very clear offer and said look let's not in our strategic planning it's not focused so much on the what we have to focus first and foremost and put a big episode on the who who do we realize that we've got about nine spots that are available on our board that are up to our in our in our uh bylaws and constitution do we want to fill them up just with warm bodies no we're willing to wait we want the right people in the right seats as well and and with making a conscious effort of saying you know what this is what help us build this build this organization of what its full potential is i see a lot of great opportunity for that organization i've seen other opportunities with other organizations that at least become conscious of that they've created in this instance a special committee a recruitment committee to be able to really think that they're there to be able to think about that and filling those roles with the right people that's interesting i love that as a perspective and i think that's really one of the things that um that again we don't think about that enough we don't think about it from a board's perspective we don't ask them right questions we don't uh we once they're there now they're part of the machine right so there's no uh continuous relationship building with that individual because we got them right now we nailed them and that's and that's really a problem with with uh with uh with donors as well right if you get this this almost becomes a transactional relationship rather than something that's a little uh uh elevated than right right if you get a donor and you thank them and you're done great you've got a board member you woo them they're in you're done and that's just begin because if you don't start cultivating a better and deeper relationship with them they're going to walk they're not going to be invested they're going to be that warm body that you mentioned uh as well if only there was some sort of summit or some sort of event that one could help uh sort of do this talk to me about this because i i'm so curious uh putting together a uh sort of a non-profit board summit right it's something that you don't see a lot no we don't um at all it's right it's never concentrated and specifically uh geared towards board members or the concept of board members talk to me about that how'd you come up with this and what does that entail yeah well it leads back frankly to my time when i was going through this exploratory fashion like this and i think that sometimes we all have our own history and stories that we have to go through certain things where i was became really aware i wanted to be really aware of the other side of the coin i learned and in my own association background as i said i think there's no better way to learn than from your colleagues or peers right content that happens that happens like this that's why there's associations like the afp association fundraising professionals cs csa's canadian society of association executives the american counterpart asae all these kinds of other organizations there's even corporate board director or associations so inevitably when i was trying to learn more of this i started thinking well i need to go and talk to where there's going to be this and i was amazed i was shocked and odd patrick that there was nothing out there nothing out there i mean all of these are various organizations they kind of talk about it on the periphery it's kind of a it's kind of an afterthought and like this and and i said well gosh darn it no wonder we keep on repeating the same darn thing because nonprofits we all kind of we operate in our own silos so if you're a health related non-profit or charity you're going to know maybe other organizations that are similar in your in your same sphere but somebody on the board for example who's really passionate about that the chances that they're going to know somebody on an environmental ngo or uh you know a chamber of commerce or a trade association i mean it's possible is it likely no and yet they kept on repeating the same dang thing maybe on a different issue but it was a really relatively simple simple thing right and i thought my god if only of these board directors which we set them up with virtually no training i mean how do we expect somebody to be a leader with so many fiduciary responsibilities like this how do we how do we set them up for success when we basically just give them a little bit of the manual with due respect it's usually filtered through the the perspective of an executive director who's i'm sorry we have we have a bit of an agenda that's different there how do we expect it to really honestly set them up for success and better yet attract the people who are really really busy so as try as i might i couldn't find anything so we i put together a formal and informal group called the society of nonprofit board directors we put it out a call out if you're a board director would you like to learn like this and i was quite surprised back in 2018 and saw that people were joining on and on getting this but a long time you know along came now coved we've seen the importance frankly in the opportunity that exists with uh with with virtual conferences virtual events and i said you know gosh darn it we've been managed to have some success in organically growing a little bit by bit but now if anything is really the time and i'm uh to to give this opportunity for people around the world and i'm blessed i just checked this morning as of this morning over 180 registrants from around the world that have registered yeah multiple continents we have speakers that are from arranged from australia canada united states spain and england um and and they keep on joining on this so clearly there's there's a desire for people who want to be change leaders who want to make an impact who want to know the difference too because it's not easy you know executive directors complain they didn't want to stay in line a lot of exec a lot of board directors they don't want to become a micro manager but they don't want to be this but nobody tells them clearly what that what that looks like right so this is going to be a one week full weekend training where you get the ability to be able to learn about that to learn about your role how to be more strategic right and also have sometimes have those difficult conversations that don't necessarily happen and need to happen like for example how to be courageous our keynote speaker margie warren margie warrell who speaks is going to use experience on the international stage working with un agencies and counseling you know board leaders like this about how to have difficult conversations you imagine how difficult it is you simply just want to come in as a volunteer you were a leader and now you're confronted with let's say a board director is not necessarily pulling away maybe you gotta give a little bit of guidance or performance management executive who might probably have more experience than you all these kinds of all these kinds of things i challenge executive directors try to think of it from their perspective this is not easy either this is not easy easier so what we do we've done is we've created this summit and we're getting a lot of board by this but we think that frankly we're only going to have as much success as if we get the executive directors on board with sending their board members in this yep okay so if they go to nonprofitboardsummit.org eds so short for executive directors eds there you can learn a lot about about how you can get your whole of your board several board members and we've even got a special uh pricing packages for for for all of them to be able to attend and yes this is strictly a an event just for the boards nothing nothing wrong this guy's you have your events you're you're you you have lots of opportunity for this smell like this but what we happen to come across with the old method and we're trying to disrupt this a bit about board uh training and development is that it's usually incumbent upon a weekend retreat weekend facilitator comes in and charges up upwards of ten fifty five ten fifteen thousand dollars and the training is either forgotten in six months or but because you got a brand new board you gotta rinse and repeat and do the whole thing again and that's assuming of course you as an executive director can even get the funding or get the agreement from your board to want to do this right it's a lot better at 47 dollars per person at this point at this point in time it's going to be scheduled to go up a moment there uh a per board member to get them in and get them training and they can connect with change makers from around the world and bring lessons back about how they can be a much more effective board leader so it's at nonprofitboardsummit.org eds i love it we're going to have those in the show notes uh as well so get get over there and again what a nice treat to have your board too hey we'd like to underwrite this have you go through it here's this trainings here's the kind of things you're going to bring back um anything you can do together to kind of grow and understand each other and ask those questions i think it's a really good growth pattern too so and as uh and as you said it you can't afford not to at this point uh if you're curious about what that is uh that's a great investment of time and talent and treasure and i think if you can uh if you can get you wrap your head around why on earth your board members do the things they do and what their background is what their passion is you've solved 99 of the problems of your board stuff already and i think that's really where the perspective of this conversation's been really fun is that that becomes the that becomes a different way of thinking and that different way of thinking is going to signal to your board that you're um a little more purposeful with why they're there what they're doing and how you're going to interact and that purposefulness will be reflective in how well they work with you uh what questions they ask how engaged they become and at the end of the day that's really what you want as a board member anyway right you want somebody who asks better questions and is better engaged about that the best bosses this took me a long time believe it or not are actually the most informed ones there you go the best conversations the board meetings i i've been through as an executive director where after the end of it i go to my staff and say well we survived another one we went through that one and then i've been on all the ones the other conversations where i i like mind blown i'm like wow that was a really cool conversation i feel personally challenged and growth like that yeah those are the kinds of things that if you get you can get your board on on board with that in going in that direction tell you something you're going to enjoy going to work you're going to you're going to look forward to it you're going to view noah you don't need to look at your board at this adversarial type of approach when i sometimes i see this too far often in the blog sphere it should be a collaborative one one that feeds off each other where you're leveraging each other's expertise yeah absolutely mark absolute pleasure uh so glad that you're doing this so glad you're bringing this topic up and uh really nice meeting you and it's always nice to meet a brother a fellow northerner i think fargo is like the northernmost thing uh ever and i get somebody who's got a better northern accent than i do that's a great addition to the official duke and better podcast mark thanks so much for being a guest on today thank you