Master Your Licensing Deals: Lessons on Licensing and Product Development

Are you looking to secure licensing deals from major brands for your product or invention but don’t know where to start? Join us as we speak with John Ellis, a seasoned entrepreneur with extensive experience in licensing and bringing new products to market. From his first licensing deal to his current invention, Roll Ranger, John has explored and leveraged uniquely effective strategies to get the most lucrative manufacturing and distribution deals. Now, he shares his insights with us.

In this episode, you will discover the factors you must consider when examining offers from potential licensees and common mistakes to avoid when making such deals. John also reveals how you can turn a rejection of your licensing deal proposal into a “Yes” from potential licensees and established brands, including establishing market demand before pursuing licensing opportunities - like he's doing with Roll Ranger, his latest invention. Join us now!

In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we cover:

•  Key strategies to successfully get licensing deals for your innovation.
• Avoiding common licensing mistakes that can harm your product's success.
• The significance of adopting the right pricing strategy during product launch.
• Insights on building a brand that resonates with consumers.
• And so much more!

 
Visit www.rollranger.store to learn about the Roll Ranger, John Ellis's invention that helps you quickly and easily find the end of tapes, reducing the hassle and messiness during use.

Also, visit www.opticsforhire.com to learn about John's optical engineering and manufacturing company which provides custom optical engineering services like optical design, prototyping, and manufacturing.



To be a guest on our next podcast, contact us today!

Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands totaling over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!

Transcript

Jon LaClare [00:00:00]:
If you're considering a licensed deal for your invention, you'll learn in today's interview how to maximize your chances of getting a deal, but you'll also learn how to make sure you're getting the highest level of royalties.

Announcer [00:00:11]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare.

Jon LaClare [00:00:32]:
I'm really excited to be talking with John Ellis. He's the founder of RollRanger Store, which is a product we're going to talk about. And also he has owned a product development company for a very long time and worked with some very big clients. That company is called Optics for hire and their website is opticsforhire.com dot. We'll dive into both of these businesses. He's got some great stories to share. I'm really excited to have you on the show today, John.

John Ellis [00:00:57]:
Pleasure to be here, Jon. Happy to chat with you today.

Jon LaClare [00:01:00]:
So let's start off by talking about your, I guess, your longer history. You've been doing product development for others for a long time and recently started doing some more of your own in the past several years as well. But for a very long time, you worked with some big companies in optics for hire. Can you tell us a little bit about that background, what that company does and who you've worked with?

John Ellis [00:01:19]:
Yeah, the backstory goes back about 25 years to the late 1990s, early two thousands. And I was working with a team of engineers in Ukraine, and this was sort of the post soviet era. And these people had been developing consumer products for the Soviet Union, like CD drives and DVD drives. And they were working with a Nasdaq technology company that was trying to come up with the next great CD DVD type format. That market moved to Blu ray and other technologies and that particular company went bankrupt. But around 2000, when that all happened, I was looking for work and trying to figure out what to do and realized that a lot of people were starting to sort of outsourcing business model and people were outsourcing to Ukraine for software. And I realized I knew this amazing team of physicists who had brilliance and skills in the technology I didn't really know much about, which was optics. So we started a company called Optics for hire, and I've been working with them since.

John Ellis [00:02:24]:
And now we have offices in other countries and we've worked with, you know, startups to Mattel and GE and Google and Microsoft. But basically what we're doing is we're designing lenses, optical systems, lighting systems that are used in other products. And to do that, well, you need a physicist, an optical engineer, an optomechanical engineer to design that. So we're designing these products, prototyping these products, and helping companies produce these products. And so we've been in so many different kinds of interesting entrepreneurial stories, kind of, you know, just along for the ride, like the launch of the Xbox, the first self driving cars, optics in the Barbie doll, trying to figure out ways to detect, you know, flu and coronavirus with optical systems, medical devices, you know, thermal imaging, underwater cameras, the light pipe on the ring doorbell, sonos, music player, like, just dozens of different applications that don't really seem to have anything to do with each other other than they use light or collect light. So that's sort of the backstory to optics for hire. And then I think we'll talk about that. More recently, I've sort of gotten involved in kind of product development of my own and learning about how to be an inventor and how to launch products myself.

Jon LaClare [00:03:43]:
Yeah, one of the first products you did. So you worked with these big companies like Google and many others that you mentioned over the years, but this was, I think, a little smaller company that ended up licensing. It was a toy, a product that you worked on for a client. Understand your story correctly, that sort of kicked off or started this journey of doing more and more products on your own as well. But can you tell us a little bit about this toy and their story? Yeah.

John Ellis [00:04:05]:
Yeah, I'll show the toy. You've probably seen it, or viewers may have seen it. It's in Walmart, target, you know, Walgreens. I see them, and it's this little toy fan. And when I do this, you'll see some animation. And this happens to be a jurassic park animation in this product is candy. And so the way that we got to this partnership, which has been great and sold millions of units, is interesting. So we had worked with an inventor in our area who'd done a bunch of toys.

John Ellis [00:04:46]:
His name is Rufus Butler Cedar. He had some really successful animated books, books that we turn the page, the characters move. He had an idea for a 3d toy. So instead of this fan kind of spinning like this in two dimensions, the fan would spin in a circle, and then you'd get these sort of, you know, 3d images of looking like kind of a floating Princess Leia. So we made that form. We designed a form, and then he wanted to find licensing. And by the way, we partnered with him, so he wasn't just paying us. We decided to go in on this together.

John Ellis [00:05:27]:
And what we learned was that while people thought that was cool, it was expensive to make. And the toy market is very price focused. Your goal for pricing of a toy is usually to have a retail price of say dollar 20, because that's what someone's going to buy for their I kid's friend at a birthday party. And if you're going to be selling at $20, then, you know, that implies a manufacturing cost or wholesale cost of four or $5 or something like that. So anyhow, that particular version was much too expensive. So then we went to a 2d thing which looked like this. But the first attempts at licensing really didn't work very well. And that was a not because the product was a problem, not because the pricing was a problem.

John Ellis [00:06:14]:
Those are essential if you're going to try to license the product. It was really about the partnership, because the first partner that we found was a company that sells millions and millions of units, but does it with multiple skus. So they have 1000 products, but they each sell each product only 10,000 units or something like that. So we struck what appeared to be a really good deal. Like, you know, they gave us a great commission percentage. They were giving us like 10% instead of 5% royalty or 3%, which was more typical. So it said, well, this is great. We've got a big toy company.

John Ellis [00:06:50]:
They sell a lot of units, good commission structure. But the fact was, because the business model was selling a little bit of a lot of things, no one thing ever sold that much. So we really didn't even recoup our investment costs than that. So Rufus, who was the partner, kept working and came to this company called Candyrific. So Candyrific is this company that now makes this product, and they have a certain kind of brilliance or genius in the way that they sell. And the first brilliance about this toy company is that they realized you could sell a toy in the candy aisle if you put candy in it. So you didn't have to compete against all the other toys in the store. You only had to compete against being something interesting next to a static Snickers bar and kids would grab it.

John Ellis [00:07:43]:
So they've made a very big business in selling toys that are in the candy out because they've got toy in it. And then the other thing that they do is that they do licensing. So they license to Disney, they license to Marvel, they license to Peppa Pig. They license to every kind of animated tv show, whatever that a kid would like, they have a licensing deal with. So what that means is you're going to get a much less royalty commission because a lot of the money is going to Disney, but they can move millions and millions of units. So that is what this toy is. And it has sold, I don't know, four or 5 million units. We make a much smaller percentage than we would have with the first deal, but it's worked out to be a great deal.

John Ellis [00:08:30]:
So that taught me about how in licensing, how much volume really matters and also how much pricing really matters. Because when we were designing this, we had, there's 15 leds on this little fan blade here. For the performance of the system, it would be better if it had 16 leds. But Candy Riffic said having a 16th led would add four cents to the bill of materials because it needed a different processor, and that was completely unacceptable. So to get the volumes they needed, they needed to be at a price point. So they were willing to take a hit on performance to save, I think, what, in the end, amounted to about $0.03 or something like that. So that was another thing I learned about working with that company.

Jon LaClare [00:09:25]:
It's a great story, I think, with a lot of learnings, really. Any inventors or anybody potentially considering a license deal, whether you've got a brand new product or one that's around, and you're just looking for a partner to help you grow, there's so many different ways to do that. But I love that you focused on volume, because that's missed so often. It's easy to get excited as an inventor thinking, as you said, getting a 10% royalty, well, that's amazing compared to a 1%, 3%, or whatever that others might be offering. But it's important to. I would just add to what you've said, getting to know your licensee, right? So getting to know their goals or strategies beforehand, it's hard to do sometimes, right. But taking that time and effort to understand their goals on volume or whatever it might be, making sure they're the right fit for you. The other thing that you, I don't think ran into necessarily, but we've had some clients over the years that have is sometimes you'll get a licensee that'll sign a deal with you and shelve your product, right.

Jon LaClare [00:10:15]:
So it sits on a shelf, and for various reasons, right. It might be that they do a competitor, it might be just that they get distracted or whatever. So getting details into your agreements upfront to avoid that sort of thing or to make sure they hit certain volume metrics can be helpful. But the biggest part is really making sure you're going to be in bed with this licensee for hopefully a long time, and you want to make sure that they're the right partner, the right fit. So that's a.

John Ellis [00:10:41]:
Well, I think the key question for an inventor to ask, and the words that I wished we had used before, was asking the partner, what is a home run for you? You know, what is a big hit? Because we asked that question about two years into the partnership with this other partner, and they said, well, a home run is to sell 60,000 units, so that sounds pretty good, I guess. But if you're making $0.20 or $0.10 or something like that, 60,000 units is $6,000, and that doesn't cover the cost of your patent understanding. What's a hit for them, I think, is what the question that I've since asked and wished that I'd asked at.

Jon LaClare [00:11:30]:
That time, that's a great question to ask, getting some maybe examples of when they've hit those home runs as well, and even talking with other licensors, other inventors that might have dealt with them. So since then, you've moved on to, or I guess you're still doing that business, of course, but you also are marketing and creating some of your own products as well. Tell me some.

John Ellis [00:11:49]:
We did. So that was sort of an introduction to licensing, and then we came up with some of our own product ideas. And I've heard a phrase in entrepreneurship circles that the reason that every business fails is the same where every startup launches, which is the same issue, is people stop working on it. And I think there's some truth to that. So we had an idea for a product that was gonna be a device to test whether your hockey skates were sharp or not. I have kids who play a lot of hockey, and when a child falls, you don't know if it's cause the skate is dull or because they're not good at skating. And we went as far as to make a product. We made a prototype, we tested it, we brought it to some stores.

John Ellis [00:12:45]:
We looked at different kinds of partners. We figured out what the cost was going to be. We just kept working on it. But in the end, we found it wasn't going to work. We weren't going to be able to get a price point that we wanted for that product to be successful, we had to reset and still think about, well, what do we know about sharpness? Was there anything that, and being hockey skate could translate to another product? And so we sort of moved the product idea to, like, let's figure out whether knives are sharp or not. People have all these kitchen knives. Probably a lot of them are dull. They might have a sharpener, but they don't necessarily know how to use it.

John Ellis [00:13:24]:
If they do use it, they don't know when they're done sharpening, and they don't know when they should sharpen. Because the current sort of state of the art is if you're super into knives, you're gonna, you know, cut the, you know, your hair or something or try to cut a grape or, you know, cut a piece of paper. And if it's tough to go through the paper, then, well, that means that your knife isn't sharp. But most people have no idea. Those are very subjective kinds of measurements. So we had an idea to build a product, which we did, that tells you whether your knife is sharp or dull and gives you a little light indicator that does that. And that eventually became this one, which is sold under the. Currently sold under the Farberware brand.

John Ellis [00:14:09]:
It's called smart sharp. This is a product that we licensed, and then they put together kind of a dual thing with a sharpener. And then this is where the sensor is. And if I put this knife in. So I'm going to just take. I got a regular knife, and I'm putting it in this device. And when I turn it on, you see that it's green because that part of the blade is sharpen as they move it through. I think it's kind of.

John Ellis [00:14:37]:
It should be dull here. So it turns a dull. It's yellow, and it's red. Okay. So I've intentionally left the end of the blade dull. As I pulled it through the system, it was green because that was where it was sharp. And then the indicator light showed it was red at the end. So this is the kind of product that doesn't exist anywhere in the market.

John Ellis [00:14:57]:
And, you know, this was another process of learning, because when we first got this technology working, it was working in the laboratory environment, and we could see it was working because we could see from an oscilloscope the sensor variation between a dome knife and a shark knife. So we made a little video of our engineer sitting with something that didn't at all look like a product, but had a knife pulling through this device and an oscilloscope screen, you know, this sort of wavy thing. Right? So to an engineer, they might understand what that was. We sent the video to a company that we thought we might want to work with. It happened to be lifetime friends, which owns far beware. And they said, well, it's a neat idea, but we're really not interested. It's just not a product, not a good idea. So we said, okay, we kind of built a prototype and made something that looked like a product, looked pretty similar to this.

John Ellis [00:16:02]:
And then we got a little film together of a woman in a kitchen with knives, chopping vegetables and stuff like that. Something that looked like a commercial. It wasn't fully polished, but it was a really good looking demo with what was now not an engineer sitting next to a steel scope, but it's something that looked like a product and a person using it, something like a video. And we sent the same video to the same people. This is probably about a year later, I don't know, maybe eight months later. And they said, wow, we love it. Incredible. This is gonna be big.

John Ellis [00:16:36]:
And after some time in negotiation, we eventually came to a licensing deal. So that really taught me about how important it was to really tell the entire story to a licensing partner, to show them, you know, take them down the path and show them what is going to look like as a product. And of course, not only that, you have to provide them with information that you've figured out that, you know, they could get this made at a factory for, you know, at a price that would be appealing for retail, you know, a wholesale cost of four or five x less what the retail is. So, you know, it was only after we put a all of those components together, this is how much it's going to cost to manufacture. This is what your tv commercial is going to look like. This is what the product is going to look like, that they really jumped in and bit at the idea.

Jon LaClare [00:17:34]:
We're going to talk about your next product in a second, which I think there's another part to the story, but I want to focus before we do and drill down a little bit or just mention, I guess, how you talk about video or having good creative assets as being an important part of the license discussion. Sending a sample, sending a product is hard. These companies are often so inundated with great products maybe coming across their desk, but until they understand how to use it and really what it is, it just ends up being clutter sometimes finding a way to share that story. And as you mentioned, having good video upfront can be a really helpful tool to be able to use the next product. We're going to talk about is your roll Ranger. And our audience can check it out at RollRanger store, where you're doing a little bit, even beyond just sending a video and information, but you're starting to get the product into market and get some proof behind it as well, which is we've seen a lot. There's been a trend in the industry. We've been doing this a long time as well.

Jon LaClare [00:18:31]:
20 plus years of launching products, but also helping people sometimes get license deals, etcetera. More and more. That proof of concept, the real proof that this is going to sell well, is becoming that much more important. And the nice thing is, I would say it's much easier to do that and less expensive to do that today than it was ten or 20 years ago as well. So those all help us. But let's talk about the product and kind of your story behind it. So, first of all, let's say for our audience's sake, that don't know the roll Ranger, what is the product? If you can tell us a little bit about it.

John Ellis [00:19:03]:
You know, as I talked about, I have these engineers in Ukraine still work with these people. And so I frequency find myself trying to pack boxes and get them to ups or whatever. I've got my roll of shipping tape, and as you can see, I now have reading glasses. 20 years ago, I didn't need them for the last three or four I did. And I'm often doing this, which is looking at a roll of tape, trying to figure out where that edge is, getting annoyed, thinking of all the other things I should be doing, and then maybe finding the edge of the roll tape and then shredding it or whatever. So I talked with these engineers who are the same people I've worked with since the start of the company. And I said, do you have some ideas for how we could make a tool to figure this out? I had some ideas that their ideas were better. And we eventually came up with this tool that we call the roll ranger, which has a scraper.

John Ellis [00:20:02]:
And then there's a little pin here, kind of like a phonograph pin. And as you, as the pin is engaged, this, sorry, this light comes on, right? So what you do is you're going to roll this around the edge of a roll of tape, and then, oops, I roll this around the edge of roll tape. And you'll see the light turns on when I get to where the edge is, that's telling me that's exactly where the edge is. And now I can use the scraper thing to lift it, put pressure on the hole, you know, tape roll and, you know, get my tape going. So that was the product idea. And in terms of anything I've ever worked with, that was a product that was, you know, more immediately excited. People got more excited about that than anything I'd ever worked on because you would say to someone, have you ever been annoyed with roll tape or never? And immediately people are like, of course, it happens all the time. What a stupid question.

John Ellis [00:21:06]:
Of course I've lost the edge of the roll tape. I hate that. So developing that really, I felt like there was a real demand for it. If you could come up with something that was low cost enough, that solved it. So when we went down this road, do the same process of making a prototype, we knew to make a video and we started talking to some big companies that sell packing tape. And we did get some pretty good interest, but not that they were ready to go right away. So this isn't a very expensive product to manufacture. And I knew that people like this idea.

John Ellis [00:21:54]:
So we just sort of decided like, we're just going to make this ourselves and we're just going to sell this ourselves, manufacture ourselves, and then we can go back to those possible licensing partners when we've shown, you know, that there's a demand for this and people are willing to pay for it. So that's why we have this website, Roll ranger store. We're on Amazon. We're, you know, in Ace hardware, a bunch of other kinds of retail outlets. And that was about a year ago we launched that product. And we may go back to licensing eventually, but it's definitely been interesting to learn about what does it cost to acquire a customer and how to sell it, what are the right channels and other things that you don't necessarily think about feedback on this in terms of product launch. But, you know, this is something that only became sort of obvious to me later, which is if you launch a product and, you know, your price in, say, you know, 10,000 units is going to be, say, $2 or something like that. But your price in 500 units, which is going to be the order that you start with because you want to test the market, is going to be $5.

John Ellis [00:23:16]:
And you think in your head, well, I got to multiply by four. Take my wholesale cost to my other one to my retail price, then you might think that your 500 unit order, which is $5, you should be selling for dollar 20 so you can make a profit. And I was kind of thinking along those lines. And then I had conversations with other people, launch products. And I realized that's wrong because you can go out to the market if you have a price point that's not right and not where you're going to be. And you spend money in marketing and it succeeds or fails, you really don't learn anything. You didn't learn whether the product was successful or not because you were selling for $25 and the proper retail price for that is $9.99. So when you're launching, if you're doing this small test of 1000 units, 500 units, whatever it is, expect to lose money, expect to break even maybe on the cost, let alone all the tooling and all the other stuff, because you want to test it at the price point that people are eventually going to buy it.

John Ellis [00:24:23]:
And I don't know if you've run into that, but that was something else.

Jon LaClare [00:24:26]:
No, I'm glad you brought that up. We've come across that many times. I don't know if we've discussed it on the podcast or not. But over the years, launching so many products, it's always the temptation, like I got to make money on this first run, but the first production run is almost always significantly more expensive. It could be two x or three x sometimes what your volumes will become. And of course it's kind of, I would say middle ground in my opinion. If we think, hey, we're going to sell 100,000 of these, why don't want to price it out at selling a million units? But that'll make it sort of realistic. But we always call it your long term cost as opposed to your upfront test volume cost.

Jon LaClare [00:25:03]:
Realize part of your expense is that extra cost per unit that you're paying in order to keep your total cost down in the upfront days. But plan on long term costs. And most manufacturers, when you deal with third parties, I know you know this, John, but they'll give you sort of breaks in pricing. So once you hit 500 units, 10,000 units, 10,0000 units. So find that volume. That is what your expectation is to come to long term. Okay, well, that's where I want to price my items. So yeah, I come to the same conclusion with all of our product launches.

Jon LaClare [00:25:32]:
And it's a common conversation we have because it doesn't feel maybe obvious because I want to make money in the early days too. But price is so much a part of the success of any launch. Getting that price right can make all the difference. And we've had products over the years where we've launched hundreds of products and many of them even changing it to free shipping or cutting the price by 10% sometimes can lead to drastic increases in volume. So finding the optimal price point for the long term approach for your business is definitely key. So, yeah, that's a great point to bring up. Well, John, are there any resources that come to mind that have been helpful to you and your business?

John Ellis [00:26:16]:
Well, there's a book I read that kind of influenced Howard's thinking about launching products, and it's called the mom test. And the idea is that if you tell, if you go to your mom and you say, hey, mom, I've got this idea for a new company or a new product, she's going to say, wow, Johnny, that's so great.

Jon LaClare [00:26:37]:
Wow.

John Ellis [00:26:37]:
Oh, I love it. What a beautiful, perfect idea. Because that's the kind of feedback a mom is going to give, and.

Announcer [00:26:44]:
Your.

John Ellis [00:26:45]:
Friends are going to be the same way you go to somebody at a cocktail party, oh, I'm thinking of launching this product that does XYZ. They don't want to be confrontational. It's a great idea when you have these conversations where you had an idea, or maybe you're further down the road. The book, the mom tests, kind of explains how to ask these kind of market research questions, and it's a lot more about asking people about the problem, because if you come at them by saying, have you ever had this problem? I don't know, whatever the problem is, uh, they, they'll give you honest feedback on, no, that I never have that problem. Or, yes, it happens all the time, you know, whereas if you were to say, well, I've got the solution, then they'd, you know, they'd probably say, oh, yeah, good idea, good idea. But, you know, and then, and then you can ask them the same kind of questions of like, you know, okay, you say you've had that problem, you know, would you spend $50 to solve it? You know, no, you know, that's been $2. So, you know, but asking questions in a way that you don't bias the information you get back. And it's a book called the mom test and explains it much better than I did.

John Ellis [00:27:59]:
But it's a quick read. I think it's worth it for anyone thinking about launching a product or an entrepreneur.

Jon LaClare [00:28:05]:
Thank you. And I think you did a great job really summarizing. And as we discussed before this interview, I had not heard of that book, but I love the principle. It makes total sense. I'm going to go out and, and download it and listen to it. I think we do a lot of market research, of course, with our product launches, and I counsel people in the early days. Talk to friends and family. Sure, while it's free, early advice, but just realize what it is.

Jon LaClare [00:28:27]:
No one wants to deliver bad news. No one that, you know, a friend, family member is not going to give you, especially your mom. Right. But anybody, really, they don't want to tell you you have a bad idea. So if you can separate the emotion from it or separate your connection from it, as you suggested, there's a lot of ways to do that, potentially. And just making it seem like it's not my business idea. I came across this thing. What do you think of the idea or whatever? We're finding the ultimate problem or solution.

Jon LaClare [00:28:51]:
But it's a great point as you're initially vetting an idea and a concept. Was there anything else, John, that I didn't ask that you think could be helpful for our audience?

John Ellis [00:29:00]:
No. It's been a pleasure. I'm always interested to help entrepreneurs. Optics for hire is our optical engineering business. If people are interested in, you know, help in that area. And, you know, I also encourage people to just, you know, get involved in the inventor community. There's great inventor clubs around. We have a good one here in New England area, but, yeah, happy to help in any way I can.

Jon LaClare [00:29:26]:
Well, thank you and thanks for taking the time today. I really enjoyed this interview. I do want to encourage our audience. Go check out, you can see a couple of John's websites. Opticsforhire.com is this business where they help companies and people develop products within the optics field, et cetera, lighting, etcetera. You'll find a lot more information on that website there. And of course, the last product we just talked about, RollRanger store. I have to say, this is what I initially met you on.

Jon LaClare [00:29:52]:
I love this product concept, really, because I always talk about the best products are those that are solving problems that people are aware they have. Man, this is one that every time, if you use tape, like the clear plastic packing tape, for those who are listening, didn't see the product he held up. But, man, every time you use that, it's a nightmare. And you use it, you rip off one like, oh, I lost it again. It's such a problem that everybody's been through. You can see it. Solving that in a simple way is genius. So that's.

Jon LaClare [00:30:20]:
I'm glad we're able to share that. Check out again, our audience. Please go check out Rolranger store. You can find these in our show notes as always. But John, thanks again for your time. Today.

John Ellis [00:30:29]:
Thank you, John. It's been a pleasure.

Jon LaClare [00:30:30]:
Did you know you can meet with a member of my team absolutely free for a 30 minutes strategy consultation? We've launched and grown hundreds of products since 2007 and learned some of our strategies while growing Oxiclean back in the billy Mays days. We're here to help, so please go to harvestgrowth.com and set up a call if you'd like to discuss further.