From Team Sky to the CEO Suite: Fran Miller on Turning Around Rapha

The following is my conversation with Fran Miller, CEO of Rafa. It's hard to overstate the importance of Rafa in the cycling clothing industry. They have had an incredible impact on innovation as well as the look of cycling for the last 15 years. Their mainstream influence and bringing, just essentially bringing new riders to the sport has been absolutely phenomenal. I speak with a lot of people and I get a lot of feedback from people in the industry, fans, and without a doubt Rafa is still one of the most important topics in terms of the fascination around cycling and cycling business in particular. I've interviewed Simon, the founder of Rafa, who exited a few years back. And so now Fran is on-door and working with the Walton family. She's tasked with providing her vision and helping the company grow after a few years. Not just for them, but for everyone after COVID and sort of the overstock as we all know, situations. So it's exciting to hear her take on what she, where she came from, but obviously where she's taking the brand. So this is a special interview for me, particular, and I'm glad to be able to share with you all. So Fran, Miller, thank you so much for coming on today. I appreciate it. I imagine you are very busy, but you are being generous with your time. And I think this is going to be a really fun conversation. I've had a lot of curiosity around. I feel like Rafa is in terms of, you know, since I started writing and recording about the business of cycling. Rafa is sort of a, in a nigh mind, a sense that it's, you know, it's really been a huge part of cycling in the last, especially obviously in the last 15 years. People are curious about it. Everything that happened with Simon and then now has just been really, really innovative and interesting. And so I'm so really, really happy to have you on today. So what does this podcast find you? So I'm sat in one of the offices in our North London headquarters called service course. And I am, yeah, like you say, busy in the middle of all kinds of planning and work. But yeah, so here in London. I think that's an understatement. I know that you've got a lot of a lot of responsibility on your shoulders. So hopefully we can shed some light on everything that you're doing. I think people will really be curious to hear about it. And I know I am. And this is kind of one of the reasons why I started this podcast. I did interview Simon couple, couple months ago, maybe last year. It's been already. And just understanding why and how things are done. I think is something that doesn't get talked about enough. So I appreciate you, you know, being part of this. And maybe to start. Can we just hear about like kind of where you're from and then we can go from there. I'm sure. So born in the North of Scotland. I moved down to South in England with my parents, my father was in the military. We spent most of our childhood, my brother, I have an older brother. And then down in the down in South East, I've eaten and my parents got divorced. My brother went with my dad to live in Hong Kong. I stayed in the UK with my mom. And I basically left school at 18 decided I wanted a job of work ever since. And now find myself here as CEO of Ruffer. You know, I've interviewed David, I interviewed David and we got the side, the Hong Kong side of the story. So your brother is David Miller, the ex writer and chapter three and now he's with factor. So just to clarify. So so you got out of school. And was your mom like what sort of work did she do? I'm just trying to understand contextualize kind of what you grew up around. My mom is a fierce firebrand second wave feminist from Glasgow. She ran her own business. She was a tea engineer studied engineering in the seventies of Glasgow University. Very unusual choice of degree for a woman in the seventies. And then she ran her own, I wish it a bit teaching an instrument and running her own financial advisory business, which even to this day she still does. She's not on exact positions on various boards. Yeah, she's a powerhouse say I, I was brought up by a very strong female influence. And so what did you take from from that sort of example? Was that something that really gave like sort of an impression on you on where you wanted to go with your life? Actually, it's probably only been this like sort of later section of my career that I've really noticed the impact of it. You know, I spent most of my career in in pretty male dominated in a male dominated industry, you know professional men's road cycling is is male dominated by the nature of it. And my first role was I set up my own agency with the intention of managing David, which went on to become probably the biggest athlete and event management agency specific to cycling in the UK. So did that from 2000 to 2007. And then I think, you know, obviously I had spent some significant period of my career at Team Sky, actually running a professional road team. It was only really when I went into bell staff, which was the fashion brand I got given to turn around back in 2020 that my own leadership style and my own approach really was something I had to think about and had to kind of hone and develop and sort of put some time and energy into and I think over the course of the last. Now, been nearly six years, I've noticed actually quite a lot more the influence that my mom probably had on me and being raised in a environment where you know feminism and you know women can do anything men can do and equal opportunities and get paid the same amount of money and all of those kinds of things it made me realize how. And I think it's sort of fundamental and foundational that that upbringing had been. So you began you got out of school and you just started working it sounds like would have been for your brother was that sort of the first you mentioned that you had kind of managed him and helped sports marketing and sort of promoting his. And you call it brand or as sort of an agent what was exactly were you doing for I was actually it was it was pretty serendipitous actually because I left school with the intention of base and this was like genuine stated ambition was all of my friends are going to university and it was in the late 90s so in 1998 all of my friends had done the UC applications going to university and I just didn't want to go to uni I didn't want to do further education. So I had this like sort of determination I was going to find a job that was going to mean that by the time my friends graduated I would be earning more money than them. So I ended up actually working for a gentleman called Anthony Bouchier and he had just bought the rights to the wisdom all men that which is the oldest cricket all men in the world and he bought them for online so this was 1999. And in those days obviously the idea of buying up data analog data and putting it onto the internet was like totally revolutionary and everyone was like you're never going to know what's ever going to go on the internet to look at the wisdom on the back. So it shows what people know and so I was working for him I've moved to London and he in his past had been the manager of Bjorn ball the tennis player. And I came into work one day after David had taken the yellow jersey on his debut order France, I hope you say to the pro look of the tourist go. And Anthony said to me you is that your brother that you know because obviously I talked about the fact that he was a pro cyclist. Yes, that's my brother and he he actually said to me you should ever think about managing him and I was like well never done management before in my life and he said well you're not at the point in time I was his PA. So well you're not a very good PA but I think you'd be a very good manager. So you know, damned with faint praise. And so he he was very generous with his time generous with his advice. It sounded like a fun exciting thing to be doing so I basically went in with the intention of how can you monetize and commercialize a professional road cyclist so we've set up a fan club and we we put the fan club behind a paywall on the internet like it's bonkers and mill time was the name of the fan club. And yeah, just I just thought it would be a fun thing to do. I love the idea of being you know sort of master of my own destiny and quite quickly obviously because David was well connected and pretty well known. A few of his friends colleagues I started to work a little bit with them. And then again very quickly we ended up doing some work with the the Great Britain cycling Federation because the 2003 in 2003 the as a belligerome in London called the handheld belligerome which was built for the 1998 Olympic Games. And they had been doing for 50 60 years they've been doing a vent called the good Friday meeting which was a track meeting on good Friday, including the name. And it had been declining in popularity year on year and year but the you know in the in its heyday. Merks had written there and you know so it was this real like throwback to the great days of of British cycling with a small sea. And so we were approached by the promoters actually to get Bradley McGee and David to come and ride at a four point pursuit at the track and I said David if you want to do it and he was like well why don't you ask me if you can promote it. So I was like OK, so we basically said yeah we'll bring our athletes but we want to do all the promotion. I think up until that point the good Friday meeting had been running for about a decade on about you know 800 to 1000 people showing up. And it's great testament to the sort of community that has kept British cycling alive over the years because it was you know people putting their own money into it and their own time and effort. And so James Pope who was my business partner at the time. We basically did all the promotion we got it in time out we got loads of great riders there we we really went for it and they ended up having about 6000 people. and it just put us on the map and daybrows. So it was running the British cycling organization at that point in time. And he approached us and said, did we want to work with him to do something similar for Edamon just to better dream? And so that's what got us into events. And so it feels like you were very quickly. It seems like you were like a fish to water with this whole concept because some people, you know, they go and they study economics or they study engineering, but it feels like you had a pretty strong entrepreneurial or perhaps self-sufficient viewpoint on, I want to go do something. I want to build something on my own and just, you know, be damned. Anybody that gets in my way, is that in my room? Yeah. I mean, interestingly, I wouldn't ever describe myself as entrepreneurial. I've always been, I've always been very good at seeing opportunity. And I've always been very good at absolutely making the most out of the opportunities that I'm given. So I probably wouldn't have come up with the idea of doing the good Friday promotion myself. I probably wouldn't have come up with the idea of going and doing a track series at the Manchester Bellagromic. I haven't been for Braille, so it's justing it. So I'm not necessarily the genesis of the idea, isn't that so. The thing I'm, which I always think is the entrepreneurial trait, right? You've got the idea and you can deliver it. I'm very much that if there's a good idea and I think, oh, I could make that happen. Then I will throw myself into it and go all in and I'll normally I'll over deliver. So I am fiercely ambitious, but I'm also, I'm really hardworking and I've got a really, really high standard that I set for myself and for the people I work with. So that tends to result in pretty good, pretty good outcomes. So yeah, it's your, your CV speaks for itself. And so from, from your time with David and the events that you were promoting, you began then expanding this business, doing more events promotion. Yeah, we're pretty, we pretty much stuck with just revolution, so which was the track event that we were doing. So for events a year in the off season of the road, calendar, we do, you know, to this side of Christmas, to the other side of Christmas. They were sell out events. And it was in the build up to kind of the Athens Olympic game and then between the Athens and Sydney cycle. Sorry, Athens and Beijing cycle. So we kind of had that grounds while a British cycling was coming through, you know, Lottery funding was starting to deliver cycling in and of itself was getting more popular in the UK. So by 2007, we had been running revolution for three years, four years. We were representing about 15 of the big athletes in the sport at Guaranteau, in Stano, Peacan, Mark Havenish. And so we then, and Tour de France came to London in 2007 and we decided to host a party, just a, you know, a pure party for our athletes, our colleagues, our clients. And we did it on the course of the prologue. And that's for the first time that's when Braille'sford mentioned to me this idea of, did I think it would be possible to set up a British team capable of winning the tour? Because there was the Tour de France was starting in the UK. There were five different riders in the race. All five of them were in different teams and I represented four of them. So it was like there was this natural synergy between what Braille and cycling were doing on the track. They were, they were obviously in many ways. They were creating this incredible talent pipeline because the best way to train for the track and the winter is to race on the road in the summer. And so Dave was like, if we could marry those two things together and create a British team, capable of winning the tour, a, we could eradicate a lot of sort of club versus country issues. So the team was having at that point in time, but also take on the challenge that no one thought possible, which was winning the tour with a clean British rider. So by 2000 and end of 2007, I was pretty deep in building out what would become Team Sky. In 2007, I had also the other thing we did deliver was the nocturn. So Simon Mottram had approached me as well. Really early days in reference. I said, do you guys doing some great stuff in the track? Would you be interested in doing a kind of a criterion with us in Central London? So I've had an affinity with Raffa right from the very early days of Raffa as well. So we put the nocturn on the in that summer as well. So in 2007. This is, yeah, this is really so debat us, but it sounds like you have these opportunities and you're able to capitalize on them in an effective way. And so you ran Team Sky for how many years? So I went in as Dave Brost was project manager in 2007 and built the whole plan out with Sky through 2008, 2009. I started as kind of like director of business operations. So running all things off bike. And I was there. Sponsors. Yeah. Sponsors legal operations on. Exactly. Well, to a licensed buses trucks mechanics carers, the whole Shabang. And then by 2013, I'd pretty much become like, you know, one of one of the leaders. I was, you know, I then got given the head of winning behavior. So I was in charge of culture and people. And then yeah, I got formally made to see him in 2018. And then we got bought by Jim Ratcliffe and I stayed with the team all the way through until 2020. So what's that called is terrifying me. Hey, it's wide here. So here's a stat that should get every cycling brands attention. 65% of all product searches now begin on Amazon, not your website, not retailer sites, Amazon. Here's a question for any brand managers or business owners listening. Do you know who's selling your brand products on Amazon right now? Chances are your distributors and dealers are already there. And if you're not actively managing that presence, you're losing control of pricing, brand story and your customer experience. So my agency works exclusively with cycling brands and we help build and manage their Amazon presence from listing optimization to driving sales as well as Amazon advertising. We've helped brands increase their revenue by 50 to 70% in just the first year. So if you're interested, you can drop me an email at why at vellamedia.io. That's why it at vellamedia.io. Now let's get back to the show. For me, it's it's kind of there's a lot to talk about here, right? Because like I know team skies was revolutionary and you're a part of that. Today, I really want to understand what what you took away from those experiences and kind of where you're applying all this experience. Now because you have a huge responsibility right now to a brand, the brand Rafa, which is clothing is not an easy business. I know that it's not an easy business. There's a lot of small brands out there. And I guess I would like to jump into Rafa now because I know that this is this is the what you're doing now and and you're taking on this opportunity, which the brand is maybe not everyone knows, but the brand is owned by a family office, which are the Walton brothers cousins. Yeah, yeah, they they're some Walton's grandson. So yeah, two brothers. Right. And they are investing heavily in cycling in Bentville, Arkansas, which is the home office of Walmart. And so you have this mandate now to to take Rafa and to grow it to develop it. And this is not an easy opportunity for you. I imagine. Why did you take this job and how is it going? I'm nearly a year in. I'm the why did I take this job? No, I am. So I took the job because I, I mean, a host of reasons I had been with the transition between teams, Guy and team in the US, we were bought by in the us who is owned by Britain's richest man in the Vatican as Jim Ratcliffe. And so I went and worked within in the US for 18 months because of the pandemic and various other things that were going on. I ended up working across quite a lot of projects. One of them was the Elliott Kipchogi sub to our marathon project, which I worked on and basically to do was effectively the CEO of that challenge. I then helped the build and creation of the in the US high junax brand, which is this sort of hand sanitizer during the pandemic. We were giving out that whilst also being the CEO of the cycling team. And so in September of 2020, Jim asked me if I would go and run his fashion brand. So it's called Bell Star 100 year old heritage brand in the UK, men's contemporary fashion. I knew nothing about it. And I was asked to go in and turn it around and give him five sort of key things that he wanted me to do and did it. And so I was four years into that project of turnaround. And you know, I don't think I'd be disclosing any confidence is to say that, you know, the end of 2023, Jim had just bought, man United, the focus of in the US had moved quite significant, like really significantly to sport. It was, you know, sport had been like one of the many cool, exciting things that in the US did. It had become the, the exciting thing that in the US did beyond petrochemicals and fashion just wasn't going to be a part of that vision. And I didn't want to go and work in football. So I was starting to think about where would my career go next and what would I do? And would it be, would I want to go back to sport or would I want to go and stay in like a parallel or retail or, you know, whatever. And I was having various conversations with, you know, private equity, people that I know, you know, just a whole host of mentors and just having like really informal conversations. Like I wasn't in any rush to move. I really loved in the US. I loved working there. I loved Bellsdorf. But I recognized that the end of the road was coming. And I happened to speak to the family of the fund manager for the family office that you've just mentioned. I called Matt Tava in the sort of the end of 23 early 24 and also to Nick Evans, who had been the chairman of Raffer for the first 15 years of its existence. And out of the blue. I so they knew I was kind of speculatively looking and out of the blue. They contacted me in June. of 24 and said they were thinking about, you know, a different approach and new strategy, bringing in a different CEO, would I be interested? And speaking openly, I was, I can't even explain how like, it excited, probably the wrong word, but how I was like, it felt like destiny, you know, I was like, oh my god. That was the type of opportunity you were looking for. Yeah, I was like, oh my god, it's a fashion apparel designer, sport, it's cycling, it's not just cycling, it's like, the most established, the most well respected, the one that arguably created the category, it's the two things that I, well, certainly on one side, I absolutely know inside out like, from a cycling perspective, I believe it. And from a apparel, I've learned so much in the four years that I've been doing ballstaff that I feel I could go and take on this challenge and do it justice. I still have like an inordinate amount to learn from an apparel and retail perspective, but I thought, I could get the right team around me here to help you do it. So yeah, so I met with the relevant people. It moved really fast. I handed in my notice that at Bell Starf in the July, I had a summer, a bit of summer downtime and handling over my roller Bell Starf and then I started mid September 2024. So nearly a year in, it is, it's going brilliantly like I, it's everything I hoped it would be in more. It's very intense. There's a huge amount to do and I think it's very generous of you to say that I'm here to lead the business to grow. I absolutely am here to do that, but I first have to fix it and there's quite a lot of things to fix that I think. Operationally or what? End and everything. I think from, you know, from a product perspective, from a structure and people perspective, from a balanced G and P and L perspective, from a small details. Yeah, end to end. You know, end to end and I think that I knew it was going to be that. I probably didn't quite grasp the full challenge like Raffa is a, it's a beast of a business, right? Like every, I felt a huge burden in response to the Bell Starf because it was so old and because so many people loved it. Here, it's like 10X that, you know, this is 100X. People, so there's a place in Raffa where I have, I'll tell you a story. So I have a, this is a great example. So I have a sweatshirt, like a hoodie with the pink Raffa logo on it. And if you want to just kind of have it tip your hat to, I'm in the know. That's something like, I don't know how Simon did it, but he was able to just compress everything about cycling and elegance and travel and the, you know, just the beautiful parts of road cycling. He was able to really sort of solidify that. So it's what you had mentioned that and it's undoubtable that undoubtedly they were able to do something that no one else was able to do. And they sort of kind of, everybody was sort of on their heels, like I'm going to give you some of my personal anecdotes. I've worked for brands in clothing and, you know, the brands they were doing, they were doing teams and they were, there wasn't a fashion element very present in the cycling apparel for a long time. And Raffa sort of was able to, you know, bring that in and make cycling clothing elegant in a certain sense. It's a huge, huge, there's, but there's also, it sounds like a lot of baggage behind all that because of operational choices that were made because of the size of the company. And so it sounds like you're trying to write size everything in a sense that from your standpoint, that gives going to make this brand very healthy for today and for the future, is that a fair assessment? Yeah, absolutely. And I think it, I think it's a, you know, it's a burden of responsibility because it, you know, for all the things you've just said and for the place it holds in so many people's hearts, you know, it's a, it's so much more than a brand and it's so much more than a clothing company, that's for sure. And I think it, yeah, that my job here is to, you know, I sort of, in my head, it's a little bit like, I've got this really complex jigsaw that I've got to put together, but the pieces feel a little bit like they made a glass sometimes, you know, so it's like, you don't want to click them into hard because it's like, well, that's smash. So I'm, I'm trying to do it very, I have a very, you may have noticed, I'm fast moving, fast pace, go at a million miles an hour, I'm a seek forgiveness, don't ask permission type person. And here I have tried very hard to be far more measured, be far more thoughtful, be far more considered, but without, without second guessing myself because it's a, it's a really tricky balance where you've got everyone has an opinion, everyone thinks they know, there's a lot of subjective idea around everything you're doing. Oh yeah. So from the inside, the outside, you've got this constant, and it's, you know, significantly more scrutiny than either they've been under in my career. I didn't have, I managed very successfully and quite deliberately throughout my time at Team Sky to stay under the radar. I loved doing my job, I loved being behind the scenes, I know, I know my contribution, and I know what I did. I never felt the need to sort of come out from behind the curtain and talk about it, whereas Raffa, you're not just out from behind the curtain, you're stood front and center on the stage with a spotlight on you. So it's a very different beast in that sense. And I have really only noticed the magnitude of that over the last probably five or six, five months, you know, the first six months I was like, right, let's go, I can do this. I know the plan. I'm going to figure this out. And actually this last six months, I think I felt far more of a sense of, oh god, wow, everyone's watching. I'm nodding, I'm nodding, people can't see it, but I'm nodding. I can tell you with no doubt that there's the S and then there's Raffa. And then those are the brands that are sort of the torchbearers of the industry right now. I wanted to talk about your relationship with the owners, like not in this specific role, but in general, it sounds like that's a huge piece of your job, in a sense that when you were at Eneos, when you were at Sky, when you were at Bellstab, that you have to communicate very effectively what you're doing, why you're doing it, and why you came to that conclusion is that I guess, naturally that's a big part of your job. Can you talk about that because I think that you are deploying resources, you are deploying resources for these companies with a huge amount of responsibility. So how are you the conduit with the ownership in this way? What do you try and do to make this as elegant or as effective as possible? Yeah, I think it's throughout the course of my career, I've been very lucky in that I've had very good owners, whether that's working directly into Sky and the board that we had there with Jeremy Darrick and the like. And then going into Eneos, where there's a very, very clear structure around how ex-co as they call it, executive committee is run all the businesses, whether you're a coach chemical business or fashion business or a sports business, their structure is in the same way, the reporting line is the same and the CEO holds a huge amount of sway and power in that organization. And then here, different again, but similar, right? I've got, I have a board, there's owner representation on that board and my job is to, like you say, take the board on the journey. I think I naturally want to take people with me when I do things. I also think to the burden of responsibility, our owners and the ownership of this particular business they've invested very heavily, they've pulled it seven years ago, they've never really seen a return. They bought it at the wrong time. I mean, we can say that. And I think the reality of it is, I never believe in looking back and say, what would you do differently? And I think that we're incredibly lucky to have the owners that we have who are as passionate as they are about cycling and they have been to Bentonville and have seen the programs that are there. And it's a very, very privileged position to be in. We're the biggest brand in the sport and we have the best owners and they are deeply passionate about bike riding, the transformative power of the sport, the role that they can play in that as well and that each of their brands can play in that. And I think that's a unique, I mean, people use the word unique a lot, but it's a genuinely unique position. So, my job here is, and as it has been throughout my career, you're spending someone else's money and you're basically building someone else's legacy. And I take that very, very seriously. And I think that our owners deserve and Rafa deserves the chance to be back to his very best. And I think that's the way I approach it. So I'm an over communicator where I can be. So, share as much information as possible. I've always been a tick-tax on WhatsApp with everyone and anyone who I have a senior reporting line into because I think day to day, not a big believer in that kind of wait three months and tell you everything all at once. You need to have a regular dialogue when you're particularly when you're doing a turnaround of this size and scale, you need to be constantly like going at it and providing communication. And you know, and in Tava, who's the chairman of our board and the fund manager, he's fantastic. I probably speak to him every day. Yeah, and that sort of communication, the goal, your goal is to provide as much detail as which allows you them to see why you're doing the things you're doing. Now, from the from the looking up, now we're looking down, how are you you now applying your style or with your management team. How does that, it's the inverse where they need to tell you what they're seeing, so there's a bidirectional conversation with the ownership and then with what's happening on the ground. Can you talk about that a little bit as well? Yeah, I think I came in here that was pretty, and again, I don't think it's disclosing a conversation, they've been pretty dysfunctional, might be too extreme, but certainly an unusual leadership structure over the course of seven years since acquisition. You saw some opportunities for improvement. Yeah, there we go, that's the way to put it. So I have worked quite quickly on building the leadership team around me that I need. I think we've probably still got a few little gaps to fill. But again, it's about communication, clarity, accountability, ownership, all the things that you learn when you're in a professional sports team. You need people to know where they're going, know how they're going to get there, know how they're going to measure it, how the tools they need to do the job, be supported and encouraged to do it and have a regular ability to check and challenge the plan. So I think we very consciously spent this first year building out what we're sort of calling ready to race. So building out a plan that is in this first year, it's not going to be about getting back to winning straight away. And I think one of the things that I brought to the business when I started actually was the idea of the kind of high performance cycle. If you look at any team that's been incredibly successful, they all come off the boil at some point in time and they all go through a decline period, they all go through a plateau period, then they start building back up again and they get back to winning. And that cycle is something that people try and short cut. They sort of think themselves are we declining now, but if we just stop and we just start winning again, it just doesn't work like that. The period of decline has often been going on for longer than you think, first and foremost, stopping decline, arresting decline always takes longer than you think. And then building back up again to build back the muscle, the rigor, the detail that's needed, that's setting up for excellence where you're building muscle memory in the business, you're getting people all on the same page, you're creating alignment, you're creating clarity, you're building trust. All those things, you can't short cut that. And it would be lovely to say I can turn this business around in a year, but it would be a lie. You can't, it's probably going to take three years and we're not quite a year into it. But that sort of building now in that setting up for excellence and getting back to kind of really rapid acceleration towards success, that bit is the really fun, exciting bit, as the bit I love. You know, I've always said throughout my career that having been a part of a team that's won the Tour de France seven times, that day on the Champs-Lis-Ais is never the best day the best days. Well, because the best days are those days where you're trying to figure shit out and you're all deep in in, it's 11 o'clock at night and everyone's going all in and it's like, oh my god, how are we going to do this? I don't know and there's a problem and something, I think it's 10 or even 10, but you've got to get some, you know, that kind of the frenetic, the frenetic high energy nature of being in an organization that's moving at pace, pulling in the same direction, heading for the same target, kind of feel like you're on track, like you kind of think we're going to win this, I think we're going to win this. That, that build and that momentum is the best place in the world to be. It's so, it's so motivating. It's so exciting. Like a flywheel that you're creating and you start seeing it spin and. Exactly and in genders in people this sense of belonging, it's like, oh, I'm part of something, I'm doing something that's going to, it's going to happen. That's what I'm trying to build here, you know, and that process that you have to go through of, you know, to forget about the past, like don't worry about the old days, I know we said we'd do this before and we've not, it's not been successful, we're doing it a different way. It's so reminiscent of what you go through when you've got a team that, you know, you look at the end of 2013 season for Team Sky, we were going into 2014 and, you know, Bradley and Framie weren't talking to each other and the team was put in the middle and it was like, Jesus Christ, we're going to be hanging on by our teeth here and 2014 was probably our worst year as a team except for our first season. And that, that building back up again, that was amazing. We came back out, we came out the gates in 2015, all guns blazing, you know, it's the year the Richie Port, like ripped up the early part of the season and I think it, it, it, that's the, that is the best bit. And I think that's the bit that I'm trying to get people here to, to come aboard with, which they are, you know, you can see it happening now with the critical mass of people. Can you tell me a little bit about what you're seeing in the market right now in cycling clothing? Because like I said, I know that things seem to be winding up again. I know that the post-COVID, like I've talked about this ad nauseam, but it was tough time, too much, too much, too much inventory. And so, like, I always, it's so funny because you literally can wake up one day, call up, call up a company in, in Northern Italy, create 100 jerseys and 100 bib shorts, open up an Instagram, open up a Shopify and you've got a cycling brand, right? And it feels like there were too many brands in the market for a long time. That's just sort of my point of view from what I've seen over the past few years. What are you seeing in the market right now in the clothing market? Yeah, I mean, I think there's, there is a lot more competition than there was before for sure. And there is, you know, a more informed consumer that has far more choice. And I think that's not a bad thing. I think the industry will consolidate slightly, particularly over the next two years. I think it'll, to your point, we blew out very wide with loads and loads and loads of brands. All of them kind of probably in that five to 25 million. It's a lucky 25, I'd imagine. Right. And, you know, like you said at the very beginning of this, a parallel is a tough gig, you know, it's a right now it is, particularly right now because the barriers to entry got so low. Yeah, but I also just think it's, it's actually a tough business, you know, because it's, you need cash, you need money, like cash, cash is a tricky thing to generate from an app harrow, but because you tend to have to buy, buy your inventory, sit on your inventory, sell your inventory. So breaking that model in terms of moving to more of a drop model or moving to how you can face your stock through your business and not end up with these big moments in time where you're sat on loads of work and capital. Yeah, so I think, I think it is just a tricky business full stop and it has been particularly tricky for the last four years. After Covid. Yeah, after Covid, yeah, exactly. So yeah, so I think what I'm seeing in the market is some great challenger brands who have really established themselves and are doing in some cases a great job. And I think it's our job to get back in the front foot and get back out in front. But I think like I said, it's, you know, we've probably got another certainly six months of hard work to get to where I feel we can go out into market and be like, right, we're back. You know, and I think that that will be the, that will be the moment of truth, I think in some ways. But yeah, I think that the market's still a bit too busy, very noisy, you know, lots of people with lots of stuff all the time. And I think, you know, finding a way to be differentiated and, and to be appealing and to be, you know, premium and all the things that we want to be and have historically been getting harder and harder. And you guys have decided to have a full distribution network now where initially Rafa was D to C only. This to me personally makes so much sense because, you know, there's only so much you can do D to C. It's, you know, it's limiting the capital, the capital expenditures for D to C. I mean, we see, we saw YT had had so much pressure, discounting pressure that all of the cash flow kind of erosion, all of the margin erosion just gets pushed right up to the, right up to the head office. So I think me personally from a, from a standpoint of, you know, a healthy brand, you know, distribution is, distribution has everything like. And I think that for a long time people thought that D to C was like this magic wand and everything was going to go D to C. And it's not that. And especially because you're going to find a lot of people, people spend time in big shops. I mean, come on, like that's, it's such a magical place for, to discover cycling and to learn about cycling. So can you talk about that, that strategy and how you guys see your channel strategy moving forward? Yeah. I mean, I think it is, you know, it is a much more diverse channel strategies than the businesses I've had before and I think relatively, relatively new to this business, having a, what we call it here, a wholesale channel. That which is like, like I just say, selling three third parties. I think, I think it is absolutely right for the business. And I think, you know, certainly from a market entry perspective, testing and learning and territory, acquisition of new customers and different price point customers, also showcasing, you know, what we are and who we are to a completely new audience. It absolutely has its place and it's very important. I think we probably have been a little bit opportunistic and I think have gone after it maybe slightly to aggressively and been a bit too over saturated in certain markets. So one of the things that we'll be doing is rationalizing that channel down, recognising the role it plays and how important it is, but really using it as absolutely strategic leave in like I say in new markets for new customers or in certain spaces that we wouldn't otherwise be able to show up. So it's incredibly important to us by thinking it needs a bit of a reset internally. And then with regards to the rest of the channel mix, I think our clubhouse is incredible. You know, we have 22 of them. We're just about to open one in Shanghai in October. So, you know, I think making sure that they're delivering on their promise of being truly club houses where we can have like an RCC chapter based within them that they have a retail proposition, but they're also a place for our community to meet, spend time to get better on their bikes to, you know, to sort of commune around this sport that we love. And I think that that for us is really the unique proposition, right? Because no one else has that, you know, we know our competitors have stores, but ours aren't club houses and with a genuine paid membership who have a real affinity to the brand in each of those territories. So, and then we have our, you know, pure play, D2C, which is our e-commerce for into 14 countries. Sorry, 14 different languages, 120 countries I think we serve now. So yeah, it's a complex mix and it probably isn't, will you would start with if you were coming in as a new CEO trying to do a turnaround? Because it's like, "Oh, okay, like, just looking at the P&L is tricky because you've got, you know, hundreds of different territories, lots of different channels, lots of different, you know, areas to look out from both a revenue level and a cost level." So it's definitely complex, but I think ultimately will be our competitive advantage because we have so much agility in that tunnel mix, we can switch and change and once we get better with our supply chain, I think the, which we're very much in the process of doing, I think we will be a force to be reckoned with because that footprint's been put down. Well, so I want to be respectful of your time, friend, but this, this has been amazing, I think, being able to discuss all these topics with you has been a real opportunity for me and really appreciate you taking the time. If anyone wants to get in touch with you or if I guess, I don't know, what's the best place to find you? Well, everyone seems to find me worse, so it should be easy, but just for Ann Miller on both Instagram and X. Okay, well thank you so much for Ann and I look forward to seeing you around events and things like that. This was a lot of fun. Well, thanks so much for having me, I really appreciate it.