Bryan Cantrill

And you have to cover that whole carry from the time that you buy those materials to the time that your customer pays you for the product.

And so when one is working with a manufacturing partner, as part of that agreement, you negotiate terms.

It says we will carry inventory for X amount of time.

And they normally want to do quarterly turns so they can kind of cycle those things off the books.

And as long as you are meeting your demand schedule and you are buying from them effectively that fully built out product in time, they will carry inventory for all those materials.

So that's great.

I mean, that's hugely important for cash flow conversion.

And this is something out of Dell that we... Oh, I mean, it was held up that the negative cash flow conversion, Dell and Costco are kind of the two companies that are the hallmarks of this.

But...

Dell would negotiate terms with their suppliers that were not net 30, but more like net 90.

And their suppliers would rent space on their factory floor so that they would not buy that hard drive until, you know, you had ordered the laptop, paid with a credit card so they already had your cash.

Then someone walked down, a line worker walked down and like scanned one of the hard drives off of Western Digital's little island of real estate in Dell's manufacturing factory.

And then it would go out the door like six hours later.

Amazing.

So they would have, you know, a hundred days like throwing off cash in that whole purchase cycle, which is crazy.

So I think we're a long ways from that because we're doing the opposite of that.

Like we're wire transferring $7 million to buy parts and then consigning it at our manufacturing partner.

And so when I first went to kind of test this or operations team, you can imagine, CJ and team and Kirsten and folks, I'm like, hey, why aren't we leveraging our manufacturing partner to do procurement and be able to pick up that inventory carry?

I can see this is a bad time.

I'll come back later.