Coutts Entrepreneurs

Mike Southon: This is Mike Southon for Beermat Radio in association with Coutts and today I am talking to Rene Carayol.  Hello Rene.

Rene Carayol: Hi Mike, how’re you doing?

Mike Southon: I am doing very well.  Now people admire Rene for a bunch of different things.  But I admire him for something very specific which is he is one of the few successful people I’ve met who can use the words former IT Director which is a real claim to fame.

Rene Carayol: So we are starting below the belt….?

Mike Southon: No it’s a credit to you but you never did have the beard and sandals did you Rene, you weren’t that kind of IT Director were you?

Rene Carayol: No not really but it is interesting because I suppose one of the learning’s I got is that you can change career, it is possible, but you’ve got to want to do it.  And I suppose I started up with my heroes, when I started off with business, I started off for Marks & Spencers sort of at the most junior of junior levels you could find and one of my heroes and role models was the group IT Director who was John secara at the time, who was amazing.  And then the second one, the wonderful Gareth Williams was even better and I think having a visible role model that behaves in a way that you would like to replicate is the way you start off in business.  And the advice I give to many people who come to me for advice is, find yourself a mentor.  But that mentor needs to be someone who does all the things you would like to do in a manner that you would like to do them and get close to them.  So for me the IT Director at Marks & Spencers, I didn’t know anything about computing, probably still don’t, but I got closer and he became a mentor and he only became a mentor because I asked him.

Mike Southon: Alright and so it was a coincidence he happened to be the IT Director, he could have been anything could have been the Marketing Director or anything?

Rene Carayol: Absolutely and I was dead lucky because he was giving a presentation and I saw someone giving people feedback that was very even tempered, beautifully delivered but he was telling them that everything they had done was crap and it was done in a way that he never offended them, there was no downturn in morale.  He kept people motivated while telling them it wasn’t good enough and I thought I want to do that.  Now the subject matter happened to be Information Technology but I think what attracted me was leadership.  It was the first time I saw someone who could get people to do the things they never thought they could do and he did it effortlessly.  Can you imagine telling people you are really not satisfied, it’s just not good enough, you have got to try harder otherwise, but he never used any language like that and he was using language, “I completely understand how you’ve come to that conclusion, why don’t you give it one more go for me?”  Or he’d say things like, “A lovely effort, I can see exactly how you have got to where you’ve got to.  Think about this and then come back to me” and everyone thought great even though he decimated what they had done.  And for me that was a start of it and I just sort of followed him around and I remember challenging him once and asking him and got up and said, excuse me, will you be my mentor?  And he said “What’s a mentor?”

Mike Southon: Oh really.

Rene Carayol: This was many, many years ago and I had only read the word mentor in a copy of The Economist at the dentist and he said what is it and I said, have lunch with me once a month, I prepare the agenda, I will do all the running around but just once a month can I have an hour of your time?  And he just gave me a secretary’s name and before I knew it I was in his office and we had a chicken salad once a month and it was for a couple of years, it was a master class.  Every month I had a master class and the toughest thing about joining any organisation is understanding the rules of engagement and how to navigate that organisation.  Every organisation is different, Coutts is different to Barclays is different to HSBC and it’s the culture that’s different, the behaviour, the personality of the organisation.  My monthly sessions gave me the DNA of the organisation.  He taught me the rules of engagement, what worked, what wouldn’t work.  And if you can imagine I was getting his 30 years of Marks & Spencer’s experience condensed into one hour bite sized chunks.  The more we met the better he knew me, the tougher the feedback, the more explicit the feedback, it was just brilliant.

Mike Southon: Now Rene, you mentioned there very briefly that you offered to do all the preparations, the running around.  What preparations should somebody do before they get an element of mentoring from somebody?

Rene Carayol: If you can imagine that you are in a situation where you want to get as much out of the meeting as possible, so my advice would be take all the work away from the mentor, do the diary management, find the time in the diary, put the one word agenda that you want in this, what is it you want to discuss this time - growth, presentations, communication, interviewing people, presentation, whatever it is you want to talk about, giving them just a little bit of time just to get their mind ready for it.  The next thing I think is when you turn up, don’t sit there as a recipient, you’ve got to provoke it.  So for me I would come with two or three examples where I didn’t think I had done whatever it was well.  What I am looking for is how would you have done it differently?  What can you add to what I am trying to achieve here and what I am really trying to do is unlock wisdom, give them some sort of context and scenario that they can give me some advice in.  But the organisational context is really key, I mean what I have always found is have a mentor from within and a mentor from without - one who looks at your behaviour within the organisation helps you navigate through and one who is outside looking at you holistically.  And mentors to me are the life blood and I still meet with Gareth to this day, Gareth has moved to Wales, he’s retired now and he left M&S and he went to be Chief Executive of Al Futtaim, the largest private company in the world.  He retired a few years ago, we probably meet now maybe once a quarter and because he’s known me for some 20 odd years there’s no run up, there’s no preparation.  If I hit the wall or I think something isn’t working, I give Gareth a bell and I better be prepared to buy him an expensive lunch or dinner and then I just get the most amazing feedback.  The longer we’ve worked, the less punches he pulls.  He just gives it to me between the eyes.  I am old enough and ugly enough to take that now but it’s brilliant.  And when I said preparations sometimes it’s a restaurant I am booking I am paying for, especially if I want it off the premises because I’ve had a really bad appraisal, I am not getting on with my boss, I have had a verbal warning and I have had all of those and I want someone to come and either inspire me that I am on the right track or tell me what did I do wrong, how do I correct it, a relationship I’ve blown how do I get it back together?  And what’s great now is that I’ve got probably three mentors who are still alive and every now and again I will get an email, a text message or phone message saying, “saw you on TV and you were crap, you are not going to wear that suit again or….” or Rene that was fantastic, I really liked it.  And it’s worth a million dollars and it probably doesn’t cost them a lot but I can’t tell you what it means to me.  I think the other bit of advice I give is now I am a mentor and I can’t tell you how much you get out of mentoring a precocious talent and I certainly remember the times when I didn’t quite believe in myself and someone took the time out to believe in me and invest some of their time in me and any of us, all of us can be mentors, it’s a brilliant learning curve.  And some of the people I am mentoring are kids in primary school and just by dipping in and out, every now and again taking a bit of interest and they notice someone outside of their sphere of influence who has taken an interest, you want to watch the impact it makes.  But it also keeps me on the straight and narrow and keeps me honest because they ask some of the most humbling questions of you and they provide feedback and they force me to speak in a language that everyone can understand and they challenge me.  The other day I was invited to Sacred Heart School, now for me this is leadership in action.  Sacred Heart school is in Camberwell, they were an under performing school, Ofsted special measures some five years ago going nowhere in a hurry and absolutely nobody wanted to send their kids to that school, if you had a choice you’d send them somewhere else.  In the past few years Camberwell has become the centre of gun crime in inner London.  Drugs are everywhere to be found in and around the school.  New Head Teacher, new Deputy Head decided to turn the school around, Sally and Serge, fantastic double act, and if there’s anything I have learned about education it’s about having great teachers.  What attracts great teachers, a brilliant Head.  If I wanted to work for the best and as a Head, she is a phenomenal coach for the teachers.  She’s been attracting the best of the best and this started to turn the school around.  For the past couple years I bumped into Serge and he’s been inviting me to go out to Sacred Heart and I went there a couple of months ago, it was incredible.  Every single pupil, every student was in uniform, immaculate uniform.  They have broken all the rules of what Suffolk sets for education, they stream all the kids, that goes against the grain but they were bold enough to break the rules.  They have a chart on the wall of performance, they rank every kid in the school and the perceived wisdom is you can’t rank kids because they’ll feel like failures.  Well they’ve turned it around, they feel in a supportive environment every child will want to be the best they can be and they have created this spirit of aspiration and an appetite for success.  On top of that they’ve got a high flyers club which again perceived wisdom says you can’t have exclusive clubs.  Well they have but it’s an inclusive club and they call it the G&T Club, the Gifted & Talented.  Every member of that club gets a purple tie and there’s no limit on the amount of people who have purple ties so everyone wants a purple tie and it just works.  But you have got to look at their results - 83% of the kids who took exams last year got a GCSE graded A-C on the best performances south of the river.  Now what was fascinating about it which I didn’t clock on first of all, 94% of the school are black, it’s a Catholic School.  Half of the school are boys, the black boys are succeeding.  When I was leaving, the Head Teacher shouted out through a window to me, who says black boys can’t achieve.  I think it’s a fabulous story of leadership, talent management, mentoring, belief, supportive environment, you name everything any successful organisation has, and Sacred Heart School has got it.  Now what’s fascinating about that is I was the MC at a Teach First, the teaching charity and one of their…for the last three years I have been the MC for their annual awards and this particular annual awards Serge the Deputy Head came up to me and he said, “Rene, one of our latest initiatives is we are trying to take 20 of our kids from Sacred Heart to Thailand.  We want them to see the street kids in Bangkok so they can see there are some kids who are even worse off than they are and it might just give them some self belief and some determination that they are not in the worst place in the world.  But this year we are struggling, it costs us 21 grand to take them, we need another £7000.”  And I happened to have the evening suit, the microphone and I had the opportunity to speak to 500 of London’s finest, the good and the great.  I said, “Serge can you condense that story to two minutes, I will put the microphone on you.”  Got him on to the pedestal, got the audience to keep quiet, told the story and I ran an auction.  45 seconds later we had the money they wanted and for me it was just amazing.  We all care, compassion is in but we got to be brave enough to tell those stories and it’s really interesting, Mike because you know for many years I never understood what separated the best communicators from the also rans.  And I was lucky enough to interview Bill Clinton a few years ago and what I realised is that the best of the best leaders, they don’t talk about strategy, they don’t talk about policy, they don’t talk about white papers, they tell stories, they just tell the most brilliant stories.  No one remembers a departmental strategy, every body remembers David and Goliath and what the best leaders do they frame all of their conservations in fabulous stories and they create local heroes and heroines in their stories and that’s how they move culture, that’s how they energise people towards their visions.  And getting Serge to speak to this audience was just amazing, every wallet opened, cheque books just flew open because one of the great things about the U.K. we do care but sometimes someone’s got to light the blue touch paper.

Mike Southon: Well you clearly do that and let’s get back to…you were talking about precocious young kids, let’s talk about precocious young Rene at Marks & Spencer.  How did you end up there, because you are originally from Gambia right?

Rene Carayol: I was born in Gambia.  My parents were born in Gambia.  They lived in Gambia and I was born there and I came here when I was three.  We were a British colony and they realised that Gambia had primary education, a spattering of secondary education, no tertiary education whatsoever and dad thankfully was wise enough to realise that education was the key to success.  And what they decide to do was to up route from Gambia and come over to the U.K. and give their kids a chance for education.  But even in those far flung days my dad didn’t realise how cripplingly expensive it was to live in London.  And he thought selling up his modest accommodation in Gambia and move over and buy a modest accommodation in London, it didn’t quite work out that way.  And my parents were instantly impoverished as they landed in London.  Well not landed because we came by boat in those days, it was a six-week ship journey and I grew up in Harlesden, North-West London which is still not yet a destination place to go but it might be at some stage and where I lived there was high unemployment and a huge immigrant population, I think 60% of the population of Harlesden was non-white, the schools weren’t the best, the housing wasn’t best but you know one of the things I learnt that when you are young it’s very hard to realise that we are actually poor.  Mom was the most amazing improviser who was able to put three square meals on the table everyday and I still don’t know how she did it and mom had three jobs, she never worked for her life, she wasn’t going to work in her life because they were relatively middle class in Gambia.  I think is one of the shocks in the system and coming here in the 60’s unlike many of my Caribbean friends and colleagues who came over and they were invited over, most West-Africans who came to U.K. came for one reason, education and then go back, and my parents dreams were give us our free education and we would all go back.  We would go to the mother country for education and go back and I know that by the time I had finished University it was time to go back me and my brother sis said back where, this is home.  And it was so, my parents did go back and we stayed.  But my father’s dream was I was going to become an accountant and far be it from me to argue with that so I was a trainee accountant.

Mike Southon: Is that what you studied at University?

Rene Carayol: No I did economics and sociology, really helpful when you are going to be an accountant.

Mike Southon: Then you took up your accountancy…

Rene Carayol: I was a trainee accountant I started at Dixon’s and then moved on to M&S.  M&S were building their first ever IT function, they never had one before, it was totally outsourced and I came in the wave of the first joiners and most people didn’t know what, it wasn’t IT then, it was data processing, that’s what we called it in those days.  And frankly I just wanted to get into Marks and Spencer and it’s where my parents were so proud of me the day I joined.  You know, he will never leave again.  And for me as far as I was concerned it was a job for life.  Remember in those days, those far flung days, unemployment was 17%-18% in the U.K.  So if you got a job you hung onto it, it’s very different nowadays.  I spent 10 years there, 10 fabulous years and when Marks and Spencer was in its absolute pomp, you had the most admired company in the U.K for some ten years on the trot.  I honestly never thought I was going to leave, I was lucky enough to work what I considered to be the best of British Management and in many respects some of the best European Managements.  But it was management, it wasn’t leadership, it was management.  I left there to join Pepsi, I was put on the joint venture board of, a joint venture between Whitbread and Pepsi.  I moved around the Pepsi organisation for a bit but god I did learn about leadership.

Mike Southon: So what jobs were you doing at Pepsi?

Rene Carayol: CIO is one of them, so IT Director on the board of Pizza, I ran delivery, so anything that was delivered from pizzas from KFC which was a part of the brand, I did some time at Walkers Crisps, around the Pepsi Empire, fabulous learning but it was leadership.  Pepsi did leadership, they knew the power of a brand and it was my flavour of being trusted, being in power, being given decisions to make what not jobs to do.

Mike Southon: So how can you make a really good distinction between management and large systems and leadership, what’s the big difference?

Rene Carayol: I would say if you really looked at management, management to me starts with strategy then it’s about plans, about tasks, activities, measurements and it is most of all about implementation.  Every single organisation in the world must have management, it’s a skill, we can measure it, it’s the bed rock of every organisation and I think nowadays everybody has it.  If you don’t have it you can buy it in, you can train it in, you can touch and you can feel it.  And mostly you get appointed to management, it’s a job-title, it’s a role, it’s a responsibility.  Leadership is something very, very different.  Leadership for me is all about vision, culture, people, teams, inspiration and for me management is what you do, what you can touch, what you can measure, leadership is how you feel.  And what separates the winners from the losers is I think all companies nowadays do management and most companies do it at least moderately well.  The bit I see lacking is especially if I look at U.K. PLC and Central Government and the Public Sector here is we are management obsessed, it’s all about the process.

Mike Southon: It’s all about measurement and results and tasks and you have done your tasks you have done your job but you may not have empowered the work force, you may not inspired the work force.

Rene Carayol: Absolutely right.  When you meet leadership you know immediately.  I will tell you another little story for you.  I was chair at a conference and this was in London two-three years ago.  Keynote speaker Bill Clinton, and Clinton was going to be the highlight of a really full day and it’s one of those moments that we start of with Mikhail Gorbachev and we end with Madeline Albright and we had a sort of as the bit in the middle, a bit of Bill Clinton.  And Clinton was coming over on a satellite link from Toronto.  It was 11:30 in the morning in Toronto, it was 4:30 in the afternoon in London and I was chairing the conference and as a chair of a conference you sort of know where to let the microphone go to and where not to.  And earlier in the day there was this woman who was very, very excited in a screaming red dress and screaming for the microphone.  So one of the girls with the microphone said, get the microphone over to her, and she grabbed the microphone and she was so hyped up and so excited and English was her third language, she just burst into the microphone, she was speaking so fast nobody could understand her, she didn’t take a breath.  So I said, can you just slow down, she couldn’t, and I let her finish and just moved on, no comment moved on.  But mentally I said to himself, do not go back to the woman in the red dress.  Clinton comes over, we are having a great day, and she’s jumping up and down, she is in a red dress and jumping up and down for the microphone.  I am ignoring her.  Clinton’s been brilliant, the crowds excited and the microphone is moving around, I am ignoring her and one of the girls walking across with the mics, and she literally rugby tackled her, took the mic, grabbed it and said again, Mr. Clinton, Mr. Clinton’s no one could understand a word she was saying.  She didn’t pause her the breath, there was just one long…but she was sort of hyper excited and the audience started to slow hand clap.  Get her off the microphone, shut her up, we want to listen Clinton.  And I turned around and I looked at Clinton on the satellite link and he had his hands over his eyes, and I thought, I have got to intercede here, I just got the guys at the back to turn the volume down and we moved on.  Caroline, take in some Q&A’s and Clinton says, hey Rene, that woman that was frustrating you, she was actually making some really good points.  I thought what?  He said, do you mind if I just spend ten minutes responding to the points that she made.  It was a humbling moment for me and a humbling moment for the whole audience.  When he had his hands over his eyes he was actually concentrating and listening.  And it taught me a massive lesson that perhaps the best leaders are the best communicators and the best communicators are the best listeners.  Now it is quite interesting because I have bumped into lot of people all around the world really who were at that conference and they all recite that one moment to me, something you will never forget and it was all about listening.

Mike Southon: Fantastic.  Anyway at Pepsi you were there for how long?

Rene Carayol: Three years.

Mike Southon: And you did whole range of different jobs?

Rene Carayol: A whole range of stuff but it was all leadership.  Pepsi, whereas Marks and Spencer believed that we have got formula that has worked for 50 years, why should we change it, and in many respects it was management that was painting by numbers.  We were given tasks to do, to perform and we were looked after, it was a fabulous atmosphere but I didn’t want creativity, innovation or leadership, painting by numbers, follow the rules and it would be alright on the night and it was. But Pepsi was different, they are what I call a challenger brand, they are the challenger brand to Coco Cola.  They spent all their life playing second fiddle to the best known brand in the world.  So we had to be special, we had to be different, we had to be fast, we had to be bigger, we had to take more risks, and the only thing we had to fight against the biggest and best brand in the world was the quality of our people.  And if you are going to get the right people in then trust them and they taught me about trust.  And we had air cover everywhere, we were supported to make and take the biggest decision but they understood not everyone would work, we would make mistakes.  I can’t ever remember being hauled over the task for making a mistake as long as I could prove what I was trying to achieve.  And that percolates right through the organisation from our frontline operators, everyone felt that they could take risks, they felt they had ownership, they felt that they could innovate, they could break the rules if it gave us a lead and it was a brilliant environment to work in.  Three years though and it was full-on 16-17 hours a day and seven days a week and I loved it.  But I remember going home one day, and my daughter I think she was 4or 5 and I had been full-on on the big implementation, opening Pizza hut restaurants around the U.K., I came home and she said, I was putting her to bed for the first time in weeks.  It’s pretty much but I haven’t seen her for ages and as we were getting into the bedroom she said, dad can I come and live with you.  And I left a few weeks later realising there is a little more to life than full-on work as great as it was at Pepsi.  And I joined the board of IPC magazines, at the time the largest consumer magazines business in Europe.  I had really gone from electrical‘s, retail, brand I would call Pepsi we were working within a brand to having a hundred brands.  We had from Loaded to Mary Claire, from NME to Country Life, it was just fab, we have got a hundred different cultures and being on the board of such a glamorous business was exhilarating but it wasn’t a modern business.  Despite it being media this was age old systems, age old processes, management-lead, not leadership and I was really lucky that I think I brought something different to the board of directors.  And in those time there was ten of us on the board, five women and that was bold and it taught me everything about inclusively and diversity and I was about…as scary as it got someone who never worked in media and knew nothing about magazines, but the boss Mike Mathew sort of invested in me and it was great, I learnt a lesson.  The biggest risk you can take in any organisation is with people and he pushed me straight onto the board of directors.  When someone invests that much in you, believe me, you don’t let them down.  And he got what I call discretionary effort, I gave him a 120% everyday because he had taken that risk in me.  I was there for three years before I had the opportunity to do a management buy out and ten of us on the board owned 1% of the business each and working under private equity was the toughest thing I have done in my career.  And many people sort of argue, is private equity good for business, is private good for U.K PLC, you better believe that it is, it really, really is.  And it’s not the job cutting, cost cutting that many people take them out to be.  In my experience the reason why people buy a company is because they believe they can run it better and it was really sort of saying, it never changed any of us, they kept us there but boy did they set the tempo.  They set the pace that was talking about stretch leadership, we were stretched beyond belief.  We had targets to do things that many in the industry said we couldn’t do.  Would want to do it again?  No thank you.  But did I learn from it?  I learnt fabulously.  And we actually sold the business to AOL Time Warner when I sort of retired and that would have been in 2000, seven years ago.

Mike Southon: Good because that was about when you were starting to write Corporate Voodoo wasn’t it, because that’s when I bumped into you, it was around that first at hot cross.

Rene Carayol: And it was then, I suppose I left corporate life with having around 20 odd years, I was shattered and mentally and physically exhausted and I needed a break and I had no idea what I will do next.  A mad publisher approached me and said, I think you might have a story to tell.  You have worked for the best of the British, worked for the best of the Americans, what is the difference?  And that was at the heart of writing the book and for some very obscure reason, lots of people bought it, I haven’t found them out or they still haven’t found me out yet.  And on back of that people started inviting me to come and speak at their management conferences and talk to them about my philosophy for leadership.  And I just think, and I still believe to this day all the organisations I have worked with, when I was writing a book had the opportunity to visit over 250 organisations in Europe.  And I was asking one simple question what separates the winners from the losers?  And it was very, very clear to me no matter which size of organisation I went into, large, small, public sector, private sector, not-for-profit, the difference between the best of the best was always the same and three things came up, the first one it’s that leadership thing.  And I am not talking about what happens in the board room or the Chief Executive, it’s an attitude that the organisation has.  Terry Leahy at Tesco says, quite tellingly, Tesco doesn’t have one leader, it has thousands of leaders, leaders that are close to the customer and that’s what I believe.  In the best organisations, everybody’s a leader.  You walk into an ASDA Supermarket and the people in the check out, they can make decisions, they just don’t do tasks, that’s different.  And the second thing is culture.  Smart organisations know how to move their culture and I think also runs just accept it.  Culture is more powerful than strategy.  If you can mobilize your culture the way Steve Jobs does at Apple, the way Michael O’Leary does at Ryanair, the way recently Fred Goodwin has done with the Royal Bank of Scotland, it can be one of the most powerful forces in the world.  Then the third thing was the one that surprised me most and I suppose in our difficult, fast-moving, complex and unforgiving world now and our marketplace is which remember everything that goes wrong, nothing is best done alone anymore, and the third thing was collaboration.  Organisations that truly know how to partner and no organisation would do it on their own, we have always had a partner who does our IT for us or perhaps a partner who might do our stationary for us.  But organisation have to ask themselves that really tough question, what is it we do brilliantly or what is that underpins our brand?  Let’s just stick to what we do brilliantly and find others who do other things brilliantly.  And I am not talking outsourcing, that’s not what I am talking about because these are the things I do brilliantly, can I get some partners in helping me do some of the other stuff.  So if you took leadership, culture, collaboration, to me that’s the blue print for success.

Mike Southon: Fantastic and finally just a few thoughts about Coutts since we are sat in their very fine offices here.  Do you come in here a lot to the meetings here, the networking opportunities, do you get to meet other entrepreneurs here at Coutts?

Rene Carayol: Shamefully I do, it’s quite interesting because I am two things I suppose, I am customer and I think that’s the biggest testimony you can have to any brand is that I do business here.  I think furthermore though and I remember I hadn’t seen you for some time and we bumped into each other at one of these networking meetings, and what was interesting, I like to spend my time with like-minded individuals.  And I like to think that I am quite positive, I am optimist but I want it now, whatever it is I want it now.  And I found people who were even more optimistic than I was, even faster moving than I was and wanted it…they are even more impatient, it was great.  And what I loved about the Coutts experience was that you didn’t notice them, you know you didn’t notice anyone from Coutts and it’s the way my business relationship works with them, you don’t notice them.  And I think they make an appearance when I want some help, they make an appearance when perhaps they sense that I need a bit of help.  But are they an incumbent, do they stand, are they interfering, no.  I think what I really love about it is that I never see them unless I want to. 

Mike Southon: And final question, you obviously deal a lot with entrepreneurs even though you are very modest I have to say, say you want an entrepreneur yourself, I have a different view with that but there you go. Anyway if there will be one bit of advice to give to Coutts on how better to serve the entrepreneurs that they have in their network what would it be, what is the main thing that an entrepreneur would need from a bank like Coutts would you say?

Rene Carayol: Do you know what, I think when you meet the service that Coutts provide, they understand the upside down life of an entrepreneur, And I think when you meet that service I have not met anything like it anywhere else. 

Mike Southon: And what they might just have an event where they might get some skilled moderator who could possibly invite his friend Bill Clinton in to interview him and it’s all beginning to fit together…

Rene Carayol: Why didn’t I think of that?

Mike Southon: Well Rene it’s been an absolute feast talking to you, a feast of good information.  This has been Mike Southon for Beermat Radio in Coutts.  Thank you very much Rene Carayol.