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17 min read

CWJJ Episode 110: Gina Rundo & Keith Ormsby

Thursday, April 14- Gina Rundo and Keith Ormsby joined the CWJJ show live at the SGA Spring Gas Conference & Expo.

Quick Links:

Gina Rundo on Linkedin
Keith Ormsby on Linkedin

Episode Transcript

 [0:00] [music]

Jim Schauer:  [0:23] Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this episode of “Coffee with Jim & James.”

[0:27] James, another historic day. We are at SGA, but we are actually doing a live “full” episode of Coffee today with some very good friends and great guests.

James Cross:  [0:38] We’ve become very good friends, haven’t we?

Gina Rundo:  [0:40] Yes, we have.

Keith Ormsby:  [0:42] We have.

James:  [0:41] It seemed like the end of last year and the beginning of this year we spent a lot of time together. We were like road buddies.

Jim:  [0:48] We were.

Keith:  [0:49] We did the circuit.

James:  [0:50] We did. Welcome to the show, Versiv. I’ll let y’all do your introductions because I feel like everybody should have to feel that awkwardness.

Jim:  [0:58] Absolutely. I do every time.

James:  [1:03] Gina?

Gina Rundo:  [1:03] Gina Rundo, director of operations with Versiv Solutions, been in the industry now for over 13 years, spent some time with Dominion Energy, held various operational leadership roles for live gas, and recently joined Artera and Versiv in 2021. That’s where I met you folks and excited to be here today. Thanks for the opportunity.

James:  [1:26] I’m going to interrupt real quick before you even get started. Keith, welcome to the show. [laughs]

Keith:  [1:30] Thank you.

James:  [1:31] The first thing I ever heard about Gina was I was talking to Laura, our friend over at Artera…

Jim:  [1:37] Laura Morrow.

James:  [1:39] and Laura said, “Have you met Gina?” I said, “No.”

James:  [1:43] I’m excited to. Who’s Gina?”

James:  [1:48] That’s a compliment in itself.

Keith:  [1:49] That’s right.

Gina:  [1:50] Thank you.

James:  [1:51] Keith?

Keith:  [1:51] Laura’s great, by the way. She…

James:  [1:53] She is awesome.

Keith:  [1:54] She’s a wonderful asset…

James:  [1:54] Friend of the show.

Keith:  [1:57] My name’s Keith Ormsby. Thanks, guys, for having us on. It seemed like it’s taken a while for us to get here. We met you or we started talking to you about this before you were an award winning show.

James:  [2:09] We hate to bring that up but two or three times a show.

Jim:  [2:13] I’m sorry. What did you say, though?

Keith:  [2:14] be the first.

Jim:  [2:15] What were those words again?

James:  [2:15] We are at SGA.

James:  [2:16] Have we made that clear? We are at SGA, so it’s fair game. Go ahead. Sorry.

Keith:  [2:22] My role, I’m vice president of commercial operations for Artera Southern Gas Division. It’s a great role. I get to help support several of our OpCos, including Versiv. It’s been a great time getting this one kicked off and learning how to start a business. It’s been a great adventure.

Jim:  [2:44] It has been. Believe it or not, Keith and I may have known each other over the years. When this all came full circle, it was absolute fun to reconnect the dots.

[2:55] Let me kick this off. Versiv, new name to the industry. We saw a lot of splash last fall at AGA and SGA and such. Give us a little overview, a flyover of…

James:  [3:07] It’s my favorite part. It’s the origin story, the garage bands story.

Jim:  [3:12] Come on, tell us how it happened.

Gina:  [3:12] It’s a good one.

James:  [3:14] Tell us the overnight success that everyone sees.

James:  [3:15] Tell us all about it.

Keith:  [3:16] A lot of sleepless nights.

Keith:  [3:18] Versiv is part of Artera. Speaking of new, Artera’s relatively new. Artera is the parent company of a number of companies that are in the infrastructure of natural gas and energy segments.

[3:36] When we looked internally at what we do, we’re out there in the field working with natural gas on a daily basis, and so we’re faced with having to create safe environments for our employees and the folks out there in the field.

[3:51] To do that, part of that is to take the gas off of a pipeline. Historically, that was done by opening a valve and releasing the gas into the environment.

[4:04] When we started taking internal looks at that, we said, “Look, we’ve got to be better. We’ve got to be better stewards to the environment. We’ve got to be better partners to our customers. We’ve got to be better stewards to the public in general.”

[4:21] I wrote a business plan to help our group with that issue. I wrote the business plan. I presented it to some of our senior leaders, and they said, “Keith, you can tell us a little bit more of why we need to do this.”

[4:36] Gina and I have known each other for years, and so I called my old friend Gina.

Keith:  [4:42] I said, “Gina, help me understand why Dominion’s doing this. What’s the value proposition behind this?” She was very gracious. She spent at least an hour talking to our group about it. She is, without doubt, the subject matter expert in this field.

James:  [5:01] Gina, how many years at Dominion?

Gina:  [5:03] 13.

Keith:  [5:05] She just pitched it. She’s a great steward for the industry, and her passion was obvious. We go through that and they said, “Now we understand why we need to be doing this.” We said so long to Gina and hung up and everybody started looking at me and they said, “We’ve got to hire Gina Rundo.”

James:  [5:25] It’s the problem now?

Keith:  [5:27] No problem, but…

James:  [5:28] Gina says, “All right, y’all. I’ll give you 5 to 10 minutes to stop this.”

Keith:  [5:34] That was my next task. Easy enough, let’s hire somebody that’s got a great job and doing great work for one of the industry‑leading providers of natural gas. I thought I was going to be sneaky or crafty or…

Keith:  [5:50] whatever. I said, “Gina, I got some follow‑up questions.”

Keith:  [6:00] I was going to spring it on her, why you need to. I get into it, and we start talking a little bit. Gina beat me to the punch. It was amazing.

Jim:  [6:06] You gotta like that.

Gina:  [6:07] That’s right.

James:  [6:08] Gina’s a pro. That made it even more clear.

Keith:  [6:12] It was really clear. Gina, tell them why.

Gina:  [6:17] I basically called up Keith and we talked on the phone that day. I said, “Look, the industry is facing a lot of pressure right now. Yes, Dominion, great company, appreciate all the growth and experience I had with them.” At this point in my career, I felt that I needed to do something more to help the industry as a whole.

James:  [6:39] Need a purpose.

Gina:  [6:40] Exactly. Seeing the scale and the reach that Artera had, 41 states, 130‑plus locations, they’re the general contractor on these type of jobs, it seemed like the right fit to scale something as important like this nationwide and to do that with Artera.

James:  [6:59] Wow.

Jim:  [7:00] I absolutely love it.

James:  [7:01] That leads in well. Let’s talk about Artera. We’ve been friends…Miller Pipeline, forever, they’re clients of ours. We’ve done business very closely with so many folks over there.

[7:12] That’s where I first met Laura and then as the Artera brand came together this past year, or whenever that unveiled, the last three years, pulling together.

[7:29] Tell us a little bit about Artera. Tell our audience that maybe don’t know what’s behind that brand, that company. I hate to call it a brand, but I’m a brand nerd. You know what I mean, that culture there. Tell us a little bit about Artera. as a parent company.

Keith:  [7:46] Sure. Like you said or we said, Artera is relatively new. Just a little bit over a year we became what is Artera. It was PowerTeam Services before that. Southeast Connections and KS Energy were the two integral or key components of that group.

[8:12] As we started evolving and we purchased MVerge, Minnesota Limited and Miller Pipeline, we looked at it and we said, “We do more than PowerTeam Services. Artera, we became what we want to be as a brand,” and so we became Artera.

[8:31] The genesis behind that name, which we’ve learned a lot about naming…

Gina:  [8:36] Yes.

James:  [8:36] Amen to that.

Jim:  [8:38] Tell us.

Gina:  [8:39] It’s a process.

Jim:  [8:40] It is.

Keith:  [8:41] We never knew, did we?

James:  [8:45] Holy cow. We went through the same thing. I laugh about it. Our CEO, Coleman Sterling, I don’t know if y’all have met him, he would agree with that. It’s a journey.

Jim:  [8:56] It is a journey.

James:  [8:59] You never know. You never know what all goes into these things as you go through that part. It’s worth noting, for sure. There should be a support group for people that go through that.

Jim:  [9:11] Artera, what was the, as you say, the garage story about that? Who said, “We should name this Artera?”

James:  [9:19] Can you disclose that? I’m just kidding.

Keith:  [9:25] Neither one of us were involved in that process. We’ve heard that it was very similar to the journey that we had when we were doing Versiv but maybe even on a bigger scale because of the significance of it.

James:  [9:37] I can imagine those meetings.

Keith:  [9:40] We hired some consultants that tried to help us to make sure that we were capturing what our essence wanted to be. Brian Palmer, our CEO, one of the things that’s resonated with me is, first of all, he’s an extremely approachable guy, down to Earth. He said, “I want this business to be a place that my kids would want to work.”

[10:03] In this day and age, pipeline’s not sexy. We’re doing things like trying to do damage prevention and create businesses like Versiv and be responsible. Artera, what I heard the genesis is is we’re artisans of terra, artisans of the earth.

Jim:  [10:28] Love that.

Keith:  [10:32] It’s a great name, great story.

James:  [10:34] How many people know that? We probably got insider information.

Jim:  [10:37] We just did…

Jim:  [10:38] and you did, too.

Keith:  [10:39] Breaking news.

James:  [10:40] That was internal stuff. They’ll probably get fired for it.

Jim:  [10:42] Versiv, same story with the name Versiv?

Gina:  [10:47] Versiv, after pages and pages of name review…

Jim:  [10:51] White boards and white boards.

Gina:  [10:51] and then legal reviews…

James:  [10:53] I feel like we’re going off script and freaking everybody out.

Jim:  [10:54] That’s all right, though.

James:  [10:55] This is the good stuff. This is the journey.

Gina:  [10:58] First off, we landed on the name because [inaudible] versatile. This industry…Today we’re facing changes, but this industry is going to continue to face those changes. 

[11:10] We thought the name was fitting, to be versatile. To be a partner in the space and say, “We are going to adapt to those changes with you in this journey, and provide solutions to those changes that we’re going to be faced with in decades to come.”

James:  [11:26] Those solutions are really focused on ESG.

Gina:  [11:30] That’s right.

James:  [11:32] I’m going to go back to AGA where we first kind of rubbed elbows. When we came out of that at that time, dipped our toe of coming out of the pandemic. I think everyone that was there could rally on the fact that there was so much innovation in the hallway.

Jim:  [11:49] Definitely.

James:  [11:50] There were things we hadn’t seen. We’ve all been cooped up. We were building. We were learning. We’re making our processes better. We were doing everything we could and then we were ready to show it off. We all came and the panels were amazing.

[12:05] Y’all were super involved and you saw all these companies popped up that maybe you hadn’t seen before. The thing that was the constant through all those conversations to me was ESG.

Gina:  [12:15] Yeah.

Jim:  [12:16] Yeah, definitely.

James:  [12:19] I don’t see it’s a bad thing, but some would say it’s just trendy, it’s the thing, or that, or whatever. Look, if some people gain the knowledge from a trendy topic, I’m cool with that. Is it a trend? It is not.

Keith:  [12:35] Right.

Gina:  [12:36] No.

James:  [12:36] Tell us a little bit about ESG, and maybe educate our folks a little bit that maybe don’t know really what all that is.

Gina:  [12:44] ESG, Environmental Social Governance. Look, it’s not just in our industry. It’s in every industry right now. So it is. It’s not a trend. It is here to stay.

[12:56] I had my first dose of, truly, the impact of ESG to the business because of the pressures that this industry was facing from the investors. “What are your ESG plans? But are you actually executing those plans?”

[13:13] Versiv itself was created on the essence of ESG. Strictly, if you think about it, the Environmental, the E.

Keith:  [13:23] That’s straightforward. The E part is…

Gina:  [13:27] The E part is straightforward. What we provide is emissions reduction solutions. That’s our bread and butter.

[13:35] But also, with that, Versiv is also heavily supporting a social, the S piece. When you think about, pipeline blowdowns, they’re traditionally done as [inaudible] to do work safely on a [inaudible] rupture.

[13:51] However, it has a community impact. It’s loud noise, it’s got odor associated with it, and now with greenhouse gas reductions, the public is starting to understand that.

[14:05] Versiv supports that and saying, how can we be a good community steward? How can we get the message across, the good things that our customers are doing in this space? We support the S heavily, as well.

Jim:  [14:19] Is it all…I think sometimes with ESG people think, “Oh, great. We got to have this whole new program, and we got to do all these things, this new stuff, and we don’t have time. We don’t have the budget.”

[14:30] Isn’t there a lot of things that you look at first that…I don’t want to call them low‑hanging fruit…

Jim:  [14:37] That are already in process, and put them together formally.

James:  [14:38] Yeah. You’re already doing this. It’s helping educate them that way as well.

Keith:  [14:43] Yeah. I wanted to talk a little bit about the social, real quick.

James:  [14:46] Go for it.

Keith:  [14:47] We’ve been doing this road show introducing Versiv, and so I’m creating a lot of pilot programs. One of the social things that came to me was we were out on a job site in a very residential area. The contractor had already dug up this woman’s yard.

Jim:  [15:08] Oh, you’re talking real residential.

Keith:  [15:10] [laughs] Real, right on the corner. She was already a little bit upset about it, and she would open her window just about that much. She would bend her head over and she would yell out there. She’d say, “Trees have lives, too, and that gas company’s the devil.”

[15:29] We were thinking…

Keith:  [15:30] If we let live gas go here and she gets a whiff of it, guess who’s going to get called?”

Gina:  [15:36] Everybody, and that’s the social. It may not have been a huge volume of gas that we were recycling that day and keeping it in the pipeline…

Jim:  [15:44] Doesn’t matter.

Gina:  [15:46] it didn’t matter because of the impact that it was having on that landowner.

James:  [15:50] No doubt.

Keith:  [15:51] To your point, as I mentioned about Artera, we’re an industry‑leading infrastructure company. We’re out there on a daily basis. We’ve been doing pipe replacement programs for years, years. Getting rid of leaky pipe, that’s…

James:  [16:07] Number one…

Keith:  [16:07] the low‑hanging fruit.

James:  [16:09] that you’re probably already doing.

Keith:  [16:11] Yeah, we’re already doing that. A lot of ESG we’re doing already. It’s just…

James:  [16:16] It’s more tracking and making sure that you have a plan and goals around it, right?

Gina:  [16:21] Right.

Jim:  [16:22] It’s almost like a PSMS plan, where, really, you take a lot of the pieces that you’re already doing and formalize it together on that journey.

[16:29] Before I lose my thought here, we talked about the E and the S. Let’s go to the G, regulatory, regulations, and such like that.

James:  [16:37] Government.

Jim:  [16:38] How does that fit into it? What’s your thoughts on that?

Gina:  [16:41] Yeah, a little bit on the regulations right now. It’s starting. We’ve already got a dose of that with the PIPES Act of 2020, Section 114. It goes into a lot of detail.

[16:55] High level, it does state by the end of December 2021, operators were required to have updates in their inspection and maintenance plans, how they were going to mitigate fugitive emissions and voluntary emissions, which is where we come in.

James:  [17:10] Say it one more time.

James:  [17:12] Really, operators need what?

Gina:  [17:15] They need to have in their inspection and maintenance plans how they’re going to reduce their emissions. Those plans, according to this writing, is going to be audited in 2022.

James:  [17:25] Is that if they want to, or is that a…

Keith:  [17:29] It’s not.

Jim:  [17:31] Is this a should or a shall? Let’s hit that.

James:  [17:34] very clear. It’s a very real thing. This isn’t, “Hey, one day you may need this information.” This is coming.

Gina:  [17:42] This is coming. That was the first dose of it. We’ve seen in other states across the country the regulations are getting tougher.

[17:50] In Colorado, there was just a recent mandate about not blowing gas in stations, at compressor stations, on pipeline pigging traps. That’s happening in the state of Colorado. It’s now just a matter of time of when other states are going to have those regulations as well.

Keith:  [18:08] That rule doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t discriminate at all. It applies to the Dominions, the Southern companies, but it also applies to the municipal systems. This is an industry‑wide journey that we’re on.

James:  [18:27] How’s it been getting out? Over the past six to eight months, how’s it been with municipalities? How open are they to that? Sometimes we get hung up. ESG, you may have a whole department for that dedicated in the larger operators. How has the reception been amongst munis?

Gina:  [18:47] We had the opportunity to attend what was a great event. I highly recommend anyone…

Keith:  [18:53] You guys were there.

James:  [18:54] APGA?

Gina:  [18:53] Yeah, APGA.

James:  [18:54] Love…

Keith:  [18:54] That was a great event.

Gina:  [18:56] Phenomenal event.

James:  [18:57] Shout‑out Stuart Saulters over there, Erin Kurilla, all great folks, all of our friends.

Jim:  [19:02] Absolutely.

James:  [19:02] Love them.

Gina:  [19:03] That’s where we really had the first opportunity to show and share Versiv and how we can support there. The feedback and the outreach since that event for municipalities, for Versiv Solutions have been phenomenal because they’re raising their hand and they’re saying, “Hey, guess what? We need help, too.”

[19:22] It’s not just the big operators that everyone thinks about. We’re facing those same regulations…

James:  [19:27] With less budget, with less resources…

Jim:  [19:29] Less people, everything.

James:  [19:30] and to also have to manage the wastewater and the water and I’m the trash guy on Thursday.

James:  [19:37] That’s the reality.

Keith:  [19:38] It’s overwhelming.

James:  [19:39] For them it does it. It’s not a box on a shelf. It’s still very personalized and custom or whatever, but sometimes in that world, that’s what they need so that they can be priced and put on the shelf next year. That’s very interesting.

Jim:  [19:55] They need good partners in the industry to do this. I’ll tell you, it’s part of connecting the dots, too. You read in the news, you hear it, greenhouse emissions. You hear climate change. You hear a lot of different terms. A lot of times, people really don’t understand what that means at a granular level.

[20:13] Honestly, a blowdown, people might not understand what that means. They might think of greenhouse gases as cars. There’s more to it than that. There’s actually landfills that are emitting gases all the time.

James:  [20:24] There’s so many ways.

Jim:  [20:25] There’s so many ways.

[20:26] Let’s dive down a little bit deeper into Versiv and the services that you actually provide. Let’s get into little details so people can say, “Oh, I understand how that is doing that and impacting that and reducing this.

James:  [20:37] How can y’all help?

Gina:  [20:40] It all ties in, really. We talked a little bit about the regulations and ESG and what we’re seeing and the changes in this industry. We’re also hearing from our customers that they’ve got goals tied to emissions reductions.

Jim:  [20:54] Definitely.

Gina:  [20:54] Versiv, what we do, at least our first service offering, is a term called cross compression, also known as portable compression, recompression, temporary compression. We’re calling it cross compression.

[21:09] Essentially what we’re doing, we’re taking that gas that would have been vented or blown to atmosphere…

Jim:  [21:16] Just out in the air.

Gina:  [21:16] just out in the open air, and we’re taking that gas and we’re evacuating it safely and recycling it back downstream in that main line or in another pressurized vessel.

[21:29] Gas stays in the pipe, where it probably should have been this whole time.

Gina:  [21:34] That’s our service offering.

James:  [21:35] Hey, imagine that.

Gina:  [21:38] The feedback has been extremely positive from our customers. The time associated with our operation is minimal impact to the operator, so it makes good sense.

[21:50] What I will say, though, it’s live gas, so it is very specialized. This came through experience with Dominion, when we started deploying and introducing cross compression. It’s a dangerous process, so it should be well suited, and training’s important, as you guys know.

Keith:  [22:08] Oh yeah.

James:  [22:09] I’ve heard. I know a guy…

James:  [22:11] he does training.

Jim:  [22:12] You know a guy that knows a guy.

James:  [22:14] I got a guy.

Jim:  [22:15] We got a guy.

Gina:  [22:16] Training is critical in this space.

Jim:  [22:17] Absolutely.

Gina:  [22:18] Anything with live gas, not anyone should do it, which is another reason why Versiv was carved out as its own company.

[22:25] Sure, we have the resources with Miller Pipeline, Southeast Connections, etc., etc., that we could’ve just bought this equipment and done the work, but you need that specialty. That’s why we’re a pipeline specialty services group.

James:  [22:39] Love it. That’s great.

Jim:  [22:43] At some point here, I would love to see something about this product.

Jim:  [22:46] think, James?

James:  [22:47] I hear there’s a video or something that might be able to help our audience…

Gina:  [22:51] There is a video.

Jim:  [22:52] Is there?

Gina:  [22:53] There is a video.

James:  [22:53] I tell you what, we’re going to cut to the video, and we’ll come back right after that.

Gina:  [22:57] Awesome.

Jim:  [24:29] James and team, this made so much sense. To see it, it was like a million words. That is such an efficient operation. Thank you for sharing that video with us and letting us look at that.

James:  [24:41] I’ll open it up to both of you. We end these shows…This is no different. We’re live at SGA, but it’s no different. We give people the floor. I don’t want to say the soapbox, it’s not like that. If you had just one thing to leave the folks with, put it out there.

Keith:  [25:03] Gina…

Gina:  [25:04] [laughs]

Keith:  [25:04] I got this one. Gina touched on this briefly. Part of the message is why did Gina come to Versiv in the first place, and then why are we Versiv?

[25:17] Gina came to us because she felt like she could do the industry good, not just Dominion, not just OpCos under the umbrella of Artera, but the industry. We were very deliberate about creating a separate OpCo so that we can provide the service to the industry.

Gina:  [25:35] In fact, just one other touchpoint on that, we do a lot of work outside of the Artera umbrella. About, I would say, 50 percent of our work has been subcontracted under other general contractors.

[25:48] [crosstalk]

James:  [25:48] Some just operated and you may be servicing other contractors and municipalities, whatever.

Gina:  [25:54] That’s right.

Jim:  [25:56] I love it, and I love that concept where we are stewards to the industry and safety. With me, that’s near and dear to my heart.

James:  [26:03] That’s why we started the show.

Jim:  [26:04] That is why, with safety number one and how we can outreach to the community and just keep the messages…

James:  [26:09] We’re doing our social part.

Jim:  [26:10] We are.We are ES&G. OK, big question. People are going to have a lot of thoughts. They’re going to have a lot of questions. What do they do? Where should they go? How do they get a hold of you?

Gina:  [26:22] I would suggest, first thing, is our website. You can go to our website, www.versivsolutions.com, highly recommend it. You’ll get all your facts through there. You can also submit an RFQ form on our services through that site.

James:  [26:36] Sweet.

Gina:  [26:36] It’s very smooth, and you’ll get to learn about a process a little bit further through there, and contact information of myself and Keith and some other folks on our team.

James:  [26:46] They’re not hard to follow.

Jim:  [26:48] They’re not. That was a softball.

James:  [26:50] If you can’t find them, we’re probably within a stone’s throw. Reach out to us, and we’ll holler down the hall, “Hey, Gina.” We’ll be somewhere…

Jim:  [26:58] You got a phone call coming in over here.

James:  [27:01] On line two.

Jim:  [27:02] Thank you.

Gina:  [27:03] Thank you both.

James:  [27:04] It really has been great.

Jim:  [27:05] Thank you very much.

James:  [27:06] We’ve been trying to do this since AGA, in full disclosure.

Gina:  [27:08] We have.

Jim:  [27:09] It has been months.

James:  [27:09] We’ve set this up 187 times, but we’ve been blessed, and we’ve been busy. Being able to do the first one live this year and having y’all has been awesome.

Jim:  [27:22] Absolutely.

James:  [27:22] I’m so glad we made it happen.

Jim:  [27:23] We want to have you guys back. Actually, I personally want to get out to the job site.

Keith:  [27:27] Oh, OK.

Jim:  [27:28] I love the video, but I want to see this live.

James:  [27:30] Same.

Gina:  [27:31] We would love to have you.

Jim:  [27:31] It’s my CNG…

James:  [27:32] we’ll do one live from…

Jim:  [27:32] that I can’t get out of my system.

Gina:  [27:34] Let’s do it.

Keith:  [27:35] We will have to check your OQs.

Gina:  [27:36] Yes.

James:  [27:37] We will have to get them caught up.

Jim:  [27:40] I know a guy. I know a guy.

Jim:  [27:42] Have they lapsed? No, they have not. That is a joke.

James:  [27:46] Probably. I don’t know.

Keith:  [27:47] Good.

James:  [27:48] It was great having y’all.

Keith:  [27:50] Thank you.

Gina:  [27:51] Thanks, guys.

James:  [27:51] Thanks again.

Jim:  [27:49] Absolutely. Thank you, everybody. Until next week on “Coffee with Jim & James, as we always say, stay safe, next week. Bye‑bye.

James:  [27:57] Bye‑bye.


Transcription by WatchingWords