Joe: [00:00:00] Hello and welcome to On Boards, a deep dive at what drives business success. Hi, I’m Joe Ayoub, and I’m here with my co-host, Raza Shaikh. On boards is about boards of directors and advisors and all aspects of governance. Twice a month, this is the place to learn about one of the most critically important aspects of any company or organization; its board of directors or advisors, as well as the important issues that are facing boards, company leadership and stakeholders.

Raza: Joe and I speak with a wide range of guests and we talk about what makes a board successful or unsuccessful, what it takes to be an effective board member, what challenges boards are facing and how they’re assessing those challenges, and how to make your board one of the most valuable assets of your organization.

Joe: Our guest today is Alexander Lowry. Alexander is a professor at Gordon College in [00:01:00]Wenham Massachusetts where he is the executive director of the Masters in Financial Analysis Program, and he is the creator, voice and driving force behind Boardroom Bound, a weekly podcast about boards of directors, how to become a board member, how to excel at the job and the important impact that boards have on business and our society.

Raza: He’s also a nationally-respected governance expert, sometimes referred to as the “conscience of the board” due to his ability to bring a unique perspective impacting the boardroom. He was named by Private Company Director Magazine as one of its 2020 directors to watch. Previously, Alexander was a deputy COO at JP Morgan and a management consultant at PA Consulting Group.

Joe: Welcome, Alexander, thank you so much for joining us today on On Boards.

Alexander: Gentlemen, it’s a pleasure to be with you today. I’m a governance [00:02:00] geek. I love having conversations like this.

Joe: Well, the three of us will enjoy this conversation, maybe no one else, but that’s okay.

We both have been guests on your podcast and we really enjoy it. It might be interesting to just talk a little bit about how you went from being a management consultant and then a private banker at JP Morgan to a college professor and a podcast entrepreneur.

Alexander: If I told you I had a plan, it all worked out perfectly. I went to a great liberal arts undergrad, and from there, I think that management consulting was not the perfect start. You can research, you can write, communicate, you can present, and suddenly you’re sitting with CEOs of Fortune 500 companies when you’re 22 years old, traveling the world. It was pretty awesome.

But after doing that for about a dozen years, I wanted to try something different. I wanted to go to Wall Street, so I used my Wharton MBA to move across to JP Morgan. I was there for about four and a half years. in some pretty senior roles, having a great time during a crisis, it was nuts, it was really fun, and when I look back at that time, there was a key moment where my now wife, who was my then fiancee, who was a wonderful kind patient woman- I married [00:03:00] way above my station guys and she said, -“I don’t think you doing an a hundred hours a week and a bank is going to do a lot for us.”

I thought that’s a fair challenge, right? So, we’re thinking about we should get married, we should start a family, and if we want to have 2.5 cars and 3.2 dogsand the house and all that sort of stuff, we weren’t going to do that in Manhatten.

This opportunity came up at Gordon College. And to be honest, this was not the first thing I was looking for. This is enemy territory I’m New York sports fan, like there were a lot of red flags here, but coming up here, starting a Master’s program, I also lead career services for the school now, it gave me a lot of opportunities and that’s where the podcast came about.

It’s my fault that the podcast started, I will admit that. We have a professional radio recording studio and I walked by it one day, it was dark, and I asked our chief marketing officer, “Why don’t we use it?” He said, “Oh, the students use it all night every night.” I said, “It’s like terrible real estate. Why would you not use it during the day?” He goes, “You’re right. You should start a podcast.”

You guys know this, there’s over a million podcasts. We must’ve been the only school in the world without one, so I thought, “Okay, let’s start a podcast.” Well, nobody needs another podcast about how to get into undergrad or grad school or how to land a job. There are lots of [00:04:00] those, and you guys will love this, at the time, there was like one or two other podcasts in the boardroom. This is like one of the most important things in the business world that people weren’t talking about. I thought this would be what we should do.

Joe: Well, a couple of things. First of all, the red flag about your unfortunate alliance with New York sports teams, not withstanding, great to have you here.

Alexander: It’s instinct, so you don’t have to hold it against me.

Joe: But I would say this, no good deed goes unpunished, so you took that empty studio and turned it into something really, really impactful. Talk a little bit about some of the goals that you wanted to achieve and what has been happening with that.

Alexander: Well, my ideal is always finding synergies wherever you can. I think about the institution as a whole, because Gordon owns the podcast, we were using their studio, how do I raise the profile for Gordon in a very smart way? And I’m just a simple business guy. I think about that sort of world, and Gordon needed to do more. If I put my career services hat on as well, how do I open doors more or how may I make people aware of the great students we have here, open doors for internships and jobs?

Well, you guys have seen the same [00:05:00] thing. When you offer someone to come onto your podcast and to talk about themselves, to some extent, it gets past gatekeepers. You can go direct to them, to CEOs, to chairmans of the board, people that otherwise you would never be able to get to. It’s amazing how often they’d say yes.

I get to bring this person on, have a lot of fun having a phenomenal conversation with them and have some fun to chit-chat before and after you build a relationship, and maybe it also works that it helps our students grow and develop. But I now have executives that had never heard of Gordon before, never would have otherwise knowing about our school, we bring them in to talk at different parts, in different classes, and we’re engaging them in different ways. It’s been great for everybody overall. It has certainly raise the visibility of Gordon College, and to think that now, I have like a top podcast. Depending on who I have on a given week, it’s like number one in Ukraine. or number two in Australia, it’s just sort of funny to think like, “Okay, Gordon’s name is out there in different places in the world.”

Joe: Number one in Ukraine, that is something to be proud of!

Alexander: I spoke at the Ukrainian Corporate Governance Association or something like that, it just like popped up on the charts.

Joe: Wow. Okay. We got to work on our Ukrainian audience, [00:06:00] Raza.

I know one of the things that you do talk about is people who ask the basic first question, ” I want to be on a board. What do I do?” Let’s talk a little bit how you approach that because I know it’s a multi-layered answer.

Alexander: That is really the focus of my board podcast, and a lot of them are very different. Mine is really about howdo you become a member of a board and be really good at it. That’s the perspective we take. We’ll have special episodes flipped about how a board as a whole can be really good, but in general, it’s wherever you are in that spectrum.

I get people that are already sitting board directors who go, “Great, I want to do this as a portfolio.” I get people that just landed their first board seats who’d said, “What the heck did I get myself into? How do I do this well? I get people in the C-suite going, “I’m ready to be in a board and let’s make this happen.” People who are about to get in the C-suite going, “I’m looking a little bit ahead. I know I want to do this and start planting the seeds.” And people who are much further away from that are going, “I think I’ve heard about this. This might be really good. What do I begin to do? How do I plan it online?”

You have all those perspectives. But what you just said, Joe, I just got an email [00:07:00] the other day from a retired senior executive on Wall Street who said, “I’m retired now and now I want to get a whole bunch of paid board seats. Help me.” And I regularly get that a lot.

I likened it to the conversations I have in career services. I’m sure you guys skip this. Like if someone says, “Help me get a board seat,” I’m going to go, but that’s like saying, “Help me get a job.” I don’t know what to do with that. What industry you want to work in? What size of companies? Is it compensated, non-compensated, public versus private? There are all these sorts of things. You have to help me figure out what you want to do, and it only from then can I even begin to start giving you guidance, because otherwise I don’t know what to do with that.” if I went to you guys and say, “Guys, help me get a job,” I’d go like, “What does it mean?”

Joe: Yeah. Let’s start with this, the first thing you have to sort through, as you said is what do you want? Why do you want to do it? And what do you want to accomplish? So, there’s some thinking that needs to be done before someone joins a board, and right now focus really on paid positions. I’m thinking about private and public boards. Once someone has thought that through and they’re prepared to commit to do the [00:08:00] work of a board member, and I think you and I and Raza have talked about this, it’s a job.

Some people don’t understand that from the outset. Some people think it’s kind of a nice thing to do when you’re retired, but in fact, it’s a job, and you need to take it as seriously as you would any other job.

But once you have all that, if someone then comes to you and says, “Okay. I’d like to be on a private company board, I have expertise in risk management. I know I’m an A-plus financial acumen person. I’d like to be in a certain industry,” then what do you tell them? What’s the next step for someone who’s given it that thought and really has considered what they want to do?

Alexander: I don’t want to gloss over that Joe because it’s really important. If someone has done their homework, they understand. I can tell that they’ve already thought about their elevator pitch. They probably have some of the documentation. I mean, there are the key things you’ve got to have your board bio. You got to have your board resume, your LinkedIn profile, all that stuff is got to be ready because if you start doing the networking and someone says, “Oh, my gosh, you’d be great for company XYZ that I know. [00:09:00] Send me your materials, you’re not going to say, “I’ll get back to you in a week with those.” You want to be ready to go. In the same way, that thinking that you just talked about has to be followed by the action, and that’s the first start.

I would actually use this, “When you came with me, Joe, with that great pitch, I would test you a little bit. All right, so tell me what’s the most important. Was it the compensation?” And some people say, yes, I appreciate their honesty, but that’s not a good driver for it. “But okay, if it is the compensation, what do you think you’re going to make in what are you trying to do?” “Well, I want to be on the board of JP Morgan and make 250,000 a year.” I’m like, “Hmm. What kind of size company did you work in?” I worked at a bunch of startups.” “Well, that’s probably not realistic. Let’s take what you came up with and let’s talk about reality. You’re probably not going to be in a cap size bigger than where you worked before.

And that’s okay. You might have only worked in private companies. Well, then you should focus on that. There are lots of different opportunities there. I would take exactly what you said, Joe, let’s dive into it a little bit more, make sure we’re all coming from the same page, and then you can come up with a game plan to do it.

Once you’ve got that, okay, networking is going to be a big part of it. For some people that’s a dirty word. It doesn’t need to be a dirty word. How big is your network today? Do you know people who are on boards? Do you know people that [00:10:00] service boards like accountants and consultants and lawyers that can be helpful for you? And then how much time will you spend every week? Are you going to spend an hour a day? Are you going to spend an hour a week? Now, a lot of that’s going to predict how long it’s going to take for you and how successful ultimately you will be.

Joe: A lot of what you’re saying, in fact, all of what you’re saying, sounds like the kind of really good advice that you would give anyone looking for a new job. For example, yeah, your board bio or your board CV or whatever it is you prepare, it’s something different than you would have if you’re applying for a job, as you said, at JP Morgan or PA Consulting, you really have to be focused on it.

Again, I think a lot of people in the first instance don’t totally understand that. They just maybe assume that it’s, “Oh, one of these things I’ve had such great business experience. Of course, I’ll be on boards,” but it really is very focused. I love the way you kind of just went through that.

One of the things that I remember talking about is advice that you give about doing due diligence before you accept [00:11:00] the first board seat, because obviously, if you do well, then you’re going to feel better about yourself and you probably get on the board, and some of that has to do with what board did you join, and I think most first-time board members will usually jump at the chance to be on any board, and that is not a great idea. Why don’t you talk about why that is?

Alexander: Let’s be really clear. Someone has worked really hard to land a paid board seat. That was their dream, that was their goal, and they made it happen. You’re super excited. Like this is amazing, right? Well, it doesn’t mean you should take it. Think about this as like you’re applying for a job. Just because you get a job offer doesn’t mean it’s going to be a fit. I don’t mean the negotiations like culturally, for example, like, is this a place where you’re setting yourself up for success? Can you do this? Do you want to do this?

A board is the same way. Boards are very different from each other. Some boards think about like, let’s go some extreme examples, some of the ones that have been in the news, like some boards are rubber stamping what the CEO comes up with. Is that the kind of board you want to be on? If so, great. Know that other boards are [00:12:00] very collaborative, very open, very discussion oriented, very much about coming up with a strategy that helps the organization. Is that the type of board you’re going to fit in with? Is that the kind of the space you want to be in?

Some boards are kind of cutthroat, like every one of them has so much value that they want to add they’re kind of stepping on each other and everyone’s making sure they’re getting all their points. Others very much hold back. It’s like, “Let’s make sure we’re sharing our valuable air time.” It’s like a baseball game, you only get to bat three, maybe four times a game. That’s the amount of time you get to talk on your board meeting of the day. You need to know what that feels like.

How about the organization? Is the C-suite team collaborative? Are they engaged? Are they working well? Is there a history of the CEO not getting on with their employees or their lawsuits? Like you really have to know what sort of organization you’re stepping into and the value that you bring to it as well.

One extreme example, we had someone on my show who admitted to me, she said, “There’s board that I got offered my first board seat on, and I worked really hard to get that. I was excited about it. It was a public company, I checked all the boxes, but I didn’t feel comfortable. I went through the interview process and I had that little person on my shoulder telling me there’s a danger here, Will Robinson, think about this.”

Actually, I’d never heard anyone successfully did this, where she got them, “Let me sign some [00:13:00] NDA so I can sit in one meeting. I won’t vote. I’m just sitting in the back. I want to observe. I need to observe.” And they thought she was the right person so they agreed to this. I don’t know why. She actually saw a fistfight breaking out in the meeting. She’s like, “I knew this was not the place for me.”

I’ve never heard of that before, but that’s like an extreme version of due diligence. The point is you want to be on the right board for you because you will do well. And if you do well, that will lead to other boards because the people you’re sitting and working with will inevitably be also be connected to other boards and they’ll know, “Oh my gosh, Johnny over here was phenomenal. I should think of another opportunity.” But if you stink it up in the boardroom, you’re not going to get another one.

Joe: From the board side, identifying and recruiting the right person is an important first step, but it is only the first step. The next step is really onboarding this new valuable board member that you’ve spent so much time finding, and yet I think you and I have talked about this, many boards are terrible at onboarding. What advice do you give about onboarding, [00:14:00] either to the individual board member or when you talk to people who are on the boards that you interact with? What kind of advice do you give them about that?

Alexander: Isn’t it terribly ironic? You spend all of this time and energy and money trying to bring someone on. Now, I get during COVID for some boards, it was extreme, it was much harder. But even before COVID, there are lots of boards that didn’t treat it the way they treat normal employees who get hired.

If you think about this whole onboarding process, show up at your desk, all the stuff is laying there and you come to a certain training and meet all the people, in the boardrooms, it’s like, “Well, you know what you’re doing? We’ll just throw you in, come to the next meeting and you’ll be great.” That’s not setting anybody up for success.

If you are joining a board that acts like that, well, then you need to act differently to set yourself up for success. You should insist on meeting with every member of the board, even if it’s just via Zoom. You want to meet with the company secretary, every member of the C-suite, and you want to know what’s going on and understand it.

The company secretary, by the way, is your best friend. That’s the person you want to be building a relationship. They’ll be helpful. By the way, they are the ones who set the schedule for the boards. If you’ve got some future commitments, like other boards, you need to whisper in their ears before they set the dates, because it’s [00:15:00] embarrassing if they have to change them later on your behalf, so you need to make relationships with all these people.

Ideally, you’d have met many of them during the interview process. Some boards do it differently than others. And if you haven’t, you need those relationships. Now, every board is a little different because of COVID now. Some are still entirely virtual, some are meeting some in-person, some virtual, and if you can get together during the in-person stuff and during the dinners start to have conversations to build relationship, that’s really important. But if your company is not taking it upon themselves to do a proper onboarding process, make sure that you are doing it to set yourself up for success.

Joe: Yeah, you just have to be proactive. And by the way, this is not COVID driven. This existed before COVID. It will exist if or when COVID goes away. I think it’s part of the viewing the board seat process as not really a new job. What you said, I think, is exactly right, “Oh, well, he was a super smart guy at blank, or she was fantastic as CEO of this company.” Yes, great. That’s why you recruited [00:16:00] them, but that doesn’t translate directly, especially in the first instance, at being a great board member. And I have to agree with you ironic that people, boards, organizations spend so much time recruiting and then they kind of drop off and drop the ball in really getting value out of this person.

Now, the best board members are going to shine anyway. It may take them longer. They’ll be proactive. They’ll ask the right questions. They’ll get there. But boards should be meeting them right there and onboarding them the way they do, as you said, any employee.

Raza: Alexander, you bring a lot of wonderful guests on your Boardroom Bound podcast. What are the top topics that are relevant today in the boardroom?

Alexander: We’ve seen it pivot just a little bit due to COVID and we can talk about that. But if I say even before COVID, the ones that were big then that are still big now, I think will be big forever. Some of those are risk management. We can do a deeper dive into that. [00:17:00] That’s never going away, never should go away. And if you’re in a board that hasn’t really focused on it and they didn’t realize it during COVID, that should be towards the top of your list forever.

For me, supply chain has become very big in the last two years. People have realized, if they didn’t already, that’s a critical thing.

We’re seeing chief HR officers actually getting appointed to boards now, which is a wonderful thing. If we didn’t appreciate our people before, we certainly want to appreciate them now when they’re so hard to find and retain, and that’s a wonderful value to bring to the board.

ESG was huge and growing before it’s taken off exponentially now with COVID, and ESG is so hard to describe because every board handles it differently. It might be in a different committee. Different industries think about it in different ways, and everybody can agree on what the letters are in a word, but how to go about doing it is changing so quickly as well, which is really fun for me. I would say those are some of the big ones that come off a lot with my guests.

Raza: Alexander, the next thing we wanted to do was it appears that the guests that have come on your Boardroom Bound podcast and our On Boards podcast have written many wonderful books. I wanted to go [00:18:00] through a list to plug in the great books that guests at our collective podcasts have written. Would you mind starting with a few and then I’ll add a few from the guests on our podcast.

Alexander: Sure. I’ll start with one related to COVID. I mentioned Dottie Schillinger before who was on our show in terms of diligence podcast. So they wrote a book called Governance in the Digital Age, and actually the timing was perfect as it came out just at the beginning of COVID. Their business has gone exponentially through the roof as more companies realized, “Wow, we need to be much more digital about how we do things in a boardroom and think about the board portal, the materials that are coming out.”

Their books has been really interesting, and I think I got her in the show maybe twice now, and what they do over there is really interesting.

Raza: The one that I’ll mentioned first is called Family Business Handbook; How to Build and Sustain a Successful Enduring Enterprise. It’s written by our wonderful guests, Rob Lachenauer and Josh Baron, published by Harvard Business Review. It’s a great book for family businesses and how to make them into an [00:19:00] enduring enterprise.

Joe: Yeah. And one that I’m going to talk about or want to mention is the Board Members Guide to Risk. We talk about how important risk is, and that is written by one of our former guests, David Koenig, who’s the founder of the DCRO, the Directors and Chief Risk Officers group. What he has done is, both in the book and through the DCRO, elevate the conversation about risk. And as we talked about earlier, it’s not just identifying, are we in danger of having something bad happen? Part of it is thinking about the notion of positive risk-taking, maybe we’re not taking enough risk, and that’s part of a more sophisticated analysis of what risk really means.

No question that COVID brought the whole concept of risk, which was always there and always important, but now it’s at the very top of mind. This is a great book for people that are interested in that.

Raza: Alexander, do you have another one?

Alexander: Yeah, I’ve got a couple more. I’ll talk about Sheryl Batchelder who has a book called Dare to [00:20:00] Serve, what she wrote when she was the CEO of Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen who engineered that turnaround, and she also brings in the perspective of a significant board member. She’s been on the boards of so many different ones, True Value, Pier One. US Foods, advisory board for Procter and Gamble, Chick-fil-A, so she’s got tons and tons of experience, and she brings all that together in her book. She was also a lot of fun. It was Episode 29 that she’s in.

Raza: The next one that I’ll mention is called High Performance Boards by our guest, Didier Cossin, and he calls himself the “board doctor.” This is a book that’s full of tools and processes for how boards can become much more effective. It’s just a great book, very practical, a handbook for helping boards become more effective.

Joe: I’m going to throw in Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business by Matt Blumberg, Matt and his book are, I think, phenomenal, and his book really reflects how he is operating the new company he started called [00:21:00] Bolster, and it’s a really thoughtful look at how to build the right kind of board for a startup, and it’s, I think, a very thoughtful approach.

Alexander: Another one that I would put out there, actually two, by Betsy Atkins, and she is, if my memory serves correctly, the second most tenured female board member in American history, and she’s got a couple of great books. One is called, Be Board Ready, and the other is Behind Boardroom Doors. You can imagine the two different perspectives on it. She was very early in my show. I think she was Episode number 30, so she didn’t share much of her background.

Joe: Wow. The last one I want to talk about is by our guest, Diane Hessan called Our Common Ground: Insights From Four Years of Listening to American Voters. It’s not about the boardroom, but it is a phenomenal book.

Alexander: One more I’d like to throw in that is near and dear to my heart would be by Mike Useem. He is my favorite professor back when I was at Wharton getting my MBA and he taught leadership, and his book is called Boards That Lead, and it’s a bestseller written with Ram Charan. If you know him, he’s another boardroom expert as [00:22:00] well. It was a lot of fun for me to have Mike on my show, I think it was Episode 113, and really, it’s just sort of almost brought me back in the classroom, listening to his expertise again.

Joe: Just for all our listeners, all of these books will be listed on our website with links to the books, so you can check them out. Now, favorite episodes, favorite guests, who have you liked? Whom you had the most fun with?

Raza: Or things that really stuck or really important, new and impactful.***

Alexander: There are a couple that come to mind that stick out forever, so I would say one of the fun ones for me was Peter Gleason, the CEO of NACD. It was a great fun to have him on the show. He just knows everything there is about boards. And I remember when I was prepping with his team, they’re like, “Okay, well, tell us the tough questions you’re going ask him.” I’m like, “No, I’m not going to ask him. I just want him to share his expertise with us.” It was great fun.

That ties in with another favorite episode of mine, I went to their annual summit. I recorded a live episode there, so that was with Tom Leopard and I’ll call it a bonus owed. It was my first bonus episode. I think it was around number 40 or something like that, and Tom is unbelievably [00:23:00]seasoned not only in the boardroom and having led several companies in the C-suite, but also he was the mayor of Dallas and he ran for Congress. He’s just a super nice guy as well, and he just knows everything about the board, so that was a lot of fun to do that live at NACD summit. When I saw Peter, I came up to him. He said, “I remember you. I remember you. We did that podcast together. Okay. This was not so bad.”

Another fun one that I would also recommend for all of the people listening to this, if you’re on that boardroom journey, trying to think how do I get better, Mark Pfister, our Episode 20 markup, is another boardroom expert. He does a lot of training around this. I tried a double episode, so Mark had so much content to give. I gave him two. We used to do a half hour. I gave him an hour and we still tried to pack everything he did. If you’re trying to figure out how do I pull altogether my materials, how do I interview, how do I do due diligence, Mark covers basically everything on that Episode 20, so that’s great fun. If you want to hear more, he does his sort of speeches all throughout the country and throughout the year as well.

Joe: Interesting. Earlier this season we had a guy named Marcus Peacock on. He’s the COO of the Business Roundtable and [00:24:00] just talking with him about the Business Roundtable, about the statement they put out four or five years ago now, but also about who their board is, consisting only of CEOs of some of the most well-known companies in the United States and how seriously they take their job. It was really, really interesting to look at and think about what CEOs want on the boards on which they serve, and really it was a good insight into what really is important when those folks are in the room together.

Raza: And Joe, for me, our most recent episode with our guest, Lisa Shalett was a jump out as well. She and her co-founder have gathered this great group called Extraordinary Women On Boards, EWOB, and we just had a tremendous conversation.

Joe: Yeah, I agree. I encourage people to check out Extraordinary Women On Boards, 500-plus women around the country and around the world [00:25:00] all on boards working together to be excellent board members and to really dive into the issues that will make their boards better. I agree. Good one, Raza. Excellent.

Raza: Alexander, to offer you the final word, what are your plans for the coming year for the Boardroom Bound Podcast? Are you evolving it in certain ways and taking a new direction?

Alexander: I’m listening to my audience’s feedback and trying to do things more intentionally for them. I’ve just, in the past, been able to have some of the most amazing people on the board, like Julie Daum, the world’s leading board headhunter, and be able to have conversations.

I’m trying to be a little bit more thematic now, so for example, the month of February, I want to have three leading voices of Black people in the boardroom to be able to use my platform to share with them. I use the three annual, I call it, military-type dates of Memorial Day, 4th of July, and Veterans Day to have semi-retired four-star generals who’ve gone from a battlefield to the boardroom, so doing more thematic things like that to use my platform, whether it’s promoting diversity, equity and inclusion or different ways, or we did some things for [00:26:00] Hispanic Heritage Month last year, we’re going to be a lot more thoughtful about how I align my guests with the calendar this year.

Joe: So, full speed ahead for ’22?

Alexander: I’m going to keep up with the weekly episodes. I’ve really enjoyed doing that. I love that you guys do two a month and you do these deep dives, which is wonderful. I know from some people, my audience, I regularly get this like, “I’m about to binge on more of your podcasts. Please keep it up.” I try to keep up with the weekly episodes as much as we can.

Joe: Well, that is great to hear. That’s really excellent.

Alexander, it’s been great speaking with you today. Thanks for joining us on On Boards, and thank you all for listening to On Boards with our special guest, Alexander Lowry.

Raza: We have a request for our listeners. Please take a moment to rate and review On Boards Podcast on Apple Podcast app if you enjoyed listening to it. It really helps others discover our podcast. Also, you can visit our website, onboardspodcast.com. That’s onboardspodcast.com. We’d love to hear your comments, suggestions, and feedback.

Joe: Please stay [00:27:00] safe and take care of yourselves, your families, and your communities as best you can. And Raza, you take care as well.

Raza: You too, Joe.

Joe: Thanks..