Built for Business Development

The CRM for business development, not just outbound sales.

Business development runs on 6-to-18-month cycles, 8-to-14 stakeholder maps, warm-introduction chains across companies, and deal shapes that do not fit a standard pipeline template. Strkr was built to track that work with the same seriousness as a six-figure direct ARR deal.

What this audience is actually dealing with

The pains that bring buyers here.

Business development looks nothing like SDR outbound and nothing like AE pipeline velocity work, which is why most CRMs treat the BD rep as a second-class user. The BD motion is slower, more relational, more cross-company, and more structurally weird than a direct sale. A single partnership opportunity can involve two or three partner companies, a dozen stakeholders across all of them, a warm-introduction chain that stretches back nine months, and a deal shape (co-sell split, revenue share, joint venture, resold OEM) that has no clean field on a standard CRM record. The five pains below show up on every BD-focused buyer call we run, from the partnerships lead at a 40-person Series B through the VP of Business Development at a public company. If any of them sound like the week you just had, the rest of the page shows how Strkr collapses the BD workflow back into a workspace that treats BD as the first-class motion it actually is.

Cycle length

A 12-month cycle does not fit a quarterly dashboard.

A BD deal spends 6 to 18 months in motion. The quarterly pipeline dashboard the CFO reads treats a BD opportunity like a stalled direct deal, which is wrong and politically expensive. Strkr lets BD leaders model stage velocity against a BD-specific baseline, flag deals that are actually stalled versus deals that are on-pace for a 14-month motion, and keep the finance review honest about what a healthy BD pipeline looks like inside a longer time horizon.

Stakeholder sprawl

Fourteen stakeholders across three companies, in a single deal.

A strategic partnership opportunity is not one buyer plus one or two influencers. It is a champion at the partner company, a sponsor at the customer, a lawyer on both sides, an IT lead who approves data access, a product lead who scopes the integration, a CFO who signs the revenue-share math, and often a parallel procurement thread. Strkr stakeholder maps let BD reps capture, visualize, and track every person in the deal with role, influence, and current temperature, so the deal review surfaces the right people instead of the loudest ones.

Intro-chain amnesia

The warm intro that opened the door six months ago is forgotten.

Half of every strategic BD deal starts with a warm introduction that chains through two or three people before landing on the real decision-maker. Six months later nobody remembers who made the intro, which means the thank-you note never gets sent, the referrer never gets credit, and the next referral request lands cold on someone who was never thanked for the first one. Strkr tracks the full introduction chain on the opportunity and the contact, so the thank-you flow, the referral tracking, and the long-memory relationship work happen on autopilot.

Deal-shape mismatch

Co-sell, revenue share, and joint venture do not fit a standard deal record.

A direct SaaS deal has one buyer, one seller, one price, one close date. A BD deal can be a co-sell split with a partner, a revenue-share agreement across two companies, a joint venture entity, a resold OEM arrangement, or a strategic investment with a commercial side-letter. Standard CRM deal records fit none of these shapes without duct tape. Strkr custom objects let BD teams model Partnerships, Co-Sell Deals, Revenue Share Agreements, and JV Entities as first-class records with their own fields, their own pipelines, and their own forecasts.

Forecast ambiguity

BD forecasts are built on signals, not stage math.

An AE forecast runs on close-stage, close-date, and stage-based probability. A BD forecast runs on signals: did the partner CEO take the call, did legal start redlining, did the exec sponsor stay through the handoff, did the pilot customer renew. These signals are qualitative and the standard forecast call treats them like garbage data. Strkr lets BD leaders weight signals as first-class forecast inputs so the exec review talks about the real drivers instead of a false-precision percentage dropdown.

Partnership vs direct motion

The partnership motion looks nothing like the AE motion.

A direct AE motion is a buyer discovery call, a demo, a proposal, a close. A partnership motion is relationship building that may not have a transaction attached for a year, trust-building across two companies, joint planning sessions, pilot co-selling, and only then a commercial contract. Treating BD like an AE pipeline makes the BD rep look like a bad AE and makes the real partnership work invisible to leadership. Strkr lets BD teams run a BD-specific pipeline with BD-specific stages, BD-specific activity types, and a BD-specific scorecard that measures the right work.

How Strkr models a BD deal

The data shapes a BD team actually needs.

Strkr ships with the standard CRM objects (accounts, contacts, deals, activities) and layers custom objects, custom fields, and custom pipelines on top, so a BD team can model the motion they actually run without ripping out the primitives their AE colleagues depend on. The cards below are the data primitives every BD team we onboard asks for in the first two weeks, and every one of them ships natively without the admin needing to write a line of code or stand up a parallel tool next to the CRM.

Partnership record

A first-class object for the partner relationship itself.

A partnership is not an account and not a deal. It is a relationship with its own lifecycle: scoping, pilot, launch, co-sell, renewal, wind-down. Strkr custom objects let BD teams create a Partnership record with its own fields (type, tier, co-sell motion, revenue-share split, legal status) and its own stages, linked to the partner account, the customer accounts in play, and the deals it generates.

Stakeholder map

Every person in the deal, with role and temperature.

A stakeholder map on the opportunity captures every person at every company involved, with their role (champion, sponsor, legal, procurement, technical approver, user), their influence level, and their current temperature. The BD rep updates the map after every meeting, the deal review reads it in 30 seconds, and the handoff to the AE at commercial-contract time arrives with the full org chart already drawn.

Introduction chain

How did we get here, and who do we owe.

Every opportunity record carries the introduction chain that opened it: the first referrer, the second referrer if applicable, and the touchpoints along the way. Strkr auto-generates a thank-you task when the deal closes, surfaces the referral credit on the referrer's contact record, and makes the long-memory relationship work visible so nobody falls out of the gratitude loop six months later.

Co-sell deal shape

The deal record fits the actual commercial structure.

For a co-sell motion, the Strkr deal record captures the partner on the deal, the split percentages, the primary seller, the fulfillment path, and the attribution rules. For a revenue-share arrangement, the record captures the term, the share percentages by milestone, and the measurement windows. For a JV, the record links the partnership entity. The commercial side of the deal is finally visible to finance and leadership without a side-spreadsheet.

BD pipeline

Stages that match the BD motion, not the AE motion.

A BD pipeline runs stages like Target Identified, Warm Intro Secured, First Meeting Held, Mutual Interest Confirmed, Scoping, Pilot, Commercial Negotiation, Signed. Strkr lets BD teams build their own pipeline alongside the AE pipeline, with its own stage velocities, its own conversion ratios, and its own forecast rules, so the BD scorecard measures BD work rather than reusing the direct-sales scorecard and finding BD short.

Activity types

The right verbs for a BD day.

A BD day runs on exec dinners, intro calls, joint planning sessions, deal reviews with the partner, legal redlines, and pilot kick-offs. Strkr custom activity types let the BD team log the real work with the real verbs, and the reporting layer reads activity by type so a leader can see the ratio of relationship-building hours to transactional hours per rep per week.

What Strkr automates for BD

The quiet administrative drag the CRM should handle.

BD reps lose hours a week to the quiet administrative work that nobody tracks: refreshing stakeholder temperature after a meeting, following up on an intro that went quiet, pinging the partner about the shared pilot customer, keeping the handoff clean when a BD opportunity becomes an AE deal. Strkr Flows handle the repeatable work so the BD rep spends their hours in the live conversations that need judgment. Each flow below is a native trigger-and-action pattern with no webhook plumbing, and each one ships on every paid tier with no add-on module gate.

Intro-chain thank-you

The referrer gets credit, every time.

When a BD opportunity closes won, Strkr auto-generates a thank-you task for the person who made the warm introduction that opened the deal, with the full context attached. The referrer's contact record gets a +1 referral count, the BD leader sees a top-referrers report at month-end, and the long-term relationship capital that funds the next five deals stays visible instead of evaporating into a thank-you nobody ever sent.

Stale-deal nudge

BD-aware stall detection, tuned to a 12-month cycle.

A BD deal that goes quiet for 14 days is not stalled. A BD deal that goes quiet for 60 days during the active commercial-negotiation stage is a problem. Strkr lets BD leaders set per-stage dormancy thresholds that match the BD motion, so the stall nudges only fire when a deal is actually at risk and the BD rep stops getting pinged on healthy 90-day scoping conversations.

Stakeholder refresh

After every meeting, the map updates.

After a logged meeting on a BD opportunity, Strkr prompts the rep to refresh the stakeholder temperature for every attendee. One click per person, three temperature levels, done in 30 seconds. The map stays current across a 10-month deal, and the deal review two months from now reads a map the rep did not have to spend a Sunday evening rebuilding.

Partner-side ping

The shared pilot customer gets a joint check-in.

When a co-sell pilot customer hits a milestone (contract signed, pilot started, first value event, pilot ended), Strkr fires a joint check-in flow: a task for the Strkr BD rep, a notification for the partner contact (via email or Slack if the partner has a shared workspace), and a timeline note on the Partnership record. The pilot stays co-owned instead of quietly becoming a one-sided account the partner stops caring about.

BD-to-AE handoff

When a partnership turns into a direct deal, the AE walks in briefed.

When a BD opportunity moves to the Commercial Negotiation stage, Strkr routes the deal to the appropriate AE based on territory or named-account coverage, with the full history attached: the stakeholder map, the introduction chain, the partnership context, the last 12 months of logged activity. The AE walks into the first commercial call fully briefed instead of asking the BD rep to re-explain the deal, and the handoff friction that kills BD deals at the AE border quietly disappears.

Quarterly partnership review

The partner QBR assembles itself.

Once a quarter, Strkr auto-generates a partnership review packet for every active Partnership record: deals in flight, deals closed, pilot status, open blockers, next-quarter joint plan. The BD rep edits, the partner contact reviews, the joint plan ships. The QBR that used to take a Sunday afternoon of slide-building now takes 30 minutes of real editing on a packet the CRM assembled from live data.

What the BD leader sees

Forecasting the ambiguous pipeline.

A BD leader's hardest job is forecasting a pipeline where stage-math does not work and signals matter more than probability percentages. Strkr gives BD leaders a scorecard and forecast surface built for signals, long cycles, and relational motion, with the same filters available to the rep and the leader so coaching stays grounded in the same data. The views below are shipped as default saved views for the BD leader role on every tenant, and the signal-weighting is tunable per team so a channel-partnership team and a strategic-deals team can model their forecasts differently.

Signal-weighted forecast

Forecast on what actually moves a BD deal.

Instead of a stage-probability percentage dropdown, BD leaders tag deals with signal booleans: partner CEO engaged, legal redline started, exec sponsor confirmed, pilot customer renewed, integration scoped. Strkr weights each signal by historical correlation to close, so the forecast number reflects the real drivers and the exec review talks about the right conversations instead of debating a false-precision number.

Pipeline by partnership

Deals grouped by the partnership that generated them.

Standard pipeline views group by rep, stage, or close month. A BD pipeline view groups by Partnership, so the leader sees the deals in flight per partnership relationship, the win-rate per partnership, and the revenue attributed per partnership over 12 and 24 months. The next partnership-investment decision runs on real attribution data instead of on who the loudest internal advocate is.

Rep scorecard

BD-specific activity ratios, not AE call counts.

A BD rep's weekly scorecard measures the right verbs: exec meetings held, joint planning sessions run, partner-side intros secured, stakeholder-map refreshes, signal-level advances. Call-count dashboards get replaced with ratios that measure relationship capital built per week, so the leader coaches on the actual BD motion and the rep is measured on the work they are actually paid to do.

Stuck-deal view

BD-aware stall detection in a single pane.

The leader's stuck-deal saved view surfaces every BD opportunity past its per-stage dormancy threshold, with the stakeholder map, the last activity, and the signal status on the row. One click to assign a coaching task, one click to escalate, one click to clear the flag. The thresholds are tunable per stage so a 60-day Scoping stage and a 14-day Commercial Negotiation stage can live on the same board without false alarms.

Attribution report

Which partnerships funded this quarter.

A rollup report at the end of the quarter shows direct revenue, co-sell revenue, and revenue-share revenue by Partnership. The BD leader walks into the board review with a clear answer to "which partnerships paid for themselves this quarter" instead of a hand-wavy slide about relationship capital. Compounding partnership investments become visible, under-performing ones become visible, and the next-year BD budget conversation runs on data.

Introduction-chain analysis

The hidden network behind the pipeline.

A graph view surfaces the top referrers across the whole BD pipeline: who opened the most doors, which referrers have the highest close-rate on their introductions, and which long-dormant relationships are overdue for a check-in. The BD leader runs a quarterly check-in cadence against the top 20 referrers that funds the next year of pipeline, and the long-memory relationship work becomes a managed asset rather than a lucky accident.

Where BD plugs into the rest of the business

The seams where BD lives next to AEs, Marketing, and Partnerships Ops.

BD does not live alone. BD lives next to the AE team on commercial handoff, next to Marketing on co-marketing campaigns, next to Partnerships Ops on legal and finance mechanics, and next to the Product team on integration scoping. Strkr is the shared workspace for all four seams so the BD rep is not the human glue between four tools and four teams.

AE seam

Commercial handoff with full history attached.

When a BD opportunity hits commercial negotiation, the handoff to the AE is a stage change, not a Slack novel. The AE inherits the stakeholder map, the introduction chain, the partnership context, and 12 months of logged activity. The AE is briefed before they walk in, the BD rep stays attached as a secondary owner for the lifetime of the account, and the quiet handoff friction that kills BD deals at the AE border stops costing deals.

Marketing seam

Co-marketing campaigns that attribute both sides.

A co-marketing push with a partner (joint webinar, joint content, joint event) creates leads that should attribute to both the partnership and the marketing team. Strkr tracks the campaign on the Partnership record and on the marketing campaign record, with dual attribution on every lead. The next partnership-marketing-mix decision runs on data instead of on which team filed the louder recap deck.

Partnerships Ops seam

Legal and finance work, inside the deal.

A BD deal is a legal workflow and a finance workflow as much as a sales workflow. Strkr lets Partnerships Ops attach contract redlines, finance side-letters, and compliance docs directly to the deal record with versioning, so the legal thread and the finance thread are visible on the opportunity instead of living in a shared drive nobody opens.

Product seam

Integration scoping, co-owned with the Product team.

A co-sell partnership often requires a technical integration. Strkr lets BD tag Product on the deal, attach a scoping record (which maps to a project on the Projects module), and route scope-sign-off tasks to the right product lead. The integration either ships on time or the delay is visible on the deal, instead of being hand-waved in a quarterly all-hands.

Finance seam

Revenue-share math that reconciles.

A revenue-share deal generates a stream of invoiceable moments that finance has to reconcile. Strkr lets BD capture the share terms on the deal, generate the reconciliation events as revenue lands, and expose the data to finance's own ledger so the monthly close does not turn into a treasure hunt through five email threads with the partner.

Executive seam

Executive sponsor relationships, tracked explicitly.

Strategic BD runs on executive-to-executive relationships that nobody except the exec remembers to log. Strkr lets BD maintain an Exec Sponsor Map that pairs internal executives with external counterparts, tracks the cadence of exec-to-exec touchpoints, and nudges the internal exec with a reminder when a touchpoint is overdue. The exec relationship capital stays alive instead of silently decaying between quarterly flights.

Head-to-head

Strkr for BD vs Salesforce + LinkedIn Sales Navigator + spreadsheets.

Most BD teams run a direct-sales CRM they outgrew, a professional network tool for the people side, and a stack of spreadsheets for the parts the CRM cannot model: stakeholder maps, intro chains, co-sell splits, revenue-share math, partnership attribution. The stack works until it does not, and the moment it breaks is usually the moment a big deal is in motion and nobody can find the thread. Strkr collapses the shape of the work into one workspace.

Feature Strkr Salesforce + LinkedIn Sales Navigator + spreadsheets
Partnership as a first-class object Native custom object with its own lifecycle and fields Overloaded Account record or spreadsheet
Stakeholder map on the opportunity Native, visual, updated in a click Separate spreadsheet, maintained by hand
Introduction-chain tracking Native, with referrer credit and thank-you flows Nowhere, or a note field nobody reads
Co-sell deal shape Native fields for partner, split, attribution Workaround with custom fields and side-spreadsheets
Revenue-share accounting Native terms and reconciliation events on the deal External spreadsheet owned by finance
BD-specific pipeline stages Separate pipeline alongside the AE pipeline Shared pipeline, BD looks like a slow AE
Signal-weighted forecast Native, signal booleans weighted by historical close rate Stage-probability dropdown, false precision
Per-stage dormancy thresholds Tunable per stage, matched to BD cycle One global stall rule, mis-fires on long stages
Partnership attribution report Native rollup by Partnership record Pivot table in a spreadsheet
Exec sponsor cadence tracking Native Exec Sponsor Map with cadence reminders Not tracked, decays silently
BD-to-AE handoff Stage change, full history auto-attached Slack novel, context lost on the way across
Introduction-chain thank-you flow Auto-generated on close won Depends on the rep remembering six months later
How teams use Strkr

How BD teams run Strkr.

The patterns below show up across BD teams of different shapes: a two-person strategic partnerships team at a Series B, a channel organization at a public software company, an M&A development function at a mid-market industrial. The common thread is the same: model the real shape of the work, automate the quiet administrative drag, and give the leader a forecast surface that reads signals rather than stage math. Each playbook is a real motion a Strkr BD team runs today.

2-person strategic partnerships team

Partnership object, intro-chain tracking, exec sponsor map.

A two-person strategic partnerships team at a 90-person software company runs Strkr with a Partnership custom object, intro-chain tracking on every opportunity, and an Exec Sponsor Map pairing their CEO with the counterpart at each top-10 partner. The thank-you flow fires automatically on every closed deal, the exec sponsor cadence runs on a 90-day reminder, and the quarterly partnership review packet assembles itself from live data. The team runs 14 active partnerships without a dedicated ops hire.

12-person channel organization

Co-sell pipeline, partner-side pings, dual-attribution campaigns.

A 12-person channel team at a public software company runs a co-sell pipeline with 300 active deals in flight at any moment. The pipeline uses co-sell deal shapes with partner, split, and attribution captured on every record. Partner-side pings fire on every pilot milestone to keep the joint customer co-owned. Co-marketing campaigns attribute to both the partnership and the marketing team, so the next-year joint marketing plan runs on data instead of politics. Attribution reports show which partnerships paid for themselves and which did not, and the next-year partnership investment list writes itself.

BD function at a Series B platform

BD-to-AE handoff with full history, zero re-explanation.

A BD function at a Series B platform company runs a BD pipeline that feeds the AE pipeline on commercial handoff. When a BD opportunity hits commercial negotiation, the deal routes to the AE with the stakeholder map, intro chain, and 12 months of activity attached. The AE walks in briefed, the BD rep stays attached as a secondary owner for the lifetime of the account, and the handoff friction that used to lose deals at the border stops costing revenue. The BD scorecard measures BD verbs (exec meetings, joint planning, intros secured) rather than mimicking the AE call-count scorecard.

M&A development at a mid-market industrial

Target pipeline, long-dormancy thresholds, strategic signal tracking.

An M&A development function at a mid-market industrial company runs a target pipeline with a 24-month cycle, per-stage dormancy thresholds tuned to the long motion, and signal tracking on strategic indicators (ownership-transition signals, financial-stress signals, strategic-fit signals). The pipeline looks nothing like a direct-sales pipeline and the forecast runs on signals rather than stage math. Two acquisitions closed in year one from a pipeline that would have looked completely stalled on a direct-sales CRM.

Joint venture motion at a healthcare group

JV entity records, revenue-share reconciliation, legal thread co-ownership.

A healthcare group running joint-venture partnerships with regional practices uses Strkr JV Entity records to model each joint venture as a first-class object with its own lifecycle, revenue-share terms, and legal-thread history. The monthly reconciliation events flow to the finance team's ledger, the quarterly JV review packet assembles itself, and the legal thread for each JV lives on the entity record instead of in a shared drive nobody opens. The group runs 18 active JVs with one BD lead and a part-time Partnerships Ops hire.

See the CRM built for business development, not retrofitted for it.

Start a 14-day trial with the BD stack enabled: Partnership custom objects, stakeholder maps, intro-chain tracking, signal-weighted forecast, BD-specific pipeline and scorecard, revenue-share and co-sell deal shapes. Model the real shape of your BD work in the first afternoon, keep every record from your current CRM on the way in, and let the AE team keep running their motion on the same shared workspace without disruption. The pricing page lays out the per-seat line in full, and the custom-objects feature page shows the data-modeling framework the whole BD motion rides on.

Common questions

What buyers in this bucket ask most.

What flavor of business development is this page for?

This page targets the strategic partnerships, channel, and complex-deal flavor of business development: long cycles, multi-stakeholder deals across companies, warm-introduction chains, and non-standard commercial structures (co-sell, revenue share, joint venture, OEM resale, strategic investment with a commercial side). It is not the outbound-SDR flavor of BD that some companies call "business development representative", and if that is your motion, the SDR page is the better fit. The two motions overlap in that both work pipelines, but the daily work, the deal shapes, the forecast surface, and the leader scorecards are different enough that treating them as the same role in a CRM leaves both teams underserved.

How does Strkr model a partnership as a distinct object from an account or a deal?

A Partnership record in Strkr is a custom object with its own lifecycle (scoping, pilot, launch, co-sell, renewal, wind-down), its own fields (type, tier, co-sell motion, revenue-share split, legal status, exec sponsor pairing), and its own pipeline. It links to the partner account, to the customer accounts in play, and to the deals it has generated. BD teams model partnerships as first-class relationships rather than overloading the Account object or hiding partnership context in a text field on a deal. The custom object framework is a core Strkr capability, so partnerships, co-sell deals, JV entities, revenue-share agreements, and any other BD-specific shape can be modeled without engineering help.

Does Strkr handle warm-introduction chain tracking and referrer thank-yous?

Yes. Every opportunity record carries an introduction chain field that captures the full path from the first referrer to the decision-maker, including intermediate touchpoints. When the deal closes won, Strkr auto-generates a thank-you task for the person who made the opening introduction, with the full deal context attached. The referrer's contact record accumulates a referral count, and the BD leader can run a top-referrers report to see which long-dormant relationships funded the quarter and which are overdue for a check-in. The long-memory relationship work that funds the next five deals becomes a managed, visible asset instead of a lucky accident that depends on one BD rep's personal notebook.

Can Strkr forecast a BD pipeline that does not fit stage-based probability?

Yes. BD leaders can replace the stage-probability dropdown with signal booleans: partner CEO engaged, legal redline started, exec sponsor confirmed, pilot customer renewed, integration scoped, commercial terms agreed in principle. Strkr weights each signal by its historical correlation to a closed deal in the tenant's own history, so the forecast number reflects the real drivers of a BD deal and the exec forecast call talks about the right conversations rather than debating a false-precision percentage. The signal catalog is tunable per team, so a strategic-partnerships team and a channel team can weight different signals, and the forecast surface treats BD's qualitative data as first-class rather than as noise.

How does Strkr handle revenue-share, co-sell, and JV deal shapes?

The native deal record carries fields for partner, split percentage, primary seller, and attribution rules, so a co-sell deal is a native shape rather than a workaround. For revenue-share arrangements, the record captures term, share percentages by milestone, and measurement windows, with reconciliation events generated as revenue lands. For joint ventures, Strkr lets BD teams create a JV Entity custom object with its own lifecycle and legal-thread history, linked to the deals and partnerships that feed it. The commercial side of a BD deal is finally visible on the CRM record rather than in a side-spreadsheet owned by finance, and the monthly close stops being a treasure hunt through email threads with the partner.

How does the BD-to-AE handoff work when a partnership becomes a direct deal?

When a BD opportunity hits the Commercial Negotiation stage, Strkr routes the deal to the AE based on territory or named-account coverage, with the full history auto-attached: the stakeholder map, the introduction chain, the partnership context, the exec sponsor pairing, and 12 months of logged activity. The AE walks into the first commercial call fully briefed instead of asking the BD rep to re-explain the deal, and the BD rep stays attached as a secondary owner on the account for its lifetime so the relationship context does not disappear once the commercial thread opens. The handoff friction that quietly kills BD deals at the AE border stops costing deals.

How does the BD scorecard differ from the AE scorecard?

A BD scorecard measures the right verbs for a BD motion: exec meetings held, joint planning sessions run, partner-side introductions secured, stakeholder-map refreshes completed, signal-level advances on active deals, exec sponsor touchpoints kept on cadence. Call-count dashboards and dial-count metrics get replaced with ratios that measure relationship capital built per week. The BD leader coaches on the actual BD motion, the BD rep is measured on the work they are actually paid to do, and the direct-sales leader is not surprised when the BD team's activity profile looks nothing like the AE team's. The scorecard is a saved view the BD leader can duplicate and tune per team.

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