Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Ian Corydon - B. Riley & Company,
Ian Corydon - B. Riley & Company
I am trying to reconcile the commentary about managing the business based on fewer attendee days and then some of the cost cutting you mentioned, but then the commentary, also, that you are going to maintain most of your sales and marketing programs, given that sales and marketing is one of your biggest expense items, just having trouble reconciling those comments.
Nicholas R. Schacht
What we are looking to do is continue to manage all of our cost areas as effectively as possible. Certainly sales and marketing is one of our biggest expense items but you will also note that we have made, over the last couple of years, a series of barely substantial reductions in our costs associated with direct marketing.
What we are doing now is evaluating how our increased investment in sales people over the last year is continuing to play out in the current situation, because things have changed very quickly over the last couple of months, and until we are confident that we have a good handle on that, I am not comfortable making wholesale reductions in our sales activity.
One of the things that we would obviously want to be certain that we would do would be to be able maintain the maximum possible revenue streams, getting the obviously appropriate returns from our sales and marketing resources.
Ian Corydon - B. Riley & Company
So it sounds like you are holding sales and marketing in the short term. Do you have a sense for would it be at the end of the second quarter of 2009, or do you have a sense if you can make an adjustment there?
Nicholas R. Schacht
We will continue to look at it. I can’t say that it would be even as long as the end of the second quarter. We are looking at the business every single week and looking at what new we learn and what changes we see. We want to make sure that the entire business is the right size for the amount of business that we are doing.
Based on the current business levels, the work forced changes that we made last month have made the business the right size for the amount of business we have coming in, but if those conditions continue to change we will make whatever further adjustments become necessary as soon as we become aware of them.
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