William J. DeLaney
Analyst
No, we didn't. I mean, that's very fair, we didn't. And again, I would just repeat what I said a moment ago that, that has not escaped us. And we thought we were beginning to make some progress, but as the quarter unfolded, June in particular, we fell back there. So the way we're structured today, John, there's 2 ways to go at it. One is to continue to standardize and centralize more and more of what we're doing in terms of how we source the product, how we work through category management, how we create [ph] transfer pricing within the company to give our operating companies and our sales people as true a cost as we can and as competitive a cost as we can to price off of over time. Driving out these initial waves in category management will help us a great deal. And as I just alluded to, there are some other things we just need to do over time, very early days, very early exploratory work, where we need to bring more consistency to how we price. Not take pricing -- so think about it this way. A little under half of our revenue stream is priced by our marketing associates, so they have a fair amount of latitude there. And we want that because they're dealing with different customers at different points in time with different priorities, so we don't want to overly limit their latitude. At the same time, if you could see what we see, which I'm not going to let you see totally, there's a fair amount of volatility in those -- in that pricing that doesn't need to be there. And so I think not so much this year but over the next 2 to 3 years, we have an opportunity to standardize that with some things like scientific pricing, I will use that term for today, but there's other things as well. And so the idea would be to take some of the volatility out of the pricing, have more consistency, but still position that marketing associate to adapt to the needs of the customer locally. We don't want to move away from that because that is our bread and butter, and that really is part of how we think we differentiate ourselves. But no doubt about it, tough quarter, tough couple of quarters, and we're just going to have to dig ourselves out of it. And as I mentioned in my script, I think that gradually, you'll see the trends improve. And look, the bottom line here, John, is we need to do all that and continue to grow the top line and take cost out of the business.