 All right. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the grand opening and ribbon cutting of all good books here in the Five Points District. Thank you all for coming. This is by far the best turnout we have had for a business opening yet, I guarantee you. My name is Ryan Coleman. I'm the Economic Development Director for the City of Columbia, and I'm going to introduce our speaker lineup real quick. Briefly, before I go through that lineup, I wanted to give a good thanks to our city departments and business associations who help us put these together. There's a lot of logistics that goes on behind the scenes with this. So city public relations, our parking department, our parks and rec folks who get these equipment out here for us. We come through and do the sidewalks, sidewalks, check everything out, and then our business association partners, Five Points and all the others as well. It takes a lot of work and collaboration to do this, but I just wanted to thank the people behind the scenes who helped out with that. With that, our speaker lineup today, providing our welcoming remarks will be Councilman Will Brennan of District 3 of Columbia. Followed by him, we will have County Councilwoman, Ms. Allison Terracia will come up and speak as well, followed by Mayor Daniel Rickerman. Ashley Lindler, the Board Secretary of the Five Points Association will follow her, and then we'll have remarks from the store personnel. So Ruth Smirrell, the store manager for All Good Books. Jared Johnson, All Good Books advisory board member. And then finally, the stars of today, Clint Wallace and Ben Adams, the co-owners of All Good Books. Councilman Brennan, come with us. How about this turn now? We are on a hot streak in Five Points. This is amazing, y'all. It's great to see so many familiar faces and all these familiar faces. Clint Jenner team here at All Good Books. The crowdfunding, the energy, you can tell it's coming to a head and this is great. We are excited about this day. Just want to point out a couple of things. We are in historic Five Points, our little village down here. And I want to thank you, Clint and team, for bringing the shine back to this beautiful old building. And we appreciate it so much. The adaptive reuse, it's a great fit. It's a unique fit for Five Points in this block. And we're just so excited. The architect, Dewey Irvin, if you need an architect, there he is right there. Wonderful historic art. And my dad's an architect, so I'm sorry. I'm promoting somebody else. And Janie Campbell and her team, with all the historic, y'all are a great resource to Clint and his team to bring all this back. But it's a big day. We are open, as the mayor keeps saying, and we are so confident in the growth, the continued growth that's coming to Five Points. So thanks again, and I'm going to turn it over to Councilwoman Teresio. Hi, everybody. How exciting it is to have another amazing business open right here in Five Points. I almost wore my swift gear today, just so I could represent. This is a really, really exciting time. And I can see the excitement in everyone's faces. I can see people from all over. And people who are just ready to get in and buy some books and read. So I'll just encourage you all to come around, come down here, spend some money, and then really carve out some time for yourself to spend some good time with a book. It really does enrich your life, it enriches your heart, it enriches all of us. And then we come back together in conversation with something great to talk about. And that's what this is really all about. This village really is about bringing people together in all kinds of ways. And I'm so grateful, and I want to extend a hearty congratulations from Richland County Council to everyone involved in the opening of this business. Thanks, everybody. Have a great day. Well, it's a great day in the capital city. You know, once again, we have an opening. We've had over 1,100 business openings over the last 14 months. We've probably done, I don't know, 50, 60 ribbon-cutting. I will tell you, I'm not sure that we've ever had a ribbon-cutting or an opening with these many people here excited about a business. And I think that says a lot. You know, for me, it's a little nostalgic to walk into this place and not be getting a pizza and a salad with a ton of feta cheese on it. You know, the Parthenon was a staple of my diet back in the day here at Five Points. But Five Points is evolving. We made a commitment to bring this village back up. And that's what's happening today in so many small businesses with a mix of other companies coming here, looking here and being part of this community day to day. We're going to continue to invest in our small businesses, make it easy for them to do business, open up and be part of it. I have to say, though, Ruth corrupted me as a young man in the cigar world and some other places as well. So now she's going to help me recreate those brain cells I lost with some good books and get my cooking skills back up. But I encourage y'all. I think I've made a purchase. I encourage every one of y'all to make a purchase. Have their opening day biggie the biggest and strongest day that they have. Is that Ashley? Hey guys, I'm Ashley Lindler with the Five Points Association. And Ben and Clint, I just want to welcome you to the neighborhood. This is truly a family. All of us, we work together. And we are just so thankful that you chose Five Points to come to. Columbia has been missing an independent bookstore for quite some time. And the fact that you chose to bring it here to our family, we're so thankful for that. And we know that you are going to be so successful and you're going to bring just even more community here, which is what we're all about. So welcome and thank you for joining us and we know you're going to have such huge success. Good morning everyone. Thank y'all for coming out today. I really appreciate it. We all appreciate it. This has been an exciting experience for me. I've been in the book business for like 40 years and I've worked a little bit of here, a little bit of there. But if someone just pointed out to me this morning, will point it out to me, I might be the only person who's had two different bookstores in Five Points. I used to work at Intermezzo, which is next door to GoFo. There's many, many years ago where I corrupted people with cigars and was owned to smoke them myself occasionally. But it was a blast and it feels like it's coming home now to be back here again. And the neighborhood has changed so much. It's coming up. We're getting more businesses in here and it's just so refreshing to see all that. But All Good Books is a dream come true for all of us. And so I hope you'll make it a part of your daily itinerary to drop by and see us on a regular basis, bring your children to our story hours, come hang out with us and have a beer with us in the afternoon, and just make us your second home. Thank you so much for being here today. All Good Books is not just a space to purchase books. It isn't just a space for folks to come and read and have a glass of wine. All Good Books is a space and place of community. I'm very grateful to Clint Wallace and Jenna Wallace for trusting me in the vision I have for what I call the Soda City Series. The Soda City Series will be an ongoing series of conversations between two city leaders. These leaders will discuss the book of their choice and have a free and open dialogue about the themes and topics of that book. The goal is for the public to learn more about a particular book and more about the two individuals who will be dialoguing. There will be an opportunity for series attendees to ask questions. We put a great list of folks together and you will definitely want to come out and hear these leaders talk about books. And hopefully the dialogue from the series encourages you and everyone to purchase books from All Good Books. There are more details coming very soon as it relates to the series book. Go ahead and get ready and start talking about it and preparing your calendars. Thank you all for being here and I would never want to take anyone's time for granted so I look forward to having your support for the store and the Soda City Series. Thank you. With that, Ben, come on up whoever is going to speak in front of the group. Alright, well thank you everyone for being here. This really is a community endeavor. That's how we see this business, that's how we see this space. It's supposed to be a place where all of you come and spend valuable time learning about the world and learning about each other. And that's what books are for and that's what this bookstore is for. So we're really excited about it. You have to humor me for a little bit to thank a few, well a few many people. So first of all, the ownership group and the advisory board and all of the Kickstarter supporters, we really could not have done this without this level of support and this breadth of support. So it's really meaningful and from the bottom of our hearts really thank you for everything you've done. There are a few specific people without whom this just would not have happened. First, Ryan and Greg and their team at the City, your help has been tremendous and very much appreciated. And that goes from the leadership on down so we appreciate you and that's been really incredible. Larry and Jeremiah and the team at McCrory, they got this building from a place that was really scary. We found something called Foundation Damage Caused by Well Vodka, which is a surprising thing. Janie Campbell and Dewey Irvin who had the design and historic eye on all of the details here, which we really appreciate for the historic rehabilitation. Maria DeFeliz is the artist who painted the mural inside and also did our beautiful logo. She's not here this morning, but she is amazing and you should follow her work and we really appreciate her. Derek Rosenbaum and Jared Johnson are our advisory board information and part of our ownership group as well and we could not be more thankful to them and their input and help throughout sort of figuring out what this store would look like and what the space would look like. I'm almost done, I promise. Last of all and most important, Raven McCrory contributed money and time and effort and she is, everyone I've just listed is a, I have called them our secret weapons and Raven is our super secret weapon who she got us to this moment and we're very appreciative. So with all that, thank you for humoring all of that, we appreciate all of you and thanks for being here and we're really excited to get this started so let's do it. Okay, I'll say a couple words real quick and then we can get on with it. I guess I should speak to the transition from Odd Bird. I see a lot of people from kind of my Odd Bird community here. Yeah, so speaking personally, when I started that store a few years ago, I did it by myself, I had my family, but really that was kind of it and a lot of that time was pretty lonely. So I'll say like I never feel lonely here, which is, yeah, in large part because of the family I have here, Raven and Ruth, Clint, Jenna, I also have my partner Carly, my family, so I want to thank all of those people and then broadly I want to thank again all the Odd Bird customers. I see a lot of people here who I met just through that store who are now... I guess I should speak to the transition from Odd Bird. I see a lot of people from kind of my Odd Bird community here. Yeah, so speaking personally, when I started that store a few years ago, I did it by myself, I had my family, but really that was kind of it and a lot of that time was pretty lonely. So I'll say like I never feel lonely here, which is, yeah, in large part because of the family I have here, Raven and Ruth, Clint, Jenna, I also have my partner Carly, my family, so I want to thank all of those people and then broadly I want to thank again all the Odd Bird customers. I see a lot of people here who I met just through that store who are now... God, I want to say hi to everybody. Yeah, so I want to thank everyone who's been here with me from a few years ago, everyone who's been in on the Kickstarter or already stopped by these past few weeks that we've been kind of soft opening at just like a different level of softness every day it seems like. But so now we're really, really open as soon as I get out of the way of the door and we move the podium. So I'm going to do that and then you guys please come in. And yeah, thanks for being with us from the beginning. Thanks for being with us today and I hope we'll see you with us for the foreseeable future. So thank you everybody.