Before we got involved in the project, the City of New York was already thinking about doing this. There was some preliminary work before we got involved, which made our lives somewhat easier, at least faster. Nevertheless, I would say that from the time we shook hands with New York City, it was about a year before we got the thing up and running on a pilot stage. A lot had to go on in that year.
The most important thing, probably, was to figure out the costs and savings, the term sheet, which is the critical piece that you have to pull together for this thing. We didn't want to talk to investors until government had blessed what we had come up with. Fortunately New York City has good data about the costs of beds and the costs of recidivism, plus we did some pretty good diligence around what interventions were returning on investments that were cognitive behaviorally based.
By putting those two things together—but it still took probably two to three months—we came up with something that we could take to the market and say that we thought this was credible. It was definitely worth testing, and we thought we could possibly get these results. Once we started, we did a pilot for about four to six months in which we ran the project at half scale. I have to say that even beyond the pilot phase, we've still been tinkering. Unless you do something at scale, you can't really....
So, yes, there was a pretty long overture before things started.