[00:00:00.000] - Brandon
What up, amigo?
[00:00:01.120] - Chris
What up?
[00:00:01.870] - Brandon
What up?
[00:00:02.610] - Chris
Changing it up.
[00:00:04.800] - Brandon
Yeah. Dude, I watched this. Do you ever watch Parks and Rec?
[00:00:09.580] - Chris
Yes.
[00:00:10.460] - Brandon
I can't remember what episode it was, but it's when... I'm going to brain fart everybody's name. What's the guy that she likes? I'm totally destroying this. Anyways, it's a bad story. Long story short, it's this key leader. He finds out that all his interns, he's responsible for this big pile of intern staff. Yeah. He finds out that every single one of the interns is actually connected directly family-wise to senators and congressmen and women. They're all these people's kids, basically. He's all really pissed off, and he's about to can them all. Then he finds out that he can't, basically. He has this moment where he begins acting super cool and trying to be connected with everybody. He's making all these old-school references to shows and content that all the kids have no idea. He's like, He's like, Rendo, Rendominium, how you doing? It's like, they don't even have a clue who the fudge he's talking about. Anyways, let's get to business here, man.
[00:01:10.300] - Chris
That's funny, dude.
[00:01:11.020] - Brandon
I don't know why you're taking your time talking about bull crap.
[00:01:13.150] - Chris
I feel like I've had a hundred of those conversations with my children.
[00:01:17.100] - Brandon
It's what made me think about it is how out of touch you end up being and you don't know it. Exactly. You try to connect in quotes with the younger crowd and you realize I'm way than I want to admit.
[00:01:32.190] - Chris
Anyway, it's true. There we go. I'm feeling more and more of that as time goes by. I was just hanging out, actually last night with a couple of business buddies of mine that are in their mid-30s.
[00:01:39.350] - Brandon
Oh, my gosh.
[00:01:40.780] - Chris
It's just like...
[00:01:42.760] - Brandon
Yeah. Exactly. It's different. Well, it just reminds me of our guy Wayne. I think Wayne's 29. Yeah, it's crazy. I was like, dude, if I was half as smart as him at 29. I know, dude. I'm not even sure where I'd be. I know. I mean, he's brilliant. Yeah. Anyways. Yeah, it's true.
[00:01:58.440] - Chris
It's true. Okay, we got a great show today. This is number two with Mr. Alex Duda. Yeah. And so this is making Alex Duda Part Two. I guess there's our title. Yeah. Alex, man, he's a fascinating dude. I think one of the things I appreciate about him is, and I hate to say, especially at his age, but it is pretty remarkable what this guy's achieved. But I think the more impressive thing to me is not necessarily what he's done in terms of dollars and how many businesses or whatever he's built. It's I appreciate how thoughtful he is. I think he's keyed in on some things in his life, certainly at an earlier age than I have. I think just puts him out in front a bit, especially in his age group. There's just so much to be learned from how he's ordering his life and the way he thinks about the work and the way he's thinking about his family. I just think it's a great listen for any business owner, certainly, but also any just aspiring leader. For those of you out there that are, quote, young, whatever that means to you, I think you'll find it really inspiring.
[00:03:03.100] - Chris
If you miss the first part with Alex, should you go back to making Alex Duda part one?
[00:03:09.310] - Brandon
Yeah, build on each other. They really do.
[00:03:11.040] - Chris
Yeah. We talk about just some... A lot of lifestyle stuff comes up, and I think we don't talk enough about this. I was having a similar conversation with my buddies last night around the fire. It's just we don't talk about these inner things as much. We don't talk about how we're approaching our family life and just how important and integrated that is with how we do business. We get into all that with him.
[00:03:32.890] - Brandon
Yeah. He reminds me a lot of Zack over at Liftify, where you got two men who are really proactive in all the quadrants of their life, not just winning at work or professionally, but they're very intentional about how they carry some of those disciplines and those prioritizations over in their personal life. I think, again, you never know for sure. But I see a guy that's doing the best he absolutely can to be winning in all quadrants at the same time. And I think that's worth taking note of and paying attention to, because I think all of us can use some hacks to get better at doing those things in conjunction with one another.
[00:04:10.560] - Chris
Yeah. So here we go. Hope you enjoy the show. Wow. How many of you have listened to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast? I can't tell you that reaction, how much that means to us. Welcome back to the Head, Heart, and Boots podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:04:23.500] - Brandon
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we lead. This new camera angle makes my arms look smaller than yours.
[00:04:33.380] - Chris
I'm noticing that, and I really appreciate it.
[00:04:35.460] - Brandon
I thought you did that on purpose. No, I don't. I didn't, and I am not happy with it. Hey, all, thanks so much for listening to the show. Hey, if you're not already following, Please do so and ultimately share. The coolest currency that we have in terms of supporting this is share it with a friend, share it with somebody, a colleague, a peer, one of your downline team members. Let them be able to take advantage of the information you're already leveraging in your And finally, guys, if you hear a show that really moves you, that really moves the needle, will you please leave us a review? Those five-star reviews help us a ton.
[00:05:10.250] - Chris
Right on. And listen, if you're trying to grow your business, you might consider checking out Floodlights It's business opportunity audit. It's free. We provided it no charge. It's actually what we use to assess new clients as they come in. It's a 110 point assessment for your business. And we've now decided to give access to the general public for it. So go and take our This is your business opportunity audit at floodlightgrp. Com. It's going to help you identify the biggest gaps and opportunities in your business right now. And at the end, it'll assign you a health score to let you know exactly where your business stands right now. So go check it out, floodlightgrp. Com/audit, and take the boa. It's a great way to get a pulse on your business. All right, Alex, my man, we're back for part two. This, decidedly, we were going to keep this more focused on entrepreneurship, your leadership journey. I titled it, and I don't know if it was a goofy title, but making Alex Duda. How have you put this life together that you've created for yourself, both in building and ultimately selling a successful restoration company to now you're in a venture-backed software startup and, and, and, and, and, and.
[00:06:19.220] - Chris
And we're maybe we'll touch on some of the other ands during our chat again today. But for people that listening to this and you haven't heard the first part with Alex, go back and pick up that first part. We talk about certain lifestyle practices and disciplines that you have, some philosophical stuff about how you approach your work. And we talked about booze, I think, at one point. And so we're just going to hang- It was with a Z, just so we're...
[00:06:43.300] - Brandon
Booze. Yeah, I just want to make sure.
[00:06:44.780] - Chris
Yeah, I'm a little bit duped up, so I want to make sure that my words come across very clearly.
[00:06:49.410] - Brandon
Keep it PG.
[00:06:50.780] - Chris
Booze. We're going to hang in that pocket. Here's how I want to open it up, man. I've been following you on social media, as have, I think, a lot of people in our industry, and you are regularly posting content. And we just talked about this at the outset of our conversation. You have a similar approach to content production as we do. It's capturing all the real moments throughout the day, all the ways we document our work, and then sharing that stuff out, pulling back the curtain. It's great. But in addition to the content, man, you have a lot of stuff going on. I mean, just to rattle off what I've seen via social media, which is, of course, the whole truth, I'm sure, about your life. You're building your dream home. You've got this You're a venture-backed software startup, which is no small undertaking to begin with. You lead at least one private Facebook group. You're active on LinkedIn. You obviously are leading and developing your software startup team. You're meeting with investors. You have existing investors that you have to steward those relationships. You have a young child. Children?
[00:07:56.420] - Alex
Child. Child, just one, Sophia. Child.
[00:07:59.180] - Chris
You're married, you're a private pilot and you fly regularly. Here's my question, how do you choose what not to do?
[00:08:10.660] - Alex
That's a tough question, but I think I boil it down into two things. If it doesn't bring me value and I don't enjoy doing it, I don't do it. Or if it doesn't bring value in general, I would say. If it's not valuable and I don't enjoy it, it gets cut out. The other thing is, I think people, if you look at the different things that people can do, they fall into different buckets. There are things that people are really bad at, not meant to do. There are things that people are all right at, they can do okay. There's also things that people can do that they're great at. I'm great at a handful of things. But I think if you're an entrepreneur or if you really want to get to the next level, you need to focus on your superpowers and only do your superpowers and then find ways to delegate and/or build systems around the things that maybe you're great at, maybe you're mediocre at, maybe you're bad at. It doesn't matter. And take those off your plate. I could sit and write a good Facebook post, but that's not my superpower. I go find other people and I build systems around a Facebook post.
[00:09:19.820] - Alex
My superpower is the knowledge of the restoration industry and restoration entrepreneurship. I need to find a system through which I can basically feed somebody who's superpower is writing to be able to write Facebook posts and then make it seamless and natural. That's when calls like these get recorded, and then they get watched, and then they get created. I think a lot of people, they're afraid to give up things that they're great at and good at and maybe mediocre at because they feel like, Oh, what's my purpose if I give up those things? But the reality is you need to find your superpower, focus on your superpower, and delegate and get rid of all those other things. And your superpower is that one thing that everybody is like, you do very well, and everybody's like, how in the world did you do that? Some people... Think of people who play instruments, for example. It's like, how in the world did you hit the piano and all that notes so well? It came, and then that person's answer would be like, I don't know, man. That just came naturally to me. I learned it over time and I just picked it up.
[00:10:19.750] - Alex
That's my answer to that.
[00:10:22.420] - Chris
What would you say your superpower is then?
[00:10:24.970] - Alex
My superpower came from a very young age, and I think my superpower I was actually dreaming. We talked about my childhood, first-generation American immigrant. Parents were working a lot. I probably still have a very interesting, maybe rather abrasive personality. I would get in trouble at school a lot, do stupid stuff all the time, and I'd get in trouble a lot. Old Eastern European in trouble. It's like you get everything taken away from you for a week to two weeks and you're stuck in your room because you can't do anything else. My coping mechanism became daydreaming. So I remember sitting on my bed and pretending like I was driving a truck down the road. And then I envisioned myself building skyscrapers. And I would dream like I drive up to the truck site with the big dump truck and get out of the truck and hop up on ladders and stuff. And I'd even pretend like I'm fixing up stuff. So it was almost this weird thing that maybe most people would make fun of me for at the time. It's like you're enacting these things. And eventually, I did some acting and such. But I realized that not a lot of people...
[00:11:29.800] - Alex
It It doesn't come easy to a lot of people to think of the future, to dream or to visualize or to come up with that. That's just something that comes very naturally to me. I can close my eyes, imagine a scene, look at how something looks like, and then communicate it well. That's my superpower. The concept of Alvie, I'm horrible at the meticulous project management part of software where you have to write these really flushed out tickets with all the requirements of what things can do. But I can see a future of restoration tech. With everything I do, I guess, yeah, that's what comes naturally to me. It's seeing the future or seeing a world where this is different and being able to dream it and then being able to articulate it to other people.
[00:12:10.530] - Brandon
That's interesting. I just have a question, a follow-up to that. First off, I can totally relate to your comment about the fact that there's almost like some fear around personal value that we build around all these exhilary tasks that we just really don't love and we know that are a weakness. So it's like, I think that's a piece that I've been personally wrestling with quite a bit recently, is just being able to segregate yourself. And honestly, man, in full transparency with you, you saying like, Hey, I think dreaming is my superpower. I think that's hard sometimes for... I know for me, for me to say that's valuable. That is special. That is the unique thing. And all these taskings are things that we can hire out and that we can develop personnel to help us execute on. All right. But here's where I want to go with this. So you are living or have lived two different places where you guys, you were a part of building a restoration company where there was all these transitions and stuff that you went through. I'm going to assume a lot more bootstrapping, right? This is grassroots. We're feeding our own machine.
[00:13:13.180] - Brandon
Now you've got this investor partnership type relationship with Albuquerque. Okay, go back to restoration days. As you're settling in on some of your superpowers, what was some of the mindset or posture that you had to have as you're trying to get the business to these points where you can begin delegating some of these things. Because I know some people are listening be like, yeah, I'd love to toss off 20 things, but it's hard for me to accomplish that or see that I can even get there.
[00:13:43.610] - Chris
Yeah, what did that look like early days for you, man. While you were dreaming, the work had to get done. The projects had to get managed, right?
[00:13:50.600] - Alex
Yeah, that's true. In the vein of dreaming, even in Resto days, I think a remarkable moment was when Warner Cruise, the owner of JC Restoration, invited us over to tour his facility. I remember my father and I had gone there and we walked in and beautiful facility. There was this sign that said, Welcome nick and Alex. We walk into this reception area, shake his hand. He had an executive assistant, see the war room, see this world-class facility. I remember thinking to myself, and then even when my father and I left there, we were like, Well, if Warner can do it, we can do it, too. What does he have that nobody else does? That's what pushed us through from day one when literally dad's garage, air movers, DUs, we had to go rent our first space because the freezer was coming in and we couldn't keep the DUs in the garage and such. We were always motivated by, well, if Other people can do it. We can do it ourselves as well. What does that other person have that we don't have? They have two hands, two feet. Yeah, warm air was a little intimidating because he had this awesome business school and went to Japan and such.
[00:14:58.420] - Alex
But I always, I guess, and always went with the mindset of, if somebody else can do it, we can do it as well. As far as delegating while in the field, I think there were a lot of challenges. There was never a challenge of giving up the work. We found technicians. We saw the value of, Hey, us stopping to do the work. Within three to six months of us starting the company, we had stopped physically doing or leading the work. We had technicians, and we would be more of a crew chief role and such. But some of the biggest challenges that we ran into We were things like, we won't let somebody else answer the phone because we believe that the phone ringing is super, super, super important, and we don't want to lose that job. And, oh, we can't find somebody who can write an estimate as good as we write it. So We were holding on to those things and it was a huge struggle to let go of items. And eventually we were forced just because we had a lot of work and there was nobody else to do it. So I can't say there was a mindset shift.
[00:15:57.910] - Alex
It was almost by the fact that we were overwhelmed. There really wasn't enough time a day. We were working these 16-hour days. We had to eventually let go of things. Then there was this whole battle of trying to accept that maybe nobody's going to do it as good as you think you do it, or maybe the tasks It's like no one individual contributor is going to be able to fulfill all the roles that you filled. At the beginning, taking a call, doing the work, signing the job, doing the estimate. But then 12 to 16 months later, we now realized that we had individual contributors that started doing things better. They didn't do the whole together, but they were starting to do things way better than we would have done them. Way more organized project managers, way more meticulous, way more organized crew chiefs, way more hard working that could lift heavier bags than we could and do work that way. People over the phone that were way more pleasant than we were at three o'clock in the morning. And then it clicked afterwards to 80% done by somebody else is 100% freaking perfect. And then the second thing clicked is, you don't need to find the person that could do it all well.
[00:17:03.260] - Alex
You need to find the people that can do little bits and pieces of it. And there's going to be people that can really knock your socks off into something specifically. We had an estimator. I was decent on Xactimate. I'd say pretty good. I'm an Xactimate certified trainer, but we had an estimator who had a photographic memory. He can just hound out $10 million a year worth of estimating work. When he worked at CWAP, he did actually $18 million a year estimating work. I personally can't do that. And yeah, it transitioned into, oh, we were holding ourselves back by not looking for those people ahead of time and our self-limiting belief of we have to do everything. Nobody can do everything as good as we can. As entrepreneurs, no one can maybe do the whole thing as good as we can, but there's a ton of people that can do bits and pieces way better than we can.
[00:17:50.050] - Brandon
That's huge. I think that's super sound. For those listening right now, maybe if you want a point of reference to maybe dive into that topic a little bit deeper, Who Not How is an excellent book for folks to take a look at to maybe help crack that code on how do I begin leveraging other people's specialties, right? Bigger piece of the puzzle. So that's cool.
[00:18:11.090] - Chris
I actually, I want to dig in to my first question again. I want to circle at it from another angle here, because while I agree with you, and I think that took us off in a good direction in terms of delegation and the importance of identifying our superpower and all that, I also know it still is a struggle that I think all entrepreneurs leaders have, which is some degree of shiny object syndrome in the sense of, you talked about doing things that you're great at and meant to do. I'm just curious about your decision making process of how do you prioritize in a sea of lots of good, great things to do that may even tap into your superpower. How do you discipline yourself and your team? And I know this is to be true, my very minimal dabbling in the software startup space enough that it traumatized me from wanting to get back into it, is this whole idea of creating a product roadmap. That we can't create the next Google in V1 of our products. You can't create the next, let's just in our industry call it Dash, in version one, go out and cover all the scope of functionality and everything else day one.
[00:19:24.350] - Chris
And so you're always managing a product roadmap of what are the most valuable features for us to develop first, next, etc, etc, from a cost standpoint, what people want, marketing, all that thing, right? So similarly, dude, how do you choose what to do first? And how do you choose when to not do something that otherwise could be very good and could be a big opportunity. How do you choose between lots of good things to do in order to focus on the most important thing? What's your decision making process? And how do you do that as a team? Because I imagine your team, you have a lot of creative thinkers on your team that are always coming up with new ideas and, oh, we could do this and maybe even other verticals you guys could serve. How do you stay disciplined doing the important stuff that's right in front of you?
[00:20:11.420] - Alex
Yeah. So I guess an example that I can give, and maybe it's not restoration specific, but a recent example that comes to mind is I was sitting in on a sales team meeting and the sales team felt a little stuck and a little overwhelmed. And there was a bunch of different ideas of things that we should have done with the sales It will seem. Data needs to be cleaned up better. We need to get better automation. We need to try to call these different people, try to go into these different verticals and so on. It's over then a bunch of different ideas were coming up, and I could see everybody, I guess the analogy I would give is like they're spinning their tires in mud, and there's a lot of momentum moving on in that conversation, but people were frustrated and there were no solutions. I, I don't know, out of intuition, just asked, Hey, team, and this was a newer team We had grown very rapidly from four employees to now the sales team, I think, around 18 employees. I was like, Hey, what's our North Star in sales? I just had the intuition ask that.
[00:21:11.020] - Alex
We got 8-10 different responses from the different team members there. Oh, it's how many demos we book or how many calls we make. But nobody really mentioned the North Star. From our board-approved plan, there was a North Star, and the North Star was an ARR goal, which was a revenue goal. It was the end result. Nobody knew it. I threw it up on the board and I was like, Okay, this is our North Star. It's like $400,000 of ARR every month needs to be closed. Then we went through and we also made a list of the problems that they were trying to tackle. It was like a list of 14. I'm like, which one of these things will really move the needle to hit that North Star? We ranked them from... Well, we cut out the ones that didn't, and we rank them. And then I'm like, which one is the 2X lever that we should focus on and put all of our time and energy? Which one is that lever that will yield 2X impact on our North Star and also have the least amount of effort? And that's how we looked at it.
[00:22:11.740] - Alex
And we all came to the conclusion that who cares if our house is not in order? Who cares if our data and our CRM isn't as clean or our company isn't as perfect? As long as we're hitting these metrics, especially since everybody's comp plan and everything's tied to it, everybody succeeds. Another example, Customer success had brought up the fact that our billing system is messed up. There's no direct tying on our user system to a billing system, and it's a manual process. Then we went back to our mission. It's like our mission is to build the restoration industry forward. We're like, okay, it's going to take us six months to build a billing system with our engineers to be able to alleviate the pain that we have this person sitting here manually doing billing for restoration contractors. And it got a lot. I mean, we have thousands of users on the platform, and it's literally a full-time job to do that. But I'm like, do we really want to take engineering resources away from our mission of propelling restoration forward? In those six months, we could build so much more, and we've got a lot on our roadmap and steer away from our North Star of that to fulfill our selfish needs of getting our house in order.
[00:23:14.000] - Alex
And that's how I think of things. It's like, what are we trying to accomplish here? And okay, all of these different things we can do are great, but does this fit that North Star? So that's another way you can frame it. And then which one of these ideas is the 2X idea with the least amount of input needed or the least amount of effort needed? And that's another matrix to look through it.
[00:23:39.100] - Brandon
I love that. Super sound.
[00:23:40.640] - Chris
That's a great way to think, dude. That's exactly what I was looking for. That's awesome, man. Because I think we all struggle with that. With deciding amongst various good options, I think that's a really great way to think about it and simplify the thinking.
[00:23:54.630] - Brandon
How do you feel that you can introduce and/or adopt that same mentality in the personal life? Because I'm assuming there's a lot of alignment in terms of the way that you behave and act and lead yourself. So what's the tie in there? How do I do that same concept, developing my North Star in my personal life?
[00:24:14.940] - Alex
I think they are very synergetic. I think personal life to me, if you're talking about personal finances and then personal being, from a personal finance standpoint, I think the most successful or people that build themselves up personally or their personal net worth, the highest, feel like a Warren Buffet, Mark Cuban, and so on and so forth, they don't get involved or don't invest in things that they don't think they have an unfair competitive advantage in. So even there, they create these things called investment thesis. Theses? Anyway, thesis is They create an investment thesis. We'll go every day. Yeah. They create an investment thesis around something specifically. Then when you go on to personal, I think every family, there's this book called Family Boardroom 2. We started to implement those principles in our family. But I think there's something magical that happens when you and a spouse or a partner co-creates together and you formulate North Stars or a mission for a family's existence and work together as a family towards that. It needs to fit the bucket of the reason for our family existing and what we want to do. If it doesn't fit that bucket, then it drops lower to the list or maybe we don't do it.
[00:25:23.380] - Alex
At the end of the day, a family is an organization, a non-for-profit church or whatever is an organization, a company is an organization, a country is an organization, and it's an organization of people that have one thesis or a mission or a North Star. And I think it's very important to look at it from that lens and to focus on that North Star without getting distracted by other things.
[00:25:49.160] - Chris
Liftify. Com/bloodlight. You've heard Brandon and I talk a bunch of times about the importance of Google reviews. Maybe even heard our episode with Zack Garrett, the CEO and founder. Recency, consistency, two of the most important things when it comes to maximizing the benefit from your Google reviews. Why not use an outside partner? Liftify is targeting 20 to 25 % conversion, right? So if you do a thousand jobs a year, you ought to be adding. Right now, 200 to 250 reviews a year, every single year. If you're not doing that, you owe it to yourself to get a free demo from liftify. Com. See their system, see how it works, see how affordable it is. I promise you, you'll thank us. Liftify edify. Com/ludlite.
[00:26:33.440] - Brandon
We spend a lot of money and a lot of attention trying to get that first call. And one of the things that we do once it happens is, sometimes we leave it to chance. Who picks up the phone? How do they respond? How do they walk that client into a relationship with us. Well, one of the benefits of partnering with a team like answerforce. Com is we can systemize that, we can make it more consistent. We can also have backup for when our teams need that help. Somebody goes on vacation, somebody's out sick. We get a storm search, we get cat event. All sorts of things can have an impact on how we receive that client. But the most important thing is they need to know that they've chosen the right team. And so answerforce. Com can support you, be a bolt on partner to help you consistently produce an awesome onboarding experience with that first call with your client. So answerforce. Com/bloodlight.
[00:27:24.650] - Chris
That's great. Cnr magazine, we're friends with all the folks at CNR. Michelle and her team, they do a great job of keeping their ear to the ground and reporting all the important information from our industry. You want to stay up on all the M&A activity and what the latest best practices are for selling your company successfully? She's got that. Great articles about all the four quadrants of our business. Cnr is constantly pushing out great material and leveraging great writers and subject matter experts in our industry. It is the water-cooler of our industry. So if you're not subscribed, go to cnrmagazine. Com. Follow them on LinkedIn. Follow Michelle on LinkedIn. Trust us, if you're trying to stay on top of everything happening in the industry, your best destination is cnrmagazine. Com.
[00:28:09.390] - Brandon
You guys, many of you have already heard about Actionable Insights and the training and the technical expertise that they bring to the industry. But how many of you are already leveraging the Actionable Insights profile for Xactimate? That's the game changer. It's essentially an AI tool that's walking alongside of you as you write your estimate, bringing things to your attention that should be added, that could be considered. All of them items that increase our profitability, increase the effectiveness and the consistency of that scope. And it can do anything from helping a new team member assimilate a estimating best practices. It also helps the grizzled vets add back that few % that we've just forgot over time. So actionableinsights, getinsights. Org/ floodlight, and take a look at what the Actionable Insights Xactimate profile could be doing for you and your team.
[00:29:04.670] - Chris
All right, I got another topic, meetings. I would imagine you have a lot of different kinds of meetings. Can you give us... I mean, so you have the experience You're a restaurant, obviously, of running a restoration company, and there's a meeting cadence that's required at some level to run a successful restoration company. Now you're in a venture-back software startup of all kinds of new types of meetings and audiences. Can you give us some of your best practices or maybe some principles that you try to lead meetings by to make them productive.
[00:29:37.000] - Alex
Yeah, absolutely. I think the biggest thing that you need to understand about a meeting is the cost of a meeting. If you're going to host a company meeting and you've got, I don't know, let's say an average person is worth 40 bucks an hour, right? You could even do an opportunity cost. An average person could produce $1,000 an hour, and you've got 50 people in that meeting. That's $50,000 in that hour. So you need to understand You need to deliver, outdeliver that much value within that meeting or else you've cost that meeting money. I don't take meetings lightly, and I don't schedule meetings just for the sake of having meetings. I have ultimate intentionality behind every meeting. In the back of my head, I know, Hey, these people are taking time out of their day to meet with me, or we're taking time out of our day to meet on this specific topic. The intentionality needs to be set. It can't just be a meeting for for the sake of meetings. I also believe in rituals, and by rituals, I mean different things that repeat themselves over and over. They build themselves on top of each other.
[00:30:41.440] - Alex
By rituals, I also mean how can you incorporate the different people in the meeting to feel human and to all feel present in one place. Oftentimes, people tend to jump into meetings and get straight to the chase. I always reserve 4-5 minutes to talk about, Hey, here's a trip report, or, Hey, what was the win? Or, Hey, what was the win? Or, Hey, what'd you do this weekend? To have the different people feel human and be there, and they're not just there for that specific meeting. As far as cadences, I think there's different types of meetings or different types of cadences for different types of meetings. Typically, we operate off of EOS on both companies, both the restoration company and the software company. Every single week, there's a departmental meeting, and we follow the I think the US structure is fabulous in the fact that you start off with five minutes of good news. Then afterwards, you go into scorecards and you're reviewing the metrics as a team. You're reviewing your North Star that we just talked about. Then afterwards, you're going into holding each other accountable on to-do lists and checking those things off.
[00:31:46.410] - Alex
And then afterwards, you're talking about your Rocks, which are your 90 day things that you're trying to move the needle on. So everybody is super laser focused. And then that all feeds into an IDS session, which is Identify, Discuss, and Solve. So basically, whatever is holding you back, A great question to always ask in a meeting, if you're talking about numbers, it's like, okay, great, we didn't hit these numbers. What's the number one thing holding us back from hitting these numbers or from doing this outcome or from moving the company forward? And then having a discussion there where you're solving things. As far as other types of meetings, I think leadership retreats are very important. We do them quarterly. A leadership retreat in my book consists of the leadership team getting unplugged from the day-to-day business where they're just stuck in the weeds and into the regular monotony of the world and going to do something together. We'll book a cabin in Gatlinburg or up in Wisconsin or whatever. We have a couple of purposes. One is review the previous quarter. Two is set the new quarter plan. Three is do something around our core values.
[00:32:49.290] - Alex
We're very important. We're very adamant about how our core values are. We have two activities that we do as a leadership team that pushes us out of our comfort zone. It could be anything from, we haven't done firewall walking yet, but that's like an extra activity. But we've done things like extreme hikes through really bad weather and stuff like that, too. If somebody's uncomfortable with presenting in front of a crowd or stuff like that, we'll do things like those to help push people outside of their comfort zone, realign us with our values. Then there's board meetings. If you don't have a board, I would still put together a board meeting. The concept of every single quarter, synthesizing and looking over your business and how it's worked, I think is huge as well. Then the last type of meeting that I use is a one-on-one, half an hour feedback between you and your direct reports. If you have any direct reports, all focused on how can I serve the direct report so that way they can achieve their goals and their dreams bigger. And again, an awesome question to just start those things off with. Well, what are you winning at?
[00:33:46.550] - Alex
Let's celebrate. And then two, what's the number one thing that's holding you back? And giving feedback 100% on what you think, speaking your mind, whether they like it or not in a polite way, and giving them that feedback so that way they can better themselves.
[00:34:01.300] - Brandon
I love that. I think that's a challenge that a lot of teams are faced with in terms of how they're deploying a one-on-one, and they just lose the point of who it's for. They're still trying to use that meeting or leverage that meeting almost to get what they want or what they need. I just love the fact that you're completely unapologetic about the fact that that is a meeting for them. It's their development, and that's your opportunity to be a steward and a guide to help them achieve that thing. I just think that's really mission critical that many of us that are not connecting the dots to in terms of the success and engagement in our organization.
[00:34:36.880] - Chris
You've been in this process of building a company where the strategy you've deployed requires outside investment. You've been working with venture Capitalists. What is the biggest thing you've learned about working with investors and managing that relationship? Because there's a lot of people that they're seeing all the M&A activity in the industry and they're like, oh, my gosh, I want to jump on that gravy train, and they want to prepare their company to sell and potentially have a second bite at the apple, work with a PE company, all this stuff. What's the biggest thing that you've learned and maybe one of the surprises about working with investors as you've been doing that with Albie?
[00:35:12.560] - Alex
Absolutely. I think one of the surprises was the fact that investors and capital markets are depicted in, I think, a negative way. People feel like they lose control. People feel like the investors come take you over and push you in a different way and then and so on and so forth. And maybe part of that is true, but I personally haven't experienced that. Now, granted, all of our investments are minority stake investments. My co founder and I own the majority of the company, and we still have full control. But I think the value that somebody can bring as an investor to the table is huge. I think that it's a myth and an illusion that that person is going to take over your business, especially if you're the operator. At the end of the day, even if you own zero % of the company, if you're the operator of the company, you actually have the most control because that investor actually needs you. Because if you leave, what's that investor going to do? So I think that's something that surprised me. The biggest thing I've learned, well, there's two things that I've learned, but one, my relationships with money and capital has changed a little bit.
[00:36:15.740] - Alex
I realized that a lot of times as business owners, we maybe imposter syndrome kicks up and we don't give ourselves enough credit. And we're always told we're not enough. We try to go get those lines of credit. We get denied on those. And we're getting beat up over capital, which ultimately what I learned is capital is just a freaking commodity. Like the banks, the investors, the capital markets need entrepreneurs like us who are building places for their stupid money to get placed into this. And oftentimes, the script is the exact opposite, where it's us as founders, we're almost begging for capital. We're going to those banks and going through all the loopholes and such. And obviously, there's strict terms for a reason, and it's hard to get capital for a reason. But most people don't understand that, and they almost beat up the value of what they're creating as a business. And your business and your enterprise is the machine that uses up that capital to produce future values. What you've built as an entrepreneur is very valuable, and they need you maybe just as much as you need them.
[00:37:28.370] - Brandon
That's a great one. I I would have not seen that one coming in a million years. And yet I just think that's profoundly important for people to consider. We're much different circumstances, likely, than where you're at, but we're in similar circumstances currently where we're having these kinds of conversations about certain projects and opportunities. And I feel myself sliding into that where you almost feel yourself shrinking a little bit because you aren't the one that can address the cash or the financial demand of the project. And so honestly, hearing you say that, even for me, I'm like, you know what? He's freaking right. I need to own that as well in my own.
[00:38:07.570] - Chris
Yeah, we were just talking about that yesterday, just how there's a lot of those mindset shifts, right? The need to happen. It starts to when it comes to money and investors. They just have a different vantage point. We were sitting in the office with a guy who's a serial investor and entrepreneur, and hearing the way he thinks about cash and thinks about debt. And debt, yeah. I think it's definitely more in line with what you're talking about, being that, flipping the script. Money is everywhere. A ton.
[00:38:37.130] - Alex
There's more money than there are places to put the money. There's a ton more capital. Talk about abundance mindset. We're all trained with scarcity mindset. Oh, there's only so much money. Let's hoard it. As entrepreneurs, too, we're stashing money away, putting it away in savings accounts. We need X months of, I don't know how many income free months that we need to have in the bank and such. But it's like there's a There's a ton of capital out there. There's a ton of restoration jobs out there. There's a ton of everything out there. Everything that you think is scarce, we'll have people say, Oh, well, the restoration market isn't big enough for you to go build this technology. It's like, yeah, it is. There's a ton of restoration contractors. Did you see the IISCRC forum with all the instructors? There was like 100 and some instructors in a room doing at the IISCRC forum of meeting of the instructors. I was like, There's 100 and some instructors training the industry. Imagine how big the industry is.
[00:39:29.120] - Brandon
And they're just scraping the surface. That 100 and something represents such a tiny on the radar. Is there any other financial or money mindset that shifted for you as the vision of what you're chasing and building is growing. What else has accompanied that in terms of money thoughts?
[00:39:49.150] - Alex
Yeah. As a venture-back startup versus bootstrap restoration company, you learn how to efficiently burn money. What I mean by that is how you can run at negative cash flows for future value. That flipped the script and it really highlighted some self-limiting beliefs that I maybe had in restoration. Like, oh, it's not worth it to pay, I don't know, $5,000 to acquire a plumber that can refer you, I don't know, $40,000 a year over the next 10 years thing. Moving over into Albi, typically software companies that are venture-backed and just software companies in general, somebody pays 300 bucks a month for your subscription will cost you way more than... It could even cost you 3,600 bucks, $4,000 to acquire that customer. You're basically paying the money now to acquire that customer, and the amount a customer takes 12, 14, 16 months to pay back, and therefore you're operating at a negative versus being cash flow positive. And it really showed me like, wow, we're building future value. And the only way to build future value is to consume this capital. But it clicked in that sense because the value we've We built, at least in enterprise value and such in the past four years here, was way more than we built in restoration in the past 10 years.
[00:41:06.950] - Alex
So you got to spend money to make money. You've got to burn money to make money. Moving money is more... That's what moves the economy. So the more money you move around you, the more your economy flows, versus the less money you move through the markets, and the more money you keep yourself, the more you might be holding yourself back. And I'm not saying go spend all your money. Keep caution and stuff. I've got my own cautions and reserves, but also don't hold on to a ton of cash for the what ifs and as if it's scarce. Go move the money, go pump it back in because it'll come back 10X.
[00:41:42.510] - Brandon
What's your source for keeping yourself, I guess, that competency, increasing that competency as the scope of your responsibilities continues to grow? What are the two, three places that you go to consistently to grow that?
[00:41:57.980] - Chris
Yeah.
[00:41:58.880] - Alex
So one thing that I do a lot just because we have to talk to the capital markets all the time, is I always try to gather information about what the markets are doing and what other people are doing. Because in my opinion, I'm always driven to be in the top X %. Now with a venture-back company, it's like no matter what happens in the world, capital is always going to flow to companies. It's just in a really good market, it'll flow to the top 50% of companies. In a really bad market, it'll only flow to the top 10% of companies. I'm always trying to gather data points to understand in the people who always talk to companies, what's the top 10% look like and how can I make sure that our company is always in the top 10%. To relate that back to restoration, it's always very important to understand what what... To always networking with restoration companies, with other people that serve the restoration industry, maybe even brokers, and understand what's a really good restoration company look like? What's a really good restoration company trade for? What's it worth? What are they paying their project managers, their crew chiefs and such, and always trying to be in the top X % in all those areas.
[00:43:00.400] - Alex
The second thing is I'm a part of a lot of mastermind groups and spend quite a bit in personal development and to be in rooms where I'm the smallest person in the room with a lot of other people of expertise. What that's given me is it's almost made me unstable in the fact of from a mastermind group, one of my mentors wrote a book, and now all of a sudden, I'm able to network with the publicist and the graphic copywriter and the person who's going to publish it and all that stuff. So the who not how is powerful. And then getting into the rooms where you could always the who is very powerful, and sometimes they cost, sometimes you have to network your way into them. But that's another thing that I do. And then the third thing is you will never know enough. Abundance mindset applies to knowledge. Knowledge isn't scarce, it's abundant. You must always be seeking out more knowledge, and not just seeking out consuming it, but learning it. So read the book, mark up the book, read the book again. Journal. Every single day and every single interaction that you do, it's a learning experience.
[00:44:04.080] - Alex
So just like Chris is writing things down right now, when you write things down, you actually catch what you learn. So it's not about what's taught, it's what's caught, and you reinforce it within your brain. And there's a difference between consuming content and studying stuff. So if you're always studying and you create a daily habit out of studying, you'll always be able to build yourself up.
[00:44:27.490] - Brandon
I love that. I'm going to dime Did you guys get into a morning routine at all? Last time?
[00:44:34.060] - Chris
I can't remember. We didn't. We talked about fitness and we talked about some of that stuff. But this was also what our first... Our last chat was over a month ago, a couple of months ago. Exactly.
[00:44:43.230] - Alex
Yeah, month, month and a half ago. We did talk briefly about morning routine. You mentioned that you were starting to plunge, and you had some fear around plunging, but that you were going to do more plunging. How did that go so far?
[00:44:56.530] - Chris
I've done more plunging.In fact,That's awesome. I recently, one of the things I started doing was on the weekends, I've been doing multiple hot-cold exposures for a period of a couple hours with my boys. It's been so fun because my boys, they feel so manly. Sitting, sweating in the sauna, and then we take turns. The first person get out, does the cold plunge, and just doing it in succession. So, yeah. That's awesome. Doing that. It's very fun.
[00:45:24.330] - Alex
Congrats on that.
[00:45:25.320] - Brandon
That's awesome. We did not fuck it, man. We totally snoop on you all the time in terms of the socials, right? So it's like, I'm watching, you're taking shots in the gym, not shots as in, you're not doing shots, but shots from the gym, keyed in on some amazing things that are happening in your business and the different things that you're chasing. Talk to me a little bit about that, just the balancing, the time-blocking. What are you doing in real physical terms to be in the right places to give yourself the time to do the things that you want and to prioritize? How do you balance that, man?
[00:45:59.360] - Alex
Yeah. I mean, I think it's all connected health, wealth, love, and spirituality are the four pillars of the life, in my opinion. If one's out of balance, it'll take a toll. I even incorporate physical stuff into our stand-ups with the sales team, for example. We'll go do burpees, jumping jacks, something like that. But I think if you're not showing up 110% at work, you're probably not showing up 110% in other aspects, and it mirrors itself. Yeah, I mean, almost every day working out, I think, sweat every day, you tire the body to tame the mind. I went on a health journey about a year, a year and a half ago. Then ever since then, I haven't stopped in the sense of working out, eating very right, doing things like stressing the body yourself. I also believe in like, use stress versus distress. If you stress your body out yourself and if you embrace discomfort yourself, basically, other things in the world don't stress you the same way. Like an employee coming in and telling you X, Y, Z, won't stress you as much because you're already used to you stressing your body to a higher three on a daily basis.
[00:47:01.910] - Alex
And I'd rather stress myself out than have something else from left field come stress myself. As far as morning routines, I focus on the mind, body, the spirit, and then moving the business or my life forward. Those are the four buckets that happened. And it could be something as quick as an hour. It could be, typically it takes about an hour and a half to two hours. And it involves a workout. It involves eating right, it involves journaling, it involves reviewing my goals and analyzing myself. I have 12 goals for every single year and analyzing myself against those goals and seeing, okay, where am I short and what can I do to move this forward? And it's quick and it's simple. Simple scales. You don't need to do a million cold plunge throughout the day. You don't need to, I don't know. I'm not like a bodybuilder by any means. A workout could be as simple as, I don't know, go for a run or sometimes it's, heck, go for a walk, right? It's those simple small little improvements every single day that really count.
[00:48:00.420] - Brandon
Do you ever struggle with, and I want to be cognizant of time, but do you ever struggle with discipline fatigue? You know what I mean by that? Let me give you context, just in case. I'm a pretty driven person. So like, Enneagram, I'm an eight. I'm definitely the challenger. I like to be disciplined. I like to be making forward progress. But I also have times where it's exhausting. It's hard to be disciplined. I have phases where I feel like where I get disciplined fatigue, and there's this exercise or this battle that takes place where my system is trying to sabotage me. Like, oh, you deserve it. You're tired. You're toe in the line, all these things. Anyways, in my mind, I have these moments where I battle discipline. Do you ever run into something like that? If you do, what do you do about it?
[00:48:51.020] - Alex
A thousand %, actually. I've taken organization and systematization to an extreme, to where if you look on my calendar from 4:00 AM to 9:00 PM, everything's on there. Even my time with my wife is on the calendar. The thing that woke me up a little bit was I was at a master in my group and I stood up and I asked somebody who was speaking who knew me so well, hey, what's the number one thing holding me back? And they sat there and they looked at me and they were like, in December, when you and your wife came to my house, I don't know. Something felt weird there. You guys were sitting on the couch and stuff like that, but I don't know. And then he went and told a story about him and his wife, and then he said something along the lines of, I feel like sometimes you're just doing the motions, or I feel like sometimes people feel like you're just doing the motions. I'm like, Hmm. My co founder was in the room. He stood up. He's like, Dude, at lunch, hit me up. I got to tell you something. Then he sat down.
[00:49:51.390] - Alex
I'm like, Okay. I went to my co founder and I'm like, Okay, what's up? And stuff like that. He's like, Yeah, your wife told my wife something along those lines, too. Sometimes use those exact words. Sometimes I feel like he's just doing the motions. I'm like, interesting. Then on the run the next day, we do this founder's run and such. I was running with people and I talked to one of my buddies and stuff, and he mentioned the same thing. Long story short, go confront my wife. I'm like, Hey, we have a great relationship. We don't really fight much, stuff like that. We don't have friction. Everything's great. She's like, Yeah, but just because we don't always fight stuff like that, you can't say it's absolutely perfect and superlative and such. I was like, Hmm, interesting. What do you mean by that, babe? Then she mentioned the same words. Long story short, those times can be turned into, Oh, you're just doing it because it's on your calendar or you're just doing it because of this. And it can add extra stress to your life. What I'm doing I got it now is giving myself permission to be more spontaneous within the structure.
[00:50:50.750] - Alex
So the structures don't go away. The discipline doesn't go away. But allow yourself a marginal area here and there. I'll move a meeting to go walk around the office if I need to. Like not a very important meeting, but time on my calendar to do X, Y, Z. But I think the fine balance is, because you're an entrepreneur, too. You want that freedom. That's what you want. The fine balance is don't throw it away or don't slip. Give yourself permission to move that one meeting. Give yourself permission, I don't know, one day a week or one day every two weeks to take it easier at the gym, or maybe go for a walk instead of going for a gym. Add some flexibility, but make sure that the discipline and the consistency at which you're showing up is still consistent because could easily slip up into the other realm where it completely eliminates that discipline. I don't know if that answered your question, but I think that's how I relate to what you were bringing up.
[00:51:39.810] - Brandon
Yeah, I think it's just important for listeners to hear the human side of people because At the end of the day, I think we could oversimplify every single interview that we've ever had with somebody of substance and competency. And that is, if you look at the level of discipline they engage on a day-to-day basis, there is a strong chance it looks higher than the person to the left and right. And that's part of where all this achievement and success comes from. But I think we also can lose track of the fact that that discipline is not easy. They don't just everyday wake up and it's just like another day getting the box checked. It is hard to maintain that discipline.
[00:52:17.260] - Alex
A hundred %.
[00:52:17.940] - Brandon
It's a plan, and we just get tired. It's appropriate for us to admit that we just get frigging tired.
[00:52:23.050] - Alex
A hundred %.
[00:52:24.240] - Chris
Well, dude, I think this is a good opportunity for us to land the plane on this part, too. A question that I like to end with a lot of our guests is just, what are you most curious about right now? And it could be a book that's provoking you. It could be a mentor that has you in a particular spot, looking at a particular part of your life or a podcast you listen to, whatever else. But what are you most curious about personally right now or oriented towards?
[00:52:53.510] - Alex
Yeah, one of the things that's been on my mind... Well, yeah, I guess the biggest thing that's been on my mind has been along the side of what I've been explaining on the co-creation front, on the family front. I'm really curious without adding the boundaries in the systems of business, which my wife personally is super against, how to boost co-creation and unity and mission within my family life, familiar life, family life, I call it. I think there's a fine line because business maybe is my super strength and just throwing business principles that it won't work because marriages and relationships are a find it balance and a delicate balance. But truly, what does that 110% co-creation between my wife and I look like, and between my wife, my daughter and I, and the future little dudas that are running around? Yeah, that's one of the things I'm very interested in and working at currently.
[00:53:58.050] - Chris
Love it, man. That's awesome, dude. All right.
[00:54:00.230] - Brandon
What about you?
[00:54:02.590] - Chris
For me, it's interesting, also personal, but I think the implications of these things, they extend, reach everything. I have lately been getting into internal family systems. Ifs, it's a type of therapy. Are you familiar with IFS?
[00:54:17.100] - Alex
No, I'm not. Tell me more.
[00:54:18.770] - Chris
The basic premise of it is we as individuals, we have these individual parts inside of us. I actually, I wrote an article about this in CNR a while back. This sense of When we tend to get into a difficult or stressful situation, have some encounter negative emotions, we tend to completely and totally identify with those things. I am really stressed out right now about this thing. And part of the principles behind IFS is adopting more of a nuanced view of yourself, that when we encounter those negative or stressful things or emotions that are coming at us, instead thinking of it as part of us. There's a perspective-seeking. Separating. Yeah, that separates from myself and who I am, these emotions that I happen to be encountering or these stressors or these anxieties. And so it's just It goes obviously a lot deeper than that. But the founder of Internal Family Systems is Richard Swartz, and he's written a book called No Bad Parts. It's just this idea that in order for us to be engaged in self-leadership, that this really is the concept of self leadership is recognizing there's all of these disparate parts inside of me that have originated from experiences that I've had in the past.
[00:55:42.500] - Chris
Often, they take the form of a protector We even count it as certain hardship or suffering or abuse or whatever early on in life. And these parts of us take shape and they take on roles. And I just find it really interesting as a leader looking at, okay, how does this How do these parts and what are these parts inside of me? Then how do I also recognize these parts in other people? You know what I mean? And think more holistically about others in my relationship with others. It's like, okay, what might be happening inside them in There are various parts that's causing this behavior or this way that they tend to show up. Anyway, it's very interesting. You can Google it. This guy, Richard Swartz, has been on a lot of really great podcast, too. I've just been digging into that lately.
[00:56:28.310] - Alex
There's a huge spiritual parallel to what you're talking about. I did some spiritual work recently, but you're the feeler of the feeling blank. You are not blank. You're not stressed. You're the feeler of the feeling stressed. Almost like identifying you as your soul versus your ego or your brain or your physical body as something separate and understanding the difference between the two. We can go on a whole episode on that, but it was very interesting to find the correlation there.
[00:56:59.820] - Brandon
Yeah, we may have to. That's an interesting place to hang. I think for me, it's almost like you can almost see it a little bit in some of the questions I was asking you. It's like, I'm in this place right now where I feel like I am creating new boundaries maybe and new perceptions maybe of what's appropriate in response to cash management, money management, the role it plays in my life. Because I think, like growing up around, I don't know, for of a better, maybe, Protestant Christian environment, you just get a weird understanding of money. It permeates into all sorts of stuff. Even as a business owner, a lot of those boundaries have been stretched and moved. But there's still this fundamental core process that's happening, probably more so at a subconscious level that I'm trying to get a grip on. Then I think another place that I feel like it stays in a similar vein is just my own personal priority. I'm 47. We're going to be 48 in November. Man, dude, I am hitting a moment in my life where I'm really tired of giving a shit about stuff that people tell me I'm supposed to care about.
[00:58:10.540] - Brandon
I'm just burnt on bidding all these other person's priorities on top of the things that I know when I'm alone thinking about my own personal vision for my family and our friend, our sphere and all those things. It's like, those things have often been in contrast or in contention with those. I'm just in this space what's the right line of being bold and saying no and not agreeing to the things that you just straight up don't agree to versus becoming the pendulum swinging to the point where now it's a detriment. It actually is function and relationship, and it actually is taking away from me. I'm trying to find that line, and I honestly don't know where it is yet. I find myself shifting back and forth on this what feels like a very sharp line. That's where my head has been. I'm finding content of value, but I think a lot of it comes down to just having conversations with guys like you where I'm like, I just need to hear someone else's perspective that I respect by the way they're carrying themselves. Awesome.
[00:59:11.070] - Alex
Okay. Very interesting.
[00:59:12.640] - Chris
Good stuff. Well, we're going to record all the various ways that people can get in touch with you and the companies that you lead and the stuff that you participated in our show notes from the episode. But man, this has been fun, dude. I think we had to find what our next conversation is going to have to be around spiritual things and what's going on between our ears Dive hard into that next time.
[00:59:32.540] - Alex
For sure. Let's do it.
[00:59:33.920] - Chris
Thanks for your time, dude.
[00:59:34.710] - Brandon
Thanks for hanging, man.
[00:59:35.010] - Alex
This was a pleasure. Thanks so much for what you're doing for the industry. You guys are clearly exposing a lot of different mindsets and beliefs to the restoration industry. I think That's the number one thing holding this industry back. You guys are nailing it right on the head.
[00:59:50.850] - Chris
Yeah, I appreciate that. Thanks a lot, man. Okay. Well, till next time.
[00:59:54.570] - Alex
Take care, guys.
[00:59:57.070] - Brandon
All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart, and Boots.
[01:00:02.300] - Chris
If you're enjoying the show, you love this episode, please hit follow, formerly known as subscribe, write us a review, or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.