john thank you for joining me tonight on acquiring minds thanks for having me will i'm glad to be here john you are the new owner of a residential uh appliance repair business in south carolina you've been in the seat now for just over a month so i think october 22nd was your was your close date and so we're going to hear the story of the acquisition of this business and what this first month has been like you have been you're a great follow on twitter you've been tweeting almost daily reports of what it's been like as as the new president and owner of this business um and so we're gonna we're gonna hear the story of the acquisition and then and then drill into some of these your more interesting tweets from the last 30 days but start us off with your two minutes on your back story and what it was that led you to want to go out and buy a business sure so i i grew up in south carolina and after college became a civil engineer and enjoyed that um somewhat but kind of became ready for the next thing i wanted to be do something a little more entrepreneurial but frankly just had no ideas no money and a family to support no idea what to do so my company offered me an opportunity to move up to virginia in a different role and so that seemed like the best option at the time so we did that um five years ago and shortly after moving um uh actually mill snell a guy that's also active on twitter kind of put the bug in my ear about buying a company and um i i kid you not it took me months to figure out what buying a company was what there was to buy about one um and where the value was in a company i i just was starting from scratch and yeah i did slowly learn more about that and as i did it just became more and more clear that this is what i wanted to do and so never really had any sort of doubts or back and forth on it it was just the more i learned the more i wanted to do it and so it became a matter of getting the the family situation and the job situation and the finances right to to be able to pursue this and so um earlier this year we finally got everything lined up in about april and so i started searching for a company and we decided that we wanted to be back in south carolina close to family and some some very old dear friends and basically searched until i found going through brokers and uh just public listings um is is about as traditional biz by cell kind of stuff as you can get and when mill snell first introduced you to the idea of buying a business did that mean that you never considered starting something from scratch it was just such a good the idea all the benefits of buying instead of starting from scratch were so obvious you never really considered or talked me through that sure i had actually been considering starting from scratch um prior to that that was the only other option that i knew and i knew i didn't have a great idea i went round and round and round spent many a night on the laptop researching various and sundry things that i thought maybe i could do and was just never anywhere close to confident enough never thought of any sort of idea that could produce revenue quickly enough for it to be a viable option so you kind of get your ducks in a row get the family situation to the point where everybody's on board for this next this next chapter you're still in virginia at the time but you know you're going to move to south carolina your goal is to move back to south carolina so you start searching in south carolina is that right that's right yep um we so tell me about this search some yes yes so we decided i mean first off the big thing is we knew exactly where we wanted to live i mean i'm talking within like a 30 35 minute radius not even like a general area versus or a region or something like that and that was just really important our family so we we did that it's a severely constrained geographically kind of thing and um and you know we're not in a in an enormous city with um where businesses are listed every day so i started looking in april and basically my criteria evolved pretty quickly but i started with just to give you some some actual numbers here yeah i wanted a floor of about 250 000 in owner's earnings which i thought would be enough to replace my salary pay a loan that i was going to need to get and provide a return that would be commensurate with the risk and allow me to build and grow company reinvest in the company basically and then a ceiling of something like 1.8 million which is what i thought i could max out with a sba loan and seller financing and the cash that i had uh turns out that part was a little bit rosy but we didn't get up near that ceiling so we didn't have to worry about it um but that is a broad range so 250 up to 1.8 million in earnings up to 1.8 million in total cost so that that you know maybe would have been a half a million in earnings something like that um so with with those financial parameters i also knew i didn't want to own a restaurant or healthcare or educational something like that or a retail space that i just didn't feel gifting in any of those areas also no online only kind of stuff so home services businesses fit the bill but frankly there weren't enough businesses that go on the market in this tiny little geography that i chose to get too concerned with that so i looked at anything and everything that met that criteria and it amounted to about i think i actually seriously considered about 15 where i got to the point where i actually modeled them out in a spreadsheet and you know requested more info and that kind of thing and the the business i ended up purchasing i first saw in july i think it had been listed in june actually and since that time i have not seen a single business this is now uh almost the end of november when we're recording this since that time i haven't seen a single business that i would have rather taken a look at over the one i got so just not a lot of businesses hitting the market and i was really really fortunate to find this one that checked all the boxes and turned out to be a really great company and uh but there were 15 that it interested you enough that you modeled out in what time span did you find those 15 like all at once or i mean how long was your search is another way of asking and then all of those 15 like how much how far did you go down the path with any of those yeah so let's say let's say there were 15 that i looked at between when i started in april until i think i i think i stopped really looking in september when i knew that this deal had a really good shot at getting across the finish line of those 15 i think probably eight were after doing the modeling they turned out to be companies that i could see myself buying and running and had you know list price that was something close to reasonable um and then of those i got to i i submitted only one other loi i got beat out by a local um strategic on that one um but none of the others even got to the loi stage so uh yeah i guess not not uh not all that far and so what were you going to do john if you if like if this deal hadn't worked out and you know the deal flow was kind of a trickle and you were just only kind of looking at what was coming up on biz by cell like what if what if nothing came in six another six months came and went what was the what was the plan were you ever going to reach out to brokers for example or or it was just only a biz by sell strategy talk me through your thinking there yeah i had been um making a point of talking with the brokers as i would see the listings and so i was slowly getting to know some of them um i did actually when i went through a dry period in uh in the summer i did start pulling ppp data using that to target a couple of industries my background is in stormwater and sanitary sewer engineering and so i i've been watching those contractors for years just and from my perspective it sure didn't look like they were making a killing and so i i you know looked into those companies and did not quite get to the point of doing proprietary outreach but that would have been that next step and just essentially more networking and we had really made a plan that this coming summer we were going to move down to south carolina either way and we would basically figure it out so it was it was kind of a kind of triage is the right word but we i did the really public easy stuff first i was moving towards more individualized broker and even proprietary outreach to owners and then if we had gotten into the spring that then it would have transitioned to more of looking for some form of temporary job or or finding a role in the industry that i might want to target yeah yeah yeah that might have been a disaster well it it it does i mean the more you describe the situation the more more fortunate it sounds that this this business came along and so what did you like about this business was it i mean other than the financials or was it basically a picture of the financial picture that you liked about it um or or were there other things like one of your tweets was um kind of your your due diligence on the industry so uh talk to me more about uh what you liked about this opportunity yeah the due diligence that's a that's a short tweet there um the so the i think the first thing that attracted me was that it meant my financial criteria and so that was all right let's take a look under the hood here what i found when i did that was a company where 75 to 80 percent of their revenue comes from contracts so we have contracts with warranty companies and manufacturers that will they have their customers who call them with a broken washing machine and they call us their contracted service provider to go do the work and we've got pre-established rates they pay for the parts they're not you know exorbitantly profitable but they are good steady income and so i loved the fact that this was not something where i was gonna have to be a marketing genius to make it work we were gonna we've got you know calls coming in every day from these contracts it is also a size that i felt like i was equipped to handle we've got seven technicians and three office staff plus a part-time office staff and and so we're not you know that that was just something i felt like i could handle but also not a you know three-person operation where one person leaves and i'm not going to be able to make my payments anymore so so it was a good spot there and then it was um as i looked at the appliance repair uh industry and and you know doing my kind of diligence on the industry as a whole honestly i didn't do a whole lot of diligence i i really just looked at the fact that they've been steady for a long time i you know just consider the fact that if it's a in a downturn it's probably going to be a lot more reasonable to repair your appliances than to replace them and that that's our typically our biggest hurdle when we go and diagnose an issue is whether that individual is going to choose to replace their their machine and we won't get you know paid for the job or uh do the repair and so i i felt like a downturn might actually be good for us and in in good times people are always going to have appliances i don't see that going anywhere and and if anything the uh people spending more time at home since code has resulted in more wear and more awareness you know there's we've had so many calls from people that are just have been dealing with something for a while and are just sick of seeing it every day but that might not have happened if they had been spending a lot more time outside of their home so all of those things just made the company seem more and more attractive as i kind of learned those in stages and then getting to know the owners and their philosophy they just ran a company that was all about supporting the employees and being you know they they like to use the term family um and and there's there was a ton of truth to that i could see it wasn't just you know uh something they said and didn't follow up on that that was a a real thing with them and so that made me feel a lot more comfortable like i'm not just going in with a bunch of mercenaries that are going to quit if they don't like the new boss kind of thing yeah yeah and have you found that to be the case that there's a culture there i have yeah it's been really humbling to walk in and just see what uh the the sellers have built over the years through the just grueling process of of bringing people in and training them and then having them move on to other things and um doing that for years and years and what you what they're kind of left with at this point is the people that have stayed that have glued together that um you know we've got seven technicians that each get in their own van and they each go to totally different areas of the city every day but they call each other constantly they're constantly talking to each other they've got questions technical stuff they call each other when something happens in their life they're they're just in in such great community that i'm walking in here and it and it is it is truly the opposite of a turnaround it is a please don't screw this up kind of case which is uh you know like i said humbling just to to be aware that this is something that i've i've kind of inherited more or less um but but also really exciting that we've got such such a great foundation here yeah well let let's talk a little bit more about that and and the size of the company so i you know i think part of your big part of your criteria was basically your own financial uh ability to that that dictated the the size of company you're looking at but there is this you know philosophical discussion of how big or small one should buy and you know if you could there are ways like to use the capital that you brought to the table to buy an even bigger company like they're you know you in theory you could have you could have found outside investors to do a down payment and bought like a five million dollar company okay that's let's say you use that kind of as an extreme example but within the realm of possibility um but that also would have meant that you would have inherited a much larger company and so i'm just curious for put the finances aside now for the moment but just the the like you're you're 30 days into this or 37 38 days into this and you are the new guy in a family the new head of a family really um and and that's great like that there's this the strong sense of community in the family but you know probably will take some time to build trust or whatever could you see yourself like what if this were a 50 person company or or 25 person company like what are your thoughts on um now that you've been been in it for a minute like what it would feel like to be doing this but for a much larger company do you feel like you could do it or like you feel already so overwhelmed even at the size of company that this is that you wouldn't have wanted to bite off more uh anyway that that's a great question and and a discussion that i have had with myself quite a bit um i did talk to several um people about potentially investing and doing more of a traditional search fund kind of route where i would um take some equity partners and and be able to buy a larger company and and um you know you had an episode a few episodes back um where you interviewed the the two guys that exactly were essentially you know pushing the the merits of that and and i think they had a lot of great points and i love the model of having some investors um in your corner and being able to buy something that's larger where you know five ten people quit and you're still doing just fine um you know and and you've got a lot more systems and structure in place in a deal like that um for me it was a matter of frankly what you know we've all got a little bit of the imposter syndrome going on i think and so just how far can we can we input you know be an imposter and and live with it and um yeah so i think this is pretty close to my limit i think if i walked into a 50 or 100 person company the imposter syndrome would be uh crippling that said you know i i'm not the type of person to back away from a challenge so i don't i don't want it to sound like i made that decision out of fear um but the the other aspect to that was just taking on an investors and that is just something i wasn't really comfortable with you know my uh my handle and website and all that is fund of one because i i really wanted to be the only one that was depending on this um notwithstanding my family of course that's enough pressure um but for whatever reason i think this is just one of these uh personality things where there's not a right answer there's it's a something of a level of comfort i'm i'm fortunate in that uh it was i would be just really uncomfortable and so it wasn't tough to make the decision um you know i i'd be lying if i didn't say that i look at some of these folks that have bought larger companies and feel a little bit of jealousy for some of the good things about that but just as quickly as those feelings creep in i i remember how much better this fit is for me and how there are so many great advantages to what i've got and i'm having a blast and so i i don't want to argue with that can you tell us more of the numbers of the actual deal sure arrived at yeah yeah love to so the uh the original um sellers earnings was reported at 265 000 and the price was 770 or 799 thousand dollars okay um doing some uh you know slightly better accounting i'll say the the real seller's earnings was more like 240 000 and honestly that was a uh the high point from the last several years they've been growing and and i really only looked the last three years of data there were tons of changes in the company that made it really pointless to look at anything earlier than that so um growing up to 240 000 in sellers earnings and i actually made an offer i did all my best you know excel jockey work and made an offer south of 600 000 and they uh didn't even respond um i had followed up with the broker a little bit later and she said yeah we're really only looking for full price offers and so i said okay i can do that you set the price i'll set the terms because you know i'm on twitter i read stuff so that's how this game works right and so i came up with on you know a paragraph and a half of um seller uh forgiveness clauses i i knew i needed an sba loan so i couldn't do like earn outs but i could say you know i'll pay you full price but you have to meet these hurdles you met this past year in order to um to actually be owed that money and uh i sent that in again didn't hear anything for a few days emailed the broker just i just literally asked so how hard did they laugh and she was just like yeah that was it they didn't um they did not want to entertain any of that so uh a couple weeks passed i got back to them and and just said you know hey are we still here kind of thing what what's the update on this they've have they sold it yet and broker said no but we've got some more updated year-to-date numbers would you like to look and so i did and that that basically gave me the um ability to kind of look back at it consider a lot more in terms just not so much in terms of am i getting a good deal that i can brag about on twitter or am i getting the deal that i need to do what you know we want to do as a family and what i want to do is a for my career and you know adding in some of those non-numeric elements to it it it became clear that that i was i did not want to give up this really great opportunity over a couple of thousand dollars a year in the end is what it would have amounted to and so um and there were there were some folks um that kind of helped talk me through this um but so i ended up making uh we ended up agreeing to a purchase price of 775 000 working capital was not included in any way shape or form and uh they only did a seller financing for five percent of it and so i provided 15 um and got a sba backed loan for the remainder of it um so in the end we're looking at us you know call it 240 000 sellers earnings purchase price 7.75 so squarely within what i think is relatively normal but probably a little bit rich for a company this size but it it was it just checked so many other boxes for me and what and i i did genuinely feel like it was a quality company in other ways um in terms like the project management software that they had going and and things like that and there were so many opportunities that i saw that i did i felt comfortable kind of overpaying if you will um repaying the median yeah and you know the whole overpaying thing it's like the the the multiples that you hear all the time three to four x or you know depending on industry or whatever like i i don't feel like they take into account all you know all of the the the the factors in a particular deal and so in your case like you got to just look at the supply and demand situation there is not a lot of supply you and and that's only been reinforced post acquisition you you're keeping your eye on biz by selling is still not seeing anything that you would have wanted to buy so when there's you know very very little supply what does that mean it means the price goes up a little bit another way to explain this away is you read twitter you know things is that uh you know this is a long-term acquisition a long-term hold and paying a little bit more up front really it it barely moves the needle in the long term yeah that that's so true and and if we are able to even just maintain much less actually grow then it's going to be a great investment um yeah it's just just ever so slightly more risky than what i intended you know what i set out to to purchase in the beginning i'm surprised that they weren't eager to find you know a john i mean you were like the ideal buyer there weren't going to be many people like you who were going to be interested in buying this business so i i'm surprised that they were so willing to just like you know risk scaring you off and not negotiate with you why why did they have so why do you think they felt like they had so much negotiating leverage well they're uh on the younger side so the seller's husband and wife team mid-50s she has a full-time job elsewhere this was his um the husband's job and he grew it from from he was the first technician in a van by himself years and years ago and they were ready they've got a couple of other businesses they're real estate agents they they are just very uh busy people and had grown this company to the point where it was taking up a lot of their well not taking that more of the time it was it was something that i think they were financially ready to move on and wanted to uh i i guess yeah just move on and so this was um something that they could have kept running and so that's that's what they told me is look if you don't want to pay the full price that's okay no hard feelings we're just going to keep running this and we'll relist it again next year and see if we can get a buyer next year so they you know the the um husband worked probably 20 hours a week and and that's like a you know not a joke that's like a legit he was out of the door by 9 or 9 30 pretty much every morning it done with his work day here and so it wasn't killing them to continue and they would just keep on running yeah yeah good for them yeah they're in a great spot that's that's when you want to sell a business when you don't have to exactly that's right so all right speaking of his 20 hours in the business so um that's actually like it seems like a great sweet spot to buy business from because it's not it's not such a small business that it's completely dependent on on the seller um and that they represent this key man or it's just like feels very fragile or like a business that's just like just orbits around them and without them like the bottom could fall out and yet um still small enough that you can come in there and really add a lot of value if you're like if you're you know hungry and really ambitious and want to see this thing grow um is that is that a fair characterization like what what do you what do you feel now that you have taken have taken over the business from this guy yeah i think you're spot on with that will like it it is at a spot where i can go i could go several days without coming into the office and the wheels would not fall off the the day-to-day is largely taken care of by the existing staff and my role obviously there have been tons of transition you know the the the flip side of all these great contracts that i really liked is that they take a ton of work to transition to a new entity so i've been doing a lot of work with that but the um the real i guess benefit of all this is that most of my time especially once we're done with this transitional will just be about improving the company in various ways so it's it's not dependent on me really for sales it's definitely not dependent on me for repairing any appliances our office staff handles even the worst of customer complaints and things like that so there's just lots of open runway for me to be able to come in and take the 30 000 foot view and and you know work on the business as they say and and and we're i'm working that in as i'm doing all of this transitional stuff and doing the day to day and learning you know spend a lot of time just just consuming what other people are doing and how this company works i'm also slowly trying to find ways to make people's lives easier to make processes faster less redundant and that's been so far you know appreciated um to the extent that i've been able to accomplish it and it looking toward the future you know i'm able to say here here's our biggest bottleneck i'm going to attack that and i don't have to shift day-to-day duties to the side to do it so it's a really really great spot to be in yeah that's awesome so do you you had talked about how one of the things you love about the business is that basically business comes to you you have these contracts with the manufacturers and they send you leads all day or send you customers all day um and and that you know you don't want to you didn't want to have to be a marketing genius to to take over this business and grow demand uh do you see opportunities for growth once you've got all the transition stuff out of the way and once you tighten up operations you know at some point you're probably going to turn your dirt your attention to to grow to growth um maybe not i don't know uh so so what what do you what value to like what what does year one and year three look like for you it's funny because that's that's pretty much exactly how i'm thinking of this is where do we want to be years and years down the line and what do we need to be doing right now to get there and so i'm working on right now i'm i'm really excited this is you know just on our theme of how fortunate i am to to found this company right now i've got a couple months to get used to things and then we're going to have january so i've got just this great opportunity to set 2022 we're going to roll out a new mission we're going to roll out a vision for the first time and we're gonna show how each person has goals related to that mission and that vision so i'm looking at for the for the vision i'm i'm looking at being a an exceptional employer in the appliance repair space i'm looking at serving our customers exceptionally well and i'm looking at serving our community well and so we're we're taking these three things that haven't been rolled out yet but i'm i'm going to be able to pull those in january and then show how every single thing that we do in this company is a part of making those three goals happen and so a lot of that is growth i think that to be an exceptional employer you need to be providing opportunities for everybody that wants to grow in their career to do that and so for us that's going to mean we need to have a lot more customers we need to have a lot more customers coming in um just we call them cash customers the non-warranty customers and and that right now will fall on me to work on our you know google my business and our our facebook presence and several other things that i have no idea what i'm doing but we'll be figuring out along the way to bring those in and so that that is is what i've kind of identified as our first bottleneck is is the um getting those cash calls and i know the work is out there because i can go on our competitors website and see when their next appointment available is and it is further out than our next available appointment so i know the work is out there um so it's about moving up in those google search rankings and and things like that and so um the the growth piece is yes it's there i think it's there for the taking and that's going to be a big part of what i'm working on so that we can accomplish lots of other goals but not not just growth for growth sake or for you know vanity metrics or something like that but so that we become a better employee with more resources to serve our customers and our community really well cool really cool john one of your tweets was um it feels like nothing has worked the way it should with this transition so uh on the one hand you you usually conclude your reports positively that you're having a good time but on the other hand there obviously there's there's been challenges and there's been things that took longer than they than they should have so elaborate on that tweet and and in doing so just give me the overall sense of like how are you feeling honestly i think that take a deep breath there's a lot to unpack um i'll be brief now the the impetus for that tweet i think was just the sheer number of uh phone calls i've made voicemails i've left emails i've sent to people who won't respond who have have every reason to respond and i i understand there's you know the world is understaffed um and so i i get that um but it just seems like you know the telecommunications company that we're working for you should be able to verify that you're their customer because you're calling them on literally the phone they provided and the only way they have for you to verify who you are is to send a text message to that phone except that it is a desk phone that they have specifically disallowed receiving text messages and robo calls so you can't even do the voice option either and then having to call their customer service wait on hold for you know 20 or 30 minutes finally get somebody on the phone and they tell you they don't know what to do all of this is to transfer a phone account i'm trying to pay people and they won't take my money and it's it that is just a one example of how pretty much every single account transition has gone and it it seems like this shouldn't be this hard right but um we're dealing with humans and systems that are flawed and not set up for asset sales of businesses happening every day and so we've just run into tons of that where it just doesn't work that way um i love that that has been something i've been experiencing at the same time as i got a call from a customer who called my personal cell phone and said i tried calling your office and it just had voicemail and i go what and so we listen to our pre-recorded message and sure enough it's confusing as to what you should do to get a hold of a person and so i am able to kind of take my angst at all of this other stuff happening and say let's make sure we are not part of this problem for our customers yeah so i i think that will have good results it's tough to say because we haven't been able to fix it yet because the company that we need to fix it hasn't come back so it's it's kind of a a cluster in some ways if you will but um uh but i i do like to mention i do end on a positive note and and i i like using the phrase this is fun because this is i mean this is what i've dreamed about doing for years now and it is the kind of thing where some days at the end of the day i do have to remind myself this is fun i have to and that's one of the reasons why i have really enjoyed writing those daily reports because i will sit down and think i did like one thing today this was just a junk you know throwaway trash day and then i'll think about what happened and start writing and writing and writing and realize well i actually moved quite a few balls forward maybe i didn't accomplish a whole lot to you know to the end to be able to check the task off but we we moved a lot forward we made a lot of progress and this is you know nothing that is um easy is all that worthwhile things that are worthwhile are difficult and hard and that's you know what i'm getting to do every day so it's just an incredible privilege and just really fun to do and so some days i have to remind myself it's fun but frankly i mean you ask how i'm doing most days it really is fun it really is energizing i've got lots of great people to work with and to talk with every day i i've got no uh you know real complaints other than all the complaining i just did but on on the whole this is what i signed up for and it has been a blast so far well last question on this point you know i feel like the the um kind of the one of the biggest things that you should be working on so so let me let me tell you what you should be working on i'm listening no but but but the conventional wisdom would say that this is you know the trust building is is you know really what the first few months are all about is just like becoming a part of the team um you know and also you said that this that your the business is already so well functioning that like you you know even those you're you're kind of some of this transition moving the accounts over is gumming is kind of feels gummed up like you know maybe you don't want to be rushing to to change a lot of stuff anyway so you know because you don't want to break anything but anyway what i wanted to get to was the fact that you've been doing these ride-alongs right you've done i think three of them or that or yes don't i don't promise i've reported them all very well okay okay so you're you're spending a whole day with each of your technicians so i guess you've done six and and then you're doing one with each of your technicians they got one more to go um that seems like you know you might not have something to come home and you know you know check some boxes that you did x y or z but that seems like such a valuable use use of your time um so how is that going like to what what are the ride-alongs like would you what would you suggest to other new business owners in your shoes is this has this been valuable talk to me about it yeah this is this actually touches on what i think is one of my bigger weaknesses is i mean i'm an engineer by training and by personality and so i'm a lot more comfortable with spreadsheets than i am with you know motivating people yeah you know these humans that i'm i'm interacting with on a daily basis um and that's not to say that i'm you know i enjoy being around people and all that but uh the ride-alongs have been really about me asking questions and i'm i'm i'm not making any judgments at all i'm not having any you know providing any customer service pointers i'm just asking questions trying not to slow the guys down too bad and i what i want to come from that is a a genuine sense that i do really and truly care about more than how much revenue can you bring in every day i want to you know in my mind i already know i care deeply about each of the people that i work with and so part of it is convincing them that that's the case and so i want to get to know them and their personal stories and their families and things they struggle with and things they like i'm i'm also asking questions about our company why are they working for us what do they like about this company what would they want to change um down to the nitty gritty of like uniforms and what their preferences are and stuff like that yeah and so yeah i think it has been pretty effective i know there was um some obviously plenty of trepidation when you know they show up on a monday morning and a new owner is announced that's that is just a fearful situation for anybody and so i think getting to spend that time is just a time where they've just been able to say okay but really what are you actually going to change and what do you actually care about and so it's been a good good um and valuable from that um it also is the kind of thing that wayne's you know after you know you go riding a truck with a guy three weeks later if you haven't really spoken much or caught up again then you start to lose that connection and so i'm kind of fumbling through learning how to keep maintain grow reinforce those connections so just this morning i started a weekly monday morning meeting i'm gonna keep it to five to ten minutes but um just another time to kind of get everybody in the same room and and get on the same page about a few things yeah a touch point and so um and you know it's a it's a industry where you you come in in the morning to get your parts for your van and check in and then you are off in a in a van doing work all day by yourself essentially and so there's there's definitely a bent in our company toward more of the not the loners probably not the right word but the type that doesn't mind being alone that doesn't really get a big thrill of being with around a bunch of other people and so we're we're i'm trying not to fight that i'm trying to make sure i'm not encroaching too much but learning how to kind of build that camaraderie and and maintain that sense of family and teamwork that they've built here at this company already that's great john how can people find you online is is your twitter the best way probably that that is the best um uh at fund of one with the number one um and my dms are open i do really enjoy connecting with people um publicly and privately in the dms and and uh happy to hop on phone calls and um i love sharing my story i know i have just what i i'm sitting in this seat today in in uh directly because of things that other people have shared and so i am eager to to provide that back to the extent that i can i um as transparently as i can and having that anonymous handle uh allows me to do that in a lot of ways and so i'm as open of a book as i can be and and happy to connect with anybody that that wants to connect that's great reach out to john people fund of one he's uh really responsive and nothing else follow him on twitter as i said link in the show notes john thanks so much for coming on this was a fun conversation thanks for being transparent um and let's catch up a year from now and see see how things have gone yeah sounds great well i had a blast all right