John Bly's Top M&A Secrets for CPA Firms and Fitness Companies

Summary

In this conversation, Jon Stoddard interviews John Blythe, author of 'Cracking the Code', discussing the timeless strategies for acquiring small businesses. John shares insights from his extensive experience in M&A, emphasizing the importance of cultural fit, the dynamics between buyers and sellers, and the evolving landscape of acquisitions post-pandemic. He also highlights the significance of relationship building and the need for realistic expectations in business transactions.

Takeaways

The techniques in 'Cracking the Code' remain relevant after 10 years.
Inbound lead generation is crucial for acquisition services.
Buyers and sellers often have conflicting interests in transactions.
Cultural fit is essential for successful acquisitions.
Post-pandemic diligence has become more granular and specific.
Constantly seeking opportunities is key in M&A.
Expectations from buyers can often be unrealistic.
The importance of systems and processes in business operations.
Acquisitions in the fitness industry offer unique selling points.
Learning through real-life experiences is invaluable for future generations.

Watch the interview: 

Transcript:

Jon Stoddard (00:00.302)
All right. We are recording. So welcome to this episode of the Top &A Entrepreneurs. I want to introduce you to John Blythe. He's the, you can see this, he's the author of Cracking the Code. Now this is written in 2012, but it is an evergreen book. John, thanks for joining the show. Thanks for having me, John. I'm looking forward to sharing some ideas. Appreciate you taking time to read the book and have me on. It's beautiful. I got to tell you, when I

When you said evergreen, we were talking about this just earlier. It is, mean, this, the techniques and everything you learn in here are good. 10 years later, there's really nothing's changed. You know, it's funny. So I started thinking about writing the book, 10 years ago and I started saying, who else has written books? There's a million books out there on, selling at the time, but there wasn't anything on how to acquire a small business. And so I was like, well, geez, I'm advising on this.

I'm doing it myself. I should write a book to help entrepreneurs, business owners figure it out. And I tried to write it so that they could read it on a three hour flight and execute at least most of it themselves. Yeah, that's beautiful. So let me just go a little bit back about what you do. Now you're a CPA, right? I am, yes. And we are doing this on April 13th. He's crazy for taking time out and doing somebody else's taxes.

Yes. You know, I think every time you get an opportunity to talk to somebody else, especially given your background and the environment you play in, in the &A space, I feel like I got to take those opportunities. You just never know. Yeah. So the book was written almost 10 years ago and you talked about doing about, I think, 10 acquisitions at that time. What are you doing now? Yep. I've done

19 in the accounting advisory space and four in the fitness space since then and have sold a few as well. yeah, spending a lot of my time, you know, both internally and externally on for for clients on crow strategy. so I want to talk to you about that. Now you also provide a service advisory service for other companies to grow through acquisition.

Jon Stoddard (02:26.026)
How does that look? mean, what do you, what do you, how do you broach that subject with them and say, Hey, would you like to grow better than 10 % a year? let me show you how. A little bit, but I'll tell you, between the book and, and just sort of general PR, you know, speaking, et cetera, it ends up being mostly inbound lead generation. people end up coming to me because they've seen me or they've heard me or somebody's referenced it. You know, you referenced a couple of books that I'm that,

that others have mentioned me in and and that tends to turn into opportunities. Yeah, I gotta tell you, I'm gonna go back to that real quick. Here's he is mentioned in by then build. And from another one from my friend, Jason Griffith Griffith, identify acquire reprieve. He's been mentioned here twice. Well, that's great PR right there. It is and so. So you know, it was a couple years after I wrote the book that

I kept referring this stuff out when it was time to you know what I was referring pieces of it out to then bring it in house and do it ourselves because I was just getting asked about it too many times. Beautiful. So tell me how do you guys charge when you work for somebody else? How do you what does that look like? Yep. So on the buy side, it's a very small retainer. It depends on the size of the company and it depends on it depends on how

if they've done it before, then our fees are usually less because we know they're going to actually execute. they if they've never done an acquisition before, it's generally a $2,500 retainer for six months. And then a contingency fee of depends on the sliding scale of the size of the business they're trying to acquire, but somewhere between two to 5 % of the of the success fee when they've finished a deal. Now, do you have to be a broker dealer to do that to take a success fee?

You do not if you if it's in the small business space. So you're you're there's a regulation that allows under the SEC, no action letter that that allows people to not have to be a registered broker dealer. right. well, that's cool. Yeah, because they're asset their asset transactions, not not stock transactions. Right, right. I love this dance. So you mentioned that because everybody you talk about this, there's this dance between buyer and seller.

Jon Stoddard (04:41.698)
buyers want to buy assets, sellers want to sell stock. And I love the way this juxtaposition is. And you've got to come with some kind of like dancing meeting in the middle for this. It is, you know, it, people that the sellers want to sell stock, they think because either they're getting

the advice from their accountant or their attorney and they think that's the only way to get capital gains they believe and so then they have that issue on one side and you've got the buyers on the other side who want to buy assets so that they can take a write-off over a period of time they can get a step up in the basis and either amortize it over 15 years or some of the fixed assets they may be able to write off a lot faster and so finding the right balance and then also you know sometimes we're helping the seller figure out that

that they're getting bad advice on just how much tax it's really going to cost them. Yeah, that's that's the key. mean, we you if you try to business by business in the tech world, it's frothy multiples right now. I mean, you just like looking at a SaaS business and they want 15 to 19 multiples. You're going well, I'm not gonna it's like a $3 million business. How am gonna get my money back in 15 years? I don't even know if I'm going to be on the planet, right? Yep.

I don't get that part. It's a the SaaS world and the multiples are a world that we rarely if ever play in because of that. I deal in the in economics that makes sense for investors and for buyers and for how to how to capture ROI. It's challenging for me to understand the growth pattern of SaaS businesses that you're buying and 13 to 15. You know, we see sometimes companies that are losing money, you know, valued at millions and millions of dollars. It's just it's

Tough math for me. Yeah, it doesn't. I mean, it just doesn't make sense to, you know, these people that want, you know, millions of dollars down with a higher multiple. And then they say, well, what are you going to do with the money? Yep. How are you going to grow faster, et cetera? Yeah. How often I got a question here about how often do you see businesses that really want to say,

Jon Stoddard (06:50.402)
you know, the buyer wants to buy and I'll give you 100,000 year for 10 years. How often does that come along? Because most of the times they want a big chunk of money and they put it in the bank. It's an ego thing, right? But they also want to go buy stuff. Yep. I'd say that it happens fairly often that the buyer wants that. It's not that often. It's not that often that that's the final result after the buyer and seller have had some discussions. The ones where I think that makes the most sense.

and get done between buyer and seller are usually a couple scenarios. One is it's an emergency situation for the seller, usually health related or they really have to get out and they're willing to take any sort of offer. That's one. Another is, you know, the business is really in a lot of trouble. And so paying over a period of years based on what the business could be, not what it is today,

is another real scenario we see where it often trades like that, where it's a small amount down and a chunk for years to come. Yeah, I could see that. When you come in to save a business, that's kind of a different earning type deal. You're coming in, you're like, well, I can plug this into my business and we can 10X it really short period of time. That's right. Yeah. Or just I come in and I just showed you, here's what you need to do. You're missing this, this, and this.

So you're, are you staying in the, let's say one to $25 million range? Is that what you're kind of? Yeah. Yeah. And, smaller on the buy side, sometimes we'll find somebody who, you know, buy somebody for 500 or 750,000 or something. mean, you know, if they have an existing business sometimes in their own market, it's, you know, it's not bad to, you know, go down, downstream a little, but 25 million on the buy side, we generally don't.

quite fine companies because if you're going to buy a company for 25 million, you may be, you know, 200 million, 300 million in revenue. We're generally playing in a space smaller than that. So I'd say most of our most of our buy side deals are under 5 million transaction value. I got to ask you, I'm going go back to your act 19 acquisitions for fitness. So what led you to get into the fitness space?

Jon Stoddard (09:06.67)
Yeah, so it's a recurring revenue model. So it's not SAS, right, which is, which is different, but it's a recurring revenue model. It also has, you know, a unique selling point, which is, you know, every January sale season, it's a little bit opposite retail, where retail might make all their money in November and December, the fitness business, you have people who have New Year's resolutions, and they come out in January, so you can sort of count on that selling cycle. And then the last thing is,

it can be owned and operated by different people. So one person can be owner when there might be general managers in place who actually run the day-to-day operations and a lot of small businesses, that's not the case. Yeah. Now, are you just looking for businesses where there's a management in place and they can, you can be decentralized? Generally, yes. I've got enough on my plate. I'm happy to be board of director, advisor, you know, owner, but,

day-to-day operational, not very interested, just got too much other stuff. How much time do you spend put into those four fitness businesses? Not much at all. One hour a month or so? Yeah, about that. that's amazing. And did you have to replace the owner or hire somebody for each Not really. I mean, my wife spends a little bit more time on it, but not a lot. We just generally hire GMs to run them. yeah, that's beautiful.

and they just report to you like the numbers like the Warren Buffett just roll up the numbers and that looks good. You're not gonna hear from me until something goes bad, but please tell me beforehand. That's right. Yeah, that's really cool. So the businesses you sold, what kind of business was that? Pieces of the accounting advisory. we, we over time as we grew, we decided, hey, look, this didn't fit our model anymore, right? So as you know, if you look at where we started to where we are today,

there were times when we were doing stuff that didn't make sense given the size we're anymore. And we found other accounting advisory firms who it made a lot of sense for. So we sold downstream. So we were the sellers of, you know, chunks of clients to businesses that were maybe 10 % of our size. Yeah. So was that, you know, a personality issue or cultural fed or just the, the niche of the service they offered didn't niche.

Jon Stoddard (11:27.276)
Yeah, it was more niche in the service offering and it fit better. They were looking for a different offering that we that we were that we weren't quite aligned with is really the way to put it that that may be some some significantly smaller business was only focused on that. Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. You ever read Warren Buffett's book about, you know, selling a business he made a mistake selling because he keeps forever and he gets like, he was like selling a Monet for a man or something like that.

And just never do it again. Because if he took a long time to make a decision, he stay with it forever. He's never had capital gains taxes, and he doesn't issue a dividend. Yeah, yeah. He's a he's a really interesting investor. That's for sure. He's very unique in his approach. Yeah. So these, I have to ask you, since you wrote the book, has there been anything you've learned that's just different from what's happened here? Or you just refined your skills so much better?

Refined, I would say the thing that has, there's a couple things that have changed. One is some of the debt opportunities have changed drastically since the time of the book. Interest rates have stayed low, but the way the SBA program, for instance, I talk about that, some of my book has changed and actually down payment requirements can be significantly less than what I wrote in the book. So there's, they redid those rules about three years ago.

and change some down payment and amortization requirements. I would say the other thing I've learned is certainly in the pandemic, there's some different diligence being done than pre pandemic and whether that stays permanently is to be determined. But certainly there's significantly different due diligence being done today than you by SBA the government or no by by buyers by CPAs by attorneys, just a lot different. We're having to look at things that we never looked at before.

Are you talking about like post and Facebook you mean or what? No, no more just like client by client. So for instance, rather than paying attention to specifics, you know, maybe at a higher level for a two million dollar transaction, we're getting into what are the underlying clients and how are they affected by what's going on in the country, right?

Jon Stoddard (13:46.99)
Are they serving restaurants? If so, what's going to happen in the restaurant industry? How many of their clients could go out of business? What does that mean for the recurring revenue stream? Are there ultimate customers, you know, in the hospitality industry? And if so, where are the hotels? If they're at the beaches, they're probably fine. If they're in the middle of, you know, downtown, yeah, could be very different. And so we're paying very close attention to those, you know, granular level of details because a hotel is not all the same.

Right now we're finding that a hotel at the beach is probably full every weekend. Or if you're in Florida and Texas. Occupancy like 30%. So it's a complete different. Yeah. And if you're in California, right, they're not allowing the type of openness that Florida or Texas is. you've got it. So the diligence is very specific that didn't have to be done in the past. Yeah. And now are your campaigns to purchase a company, are they?

Are you doing this year in, year out, is it just coming across every now and then it just the deal flow comes to you? Year in and year out because I believe it's a little bit like sales. It's the reason I, you know, you said at the beginning, I'm doing this on April 13th and I'm a CPA in busy season, right? I believe you have to constantly be looking because you never know when you're going to find a good opportunity. It doesn't mean you have to do it right away. Maybe the timing doesn't quite work. Maybe you delay it three months, six months, a year, whatever. In some cases,

We've had conversations that didn't turn into deals till three, four, five years later, but you stay friendly, you share information, you have some discussions. You know, the timing's not right for one party or the other. And, if cultures change or a life events, I, I'm working on an acquisition in the IT industry and, his, his wife, just, he called me up and it says, wife just got no car. head on from a drunk driver. Now she's going to be okay. Full recovery. She was a triathlete.

but she's gonna be laid up for a while and that is a life-changing event on how you think so he wants more money down. Yeah it changes some of those life events change things for people and and it changes the way they look at the long-term future. Yeah I got it I was gonna go back to this year and you're out yeah I was

Jon Stoddard (16:03.47)
I there's this printer business in Missouri that every year he sends about 500 letters to printers in the geographical area and he gets one or two every year. I think he's made over last 20 years, 20 acquisitions. It's a perfect little model for him. Yeah. We've we've historically done that. The letters, the letters, I know it's, you know, 2021 and email and, you know, lead gen and campaigns and everything. But the reality is

The founders of most companies don't get a ton of actual mail. And so they open them more often than they open the 300 emails they get a day. Yeah. And that's a sweet little letter said, Hey, I'd interested. Very simple, right? Yep. Super simple. Two, three paragraphs max. It's got to be, you know, pretty generic, but not so generic, right? Because if you're going to produce 500 of them, you can't write 500 customized. You'd have to do a lot of research on each individual company.

But it says something like, we're looking to grow. We're interested in your market. We're already in the space. We've already done some deals. To the extent you have any interest in discussing your future, we'd love the opportunity to have a 15 to 30 minute conversation. Yeah. And how much do you allow them? And there's this odd feeling, because if you get them on the phone, they like talking, the sellers like,

There's always this belief it's worth more than it is. There's a big space in the backyard for a pool, but there's no pool there. Yeah. How do you, and if you look at Warren Buffett's model, he will say, you send a letter, you get something back that you're interested in, and then he'll get the financials and say, and then he'll write back or call back and say, hey, what's worth this? And if you're interested in selling, how much do you get into the conversations with the buyer seller?

You know, not a lot at the beginning. I'm a big fan. I started the book with culture. I'm a big fan that culture has to be a fit first. Because if not, sometimes people fall in love with the deal. They fall in love with the numbers. And then they fit a square peg into a round hole and it turns sideways, know, six months, five years later. Yeah, I'll I'm a testament that I chased a library of courses on Udemy that was doing 2 million a year, 97 % profit.

Jon Stoddard (18:22.862)
And I chased it for almost a year and it was like Moby Dick, man. was gonna pull me down just like Moby Dick did. Yeah. Yeah. And it can be, you know, people like the way the structure of the type of business or whatever it might have been or the profits or the clientele. But if the people don't fit and the culture is not right, you know, you can look across big

publicly traded companies everywhere, not just now, but over the last 30 years, and they buy somebody and two, three, four, six years later, they spin them back off on their own. And it's because they didn't really focus on culture. They focused on, that's my belief anyway, they focused instead on stock price and performance and things like that. Yeah. Now are you doing any public companies or are they all private? All private. Interesting. Yeah.

Now, what would you say for, you consult with just companies or do you take clients and say, Hey, look, can you start a campaign for me and help me acquire a company? I'm starting from total zero. Yeah. We do that as well. Although it's more challenging unless they've already owned a business. for instance, you know, whether they're, say a retired banker or something, you know, I use quotes on that because

I don't mean retired as in they're actually retired but they've stopped you know commercial banking and they're going to do the next thing and the next thing is they're going to be an entrepreneur and they're going to buy a business. That's not generally easy to find a target. The reason being the parameters are so broad. Instead what we find is the person who you know owned a business, sold a business and wants to do it again, that individual buyer yes that fits our model a lot better because they've already done it once, they know what it takes, they also

generally have a much stronger opinion of what type of business. The person who says I would like to buy a company that does five million in revenue and a million dollars in EBITDA and I don't care the industry is not a target for us. It's too shotgun approach, you could look almost anywhere and there'll always be a problem with the type of business and the one who says look I'm looking for a homeowners insurance company that does two million in the southeast or in you know...

Jon Stoddard (20:41.686)
Atlanta, Charlotte, then we get. Then we get focused. Yeah. So I got to ask you about the be prepared or surprised, surprised. The buyer has unrealistic expectations of what the seller's business is. What do you mean by that? Obviously, as you've seen some war stories where, you know, just you see these numbers, it's doing 5 million and

two million ebony looks fantastic and you chase it and then what happens? So you just you look under the hood and it's not what it seems. Yeah, or or you buy it and then you're in it and you don't realize what you didn't know. So they you know, sometimes buyers, it's been our experience that buyers focus a lot on financial diligence. And they think I got to tie out PNLs and tax returns, I got to make sure the bank approves this.

But they don't do all the other due diligence, they don't do the diligence on the people, the systems, the process and they find out that you know the owner for instance you know was working 90 hours to keep it together or you know had everything in their head and wasn't written down and so there's not a process or there's not a team of managers in place to help you know sort of the effective the flywheel and continuing to roll on its own and so I think that that

is the is potentially the issue, especially if it's an individual buyer who's coming from a big corporate background. They're used to really nice systems, If work at a big bank or a big manufacturing plant or whatever, you know, that does 100 million to a billion or more. Those systems were all built before you even were there, essentially. And so you got the benefit of that. And now having to build your own systems, if you take over for an entrepreneur is challenging.

Yeah, I had that pie thrown in my face. I had a business e-commerce selling hearing aids online. And when I first tried to sell it through employer flippers, Joe, the CEO at the time, he just started the company, said, hey, John, the first question you asked me, you didn't ask me about sales or revenue. You asked me, how many hours a week do you spend on the business? And I said, 50. I go, it's too much. I go, well, what do you mean? He goes, I'm selling businesses doing $400,000 a year. The guy spends an hour.

Jon Stoddard (23:00.748)
You need to automate everything, put systems in place, delegate. You can do it with 90 % of it with technology or VAs or something. And yeah, that was a hard, cold water lesson to, you know, I spent a year and put it in, put all that place and I was able to sell it later in a year. So, yeah, sell it easier, sell it faster, probably sell it for more. It's sold over the weekend. Yeah. It's sold over the weekend. Yep.

And that's the sort of thing I'm talking about is, you know, people are surprised at just how hard, not all, but a lot of entrepreneurs and founders specifically, how hard they really work. If you bought a current business, you've already put some systems in place. You bought it because you didn't want to work, you know, 100 hours that the founder did to build it. Yeah, nobody does. That's crazy. That's building a job. You want to stay above the business, not in it, on it.

But above it. Yeah. Yeah. So what's next for you? mean, 19, are you going to go ahead? You got a goal of revenue goal or an acquisition goal or what? So we'll continue to we'll continue to grow and in strategic opportunities. I mean, there's not a goal necessarily. There's, you know, we've got now we've got 700 people across the East Coast of the US and and we'll continue to 700 employees. Yeah, that's amazing, man.

Isn't that considered a Fortune 1000 company? No, I don't think so. think it's nice of you to say, but no. But I think it's one of those things where we're really focused on strategic opportunities in new markets. So for instance, added New York City last year and added Nashville, Tennessee last year. And we'll continue to look at those. But then also in our current markets, finding opportunities that make sense, whether it's

specific niches, or other services that we don't currently offer. Yeah. Now, is it just going to be focused on CPA businesses? I know that your friend, Jason, my friend Jason also does CPA business out of Nevada. And it was interesting because a CPA business came to my lap. They wanted to sell, but they're in a really small town in Redding, California. And I didn't know what the multiples was. So I just turned it over to Jason. He goes, it's 1X sales. Yeah. Like that.

Jon Stoddard (25:29.866)
And now it's the problem with it's not a problem, but for Jason it was, is it a cultural fit? Do I want to drive or fly out to Reading, California once a month or once a quarter? Do I want to do that if I have three kids? And the answer was like maybe yes or no, depending. Yep.

Yep. And that drives the that drives the decision making because it's not just about profitability. If it is, you end up in bad situations a few years later, if it's all about profitability. And that doesn't work long term. Yeah, that's beautiful. mean, I making those decisions doesn't fit within my family versus just profit, because it is a really successful business. It's been there for 30 years. Very profitable, but it's in the middle of nowhere. Yeah. Yeah.

And you may have to go there to help them for a couple hours with clients and that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Not easy to get to and, and, and not maybe the place that the family wants to tag along to, right? If it was in, Orlando, maybe the family wants to tag along and go to Disney world while, while he's working. Yeah. I got a question for you about the 19 or in the four acquisitions. How many of the, how many do you think, what's your number now? Like your ratio, how many you look at?

to the ones you've turned down because of the numbers? Yeah, it's probably close to 12 or 13 to one that we look at to try and get one deal done. That doesn't mean that we turn down the other 11 or 12, just to be clear. It means that somewhere along the way, the deal doesn't get done, whether they're not interested in selling today, or we can't agree on terms, or maybe we just don't fit culturally.

But it's, in that 12 to 13 to get one done. Yeah. Now is that pretty mechanical for you today? There's a very, there's a process and if they don't want to fall out, you know, they just don't get in the pipeline. Yeah, pretty much it is. It has to be at this point because we've tried to systematize as much of it as possible, to be able to fit. and again, it all comes down, it all starts, with culture. And then we worry about profitability. We can figure out numbers. We're all accountants, advisory, you know, CPAs.

Jon Stoddard (27:46.254)
that's easy enough to figure out as long as everybody's rational and reasonable. It's the other stuff that's not right. The emotional decisions, do you want to give up control? Do you want to give up ownership? Do you really want to retire? I mean, all those sorts of things are more emotional. Yeah. Now, do you buy unprofitable businesses? Fix them? No. So it's just profitable 100 % of the time. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not, there are plenty of people who do that. It's not in my DNA. Yeah. That

rehab in a business or renovating a business is a lot harder than you think. And if you really going to do that, you're not going to be spending, you're not delegating anything to anybody, you're spending 60 to 100 hours to fix that. Yeah, one of my old neighbors, this goes back five, six years, one of my old neighbors did that for McKinsey Consulting, right? So huge, huge consulting firm, and he was as good as they came. He was a Wharton MBA.

really smart guy and he was he would go in as interim CEO and turn around companies for three to 12 months. And it's a there are people who are unbelievable at it and he is and was and that's just not me. Yeah, no, I remember talking to some guys in investment banking that did that McKenzie it's like 100 hours a week. Yes, that's not and things pop up on Friday nights that require you to fly somewhere for you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday meetings because you're

you know, you're turning around a company, you're turning around a company that may be losing 100 million a quarter. And next thing you know, you got to get them profitable. So what's the first thing you asked for from a business? That process? Yeah, so start with conversations, to be honest, I don't ask for numbers or financials or anything. Start with usually at least a 30 minute conversation today. Today, it's different because if you look pre pandemic, it would be

30 minute conversation followed by a lunch or drinks or coffee, you know, for at least an hour before I'm interested in looking at anything financial because there's, no point. There's no point if we can't, if we can't understand each other, if we, if we don't think we serve clients in a similar pattern, if we don't treat our employees in similar ways, you know, it's probably not going to work. you know, that the start of the cultural fit, so important that you guys fit it ethically, you know,

Jon Stoddard (30:05.046)
everything that you know, customers love you. So important before you can get to that number. Yeah, yeah, before because otherwise what I've just seen it too many times where people take the numbers and they're like, yeah, they'll fit, they'll definitely change. I don't care that they're 65 years old, they're going to change over the next couple years working here. That doesn't happen. People don't change very often. It takes big life events like some of the ones you were talking about, John, that that change people otherwise.

you don't just all of a sudden change when you're an adult. Yeah, now 65 years old, you're pretty set in your ways. I'm to change for some younger guy that wants to do this, this and this. No thank you. My teenage kids are pretty set in their ways as teenagers, right? Never mind me at my age. Hey, I got a question. So what do your teenagers do? Are you bringing them into the business, showing them how to work above the business?

Yeah, so we talk about my wife and I both talk a lot about our businesses at home and we talk about them with the kids so that they can see and hear what it's like that we talk about not necessarily specific clients as an example, but we talk about like what we're doing on a daily basis and in some of my business travels, I take the kids. So for instance, about a month ago, I had to go to I had to go to Texas and one of the dinners I had the opportunity to bring the kids to and they got to they got to meet the person I was with.

a business coach, I spent the evening with him four or five hours and at a really nice restaurant. The kids got to be part of that experience. They got to ask questions, they got to listen and you know, it's cheap, cheap learning lessons at these ages. And so my kids have traveled with me a lot in business settings to listen to speakers, to be part of the environment so that they can learn what they don't like, what they like and you know, at least how dad's going about business.

That's good parenting. I mean, you're instilling something into the, you know, what they can use in the future. And this is, you know, this is something when people say it's like, it's unfair, you have privilege. No, it's generational. It's because you're a good parent. And you, you know, you brought your kid to a business meeting. Yeah, you know, funny, how the world works. It is and and, and no better way to learn some of those things than in real life experiences, not just reading from a textbook. I

Jon Stoddard (32:24.546)
I'm a firm believer that learning is all different varieties. And to the extent I can be part of my kids learning, it's helpful. I'm gonna try and it as much as possible. That's beautiful. John, I wanna appreciate your time on this. This has been fantastic. He's got a great book. I mean, it's 10 years old, but it's ever great. Go get it, it's on Amazon. I'm not an affiliate, but go get it. It's great. John, thank you so much for your time on this interview. Thanks for having me, John. Really appreciate it.

Well, good. Let's work out a deal in the future. might have something that you need. I'd love that. All right. Take care, John. Bye. Bye. I'm going to take it off record.