Brock Weatherup. Secrets of Successful Sequels

29:10So that created a motivation for you to succeed. That's what you mean that the failure was useful? at any time you know we we fortunately learn more from our failures than our successes um i you know kind of it's because they they jar a little bit more and they scar a little bit deeper but um yeah you know i mean the outcome of it again was like okay all the things i need to know about how do you structure it how do you create great teams how do you create great motivation how do you align incentives how do you put all of those things together and you know the reality is, you know, all of those things came together.

29:45Who are your investors? Not just that they are able to write checks, but who are they to you? Who are they as people? How do they operate in business? How, what, you know, are you, are you doing the right sort of background checks on them? They do it on you or you do it on them and your verse is like, Hey, it's great that you're writing a$5 million check, but okay. But, and it's all wonderful when things are great, but when things get challenged that's when generally people's true colors show up and you know folks who aren't good people will show up as aren't good people when the things are difficult and that's what happened to me how important the financial motivation was for you early on i've been lucky enough my my first job which was uh my first kind of real big job was was kind of working for what what has become interactive corps so the early days of ticketmaster online and CitySearch is$99 ,000.

30:37And I did okay. I had a good salary. I was able to save. I've always lived well within my means, and so I kind of always had kind of enough.

30:49And I'm not saying money wasn't a motivation, but I wanted to build something. I wanted to create something. I wanted to have fun doing it. And I believed that money would be an outcome of that, but not the why of doing it. I'm sure I could have put more money in my bank account if I was, I'd say, more selfish and more greedy and those sorts of things. But I conversely believed it was really important to share equity across people who were doing things because it created a more ownership mentality. And I believe that's why we created success in the way that we did was because the people who joined my teams earned by and were collectively motivated to create an outcome together versus, hey, Brock owns this business and we're going to make him wealthy.

31:46Like that feels like such a horrible motivation. I've tried to live my life that if today happened to me, my last day, that I would go happy. And like, I don't leave regrets, but just, you know, have fun doing it and, you know, have a great time with it. And, you know, we'll see what tomorrow brings, but let's just, let's do it right today. And, you know, let's see where it goes. And I've been lucky enough that has continued to work for me and continue to kind of fill me with rewards on many facets. So all the three businesses that you sold had partners in them, correct? Correct. For this very reason that you described.

32:25It was interesting. You know, I had this sort of dramatic experience where when I sold, when we sold Pet Coach to Petco, and then I, and I learned a lot from my experience at PetSmart and the senior team and what to do there. So I thought I had a playbook on how to be better inside Petco. And the reality was it was fascinating to kind of get in there. And I really struggled the first six months there. And I think one of the biggest reasons why I struggled there was I was operating as an owner in Petco, not as an employee of Petco. And that sounds like a small difference, but I was sitting in our board meetings.

33:11And again, I was one of the top couple people in this multi-billion dollar organization. And if you're in a corporation and you've grown up in a corporation and that's where you've built your career, power and value and all the things of how important are you are predicated on what is your headcount, what's your budget size, and what's your title. Okay, those are three things as an owner are irrelevant. As an employee are everything. And so we'd sit in our board meeting, especially early, and it would be like, you know, I'd be sitting there, oh, you know, oh, well, you know, Rebecca over there, she needs, you know, more people and John needs more capital.

33:52And I'm like, well, I've got some extra headcount and I've got some extra things. And I think the best thing for our business is to get, John should get more capital and Rebecca should get more people because that's where the opportunities are. And I would do that and would be okay with that. And I got these sort of looks from them being like, okay, what's your angle? What are you trying to get done? Are you trying to become CEO? Are you trying to step over me? Are you trying to... Because that's what somebody who was used to working in a corporate sort of scenario and was a career employee would never do unless there was a subtext that there was some other reason for it.

34:31And I just wanted to be successful because when we had sold the company, I took a big chunk of what we sold in equity in Petco. And so I was an owner. And that dynamic was really hard and took me a while to see and finally did five, six months in that like, oh, okay, I got to figure out how to approach this differently because I was not being as successful as I should have been because I was not operating in the way everybody else was thinking about it. Fascinating. I really like this distinction between a founder mentality and an employee mentality. I can absolutely see that. So your only failure in business was that first business, or did you have other failed businesses later on?

35:18Well, to say that that's my only failure is a, is a absolute gross understatement of what happens actually, right? So within all of those are massive failures in all sorts of things and all sorts of different ways. You know, like, like fathead at the end of the day, I would say I get more accolades, more follow up, more excitement, more credit for building fathead than I do any of my other businesses. And yet, it's the one that was financially a disaster for me. It's where I got fired from, but it was a great brand. It has a lot of following and people are excited about it. So my failure is what most people remember that I did.

36:02Not because it was a failure, but because they liked the brand and the company. But underneath that, within every one of those businesses are lots and lots and lots and lots of failures. But one of the things that I always made foundational within my teams and then with everyone that I would talk to was like, You know, we didn't actively pursue failing, but we celebrated failure because if you didn't celebrate failure and you weren't open and honest about failure, then people were scared to fail. And people didn't try as hard as they should. And people didn't discuss problems as openly as they should.

36:39When we wanted to tackle the next challenging things, I always had volunteers. It was always like, I want to go do that. I want to go. And guess what? people were willing to take that risk because if you took a risk and went after it really well, worked really hard with it, executed it exceptionally, you would end up in a position where, okay, you know what? I want to do this and we're going to go figure it out. And we would find more successful things because you tried more things and you tried things that were a little bit riskier, but you put more effort into it and just created this positive cycle of trying and failing and growing and trying and failing and growing and being okay with all of that and celebrating all that.

37:22And, you know, I think that's foundational to what is. And so the failure is not a failure. Failure is a great opportunity to learn and move on and figure out the next thing. I think it's so absolutely brilliant. It's kind of counterintuitive to so proactively celebrate failure, not just embrace it, but celebrate it. But I can absolutely see how it would have a very positive long-term effect on the team. Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong. You celebrate the successes also, right? But it's easy for everyone to celebrate and see the successes. But the successes don't happen if you're not making a whole bunch of failures along the way to that success, because otherwise the success is not going to be as grand as what it can be because you didn't try hard enough along the way.

38:06So you got to find that balance all the way through to create that outcome at the end of the day. Well, lots of us forget to celebrate successes too. I actually talked to someone yesterday who said their biggest regret in their whole long career of building businesses was not celebrating every small occasion they could. And they look back and there is not much of that joy in their memory, which I found very interesting. My wife has described with me as relentlessly optimistic, and that hasn't necessarily been the most positive thing sometimes. And the reality is, yeah, we can wallow in what went wrong, and I would get very upset and not be in a good place if we repeated a mistake again.

38:54that absolutely intolerable you cannot let that happen doing the same thing wrong twice that's just not that's not okay doing it wrong once learning and doing something different next time great like do that every day do that all the time make that part of what your dna is and you know kind of keep having fun with it and bring energy to it and you know keep figuring it out like yeah that that can be a lot of fun but no i i think i've i think i've been able to have a lot of fun along the way. It's been really hard and really difficult and you have to put a huge amount of effort into it. But at the end of the day, my whole thing was like, okay, I'm selling a giant image of LeBron James on my wall, or I'm selling dog food or a leash with all due respect.

39:45Nobody's dying on our watch because of this. It's just not that. Let's not take ourselves that seriously. We're building businesses. So, okay. You were talking about a failure for very rational business reasons. The business model was not good enough. How about failures when you didn't manage yourself or your personality well enough and that resulted in a business failure? Yeah. Well, I think the, you know, well, a little bit, my example, so kind of go back to it, the first six months of my time at Petco and I was, and the owner, the owner thing versus the employee thing, it doesn't mean that being an owner mentality is better than an employee mentality.

40:25It was total and complete obliviousness and being completely unaware by me of not spending the time to learn and see and understand. I thought I came in as this founder who had sold his businesses and was so smart and all these, I knew all these on how to do it and where to go and what to do. the reality was I knew a lot for sure, but I didn't spend the time to see what was actually going on and learn how it had worked so that I could then take the right steps of moving it maybe some direction that I thought it should go. Instead, I was like, yeah, we should go here. And everybody else is like, well, I'm not going there versus I should have spent the time, especially early to be like, okay, like spend a lot more time learning.

41:16And frankly, a lot less time talking and a lot more time listening early on in that process to be like, okay, like I'm the newbie in here who doesn't know anything versus I came in being like, and part of it, I was brought in. The CEO wanted me to be a change agent, wanted me to be all these things, you know, that I was excited to do. And so I was like, well, yeah, I'm coming in. The CEO says I'm going to be a change agent. I'm the innovation guy. I'm changing this place and I'm going to make 30 ,000 people operate differently in a week. You know, It just doesn't happen that way. I think my blindness of being able to see that I had a massive gap of both knowledge, skill, and awareness didn't allow me to get there.

42:04I eventually caught up to that, but it should have taken weeks, not six months, to figure that out. And those sorts of things, you know, I think those are kind of growth things as a leader that I could point to 50 of them along the way of just, okay, tried, didn't need to. And you just got to build a lot more of your capacity and capability and just be more aware. And, you know, kind of I've learned over time to just be like to to to just, you know, be be have an insatiable appetite to learn and don't let that cloud that you actually don't know very much. You know, a lot. Everyone knows a lot.

42:47But you also got to like show up to everything. Like, I don't know what this is. I might have experience of what this looks like in somewhere else, but I've never been to this moment. But this moment right now has never happened before. Okay. We can't say it has because it hasn't because today is a new day. It's not yesterday and we don't know what tomorrow is going to be. We can try and optimize for tomorrow, but you got to stay learning and stay aware. And that I had to get caught up in and kind of, you know, had any stumbling and falling on my face in a pretty bad way right out of the gate, being able to do that.

43:20So it sounds like a lesson in humility. You know, especially when you're succeeding, right? And I'd had a lot of success prior to that point. Like, you're getting promotions and you're getting raises and you're getting, you're starting new companies and people are joining you and people make you feel good and you're raising capital and then you sell a business and then you start another one. And like, it's easy to tell your really positive story about how great you are, right? Because there's also a lot of people telling you that, which is really nice. And it feels really good. And, you know, anyways, yeah, I think I am pretty good.

43:52But I also have a huge amount of things I'm not very good at. And I got to figure out how to always manage that. And it's hard to find that sort of balance between those two things. And that's where, again, you need the great people around you to, again, help you continue to be great at what you're good at and hopefully minimize your weaknesses. Like I was talking about people like, look, you can't make your weaknesses your strengths. A lot of people try and kind of go through, well, I'm not good at this. So I'm going to get, make that my strength. Like, don't do that. You're never going to take your weakness and make it a strength.

44:26You just can't. Now, can you make your weakness a neutral so that it doesn't hold you back? You bet. Right. And how do you stay aware of what are your pluses and how do you do more of those? Amplify your pluses because you can do that, but you can't take your minuses and make them pluses. You can make them neutral or make them as least impactful as possible, but okay, you got to figure out how to do that. Yeah, that requires quite a lot of introspection and the critical looking at yourself to understand what you're good at. You know, Steve Jobs talked about it quite a bit, about this overconfidence we have when we succeeded in building a product.

45:05And then next time, we just assume it's going to succeed automatically. And what I see a lot in the post-exit community is that when that is fueled by money after a liquidity event, it can become very dangerous very fast and people get burned very quickly. And then it's a long way to climb out of that situation. I would agree 100 % because the reality is, again, I think I learned a lot by some success and a whole lot of failures in all that time too when I created my last business in Great Pet Care. where the thing that I was incredibly proud about was I was like, okay, I've learned all this stuff.

45:52What can I do? And the reality was, okay, you need a really talented group of people that, oh, by the way, are not like me, meaning. So when we got our initial team together, there's a thing called Enneagram, which is a sort of personal, kind of your style sort of thing. I think it's a great test that helps people be very introspective in knowing what they are. like I made everybody in our team take the Enneagram so that we could work better on day one and I was really really proud that of the seven of us there's nine types of Enneagrams out of the seven of us there was one overlapping type like everybody had a very different style and personality about how they thought what was their like what they and that made me feel really really proud because, and that to me was a, a lot of lessons learned over time that you have to have a, and diversity gets kind of overused in many, but different diversity of perspective coming into it.

46:50And that's a lot of things about background, a lot of things about, you know, kind of culture, a lot of things, you know, that all kind of lead into what, you know, but diversity of thought and perspective and dynamics, right. Come to the same, that's how you create great outcomes because you have different ways that people are trying to attack the same problem. We're going to try and create and do this. Well, this requires, I have my thought about what that is, and I can guarantee you it's not right. There's a lot of elements to where I think it should happen that are probably are right and will make it successful, but they're not all of the reasons why, because I need five other perspectives to say, no, we got to do this, this, this, and then you end up with a great outcome.

47:30And again, when you look at what the next thing would be, it's going to dramatically be different because it requires another iteration of what it is. And look, you know, people who fill their bank accounts and put things, you know, kind of this, all, you know, people think money is the reason why that is a demonstration of why they are successful. And the reality is like, okay, maybe you were, maybe you weren't, but there's, God knows there's, you know, you have to work really, really hard to get lucky, but you also have to get lucky. And people think, well, oh, I just worked hard and I'm so smart and that's why it was successful.

48:08Well, you know what? No. You just happen to be working really hard and being successful and it fit the moment in time in life where that was valued. Because if you had done it five years prior or five years later, you would have missed the boat. It doesn't mean anything else. And I think people don't get, don't either don't have people around them to say, Hey, like, ego, check it at the door because you're, you know, you're getting a way too inflated for what you actually are. And, you know, on the other hand, like, how do you kind of fulfill what, what those things are? And I think that's especially true, you know, in, in, in with youth, right.

48:47And we were all that way when we were young because we didn't know enough. And so we thought we were, look, everybody's invincible when they're 25, right? Like you can go, you can do anything. You can go anywhere, you know, nothing's going to hurt you. Like you're going to, you know, everything. Yeah. And you don't, you know, a lot and you have a whole lot of value and unique value of energy. You have unique value of not being encumbered by experience. So you think more broadly and more clearly because you don't have things that have taught you not to do this and not to do that, which older people need to recognize just because you've learned not to do this and not to do that, that does not mean that you shouldn't try it again in a different way.

49:26And so that's the balance of the sort of thing. But there's a lot of youth that would say, I know everything and the old people are dumb. Okay, well, part of that's true, because there's experience that holds you back on the other end. Like if you're old, doesn't mean that young people are dumb and naive either. It just you got it like, what are the strengths of each of those dynamics and allow that to happen. But people can get out ahead of themselves and think that they are much more capable and much smarter and far more of an expert because something happened. And the reality is it's just not.

50:03So we talked about the importance of having a good incentive system and sharing equity with your partners. we talked about humility lessons and understanding your strengths and weaknesses anything else you think is very important to avoid a failure after success um well i think you you said it just going a little deeper into it is to just not not not have the belief or more importantly not think it's just true because you did it before this way that that will work today because the The market has changed. The people have changed. The execution of it is different. Again, you have to stay in the, I got to keep learning.

50:48Now, are there dynamics around what I would describe, what I would put in the leadership category that are repeatable? Absolutely. Right? That you can get better and being a leader of people and how do you build culture and those sorts of things like the fundamentals of how you do that. you can definitely build and get better and better and better and do more of that. But you also have to be very aware that the situation is different and you got to just, you got to optimize to the situation, even though you may start with a set of rules that you think are how you're going to solve it, the odds of it being how you're going to solve it are likely not true.

51:29And it's because it's, but there's going to be a version of that, that if you edit and, you know, rough around the edges and do some things, it'll probably be at the core similar, but that's not going to get you great success. That's going to get you out of the gate. But to create great success, you got to take whatever you've learned, refine it, learn, test, improve, make it something better, different that works for that moment that's different than the prior moment. And that gap of perspective, I don't know if I put it really necessarily as humility or any sort of like, it's just a, like, just learn because you aren't, you're, you're, you're, yeah, what was it?

52:07The, you know, your, your future investment results will not be the same as what they were, you know, whatever the sort of caveat that everyone else, which is just true, right? Just because it happened before doesn't mean it will happen tomorrow. And so how do you make sure that you continue to stay learning, continue to stay active, continue to stay in this sort of progressive, figure it out sort of mentality, because that's how you'll find a way to get from here to there. Yeah, it's like the stock market. Past performance doesn't guarantee future success. Exactly, exactly. So you also stayed in the same industry.

52:45You kept the same team, which I assume were fantastic risk management tools, whether intentional for that purpose or not. Do you think looking back that that was part of your continuing success? You know, look, I absolutely know that my success is because of the people that I've had around me and been lucky enough to, you know, kind of both be with me and then come work with me again. And kind of that builds many. So going back to the Petco example, the first six months, what I did not understand. But one of the things that I did do in that first six months that did pay off really well was I recruited a whole lot of people into Petco.

53:31And by recruiting them – and by the way, they weren't necessarily working for me. It was like, okay, I helped recruit somebody into the business strategy team and somebody into the tech team and somebody in the merchandising team and helping them. But they were people who understood me, my language, even though I was not being particularly capable at articulating what I felt I needed to. If they were in their groups and I was talking, they would help translate what I was saying ineffectively into their groups in the way that worked for their groups. And that was really helpful to what it is. And again, just the people dynamics of that is absolutely where the success dynamics were for me.

54:14And I would say it still happens to today. When I'm working with a company or on a board, we need to find somebody. I'm like, okay, I'm going to call somebody who's going to find somebody. And you can get amazing people to do amazing things in that sort of dynamic, which is just a very, very special thing. when it works and people are willing to do that. And that's a two-way street, right? Somebody doesn't come work for you again because it was a crappy first experience. Like nobody goes, oh, I hated working for that guy, but I'm going to go do it again. Says no one ever, right? But if somebody does that, and it gets them up to speed much quicker.

54:53Like again, when we built Great Pet Care and I brought that team together because everybody had worked for me before, like the how and why and the words I used, the style that I was was already given. Like our ability to have a quote unquote culture on day one was instantaneous because we'd done it. Now we made a new culture, but the foundational elements of it was like, oh, okay. Yeah, because we know how Brock leads and we know what he expects and we know what we do. And we know when we say this, this is what it means. And that just got us going much faster, much quicker than we would have in any other scenario if everybody was new.

55:27And so how do you kind of keep building that? But I think you got very lucky there as well, because you could actually have the same team. Because more often than not, you would have to restrict your hiring attempts. One of the guys that was in the last, his name was Nick Rosendahl. He hadn't worked for me in a pet company. He worked for a company that I was an advisor to, that I had worked for that was totally outside of the pet industry. But I had gotten to know him and he had gotten to know me. I'd tried to hire him a couple times before, but I was unsuccessful for what was ever going on in life, in his life, our life, whatever else.

56:05And this time it worked out. And it was an unbelievable hire. Another guy who I had worked with at Ticketmaster 15, 20 years prior, who I'd stayed in touch with, was impressed with him then. We'd stayed in touch and been like, okay, well, that was another person. Those happen because you just see them over time. It's not because they were pet industry experts. They were really talented people who were doing lots of things that I just stayed aware of as they did their things in life. It's the beautiful thing about LinkedIn. It's a beautiful thing about social media if you pay attention to it in the right way.

56:43And I needed talent in these sorts of things. And it was like, oh, fantastic. Like the one guy who was at Ticketmaster, I brought him into Petco. And he had gone from Ticketmaster. And then he'd gone to Nike and had done a bunch. He'd been insanely successful, but he knew how to operate in a large corporation. So going back to my challenges at Petco, I brought him in. His name was Bob Bennett. And he was every reason why I had almost any success inside Petco because he knew how to translate. He jokingly said, we'd go into a meeting to talk about something. I would break everything and I would get us going the direction we needed to go.

57:21But I would leave a train wreck. I'd leave a mess because I didn't know how to get the corporate culture behind that. And then Bob would come in next to me as my right hand and would organize everybody behind me after I left a mess because he knew how to get everyone organized, put it together, create an outcome and create something fantastic. And like we worked really, really, really well together because I had a skill he didn't have and he had a skill that I didn't have. And the two of them together worked incredibly well. But, you know, you got to find those people. So it's not necessarily inside the industry.

57:57It's just more of like who are skill sets that you pay attention to and you follow over time. So, Brock, in your second company, you brought investors in right away. You raised$2 million in seed financing. Do you think that was a good idea? Why did you decide to do that? Well, what people don't really understand is the value of the cap table of what you have. I personally made more money selling a company for$30 million than I did selling a company for$200 million. Okay, well, it depends what the cap table looks like. It depends. Well, there's things like preference stacks and other things that people learn along the way that you just don't understand on the first time around.

58:49And you're like, oh, yeah, well, oh, great. Thanks for the$10 million check. And, oh, you mean it's got a two times pref and a this and a guaranteed that? And you're like, all of a sudden, when you get to the outcome, you're like, well, wait a second. Why did this all happen? And you just learn. You learn to figure that out. You know, there are important things to bring in money because money can be helpful, mostly because who is bringing in the money, not necessarily even the money. So when I was in later companies, the money that I brought in was helpful, knowledgeable money that brought a person, brought a company, brought an experience, brought a connection, brought a customer into the conversation versus just the money.

59:37First company, I was like, I needed money. I just wanted money. And that was a mistake. I should say. That's the wrong way. It worked for what it was at the time. I could have been much smarter about it if I knew what I know now and gone back and done that. And look, and the reality is like, you know, you put things together and how you manage what's going on in your life and how you are thinking about your investments, where you are with your family, where you are in your personal family. That balances your risk profile, right? I mean, there's a reason why people who are younger start businesses more frequently.

1:00:13I'll call it their family burn rate is very low, right? If you're 23 years old and you're sharing an apartment in St. Louis, Missouri, your burn rate is very low, right? You don't need a lot of income to stay alive, right? If you're living in New York City and you have two kids and you're married, your burn rate is dramatically higher. You need to earn a certain amount on any given year to not go into the red, right? And so those are the dynamics that also then affect how much you personally invest into the next thing. So, Brock, is there anything else you feel would be helpful to know for someone who recently exited and is thinking of doing what you did, which is building the next business and maybe more businesses again and again?

1:01:01Be intentional. And what I mean by being intentional is like we put all this planning into our businesses about where do you allocate capital? Where do you allocate time? Where do you allocate resources? What's the market you're going after? What do you want? How do you measure what that success looks like? But we don't do much of that into our personal lives. Right. And so for somebody, especially in times of big transition, like after an exit or anything else, sit down and spend the time. And you've got to write it down and you've got to share it with somebody that's important to you that will hold you accountable to it.

1:01:38But what are your intentions for you as a person? In my case, what is it for me as an individual? What is it for me as a husband? What is it for me as a father? What is it for me as a son? What do those things look like?

1:01:55discipline that you put into your business. Okay, me as an individual, it's not like get in better shape. Okay, that's a goal that you would never accept in business. Make more money. You'd be like, what's the worst goal on the planet for the business? Yes, that's what we're trying to do, but no, how exactly are you going to do that? I'm going to do it this way. And so, okay, if that means, okay, well, you're going to get, you know, an hour's worth of cardio exercise four times a day, four times a week. Okay, great. If you think that's reasonable and make sure the person you're sharing it with is going to go, yeah, great, Brock, but not a chance you're going to do it that often.

1:02:32That's not how life is working for you. Okay, fine. But, like, how do you put in what those things are if volunteering is important to you that, okay, like, you know, okay, yeah, we all want to volunteer once a week, but it's probably not going to happen once a week. But okay, maybe make it once a month, right? And okay, where are you going to do that? What, like, who are you going to want to do with it? What volunteering are you excited about? Like, just be specific about what you want to do in life, right? And be intentional about it. And if you create that on a sheet of paper and actually write it down and have to present it to somebody, whether it's a parent, a spouse, a good friend, but like share it written down, you will be so much more focused about what that is and it will help you then define does this next startup or this next thing I'm going to do fulfill against those goals that I am setting out that are important to me in this basket of intentions and it gives you a way to measure whether what you're choosing to go do fulfills where you want to go and what you want to do or doesn't and look and it's fine if the answer is like I want to make a lot of money There's nothing wrong with that being an intention, but what does that mean?

1:03:45And when does a lot mean a lot? And what does that look like? And what are you aiming to do? Are you going to take a risk to try and create a billion-dollar company? Or are you really happy making$10 million? Okay, or maybe a million, whatever it is. But what are those sorts of things? And how do you get intentional about it? So I just would always encourage folks to do this just in life, and whether you do it every year or do it during every couple of years, or whenever you have big moments where you're thinking about what should I or where do I want to go? Where do I want to move? What does that look like?

1:04:14I mean, spending that time to be that sort of intentional, like I did it right after I got diagnosed with MS. We've done it as we became empty nesters as a couple, you know, like what, what is our intentions? Okay. Well, guess what? We were living in San Diego. We now live in Connecticut because we made the choice to be intentional. One of the things in our intentions as a couple was being closer to family and our family's more in the East coast, the Northeast than it is in Southern California. As much as we love living at San Diego, but we made that choice because that was in our intentions and we were able to say, this is what we wanted to go do.

1:04:45And that's what we're doing. And now we feel better about it. So like getting in, spending the time to be, to put that same planning into your personal life and activity that you do in business that we spend so much time training ourselves how to do. Would you say that being intentional in your personal life also increases the chances of your success in business? 100%. There is 100 % correlation between those two things. Because if you're lost personally, how are you going to figure out what you want to do professionally? If you're not sure what you want to do professionally, you're never going to be happy personally.

1:05:19So those things are inextricably tied and they are 100 % overlap with one another. Yeah. You know what I see a lot in the community of exited founders is people jump straight into a new business in a way to escape dealing with personal issues that are triggered by success. Very likely. And then I see this pattern. Then a few years later, businesses failed because there were all these personal issues that were not properly addressed. How did you avoid that? Well, I think on a personal level, I found an incredible partner on the personal side of my wife. And I think, B, we've always been very, we have a very open dialogue.

1:06:02And it goes back to a little bit of, again, what came first, the celebrating failures in business. I don't know if that became before or after how to work on a successful relationship, which has successors and failures. If you're not actively talking about why is it working in a relationship, then you're not going to improve what you have in a relationship. much like if you're not talking about what isn't working in business, you're not going to improve what's happening in business. And so, again, I don't know if I'm going to be totally honest with you, what came first, but it was always a part of things in my personal life and in my professional life.

1:06:37We just always talked about whatever was going on. The hard stuff went on the table first. You don't talk about the easy stuff on the table first. You talk about the hard stuff. And if you work through that, then the easy stuff is easier and you solve things that really matter, which is the hard stuff. And so, you know, again, whether that's your personal life or your professional life, I think it's critical that you bring those two things together. And thus, one allows you to be happy. I mean, look, there are people who found great success in their business who are just, I would put in the unhappy category.

1:07:04And that's unfortunate, you know, like the same sort of thing, because they have not spent the time to be happy in their personal life and vice versa. Right. And so you got to find that balance between those two because they are completely and inextricably tied. So how do you want to be remembered? A person who cared about other people and backed up what he said. I so much enjoyed our conversation. I could continue for hours. That was great. But I know I need to. Yeah, I think we could go for a bit longer. This was fantastic and enjoyable.