Ep 97: Jimmy John Built a Restaurant Empire; Government Almost Destroyed It

0:00Final advice for entrepreneurs who are listening in. Come in earlier, stay later, work harder, volunteer, take the toughest jobs for yourself. Nothing's above you. Get in there and clean the bathrooms, clean the stalls, do whatever it takes to make it happen. Lead by example. Your people will really do what you do, not what you say. And so lead it, live it, do it, build your team and know your product, love your product and understand your numbers. And if you do that, you know, and you have a little bit of luck, I think you're going to kick their ass.

0:37My friend Jimmy John Liotto is the founder of Jimmy John's, one of the most successful restaurant businesses in America. He's a kind and gracious guy. He's an entrepreneur who's really passionate about his business. He's passionate about this country. He started off at the age of 19. He scaled slowly at first, making sure he really aced every restaurant. Then he started scaling more quickly and built one of the most impressive restaurant businesses in our country. His business was almost destroyed by the government as he was attacked over several years over really crazy things. So you'll see why this guy who originally didn't really think about freedom, think about things like politics, really passionate about politics today, but is also still bullish and passionate on America.

1:14I'm Joe Lonsdale. Welcome to American Optimist. I have my friend Jimmy John. Jimmy John Leoteau is his actual name, but he's known as Jimmy John because of his amazing business. Thanks for being here. It's my pleasure, Joe. Thanks for having me. January 13th 1983 that was when you first opened your first Jimmy John's you were you were 19 years old tell us about the store on the menu yeah it was I was 19 years old it was a it was a two-door garage that had been converted into a pizza joint that had failed and I rented it and it was at Eastern Illinois University and I had a couple cousins and a brother that was going that were two cousins there brother was going there and and I rented this garage and I had four sandwiches on my menu and I had 25 cent Cokes and I opened the business with a$25 ,000 loan from my father and he was my partner.

1:58I love it. And you were baking the bread yourself, designing the sandwiches and the menu. How'd you figure this out all out on your own as you got going? Well, my father gave me a budget of$25 ,000 and I wanted to open a Chicago hot dog stand. And when I found out how much equipment it took to open a hot dog stand with fryers and steam tables and milkshake machines and ovens and hoods and all that, I didn't have enough money. So I really was just by default, It was a sandwich shop or go to the army. It was one or the other. And I didn't want to go to the army. And my father was going to let me live at home.

2:26So I just discovered sandwiches. And that's how it started. It's actually fascinating. So it's the scarcity of only having a certain amount of money forced you into a more efficient thing to do. And, you know, to what do you attribute your success? You obviously have a larger than life personality. You're a really bold guy. Was that a key part of it even early on? You know what? I don't know that that was a key part of it early on because when I was a kid and I was that young i was honestly i was scared to death like i i i really didn't i didn't have any other option like my dad was serious and and and uh and i don't know that my personality was quite developed really at that time i mean i was a kid um uh but what certainly helped me was my ability to to uh well i was all my employees quit to like a month after we opened all my employees quit and and i had the energy and the and and the big energy where i was able to run the store from open to close from eight in the morning to two in the morning so that's something i never knew that i could do but i did it and so i guess my energy helped me there so i think i i think it helped probably it helped me yeah i guess it helped me but uh first few hires and they didn't work out at all they left and i hear you made a woman take a lie detector test is that true yeah i did i you know what i had i had a written test that would that was a uh that you would fill out and i would and I, and I would grade the test.

3:43And if they scored a certain way, it said the chances of this person stealing from you, you know, is pretty good or, or, or not. And it was, it was like a Myers-Briggs, but it was for thievery. And, uh, but I mean, it wasn't like lie detector test. I wasn't like hooking people up to machines and shit. You're doing your test now making sure it's going to work. That's funny. I would push back on the personality being big at that time. One of the ads we looked it up was all restaurants in Charleston closed after, after people eat at Jimmy John's. So that must've been a little bit of your personality coming out then?

4:12Yeah, it might've been. It might've been. Yeah. There are thousands of Jimmy John locations. You've sold part of the business now. What's the situation now? So situation now is I sold, um, I sold two thirds of the business in 2016. And, uh, and, and 2019, I rolled my retaining 33%, whatever it was into inspire brands, which is Jimmy John's, Dunkin' Donuts, Buffalo Wellwings, Sonic, and, um, Arby's. It's a giant, giant company. How many Jimmy John's are there now? I think there's about 2 ,900. That's amazing. Yeah, it is amazing. It is amazing. It really is. And Jimmy John's actually doing very well right now.

4:50Fast food, it seems like an incredibly competitive area. What advice would you give someone entering this space? And how'd you get it to work at scale? Joe, well, first of all, we went through a journey because the model, as we grew the business, from 83 to 93, I opened 10 stores and I moved to 10 different cities. from 93 to 03 I opened 200 franchise stores and 25 company stores and then from 03 to 13 we built 2000 so you really started with just 10 over 10 years really getting those early ones right yeah and I moved to 10 different cities in 10 years I opened up my I opened every one myself and then so so at 2006 2007 2010 it really hit an inflection point it started really cranking and we were opening between 15 and 30 restaurants a month for about seven eight years we were really really cooking and um and the model was great it was 350 000 to open a store the stores did about 900 000 in sales and the average store made about 200 000 of profit and then and we paid the managers a base pay of like 36 to 42 grand base pay salary depending on where they were and we gave them 25 of the profit of the store so the managers made a lot of money and they made 80 to 120 ,000 bucks a year.

6:05And it was a, it was, it was really symbiotic, copacetic. It worked for the managers. It worked for us. I mean, and we hired the people right, right, right below government wage and right above welfare. So we were in that sweet spot and we were taking these people and we were teaching them a, how to run a business, how to operate with discipline. We had systems and procedures. We showed them the PNL. We taught them the PNL. We got, we met with them once a month sat down with them reviewed their p &l and we gave them their their bonus check and and we had 3 000 stores open and and another 3 400 sold when i sold the business or 2 900 stores open and another 3 400 sold and and what what what happened because you asked me jimmy should people go into this business or should they get involved in this business there was a gradual change in the in in in the government oversight and the government rules the policy started to mess it up basically Policy started to mess it up.

7:02And it first started with insurance. You got to have insurance. And if you don't have insurance, you got to pay this minimum to the government. And then it came, then they changed the definition of a manager. They said, you got to pay a manager$52 ,000 a year. So these people before making less than that, but then they're making$100 ,000 in total because they have all the incentives, which of course you want incentive alignment. That's how your business works. But they were forcing you to pay them more and not have as much incentives. That's right. They wanted to reverse that, give them a guaranteed 52.

7:29and then the bonus, the government, well, they started. Why is that even their business? That's crazy. Why are they, I mean, you're paying, most people are doing well. Like, why is government stepping in there? The government's stepping in there because, you know what, I just, I wonder why the government didn't come and ask me if Barack Obama was so excited about making it better for these people, why wouldn't he come to me and ask me, say, show me your business, show me the model, show me how it works, let me meet some of your people and let me talk to some of your people. I mean, it makes so much sense.

7:54This was the Department of Labor coming in and changing the rules on you? Well, Obama's policy is where it started. And then when it started and they made the new labor law, we weren't concerned about it because our average manager was at$72 ,000. So then what happened was they started suing individual franchise owners. My average franchise owner had 3.2 stores. So all around the country, they started suing our franchisees. The government did. government did for uh for taking advantage of uh taking advantage of managers and so and then that escalated and so our franchisees who spent all their extra energy and time marketing the business going to local baseball games pitching marketing selling creating catering building the catering business taking care of their people all of a sudden they're litigating and then and then the policy evolved more and and obama said now i'm a co-employer and i became a co-employer and once once my whole chain was all of our energy was spent on growing a business building building the business and and helping serve the franchisees that are serving the sandwiches and it changed uh to we were in litigation so all the momentum went from from from building and helping and and winning to litigating and it was a whole the entire chain all the mom and pops and then us as well and we spent you know i it was it was a total disruption this is 2014 2015 yeah this is this This is like started in 2012, 2013, 14, 15.

9:24And then every time we go to court, the Department of Labor courts, the judges were all appointed by Obama. They worked for Obama because they think it's called adjudicative judges at the regulators. It's not really an independent court. It's an Obama judge. It's an Obama judge. And every time we went, they ruled against the law in favor of them. So you had to appeal above. But then even the first appeal is still to the Obama judge. did you eventually get it out of the judges to the real courts as soon as we got to the real courts we won it on a summary judgment but that stopped momentum for like seven years crush your business crush the business and the momentum and one thing you can't buy culture and you can't buy momentum it's not for sale were you already politically active when this happened were they punishing you for something maybe you know what i don't know um i'm a bit of a pollyanna joe i i just am and and my mother was a lithuanian immigrant right and my dad was first leoto that that got an education and he fought the korean war on the gi bill they met at university of illinois i love america and i wanted people to have the same opportunity as me my business partner was uh i knew the romney family and i loved mitt romney so i supported mitt romney you did just to because i love america of course knowing nothing about politics at all but once they saw you're supporting mitt romney it might have encouraged them to go after you hard the irs audit started to happen at that time yeah so great they could they really were i mean famously they were auditing huge numbers of conservative groups and conservative people.

10:50And I remember, I think she went to the White House a record number of times to see Obama, right? The lady running the IRS back then. So it sounds like it was targeted. Were they going after other store owners, other franchisees as well? Was your model something that was unique to Jimmy John's or were other people in trouble for it too? No, they went after it. They did the McDonald's, Domino's, Jimmy John's. It's so crazy because you had a model where you're giving more upside. They're basically forcing you to give less upside. I've seen the government do this a lot where the SEC doesn't let people participate in certain types of upside because they're not qualified investors.

11:22And so you're not allowed to give them exposure to things that would make them a lot more money. And so they're doing the same thing to you. It's almost like they want to keep people poor or something. It's really weird. You know what? It is really weird. And it's, I just don't think they understand it, nor do I do. I don't think that they even understand where the money comes from or how it's made. You think they're just that dumb? They don't understand how business works with basic incentives and ownership in a business and 25 % upside. You know what, Joe? I don't know that they're that dumb.

11:48I just don't know that they've ever been forced to really figure out how you raise a herd of cattle. You know, I don't think that they know that cattle get sick on weekends and on Christmas. You know, I think they just, you know, you're a little bit more, you know, deliberate about that. But I just think that if you can get away with not having to know the details of your business and you make money in spite of yourself, why do you need to get into the details? And all of the money is made in the details right yeah so i don't know i'm a bloom i'm a little bit of a polly i don't really want to hit him over the head as hard as you do yeah no that's fair you did hire a company though jimmy i understand to go back and do forensics on where all the money that came was came from that was used to attack you what'd you learn i learned that every attack and every every single one came from democratic supported uh uh parties different different different different groups uh but it was 100 uh liberal and democrat people soros type stuff so so that does that make you want to fight a little bit more when people do that to you you know what for me joe i had been i was in business for 32 years and and 30 years or something and all this stuff started happening and i fought it and fought it and fought it and honestly i just i i sold my business because joe i couldn't do i i just was done i had enough i had enough money i had everything i wanted but i just i just i just couldn't do it anymore i was i was i was uh i was really uncleed you know of course well you they came after you a bunch but you know on the end in the day you made a lot of money and overcame them so it sounds like you're in a good place i'm in a good place yeah you know and so i want to ask there's a lot of successful business leaders who don't want to get involved in politics at all is it time for them to step up and stop things like this like what would you tell people in business i would tell people in business that um something that i completely missed joe uh i missed that freedom was a privilege and i never thought i never was it was top of mind for me to that that it was part of my responsibility to protect freedom and to be involved in politics and get myself educated and to know what's going on and understand that every single election matters it doesn't matter whether it's local judges or what whatever it is it all matters and i would so i would tell anybody that's a young people uh i was i came here with my son fred today to fly to austin to see you and i was with fred and i and i was talking to him about netanyahu and and fred my son fred said to me dad who's netanyahu my son fred's a young man and so i said fred just to make it easy on you download the new york post and and and and and fox news and just read the top five articles every day so you can have a conversation but that's that's pretty elementary but be aware that freedom is is is is is not a privilege or it is a privilege and we got to protect it get educated about it be as involved as you can be and and you have to because if you don't it will be stolen from you the same way that it's been done and i mean history history tells us what happens right so i would tell it's a rare thing for us to have it we got we got to preserve it for sure we have to preserve it and and and to just educate people about the facts and not the emotions you know um i don't other than that i just uh i just don't know i mean i do it because i love the country and i love america and and i love trump and i love what he stands for i want to ask you about trump one more political question before we go to a couple other topics is you've you spent a lot of time personally with president trump yeah it sounds like he's a friend of yours you guys chat a lot what do you admire about him i admire his resilience i admire his ability to to not take this personally i admire his ability to take a shot in the head and and the next day be back out on the road fighting again i admire him walking away from the from the crowd with a bloody ear saying fight and and it was real it wasn't staged it wasn't it it wasn't uh you know it was real that's who he is i mean he is one he we are polar opposites he is he is a fighter but at the same time he's a family man he's an amazing memory he's kind he's thoughtful he picks up the phone and calls you're kind of a thoughtful guy too jimmy yeah but but you but but he's a fighter i'm not a fighter got it and and and um and he's a natural fighter and he loves america he loves the country genuinely loves the country and i i just you know his bedside manner could could he be polished a little bit yeah but me i mean i'm i'm the clumsiest dude i ever met so but that's all right so he's got so his bedside manner is a little rough but he is a beautiful human and his family's great and his wife is great and i just love the guy um he's um he asked me about my nephew all the time and i i just think he's a real real human being he's not the guy that the press makes him out to be i love it well well thank you for sharing that i want to ask you also do a lot of other things philanthropically you know something you've given huge amount of money to underserve youth uh through zach brown's program racial elder association what are what are some of your passions to support the country otherwise us um well besides scholarships and i one of my biggest passions is conservation and wildlife and so i i probably give besides scholarships that i give every year a lot i give a lot of money for for direct scholarships i like to i like my money to get directly used immediately i don't like to put it into into funds you know you know but i'm really into wildlife conservation and i'm into repopulating wild sheep actually around around the usa and around the world why does that matter well it matters because we we can we like i'm involved with the foundation for north american wild sheep and 15 years ago we did a transplant of wild sheep in new mexico from one area to another mountain range 15 years later now just this year they put 30 sheep over there there's 300 sheep on that mountain and this year they sold they sold a license to hunt this area for $600 ,000 that license it's the first hunt in this area after the transplant 15 years ago the$600 ,000 went back into and there's 300 sheep there and then they had three resident draw hunters drew a tag and got to hunt the mountain there's more animals on the mountains now than there than there than there ever have been in the history there's more elk there's more sheep there's more deer because of because the hunters because of hunters so you kind of combine hunting with preserving the nature and bringing more animals it's kind of a cool thing that all feeds back on itself absolutely and when you put value on the animal and there's value on the animal then then then then people don't poach the animal they protect the animal and and that's the opposite of what's going on in in africa right you go i love it no that's right well i'm looking forward to more hunting together i hope we enjoy that i i want to ask a couple more business stories because i think you've done a lot of really fun stuff there over the over the years um one thing is just you've been inside thousands of stores and so obviously you spent so much time in that You must build up a strong intuition.

18:28When you walk inside like a restaurant, like a Jimmy John's or something else like it, what are the most common mistakes? And what are the things you sense right away that could tell if they're doing it right or not? Immediately, just look at the front door. If the front door is clean, if the glass is clean, like from top to bottom down to the corners, and look at the little, where the door closes on the floor. Just look and see how clean that is and just start right there. So if that front door is clean and that glass is crystal clear before lunch, that that store probably what you're going to experience behind that glass door is probably going to be just like that.

19:03If that front door is really dirty, the probably the back of the restaurant. Oh gosh, that's interesting. Yeah. Those little details really show right away what they're doing. Sure. Absolutely. They do. I mean, sometimes you can have a dirty door in a well-run restaurant, but it tells you right away. It's all about the small stuff in a restaurant. If it's piled up and it's organized and everything's neat and labels are faced and people look right and tight and the uniforms are in that yeah everything's right and tight it's probably going to be a pretty good restaurant so it actually matters if people are dressed properly with their uniforms correctly and clean and all that stuff absolutely look at chick-fil-a look at in and out look at how great those those models are i mean both of those models by the way the managers are very incented to they i mean they're aligned with the owners you know chick-fil-a managers make upwards of five hundred thousand dollars a year i mean this is very intuitive to me because every company i've ever started or every company i've ever invested in we hire lots of smart people who are owners in the business and those people wake up in the morning and go to sleep thinking about the business.

19:56I don't know how you could run one of these things without the manager owning a piece of it, you know? It doesn't work. It doesn't. I mean, it's the only way to really make it work. It really is. And so what else did you learn? So 10 years in 10 cities, and then all of a sudden you started going into this hyper growth mode and opening tons of them. Like what clicked? Like how come you're all of a sudden able to go really fast? Interesting they ask that. So So the first 10 years, I moved to 10 cities, opened up 10 stores. I joined Young Presidents Organization, YPO. YPO said the entrepreneur has to hire professionals to run their company once they built the company.

20:32So in 1993, I made a million dollars and a million dollars in the bank. I didn't have any debt because I didn't know how to get debt. I didn't know how to make a business plan. I didn't know what it was. I saved up my money and opened up another store. So I hired some professionals to run my franchise business. I ran the company store. So from 93 to 03, I took my 10 stores to 25 and took the franchise from zero to 200. And this is a story. 03, I got 200 stores open and 70 are failing. Wow. And so, and my 25 stores, my sales were skyrocketing and my franchise stores were. So James, who's the president of the company right now, his name is James North.

21:08He told me, said, Jimmy, we got to stop selling franchises. And I was addicted to the franchise fee and the royalty. I wasn't sticking the key in the door yeah he says we got to go on the road we're going to stop selling we got to go turn around these 70 failing stores if we don't go do this we we're not going to have anything to sell yeah so I just had my kids were three and four my natural children I adopted my son Spencer who was in first grade and I had to go back I've been on the road for 20 years and I'm going to go back out on the road again you know after just getting married and having kids and so we did it and we went on the road and we turned around 63 of those 70 stores by hand and And after we did that, my 25 stores were making me four and a half million bucks a year.

21:47We turned around those stores and I said, I don't want to, I don't want to do this ever again. So I only sold, I sold people one store at a time. And if they liked it, we liked them and it worked. I'd give them more stores. And I said, you know what? Don't let them scale all of a sudden something's not working. Yeah. And also sell them to the, but if my, my criteria prior to this journey was if you had a check and a pulse, I took your money. Yeah. Okay. after I went on the road for 18 months and turned around 70 restaurants, you know, it changed a lot. I really want to know who they were. I told them the truth about the business, how hard it was.

22:17It really is difficult. It's not fun. You got to work on it. It's nights, it's weekends, it's sacrifice. You got to work on it. You're 63. That's 90 % of them. The seven you couldn't turn around. What was the difference? The seven were just, the owners are just like, you got to feed these cattle? I thought you just buy the cows and they grow themselves. Yeah. They wouldn't want to work on it. Yeah. They didn't want to work on it. And what states were these in mostly? Where did you guys build out? Really, that was really Midwest. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Kentucky, Iowa. Really, just the Midwestern area.

22:46We grew pretty much Midwest. We stayed away from the coast. Amazing. And were there any other traits of successful managers, successful franchise owners? What kind of people were you looking for at the end of the day after you really started to scale? At the end of the day, I was really looking for people that really genuinely love the product or I thought they love the product and that also understood that process and procedure is really the way to go. And if you love the product and you follow the process and procedure, pilots that use checklists typically live longer than pilots that don't.

23:14And people that once they put process and procedure on a pedestal and they love the product, it was a no brainer. It's printed money. And speaking of loving the product, I don't know if this is appropriate to tell you can censor it if it's not. But my friends were on a plane with you, a private plane. You were being served Jimmy John's on the private plane, which I thought was amazing. You clearly still love the product. I clearly still love the product. It's a great product. The product is good, right? That's funny because you could have anything in the world clearly at this point and you're eating your own stuff on the plane.

23:40I think that's awesome. Thanks, buddy. I want to ask about a couple of hot topics going on right now on Policy World. What's your take on the minimum wage debate? First of all, you've made a lot of these managers and owners millionaires. You've created huge numbers of millions. hundreds of them hundreds of millionaires which is an awesome thing it's something i'm very proud of from palantir as well when you bring people together you work hard and have all these people creating wealth so you obviously proud of creating all this wealth yeah but and you obviously want people to live well but like is minimum wage a good thing to help people make more as a break things like what are your thoughts on that well i think minimum wage is is is is a destroyer of the free market i think i think that the free market should determine everything that the free market should determine what what the wage should be let the market determine it if the free market determines is 28 bucks an hour let the free market determine it's 28 bucks an hour but when the government goes in and sets the sets it i i'm strongly against the minimum wage i'm strongly against any oversight any not any oversight i'm sure things have to be oversighted but when you come into a mom and pop business that's doing five six hundred thousand a year you know you you i mean they they literally oversighted the businesses out of business right the model's not what it isn't yeah so the market will determine it and people if they start lower up then they'll probably end up growing and making more over time.

24:54Is that what happens? People come at a certain level and they'll get paid more if they're doing really well? Absolutely. I mean, 14 of 17 department heads at Jimmy John's that became millionaires when I sold through stock, they all came from the sandwich shop, Joe. So that was when we sold the company. But yeah, and not only you start out as a sandwich, we never wanted people ever to come and be a full-time sandwich maker. Being a sandwich maker was the beginning of your journey out of poverty. and you become a sandwich maker, you become an assistant manager, you become a manager, you become an area manager and then you could grow into the business.

25:26But I hate damn minimum wage. It destroyed our model and it just f***ed it all up. Seems like it does destroy, like they say it's like taking the low rung on the ladder out so that people on the bottom can't work their way up because they can no longer can even start off if they're not worth, you know, the higher salaries. For sure, for sure. And look at all, and just look at all the bodegas in New York City now and yet there was Those beautiful bodegas in every side street in New York City is now a blue box truck. What's prettier to look at? A little bodega with all these different cultures, all these different products and all this different action going on or a blue box truck?

26:00And look, right? The blue box truck has taken over. I mean, I use Amazon all the time, but still. No, it's got a little bit sad. Another question I got for you. What's your sense of AI and robots and where things are heading? So I'm obviously involved in a lot of the tech world. There's a lot of new possibilities for doing certain things with robots. You can use less people. Is this going to affect models like Jimmy John's? Well, it's got to. I mean, restaurants are probably always going to be the last things to pick up on this technology, but they're doing it now. I mean, it's happening now. You know, I don't know how, but I'm sure it's going to eventually it's going to evolve and it's going to take away labor, right?

26:37I think eventually it's going to work. I mean, what did Elon say? His robot's going to be$10 ,000 when he can make a million of them a year? Yeah. You know, I mean, that's an incredible. You could probably open some more stores more cheaply if you had extra labor that way. How about that? How about that? Yeah. Well, hopefully it'll be a little lower cost for consumers as well. I guess that'd be what would come out, right? For sure. For sure. And I mean, sandwiches don't cost$12. I mean, sandwiches are four or five bucks. They're not 12 bucks. And eggs don't cost eight bucks. Yeah. I mean, they just don't cost that much.

27:07So anyway, I don't like, I don't like. No, I know. I get it. Yeah. So you were 19 years old again when you opened your first store, which is an amazing journey here. Do you think a 19-year-old could do it today? Are the regulations too crazy? Is it possible for a 19-year-old to step in and figure out something like this? Joe, first of all, look, you made it. I mean, you did what you did in your early 40s. But yeah, a 19-year-old could make it on the hustle and figuring out a hustle and doing it. But Joe, it's going to be so much harder. Is he going to be able to take 20 ,000 bucks and open a sandwich shop?

27:39There's no chance. No way. I mean, they're going to need a couple hundred and you're going to need to do a million dollars a year. I mean, you can't, you can't make it up 400 ,000 a year anymore. Yeah. And so the, the numbers, it just, the barrier of entry is so much higher. It's, uh, uh, the government has just, you know, when the government is the biggest competitor of small business, imagine that you're good. The government is 50 % of the upside of every deal. None of the downside. And then, and then, and then, you know, you can eat the chicken eggs, not the chicken legs. Don't kill the chicken, you know, like throw me a kibble once in a while instead of beating the shit out of me.

28:12No, it's true. Well, it's up to guys like you and me to help help back those new guys getting going. I know you're into that too. For sure. Jimmy, we started the American Optimist to push back on a lot of the cynicism and pessimism in our country right now. Your mother, your family fled Lithuania, right? When the Germans invaded, she came to America through Ellis Island. Yes. What does this country mean to you? Are you still bullish on America? I am totally bullish on America. I am so excited about America. I'm so excited for Donald Trump to be elected into this country. I'm so excited to have Elon Musk.

28:41If we have the honor and the privilege of having that man be involved in facilitating the audits and making everything more, more just better run and more just the Department of Government Efficiency. Absolutely. Department of Government Efficiency. And I mean, if we and it's good for everybody, everybody wins. It might be uncomfortable for the people that are in positions that they think they're going to be in for life. And they they bobbed and weaved and manipulated themselves into those positions. it might be uncomfortable for them but you know what it's uncomfortable getting up at four in the morning sticking your key in the door in a sub shop too so you know what welcome to the world of being uncomfortable but i am so bullish on america and i'm so excited uh for donald trump to get in into office and uh um and he's not gonna you know he wasn't a middle-class kid in the neighborhood where people love their lawn you know that's that's quite a that's quite a line but final advice for entrepreneurs who are listening in what do you tell some entrepreneurs as in America?

29:39Come in earlier, stay later, work harder, volunteer, take the toughest jobs for yourself. Nothing's above you get in there and clean the bathrooms, clean the stalls, do whatever it takes to make it happen. Lead by example. Your people will really do what you do, not what you say. And so lead it, live it, do it. And your people build your team and, and know your product, love your product and understand your numbers. And if you do that, you know and you have a little bit of luck i think you're gonna kick their ass i love it jimmy you're a great american thanks for joining thanks very much