I Lost Everything Twice...Then Made $26M in 18 Months (My First Million) | Ep 761

23:22We just add value rather than taking away price. And then post-purchase, in order to make sure that ops is all the same, you then give them a surprise and delay with the remaining four. You say, by the way, since you did buy, I want to give you these other things. And so if you get the fast buyer that doesn't need the bonuses, you just give them the bonuses and they love you. And if you got to somebody who needs all seven, then you give them the seven bonuses on the sales calls. And that's kind of how you can just get increased close rates without giving away discounts. Goddamn. Yeah. Highly useful.

23:51I feel pumped up, brother. I need to go read the blue and the purple one. This is the stuff that I enjoy. And that's the stuff that we do to really grow the business and the portfolio is we're in it. We're re-scripting the sales. We're changing the process overall. We bought a chain of 32 teeth whitening studios. Is there anyone at acquisition.com who's better than you at this? Or are you still the best? When it comes to offer reimagining mixed with sales process, that's probably my strongest. It's probably the thing I'm best at. And it just drives so much profit in a business since pricing is the strongest lever on profit.

24:28There's a great example of the offer, by the way. I've been knee deep in like a... I do these two-week learning sprints where I just pick whatever the topic I'm most interested in. I just go fucking ham on it. Every minute that I'm not on this podcast or not on a required meeting, I'm just going down on one topic. In this case, I've been doing the old school marketers. And there's a great story. I think it's Ovi who, when he launched his agency, he's like, how do I get people to do this? And he basically made a killer offer. He was like, take your top performing ad that you've spent years iterating on.

24:58You got this to be your top performing ad. I guarantee that I will beat it. in an A-B test head-to-head within a month, and I will fund my portion of the A-B test. So I'll make the ad. I guarantee you that I'll beat it. And I'll fund the ad cost of the... I'm so confident I will fund the ad cost if I don't beat it. Or even... I think even not if I don't beat it. I will fund the ad cost in order to win your business. And what he said was, this was like the response rate on this ad was through the roof because... He's like, but the best part was of the 100 % of people that responded, he's like, we didn't even end up having to do it because the top 20%, the most expensive clients were like, okay, cool, forget the A-B test and the mechanics and the contract for that.

25:39The fact that you're willing to do that, we looked into your track record, we are big believers in this, we'd like to just move forward and go ahead and retain you. We know that our agency would never be that confident to pull that up, so we're willing to work with you. And he's like, it was incredible because I used this killer offer to fill up the funnel and then I just picked the top 20 % of clients in that funnel and that kickstarted Ogilvy, which became one of the big ad agencies. That's in the game. And we bought the teeth whitening chain. And so I sat down with our director of sales and we re-scripted the sales process and basically re-imagined how the offers were going to happen.

26:12And we 5X'd LTV per sale. And so I was like, okay, here's the plan. Just roll it out. Fundamentally, it's like a lot of times people think there's a lot more that it takes to grow their company. But sometimes just a handful of levers just make a huge difference. Does every business and product offering have a killer offer inside of them? I do think so. I think that sometimes you have to... The big part with the offer is you have to operationalize it. And so if you're Ogilvy, it's like, okay, well, how can I write all these split tests? It's like, if I'm going to have all these bonuses that I have to add in in order to make the thing more valuable, I have to operationalize that part.

26:51And so, yes, I do think so. It's just like, usually, you might sometimes have to put terms around that. Like if I was an accounting firm, something boring. it's like i can guarantee that i will get you more than you pay me by just auditing your back taxes and saving that money today right uh but you have to provide all the back taxes and like you have to and then i have to have a separate team that i now have to create just for our front end conversion to shrink time to value using that little nugget and the big thing with most of the businesses i try and shrink time to value like really aggressively like even that publishing business It takes a very long time for that business for a customer to get a result.

27:26And so we looked at it. We're like, can we peel some element of what we do and drop it in the beginning? And it turns out we could do something in like seven days that gave people a very positive outcome really quickly. And then they get bought in emotionally that you know what you're doing. And to further on the point, I think that probably a major difference between the tiny slash Wilkinson model and how we do it is that we are operators. And so the investment strategy continues to move over time, but it's been fewer bigger deals that we have larger percentages of that we do more for. And it's just like, basically, the more we work on the business, the more money we make.

28:06And so if we're going to work on it, then it might as well be big. Dude, you did that school deal, right? We had Sam on the pod. Interesting guy. Sam Ovens, we're talking about school.com. is it school.com? He, um, one of the oddest people you'll ever have a conversation with, but odd in the best possible way. So one time I was with him, it was my wife, me and Sam ovens. We're sitting at, um, we're at a party or something and him and my wife get along great. Cause my wife and I both love like quirky people. He's extreme quirky. It gets to a lull in the conversation where there's probably a five second silent silence where we're thinking about what we're going to say next.

28:46and he looks at my wife and he goes I delivered my baby

28:55and we both look at each other and like what? he goes I delivered my baby and I'm like with what? he goes my hands and he goes on to tell the story about how his wife gave birth at home because he couldn't make it to the hospital but like he didn't laugh when he was telling any of that stuff. And I thought it was so funny. And he's one of the quirkiest people I've ever met. But he's the type of people who I love where he's so logical that it's painful a little bit. But also, he's the type of guy who I think has read a book on how normal people interact. And you can tell he's like, I do care about you, but I kind of have to learn a little bit how to adapt to fit your...

29:35And you can tell that. And it's endearing. It makes me love him more. He's listening to you. He's like, I am active listening. Yeah. It's like, okay. Got it. Thank you. which I love because he wants to show you he cares about you. And I like that. And he's got a really interesting personality. Yeah, no, the school deal is going exceptionally well. We've 5 or 6x the business in the last 8 months. Well, break it down. Why do that deal? It seems like you made a much bigger bet. And I'm saying that because you started wearing the hat around, whereas your other deals you don't promote. So I'm like, okay, he definitely ponied up for this one and made a big bet on this.

30:09So why do a SaaS deal? Or why do the school deal? how do you figure out the bet size? And was it like a butt-clenching number? And then what's the plan? Well, I'll say this. So breaking down into the deal components, any brand endorsement for me is by far the butt-clenching component of it, not the cash. Because you only have three, four brand bullets that you can use where you're going to promote without becoming a shell, right? And so if I looked at my audience, I think about the people who best monetize an audience do percentage conversion times LTV. That's it. So what percentage of your audience do you convert and what's the lifetime gross profit per customer?

30:52And that's it. That's the math. The person who makes the most money wins. The big thing that I saw with my audience is that obviously we have a very skewed monetization structure because we have portfolio companies where we just make a tremendous amount on a handful. And then everything else kind of doesn't matter. um and do you even promote you don't even promote those others right no i don't know no the other no not at all that's just but they come inbound though so that's it still comes from content often but a huge percentage of my audience are people who want to start a business and that's probably some of the people who listen to your stuff they're people who are employees they're high up they're executives things like that or and they or they want to start a business with their own whatever and so i was like okay so there's this entire huge part of my audience that wants to start a business and I want to have something for them.

31:42And so I also don't want it to cannibalize acquisition.com in terms of how we generate deals and things like that. And so it had to be something that would help people start a business, which in my opinion was going to be the closest match, like audience match, so highest percentage conversion. It had to be a scalable thing. So I didn't think a service would work given the amount of volume that we have. And so it's like, okay, it has to be something that's demand constrained, not supply constrained. So it's like, okay. And ideally, if there's something that we can create some sort of network effect and some sort of compounding machine within it, and it has to be at the right point in the life cycle of the business, right?

32:18If you're a day 1 ,000 at Facebook, it's probably too late, you know what I mean, to get in on Facebook at any appreciable percentage, right? And also where I would have less leverage and less value to add to a company of that size. And so School was a big company in terms of its value and the rounds that they had done already. But I also have a really big brand. And so it took Sam and I, call it nine months, to work out every component of the deal. In my opinion, it was the best deal I've ever done. Not in terms of winning over anything like that. it's a really elegant deal the way that it works, which I'm not at liberty to explain all the pieces of it.

33:07But basically, we both gave a lot. And we both are happy with how it's going. And so we both made commitments to the other person of what we can and can't do. If someone's going to come on and be in an ad from school, I have to be okay with it because I have a strong association with that. And things like that. It's like, how can I mitigate this risk? How can you mitigate that? And so to circle back to the original question, why did I do the school deal? I felt like I had 70 % of the audience that I have because there's always way more people who want to start a business than have a business, especially if you make business content.

33:42And so I wanted to have something for that audience that met all those other requirements. And I knew Sam. And Sam told me about school two weeks into him starting school. And so I was kind of like, well, I mean, I'm not going to try and bet on a platform at day one. That's where Sam has just massive balls. I think on our podcast, I think he said he spent$10 million of his own money to fund the business. And I think he also said that was the bulk of all his money. Yeah. It was. I mean, I think he's been public about it. And then he still raised another five to still keep continue reinvesting the business.

34:17And when I saw the metrics of school, it has everything that you want. It had viral organic growth. It was compounding, you know, 20 % every single month, month over month over month. And I was like, this thing's a fucking monster. And it was right at that point where he's like, we need to grow. And I was like, okay, I need a product. And so it was a perfect match. And it's worked really well. That's great. Last time you were on, you were talking about how like you started doing minority deals. Then you sort of realized like, damn, we're creating on the deals that win. We create so much value.

34:48You know, you basically wish you owned more on anything that works. And you're like, maybe we'll switch to doing majority. Like, where'd you land on that? Like, what's the evolved thinking on that? And I don't know if that relates to how you did the school deal, but just in general also. Yeah, it's almost all majority. It's almost all majority. Like if we're going to do a minority, it's got to be a massive company, you know, like for us to do that. But I basically have, and one of the unfortunate things with content is my deal line has continued to move up. And so you were like, I finally hit a million dollars in profit.

35:17And I was like, we're kind of looking at five or 10 million in profit now for minimum to look at. Because right now, the portfolio is 250 million a year. We do 70 million in EBITDA. We have consolidated, the smallest percentage ownership we have is 20%. The largest is 100. I think our aggregate is somewhere, it's like 42 or something percent if you blend all the percentages together. So we have meaningful chunks of the companies. Are you, like our friends, we have a couple of friends that are doing this and they were talking, I was talking to them about metrics and they were saying, with a hold co like this, there's a couple of different things you can go for.

35:52One is just free cashflow. So how much cash are these businesses spitting out? And they buy cashflow businesses, that's their play. They don't care as much about the equity appreciation. Obviously they care, but first and foremost, they're looking for cashflow generation. So they picked free cashflow. And I know other people in private equity that are, you know, they're looking for basically, ultimately, like a return on capital invested, or, you know, multiple on capital invested. So what do you, what's the main metric for you with acquisitions? How do you measure if you're doing a good job deploying capital or not?

36:23I have thought about it as deal by deal. Like school is obviously a appreciation play, you know, like that will realize all of the gains from that years into the future, right? Whereas there's some companies that will buy that are pure cashflow deals. And so it really just depends on, I mean, deal by deal. So we don't have like a mandate, which is one of the reasons, you know, I haven't had LPs because I just look, because the nature of having inbound deal flow is like we get weird deals. And so some of them are very interesting. buy out a partner. And it's like this weird, terrible situation, but no one else wants to get into it.

36:57But we're operators, and so we're happy to get into it. So we can get really good valuations, and maybe we get both in terms of cash flow. But I'd say for us in cash flow, we're probably on pace to do 40 in cash flow, just like our slice for the year. That's incredible. And how much capital did it take to get to that? Because that's the skill. That's the finesse. If it takes a billion dollars to generate... Yeah. If you have cash flow, that's one thing. If it took$50 million to generate$40, that's incredible, right? Not a lot. And it's been mostly because what Layla and I have realized in this process is that we're better at building.

37:31Better at building than buying? Yeah. So we did 20... I did a deal a month for two years. And of those, I've gotten rid of... I basically just like, here's your equity. I don't even care. To 80 % of them. And then we just basically did an 80-20 because it wasn't worth the time. I was like, you can keep the cash and I will give you the equity back. I don't like this. It's just not worth the time anymore. But the largest two companies in the portfolio together will do$150 million. And we own very large chunks of those companies with probably consolidated something like 60, like a lot of EBITDA. When you say build, you don't mean incubate from scratch.

38:15You're saying once we get in there, we just do a shit ton of work and we kind of run the business. Yeah, so the company that's doing 110 right now, which is the largest in the portfolio. Can you say which one? No, I just don't do any names besides school. Okay. It's a B2C business, business consumer business. But it did 2 million in trailing 12 months when we got it. And so we own 29 % of the business. And this year, it'll do on its own between 35 and 40 million in EBITDA. Wow. What was the unlock for that one? what did you guys do that cranked it up so much? Because that's a massive outlier. I'll tell you all the stuff we did.

38:53And by the way, you still only have 30 % of it? Yeah, I still have 29%. It hasn't changed. So in the beginning, it was just basically a handful of founders that were together and they figured out a way to generate positive ROI on the front end in terms of getting customers. But they had no back end. Can you say category like e-com, licensing, just like a general architect? Publishing. Yeah, it's publishing business. And so they were getting like three to one upfront, LTV to CAC. And so I was like, hey, man, wouldn't it be cool if we sold our customers something else? And this is actually a really funny story if you guys want to hear it.

39:28So we're negotiating this deal. And we're like right near the end. And we all agreed we need to have some sort of second upsell, some sort of back end that's going to build some sort of continuity, whatever. And so they were like, we've already got it. We've already built it all out. We're super passionate about it. we want to show people how to build a business like this. And I was like, that's not, it was a B2C business. It's like a publish, like it helps you publish books, like things like that. Right. And I was like, this has nothing to do with what we do. And they're like, no, we're passionate about it.

40:00We know our customers are going to be passionate about it too, if we're passionate about it. And so I was like, this is kind of a deal breaker for me. Like, I don't want to do that. And they're like, well, it's done. So I said, okay. And we're pretty much at the point where we're going to walk away. I said, crazy idea. Why don't you just survey the audience and put your offer next to my offer and just see which one they want. And I was like, and if they want your offer more, I was like, I'll kill myself and we won't do this deal. And I was like, and if they do want it, we do the deal. And they were like, fine.

40:31If you're, and so we ran it and 85 % of people wanted my offer. And my offer was more of that thing you just bought. And so it was a great moment. Everybody came together. So we did the deal. And then we built out that back end, which 1.9x Dell TV, which now we've actually increased this 2.2x Dell TV. And so we kept the same three to one, but we were able to 5x advertising in terms of how much we could advertise and spend so we could be profitable. Which is basically... I mean, this is just like any digital marketer who's been in the game for 10 years or you know like this is like this is the game this is pretty standard shit but every business owner has blind spots right yeah of course so many business I look at it's like oh yeah we have 5x ROAS it's like cool why aren't you spending more yeah they don't have an answer it's not like they have some complicated reason that they don't they're saying I don't know I haven't really thought about it yeah or they get romantic about it and they're like well we don't want to we don't want to like market it too much we'll be annoying this thing that said we need to have this margin it's like no no dude you do this for two years you get 10x bigger, right?

41:36Like there's a story they tell themselves or a blind spot or, hey, how'd you get all these customers like six months ago? It's like, oh, I used to go to these events. Like, do you go to those events anymore? No, I got tired of it. And then customers are gone, right? Do you want this to grow? Or like, what's going on here, right? So it went from 2 million to did 16 million to 50, then 70. Then this year we'll do 110. And so we hired 40 sales guys so that we could add that back end in. We added a CMO. We added a CPO and a whole product team to help the chief product officer out. We added in a controller.

42:13And so one of the things at acquisition.com, what we do is that we recruit. And so because we have a lot of inbound, we have a lot of talent that is in my audience. And so I might not endorse the company publicly, but from a private perspective, we'll recruit at Holdco, get usually higher quality talent than a portfolio can get, place the high quality talent, and then they just grow way faster. Well, why wouldn't you recruit that or promote that company? Why wouldn't I? It's because I don't want the key... Well, one, I don't like promoting lots of things. So that's a big thing for me because I don't want to promote lots of stuff.

42:47It's one that I am considering, to be fair. But it couldn't handle the amount of volume that I can send now. And now it's probably close because we actually built a SaaS component of that business. And now the software is doing about 50 % of the revenue in that business. And so that's going to be a monster deal. But the point there is that we took the team from a handful of dudes with some VAs into now the company's got 100 employees and a whole leadership suite, a whole executive suite. It's a company. You know what I mean? And that just took a lot of work in four and a half years. And so our first batch of deals that we did, we have our handful of winners that have come from that.

43:29What did you pay for that, by the way? The 30 %? How much cash did you put up up front? Like almost nothing. I'll just say like a negligible amount relative to what we do now. So you made tens of millions of dollars in value, potentially more in four years. And you made it for everyone, it sounds like. Dude, I want to normalize this because I think this is really cool. So I just did this. I just ran our stats this last weekend. Our average founder return on equity. So post deal, how much more is their slice worth? Like every PE buyer says, listen, and you could make more on the second buy, right?

44:01So everyone's like the same pitch, right? So our average founder return on equity net of the chunk that we now own is 13x. Yeah, that's silly. That's silly. That's crazy. Right. So it's like at that point, I was like, you should pay me. Well, dude, so I did a deal that was similar. I can talk about it now because the numbers have come out a little bit, which was this deal that at the time was called Shepard. and now it's called somewhere. So it's somewhere.com. It's basically a way you can hire like top talent overseas. So, you know, in the US, that same role for a developer might be 150 grand, 180 grand.

44:36A lot of business owners don't want to do that. They're trying to be more profitable. It's cheaper than that? Yeah. So Nick was in the business and then I wanted to join. I like that blueprint. So I was like, okay, that's a business I'm either going to start. I'm going to buy into, I'm going to do something. I tested all the services out and I was like, okay, I like this one. So I approached Marshall and cut a deal that I thought was so good for me, which is my objective when I do a deal is it has to be good for me. I'm not going to do a deal that's bad for me, but I want it to be good for both sides.

45:02But if I'm being honest in my heart of hearts, I was like, I think this is a good deal for him and a great deal for me. Turns out I had it like totally flipped. So what ended up happening was we put in a small amount of money and then actually, you know, but the business was already making millions of dollars a year of profit. And so I was like, I can't value you this low, but I'm bringing value. That's not cash. So how are we going to do this? And they were like, look, how about we do this? This was Nick's idea, actually. Nick was like, the business will loan you the money to buy your shares.

45:27And I was like, sick. Okay. You're going to give me the money to buy you? All right. Sign me up. Say no more. And that's when I was like, okay, this is an incredible deal for me. And it's a really good deal for them because I knew I was going to grow the business. I didn't know exactly by how much and by how long it would take and all that. And what ended up happening was at the time, I think Marshall had an opportunity to sell the business, something in the range of, let's call at like 15 million bucks. That's what he's looking at. He didn't want to sell. He believed in the business, so he decided not to sell.

45:56But he had gone out and looked at offers and that was like kind of where a realistic deal might have got done. A year later now, the numbers came out. So it basically, you know, the buyout happened at a$52 million valuation. So in less than a year, so basically like, I don't know, nine months of time, the business went from being worth 15 million to 52 million. And so I thought I was getting this incredible deal on my equity. Actually, Marshall got like, by far like the most value out of the deal in less than a year. And the only thing that changed was be coming in and being able to help the business in different ways.

46:25And so that way, then I realized, oh shit, that's the metric that matters. Because like, of course, I'm always going to protect my bottom line to try to make this work. But the only way that this model works long-term is if the founders get a stupid return on equity after my split. And YC does the same thing. YC, which they used to get a lot of shit because they would give you 20, the original deal was like$18 ,000, like 6K per founder in a company. and they would take 6 % or 7%. And people used to be like, well, YC is getting in an effective, like a million dollar valuation into these like future Dropbox, Airbnb, like those were YC companies.

47:00And Paul Graham came out, he's like, there's a very simple equation. You do one divided by the equity you gave me. So basically it's like, if you gave me 7%, but I make the company worth 10%, like because you gave me, because I'm now involved in the company, the company's worth 10 % more, it was a good trade. You would do that all the time. And obviously they add a lot more than 10%. So it became kind of a no-brainer. It was a different lens to look at than just valuation, which I think is where most founders get stuck on, either due to Shark Tank or just whatever. That's the general parlance.

47:30It's just, is this the right value? Am I getting a fair valuation or not? Versus if I gave you 10 % of equity, but I knew you'd tripled the value of my business, of course I would take that trade 100 % of the time, right? Right. And then the risk that's associated is, what if you don't do anything? And so then you covenant around that. I think I'm a big, personally, I love performance stuff because I know I'll hit it. And so people tend to be like, well, if we hit that, I'm like, cool. If you're good with that, I'm good with that. Sam, you were smirking. Am I high on my own supplier? What were you laughing at?

48:01You're not high on your own supplier. No, I like it. I think that... So we're glamorizing this, the buying of businesses because Alex, you're doing it wonderfully. And Sean, you told the story of doing it wonderfully. Whenever I hear these stories, I'm like, this sounds awesome. And then I get into the nitty gritty and I'm like, I hate this. I love starting stuff from scratch. I get so much more joy crafting the brand and putting my personality into it and calling customers on the phone early on and hearing... It's like you're a comedian. I'm practicing my bits to hear what works well. I love that so much more than having to buy things.

48:41because I just think it makes my soul feel better. And now we could debate all day if the numbers make sense. For you and both those examples that you guys gave, the numbers make so much more sense. And it's hard to create that much value in four years starting something from scratch. And so what I want to know, do you feel that way? I mean, you started something from... Do you ever get a little bit of that vibe when you're starting something from scratch? The artist's regret. The artist regret. Yeah, you're like, dude, I'm producing all these artists. I'm not actually writing songs. You know what I'm saying?

49:17I miss that art. It's actually more like the analogy would be like a label. You're a label. Sure, whatever. Then you get to go be in the studio. I get that. I would say, first of all, I do consider myself a businessman. So if I were to give myself a title, I feel like that's probably most appropriate. That being said, I do get a lot of the stuff that I like a lot, which is the big picture decisions, which is like, what big bets are we going to make? Like, I love that stuff. Like, okay, we have, we were like, what's our one big bet for the year? And then spending a tremendous amount of time doing research and being like, okay, this is where we're going to go.

49:49And this is how we're going to go. What's an example of a bet you made a year and a half or two years ago? The software component for the publishing business. So it was not that. It was basically a consumer service business, fundamentally, like education and service, whatever. And it was, I think the revenue is 50-50 split between the two. And so I was like, we have to put some sort of software thing in here that we can facilitate. So either we get a tech-enabled service multiple or we just get a pure SaaS multiple. And so it was a year and a half ago and we started putting a few million dollars into developing the software that now has just had a tremendous uptake rate, has improved conversion rates, improved client success scores, all of these things.

50:28And that was a bet. I mean, to be fair, for a company of that size, even when we made the bet, I think we were doing somewhere like 20 million in EBITDA when we made the bet. something like that. So betting 10 % or 15 % of net free cash is not like a massive bet. But from a resources perspective of the attention of the leadership team, that was where the big bet was. And so kind of like the point with the brand versus the cash, if I'm going to do a deal and I promote it, the biggest slice that I'm giving is the audience and the attention, not the cash. What's a company you would want to go buy right now?

51:03Let's say you had the money today. What type of company would you go buy? I'd probably want to buy a big professional services business. What's that mean? Business plumbing. So payroll, financial services or business like accounting, tax, like the things that every business has to have. I like those businesses. I mean, I love service businesses, even though 40 % of our portfolio is software. I still like service, tech-enabled service. And I still see software as software as a service. I feel like I get those types of businesses because there's so many things where my skill set of tweaking, pricing, and figuring out sales process and demand gen, like that's where I'm pretty good.

51:40And so there's the businesses that I can make a huge impact on. I got one more question for you, which is what are you trying to figure out? Because one trap you could fall into is like you're the advice guy. It's like, here's the guy who turns on the camera and gives everybody advice all the fucking time, which is like inherently somewhat of a know-it-all position, which is dangerous on the audience side of like eventually people start to resist that. But also more importantly for yourself, you're like, you got where you got because you were the student. And now you're getting good benefits of being the teacher, but you still want to be the student.

52:09And so I'm curious, where are you still the student right now? What are you trying to figure out? What are your unanswered questions that you're noodling on that maybe even we could help you out or kind of help you talk through this? I would say the big things that I'm still green on are the fund world, raising capital, like LPs. I don't have any experience with LPs. I've always done my own money. I don't use debt. I will probably use more debt in the future. I just haven't. So those are all things that I am kind of more spending time on. That being said, like to be very candid with you, I feel like in Sam and I talk other Sam, Sam partner of mine.

52:48And I talk about this, which is like, there's periods of figure it out. And then there's periods of do like I'm in a period of do right now. And then when I get to a constraint, because right now the plan of like grow more media, grow the companies has been working. And so I want to do more better, not new. and so I'm going to continue to do more better until more better stops working and then I will look at something new so like in terms of where I see my deficiencies from the private equity perspective LPs and debt are things that I would say that are weaknesses of mine in terms of understanding just because I've used my own capital but in terms of limits for the business right now I think the biggest threat is always focus and so that's why I try and say no to everything except coming on this podcast because we're your boys dude you're the man you guys are the man Thank you.