Solving 6 Scaling Problems | Ep 969

0:00I've been in business for 14 years. I recently did$106 million book launch in a weekend. And our portfolio of companies at acquisition.com does over$250 million in aggregate revenue. And a portion of that is brick and mortar chains that we own. And so in this video, I'm answering your questions about how to scale specifically a brick and mortar HVAC business. And for all those questions, I try to do my very best to make the solutions as tactical as humanly possible so that you watching from home can actually use this stuff. Enjoy. My name is Thomas. I sell roofing and exterior remodeling. We do close to$6 million this year.

0:29I would like to be at$100 million. What's stopping me and I'll be a little bit vulnerable? I would say it's comfort, distractions, and fear. And food? Fear. Oh, sorry. I was like, all right, good to know. Sometimes I feel that way too. So the comfort is I have built the business. I've replaced myself in every aspect. I can work two to three hours a week and it'll run fine. okay um fear i would say the fear of losing family time the work-life balance sure and the distractions are my other i've got another business drunk removal business i've got real estate i've got just all kinds of little what do you think you should do that you're not doing that you want me to tell you to do so so i know i need to go all in again okay and i did that the first five years that I worked out and it worked out great.

1:24Um, went through COVID. Um, I got, you know, kept the business going really well and I worked myself out of a job, got comfortable. Okay. So I don't know what I'm looking for you to tell me to do. Well, I'll say, I'll say this differently. I think regrets come when we imagine the upside that we don't have without taking into account the cost that we didn't suffer. and so i think we regret when we imagine the upside that we didn't get without also considering the downside that we didn't suffer to get it and so i think that's where a lot of regret comes from because it's not it's not real so it's like maybe there's some girl that got away or some business opportunity that got away and we just imagine this amazing thing but not the trade-off that we would have to do in order to get it we just imagine the upside without the downside and so I would say a couple things.

2:17So one is, I think that there are trade-offs that we always have to make. And I don't think they're right or wrong. I think they're just their preference. There's no right answer to how much work-life balance you want to have. It's right for you. And so, said differently, if I like cookies, and I'm good with that, and I also want a six-pack, I just prefer cookies to a six-pack. It's just that's the trade. And I think the the dissatisfaction comes from wanting both. Right. Right. And so either want less or trade more. And I think that's really what it comes down to in terms of like, is there a path where I can work no more than I currently am to go from six to a hundred?

2:57There probably is. It depends on how much you're willing to pay other people. And so you might have to take a short-term hit in terms of profitability, uh, to bring in the level of talent that you want to expand the business on their behalf to where you wanted to go. And so as long as you were the type of person character wise that they would want to follow and believe in your vision, and you can make your vision big enough that they think that their aspirations can fit within it, you can get that type of person. But like, it's 100 % like you're graduating right now into the who game. But there's levels of who's, you know, like I remember the first time I hired a$50 ,000 a year employee, and I was like, this is the shit.

3:31This is what I'm talking about. You know, I mean, like, I went from minimum wage, you know labor to 50 i was like this they're they can read they can write like let's let's go you know what i mean uh and then i hired my first six-figure employee and i was like oh what was i talking about like this is what's going on and then i have my first 250 first 500 first million first multi-million dollar per year employee and it's just levels and so um sharon who's our president said this to me years ago but i always remembered he said the best the best talent's always in the future so whatever we have today the best people are always ahead of you not behind you and so i think for you if we if you really do want to accomplish it without making the trade you will make a trade because if you change nothing nothing will change right so we have to change some some component of your life and so the question is which thing do you value the least do you value having more profit or more time with your family in the short term in the long term you can make it up you won't make up family time in the long term you can't make the profit up in the long term right so if you're willing to give up short-term profit you can bring in high level talent and then they can lead the growth in terms of the uh the fear stuff i mean i would just say like just hold the line if you don't you're like i'm afraid of losing time with the family it's like just don't like i you know and then in terms of the real estate thing i see real estate because i know a bunch of entrepreneurs i have a ton of real estate as long as you're not like actively running it like that's why i'm a fan of like reits and funds uh because you have if you have you know good partners in that stuff they can just run it you can make better than the market and then but it's not it doesn't change anything about what i do like me putting in the s &p or me buying another big building changes nothing about my life and so it's not a distraction unless you're like you know if we could add a gazebo and what if we added a different roof because i'm a roofer and what if i combine what i'm really like dude stop just like let the real estate be the real estate let the business be the business and just keep them apart as long as you're good there because i think he's a distraction actually let me double checking that real quick which is when you said you're the distraction thing that you're afraid of why are you afraid of that i'm not afraid of it okay i'm just i've got adhd and i i i collect gold and silver i buy houses i buy buildings i i mean it's just yeah a little bit of the red dress well as long as it doesn't change anything about what you do i don't care but if it's like now i check this stuff all the time and it like eats up my days then yeah i would say that's a problem and it's only a problem if you decide it's a problem like you might just like that stuff it's just like i sacrifice my goals because I enjoy this ADD.

5:54You know what I mean? Like the cost of the big thing is the new stuff that you have to give up to keep it going. Yeah. Thank you. I feel like I'm going to get some amens. This is great. This is like a good meal, right? Yeah. I appreciate it. But yeah, that's like the cost of the big thing is all the new stuff you have to give up that you don't get to pursue. All the exciting things that you will no longer participate in because you want to do one thing big. And I think for me personally, I had this moment, I think a while ago, but like I had this realization of how long it takes to get good at anything and then i thought about oh i only have like 30 or 40 more productive years at most and so i'm like i've got like four or five big seasons in me left yeah and so that's it and so i don't have like unlimited shots on goal i've got four or five big runs in me so hopefully that helps i appreciate that answer because i thought you were going to say sell everything and i mean they're investments i mean i'm not gonna tell you sell your investments i would say keep passive stuff passive don't make it active that's like incurring cost because if you're gonna make it active then make active money yeah if you're like i want to take my passive money and then make it cost me more time to get 55 better returns it's like you're gonna get way better returns in your active income than your passive and just i would just keep active active keep passive passive thank you appreciate you my name contractor.

7:16I do 1.6 million a year. I probably keep about 650 of that. I'd like to be about five is kind of what I can see right now. My biggest constraint is myself plus hiring quality candidates. So you can handle the volume you have right now. So you can't handle the volume you have. You could get more business, but you can't handle it. I can handle it when the whole crew's here. And then as soon as one guy's gone, I'm back in the van. Yeah. So you need more people, more people yeah i got so we have to think about like so this is probably a multi-step thing just for everybody like as we're following through this is like if we have if you have enough business which it sounds like you do that's not the constraint then it probably means we need to bump price and we bump price so that we can have the cash flow so that we can hire the extra person so that you have redundancy in the team right like if alex had to hop in if if tim's sick that's not going to work right we have to have two or three backups for any person who's here so that i can keep doing my job.

8:10Right. And so, but I can only do that if I have the cashflow to sustain multiple tips. Right. And so this is where sometimes it's like a multi-step solution. So it's like, we have to fix the pricing component and it's like, okay, well, I feel weird charging more because other people in my market charge even less than I do. And I'm a little bit above the market. Right. So then we have to think about the offer. It's like, okay, so the offer might be the issue, which is like, okay, can we make our thing faster? Can we make it more reliable or we can make it easier right and can we guarantee around that and if the answer is yes and it's like great well then that's what we're going to charge our premium and bump prices by 20 to 40 percent which sounds like a lot i know but we say hey if we don't meet any of these qualifications i'll give you all my profit back which means that you raise the price and if for some reason you don't meet it you go back to the exact same price you're charging now but everyone that you do meet everything on you get all the juice and if no one else does those kind of guarantees which basically no one does then you can basically say well the reason that they're not doing that is because they're not confident they're going to be on time and on budget.

9:09Right? And I am. And so it's very easy for somebody else to say, hey, I'll do this job for you. And maybe I'll be on time and maybe I'll be on budget. But if I have no teeth in that agreement, I promise that it'll be free and I'll be done tomorrow. But if I don't have to be right about it, who cares? Sure, I'll be done tomorrow. And they'll be like, oh, I guess I get your point. Like, right. I'll be done by this time. And it'll be done satisfactory at this price, period. And you know that when you sign this, you get that. that's it and if for some reason something happens we'll come back and fix it right and so by doing that you'll be able to increase the cash flow which will then allow you to go recruit the extra tech that you need so you can stay above the business and then ultimately honestly just keep advertising it so that you can keep hiring and backfilling okay i can see that totally for my service calls and stuff like that kind of my bread and butter is i chase six or seven different heating and cooling companies around and do all their electrical work cool so they take the lead I have a flat rate sheet for that.

10:02But the biggest thing they always complain about is price. And we're super efficient. We get in, get out. But they're always complaining about the cost that we came in at. Do they still buy from you? Have for six years. Yeah. I mean, I care more about what people do than what they say. Okay. Everyone would like it cheaper. Right. I would like it cheaper. I would like all of you guys to get paid less. Yeah. Right? But it's, yeah, I pay very little attention to that. Okay. Like customers will always want it cheaper. They will always want it faster. They always want a guarantee. Like these are all things, like that will not change.

10:40So when I'm moving my prices, don't even. Yeah, I'd be like, this is what it is. Okay. Yeah. Now to make yourself sleep better, you have six or seven guys. It's like, wouldn't it be cooler if you had like 60? Right. So then we go back to the top here, which is you have your way of getting customers, which is mostly chasing these six or seven heating and cooling companies around. And so it's like, what do you get? What do you do to get the heating and cooling companies? Basically, I've worked for one for 15 years and it's just constant. Yeah. And then the other ones, since I opened my business shortly after, they've been with me.

11:11And so really, I have no... You have no marketing function. Yeah. So you should start doing... This is what I would do if I were you. I'd start doing outreach to other heating and cooling companies. Say, hey, let me quote some of these jobs for you. Like a lot of people are just stuck with the person they're with. They're not happy. They're not unhappy. They're just whatever. like let me at least bit some it'll just keep them honest at least right and so then you can just start bringing business for yourself and that'll just give you more leverage with all of the other kind of uh negotiations that you have with the existing companies okay because right now you're just dependent on them so they have all the leverage well yeah and then as soon as they like i'm missing out on work yeah because as soon as they say hey we have a job tomorrow yeah i'm going because they're my yeah they're my whales right so it's so you see more whales okay yeah So we need more whales, but to get more whales, we have to tweak price to get so that we can hire the manpower.

11:58Like it's usually multi-step solutions because like for most businesses, it's if it were one thing, you probably would have already seen it. So it's usually second order or third order that has to change so we can reverse engineer back to the fixing the core problem. Gotcha. Thank you. That feel good though? Yeah. Okay, cool. Real quick. I'm going to show you the exact 10 stage roadmap from zero to a hundred million plus that less than 1 % of companies finish. I've now done multiple times. And so I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as headcount increases that you need to get through.

12:29And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it? And then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this. And it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com forward slash roadmap. Just enter info and it'll spit it right back to you all free. My name is Tanner Jarrett. We're at 1.5 mil to date, 700 net.

12:57My big concern is how do I make the dream team like you have here? How do I get technicians on board, sales guys? Yeah. Like make it work. So, okay. What breaks when we do more? What breaks? Like what stops you from doing this? We're going to figure out which one, like order ops. What breaks when you do that? Biggest issue is technicians. okay so techs is the is the issue okay so what do you so what do you make on a tech uh anywhere from 180 200 300 000 a year per yeah after cost uh-huh damn well this year yeah because you're you're a dentist you're giving your run for your money there i'm just saying man all right all right so we got 300k for the techs got it um all right and you need them local in bozeman yes okay um And what are you doing right now to recruit techs?

13:53Honestly, kind of just gave up lately. Yeah. Yeah. I would imagine that would make it difficult to recruit more techs.

14:02So then let me ask the next question, which is like, what stops you from recruiting more techs? Not the decision. Some of you guys have probably seen that management diamond that I have, which is like, people don't know that you need to do it. They don't know how to do it. They don't know when to do a buy. They have something blocking them or there's a motivation issue. I'm assuming you're motivated. I'm assuming you already know that you need to do it and how to do it. 100%. And you need to know the when is now. So I'm guessing there's something blocking you. My thing that's blocking me is I have to be involved, I believe, in every single…

14:32Strong words. Yeah. Every single aspect of the company. Have to or choose to? Choose to. Okay. Choose to. 100%. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, staying from the same home. Choose to. Okay. And so I can't let it go. Okay. So can't or won't? We have some very high-end clients. Okay. That's where you get your money. We work at the Yellowstone Club in Montana, Spanish Peaks. I know Matt Damon, Jennifer Garner, Mark Zuckerberg. Man, you don't need a name drop. Yeah, sorry. You're a big deal. I'm not a big deal. It's tiny. Ed told me to say it.

15:08Anyhow, and so it's hard to let that go, you know, that ego. So fundamentally, this is, I guess this is, I mean, Keyman is the number one risk of every business for two reasons. One, no one wants to buy it. But second, you want to kill it yourself at some point because you're like, I don't want to do it. You said you burned yourself in the ground, right? So what we have to do is if we look at all of the things, like look at your behaviors, not your feelings around them and say, okay, these are all the things that I do on a daily basis. Some of those things someone else can do. Now there's for sure things that are higher leverage, higher value.

15:41It might be that for you, doing the design for stuff is the highest leverage thing. I don't know. It might be. It's definitely not using your hands. I can promise you that. It might be getting the relationship and managing the relationship. That might be the most valuable thing. So if we did a rank order, this is what you'd have to do. We do a time study, which is step one. So take an Excel sheet. You can open up on your phone. Every 15 minutes, you have an alarm. It'll annoy everyone. Don't worry about it. And every time it goes off, you just write what you did in the last 15 minutes. And at the end of the week, you can look at all those activities and rank them in terms of revenue, like which of these is the most valuable and most unique.

16:18And then when you look at the bottom half of that list, does it neatly fit into some person that either exists currently, that has bandwidth, or somebody that we can hire? And part of the good news that you have is that when you serve premium customers, which you do, you can charge a premium, which you do, which means that you should have excess margins, so you can get premium people. And so right now, what will probably be required is that you have to lower your tolerance for mediocrity on your team. And so it might cost... So if you're going to make$300 ,000 per year for a tech, it's like, would you be willing to spend$50 ,000 to go get another tech who's good?

16:57100%. Right. And so that's a combination of like, you could try the recruiting firm thing, which is a thing. One that you probably haven't thought of, but I would strongly recommend. this will probably be the unlock for you, is run national ads and then offer a really generous relocation package. So make the 50 basically a signing bonus. You get 25 now and 25 a month six. What do you think about instead of having W2 employees and how much they cost running 1099 service techs? You're a business. Do they have to show up at certain times and do work specific the way you want them to do? Yes. They're employees.

17:32Employees. Yeah. Unless they're like, they're not vendors. They work for you. If you have meetings and they have to show up, they're employees. So no, you like... Keep it W2. Yeah. You want to go more legit, not less legit. Yeah. But fundamentally, like if you were to spend this$50 ,000 to go get another tech, we just have to like... Getting the tech, I don't think it's gonna be that hard, honestly. If you're just willing to spend money for it, which you have the money to do it. And then the other piece is, okay, now that this person comes on, I have this big stack of stuff, how can I give them a third of it or half of it?

18:04And then all of a sudden you get those time back. And so let me ask you a different question. If you got half your time back, could you double the business? 100%. Right. And so that's the game. Yeah. Beautiful. Thank you, Alex. My name's Trenton. We sell roofing. We're going to do about 3 million this year. We'd like to be at 10 million. My biggest constraint or what's stopping me is that for the last eight years, all of our lead gen has been from doors. So it's been 100 % door-to-door lead gen. And now when we're trying to knock for retail, it seems to be heavier of a weight on the team. When you say retail, what do you mean?

18:45So just people on market that need a roof. It's like residential? Residential. Okay, got it. And when you were doing door knocking before, you were knocking on? Residential doors. Okay. So it was the weather. But we were getting funding from the insurance company. Got it. Word. Okay. Yeah. So now with me being a door-to-door guy, like purchasing leads and all that was like sacrilegious to me. Okay. So there's some limiting beliefs there that I started to, you know, explore last October. We bought leads. I just want to be lead curious. That's all I'm asking for. Yeah. I'm very lead curious now.

19:18And, but I basically got slaughtered learning this. This will be acquisitionary binary. You know what I mean? Like be non-binary with your leads, like as many as you want. Yes. Yes. No, that's what I'm trying to do here. And when we did purchase leads and I was the unedited version, by the way. Go ahead. And when we started to, you know, stack the guys' calendars, there was a big culture shift where we actually saw like more buy-in from the guys, but then like the door knocking just went way down. Yeah, because it was easier. It was way easier. Yeah. But like our CAC and all that was absolutely horrid, right?

19:51So I'll spend like $7 ,500 just to acquire one customer over the summer. And it wasn't sustainable. So I make from a customer on average$6 ,500. So that does not work. No, it doesn't work. Yeah. And it was just like a lot of the marketing agencies that we worked with were like younger people. They were like using AI tools, go high level. So we decided that we were going to build it in-house. So with With that being said, now it comes into a leadership issue because I need somebody that knows how to market better than I do so that I can focus on training. Can I pause you real quick? Yes, please.

20:30Okay, cool. So you're at three. You want to get to 10. You rebuilt it from storm chasing to just straight up door knocking whenever. Fine. I think it was a good idea. You had a door knocking team. You took the same sales guys, brought them on leads that you got them. they got lazy, fat, and don't want to do door knocking anymore. So great rule number one, outbound and inbound are separate teams. Inbound is what you graduate to. And so if you're an absolute savage, like you just take children's souls and just rip them out every day because you're a terrible person, but you're just unbelievable at sales.

21:04Then and only then do you get the opportunity for me to feed you leads. Because these are the most expensive leads that we have to work very very hard for to make sure and like we cannot waste them on anybody who cannot close everything and so thank you oh that was an amen and and so so first off is the team should be separate but you're in this mix now you're in a little bit of a mess and so my my two cents would be like take that because i'm sure their commissions have gone down since they now are selling nothing basically yes yeah so i would say guys my fuck up i went to this thing he told me i did this big boo-boo which is inbound and outbound were together which is not how it should be.

21:39Everybody get back on the streets. You guys do that. And then for the absolute savages of you, because you can usually have far fewer people on inbound, that becomes the Christmas tree of the career path. Because on inbound, I can feed you and you can do like five sales a day. You can't do that door knocking, right? But you can do it if I'm feeding you leads that are already qualified, already set, already gone through a VSL, whatever, in the sales motion. And then those guys can absolutely clean up but you get you earn the opportunity to get that level of commissions now the commission's structure should also be different on inbound because you have to pay for those leads so it's a different role they graduate to it it's more volume lower per but it's more reliable which guys with families things like that if you have a bad day you close two and a good day you close seven it's different than you have a bad day you can close zero zero zero right it's much more uh it's much more stressful and so guys will be happy to even give up they'll even make the same money but you have to be more reliable they'll be make and you don't have to be in the sun so so then we should hire for inbound sales yeah or take one of the guys you have who's really good at it and put everybody else back on the street so you just funnel everything to that guy who because then you can iterate faster because you're new on this and so you want to you never want to have too many news because kind of like the brick analogy i gave at the beginning the more news there are the more likely something's going to fuck up right and so it's like i know this is an absolute savage salesperson, if they're closeable, he'll close them or she'll close them.

23:03And so then the only variable we have is just what offer slash lead source am I getting? And what process are going from lead to talking to them? Those are the only variables you have to play with. It's much easier to iterate on that and then get it to go faster. Okay. Okay. And then, okay. So then I want to hire a marketing director or leader to manage that. outbound team goes out inbound team becomes the one guy you need to hire a marketer person who actually knows what they're doing probably pay more than you expect but then that person will be worth it your entire business is sales and marketing so you should have the core elements of the business in-house okay great excellent if you need help with the sales process we can help excellent thank you my name is art we sell junk removal and demolition to commercial property managers currently do 1 million a year uh would love to be at 10 million a year what's currently stopping us is knowing which sales channel to focus on.

23:55I know it's important that we pick one, capitalize on it. And I'm wondering how much time, energy, or volume do I spend on one while I determine if that's going to be our channel or not and know whether to leave that one or focus on that one? Yeah. So I'll give you two answers to that question. So before I answer it, I'm going to do the first thing though, really the second thing first. What do you do currently right now to get customers? Right now it's been mostly referrals. Okay. So you can't do more referrals because there's nothing for you to do besides do a good job. Okay, that's fine. If referrals is the way you're getting business, what ways have you begun or you haven't started doing sales channels yet?

24:30So I, we've started to lay the framework for doing email cold outreach as well, simultaneously with LinkedIn outreach, and then also converting some of our social media efforts into a bit of outreach as well with people who are engaging. So those are some of the things that were like many chat and then DM. Yeah, yeah, I'm more more manual for now while we get the flow going. And then also I'm in a networking BNI. So that's. Yeah. I would prefer you stick with one of them and just do more in that thing. And so if the question is, how do I say the original question was, how do I know which one to pick and how long to stick with it?

25:06So I think I will reject the premise, which is that one of them is going to work. Like you will make one of them work. And so you could make any of them work. And so I would take the hypothetical extreme of, is there a business that acquires other businesses, customers in each of those different channels in your market? I'm not sure. I'll bet there is. There probably are some junk removal people who do it via social media and they take it that way. Some people probably do it via LinkedIn. Some people do cold outreach. All three of those are super repeatable channels that anyone could run. so all of them can work my recommendation to you would be the one that you have the highest overlap with existing skill set between you and team so if you and or your team have more knowledge around social media stuff that'd be like just double down on social media if it's i have you know we're better at kind of the outbound motion then i would say go do the outbound motion via via email and if it's like well we want to both of these things it's like well why don't we just send more emails you know i mean does that help yeah it does okay that was super i was like you sure everything else you guys that was that was an easy one that was like a warm-up well for um i guess uh follow up since you're taking more questions uh i guess if you had to just say one like let's irrelevant what the team has which one do you have the best skill set uh and to be honest i just don't have the skill set.

26:36And I guess networking is number one. Like when I'm in person with people, I'm doing the best. Okay. So, so hear me out then. Wild idea. So you do networking stuff. And so if I said, I want you to spend four hours a day to find every local community based related event with 20 people or less or 50 people or less in it that have people who are similar to your avatar, would you be able to do that? Yes. Okay. So why can't we do more of that? We can do more of that. Okay. So how many of those events do you currently go to? And I'm guessing you get customers from when you go there, right? Yeah, they compound over time.

27:11We go to currently a few a week and then we're meeting one-on-one with a lot of people we meet. Afterwards, right. So I would say, all right, well then what would it take for us to go to like several a day? That would be my first kind of like risk-adjusted move because the other things you haven't done yet at all. So it's like, how do we go from one to three just like this year? I would do that because then it'll free up more cash flow because the issue that you have right now especially like in the in the in the swamp that you're in right now I would just do way more of the thing you're currently doing um as my path of at least getting to one to three it's probably super profitable for you as well and then I would invest more of those resources into learning one of the other channels got it all right thank you cool you bet my name's Adrian I own a commercial construction company.

27:57Did 11 million this year, 10 last year. Read the book Built to Sell. So I started analyzing my company and I said, or I figured out that construction companies are not an easy asset to sell. That they're enterprise values based off of assets or backlog of work. As a commercial contractor, I thought to myself, okay, well, how am I going to do that? So we started doing public works projects, bought some heavy equipment. Now we have contracts that are for several years. At the same time with the clientele base that I had in the multifamily space, I started thinking about, okay, well, if I don't want to sell this company, if it's going to be that difficult, how do I get recurring revenue?

28:36So I started an elevator company. And over the last 12 months, we did$3 million to start. It's a racket. Congrats. I have elevators. It's ridiculous. We can help you. So if you were me, with the two companies and the combined revenue um what would you do next in order to go from 10 to 100 what's profit on three versus 11 30 on the three 18 on the 11 okay so you're making roughly double on the construction side but cash flow sucks and it's a pain and you never take the money out of the business probably i'm guessing um okay so it's a tough call because you already did it right you can't like not have the kid it's already out there running around that's what i had said you can't can't insert it doesn't go back up, right?

29:24Okay. So I think, again, it depends on what you want to do. So I think the elevator company totally could sell if you wanted to sell that business. I do. Are you splitting your time right now? Yes. Yeah. So it might take$800 ,000 in profit on the construction side to get the two or three leaders that you need to do it without you and then it would continue to exist i do think the elevator is the better opportunity for the reasons that you're already aware of and it probably grew significantly faster than the other one did oh yeah yeah this isn't normally what i would say in this type of situation but i'm just familiar with it what timeline do you have like selling five selling 10 definitely 10 um okay you know if i could do it in five okay you could sell in five i mean what's the growth rate on the um elevator well i mean year one three million oh year one right so it's a straight up elevator okay sorry uh exactly straight to the penthouse okay there's the reasonable advice which is hey hire the people and then let them continue to run that thing and then i would say like what the quote alex advice would be which is super unreasonable and i only give it because this is what i did i burn things down and so if i can't exit it so like you could exit the 11 now for way less than you think it's worth right i'd i would just be willing to exit it.