E: 34 Top M&A Entrepreneurs - Marcus Sheridan Merged his Pool Company, Merged his Marketing Company

Welcome to the top M&A entrepreneurs. I wanna welcome guest today is uh Marcus Sheridan. Marcus is uh somebody I met at a distance uh about 56 years ago when I was running my own business, uh, e-commerce business. Uh, but he's, uh, let me tell you a little bit about Marcus. He's a speaker you don't want to miss according to Forbes, a web marketing guru, says the New York Times. Uh, he's been featured in The Globe and Mail, Forbes, Marcus gives over 70 global keynotes annually. He's the author of this book right here. They ask you answer. It's the number one marketing book to read in 2017. Um, he's listed as the 11 marketing books every CMO should read. Uh, he's the number one ranked LinkedIn voices for entrepreneurship. He's also a partner in river pools, and I'll tell you a little history about this cause I got this from this book. 2007, he was doing about 4 million and he spent $250,000 a year doing that. 2009, of course, 2008 happened, which was the crash. 2009, he was ready to lose his business. PPC is not working, nothing else is working because they have any cash flow to work on anything. Uh, that was his toughest year financially. By 200, well, he implemented, they ask you answer, by 2014, he had 350,000 visitors to a site. 2015 $500,000 2018, 6000, and by 2018, he was doing $8 million in business. Welcome to my show, Marcus. How are you? Uh, it's great to see you, buddy. I'm, I'm glad we can have this chat. Yeah, I, I, let me just, I, I know I'm talking a lot here, but, uh, I'll just tell you my experience with your work. I ran an e-commerce business in, uh, yeah, like, uh, 567 years ago, and I was mistakenly, naively relying on paper, uh, click traffic. About 90% of my business was paid per click using Google Ads, and it was just, I had it streamlined. I mean, I knew what the cost per click is. I knew how many visitors were coming in, and everything was smooth, you know, and I'd have it in 13 to 11th, 12th or 13th position on desktop. And then I didn't take notice, but Google moved over from desktop. Uh, to Mo, which means there was only 4 positions left to uh bid for, and my cost per click went from, uh, it went up 4X. So I could no longer run my business profitably. And I found your information, and this is right before the book, it was just your, your work, your coursework, I bought that. Then I, I implemented. I created 100 videos of how-to videos, how to read an audiogram, how to change a hearing aid battery, everything. I turned my business around in 6 months, and then I was able to sell it for, you know, 4 or 5 times what I bought it for. So, I wanted I thank you for that. That's so cool, John, and, and that's the thing about paid is sure it's fine, sure it can be profitable, but ultimately, it's a short-term solution to what is a long-term problem slash need, right? Which is how do I always attract people to me instead of having to pay so much just to get in front of eyeballs that may or may not want to have anything to do with me whatsoever, right? That's the challenge that we're in, that's the world of digital. That's why they ask you answer is such an evergreen framework for digital marketing. It's gonna work just as well in 10 years as it does today. I think even more because uh what's the YouTube is the number one search engine now. Yeah, it's number 2 next to Google and eventually it's probably gonna be number 1 for teenagers is number one. It's pretty amazing. I gotta ask you about what you were thinking in 2009. Were you about ready to declare bankruptcy, go out of business? I mean, yeah, I was. The problem was, you know, we If you're a small business owner. You recognize that. We have to put so much on the line to even have a business. It's what the world doesn't understand about business, you know, and, and, uh, you know, partially I blame the media on this, people hear the word corporation. And they don't understand in businesses and taxes and all these things, but they don't understand is there's a lot of small businesses who pay a lot each year, they sacrifice. In my case, my house was on the, the, the, the, the note, if you would, for the business. My two business partners, their houses were on the note. And so this is one of those things where We were gonna lose essentially 3 homes out of the deal, uh, our 160 employees we would have to let go. So it's a really, really brutal time and every consultant I talked to just said, you know, I just don't see, I don't see a path for you to get out of this. And uh so. The Hail Mary in this case was. They ask you answer and it started by just reading about the internet online because I had this, I had this prompting for a while that, you know, the internet has changed me as a consumer, it's changed the world. I know it's happening for our buyers in swimmingpool space. Nobody's taking advantage of it and the more I read about inbound marketing or content marketing or digital or social or blogging, any of that stuff. I, I just kept coming back to, you know, Marcus, if you just obsess over their questions, if you're willing to address them on your website through text, through video. And you're willing to address all of them. I'm not talking about just the, just the good ones, but the good, the bad, and the ugly. You might save your business. And of course, that's what happened. That's how we became the most traffic swimming pool website in the world. That's what saved fundamentally, that's what saved the company, right? I just did a stat, John, this is freaking wild. Uh, Saturday morning, I was looking at, um, my stats. And over the last 5 years. We've gotten, I think it was 708 customers from Organic Search to our website, 708. Now, that doesn't mean anything until. You know what it equates to from a sales perspective, which is $45 million in sales. In the last 5 years from essentially. The blog content on the website, and that's written content that's written. It's, it's probably some video too, but you know, video is a little bit, it's a little bit tougher, uh, because if they go to YouTube, they're going to come to you maybe from a link on YouTube maybe, or they're gonna do a direct search for you afterwards. That's pretty common to do. Which is why, you know, if you're doing videos on this stuff, not only are you're gonna have your YouTube channel and you're gonna be doing your thing on YouTube, but you're also gonna have, ideally a video library on your site, and you're going to embed those same videos. In text-based content slash posts that are found within let's call it the learning center of your website and everybody's listening to this should have a learning center on your website. Don't you see it as a blog, sees an actual learning center where I can go if there's a place where I know I can go as the buyer as a consumer and say this is where I get all my questions answered, and ideally I wouldn't even call it necessarily a blog per se, even though like River pools, we still have Uh, a blog in our navigation bar because so many people kind of rivers looking for the blog, the river blog is famous, right, but And generally with clients that we have with my agency, we have a learning center. The learning center has articles that would be your traditional blog, and you've got your video library, this is where you have all your videos, then you might have another section of your learning center which could be case studies, another section if you have a podcast or any type of audio, another section if you have like digital brochures, another section if you have buying guides, right, like MIDI, you know, uh, MIDI lead capture style content. So that's what a learning center should look like. And the idea is somebody goes there and just says, wow, I can learn however I want to learn, and whatever style I want to learn, it's all here and I get all my questions answered and they don't have to leave. That's the big key, you gotta leave. I remember this part and I don't remember it was in the book that you had this conversation with the customer about, hey, we've answered all your questions and then why would you go anywhere else at this point? Because we've answered, we've become the celebrity authority for you. Yeah. Yeah, and, you know, people say it's, it's, it's funny how Almost like scarce, like the scarcity mentality a lot of companies have with this, because they say things like, well, if you answer all of the questions. Then what value do you bring when they actually talk to you, which goes against all buyer-based psychology today because all the studies show that buyers are at least 70% to 80% through the buying journey before they even reach out to your company. And that's, that's a study that's studies that have been done done by Google and Forster research group. I'm just like. So we're not, this is, this is not anything surprising. Buyers, consumers are vetting us more than we've ever been vetted in the history of the world. They know more than they've ever known. They're not dumb. They might start off as uninformed. Eventually they're going to be informed. So the choice is we can either be the ones answering their questions or we can say, you know what, I'm not gonna go there, get that answer somewhere else. I mean, imagine, imagine if you call the company up. And you ask them a question, like, can you give me a sense for how much your stuff costs? And that person on the phone said, I can't tell you that, but if you come into the store, I'll tell you. You are going to like spend 0.01 seconds. With that company and now you're gone. You are done so with that company and so we have to have the same mindset in terms of the way people approach our our website. We can't hedge, we can't hold back if they're asking it, we need to be willing to talk about it, which is why, like, you know, when they ask you to answer, we talk about the big five, which are the 5 most fundamental subject areas that buyers research and still to this day. A lot of companies can't get their arms around, man, how do I do that? These 5 are buyers want to know how much is it? In other words, cost pricing questions. They want to know what are the problems or negatives with it. There's, how could this go wrong, how could this blow up in my face? If I buy this thing. What are the issues that the marketplace is talking about? Number 3, buyers love to compare stuff, so comparisons. Number 4, we love to research reviews, pros, cons, but unbiased reviews, pros and cons. Number 5, we love to research the best. Like all the times you've researched best plus something online. Those are the big 5. The book extensively, they ask you and talks about how to address those five things. And what's wild is now that I've had, you know, an agency for 10 years and I've helped so many companies embrace the philosophies if they ask you answer, we see these big 5 coming up again and again and again and again and again. Over and over And so, that's where companies should start, and that's the content that's gonna help your sales team the most. Yeah, it's a great book. I, I mean, I didn't know what those big five are. I don't, I didn't read the book back then, but Uh, like you suggested in your first material said just go to the internet, find out what people are asking and answer those questions. And that's exactly what I did. I created a video of how to read an audiogram because it was the most requested question by people with hearing loss. I created a 5-minute video from Fiver, cost me a couple 100 bucks, and it's been viewed almost a million times. Yeah, what's the ROI of that, you know, it was incredible because you spent 5 buck at fiver and now you've gotten almost, you know, a million views of that video. It's, that's what it's all about. And that's why the internet is the great equalizer. It's where digital Davids can crush Goliath because Goliath generally tends to be too slow, too clunky, and they try to do things by the rules by which they've always been done. And the ones that are crushing it online. They are willing to be imperfect. They're willing to fill in the circle outside of the circle, not just inside the circle. They are willing to do it differently. They're willing to fail forward, and, um, they embrace imperfection actually in this process again, because it is pretty, it is pretty clunky. Learning to do video is clunky. Learning to be good online is clunky. Right? Audio, right, everything, yeah, yeah, but this is why you see like rich teenagers left and right because they just don't really care. They're just like riffing stuff online, and they're not sitting there saying, well, I'm not sure if this matches our brand voice. It's like that company that's sitting there talking about doing a hyper-analysis of their brand voice or whatever. Whatever you wanna call it and therefore still hasn't launched their first video or the only video they launch is the one that costs them, you know, $50,000 per video from that, you know, video production company that's way expensive that they're outsourcing everything to. You get nowhere. I mean, you get nowhere with this. And so too many companies think they're BMW, they're not, and if BMW had, had the wits about them, they wouldn't, they would uh hold. That that brand standard against themselves. So like oftentimes brands literally because of brand, they hold their brand hostage because they think it has to meet a certain caliber of let's call it quality, whereas so much of what buyers want today is the feeling of authenticity of slightly imperfect, they're just like me, they get me, that's what induces trust. Yeah, I, I used to give free hearing aid batteries for people that would give a testimonial. And it's very odd because the videos that that did the best were the worst that you would qualify. I mean, it was, I had a a Canadian couple, they set it up there and they go, I thank you for the batteries or the the hearing aid is great. And then that video did the best out of people that were trying to. You never know, right? You never, and this doesn't mean that that you don't have the intention to uh get better with your content and your quality and all these things, but it's progress over perfection, that's the key to online, progress over perfection, but too many companies start with Perfection Over all else, and that is a recipe for disaster. Yeah, yeah. I, I think a lot of people that uh are um comfortable getting video, video cameras is I, I, I gotta make this perfect, you know, I'm gonna go out and buy the best camera. I'm gonna go out, buy the best lighting, the best audio and making, and then just try to create something and it doesn't turn out that they want, they go, this is not gonna work, so they just stop. Mhm. Yeah, that's right. That's right. So what is going on now with the river river pools? Tell me about what's happening there. I mean, sales 2018 were $8 million you guys up over that, are you still managing that? Well, OK, so, the original river pools is out of Warsaw, Virginia, little town of Warsaw, Virginia, that's the company I found in 2001. 2017, we started to dabble with manufacturing because we saw, hey, we're starting to get leads from all over the country. If we want to scale these leads, we wanna scale the business so it can reach its potential. Why don't we? Start manufacturing our own pools, we can do it better anyway. Uh, we can certainly market it better. And so that's what we did and in conjunction with that, by 2019, we had started the first franchise for fiberglasspool companies in the US. River pools became a franchise. So now we have franchisees all over the country, and we had, uh, we, like last year, we manufactured well over 1000 fiberglass pool shells for, for our franchisees and dealers around the country, and we also got acquired last year, the manufacturing and the franchise side of the business. And uh so that was pretty cool because it was essentially like the uh the capstone on the story arc, right? Company is about to lose everything and company gets bought for a really great number and uh and, and what's, what's still fun too is I still own the original Riverpool's franchise. So I'm, I'm like a franchisee today. And that business does over $15 million a year in swimming pools. And uh so it's not a, it's not a small shop, it's, um, you know, it's, it's still doing uh a hefty business. And I'm on the, essentially on the board, if you would, uh, for the manufacturing company and still helping oversee some of that marketing um vision that we have, and we have a big vision for the company. So it's still a fun ride, uh, to be on, still a part of it, still watching it happen, but, uh, it's come full circle and, uh, it's, it's, it's, it's just crazy if you think about John, right, because 10 years ago. Shoot, man, 10 years ago, I don't think it was like for me as an entrepreneur, small business owner, I don't think I ever made more than $100,000 a year to like, 2013 and 2014, I mean, and um that's when like financially. We could, we actually could turn it around. Remember I started the business in 2001. So, you know, we went from a place of near bankruptcy 2009. They spent the next five years building and paying off those debts and starting to become. Just, you know, profitable, if you will, and then finally could start to get paid, start and then starts to take off, and then we have an acquisition that's like that's the hockey stick place of, of, wow, look at that, look, look what happened, all this simply because I said let's answer our customers' questions on our website. I have to point this out before I ask about the acquisition. Warsaw, Virginia, is this correct? You've got a population of about 1500. Yeah, you're doing $15 million in a 1500. Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly right. I mean, this is one of those businesses where everybody in town knows about it because it supplies so many jobs for the for the local community. Yeah, and you're still the, you got two other partners still and then you're still the sole owner of that, yeah, yeah, I still have two partners. I'm a third owner of of that of, yeah, of that Warsaw location. I've got my agency and I've got new ventures that I'm working on, man, because, um, it's like. The beauty behind this stuff is it can be applied to everything, everything. And so, once you understand that the principles of success, then it doesn't really matter what industry you're working in. And that's, that's how some people just miss the mark with this. You're like, yeah, that might work for you, poor guy at Virginia Marcus, but that's not gonna work for me and my company. And that's like saying your humans are different than my humans. That's just, that's just silly. It's dumb talk right there. It doesn't make any sense. fundamentally, every business is built on one singular building block, which is trust. That's what allows someone to give you money in exchange for a good or a service. And if you embrace that, then you recognize at our core we're all the same. We're in a battle to see who can generate the most trust in our space. So that's what I, that's what dictates the decisions I make as a business owner, as a marketer, what's going to lead to more trust. Yeah. Trust, they gotta like you, trust you before they do business with you, and that transparency 1 does that, yeah, 100%. That's why when companies, you know, talk about. You know, we're getting crushed because of our pricing. I just love to say, so is it possible that you be more expensive could be an advantage and not a disadvantage in the eye of the buyer? Like, what? Yeah, yes, the fact that you're more expensive, be advantageous, could be a part of your unique differentiator. Of course, the answer is yes. I mean, we talk about how, for example, fiberglass pools are more expensive at first and how we tend to be more expensive, and here's why we chose to go that route, what that means for you and You know, because of the fact that we're at least 10% more than everybody, here's the things that we're allowed to do that you're not going to see from the competition and from the rest of the marketplace. And now you can decide which one aligns with your value set more, but here's what we decided to do, and we believe in this. People are like, sign me up, sign me up, sign me up. Does this mean that we get everybody? No. But anybody that tries to get any, everybody does not have a sound business model. You're, you're in trouble. And so this is why I'm a big advocate of every single website talking clearly who they are but also who they're not a good fit for. Almost nobody has a section of their website their messaging that talks about who they're not a good fit for. That's a mistake. That's a mistake because the moment you talk about what you're not is the moment you become dramatically more attractive to who you are a good fit for. Remember that. So be willing to talk about what you're not. And those that are really, you know, more part of your tribe, the ones that are truly attract to you, yes, now that Kennedy and Frank Curran talk about that a lot. I don't talk about your superpower, but who you're not good for, yeah, and you just don't, you don't see that very much, but it's so freaking empowering to do that. Yeah. Well, I gotta tell you about, uh, many of my listeners on top M&A, you know, we buy profitable businesses, and that means a business that's probably more expensive, their products more expensive because they're fans of Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett, and you've just got to have that cash flow and that gap in there to be able to have a good business. You, you do, which is, you know, it's like if your goal is to be the Walmart of your space. Then you need to stay an employee for someone else. But if your goal is to be long term and to be profitable. Then you need a very different business model, which we've got, you know, it goes back to the classic value proposition, and our value proposition is we're gonna tell you and teach you more than anybody else. Our online user experience is just through the roof. And I'm working to create Uh, a post-sale user experience that matches our online one, because rarely does anybody have both, right? And so I'm trying, I'm trying to get, I'm trying to become the chick for what, so what we're trying to do is is make my co-founder Jason Hughes. You know, he has met with Chick fil A multiple times now, and we're, we're gonna try to Chick fil A, the swimming pool industry, and, um, you know, Chick fil A is really expensive. They ain't open on Sundays and they're making money hand over fist. Nobody sits there and says, How can you do that? They, they, they beat everybody else by saying it's like it's like different decimal points, man. It's just crazy. Yeah. That's amazing. Now, let's talk about that you, you were involved in the acquisition. Was this a private equity fund that acquired your company, or no, it's another manufacturer, um, and, uh, they, in their case, they had a Uh, they're called, uh, Thursday pools. And uh so they're one of the leading manufacturers uh in the fiberglass space, and they have a super plant in Indiana, so they have the ability to make way more pools than they were making. Uh, and so they saw a clear opportunity. They were very attracted to us because of the website, because of the brand, uh, because of our influence in the space, and what they were world class at is manufacturing, but they weren't very good at marketing. They were just very average, I would say. We were world class at marketing, but probably very average at manufacturing because we were really just getting going, right? And so, they've got a state of the art facility, it was a perfect match. And um so it's, it's been overall, it's been great. I know a lot of people go into a depression when they sell their business um. I'm not one of those people. And, uh, plus I had other, you know, goals that I had set up. And I've gone through this a couple of times now. I started a consulting company uh called the Sales Line in 2009, uh, when I, when we were doing this with River Pools and I started blogging about what we were doing, and that turned into a consulting company. And today, that merged a couple of years ago with another marketing agency. We've got 70 employees over there. You know, and it's a, it's a, it's a decent sized business too, and, and I'm a partner there as well. And so for me, like my preferred model is. Find really, really great partners that I'm aligned with but have very different skill sets than I do that can fill in the gaps. I don't really have an interest in having business partners like me. I want business partners that are quite different than me. So for example, I need implementers because I'm not very interested in being an implementer. Um, that's, that's really not my thing. So I think, I think a big part of, of, of acquisitions and of entrepreneurship is that keen, keen self-awareness of what you do well and what's not your thing, and then finding someone that can fill those gaps, whether they be a partner in the business or whether they be an employee. The one thing about partnerships is I don't, I don't really enjoy business so as much without a partner. I enjoy doing things with partners. And uh so like I'm on my 5th business now with a partner or partners. Um, and I think ultimately, the, the, there's two keys to great business partnerships. The first one, Um, Well, let, let me say, yeah, so the first one is, I mentioned this, that you're, you have a different set of skills that fill the void, right, that fill the void. And uh you don't look for a match, you look for uh a dismatch. The second one though, is that you have to have a match with your value set. And what I mean by that is, what can quickly destroy a partnership. I, let me give you an example, is if something bad happens, let's say with a customer. And you're sitting there saying, man, in order to fix this problem, it's gonna cost us $500 or $100,000. 1 of the partners says, screw it. Let's just have them. Let's just put it back on them. Let's, let's, we can legally get out of this somehow, I'm sure. Let's put it back on them. And you're saying, yeah, but we screwed up. Let's eat the $100,000. OK. In that conversation, from that point on, the partnership is gonna start to dissolve, right? It's done. It's done. It has not happened to me. I've watched it happen before. So I'm, I'm ultra, ultra careful about who I get in business with even though I've had now multiple partnerships because they have to be willing to do the right thing and match my integrity set while being a uh an unmatch or a dismatch for my skill set. That's the thing that I think a lot of people that get into business don't understand, and that's where they get off track a little bit. And it's kind of hard sometimes to test to what somebody's integrity set looks like until you're thrown into the fire together and you're under that stress and you're like, I don't have $100,000 how can we eat $100,000 but it's the right thing is the right thing. And so that's harder to test for when you're formulating partnerships. Yeah, if you say, hey, uh, you know, that first meeting, 2nd or 3rd meeting, like, we get along really great. It seems like a dismatch, sign something, you're in it and go, oh my God, I, I have to unwind this because we're, we're not the same value set. That's correct. That's correct. That's, that's what, that's when it becomes problematic, right? Look, I, I have to ask you about, it's very easy to say Marcus, uh, is the, you know, face of the business cause he likes getting in front of crowds, you know, he just creates this buzz and maybe he's not the implementer, and that's a dismatch. I mean, it's very, check those boxes right here, but how do you know it's like this other merger that bought or merged with your company is the match, and I check those boxes here. How, how do you know that either one, either with the, the agency that requires, yeah, so one good way to test this is to put yourself in a stressful situation, if at all possible, with the potential business partner. So I give you an example. Before I merged with Impact, which is my agency today. We did 2 events together. Now events are difficult, they're stressful, they require a lot of planning. You lose sleep and so you get to see uh, you get to see the person. In a stressful environment when they're being hit from all sides, and it allows you to say in the end, wow, I'm really glad we're not business partners, because I had no idea they would react this way or it allows you to say, wow, that was, that was, that was a lot coming at us, and we feel closer today than we did beforehand. And so that was, that was an absolute key. Impact was merging with Impact uh was. did come as a little bit more of a challenge, because my, I've got a couple partners there, but my main partner, his name is Bob Ruffalo. And so Bob and I did these events together and it was a very good match, but. We had a few issues making our partnership work. One of the biggest issues we had making our partnership work, um, to the point where we are today, where it's very successful, is we, we ended up finding out that We both, if I don't know if you've heard of Strengthsinder, John, but that's one of those tests that you take to find those core strengths that you have, uh, and there's like, I think there's like 32 main strengths that people have. Well, it turns out that. Your, your top five strengths are what you should lean into the most, and your bottom strengths are actually major weaknesses that you should have somebody else doing for you, OK? So there's, like, like I said, I think it's like 32 of them. Well, the thing about it is what we found out with my business partner and I is we both had a top 2 strength of what's called command. And command is the person that um like if I wasn't in If I wasn't doing what I was doing, I'd be a football coach, that's what I would be, right? That's like, and the reason is because my #1 strength is strategy, my #2 strength is command. I'm a very strategically thinking person. And so that's how they ask your answer came to pass, is I saw, I start to, I I I saw this thing that we were calling digital and inbound and all that stuff. I saw it from a strategic standpoint and formulated a pattern in my mind of this is how you can make this work. We call it they ask you answer, there's these things called the big 5, and boom, it takes off. That's the strategy, right? Now, command is when you can get a group of people behind you to run with you, right? To run through that wall with you, right, and you're leading the way. Well, sometimes it's not very good to have two that have that core strength that are leading a company if you're not going in the exact same direction. Also, it can cause confusion to your leadership team and or your employees. Who is the person that's really in charge? If you've got two major figureheads at the front. And so, like, how did Bob and I resolve this issue? So what I ended up doing is I recognized I had to be very careful about. About seeing my vision. To the entire team, before I say it to Bob. I need to make sure that I give Bob my vision first. And that he and I therefore on the same page of a direction always. Because I'm the type of person, the way that I communicate is such that if I'm just riffing on a particular, hey, you know, maybe we should do this. Suddenly everybody's thinking, that's a great idea, Marcus. And that can be problematic to a company because of the fact that Bob also has a vision and it could be misaligned from that, and I could be off track, but just because the way that I say it sounds convincing or influential, now it could be causing discord within the direction of our company. And so I act as the figurehead of the company. Bob said, you're the figurehead. You're the guy on stage, you're the one giving the vision to the world to get behind. I'm the one that is able to give that vision to the company. And they get behind together it's a great match. But if he tried to be the public figure with the world getting behind him, he would probably fail or we wouldn't reach our potential. And if I tried to implant myself as the the core leader in the company that everybody was behind. Then again, it wouldn't work very well. So now, although we reached a point of 1A and 1B, he's clearly leading the company and I'm clearly leading, we'll call it what, what we think as a company digital marketing should look like and how the public, therefore perceives our company. And that's the difference. He had to swallow some pride and say, I'm gonna let Marcus be the public facing figure. I had to swallow some pride and say I'm not going to dictate all the terms of the company itself. Yeah, I, I, I think a good example is that if you've ever read the history of Steve Jobs and Apple, man, the way he created all pis right there and just nearly destroyed the company. That's right, yeah, that's right. Yeah. Well, this, uh, with uh Bob Ruffalo, uh, did you have a dating period, engagement period and say, hey, we're You know, we've been through a number of these crucible by fire type events like let's get together and get married or what we, we probably didn't, we probably didn't date as long as or go on as many dates as people want. It's 2 events and that was it. We just did 2 events and I felt like it was time because, again, my self-awareness just told me, Marcus, you're never gonna grow your consulting companies as big as it could and should be, and you probably won't take the ask you answer where it should be. Because you don't always, always have a visionary scaling of businesses. So You know, I recognized that. Bob saw a major opportunity. And so, therefore, we went ahead and we took that leap, and we did have to work out again on that one, we had to work out a decent amount of kinks, because you got two alphas that are 2 command strengths and uh but we worked it out, and that's, that's the main thing. We, we worked it out and we're better for it. They ask the answers better for it, because to give you an example of this, Bob was the one that pushed me to do the revised version of They Ask you answer in 2019. Is the book's crushing. Let's do a revised version. I think there's a lot more that you could say, and I'm like, ah, he's like, no, I'm telling you, you can do this. And so I did it and the book's selling more today than it did in 2017. It's crazy. That's crazy. And so books aren't supposed to have that staying power, you know, 1% of the 1% of the 1% have that type of staying power, they're selling more four years later. They ask answers one of the books, and that's, I attribute a lot of that to a business partner that pushed me. And see I wreck, but, but part of that goes back to the self-awareness of me knowing that I wasn't going to scale the business and some of my ideas, like they should have been scaled, because I'm not a great implementer. Therein Bob solves the problem. That's a, that's a, it's it's amazing of self-awareness to say, hey, look, I'm gonna sit back in that role. I'm gonna, I, I can do this well, but I'm gonna let somebody else do that. That's great. A lot of a lot of people have it though, let's be honest, and it's hard to test for that. It's hard to interview for it sometimes, but I, you know, to me it gets in the way so often. It does, it absolutely, it absolutely does, you know, and I love, it's like I will consistently. We practice this as a company. Uh, embracing our failures, talking about them, so that everybody could learn how powerful self-awareness is, because the, the problem that I have as a business owner with mistakes. Is, and this is like most parents. It's like you expect mistakes. The issue is when the person doesn't recognize they made mistakes or why they made the mistake. That's when you're like, this is, this is not gonna work out. But if somebody wets the bed and says, hey, I wet the bed, here's why I wet the bed. It's like, OK, now I got something here. I got a, I got a team player here that's gonna be great, but they have no concept that the bed's even wet. Oh my goodness, we don't, we don't, we don't, I feel like if I could just get him in a minute and goes, you know, a conflict arises, a misunderstanding, just say I'm sorry. It's like, OK, then we'll say it, move on. Reco if they don't see it, then we got a problem. This self-awareness is like the number one attribute that we look for in employees today. Yeah. Amazing. Hey, I have to ask you about this, the, the pools and the Thursday pool acquisition. When you were dabbling into building your own pools, what was happening there? You just weren't able to build enough or the quality wasn't there? What was happening? Well, we were, we, we financially bootstrapped the whole thing. Yeah. And so to build a manufacturing facility. But all we put into it. Um, that was, that was hard, and we didn't have a manufacturing background. So it was, it's not just bootstrapping of, of, of money, it's about bootstrapping of ideas, right? And a lot of it was reinvention of wheels that were already out there, but we just weren't smart enough to necessarily know. I mean, did we pull it off, but the biggest catalyst to that was Jason, speaking of self-awareness, my business partner went. To Thursday's plants, the one, the company that ended up buying us. He went to Thursday's plant. And it was. It was the type of thing, he looked at it, he said. Could we ever build a plant like this? I don't know. Best case 10 to 15 years down the road, best case. This is just so above and beyond how my brain works and our brain, but we, we don't have really engineering brains, and the head of Thursday is, uh, he's got like an MBA in accounting and in engineering, and he's just like, just totally like that. That's just how his brain works. And so Jason said, Wayne, I don't want to compete with that. I wanna be a part of that. I want to have that type of quality control now for our franchisees. And um so. You know, I had been pretty much removed from river pools. For the most part, for, jeez, probably 78 years. I've just been 5 hours a week with River pools for 78 years. So for me, it was, hey, I can go ahead now, I can cash out, I can complete the story, the story arc, which to me is important as a speaker. Uh, and at the same time I can continue though with it and offer continual guidance. So that's, that's, that's nice, right? That works. And I still have the original company, still a third owner of the original install company, Warsaw, Virginia, that is still, you know, a, a pretty, pretty good size. Population 1500. That's amazing. Yeah, right, exactly. I mean, I'm not laughing at that. I came from a town in Wilcox's cool, right? One stoplight. Yeah, yeah, I got 2 stop lights in the county. I mean 15 million dollars, that's amazing, yeah. What was the conversation? Why did you decide to franchise the opportunity? And like how did you figure out like, hey man, we got this package so well. So in a lot of ways that goes back to they ask you answer, and they ask you answer, you know, at first it's, it was like, hey, let's obsess over our customer's questions, and then over time, It becomes a part of who who you are to just listen to the marketplace better than everybody else listens to the marketplace. And this might be the old strategy strength for me as my number one, but it's, it's, I'm seeing around the the curve or the turn because I can understand the obvious for what it is and not overcomplicate it. Right, and so this really, that's the same thing. That happened with our company. And that's what, that's what, that's what allowed us, that's why we, why we decided to do what we did. We were getting so many leads from so many areas around the country to, to, to launch a pool company. People were like, I learned everything I ever learned about pools from you. Is there any way you can install it in my area, like, no, I'm freaking in Virginia, and you're in like Idaho, no, I can't do that. I would love to do that, but I can't do that. You get enough of those, you're like, OK, I can sell the leads. OK, so you sell the leads to some company you don't know, and you could, you know, lead to a terrible experience for the homeowner. Mhm. Plus I'm sure there's some law against that. So it's like it doesn't feel good, it doesn't feel right, and it's not very profitable whatsoever. So it's like, OK, that's off the table. So if we're gonna take advantage of this national brand that we've developed, What do we need to do? Well, it makes sense that we manufacture, because now we can scale as, as far as we want to scale, just like these other manufacturers had done. Um, and so that's when we said let's, let's go for it. The marketplace was sending us the clear signal. And um, it's really interesting, when we franchised, I thought a lot of our franchisees would come from the pool industry. We're getting a ton that don't come from the pool industry. And we've actually gotten like 3 of them that have come from researching pools, frustrated with the experience, Discover us, this is amazing. Can I get one of your pools? Oh, sorry, we don't have a franchise in your area. Hey, how do I become a franchisee? Oh yeah it's crazy, right? And isn't passionate about selling too for oh my goodness, yeah, I wanna talk about an integral part of the family. Of course everybody in the industry said franchise model won't work, swimming pools just won't work. That's an SEC offering, isn't it? You had to go through the uh licensee for that. Yeah, I mean, we had, we had to go through, you know, all the legalese, but it wasn't like the hoops were not incredible to jump through. And hey, look, we're still figuring it out, but um it's going, this the whole model goes back to People want to do what they're good at and don't want to have to reinvent the wheel with things they do not thrive with. You got all these people that's like, I just wanna provide a great customer experience. I've got swimming pool experience, or I want to install pools. I don't wanna be the marketing person, you know, I don't want to have to come up with the contracts. I don't wanna do da da da da da da. So it's like, that model is a beautiful model because it eliminates so much of the learning curve. Now the drawback to the model is, man, you marry the freaking brand, right? I mean, you become completely married, your business is now River pools of Nashville, Tennessee River pools of Salt Lake City, right? And that's a commitment. Now the beauty for us though is it's a commitment. You know, the swimming pool industry is full of wishy-washy dealers that are just like, what manufacturer do I want to work with today? I mean, imagine an automotive dealership that sells Ford, Chevy, Toyota, you know, Lexus, Porsche, they sell every single one. I mean, it's like, In, in now that doesn't work for a reason and it's a law of diminishing returns at that point, right? And so. You know, if business is proven time and time again that if you have a singular focus, you tend to do dramatically better than, you know, if you're offering one line of swimming pools versus 3 lines. The paradox of choice. Tells us that for the buyer, it's easier to make a decision. For the business, it's much easier to build a brand and to sell and market the product. Yeah. I had that issue with uh the hearing aid business. I thought, man, if I just kept adding more hearing aids to my website, people will choose. Actually, sales went down. That's right, Paradox of choice, right there. I went back to just 3 good, better, and best. That's it. And that's what, that's what people want because there is a clear law of diminishing returns that comes with that paradox of choice where choices, that's why, you know, it's like freaking. You know, your business model is not the Cheesecake Factory's menu, not a good strategy for your business. Too much stuff. Think Chipotle, really simple, more simple, the better. Yeah. Speaking of uh arc of the story, it sounds like you read a little, uh, Hero with 1000 Faces is Jose Campbell. Where are you at right now with, uh, I mean, you've called to a venture, refusal to call, and meeting a mentor. Who did you have a mentors through this whole process or? New books or online or You know, I wish I had more of a a mentor. I don't really feel like I've got a definitive, you know, I've I've got my I, I, I don't read as much as a lot of people do, um, I probably only read a couple books a year. I'm much more interested in just really paying attention to the market. So I think a lot of people read books like every week. But they're almost blind to what's happening around the left and right. Where I thrive is I don't read a ton of books, and by the way, I think reading books is great, and when I read books, I enjoy it and it helps me, but I just find myself working more on observation. And collecting those ideas and then running with them, right? Uh, I still think the greatest book ever written from a, uh, from a nonfiction standpoint is How to Win Friends and Influence People. Um, I, I just think that To me, Probably 90% of my success. Goes back to understand communication. Understand what moves people to take action by someone's word or message. And so I get hired today to speak about marketing, I get hired today to speak about sales. I get hired today to speak about leadership, but all I'm talking about in all three of those is principles of transformative communication. It's all I'm talking about. And so I latch on to these principles and again it goes back to, and then you can apply it to whatever you want to apply it to and so there's not a lot of people that are, are great in terms of there's generally in the world of speaking, you're hired to be a sales speaker, you're hired to be a marketing speaker, but not both. I have transcended both very, very well. This is not a brag, this is just me because I'm happy to tell anybody all day long, all things I don't do well. So by the way, that's a whole other subject. We talk about self-awareness, society looks down on us saying, hey, I do this thing really, really well. Now, You, if you were granted a gift, uh, that you have. Then it's very, very important that you embrace that talent, you don't bury it. And that you recognize it for what it is. Same thing as I, I recognize I'm not good at accounting. I'm not good at algebra. You mix math with letters, I really start to falter. I actually am not good at um at labor with my hands so much, so I'm not turning on the excavator really to dig the pool, and I'm not, you know, turning on the spray gun to build that fiberglass pool shell. It's not my thing. I'm OK with that. But we have to get very, very comfortable embracing what our strengths are. And having an understanding and a relationship with them of, OK, that's my thing, that's what I'm really, really good at. I know what I'm very good at. I communicate better than 99.9% of the world. In certain settings and applications. So that allows me to teach it. And to expand it out, to, to expand upon it to different things. They ask you to answer ultimately it's a communications book, but it's called digital sales and marketing. The next book I'm, I'm writing. It's a, it's, it's all about transformative leadership communication. But again, it's just about, it's just about communication. I did a book on video, um, uh, this last year called the Visual sales. It's how to use video in the sales process. It's just a book on communication. That uses video as the core theme to it, right? You know your strengths, and you embrace them and you run with them, and it's just amazing what it can do with your life. It really, really is. They can give you a comfort level with yourself to where you're never sitting there and dealing with the issues of impostor syndrome that so many people are dealing with. It's like, sometimes people say to me, Marcus, how do you overcome impostor syndrome? This might sound like a weird subject matter, but like, I have honestly, I don't remember the last time I struggled with what people would call imposter syndrome. I think one of the biggest reasons for that is, if it's not my thing, I just don't swim in the arena. I just don't even go. I don't go play there cause I'm totally fine with it. I'm just completely comfortable not doing the thing. That's why we're not talking about ballet right now, right? It's not my thing. I'm totally fine with that. Just talk about my stuff, and I'm not gonna suffer from impostor syndrome because I've embraced my gifts for what they are. And if it's not my, like, sometimes I get these thought leaders online like, hey, Marcus, I wanna get your thoughts on such and such uh for this article that we're doing about You know, the biggest, uh, you know, uh, uh, keyword automation tools for 2022, and I that's not my thing. I don't have something for you, like, but Marcus, we want you on the list. Yeah, it's not my thing. So I'm not an imposter, and I'm not going to put myself in a position to be one ever. I'll talk about where my strengths lie, and know what they are. Maybe this is where the command comes into play. It's like I am just very interested in staying in my lanes. Sure, I'm discovering more lanes. But they all have the commonalities of my specific strengths. Every we's listen to this, I think if you get to that point in your life, you become so much more comfortable with what you're doing, who you are, the stuff that you communicate, your message, your personal brand. You're satisfied with that. It's no different, John, than as a speaker. I know that roughly 2% of the audience is going to hate me and it's going to say, I don't like this guy. He yells at me, um, he invaded my space because I walk into the audience, and then they just say these things. 98% is like, he's like he's one of the best speakers I've ever seen in my life. It's the way he came into the audience, the way he's so enthusiastic. I let go of those 2% before I even get to the room. I accept the fact that they're gonna say negative things, and they will not dictate the terms of the way that I communicate with the world. I am OK with them not liking me, and it's not their fault. I'm not their thing. Remember going back to know who you are, know what you're not, same deal. You gotta have that mindset in business. Beautiful. I got one last question because we're running out of time. How did you do the Co market with grunt style and river pools, the shirt? I'm a veteran. I love Grunge style, yeah, yeah, um. I don't even know how he did this. I know my marketing person set it up and I just, uh, these are new and I love them. Like these are the greatest shorts ever and so I don't, I, I gotta find the answer to that myself. Uh, I, I really appreciate this time, Marcus. I mean you guys, if, uh, you get on Amazon, they ask you to answer, it's a great book. His content saved my business. I was able to turn around from having my vendors in here and say, hey, we're gonna close down to less than 6 months later, selling the business through Empire Flipper. So, uh, thank you very much, Marcus. I really appreciate the time. My pleasure, brother. Be well. Take care.