EP14 - Why ESOP culture makes a difference! Discussion with Daniel Goldstein from Folience - a portfolio of ESOP companies.

Welcome back. Thanks so much for joining. I'm the ESOP Guy and we are continuing on this journey to an ESOP. If you are just tuning in for the very first time, this podcast is really created and produced to help those that are thinking that might want to use an employee stock ownership plan in their business. And all the things that that come about in terms of understanding an employee stock ownership plan and how it's used are things that we cover on this podcast. And so if you're one of those, I want to say thank you for joining and check out our website because uh journey to an ESOP.com, we have a lot of episodes, there are different topics and there's different interviews, um, just like today we'll be an an interview, and there's a lot to learn and it's a great resource for those that are thinking about using an ESOP. I also wanted to remind everyone that the ESOP Guy live webinar series has started. We had our first one in March. Uh, we have another one coming up April 28th. The first one was really just a good overview. So if you've joined that, um, you know, thank you very much. It was a good overview of what ESOPs are and how they work. Um, this next one is going to be going into the valuation side for an ESOP and really understanding the mechanics behind what happens with valuation for your business and so what your business is worth. So, so be looking for that, it's April 28th at 2 o'clock and that'll be on our website at journey to an ESOP.com as well. So this episode is going to be titled Why ESOP Culture Makes a Difference. To do that, I have the opportunity to interview Daniel Goldstein with Folliance Inc. It's a 100% ESOP owned diversified portfolio of companies. Daniel's background is, to me, extremely interesting. It's very, he's got, um, you know, story of living in the US but spending a good chunk of his life in Europe. Um, he is a, a very strong ESOP advocate and has found really his life's passion in working with ESOP companies including his own. So with that, I wanted to um to just thank Daniel for his time here today with us and welcome him to the podcast. Thanks, it's great to be here, and I really appreciate the work that you're doing. The ESOP guy is getting the important message out there. People need to know more about what ESOPs are and why not only the culture makes a difference, but why ESOPs make a difference. Excellent. So, so Daniel, um, let's go into your, your kind of your background a little bit. What, give us like a brief over round of your background with ESOPs, um, especially your advocacy work with within the employee ownership community. Sure, so I actually just came to ESO's about 5 years ago. Before that, I had a long career working with family owned businesses and family offices around the world, but my foray into the ESOP world started almost exactly 5 years ago in April 2016 when I joined the company that is now Folians and We'll talk, I think a little bit more about the company history um in a little bit, but as I was working, developing the culture of our ESOP with my team, I also got very involved with employee ownership on the national level and became a trustee of the Employee Ownership Foundation. I'm on the board of governors of the ESOP Association. I uh was on the board of the Employee Ownership Expansion Network, EOX um in February of 2020 last year. I had the opportunity to testify before the House Committee on Small Business on the benefits and challenges and employee ownership, and I do a lot of speaking at conferences, webinars, and now also podcasts about employee ownership. And lastly, I'm also on the boards of other ESOP companies apart from our own ESOP company. So it's something that I To find it, as you say, it's, it's become my purpose. It gets me out of bed. It's not just about our own ESOP but I'm not. That's great. 11 thought I had when, when you went through your, your background a little bit is I get questions from people when we talk about ESOPs about the politics behind it. And it's like the question they have is like, how would the government allow a company, an S corporation company as an ESOP not to pay any taxes and What's the political environment when it comes to ESOPs? Like the, the question really behind that is like, how is, how are both parties really kind of in the in sync on something like this when there's so much division in the parties? Yeah, no, absolutely, and there are two answers to that. The first one is that it is so bipartisan, that it's nonpartisan, which is so refreshing in today's sort of politically charged climate. That both sides see just all the advantages to employee ownership, to the employees, their families, to communities, to our economy, to keeping good paying jobs in our communities, and I saw this firsthand when I was testifying before Congress because both sides were equally engaged equally interested, and equally came up afterwards and said that they wanted to work with us. And part of the reason why that is, if you'll allow me, I'm going to make one small correction. It's not that ESOPs don't pay taxes, it's that the taxes are deferred, and that's actually a really important distinction to make because it's the same as I draw the distinction to 401k plans. It's not that you don't pay taxes, it's that the taxes are deferred to the time when you take the money out as income in retirement. And hopefully not beforehand, in which case pay penalties, interest taxes, etc. and it's the same thing with ESOPs. While they don't pay the federal and state corporate taxes, the taxes are deferred because the taxes are paid by the participants when they take their value out of their ESOP accounts just as they do with the 401k. And so I always like to draw that distinction because I sometimes make the error of saying that we don't pay taxes, but it's really the deferred, right. Well, well, good, good point. I, I like, I do think it's refreshing though politically when you have, uh, like you said, a nonpartisan issue, because when you get into, you know, it, it's so it's difficult to even talk about politics anymore because people are so split between the two sides. So it's, it's just refreshing to kind of have a, have a, a topic that we can actually talk about where you don't have that, you know, the, the, the grind and the aggravation on, on other issues. So, Um, so with that, you know, let's, let's kind of go into your story with the company. Um, you guys have a very interesting ESOP story in Iowa, um, a lot of history, um, and it's really, you know, kind of pulled together kind of the future part of, of what you guys are doing and where you're going. Um, can you go through kind of trace back your roots of your company and, and how that has worked with the ESOP? Yeah, we have a lot of history. So our company started in 1884, and that's around the Cedar Rapids Gazette newspaper, which we still own and publish 137 years later. The paper actually started in 1883. And if you go forward 100 years to 1986, we were by then both a print and broadcast media company, and that's when our ESOP started as a partial ESOP. So our ESOP is 35 years old this year. In 2012, our company bought back the remainder of the family shares and retired those, so the ESOP then became 100% owner of the company in 2012. In 2015, we sold our broadcast business, and that was 62 years after bringing it on air. So that that was a long time, we don't buy and flip companies. And I joined in April, that was at the end of 2015. I joined in April the following year, 2016 with the charge of diversifying our revenue base so that we would be around for the next 130 years. And so in 2017 Acquired lifeline emergency vehicles in Sumner, Iowa, and today they are 36 years old, 180 employees, and of course that made them 100% employee owned. And then in 2018 we acquired Cimarron Trailers in Chickasha, Oklahoma. This year they turned 21 years old and they are about 135 employees and of course they are now 100% employee owned. So today we're about 530 employee owners working 2/3 in manufacturing, 13 in media doing over $100 million in revenue. And well positioned to be around for the next 130 years. It's awesome. What a cool story. So as we, as we think about that, and I don't think people think about ESOPs like you guys are doing them, and I think in general, I mean the idea that you have these, these combinations of companies that are doing different things. One of the things that we Focusing on is the story behind what happens to, to these small towns when, and this is one of the things I really love about ESOPs because I think it's, it's, it's not talked about enough and, and it's the idea that an ESOP company can literally, you take a company like what you had and, and had a 130 year history in that town and, and suddenly they're, they're going through some transition and suddenly jobs are on the line. So saving jobs for local communities becomes such a a A key element of what an ESOP can do in terms of helping a town. Um, can you kind of go into the, you know, as we go into the entities that you guys have went into, what, what you kind of talked a little bit about the acquisitions, but what does that meant for the local economies as you guys have gone in and acquired these companies and then pulled them together and utilizing the ESOP benefits to, to create a stronger company and stronger jobs for those communities. Yeah, so let me tell the story of lifeline emergency vehicles, and this is really why I had been invited to have to testify before Congress. It's not that we're the best, the biggest, the most profitable, it's our story. exemplifies the story of what ESOPs and employee ownership means to local communities. So Lifeline emergency vehicles started in 1985 in Sumner, Iowa, and today Sumner, Iowa's population of just over 2000 people. Lifeline employs 180 employees, employee owners, and very good paying manufacturing jobs. And so if you think of a town that's a population of 2000, and you take out the young people, the elderly people, the people that are running the local businesses, local healthcare restores, etc. 180 employees is by far the largest employer. We're committed to stay in Sumner. We've been there. The company's been there for 36 years. They're very proud to be American made employee owned, and what's happening for those employees is that not only are they getting good benefits and salary, but they're saving for their retirement, and we can talk a little bit about that later. Siarran was very much the same. A bigger town, Chiashe, is about 20,000 population, and Simran employs 135 employees, so it's Not quite the largest employer in town, the way the lifeline is, but it's a large employer. And the owners of Cron had turned down private equity bid to buy the company because they had a saying that nobody ever retired from the trailer business and we're changing that so that people can and they'd seen what happened to other trailer companies that had been bought by private equity and then resold, closed, moved. So it's the same story there that we're committed to the community. We're actually expanding that business right now. And so not only is it working with those local communities to keep good paying jobs in the community, but by making them a part of a bigger system of folians, it's also diversifying their ownership that each of those employees is not just an owner in their own business but an owner in all the businesses that make up for. Mm. Yeah, so they get, you know, they, they definitely win where they have a larger company in, in the end to have a higher, you know, hopefully a potentially higher evaluation and the diversification of multiple markets, multiple businesses, as you guys said, 2/3 manufacturing and, and 1/3 um in um was it, was it? We do. Yeah. Yeah. Um, so what would happen? like what would be the alternatives, um, and how would that affect, you know, those communities if, um, and what would be, you know, is an ESOP, what, how, how is that a better option than what they had just kind of playing through the whole scene that you guys had had kind of experienced. Sure, so when I started talking with the CEO and the largest owner, the widow of the founder of Lifeline Emergency Vehicles, she was 75 years old, didn't have heirs to pass the business on to, did not want to sell to private equity or strategic buyer, and like I said, it was the largest employer in a pretty small rural community in northeast Iowa. If it had been sold to private equity, we know statistically that companies are sold to private equity typically within 3 to 5 years are resold, and that can often destroy the culture of the company gives competitors advantage. A lot of times employees managers will look elsewhere. Strategic companies often do the same. They often consolidate, move companies out of town. And like I said, Siran had turned down a private equity offer because they had seen what had happened to others in their industry that had been bought by private equity. So the alternative often can be that companies close, they are reduced in size as there's a carve out they're put onto platforms to get returned back quickly to investors. Um, or they're resold, whereas in both the case of Lifeline and Siron, there was not a single job lost in the acquisition, and both companies have gone on to grow since then and create more jobs. And create more jobs and the data does show that ESOPs do have a competitive advantage over other forms of company ownership, that there's better growth, better return on investment and assets, they're slower to lay off and downturn, which means that they're quicker to come back and the upturn, and we've seen that ourselves in in our companies. I have this visual, you know, and I don't want to come up with like, this is not a private equity, like we're, we're mean to private equity people. But I, but I do see that too with our own clients and our own local communities. So I have this visual, it's like a tumbleweed rolling through an empty town and all the jobs are gone and You know, and the buildings are dilapidated and, you know, and it's like, I don't want to like, like again, come after the private equity guys. They're doing their jobs and, you know, they're getting paid what they for what they do. But I have had so many clients have that kind of similar reaction like, they could sell to a private equity or a strategic buyer. And because in right now, I mean, we're seeing private equity become again. Before COVID, it was, it was like this and it's getting, you know, they had all this pent up demand, I think, but they're going after a lot of companies right now. Um, and it's not, you know, I'm certainly not gonna ever say to anybody, hey, you shouldn't have sold to private equity, but I do think if you're, if you're thinking about your employees and you're thinking about your communities, Um, definitely just not even say, like, you know, you have to go to ESOP, but ESOP just simply is a viable option. When you start comparing, compare the private equity deal with the ESOP deal and really look at the two. I think that's, that's really what I would challenge people to do as opposed to, you know, just like, well, that's what everybody should do, just sell it to a private equity. Um. And, and, and I do think that you, you, if you look at structurally, who is the owner and how do they get paid, then that tells the story. So private equity, which is, and, and here I'm talking more of the typical GPLP fund private equity as opposed to, for example, a family office that's doing direct deals, that private equity is set up typically on a 10 year basis. To return an IRR and they're paid handsomely for that. And the way that they get the IRR is they compress the time between investing and harvesting in companies, and that's why you have that 3 to 5 year resale cycle that private equity gets into. So it's not that they're bad people, that's the structure of how they're set up, whereas in ESOP when it makes an investment, the owners. Are the employees and they're compensated over the long term. It's literally set up as a qualified retirement plan to accumulate wealth over the long term, and that's where you see the difference in the patient capital of an ESOP versus the private equity resale cycle and you see the fruit of that in the different in the different models or the different, the evidence in different markets as well. So, now, so if we shifted over to the employee side, so what is, you know, the significance of employee owners of building wealth in a qualified retirement plan in in terms of specifically in terms of how an ESOP works? It's a wonderful method, and there are a couple of elements that I want to highlight. The first is that it addresses both income and wealth inequality, and the way that I separate the two is income inequality or talks about how you get to the end of the month. It's about your pay, your benefits, the cash that you're taking in to cover your living expenses. You need to have a living wage. You need to have competitive salaries so that you can take care of your family on a month to month basis. The wealth inequality is more about funding your lifetime needs, and that's where the ESOP comes in. That ESOPs do pay competitive benefits and salaries that addresses the income inequality, but it is a qualified retirement plan that over the long term allows employee owners to accrue wealth that funds their lifetime and retirement needs. And again, to remind people that aren't familiar with ESOs, you don't pay for the shares of the company. You invest your labor to earn equity. So while you take money out of your paychecks to put into your 401k, the value of the ESOP, the shares that are given to employees, I don't like to say the word given because they're really earned by the employees, but they're earned because they work there. And that's where it's really a wonderful system because the American dream used to be about building wealth through owning your primary residence, and that changed a lot with what happened in 2008. Either people are not finding that the value of their residence is increasing. They don't have access to buy their residence. Lately there's been a little bit more of a return as As markets have gone a little crazy with homes, but not everybody has that opportunity. Owning a stake in your company is really what the American dream can be about and should be about, and especially because that's accessible to anyone regardless of gender, ethnicity, educational background, so long as you can work for an employee owned company and you're earning equity. Because you work there, then that American dream is really open to everyone. I think that's, I think that's a wonderful aspect of the, of the, of the ESOP story and I think you put that so well. One of the things I'll I'll kind of comment on is, and I get this from, from, so I work with the owners and then the key managers when I'm putting an ESOP together. And, and so for some of the key managers, you know, they're probably, you know, at the Not the end of their career, but maybe they're 55, 65 years old. You know, when we look at the ESOP, it really does benefit people to be there a long time. It's not, you're not going to have to set up an ESOP and then everybody is going to have all these shares over, you know, a few years. It's gonna take, you know, a good chunk of time, like 25 years to start earning that, that stock and having it accumulate in value. Um, you know, so the comment I'll make there is that it's, it, you know, to address the issue. I think there's You deal with the whole base employee, you know, compensation and I think for the rank and file, it's, it's a phenomenal um plan because they're connecting their retirement to the private stock that that was held by the owner before that has so much potential to grow and appreciate. Um, in the long term, that works well for the key managers, one of the things I'll comment on is it's, it's important that everybody wins. And they're, you know, generally going to work, you know, like an owner would, right? They're going to put a lot of time and energy in it. And so utilizing the ESOP plus, you know, things like stock appreciation rights programs are really important because they do reward the key managers as well. For the above and beyond type of work, you know, 12 hour days to try to, you know, work the company to get to that next level and increase value and, and those can be paid out, you know, in a shorter period of time, like a 4 or 5 or 6 year period, um, to really give them the benefits of, of being a key manager. So, You know, I think there's a balance between the two, but I do, I do think it's important to understand what it really is. Um, and I do, I like the idea that it kind of gets us back to the American dream of people having the possibility of creating wealth in this country. And all that I completely agree, and it is about the long term. There are a couple other things that you see with ESOPs, as opposed to other companies. There's less differential between executive pay and average salary. The differential in public companies is just so much greater than in ESOPs. The ESOP allocation is given on a percentage of eligible compensation. So everybody in the company is going to get the same percentage allocation, which is more of an equalizer, and I do really want to stress that it is long term and we have employees that have been here since before day one of our ESOP, which started 35 years ago, and it does take time to accrue that well, to accrue that benefit, but that's also Reward also for the more senior managers and executives, but the longer that you stay, the more that you accrue of that benefit that's going to fund your retirement. So it's definitely not a get rich quick or see the results in the first couple of years. The longer you stay, the more you see that wealth accumulating. Which again works back to the whole idea that we want in the communities, we want these companies to be, to have a long term investment in the communities and create long term employment and long-term sustainability. So, so I think all of that works, you know, really well together. Um, when we, we think about it, 11 thing I did my last webinar recently was I had an older statistic, but the the statistic was You know, as we hover around the idea of retirement was the average worker, you know, and this was from the NCEO that I got the data from, but the average worker in ESOP had almost double the amount of of retirement account balances than the, the company, the employee that worked for a non-ESOP and just normal 401k type of thing. So I don't know, is that something you see statistically or or I don't know if there's more research on that that you've come across. Yes, no, I've seen that research, but I can add to that with our own experience here at Foans. So we are close to 90% of our employees contribute to their 401k plan, and that is a very high number. First of all, there are many companies in this country that don't offer. 401k s which is abysmal, but then of those that do offer 401ks, the participation rates tend to be much lower, and we do that with education and also with an incentive that we match 50% up to the 1st 6% of wages that are contributed to 401k with company stock. And so that means on the 1st 6% of salary that you set aside into the 401k, you earn 3% of ESOP stock and the average contribution that our employees have when they're contributing to the 401k is 7%. So you have the 7 + 3, that's already 10% of annual compensation set aside, plus the Average contribution, if you add another 5-6%, then that means that our employees, the majority of which are saving 15% of annual salary every year, and of that only 7%, they're actually contributing from their paycheck. That's how you get your employees on the path to funding their retirement. Wow, that's pretty cool. Yeah, I mean, and, and that's the shock I think for people that haven't save for retirement and they're getting closer and closer to that. Um, and knowing that that's a major issue going forward. I mean, we don't know what Social Security is going to be like, you know, when, when, you know, the next 20 years with, with the amount of national debt that we have. So this issue of, of really helping build people's retirement account, I think it, as well as the issue of building better communities, I think it was You know, just a phenomenal way to connect the dots and it's way bigger than just hey, the ESOP makes sense or it's a viable option. I think it's, it's a bigger picture. So, um, I think that's really helpful to think about our community and our country and knowing that people are gonna be better off at the end, um, in general, more people will be better off in the end because of the ESOP. Yes. So kind of turn, so turning the corner and looking at now, we, we think about one of the things you guys have done, which I think again it's, it's very intriguing and when you pull together these companies under the one umbrella, um, and have this idea that you, you can, you know, and I've done acquisitions in our, in our firm too and one of the issues of acquisition work. Is you're, you're pulling in a new company into your culture and culture, you know, and they say culture strategy for lunch, right? So the culture is so incredibly important. And I wanna kind of talk a little bit about that process for you guys, like how you went through that because you have different geographies now and you have different companies and the different business models, um, and pulling that together with the ESOP and on all the things that went into it, um. How, how did that work for you guys and, and connecting the dots between the new acquisition companies that you brought in and then just blending everybody's culture together? Yeah, so and as we're talking, we've used the term long term so many times, and I actually had just jot it down on a piece of paper, long term equals culture because the only way you're going to stay sustainable in the long term, no matter what your profitability is, is that you have good culture because that's what really holds us all together. So as and ESOPs have an advantage that employee ownership, if you use the levers that help educate employees about the benefits of employee ownership culture and employee ownership benefits itself, then then you have a better starting point for working on developing a sustainable culture that's going to add to safety, productivity, better employee satisfaction. But as you look at bringing together disparate companies the way that we have, the first thing is that each of the companies has its own brand and has its own culture, and there's this tension of bringing something into the hole, but also leaving the autonomous brand culture identity, which is important to their success. And so at the heart of all that is something which we call the license to act, and it is literally a card, which is a license, and it's a license to act, and it's about the rights and responsibilities of ownership. So while each of the companies is going to have their own brand, culture, identity, It's about educating employee owners to participate in their ownership, and it's the simple things like you can walk past a trash lane on the ground or you can pick it up. You can have an idea about better nesting. As you're cutting out the parts for something which is going to reduce waste and better utilize resources, you can have a better way to interact with customers to improve customer satisfaction. That's using the rights and responsibilities of ownership because at the end of the day. It's really not the managers and leaders that are having that direct impact. It's the employees that are working in production that are working to make sure that they stay safe that are working directly with the customers who are able to directly impact them. The other thing that we do on the culture side is that we've developed our own finance leadership development program in coordination with Pra Consulting Group. And we've had about a quarter to 3% of all our employees go through that so far since implementing this. And it's really important because a lot of people, they become managers or have some sort of supervisor authority as they've moved up through an organization, but they haven't necessarily received any training education on what it means to be a good man. And so we work with our people that have that managerial supervisor authority on communication, feedback, appreciative inquiry, working with bias and inference to try to eliminate that. And then also we've implemented pulse surveys that we we actually have one open right now. We do it twice a year to get feedback from employees across the entire organization, to have a baseline to have metrics. Start conversations of what needs to change and improve, and it's not a one-way street. We then show that the results to all employees get them involved in groups to work on the areas that would improve the organization. And lastly, also, there's ESOP education and celebration. So ESOPs can be complicated and it helps employee owners better understand the benefits and responsibilities that come with employee ownership. If you help them understand what it means to be an ESOP, what it means to be an employee owner, and again, what that means is that you improve workplace safety, productivity, and also it's a more fun workplace and and we see that may not be for every employee, it's never work that's done, but we see that uh ESOPs tend to be more collaborative and tend to have better employee engagement. That's awesome. Now, let me point out a couple of things. I think it's so important and one of, because I do so much work in creating new ESOPs, you know, and so you kind of having this discussion, I think it's really, it's really fun for me to get into it because a lot of people, what I, what I spent a lot of time talking about and ESOP isn't on automatic culture turnkey operation like you, you're not going to convert your business to an ESOP and then like, all right, now I have the great culture that I always longed for. Um, it takes like this, the things you named off. wrote notes as you said, I mean, you have a card that says licensed to act, you know, so you're communicating with everybody. You've got your own leadership development program, because every company needs new leadership and continually growth in leadership. You have the Pulse survey, which I would like to an engagement survey. Um, you guys take the time to do education, spend the money to do education, um, and to stop and celebrate. I mean, those are very specific things. And I, and I, I think that for those that are listening, you know, I think the the core of this. I, you know, certainly if you're not an ESOP company, those, all those things are going to make sense, right? Culturally. I mean, every business should have some level of, of, of intentionality when it comes to culture. ESOP, what an ESOP does is it pulls people together to get kind of that sense of what now what's in it for me. And I think it cross, you cross a bridge now as an ESOP where you can now see that you're, you connect to the company from a long term investment standpoint. I think that's the, the cherry on the top, but all of those things you mentioned, Daniel, I think are phenomenal areas that that companies really struggle with sometimes, and they, they, I, what I don't want to do is think, hey, I'll just do an ESOP and my culture will magically be better. Absolutely, as you said, it has to be intentional. It takes a lot of work, and the two words that I always stress are consistency and patience. You have to have patience because you're not going to go from 0 to 100 overnight, and you need to be consistent because that's what builds trust and I always make the dumb little joke that the thing about consistency is that it has to be consistent. Need to be doing that over the long term. That's how people build trust, that's how they get engaged, and then it's not about the leaders anymore. It's about every employee owner sustaining that system. And if you think about sort of a network with with sparks or sparkles on it, that's when you know that you're really starting to be effective with sustainable culture because it's not coming. the leader anymore, it's coming from every employee owner. They're encouraging each other and then the the culture itself just reinforces itself and then it becomes compelling when everybody's, you know, it's automatic where you don't, and what, what, you know, there's no better place to work where you feel like from from the top down, that everybody's going in the same direction, you know, as best you can be, right? It's not perfect. Yeah. Well, I, I think that's awesome. I think that one of the things, as I pointed out, I'm kind of kind of wrap up a few things that I think are are kind of good takeaways is that first off, just thinking about, you know, what an ESOP means to, it's so much bigger than just the the singular company that's selling and the owners getting what they want out of it. And, you know, where an owner really does care about their employees, I know they also care about their communities too. And if we start thinking about ESOPs really do, really do have the potential to create better community communities across America. I think that's a really good takeaway as a benefit. Um, but then if you start thinking about the quality of life and, and the, the potential for America and having, you know, a better, you know, American dream possibilities within each of these companies, um, I and compare that to or contrast that with. The other options that are out there, which we kind of talked a little bit about private equity firms and strategic buyers. Um, there's a lot of benefits that go way, way beyond when we talk about taxes, which I think we tend to, to gravitate towards or we talk about, um, you know, the, the idea behind what the owner can, can structure so that they're taking care of, you know, you go into just a bigger picture. So, and then the idea of of transitioning that into a very strong Corporate culture and having the possibilities there, I think is, is there are great pieces of things to think about and I'd say early on in the planning process, these are all relevant to what you want your company to look like, you know, before the ESOP and after the ESOP. So what I mean, I think Daniel, you pro you provide, you know, you provided a lot of really good insight into a lot of those different areas. Well, I, I appreciate that you're your day in this podcast because for employees, um, I'll say start saving early, work for an ESOP, and you will fund your future and your family's future for business owners as you're looking to transition ownership if that's where you are, consider an ESOP because it will honor your commitment to your employees, to your community, to the legacy of your brand. There's lots of resources out there. The ESOP Association, the Ownership Foundation, then CEO EOX go to State Center. Listen to the ESOP guy. He gets it and at the very least, if you want to reach out to me, you can find me at www.follan.com. Daniel@fo.com. Awesome, awesome. So again, Thank you so much for your time today, Daniel, and with the insight you brought, I think as you, as your role as a CEO, ESOP CEO, I think just what you've done with what you've created in your company there and um and what you've shared today is so much, is so helpful. So reach out to Daniel if you have questions. Uh, as we close out, I just wanted to remind everybody, if you like the podcast, please subscribe and share it with a friend if you think it might be helpful. Um, be looking for our next ESOP Guy live webinar, April 28th. And with all that, have a great day and we will look forward to our next step on this journey to an ESOP. Oh