EP21 - “Create Amazing” Interview with author Greg Graves, Retired, Chairman and CEO, Burns & McDonnell - ESOP company.

Welcome back. Thanks for tuning in. I'm the ESOP guy, and we are on this journey to an ESOP. So if you're just tuning in for the first time today, I wanted to thank you so much for joining. This podcast has been produced and is really a resource for those that are thinking that they might want to consider an employee stock ownership plan. Sometimes this is because they want to look at their succession and exit plan. Sometimes this is because they're really thinking about how do I recruit and retain key people. There's, there's a lot of ways and a lot of strategic ways you can use. An ESOP. So to check out our other episodes and different of, of the podcast itself, please go to our website at journey to an ESOP.com. Um, I also wanted to highlight today again, the ESOP Guy live webinar series that we're, that we're doing. We're gonna have our 4th 1 coming up at the end of June. So be looking for that on our website as well at journey to an ESOP.com. So today, we're gonna have the opportunity to uh investigate a book called Create Amazing. Turn, turning your employees into Owners for explosive Growth. This book was written by Greg Graves and we have the opportunity today to um interview Greg, um not only just about the book because I think that's gonna be a really important um highlight to our podcast and really the education of ESOPs. Um, but to get to know Greg better and, and his journey of his own, you know, story behind, you know, working with an ESOP company. Um, his company that he was the CEO of for over 13 years was Burns and McDonnell or is Burns and McDonnell, and he Um, fortunately, I got to serve in that role and also now move into uh a very fun retirement role, um, and really help be a strong advocate for ESOP. So we're excited to have the opportunity to talk to Greg today. So with that, Greg, I wanted to welcome you to our podcast. Philip, thank you and thank you to all your listeners for chiming in. Great, great. So as we, as we start this, um, conversation, I wanted to just give maybe a better feel for your overview, your background, you know, specifically, and then connect that a little bit with, you know, certainly your passion for ESOPs and where you are today. Well, Deanna and I are just a couple of kids from South Dakota who made the big move to Kansas City, which for a couple of kids from South Dakota felt like Singapore back in 1980 to a firm called Burns and McDonald, and I'm one of those weird guys that spent my entire life at one place. Burns and McDonald wasn't employee owned at the time. They were actually owned by one of the behemoth steel companies in America, Armco Steel. But thankfully for the people who work there, Armco Steel allowed Burns McDonald its freedom again in 1986, when it became 100% employee owned. And so I worked for that firm almost for my entire career under that, under that ownership structure. Which turned out to be an absolute blessing to the people who worked there and for Dean and I specifically, I was fortunate enough to become the chief executive officer and chairman at the young age of only 42. And spent some glorious time there leading that company, not only through times of financial success that I'm very proud of, diligently to make it one of the best places to work in America verified by Fortune magazine 10 times, which was probably my proudest achievement. And that of course led me to knowing that I wasn't going to be able to simply retire. I had to do something that gave back to this ownership structure in America, not just for the people who work at these firms, but the people who can and should work at these firms and And like I talk about in the book, what it can do for America overall, social inequities, financial inequality, productivity and competitiveness advantages. And if that's not enough, we bring it all back to America itself and why it was born and why it has been so economically successful, and it all comes down to ownership. Ownership is the key the key. So how, how long was Burns, McDonald and ESOP or how, when did they go through the ESOP process? So we became employee owned in 1986. And so this year they will uh celebrate their thirty-fifth anniversary. Nice. Wow. That's, so that's a long, a long one. The, um, you know, you were there, so that was before you got there. So you walked into the CEO role with an existing ESOP company. Was that a challenge for you? Oh, exactly the opposite. We were already employee owned, and we already had some level of financial success. And by working there for quite a while before I became CEO, I saw what the drivers to that were. But what I always believed was our firm was already a great place to. retire from because of our financial success, but it wasn't always a great place to work for. And so somebody had to step up and say, if the employees are the owners, then why wouldn't we want this to be a great place to work? Somewhere you could be really proud of to come to work every day and work on important things. And to make sure that our owners knew that they were our most important asset. It wasn't that hard of a message to put in place, but it was a hard transition in terms of convincing people that that they should have this ownership mentality. And of course, that led to even more financial success and And led to a lot of people really loving to work there. And I'll tell you, Philip, one of the things that people don't always think about is the turnover advantage at an employee owned firm, when the people who work there believe that they are being treated like owners. At Berns McDonald, once a person had worked there for 10 years, our turnover rate was closer to 0%. Every year than it was to 1%. And I probably don't need to remind any of your listeners the incredible economic advantage and client service advantage that comes from extremely low turnover. Oh yeah, I mean, it's it's one of those high level critical success factors. When you're charting out your business plan and, you know, connecting, I had, I had 75 officers that worked for me in our firm when I retired, and in my entire 13 years, I only had one officer resignation and that. That one officer resignation came back to work for us 3 years later. Wow, that's unbelievable. And I think, you know, again, when we talk about the audience, there's definitely people that are looking at this issue right now in their businesses, which is, hey, I really want to hold on to my good people. And the challenge of, of having the good thing about an economy where you have low unemployment is, hey, we're doing good as a country, but the, the downside for companies is just how do I hold on to these people? Um, why does an ESOP make a difference? And this is a loaded question because I, I would come up with an answer to, but why for you has an ESOP made a difference to keep people, you know, and keep your turnover so low? Well, I'll tell you what, it's one of the most important reasons why any company that should consider employee ownership and why current employee owned companies should consider either increasing their ownership model to 100% ESOP or changing their whole HR philosophy to a to a point where every worker is treated and and is expected to act like an owner. If you go out in the real world. Entrepreneurs don't quit their own companies. And so if we can simply convince and act like our employees are not only the workers that make us successful, but are the owners of our firm and therefore, we're my boss. Every day they will get to the point where their ownership valuation, where their ownership advantages are simply so excessive to what they think of in terms of normal compensation, they won't even consider leaving. And so it's great when You can hold on to a worker who thinks about their leaving, but imagine the competitive advantage at any firm when workers never even conceive of a future without working at that place for the rest of their career. I love, I love what you said. I love the quote too, and I'm, I'm gonna give this is entrepreneurs don't quit their own companies. I don't know, did you write that in your book? It wasn't. It's one that I've used a few times. I love I love it. I'm gonna, I'm just gonna put the quotes on it and I'll put your name on it so I don't, I don't take it, it in the sequel and then I think it's one of those things where people will remember that. I mean, especially if you're a business owner. I mean, if you're a business owner, you know that like you've founded something and you You're you're passionate about it, you grow it, and you're not gonna just walk away from it. And the same principle exists if your employees feel or in experience that same level of, of reward and commitment that you make um into your business. So I think that's a great quote when a successful company loses one of its senior people, uh, say, even an executive. The cost just in management attention is so excessive to to ever the savings you could get from paying people a little bit less or treating them a little bit, a little less nice. And it really becomes very easy math to realize the better I treat my people, the less they leave, and the more that ends up rewarding them as the owners of the firm in the future. I simply, uh, can say from my book that the most important question an executive faces every day is who. And as long as you keep focusing on who, good things are going to happen. Yeah, I think that's solid. Let me ask you on, on the company itself because one thing that people talk to me about. Is, you know, am I too small, you know, or is my business work, you know, is this applied to my business? When you think about Burns McDonald, you guys are about a $3 billion dollar company, I think in revenue and we have like 7500 employees at this point. I'm sure that wasn't the case in 1986. Um, how would you address that question from your perspective in terms of, is, is some company, are some companies just too, too big or some companies just too small, um, forget the 409P and different things like that, but just from uh applicability of the ESOP ownership culture, that kind of thing. Well, we certainly did have success in in my 13 years, we grew uh employment 4X and we grew revenue 10X. And of course, when you grow revenue that much faster than employment, usually really good financial results happen and they certainly did for us. In my book, I do talk about that there are some limitations to that not every American can become an employee owner, those who work for federal and state governments, those who work for not for profits. But beyond that, I'd like to think that there are Very few limitations. No, I don't think that Google or Amazon is going to adopt an employee ownership model anytime soon, at least not in a significant way, but I do write a letter to Jeff Bezos in my book. Recommending to him that if he would just take on a small percentage ownership, a lot of his labor issues would go away, and he would eventually have people running from their Amazon trucks to my front door, some of them do run now. I certainly know that a lot of Amazon trucks do come to my front door, but it's certainly for some of the biggest corporations in America, there are very few limits on the downside though. Yes, there are some ESOP regulations that have to be worked through how you price your firm and making sure that you handle it correct from human resources and a legal point of view. That's why there are firms like yours, Philip, to help those companies through that. And those costs do not have to be excessive in any way. I'm helping a firm that's an entrepreneurial firm in Kansas City right now. There's only 25 people that's going to adopt an EAP model. And so I might put the lower limit at 25 in terms of Um, being able to focus on all the things that it that it takes to create a great employee stock ownership plan. But if we take the 25 at the bottom. And the top 10 corporations at the top, you still are left with over 100 million American workers who'd more or less love to have a piece of the pie. I know, and that's huge. And I don't know what your stat was in your book, but I think we've covered this before, like, in America, there's probably between 6600 and 7000 ESOP companies as we speak. Um. Correct, in about 12 or 13,000. Uh, workers with, like I said, the math says there could be as many as 100 million more. Talk about what we could do for wealth equality in America if we achieved anything close to that. Yep, I mean, that's, and that's the nail on the head. I mean, that's why when we're doing this podcast, it to me. Um, I just see it. I just get super excited about it and I love talking to companies, whether they, they think they want to be an ESOP or they don't like the concept of ESOP, or what, however they fall, because I think that huge spectrum of companies you just mentioned, um, that they should at least know what an ESOP is. And I think the problem is is that. Some of them really just don't. And that's one of the, that's one of the missions that I'm on is just try to help them um discover that this is, you know, maybe not for everybody, but it's certainly a viable option. If we go, go into this a little bit now, I wanted to kind of say this, I, I think, you know, when I look at my podcast audience, I've got some, you know, obviously companies and the target here is companies that are thinking about ESOPs or and they're not yet ESOPs. I have some people that are existing ESOPs, so maybe they're small ESOPs and they're considering, you know, they're considering their next stage transaction. Um, I have some that are just ESOP advisors, you know, that, that maybe are in the in the Uh, practice of helping and whether they're doing what I do or they, they do attorney, the attorney work or they do trustee work. So out of that, we connect that back to your book, who, who should be reading your book like and, and you might say everybody, I just was curious like who we, who we're really targeting when we say like, let's open up Create Amazing, which I love the title by the way, and um really talk. My publisher's favorite line he sends me every time he emails me is, uh, bulk discounts are available. And so. He would definitely argue everyone in the country, etc. etc. etc. should he wants me to write ESOPs for dummies for my second book because those tend to sell those titles tend to sell really well. Um, so, the, the, the reason I wrote this book is that more employees, more workers in America should become employees. And if they do, the country is going to be significantly better off for the American retirement challenge could almost go away. America's competitiveness concerns could almost go away, and we treat a heck of a lot of people better at work and when they retire and all of those things are good for our country and are good for the people who work and work and live here. Um, I'd like every employee owner in America to at least be exposed to this book because there are so many employee owned firms that could be prospering more. More important though, is your listeners on the side of people who are thinking about whether or not this would be a good idea for them, their firm, and their people. And that's why the first major chapter of the book is called Why. If you can't get to the right why, then you'll never get to the point of needing to hire a firm like yours, Philip, or some of the other fiduciaries and trustees, etc. who can help people make this. Successful. It's key, of course, you could argue that it's key in anything in life, in life, to start with the right way. But this is a really important one that current ownership discovers. Are we interested in these in these people who've made us successful? I hope that they are. Are we interested in still having our name on the front door 50 years from now, or are we, are we willing to just sell for the highest and easiest? I hope that they are. And most importantly, do they think that the legacy they built through this This firm is something that's worth continuing, and I've met almost no one in my life, including some very rich former entrepreneurs who aren't interested in their firms being successful post them. I've always felt that the true measure of a successful executive is that the firm continues to be successful after they're gone. There might be this tiny Any bit of us that would like the place to burn down and beg for them to come back, but in the end that's not what any of us want. We want the people that we've left behind to be incredibly successful. They're likely our best friends. They certainly are for me and in my case I'm very proud that they have continued to be successful, and I think most of the people who are listening here probably feel the same way. And if that is what they want, then I can tell you that no system of ownership in America exists, that it has not only the possibility for greater success and greater economic equality and lower turnover, and you could add and add to that, but is predictable to have a greater. Achievement and success, then the employee ownership model. It's been studied by Rutgers and Harvard forever, and all of their studies continue to prove even during the pandemic, that employee owned firms will outcompete those who aren't nationally and internationally. I like that. I like, you know, in business, nobody who wants to kind of bet on something and not knowing what's going to happen, but predicting the future success. You know, when everything else is kind of like, hey, I, I hope this works out, um, it's just phenomenal. So when you, when we go back to the, the idea that you, you, when you took over and then the company obviously experienced growth under your leadership, I know people are thinking, hey, what did, what did Greg do? And so how do you think you connected the dots between The ESOP and the employees and, and building, I'm gonna call the ownership culture and then as you as I borrow from your own, you know, your own um title which is turning your employees into owners for explosive growth. How did that all connect, like, what exactly do you think you did on a um a business planning standpoint? Well, I appreciate that. My final big chapter is called How and it's Greg's Top 10 Ways to run an Employee owned firm. Some of it is based on my personal experience, but some of it is based on the research that's been done by the Rutgers School of Business, their institute for the Study of Employee Ownership. And so between my on the ground view and their 10,000 to 40,000 ft above the ground view comes this top 10. A couple of my favorites are communication rules. And when you're the owner of an organization, you want to know what the heck's going on. And so if you're going to ask your employees to act like owners, and you got to treat them like owners. And so we would communicate with our employee owners all the time. And so I know there's that subtle difference or that subtle line that you don't want to cross where you're employing with, you're communicating with them adequately, but you're not nagging them all the time. And when we worried about the grayness in that bar, we always erred on overcommunicating. I wrote a Friday email that went to my employee owners every week of my 13 years. Yes, CEO. We sent quarterly reports to our employee owners. We sent them monthly data on how the company is doing and how it's not doing. We told them about big successes, and we told them about failures. Lawsuits, some of the stuff that a lot of people would say will never share that outside of human resources. We had an annual meeting for our shareholders in person where we, you know, treated them like the shareholders that they are. We sent them an annual report. We sent them an annual shareholder report that showed them, OK, what, how's my ESOP account doing? What is it worth now? What were my dividends? Etc. etc. And uh when you do that, it sinks in more and more that, hey, I'm the owner of this organization, and I should have high expectations for its performance, including the performance of the executive team. Which doesn't hurt at all to prop up the executive team that these people are counting on you, their retirements, their families, they're counting on you not to do dumb stuff and to do really, really smart stuff. We never hesitated to absolutely cheerlead our firm, and I was accused a time or two of being a cheerleader type CEO and I certainly fall victim to that. But the last one that I have. In that chapter is be the best place to work. I know we've chatted about this already, but there are so many elements to any firm and how it could still be a better place to work. And we focused on it all the time. We even had an annual business plan. Not only from our different global practices and regional offices, etc. but our human resources department would present to me annually a best place to work business plan. What are we doing? How is it doing? What our employees say about us and not say about us, and what's the next big thing? We can do. And then we weren't afraid to celebrate it when good things happen the first time that Fortune magazine named us one of the 100 best places to work in America. I think the first year we were 50th. We celebrated by having semi trucks full of local brewed beer show up in the parking lot in Kansas City and every one of our regional offices and we all celebrated, hopefully not with a whole six pack before they went home, but uh. Absolutely. We weren't afraid to celebrate the heck out of it, you know what I mean? And sometimes you just got to get up and say we are the best place to work in our town unabashedly. And now if you're, if you're just Completely wrong. Well, that might come across wrong, but I'm telling you, if you're employee owned, you already have the right to talk about being a great place to work because you share the financial success with those people who made it possible. Yeah, and that's, I think that's really important. I think it's even really kind of very impressive that you were able to do that. With such a large company, you know, with all these different people and different, in different um markets and so did everybody celebrate the same way in, in those different markets and, and how did you feel as a leader to kind of make sure that everybody was kind of doing the same things you were doing at the highest level? We always had 6 packs of root beer that someone could take instead. But as I recall, we gave out very few of those. And so, yeah, sure, in some of the different regional offices, we would behave differently, certainly in our our major office in Calgary, Mumbai, India, you would behave differently. And that's why it's important to give up control sometimes to the people who are local, who might understand. We don't want to, we, we're not going to celebrate the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl if we're sitting here in Los Angeles, right? Or in, right. And so you got to be careful with some of that. But for the most part, give up that control to the people that you trust in those local places. And if you don't trust them, you should find somebody different anyway. Yeah. Did you guys ever use any type of um tools to measure the engagement of your employees across the, across the, the different regions and, and offices that you have? Or did you kinda just have a sense, you know, your finger on the pulse of what you felt like your, your culture was? We studied it all the time. OK. Uh, annually at the longest, would we reach out to our employees, we'd reach out to our employees on specific issues. And sometimes we would reach out to our employees on all issues. And so we just, and You can always tell a lot by employee engagement surveys just on how many you get back. And so I know that good numbers can be that maybe only 25 or 30% of your employees will even return a survey like that. We, we always got 90% plus. And so we often had to go and hire outside firms to make sure that we could get through them all, that we could look at the comments and. And not and, and then you have to be very Teflon, if you will, when you ask your employee owners for, for their opinions, because if you have 5 or 6000 like I did towards the end, they're going to tell you. If you, if you, if you ask them to act like owners, they're going to act like owners when you ask them how could the firm be even better. And you as an executive better not have too thin a skin. When it comes to that, recognize that once in a while, when an owner, an employee owner tells you that they think you can be better at your job, they're probably right. Yeah, yeah. No, I think you're right. I mean, and that's some, some of the hesitation, resistances as an employee or as an owner, you're, you're, you know, you don't want to really hear the bad news, but I think as you've embraced that, and even like you said, you, you, you exposed some things that everybody knows about or doesn't know about, but you're admitting your failures, your weaknesses at the same time you're being transparent, um, that creates an honesty and a trust that is essential cause You know, and you're, when you're able to kind of embrace the weakness as an owner, um, everybody kind of and or as a, as a CEO or leader, um, people didn't start to really feel like they're in and as opposed to, you know, being told something that's not really true and, and then you start to get this. As an employee, you get this sense of I'm, you know, not really, not really here. I'm just a number or whatever. So I think it's pretty, it's pretty important to embrace those engagement surveys and, and ask the hard questions and, and be committed to do the things that are hard, which is, hey, we're gonna respond to those and we're gonna keep working on what needs to change cause every business has its, you know, it's issues. If it, and it's just true, right? And if you don't work on them, then, you know, or you hide them, it's just gonna get worse, so. It's sort of like Jim Collins talks about in his book Good to Great, uh, when the employees, the employees, they know when there's something that needs to change. And maybe it's a person that needs to be asked to leave, or maybe it's a policy that doesn't make sense anymore, or a whole business unit that needs reorganization, and they know, you know. And so if you as an executive aren't doing something about it, well, you know what your owners are thinking now. Yeah. Whether or not they're saying it, you know, they're thinking it. So, so kind of a segue there, what, what with all the experience you had, what were some of the pitfalls that you guys ran into um in terms of the ESOP itself and or just in general, some of the things that you you tried to get done and it just didn't work out as, as well as you had hoped. This might sound like I'm parading, but um one of the pitfalls that often happens to employee owned firms because I know it hasn't happened just to mine, is that the success can become a bit overwhelming. And that people worry, well, how, what, what, what are you going to do next year? What are you going to do next year? And then you quickly realize that there's millions and millions of people out there who are always looking for something better. And so every time we had some great level of success, when we were named the 50th best place to work in America, we were, we were planning to add 600 people to our company that year, which is, which was a lot of growth when you're only at 3000. And we had 75,000 people apply to come to work at our firm that year. Get out. And so, wow, the never ever in my opinion worry about the success equation that, well, once we're the best place to work in our in our town, well where do we have to go from there? Well, you have lots of places to go from there. Be the most financially successful, be the most rewarding, be the best place to retire from. We're never going to run out of things to worry about to make our firms better or not veterans, but one of the challenges can be that end of year financial equation, when you're starting to calculate how much should we pay out in bonuses versus how much should we hold back to to create net income. How do we do our stock evaluation this year when the market might be up or down? How do we Do we have some end of year benefits that might be fun to to manage income or success or our revenue success, etc. etc. So we would always have that. We would almost all the time have the challenges with an employee owner who thought that it was their time to run the company. If you will, and that's just not, you know, going to be in the cards for companies that are successful. It was always very, very minor, but, but, but, but it certainly is true. We would have the fiduciary challenges of running an employee owned firm because you have a special fiduciary duty when your workers are also your owners. You have a fiduciary duty to their success. And to their competitiveness. And so the people that go on boards of directors for ESOPs, they should have it always educated to them fully. What are the special fiduciary duties of that, if you will. There's the not the complication, but there's the, of course, the requirement that there is a trustee involved, and I think it's very important. One and one, I'm sure Philip, you guys have a lot of experience in or at least experience in pointing people to the firms that make for great trustees, so. You know, you could come up with a long list, but none of them ever held us back. No, no, that's that's the thing I think is like this, right? You, you, you leverage what you have available to you, and I think when you can think about this in this in this light. Leveraging the opportunity of an ESOP, you know, with it, and I always tell people, an ESOP is not the fix to a bad culture. Like you, you just can't set up a company and say, I have an ESOP now, I'm going to be good. You, you leverage the tools of an ESOP, um, in order to create a better culture and a more enhanced environment for your employees. And that is, you know, when you start thinking about what, what Greg is writing in his book, and as we start thinking about that and talking about some of the, some of the top 10 things you can do. These are things that any company could really do to create a good culture. There's not the, the, the, the tool of an ESOP is really when you start thinking about the advantages of connecting employees to the concept of ownership thinking, um, is, is invaluable. But I, I think, I don't know if, if from your standpoint, all those pitfalls are there for everybody anyways, whether you know, specifically the fiduciary ones not like an EA board, but just things like Um, hey, I've got to have a successful company. I've got to connect people. I've got to communicate with people really well, um, celebrate successes. Those are just things I think are, are very good business practices, but I think the ESOP just adds a level of a possibility that doesn't exist without it. Well, Philip, you're exactly correct that being an employee employee stock ownership plan won't fix a bad culture and it won't fix bad strategy. Before ESOPs even existed as a retirement program. Employee ownership options and those kind of programs did exist at big American corporations and two companies that began employee owner employee owned stock programs. Uh, even before ESOPs were official, were Sears and Home Depot. And so there's two companies in about the same industry that adopted employee stock programs, and boy did those two companies go different from there. And so it doesn't excuse a bad business plan or or bad culture with any of those firms. You still need exceedingly smart people at the top of these firms to make any firm in America successful. Totally. I definitely agree. So, as we, as we think about closing out, I, I wanted to make sure first off, um, that you, everybody knows where to get Greg's book. Nowadays, it's easy, just go to Amazon.com and type in create amazing and you're gonna find Greg Graves's book and I highly recommend that you do that. Um, you know, to me, I wanted to kind of summarize some of the points that we had today and then let you do that, Greg, as well. But just to me, the overarching theme of this is that the possibilities of an ESOP company, first off, are available to like a wide spectrum of companies. Companies throughout America. And it's great throughout the stat, I think it's a really good one. Over 100 million Americans can be part of an ESOP. And the thing that you can do with an ESOP company that you can't do with a non-ESOP company is connect people into a place where they really do experience. That level of reward from being um an entrepreneur without having to subject the employees to be, you know, to dealing with the risk of being an entrepreneur. So I think you get, you get all the upside as an employee and really hopefully it all, you know, at the end, every company is successful, but they don't have really much downside when you get down to it, um, even if the company doesn't do well. Um, they haven't put their own capital in it. So, so those are things I think are really valuable. Um, from your standpoint, Greg, what would you say are, you know, in summarizing the points that you wanted to make today, just kind of wrap that up a little bit and then we can um go to there and close. Well, Philip, I sure appreciate you having me on and all your listeners for their time. You can buy the book on Amazon. We were actually top 2% of all Amazon sales for books, of course, in the first month of release. So that was very gratifying and not completely expected. I must admit. I've been inundated with requests for companies to come visit them and to bring the book. Um, and just do some free consulting. I can always be reached at my website, which is www.gregraves.com. And if the book comes down to just a couple of things, it's you have to begin with the right why, and that's a search process. That every current owner has to go through themselves, and I give them what I think are some really great whys, but in the end they have to create that conundrum that they have to get through that conundrum on their own. After that, the book has some interesting research on what ESOPs do in America and how they work and what's important and what's not so important. I give my ground level advice on who I believe makes a great employee owner because it's not everyone. And then it finishes with a whole chapter on Greg's top 10, and then we do some fun with some quotes from famous Americans from Ronald Reagan to Condoleezza Rice to Dr. Anthony Fauci, about what they believe is unique and interesting in America, and how I believe that employee ownership can make a lot of that come together. There's a A famous quote about inequality in America from Condoleezza Rice, and it talks about how America is great for so many reasons, but basically it's great because you can come from nearly nothing, and she did from nearly nothing and can achieve almost anything. And wealth inequality in America has become such an issue, and I believe post COVID, it will be the number one issue we face in America. And for people of race, it is a massive issue, wealth inequality in America. The average African American female in America has 1300 of the wealth of the average white male. And until we do something about that, America's not going to be the country that we all have dreamed of, and employee ownership can do more for that wealth equality than almost anything else we can do in this country. Well, I would highly agree with you. I think I appreciate that. Um, so as we close out, I wanted to say thank you so much for being here. Uh, congratulations on your, you know, your successful career and on this, the book accomplishment that you've made and um I'm, I'm imagining you'll have another book coming out, and, but I appreciate one of the things I wanted to say that I really appreciate you talking about um ESOPs because I have read through some of the things in the um the world of ESOPs is bombarded by academic professionals and I must call them, I call them ESOP PhDs and You know, it's like they just have so much information and it's hard for them sometimes to communicate. At more of a, a business person's, you know, point of view. Um, and so when we get, when we get to talk about techno technical ESOP terms, um, people like lose it a little bit at the beginning. So I appreciate that from a solid business person who can just speak to what are the real issues. Um, I really highly recommend everybody check out Greg's book and uh with that, I wanted to say thank you so much again for joining the podcast today. If you like it, please subscribe and share with a friend. Have a great day and we look forward to our next step on this journey. Thank you all.