Steward Ownership: Ownership Diversification Through The Cooperative Model - The Journey of Corey Kohn

Diversity and inclusivity is something that people are really rightfully focused on right now. And I think one thing that people can consider in thinking about how do we include people? How do we actually impact people and how do we do that in like a real material way? Well, one way is that you can diversify ownership. Usually, the financial purpose in a traditional business model is to maximize profits in the short term, where the owner is often disconnected from the life of the enterprise and the corporate governance is controlled by how much the investors own in the business. What if the reason you started your business is to create conditions for life? Over the long term, where ownership is in the hands of those who care about the greater good of our people and the planet, and the corporate governance is controlled by those dedicated to the social mission. What would be the non-traditional business model you should know and consider? If you want to know more about the non-traditional business. Models, we invite you to follow along in this alternative ownership podcast series. Starting with episode 137 and throughout the next few weeks, we want you as a mission-driven founder to explore the non-traditional business model and really think outside the traditional exit strategy so you can protect your mission over the long term. By the end of this podcast series, you will learn about the 4 different types of alternative ownership and how each of the alternative ownership model can also be your exit strategy option, which is likely more in alignment with who you are as a mission-driven female founder. You will also have a good understanding of key steps you need to think about if you are interested in alternative ownership. In last week's episode, episode 138 was the 2nd episode in the series. We had a conversation with Natalie Reitman White on how she led organically grown company to Transition from a traditional business model to a perpetual purpose trust model. Today's episode is the 3rd episode in the alternative ownership podcast series, and we are joined by Corey Cohn, the co-founder of Dojo 4, a B Corp certified business located in Boulder, Colorado. In addition to the B Corp certification, Dojo 4 business model is a non-traditional business model. In 2017, Dojo 4 transitioned into a cooperative model. In this episode, Corey shared the flexibility that the cooperative model has to offer to mission-driven female founders, how the cooperative model aligns with dojo 4 values, the important steps you need to consider to transition from a traditional business model to cooperative, and how to set up a capital structure that is accessible to all employees. You're listening to her CEU journey, the business finance podcast for mission driven women entrepreneurs. I'm your host, Christina Shali. If you are new here, a big warm welcome. If we are not connected on LinkedIn, please reach out and say hi, because that's where I hang out and share my business finance tips. If you have been listening to this podcast, For a while, and you are a regular listener. I want you to know, I appreciate you. My podcast won't be around without your support. This is a free weekly show where my guest and I want to inspire you to balance between mission and profit, to create an impact in this world and to achieve financial equality through your business for good. Any business decision, especially the big decision, always involve financial forecasting, including when you want to transition to cooperative model or any other alternative ownership model. Think about it this way, your future cooperative. If members are your investors before they decide to join your cooperative, first, they want to know if your business is thriving and will survive in the long term. They want to know how your business is going to look like in the future in terms of profitability. Why? Because whoever decided to become a cooperative member is taking a financial risk. So how can you upleve your forecasting process to show future profitability? If you are not sure how to get started with the forecasting process, we have created a guide for you. Use the link in the show notes to download the guide and jumpstart your financial forecasting journey. When you are ready to focus on building your business and want us to manage the financial back office process in your business, connect with us at christinahali.com/let's chat. Corey Cohn, welcome to her CEO journey. It's a pleasure to have you here today. It's a pleasure to be here, Christina. Corey, before we dive into the discussion on forming and running a worker cooperative, I really want you to start sharing your journey in creating Dojo 4 and becoming the founder of Dojo 4. Jojo4 is a small custom software agency here in Boulder, Colorado. It was formed in the very end of 2009. And actually, I was not one of the original, original founders. There's 4 original founders, and I came on a month or two afterwards to help them manage the business. And then over time, most of those other owners left. I became an owner very quickly within a few. I believe. And then I'm the founder of the current business model that we have. So it started sort of at first as a co-working space for developers and designers. And then then it quickly became an agency. And then a few years later, my business partner and I turned it into, we got a B course certification and we honed down the business model a little bit differently. Give me an overview a little bit about the solution that Dojo4 provided to the clients and then the type of clients that you are serving. We build custom software, we're definitely on the nerdy end of that continuum. What that means is that people come to us to build sort of complex applications. Now that could be a simple iPhone application, but More often than not, it's something that works with a large amount of data, that needs high security, that has a lot of different moving parts. Mostly it's stuff for the web, but we have things that also don't use the web as much. Our clients, in the past, we worked with a lot of startups, but that's really changed over the last few years. We've refocus. Focused our work to be more centered around clients that are doing what we consider social or environmentally impactful work, stuff that we feel like is meaningful and is making good change in the world. So we work with anyone still with startups. There's a lot of startups that fall in that category. We work with NGOs. With government organizations and institutions, we work with even large corporations that need a small team that can kind of figure out a hard problem for them, technically. And we're a small team, but we're have years and years of development experience under our belts. And so we often get called in for what I think of as like the hard technical problem. So I know that a few years ago, you basically switched Jojo 4 to the cooperative model, right? When you first started, what was the traditional model that you used to have? And then the thought process you and your co-founder went through to switch and transition to cooperative model. It was a business partner and I that owned the business solely as a partnership for many years, and at one point we had employees, and at another point we just had contractors. It changed a little bit over time, but the whole time it was just. He and I, you know, after the original founders left kind of early on in the game, it was just he and I that owned the business 50/50. We made most of the decisions, 50/50. We've been in business since the very end of 2009, so I like to just say 2010. In let's say between 2012 and 2015, we had sort of explored some various options of having, inviting other people to be owners with us. That way you're also diversifying the ownership, but you're also diversifying the, you know, responsibility and liability, and that was appealing. to us as well. But every time we tried to do that, it kind of just, even if there was sort of some initial enthusiasm, it just kind of fizzled. And my theory on that is that our business wasn't mature enough to be appealing to someone who might want to buy into the business in that particular way. And in 2015, we started thinking about transitioning to a cooperative instead. We worked with our lawyer, Jason Weiner, who is really expert at these kind of transitions, and he suggested this kind of consensus building process to really find out whether the cooperative model would have legs for our particular company. We went over financials. We talked about management and practices, you know, how things were going to change, how things might be the same with the people that we were inviting to become co op members with us. And the people that were working with us at the time, almost all of them had been working with us since the very beginning. Part of that process was also us figuring out what kind of cooperative we wanted to have, because it's actually a very flexible. Model, and it can accommodate all sorts of management practices. It can be like a flat hierarchy, or it can be very hierarchical. It can have everyone partic, you know, especially if it's small, it can have everyone participating in every decision, or you could have co op members just participating in very few of the decisions that might need to be made. And so, through that process, we kind of started to feel out. OK, is this going to work for us? And if so, what is our cooperative going to look like? And yeah, it took us a year to get there. So you basically kind of like sharing your idea about transitioning to a cooperation. model with your employee, is that correct? Yes. So during that process, when you testing this or getting the consensus, what were the concerns from some of your employees? Yeah, that's such a good question. Yeah, there was some real concerns from our employees about transitioning to being a cooperative. Part of it is that you're becoming an owner of a business. They thought, if I had wanted to be an owner of a business, I would have done that. I don't want all the responsibility. There's financial liability, there's a different level of accountability. So there was questions around kind of how viable is this business actually. Like, we, we've always had really transparent bookkeeping, and so mostly people kind of always knew, but they just wanted to really test out like Am I going to become part of a business that's just gonna fail soon? What are the financial liabilities involved? What are the tax implications? So on the one side, there was this kind of like practical piece of just like, what does it actually mean to be an owner and, you know, how is that gonna affect my, and my family's financial life? How is it going to Affect like our schedules, and we're gonna have to put in more time, less, you know, that kind of thing. Then there was, I would say, kind of more like philosophical considerations for people, which had to do with, I mean, I remember the kind of most, the most common concern was, I don't want to be part of meetings all the time. You know, I don't want to be making decisions about things all the time. And then if we're gonna do that cooperatively, are we gonna have to find consensus about big decisions, little decisions, all that kind of thing. And so, the consensus amongst our, our, the people that we were asking to join us was that they really did not want that. They essentially kind of didn't want their lives to change. Like they said, can you guys, as the The original owners, can you stay on as the managing directors and essentially continue to do your jobs? And that way, we don't have to be part of the day to day management of the business, which is a completely valid way to form a cooperative. It's absolutely fine. And I can talk a little bit later about how there was some advantages to that, and there was also some disadvantages to that in the end. So in the end, we decided what people felt good about was that we would, as a cooperative, we would only make what I think of as a set of 3 decision together, or it's really 6 decisions that we would always have to bring and get votes from the cooperative about. And those decisions are hiring or firing a new client or a legacy client. So we all decide if we're gonna take on a new client or get rid of a client that we have. Hiring and firing new co op members. So if we want every contractor is eligible for membership after 6 months according to our operating agreement, and so we vote as a cooperative, do we want to have this person or. If I guess, you know, in a hypothetical situation that we had a cooperative member who wasn't a good fit or, you know, people didn't want to be part of, as members of the co op anymore, that the cooperative would have to decide together to ask that person to leave. Then the last one is hiring and firing board members. And now that we have still not formed a board because we're small enough that we have a threshold that we are not required to form a board until we're over a certain number of members and we haven't hit that threshold. Yeah, and so we're in the process of considering whether or not we want to form a board anyways. But those are the only decisions that we have to make together, and we tend to make those decisions through a consensus process rather than just a yay or nay vote. They basically saying, hey, I don't want to get involved in the day to day of managing, but you basically selected three criteria that are important for the cooperative to make the decision among the members together. Did you have to bring in like expert advisor to explain, for example, like, The tax implication of this, the financing implication of this. He did not, but we did have our lawyer Jason Weiner was as part of the meetings that we had before we decided to go ahead and make the transition to being a cooperative. We did talk about the uh those things a lot. Aaron and I made presentations about our finances. We talked about what we do in our. Jobs, just to be really explicit about it, all those kind of things. So, although we didn't bring in necessarily an outside, like business expert, our lawyer addressed some of those things, and he was part of all of those meetings. And we did address, this is what it looks like to be a business owner. Now, we didn't actually know what it, you know, what was going to change once we became a cooperative. We knew on paper, but we didn't know. Was this going to, you know, was it going to change the feel of the place? Was it gonna change the way People's level of engagement in the process, people's level of engagement with clients, all those kind of thing. And, and we really couldn't predict. I mean, one of the things when we decided, when my business partner and I decided that we wanted to try cooperatizing was, there was a few reasons we, we were trying it, you know, or we were hoping to try it. And one was that we felt like a lot got bottlenecked around us as owners, and We wanted to open that bottleneck. And basically, we could only we do client services, right? So we could only take clients that we knew either he or I could provide the service to. Now, we could always hire contractors, right? And that's our model. We hire contractors to help us perform the service. But we knew at the end of the day that the contractor was not going to be on the line if, let's say, the client was unhappy about something on the weekend or Or, you know, really ever, it was always going to be us having to deal with kind of the more difficult aspects of being business owners. That also meant that we then had to make decisions to be able to be sure that we could do that. And so everything started getting like tighter and tighter around what was possible for us to do when it was just us that always had to be kind of the buck stopped with us every time, right? Which is a common issue in a small. Business, right? So we wanted to open up those bottlenecks. We also wanted to promote the possibility of longevity so that if, you know, one of us decided that we wanted to do something else in our lives, that it wouldn't then mean the end of the business that we had built over time, you know, and that was, is a valuable part of a lot of people's lives and holds a place in our community and all that kind of thing. And in fact, actually, my business partner, Era, he actually Just this year, he decided to move on to something else. And so, which, you know, it was very amicable separation, but it felt much different doing that. And I imagine it would have felt much different because when he decided to move on, although, of course, it's impactful, you know, we've been in business together for 10 years. On the other hand, the company is really well held by the other members. And so it made it much more fluid and possible for something like that to happen. So we wanted longevity and stability in that way, that wasn't just dependent on us. And we also wanted to open up the company for the possibility of growth, if people are interested in that, so that more people could be involved in a, a much more active way. So those were the reasons we decided to do it. And I would say actually, so far, it's actually panned out pretty well in, in those departments. How is this decision to become a cooperative support the future growth? I think of it as like two kinds of capital, basically, financial capital, growth of human capital. We were actually more interested in the human capital growth of including more people, uh, because we really like our company and we think it's a great place to work. And so we wanted to be more inclusive and allow more access for people who might be interested in being members or participating in our company at all, right? So before, the only way that someone could participate in the company was by Becoming a contractor in the years that we had employees, you could become an employee, but there was no other way for them to kind of participate in the company. And so, by becoming a cooperative, it allows a structure that is less dependent on specific circumstances. So all you have to do to become a co op member is you have to have worked with Dojo for for at least 6 months, with capacity, usually as a contractor. You have to Be invited and voted by the current co op members as being invited to be a co op member, to be accepted. And you have to be interested in participating in that way. And one way of participation is you pay a one-time membership fee. We tried to keep that membership fee enough that it felt like real buy-in, but not so much that it was prohibitive. So our membership fee was 6. $6000 US dollars, and we allowed co op members to pay that for a year, over a year, every month. And I think a few people even took like a tiny bit longer. And so ours was like a little different in that, I think sometimes when people transition to becoming a cooperative, one of the reasons they're doing it is because they're actually looking for an internal acquisition. So they're looking to sell their company, but they don't want to sell their company to someone else. They want Sell it to their employees or their colleagues, right? In our case, that was not so much the case. What we really wanted is we wanted to, in some ways, you could say, if we were doing it for selfish reasons, then it would be because we wanted to ensure that we had a healthy company that we could work with for a longer amount of time and get paid for, have our livelihood insured in that way. And we felt like it was the kind of the healthiest way that we could stabilize. The company going forward into the future and, and provide us with a sense of a long runway of being able to participate financially and culturally and all the different ways in which we participate in the company. And so, since we didn't want to leave, that was one reason. Another reason is we're really small, right? We, we actually grew at one point years and years ago, and we decided we didn't really like that as much. We didn't want to spend all our time managing people at that time. I think maybe we would feel differently now, but at the time, we didn't like that feeling of growth. And so we, we pared down again. And it's really small, it's hard to have a significant buyout from a Very few number of people, right? Especially for a services organization, because let's say you'd be asking people to put in a substantial amount of money, and what they would be getting out of it was basically just the branding of the company. Because we provide a service. There's nothing material other than that. Maybe a client roster, but it's hard to put a number on that. So, in that way, It wasn't practical to do an internal exit like that. I want to go back to what you just mentioned in the earlier conversation about the model you choose this cooperative, the benefit and risk where you and EA are the project managers. I would like to hear you choose this model that you continue to become the project managers. To me, how is it different than you? Still running the business except for, except for the 3 decision that you have to ask the other members to vote, right, but technically you are still gonna be dealing with clients. The advantage of us staying on as the managing directors, my business partner and I, was that it made the transition very smooth from a day to day perspective, in that we didn't have to kind of reassign roles in any real significant way. We didn't have to change pay structures in any real significant way. We didn't have to change. Who was interfacing with clients in any significant way. And so it just had this very smooth feel to it. But there was also kind of this excitement of people kind of going, Oh, yay, but now we're going to make these decisions, you know, these few decisions together. So that was the advantage. And we also, you know, my business partner and I knew how to do our jobs. We had already been in business for at that point, I think it was 6 or 7 years. We, we knew how to do our jobs well and kind of take care of things in that regard. The disadvantage was then exactly what you're saying, Christina, which is, so then what's different? I did notice right away that there was an energetic shift, even though our, our structure stayed mostly the same just from a, from a management and hierarchical point of view. I just noticed people had, it's almost like they had like a little ownership spring in their step, you know, they kind of like, this is my company. And we've been in business long enough that if you say the name of our company around town, people tend to know who we are, you know, we're well respected in the community and we have good relationships in the community with our clients, with our competitors, all that kind of thing. And so it's fun to be able for people to be able to say, I'm an owner of the business now. You know, that's, I think it feels good and I felt people's engagement really Kind of go to the next level. I noticed that people sort of had a different sense of accountability in their relationships with our clients. And yet, internally within the company, because we had decided not to change the management structure, the thing that was difficult was the patterns of things that didn't work. So the kind of interpersonal tensions, the ways in which people would kind of go, Oh, someone else is going to take care of that. Or I get to, you know, decide how this is gonna go, and you don't. Or I'm not going to be accountable for those things, but I will be, you know, anyways, every company has its things, right? I really think it wasn't until my business partner decided to leave the company earlier this year that it really kind of gelled, that the co op really shifted into this place where everyone feels fully engaged with their ownership. And I think that would make sense in most companies, right? If all Same people are there, but you transition into a different model, then a lot of that is going to feel like it's just on paper. Whereas if you shift up the people, then that just changes the interpersonal dynamics, the energetics of that place. When you explained to me that you and Era are still the project managers, to me, it sounds like the leadership are still you and Era. Right. Exactly. And that's really shifted now because, I mean, In our case, it's also because Ara was a technical lead of the company, and I was the business lead of the company. We shared a lot of responsibilities, but almost everyone I work with is also technical. So now that he's not in the picture anymore, now everyone else is, is can fill that space. Whereas if I left, I'm not sure it would have changed things in the same way, because there's no one else to kind of do a bunch of the stuff that I do. One of the reasons that you want to transition to the cooperative is also because of the bottleneck issue that you mentioned. Since you and Era are still the project managers, don't you still have to deal with the bottleneck issues? Yes, that is true. And that, you know, I noticed that, but it did kind of open those bottlenecks somewhat. Subtly. Now much more so, you know, over time. I mean, the other thing is that nothing happens on the turn of a heel or whatever you say. People can't switch their minds instantaneously. And I think part of transitioning into a new business model is that it takes people a while to learn how to be with each other in That new way, it can take that long for something to really settle. And we're actually just now in a place where we're really starting to feel like, OK, we're ready to accept new members. But it took that long to really go, who are we? How do we do things? What makes us different? How do we work well together? Where are people's natural, you know, for people to find kind of Their natural fit in terms of like, what does ownership mean to me and how can I contribute that kind of ownership quality to this company, didn't go away right away. But I did notice that we were able to take clients that some of our members had the expertise to work with that A and I didn't necessarily have the expertise for. So when we were owners, we could only take Clients that we felt we could take care of. But when we became a cooperative, all of a sudden we could take clients that might need something built for them that some other co op member could do. And so then things weren't bottlenecked around us in that particular way anymore. Because your model SOL is contracting the work to others, right? When they were not a member, the decision was with you. An era to see, OK, these are my expertise, and then this is what I'm comfortable with. But now because you have other owners, technically, the members are owners, right? You can leverage and then, and one of the decision is hiring and firing, uh, clients. So they can basically raise their hand and said, Hey, I have that expertise, so I can do it. Exactly, exactly that. I believe in a cooperative model, there is something that is called patronage unit, like a patron unit. The members, it has to be keep track the numbers of hours, if that is the patronage units that is being used. And then for non-member, there is a different thing. So explain a little bit about the accounting structure and the financial structure of it. Every co op, you know, can be customized for your needs, for your business model, for your size, your, you know, style, that kind of thing. And we use the model that you're talking about as our patronage unit, as we, because we, our business model does, um, charges clients time and materials, and so we pay our contractors in time and materials, basically. So we pay by the hour. And so everyone works. On every project has to keep track of their time so that that can then be built to the client. But it's also serves as a way for us, we decide, I mean, this is an aside, but time, of course, is like a terrible measurement of value. And, you know, this is a conundrum that a lot of service organization, right? It's horrible, right? And yet, it's like, you know, every time we try something else, exactly. So it's sort of like you're in this stupid bind of like. Oh, that's, you know, I hate it too. I'm telling you, I know what you mean. It's the worst, right? It really, it doesn't make sense. And yet, we have to, yeah, it's part of the process. It's part of the process, exactly. Yeah. Keep track of their time and then we just use a simple formula for co op members of both billable hours in a year and non-billable hours in a year. Although they might not get paid immediately for their non-billable hours, we include those in our patronage equation for figuring out how to. Distribute patronage dividends as they're called, when we decide to do that. So that might be yearly, it might be quarterly, it might be when we have a certain amount of profit in the bank that we want to distribute, that kind of thing. And so then it could be, let's say, you know, we have one person who really just, he, he works a lot. He does a lot of non-billable hours, and on the one hand, so that's one person. And then we have another person and that person really prefers to work part time, and they do some non-billable, but not that much. They're both co op members. So, you know, co op member number one, that I was saying. Who works a lot. The patronage dividends are also going to be significantly higher at the end of the year than the part time person. And so I think this is one way that is easier for people to understand. If, if they were both just regular owners, and we decided to split profits amongst owners, and if it was just a regular, let's say, like C Corp or something. Then, you know, some regular business partnership, then everyone would get equal, or they would get paid out to the degree to which they own the company. So let's say everyone owned 25% of the company, they would get 25% of the profits, let's say. For a cooperative, you get paid on effort because everyone owns the same amount, but not Not everyone puts in necessarily the same amount of effort. So a cooperative is one person, one share, one vote. However, in terms of how you distribute financial wealth, financial capital depends on how much effort is put in. And that can be measured in so many different ways, right? So you might say, for us, we use this really simple formula about ours, but it could be, let's say that you have Someone whose job is, let's say, sales, and a successful sale is worth 10 points, but the time put in or the effort put into a sale that did not end up being successful is 1 point, let's say. I'm just making that up as an example, but you could use these kind of units, you can be really creative in terms of like what feels value. valuable depending on the business model, depending on the people involved, and then you can sort of set that up in terms of how you decide to distribute profits or as it's called in a cooperative patronage dividends. I'm assuming this is all discussed during the formation before you really transition, and then all members needs to agree on this. Yes, and it's in the bylaws. And I think maybe it's not included in just the kind of operating agreements, but it's all documented in the blogs. You said at the very beginning, you have always been open about the financial aspect of the business. You share it even when it wasn't a cooperative. Is that correct? That's correct, yeah. Now that it is a cooperative, how does it change in terms of financial planning for the long term? As the person who kind of keeps, you know, has my finger in the in the finances the most. I report on that to my co-members at least once a year. However, you share a project management tool, software tool, and they can go in and look at it any time. Anyone can look in our bank account, they can talk to our accountant and our bookkeeper, you know, all that kind of thing. But I make a point to make sure that it's packaged up in a way that's uneasy to. And and consumable at least once a year, sometimes a little bit more often. So they can all see it, if they were interested before we became a cooperative. I'd say the interest in it has gone up, for sure, but only slightly. And I think, I think that's for a few different reasons. I think some of them we've discussed. One is that the people that are now co-members, they weren't sort of naturally entrepreneurs anyways. Another pieces that were really small. Everyone can hear everyone else talking. We kind of know how much money is coming in and out. And so there's no kind of secrets. Before we wrap this up, is there anything that you want to share with my audience in terms of, if they are thinking about transition to a cooperative, what other critical things that we haven't discussed in here that you want to share? I mean, a few things come to mind. One is I just want to underline that you can really make this what you want it to be. So that in some ways is daunting, right? Because there's so much flexibility there. On the other hand, if you think, oh, yeah, I'm sort of interested in cooperative model, but I couldn't do it because of this or that, you know, whatever the thing is, reconsider and kind of think, oh, no, actually, you know, maybe I can customize it to be what I need it to be. And you could even cooperize, let's say, part of your business, and not all of it, for instance. Like if you think, I'm not ready to give up all my stake in this business, you know, you could just say, OK, well then I'm, I'm gonna slice it up, and I'm gonna make 50% of the business available for cooperative ownership, and I'm going to keep 50% for myself. You know, it's like you can really be creative with it. I would say another thing to keep in mind is that diversity and inclusivity is something that people are really rightfully focused on right now. And I think one thing that people can consider in thinking about how do we include people? How do we actually impact people and how do we do that in like a real material way? Well, one way is that you can diver. ownership. And so I think that's, you know, depending on where people are committed in that way, that's something to consider. And then I think community involvement is really important to me as a business owner in a somewhat, you know, small town, but I think I would feel this way, even if I still lived in New York, wherever, or Montreal, or wherever. I think that diversifying ownership and Becoming a cooperative is one way that you can really provide a community service by impacting your local community, uh, your local economy in a different way, by modeling that for other business owners. Like you can say, look, I can still be successful financially while diversifying ownership in a way that will impact many individuals and families. And it's not just, it doesn't impact just financially, it's also So, so empowering. It gives people access to exactly what you're talking about, Christina, access to knowledge and experience of what it means to own a business. And then they're likely to stick with you for much, much longer, which we know as business owners that turnover is hugely expensive. And so really keeping people is such a smart choice. And then also, just on a really personal level, it's, it's really powerful in people's lives. And so you're giving people access to something that then even if they decide not to stay with you forever, then they can go and start their own business in a way that they maybe wouldn't have been prepared for otherwise. So the benefits are so far reaching. I know, you know, I will not, I'm not shy to say that I can be a control freak. The thought of giving up my business to other people after years. Years of hard work and sacrifice. You know, there were some real challenges there for me psychologically. And I really don't have any regrets about it. And it's not that I never, you know, there was moments where I thought, Oh, no, like, what did I do? But now having that, you know, been in it for, I actually realized that we didn't coopertize in 2015. It was actually 2017. We've been a cooperative now for 4 years, and I really, now having seen the arc of that transition, I really have no regrets, and I feel like fortunate to have made that transition. I feel grateful to be in relationship with my fellow. Co op members, I feel really honored by our community. I feel, you know, it's just, it's all basically all good. Corey, I really appreciate you sharing all your experience in forming and operating cooperative. And if people want to connect with you, where can they reach you? I know it was really helpful for me to talk to people when I was in the process of, you know, making this transition or deciding whether or not to make the transition. And I have conversations with people all the time. I recommend people just email me and please don't be shy. My email address is on my website, Jojo. For.com, but you can also just email me at Cory@ dojoor.com. That's C O R E Y at dojoo.com. That's a great way to reach me and I, I, I welcome it. Cory, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate it. So happy to be here. So nice to have a conversation with you, Christina. And that's brings us to the end of another show. Thank you so much for listening to another episode of her CU journey, the business finance podcast for women entrepreneurs. If you want to create a proactive financial plan and process, For your business, so you are ready to weather the financial storm over the next few months. Let's chat and see what's possible for you. Booking a time to speak with me at christinahaley.com/let's chat.