EXPERIENCE 257 | #Waterfirst Founder Nate Hines, CEO of Hines Inc. - Nate Interviews Curt for the 2nd half of the Show!

In today's episode of the local experience, I welcome Nate Hines back into the studio for his second appearance, with the agreement that he gets to interview me for the second half of the show. Nate was our final guest of season 4, episode 200, and in 2025 he executed the strategy shared in our previous conversation, acquiring and integrating three water-engineering firms. Hines Inc. is the leading voice in the water-first movement, which encourages developers and property owners to consider water-first when designing anything from a residential landscape plan to a city park to a major subdivision. This can save 30% or more on install, 30% or more on maintenance, and increase the longevity of systems through professional management. We zoomed in on Nate's skills building journey, which included bruising lessons from a failed merger, and the support and encouragement of an advisory board along the way. For the second half of the show, Nate interviewed your host, Kurt Bear. We discussed the philosophies that drive our policies at Locoh Think Tank, My Why, and becoming a small L Libertarian, and we closed with a selection of Locoh experiences from years truly, specifically a quick tour of the five times I've nearly killed myself and my wife, in raging rivers, on mountain passes, or on a motorcycle. So please tune in and enjoy my conversation with Nate Hines. Let's have some fun. Welcome to the Locoh Experience Podcast. On this show, you'll get to know business and community leaders from all around Northern Colorado and beyond. Our guests share their stories, business stories, life stories, stories of triumph and of tragedy, and through it all, you'll be inspired and entertained. These conversations are real and raw, and no topics are off limits. So pop in a breath mint and get ready to meet our latest guest. Welcome back to the Locoh Experience Podcast. My guest today is the fabulous Nate Hines, a second time on the show, and he's the CEO of Hines Inc. and the founder of the Hashtag Water First Movement. Thank you for having me. Thank you for having me. Thank you. A movement, Hashtag Guy? No, no, no, no. I think I'm kind of a reluctant starter of things. What a movement needs to happen. Oh, you Moses was that way too. Moses was that way. Moses was reluctant. But yeah, it's becoming kind of a thing. Yeah. Let's set the stage a little bit for those many folks that have never heard of Hines Inc. Nice new building, by the way. I should have caught by there to get the tour before we had this return. Yeah, absolutely. But yeah, tell the folks about Hines. Yeah, so Hines is we're an engineering company. We plan, engineer, we design, and then we manage water use. We do that in an irrigation context. And so that's what you manage water use. Yeah, that's something that we built over the last couple of years. Okay. Okay. I'm going to want to hear more about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So your water nerds is what I'm hearing. Big water nerds. Big water nerds. Big water nerds. Small water nerds even. It's a tiny industry. Right. You know, it's it's kind of the last thing that's thought about in site development, right? You think sprinklers pop up and do what they do. Yeah. But it's really red headed stepchild of maybe the development industry. So is this like almost like super elite irrigation system designers? It is. Like the guys that come to your house and put it in your yard, they probably have a formula. But it's probably not nearly as efficient or comprehensive as what we're talking, especially on a big development or even a commercial property. Yeah, absolutely. Office complex. It's my dad started the company 34 years ago. And the mechanical engineer. We always brought engineers into the company to design these systems. But water was pretty cheap and it was thought to be plentiful then. And the last 10 years, that's really shifted in a big way. Was he more in the agricultural space then? No, all commercial. No commercial. Yeah, but tiny little industry. And maybe at that time, perhaps you had. 15, maybe 20 companies in the country that are designing little irrigation systems. Not all small, so two, three, four hundred acre type projects. But it was an industry in its infancy. Yeah, for sure. And now Colorado is notable for having the most expensive, most highly regulated water in the country. Is that right? And about 60% of the water we use goes on landscape. And really a significant amount of that is wasted. Any municipal context, right? Oh. So ag and industry using enormous amounts of water. Okay. But if you're in the city of Fort Collins. Okay. If you're at your house, right? Yeah. If you've got a yard. Yeah, and a fish pond. And a chicken, chicken coop. Exactly. And sprinklers. Yeah. It's likely that 60, 70% of your water use is going on plant material. And the majority of that water is wasted. Hmm. So there's a pretty awesome opportunity to keep the landscape you love and just cut your water use by 60%. Yeah. It is that like drippers and things like that a lot of times. There's a whole suite of. Whole suite of things. Yeah. Whole suite of things, including the collection of what you plant, I suppose. Yeah, some of it is plant material, but it's cool over the last two years. So originally we would engineer and design systems. So if you're in Fort Collins and you think about spring canyon park or if you think about twin silo park. Sure. There's a pond right there at twin silo. Okay. Someone needs to design that pond and size it for all the future irrigation use. And then there's going to be a pump station. And then there's going to be a 12 inch pipe that delivers that water to the high school there, the middle school, and the park. Sure. So there's planning and engineering there. There's water rights, a calculation and acquisition. All before you get to the irrigation system design, your green valve boxes and your sprinklers popping out of the ground. Do does the city has to acquire water rights in the same way that they do. They would have as a development. Yeah, they would. Okay. And they've got a, you know, been building a nice portfolio. They've got a reserve kind of they can allocate it basically for a park or whatever. Okay. So we used to just do that. Right. And then we, we saw that as you get more efficient with irrigation system design. You, if you use less water, your pipes can get smaller. Sure. If your pipes get smaller, you can tell the city and you can tell the developer. Yeah. When we design your system, it's going to cost you $25,000 in acre less. Hmm. Maybe use us instead of having your non technical designer or your contractor go out and throw big pipe in the ground. Right. That's the orange pipe costs a lot less than a six inch pipe. It does. You know, yeah, you get cheaper fittings easier to install easier to maintain. Yeah. If you get a break, less water comes out. There's all sorts of reasons to make things small if you can. But there's a point at which if you make it too small, now you need more professional management. Right. You need a person monitoring that water every day. You can go close to the edge. And so you built some special sauce to help. So we've built a team to monitor. Interesting. So three years before a project gets built, we can forecast how much water you need. Then you can save a bunch of money on your water rights acquisition. Then you can construct a system that costs you substantially less to build. Sure. And then you can monitor it every year. And our water monitors save 40 to 60% on every project they touch without changing out plant material. So at least someone would build a project. Yeah. It would fall apart language, language, waste water, waste labor, and break things for 10 years. And in about 10 years, an HOA or a city or a developer is going to say this project is defunct. Our landscape is dying. We're wasting tons of water on money on water. Right. Come in and give us some new magic technology. Come in and fix it. There's like a postage. There's like all this broken technology here already. That technology should have lasted for 25 years. Right. So in 10 years, you're replacing a system that should have lasted for 25 or 30. So we thought, let's plan it, let's engineer it, and then let's monitor it, or train people to monitor it. Yeah. So you don't break stuff and waste water for 10 years. Well, and you get relative mailbox money, kind of. Like it is an all project base anymore, but you can have a portfolio of folks that you legitimately save them money on their water. Exactly. Because you're smarter at paying attention to how water needs to do stuff. And we don't have to hunt for every project. Right. You're exactly right. And so we hunt for a project. We designed it. It goes away. If we win the project, and we promise savings for five, 10, 15 years, I mean to deliver on it. Yeah. Now we've built a room with an annual maintenance fee effectively, our management fee. Yeah. Very cool. One of the things I wanted to make sure we talked about is when you were on this podcast, we were talking almost two years ago. Yeah. Or maybe just over two years ago, I think. But you were talking about how there's a few boutique firms like yours. But smaller, often one man or two people shows. And those guys are 65 like your dad or whatever. And might want to keep a job, but don't want the complexity of being in business for themselves. Yeah. Talk to me about like what has happened since then. When you and I talked first, Kurt, we were just kind of starting down this path. I bought theory kind of. It was. It was. And I bought a, I mean, I bought Heinz from my dad 10 years ago, generational transfer of a company is usually the number one killer of small businesses. True. And so we did that. You're not really a silver spoon guy though. No. No, I'm, I'm food stamps and we're starting the car driving to work, you know, driving to school when I was a kid. Sorry, I could be really. No, no, no, you're totally fine. I was just, and I did actually make a bad merger early on after I bought the company and lost the company figured out how to rebuild and get the company back. And came out of that in about 2018. It's a started building. Yeah. And going through the cultural change, the vision change from, you know, dad to me building on strengths and kind of figuring out what my vision for the company was and really living into that. Yeah. It was hard work. And so when you and I met a couple years ago, I had started to notice that there's a bunch of people aging out in our industry. Yeah. And I had a fluency for understanding what are the hurdles they're running up against. What's it feel like to have put 30 or 40 years of your life into something build something doesn't need to be big, but reputations incredible. Right. We're client relationships are deep. Yeah. In some cases, I'd rather just shut it down than risk somebody abuses my clients. Oh, yeah. Oh, no question. And there's been a number of businesses where either an industry manufacturer or it's a big thing right now for companies. They think they'll vertically integrate. Exactly. We'll get all these consultants to recommend our plumbing tubes. Yeah. And they won't they won't sell because it ruins the business, right? You sell more plastic. Right. You don't save more water. Right. Right. So since you and I talked, we've acquired an integrated six companies. Five maybe five. I may have just done one right before you and I talked. That was yeah, maybe you had done one, but you thought there's more opportunity here. Yeah. And we bought three last year in 2025. Wow. And then we bought two the year before that. Well, anywhere from one company we purchased had 12 people. Okay. One had two. So what's your scale? No. You were 70 person company or something? No, no, no, no. We're just under 40. Some of those folks left and stuff too in some cases. We had the founders in particular. We're looking for an exit. Exactly. Yeah, we had some founders leave. One company had, they were a bit heavy on personnel. Those 12 people should have had six already. We took three months and just we did interviews with them. We wrote letters of recommendation for them and helped them transition to some other areas. Yeah. And that was part of the discussion with the owner. It was like, you know, buddy, you've got a really staff heavy company here. What can Hines do to help you transition people to something that might fit well for them? And would that be part of a transition package that would be acceptable to you? Yeah. Yeah. It comes a lot easier from Dan than it does from Nate. Absolutely. The new boss. Absolutely. And them knowing that their people were going to have a home before we did anything. Yeah. Was a, was a powerful thing for them. Yeah. Yeah. And there aren't, maybe there are a lot of companies doing that. How many are here in Fort Collins Northern Colorado and how many spread around the country? We have 12 folks here. Okay. We've got eight in Florida. We've got three in Texas. We've got four in Washington, D.C. We've got four to six in kind of our Kansas City Midwest area. Several people up in the Chicago. All kinds of cultures. Yeah. Yeah. We're trying to node now, like build around nodes of people so that if, if twice a month, we want to do something at a we work in the region or we have a physical office in Florida and Dallas. Very cool. They can do that. Is Florida a big deal for water? I thought it rains all the time there. They get 30 to 40 inches of rain. Okay. For a specific period of time. And it's all too flat to store it very good. True. In the state, it's interesting in Florida, the state owns all the water under the ground. Okay. And they require that if you irrigate, you do not use potable water. Oh. If it's your only option. Right. But you need to use either well water, ground water. I mean, you dig a hole. It fills up water. Right. Everybody's got access to water. Yeah. The waste water treatment plant will deliver treated water to you. So potable is kind of that fourth option that you can only use if you've exhausted all others. Interesting. And if you pump too much water out of the ground, you start sucking sea water into your ground water. Oh, interesting. There's a hydrostatic pressure there that you need to protect. I see. So Florida's got some big, big issues that they've got to, that they've got to work with. And a relatively low level of engineering sophistication in the irrigation world. Some awesome practices. Yeah. But the Colorado guys are super smart. Things they're doing. Dude's in Florida. We have had a unique history of regulation cost. And the climate is one of the more aggressive climates in the country. Sure. Yeah. We didn't create it. Yeah. I'm an idiot with a pulse who just, and things have evolved in such a way that we can be a part of that change. Talk to me about the hashtag water first a little bit. Like, where did that come from? Was that swimming around in your head? Because that's been part of kind of attracting, even, and finding these firms is setting a, I guess, a visionary leadership position in the industry and not kind of following. Yeah. The herds. It has been, we've, we're building a, a water first founder board. Okay. And so most of these founders have come and worked in Hines for three, four years. A couple have been like, hey, I'm out. I need to, I need to go do other things. But we've got three founders working in Hines right now. Okay. And they've built up, you know, whether they're, we have, there's chemical engineers, civil engineers. Yeah. There's these keepers of odd irrigation knowledge that started these companies. And so in Colorado right now, if you own land and you don't have water, your land value is zero. And that's becoming more and more true in Arizona, California, Texas. Florida, not, not so much. You're going to have some quality. But regulation requires that you think about these systems and you build some big infrastructure. So it's expensive. And do you get into that kind of work too, like infrastructure building and consulting with government and stuff about what they really need to design for the future? Yeah. You know, we, so we manage, we manage all the water for several cities in Florida now. Okay. So their parks department, their city streets departments, we manage their water. Seems like your insurance policy would be expensive. Yeah. It's, um, everything seems like a lot of risk. Everything seems fun stuff. You're actually out of water. Your people are going to die said trucks with water bottles. And we're fortunate that it's a lower liability thing than say stormwater or potable water. That makes sense. You know, you, you, um, you know, stormwater can flood. Yeah. Yeah. If you're, if your grass goes into a state of dormancy and we need to water a little bit more. To get it back. Fortunately, nobody's dying. Unless people die. Yeah. Fair. So I guess to get back to that question, but you, you, you, like, you saw the opportunity to give these folks exits and make some acquisitions and kind of grow your space. Yeah. Was, was creating the movement part of being able to execute that strategy? Or was creating the movement, like, was that the purpose that drove you to work so damn hard to figure all this out and make those content? I'm trying to figure out which is first the ticket or the egg. Water for opportunity first. Okay. So, so you had already been water first a little bit. Irrigation is the largest water use. User on commercial. Park. Mixed use single family residential. Right. And nobody thinks about irrigation until two weeks before they're going to build the project. Okay. And, and so coming to a developer and saying, you know, in Colorado, you're going to spend two, three, four, five, ten million dollars by water rights for irrigation for a project. Have you thought about that cost? Yeah. Have you planned it? Have you built your pro forma around how much water you should acquire every year for the first five years of your project? If you could cut that value down by 20 or 30 percent, would you like to know about that a year or two before the project? Yeah. Or do you want to find out after you're out mass grading the project? Yeah. People want to know early. And so having that water first conversation, you know, we can build out what's your budget for water? Yeah. Then work with planners and landscape architects to say, this is how much budget we have. Let's go get creative around plant material site development. Yeah. That water discussion can guide the decision making that's being done by smarter, the planners that run these projects, generally, an architect, a landscape architect, a civil engineer. Yeah. They're running these big projects. They have the ability to do that. Knowing how to cut two, three million out of a project is, well, and something that's operating costs too, right? Absolutely. You don't just cut them a cost on the front, but it takes 30 percent less to maintain. That's that's that next step, right? First, it was nobody cares about irrigation. If you can prove up front costs go down, people want to talk with you. Right. Now that labor and operational cost is becoming an issue. So we can reduce labor by 30 percent water by 40 to 60 percent without changing plant material. That's what I was going to ask. Is there agronomists and stuff that are on your team too? Yeah. Agronomy, we've got some water, soil, science, folks, horticulture lists. Yeah. So you can choose plants that will shade one another in the wrong seasons. Or I was thinking about, like, my backyard is facing south, I'm on the Port Avenue. Yep. And the chicken coop gets roasted with rays and my gardens get roasted with rays all winter long. And the front of my house is all shaded, including in front of my motorcycle shed, sadly. And so unless I shovel it, that's known as sitting there for a long time. And the grass, like, it doesn't need any water on the front of my house. Yeah. Because it's just in the shade all winter long, even if it's, I mean, I'm sure it would like to be watered once a while in a year like this. But the consumption of water to be a healthy plant is much lower in the shade. Absolutely. As long as it can tolerate it. Absolutely. And there's a bunch of, you know, historically, we've not resourced our gardeners. Right. And so water is becoming expensive enough. Labor restrictions are becoming more poignant. So applying technology, good design. And then just good habit forming processes. Yeah. You said gardeners, are you talking about like greenhouses instead? Yeah, our landscapeers that come out and work out in the landscape who might schedule a controller who might manage a landscape that is not often been a well-resourced position in our culture. So water first speaks a little bit to we can build process. We can take technology. We can uplift roles in landscape maintenance and contracting. But half the projects that we work on that we apply this to. We're teaching training and handing off. Yeah. And that's a great solution for us. So you almost deliver like a manual care and feeding of your commercial project. Here's your playbook. Yeah. How do you make your irrigation and landscape division 30 or 40% more profitable? How could you take a staff that's that's limited and constrained and take on more projects because you've gained business efficiency? So there's a bunch of little places to take it. Yeah. Certainly are great for hines, but really, really good for the industry as a whole. Talk to me about the, maybe the business model a little bit. Is it like an architecture firm? If you keep everybody busy, you make pretty good money. If you don't keep people busy, then you don't make any money. Is that kind of the, is this engineering services company? Or is it, because it's time of material on your contracts, right? Yeah. Yeah, we are doing mostly fixed contract work. So if we say something's going to cost $20,000, we're aiming to deliver that project as efficiently as possible with a delighted client. Yeah. And some projects we win and some projects we lose. Yeah. So utilization is a big metric for us. But you probably get pretty good at understanding how many man hours it's going to take to design this or design that. And just the environment and collecting all those case studies. Yeah. If you communicate well enough within yourself. Yeah. Very true. I mean, it's a big process build for us internal training. I wouldn't be able to live without a few key leaders in the company. That's what I was going to say. Like project management is probably a really clutch. Huge. What's your job? I am kind of chief answering the question. I work hard on the acquisition front. Okay. So I want to meet owners, talk with them, share vision values, and see if we can create a vision that all of us would like to inhabit two or three years from now. Okay. It's a bit like a marriage. Yeah. For sure. So there's a lot of getting to know each other. Yeah. Yeah. And then I'm doing strategy for Hines. Yep. And then I'm working with our leaders. And you're out of hiring mostly. And stuff. I guess you don't hire that many entry-level people. You just acquired. I mean, occasionally I'm sure you do, but. You know, we probably hire last year we hired four people. Right. This year we'll probably hire eight in addition to acquisition. And then I'm looking for people that are going to help us get where we need to go, you know, a couple of years from now. Yeah. And what is that vision? Well, I think we'll probably double revenue. Okay. This year from this year to two years from now. And 2026 going to 2028. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Entering 2028, we want to be on the run rate to double revenue. Okay. And there's a real good path to get there. And then. Oh, we're going to keep going. It's never going to stop. Once you get to that size, then we can start looking at some looking. So the last couple of years, we also added to our registered PEs. Okay. Professional engineers that are able to stamp and do different types of project work around the country. And so we're adding services there that are adjacent to irrigation design. There's going to be a bunch around environmental engineering, water and soil quality and nutrition. Water quality is going to be a big issue already a big issue. And it's just not going to get smaller. And if we don't want to live on the surface of Mars, we need to learn how to take care of our soil and our water quality better. Talk to me about who else is in this space. Like what's the competitive landscape? Are you the smartest but mid-sized kind of small-ish firm in comparison? Or do you have that more comprehensive suite of services than most or? Yeah. Colorado has a number of really great firms. They've trained up in that same environment that we have. Strong engineering, awesome client bases. They've worked around this difficult regulatory and climate world for 20, 30 years. So we're really blessed to be in that community. Around the country, we see a lot of just depending on how difficult it was to work with water. You see everything from we're helping you get set up to design build something. And we're not investing a lot of time and energy into how this system goes together. The efficiency and stuff doesn't matter that much because water is cheap so don't worry about it. And that changed during COVID because the cost of PVC skyrocketed. We started, we case study 40 to 60 projects a year. So we know in North Carolina, one of our plans will cost $35,000 less per acre to construct. Interesting. So water is cheap. They give it away. Right. But by spending a lot of money on construction. And then that system is going to cost 30 to 40% more to maintain for the life of the system. So construction costs going up have helped us expand the country. Interesting. We do see just a number of eligible and interested customers. Oh, yeah. Yeah, and we've built a sales team. We've got a couple of marvelous golden retriever type young people in the office. Perfect. And they call three to 400 people a week. Oh, wow. I'm Nate. I work at Heinz Irrigation. We're engineers that pay attention to irrigation systems. Tell me about your development. You guys develop things. Your landscape architect. What do you do? Yeah. Is irrigation a pain? How is it a pain? Tell me all about it. And their goal is to just set a meeting with one of our senior principals and new clients. And they book somewhere between 10 and 20 meetings a week or sorry, a month each with people we've never met. Wow. And then our principals job is to talk with them about the value of Heinz, what we could do specifically for them. Yeah. And then get under the technical details and get some interesting. And our principals are no kidding engineer architects, people who have practiced for 15, 20 years. And how do you pay these young guys that chase cold calls? Beer and pretzels. Yeah. I mean, they don't really close the deal, close the deal, but even just setting a meeting as a major accomplishment. And there's a lot of work between here and there. Very much. So we have a base salary there. And then they're compensated for every single meeting. And you would have to give you crappy meetings. No, we've got to qualify. No, it's an awesome question, right? So you've got to be a young person who can afford to live in Fort Collins. And so if they're hitting their metrics, they're doing quite well. So we have a couple of young people that if they hit their metrics this year, they'll make a $100,000. And they're doing better. I read something about this business development role on LinkedIn. So take that for what it's worth, but less than 40% of people in this role are hitting their metrics, right? Our team is doing much better than that. That's awesome. So one is book meetings. The way that the way that we know it's a good meeting is we also measure proposal requests that come from the meetings they set up. And so we balance. So some people would say, well, we want a principle to analyze the people that came to the meetings. And then tell me that meeting counts. That is an overhead and administrative function that we would pile on the principle to judge every meeting they could set. What I'd rather do is say what's a proactive value-based KPI we could measure. And that's well, how many times did you set a meeting? And then that person asked one of our principles, I'd really like a proposal. It requires that we have the right message, the right service, the right case studies to bring. And it's an aspirational service-based information that we've done the right thing. And so the first year we experimented with this, we hired a young guy, trained him up, he helped to train us because we had no idea what we were doing. In seven months, he booked 208 meetings. And that we never would have had. And that led to $1.2 million in signed proposals with those clients. He had a 60% close ratio. I think there was like $2 million or $1.9 million in proposal requests, signed 1.2 of that within the year. So it really has been a cool, that water first message resonates. We can go to an LA, a landscape architect, we can go to a developer and say, have you thought about this? Let's walk through this process. Yeah, the water first way. It's awesome. We'll speed you up, we won't slow you down, we'll save you money up front or we'll save you money every year for 20 years. It's kind of a cool thing we're trying to do. Part of why I'm so curious about that movement is because ultimately local think tank deserves to be that too. That kind of craze about local business theme that we've used. But wherever local is to you, there should be these kind of peer advisory groups. And so now I'm just going to do, did you hire communications person internally or things? Is that you crafting the message with some of your leadership and what do we think we want to say? Yeah, it is. It's probably why we haven't grown faster. If we just invested an actual marketing person internal communications. Part of my history and background is like there's a fractional hire for everything these days. And I don't know that I'm not opposed to it. People should do what they want. I just find that when we've experimented with that, you know, whether it's a fractional sales lead leader to come in and teach us sales. Right. Or it's a fractional CFO or it's a fractional marketing and communications person. We have two weeks of good meetings. And then two to three weeks after that, someone on my team says, well, why don't you let me do this? And then we can scale up internal operations if we need to to provide them time to grow. So there's something about, in this way, if you look at history, you know, Roman Empire, Greek Empire, the Macedonians went through this, the Turks. All the big empires go through this. If you start paying mercenaries to do your dirty work, things should start falling apart. And our people get so energized by building a new thing. Let's research some AI internally. And then instead of making two hires, we'll just make one and build competence within the team. And so the marketing part, some of the communications part, we're doing some of this stuff in house. I've not met people that we've sat and been able to talk to, and I feel like they were saying back to me what we wanted to hear. Yeah. So I just think we're the best. They can't do that. Get out of your head. No, I mean, a little bit. And your team. Yeah. Like it's not just, I mean, you have the vision, I imagine, but there's also that's been sharpened and corrected at times and adjusted by other smart people. Yeah, I think, and there's work probably that I need to do, I need to become the sort of person that can more perfectly communicate what I'm saying. And that then will give that marketing person or that creative person the ability to create and represent it. So I'm really comfortable with the idea that I haven't fully formed what I'm thinking. Yeah. It's the process of doing it myself. Yeah. That helps me stand it up and then know the type of person to hire or know the kind of person we want to outsource to. So I don't mean to say that there's something inherently wrong with the fractional approach. Sure, sure. It's just as much me fumbling over my ignorance and adequacy. That's fair. That's fair. Or even fear of doing it wrong. Tell me about where you've built your business skills because you seem to me to be a business enthusiast in addition to financial management, balance management, project analysis, cost allocations. Where did you go to business school? Did not go to business school. Did not grow up in a business savvy environment. Your dad was a passionate guy. I made a living at it, but didn't really turn it into a awesome lifestyle business. Incredible reputation, really deep and endearing professional relationships. But for me, it was just failing massively. And so one of those was I was helping in the business someone the recession and 07 to 09 happened. Okay. And company revenues dropped 75%. If people don't remember, this was primarily a building construction recession. I remember selling houses that the bank had a $350,000 construction loan on for $270,000. In Arizona. Yeah. In Maricopa. People were selling $300,000 houses that they'd paid $3,254 for $40,000. I mean, it was a blood bath. Yeah. And we were, we'd had our best year revenue wise, but we're only 3% profitable. And had a bit of, had a bit of debt. And so there were some experiences there that I felt like, man, I never want to participate in something like that again. So what are all the levers that I could identify and try to learn and grow competency in? And then after I bought the company from my dad, a couple of years in, we've been vetting an opportunity to really do what we've done over the last eight years. But I thought it would happen a lot more quickly and that someone else would do most of the work. That was the merger, you mentioned. Did a merger. And, and for a variety of reasons that went very, very poorly. That's a pretty good business education is untangling a merger or whatever that looked like. I don't know, but I had no ability to untangle it legally. But there was behavior in the partnership group over there that, that enabled us to do that. And so we came out of that with all our staff, all of our non-competes gone, all of our clients and all of our projects, none of our financials. No money, not even reports or anything. No, no, because if those reports got out, then someone could go to jail, not me. And so it was a, and then we were hit, I was hit with four lawsuits directly related to that. Even though we'd signed some agreements and stuff to try to control how we grew and came out of that. Yeah, yeah. So if you think about ground zero basically 2018 ground zero 2018 with about a $1.8 million backlog of work. Okay. We could do that. Yeah. But no, no receivables and no cash flow for three to six months, right? Until we performed work, sent in voices and money was sent in. So did you find some money in the marketplace somewhere? Recapitalized, pulled a board together, had a couple of people in the industry that view us. So you've got a few of us. And they said, they're like, Nate, you need to form a board of advisors and we're going to beat the crap out of you. And we're going to help you put this back together. Okay. And so there's something about figuring out how to run a business, provide for your family, and pay two to three hundred thousand dollars a year in legal fees that straightens you up a bit. That's where you have to quit. That explains a lot about your both kind of your appreciation for what local think tank does. But also your reluctance to get engaged because you probably still got this board there kind of helping you get some perspective on what you're doing. We are very focused. The accountable to. We are very, very focused. Yeah. Which is awesome. And it's so good. But I, to your point, a number of the guys and gals that have been advising me are just you need to do every single thing yourself. Yeah. So you're going to spend a year focusing really hard on your accounting processes. Here are the things we want you to fix. Build this company so that you can predict how many dollars you will have in cash in your bank account at the end of every month. Cool. And you do that. You've got to build every single thing upstream of it so that it's perfect. And our, our, to, to celebrate our director of finance in 2025. He a forecasted our free cash. He was within 2.8%. I do shabby, which is incredible with all the things that happen. I mean, it was awesome. Did you have three mergers in the forecast? We knew that we would do some acquisitions, but we didn't know what format they would take. We didn't know what they would look like. We say, let's go find, do we think we could find a million and a half or two million in revenue across two to four companies? Yeah. Right. And what are you going to pay for that amount of revenue? Like is it a three times multiple? I mean, none of my down business. No, no. It's quite all right. So typically what you would do is you'd go in and you'd look at PNL for a service company. Sure. And depending on kind of an average is you look at their net profit every year. And you'd say, man, for a well run business and your sub five million, you're probably going to be around a three X multiplier. Another way that people look at it is if they're running the business properly, that three X is going to be pretty similar to one gross revenue year. And then you start looking at. To both. Yeah. Yeah. It's like that 30, 30, 30 rule of 33, 33, 33, 33 rule. If the company is not dependent on the owner, that adds value. Right. If there are senior staff that would like to stay and stay engaged, that adds value. And they bring clients. Yeah. Exactly. If you can document your processes like you know, hey, we wrote two million in proposals. We've signed about half of that. Right. Year over year, we tend to close about 55%. Here's that list of projects. Yeah. Yeah. If they can demonstrate that kind of organization, then there's more value there. Well, and like, oh, by the way, we've got two young men that are killer sales people. And all they do is set appointments for you. Yeah. Would you like to not do cold calls anymore, Bob? It's a, it's a different thing to be able to say in many companies in our industry, landscape architects, engineers, the principles, the owners, the senior people. They're putting in 40 to 50 hours. Yeah. And then they're trying to market and write proposals as well. Right. And it's exhausting. And we've just, we've divorced that. Cool. We've got a sales ops team that does 75% of all the proposal prep and response. Oh, cool. Like we want our principles, walking sites, working on technical problems, writing proposals, loving on those clients. Yeah. So we try to pull all of that kind of admin work off of them. Well, I wish I was a qualified water engineer. I'd be applying for a job. Oh, it's a rough business. Well, it, plus they worked their ass off for 20 years in most cases. Yeah. What's your like ideal five, 10 years from now? Like do you want to be president of the world? Or do you imagine potentially exiting, merging, getting acquired? Or just don't know. You're going to just keep doing your thing. Don't have that. I want to keep doing my thing. And my thing, I heard a quote a couple of years ago that I really liked that said, the spirit of your aim will answer your prayer. Or give you what you're asking for. It's a bit of like you stand up the door and ask kind of the way you're in your receive. And if you do it in the right spirit, kind of. I think that I think that many of us, me included, have multiple competing goals. And sometimes and maybe often those goals work against each other. And so rather than thinking, it's not necessarily wrong spirit, you might just be praying to the wrong God. And, you know, sorry, quote unquote God, right? Yeah, yeah. You might actually want to ruin something. You might think you want to do something, but man, you've been doing something you hate your whole life and you're kind of sabotaging it and getting rid of it, right? Yeah. So I think that that's helped me work through what I want to do is be as highly competent in business as possible. And anything and there's a variety of ways that I balance that, for instance, six and a half out of seven nights a week. I'm home for dinner. Cool. Right? So I manage my travel pretty carefully. Yeah. I work hard, but I've also never worked less. And what do you get then I do now? Three littles. Is that what I remember? Yeah, 1916 and 12. Oh, they're not that little anymore. Yeah. So I want to be around, right? Yeah, yeah. We took my daughter up to school for her second semester in Bozeman and spent four days. We went skiing and like, I want to live with them and be around them. And so, you know, as a dad or as a husband, I don't want anything blocking me from those casual things. I think that's right. I can't be in those in those arenas. So from a work perspective, I don't see myself ever not being meaningfully engaged in solving hard problems. And for as long as far as I can look ahead, that's kinds. It's water-related. It's just kind of where I'm at. Yeah, yeah. Which is great. So I don't have any, any, any plans to sell or anything like that. There's just a ton of issues to solve and people to train and things to build. And so we're just, we're getting to work. I dig it. We're going to take a break and we'll continue with conversation. But I want to get the update on water first, especially. And we're going to trade chairs. And you're going to ask me some questions. I'm in, baby. We're going to go deep. That was your, that was your requirement for coming back. Yeah, so fun. We're going to crack the head of Kurt Barrow. I hope so. Hi. This is Clint Jasperson, managing partner at Purpose Driven Wealth. We believe financial clarity leads to a life of contentment and purpose. Our mission is to guide clients through the complexities of wealth management, retirement planning, and legacy using a values driven, stewardship based approach, focused on provision, contentment, and enjoyment. With more than a century of expertise through thriving, we offer tailored strategies to help individuals and families achieve their goals and embrace generosity. Whether you're navigating a life or business transition or planning for the future, we're here to partner with you every step of the way. To learn more about Purpose Driven Wealth, call 970-330-741. Good. Well, we're back. We're back. And it's in the big chair. Kurt has been kicked out of the, out of the captain's chair. And I love it. I love it. So I think we should start with our new hot sauce here. Matador. You are. Yeah, Matador has created. Crazy ginger. Do you want me on the three or the two? Try the three first. The three is a little bit. My brother-in-law, he might even be a good person to bring in. He is an executive over at Walker Mower. Oh, cool. Yeah. Supply chain management. He's an animal. As far as hot sauce. Well, just in life and general and hot sauce. Particularly. I'll get sweaty. We go on these motorcycle trips together a couple of times a year. Yeah. We always find a Thai restaurant. He'll order something. That's nice. Thai hot number five. And then he'll ask him to just cut up whatever peppers they've got in the back. Oh, no. Put it in a little bowl. Oh, no. He'll throw that on. I've seen him go through ghost peppers. I've seen him just. He's bearded. He's huge. And the sweat just pours off. And while he eats. How much bathroom time does he spend? He makes it just look effortless. He's an insane human being. And he just rips through stuff like that. It doesn't even put a dent in him. It's awesome. Well, it's who I want to be when I'm not that guy. I used to be stronger. But now I'm going to get sweaty. A little gentle. You're getting a little gentle. Yeah, but I'll eat more because that's part of my thing. So this is going to be crazy ginger. Okay. And the two and three here is test batches two and three from Matador. I think tomorrow afternoon I'm going to try one more, which is pretty close to halfway between these two. I love it. You're either one of them better. That one seems spicier to me, but I'll know this ginger is now catching up. Okay. That's nice. I knew either one of these all day, brother. Yeah. It's nice. Eat them up. You got to ask me some questions and stuff too, but. So you're a libertarian. I would say so. A small L. Tell us a little bit about that. Why? It was an interesting question. You know, I think. Probably as much as anything because my dad kind of leans that way. And he never went to college or anything, but he had his own kind of philosophies. And it was very tolerant for, you know, a. White dude in central North Dakota that. You know, he wasn't racist or anything like that, but he was very. You know, just they should just leave everybody alone. He even though we would take farm program payments. He'd be like, they shouldn't even have these things, you know, in the CRP programs to pay to take crop out of production, crop land and stuff. That was all. Like he would look at that. We like, that's just for lazy guys that don't want to work their land. And you want to be on the government goal instead. And the government really needs a whole bunch of. Properly did not be in production to support the prices. There's less supply. What? I mean, what happened to capitalists? So that's the start of it. And then I guess I would say also in. Like through high school and college, I just read everything. Yeah. And I'm kind of a student of humans. And like we're seeing it now, honestly, like. What I've always said is that the union needs to be held looser so that the federal spending can't be manipulated to. With people or states or parties, you know, Minnesota has got this gigantic fraud, which is probably going to be surpassed 10 fold by California's fraud. I mean, there's 273 hospices in a two square mile area of LA County with 18% of the hospice patients there. Yeah. Most of which have never died. Yeah. Ever. That's fraud. You know, and if that pot of money wasn't there and available to them, I just, I'm just local supporting local. Ultimately, and that's the ethic that I grew up with. I was in it from a town of 100 kids that merged with the next town of 100 kids. And you know, we went to the cafe because the owners of the cafe needed to have customers there. If we were going to still have a cafe. Yeah. That kind of thing. What are some of the underlying values that you feel like you pull out of. You know, we say a word like capitalism, we say a word like libertarianism. And those create pictures, I think, in people's minds that may or may not be related to what you think of in reality. So what is a value or a principle that you draw out of that for how you live your life every day? Yeah, I guess. So it's maximum freedom. You know, I want maximum freedom, maximum flourishing for humans. And I don't think it's accomplished by getting them hooked on government sugar of any sort. And like I, the sun was shining before you got here. It was like three o'clock. I was working on the computer in the back. And the sun was in my face because I positioned myself such. And I was like, can I take my shirt off and sit here working my computer, working on my emails and my sales call follow ups and just enjoy. That I could be free in this backyard of this office complex area. Nobody's probably going to come for another 40 minutes. I decided not to because I'm still pretty white and you know, not buff like you are. But that's the kind of freedom I liked if I'm not hurting anybody. And so I would say that's part of my how I exhibit my values. You know, I offered you a joint of homegrown before we came into the podcast here because I can, I grow one every year, not pretty much. And I'm a really good farmer and I get a ton and I gift a bunch away. And I like that. And I don't smoke that much. Not as much as I used to. 50 now, you know, and but I'd like that I couldn't do that if I want to. I always thought that that was weird that I would not. It was, I guess it was just almost for my core. Sure. If I'm honest because I was reading the same propaganda, you were newsweek and US news and world report and financial times and whatever else. Well, street journal. But I just, I'll be a wildly. If I was in the game of throwing kind of conversation. And it doesn't always make me popular, but I'm convicted by. Yeah, I think I think of it's actually an ecclesiastical term. It's a church term from the Middle Ages. Subsidiarity, which is a concept that responsibility and authority should be pushed down to the lowest possible level. Yes. Yes. And so that's one. I'm going to use my little path. Yeah. Well, because you're like a historian, right? Like that's your background is instead of business school. You went to ancient history school or something. Yeah, I was it. I was at the University of Oxford for a number of years studying history. Yeah. And was that your like your, I don't know if you identify as a libertarian all the way or a little bit leading that way in some respects. But was that still your history where you came to your values or where do you put yourself? Because you're also a water first guy, right? Yeah. Like I'm a tree hunter too. I have a very small carbon footprint, even though I'm a libertarian. And I, you know, just bought my wife a Porsche client because they kick ass, but they only get 14 miles to the gallon. But we don't drive that much. It's a fantastic car. It's great. I love it. Fantastic car. I bought it for her. But kind of for me. Yeah, I really like. I probably think about, you know, we talk about rights. I think probably that rights only exist to the extent that we have the ability to enforce them. Okay. Or not negatively enforce them. Yeah, I mean, you know, we say that we have freedom of speech and it's codified in a constitution. But that'll only last as long as the army doesn't take it away. Sure. Right. Yeah. And so I think having a people that are all in love with the same set of values is probably the best way to maintain. Are we heading the opposite in free direction, though? Yeah, it seems like it's kind of swinging back and forth. Right. Well, and like the, like there's a lot of people that hate Trump. And I'm not really a big fan. Yeah. I'm not libertarian enough for me, for sure. He's a little heavy handed in some of his policies and procedures. And the left created him. You know, we got into office in 2016 and they bombed him with all these fake news scandals and rushes of hoaxes and investigations and impeachment. And then 2020 happened and probably that was a pretty shady election. Yeah. And for him to say it was maybe a little shady that they like tried to put him in. They probably set him up with the January 6th thing. Yeah. Potentially like there is 275. Federal. And the crowd. Oh, yeah. You know, and so. And then they now he's this monster. And they let 15 or 20 million illegals in, including Venezuela, like literally being like, woohoo. We could empty all over a mental asylum. It was some of our prisons. Yeah, I've been, I've been reading the order patrol stats that were reported during the Biden administration. Right. Just to see kind of what that was. And they're a bit hard to get to. But even the Biden administration self reporting. You know, there's somewhere between eight and 15 million people. Right. And it was interesting. Like we wouldn't have to have eyes run around being dickheads if they hadn't done that. Well, 2.2 million paid cartels extra to get into the country without encountering order. So we were no revenue source that circumstances primarily military aged men from China and Russia. And this is and Saudi and Kuwait probably order patrol reporting this. Right. So it's a pretty. I think England's that way too. Yeah, they're 70% of the Muslims that they've brought into England are like military aged men with no families. That's why they're getting all rapey rapy with all their girls over there because they got no women anyway. We have family and live in England and. It's it's been a tough few years. Yeah, figure it's a different place to live. I'm sure they're creating the bridge government is creating borders now just within cities. Like they don't have a national border. It is the Muslim zone. And now they have special zones for all different people within the city. And I mean, it's an odd cultural miss. 15 minutes or you can't go into the city. And it's a mess. And that's what I'm saying is. Like. Trump's. I'm not a huge fan. But they kind of created the monster. They created the orange man bad by doing all this stuff. And it's like, well, they don't think that he's going to try to do something different there. So how would you apply local. The principles of local to something like that. Yeah, I think part of it is is getting our heads out of the national news kind of. And worry about what's going on in Fort Collins. What's the actual scope of illegal immigrations in Fort Collins? What can we do to help those people? Frankly, like I am not super opposed to try to find these terrible criminals and good amount of hair, especially the real bad guys. And I would probably, if my former employee Alma said, hey, there's this young couple from our church that are illegal and they're concerned they're going to be a target for ice. I would hide them in my guest bedroom, probably. Yeah. Right. So it's a complicated like I've far away from being single minded in that. So the biggest thing I think you have to do is just put up a financial wall between illegal people in the country and a voter wall. And they don't get any resources. You know, I'm sorry if you go to the emergency room. We're not going to help you. Wouldn't it be interesting for communities to say we would love to have 500 immigrants come to our town. We've built the finances. No charity. Yeah. Or what church is kind of could do. Churches. If you're getting trouble realities for children, I mean, there'd be all sorts of local nonprofits that could do that. Totally. And instead of a third of my taxes or half of my federal taxes, that money could be channeled here locally to solve the problems here. Yeah, let's do that. We're going to find work. We're going to find places to live. We're going to sponsor. And and we'll be responsible for the. Conduct. Yeah. And I get to pick them. Local responsibility. Like you could interview with me and you can apply to join our country. Yeah. Because we can be selective. Like everybody wants to come here. That's obvious. So we could be selective instead of being anti selective. As I travel around and I'm all over the country, I don't meet anyone who doesn't want to have a vibrant and celebratory immigration policy in the country. I mean, Joe and I posted 12 extensions. Yeah. I'm not a racist. You know, I love people from all shapes and walks of life. I find it fascinating. Yeah. And if they all move here, we're, how's things going to go up? You know, especially if they all moved to Fort Collins. But I do believe in intentional strategic. And I, yeah. So, so that's what I would say is like for me as a, as a relatively strong diet in the world of Italian. I mean, I don't think I'm going to see federal government restricted to the common defense. And I don't even think there should be block grants to states for Medicaid and stuff like that. Yeah. I think that that's just a ripe for corruption. So, tax the state to do the state stuff. Yeah. And if that includes Medicare, Medicaid, that's, that's fine. I don't think there should be a federal program for any of that stuff. That's not. I mean, the federal government's, they like to manipulate what the localities do by keeping holding a pot of money over their head. And so that would be the first biggest change. If we could all just celebrate local business and there wouldn't be that big trough of money to try to fight over. And then even in your space, you'd probably barely get any federal dollar contracts. Yeah, not many. Not many. More state and municipalities, you know, push the decisions to where they come from. And those decisions, like it's what I was food trucking catering. I used to joke that my favorite customers were those that were spending other people's money. Oh, yeah. And so whether it was a company picnic or a wedding or a mom and dad are paying for it or whatever. Yeah. Like it's easy to spend somebody else's money. Super easy. I love it. You know, that's one of the biggest things about working at a bank is an expense account that somebody else paid for. Yeah. And so that's why it's important for my own to have expense account. You know, and Ben's expense account and Lauren's expense account. Well, I think that at least a meaningful life. Yeah. Well, that's part. How do you ever know yourself? Yeah. So tell me tell me about what you just said there. That's part of the movement. So I've really felt like all along that local think tank could be and should be the kind of organization that. So both of our communities and empowers, local community businesses to do better. You know, in my years as a, as a banker, I saw some people running really great businesses. Others, not doing so good. Others being run by their business. And so building that. I think of the entrepreneur and the small business owner, especially as being the most free people in the world. In some ways. you went up to Bose minutes, spend a few days with your daughter, even though you were busy. You know, it doesn't mean you don't sacrifice other things as well, but you have those freedoms during our COVID crisis. You know, if you work for Facebook or HP, you couldn't be posted on your Facebook about, hey, here's why I'm not getting the vaccine even though I'm not at risk, right? You might get fired. You know, that's not free speech, really, if everybody's dependent, but the few voices were kind of independent people. Most of them were poor, that were pushing back or the truckers in Canada that they were being affected their livelihoods, you know. And so if everybody's beholden to an interest that has their financial strings attached, then free speech isn't really there either. When underlying value that I pull out of that is competence. It seems like what you're saying is that for local strengths or local freedoms to exist, individuals in that locality need to be highly competent. Have you read the little book Richest Man in Babylon? No. It's kind of a Christian-ish-oriented book. I suppose I came to it soon after I became a Christian, but the concept is that the King of Babylon wasn't really that rich in its own self, but the merchants of Babylon had all built up tremendous wealth. And so when the King of Babylon needed to pursue a war, he could tap into these very well-managed merchant class and fund his thing and go get some more stuff for us to merchant around. In America, I still remember when 9-11 happened, and I guess it was bush, was like everybody get out there and do consumer spending because that's what drives the economy. You know, why more cheap Chinese crap that we can finance and put it on our line of credit with China effectively. Well, that would be such a transactional economy, and so that's part of why, you know, look at your business. Probably your average wage is 150 to $200,000 a year. More than that, even. No, no, no, no, we're not more than that. But somewhere in that span, or mid one hundred, so those are great jobs. They work hard for it. But with a job like that, you can buy a home, you can raise four kids, you can put them to college even. You know, you can buy some rental properties and retire wealthy if you make smart financial decisions. And so companies like yours are to be celebrated in my opinion. They create a ton of revenue and opportunity for others right here locally. And in your case, a lot of your work is coming from outside of our specific region too. And so you're a little bit like a primary employer. Where, where even though it's service income, it's not manufacturing, but you're bringing in money from California and Florida and all of these places. And, you know, then you send some back and make another acquisition and put a little clump of money over here in Texas or Arizona or whatever. But it's still bringing critical mass, you know, what Northern Colorado doesn't have much of as well. There's a lot of young money here. There isn't that much old money. And so when really good ideas sprout, they have a hard time finding capital to get behind them. The capital they're finding, you know, the atmosphere, God bless them, they're doing good work. And, you know, a lot of their capital is government related now. And so then there's strings and expectations and cap on innovation a lot of times. Whereas if you get people that have become wealthy, God willing, you'll be one of those people in 15 years or something. And then you can invest in other really good ideas or technologies that save water that aren't in your sweet spot of your firm. But would allow humanity to preserve, conserve the only superimpot. You know, as Elon Musk says, solar energy is like 99.99% of the energy in the solar system. So eventually we're going to use a lot of that. You know, in the meantime, I still need cheap gas from my wife's Porsche. Because otherwise it's a constraint on what we can do, but we can move around. That's human, like I think a gallon of gasoline is something like 15 hours maybe of human work. I'd not heard that statistic before. That's how much work you can do. And so a gallon of gasoline is $3. And here in Northern Colorado, $20 an hour is kind of base level for labor. Yeah. And so if we didn't have gasoline powered machines, that's so much leverage on people who do stuff. And you could put a brain with brain cells and then put it match it with gasoline or diesel fuel in a big truck that moved dirt around. Like they come much your infrastructure projects. How many Mexicans would it take? How many hours to carve in some of those drainage systems and stuff you're designing? Oh, having to do that manually would be extraordinary than that of time. I've got a podcast guest coming on soon. Let's build the ant autonomous nanotractors. Oh, you need to meet her actually. You might want to invest in her thing. Because she's sending out a little AI electric battery powered little tractors that can do either one row or three rows either dig up specific little weeds or spray them with a little tiny drop of fertilizer or not fertilizer but pesticide. And it gets the effective labor rate down to four bucks an hour or something. That is extraordinary. So in these labor shortage farms in Arkansas Valley as where her family farm is. Now you've got a labor source that can allow you to keep if you can get enough water. Sure. They can allow you to keep your farming operation because we do need food. Absolutely. That's one thing we need more than anything just about more than housing. So I think I don't know we could sleep on a tent. If you want to export and create a movement out of the loco experience. Well, in loco think tank more specifically. What are those two three core values that inform your passion for building this here that you take to do that? Like I'm a big believer in compelling vision. Building meaningful pictures of what the future could look like. It offers an unconstrained palette for people to dream on. Yeah. But I do think that there are some like I don't know how you you boost loco think tank in a hierarchical top down authoritarian society. Because nobody cares what we're fighting against. Right. Nobody cares about loco. You're going to do it. You're told and get your stuff from Amazon. What would those values be? What would those core driving values that are going to attract that next generation or that regional leadership for you? So the values we have on the wall are be smart, be kind, be true. And so that all kind of speaks to what you should be. Like if you weren't all three of those things you wouldn't be finding these principles to be willing to sell their companies to. Yeah. So you got to be honest and up front upright. You got to be smart. Learn the things you don't know yet. Be kind. Yeah. Nobody wants to work for an asshole. Be local. Yeah. Be the change. Be you. Yeah. So the be local is wherever you're at be local. Fort Collins is a choice city. The choice city perhaps of Colorado, which is the choice state perhaps was at least, you know, of the nation. And there's a there's a former mayor that said where where Fort Collins goes, so goes Colorado and where Colorado goes, so goes nation. So if we can start a movement that celebrates the localness. Yeah. And that can be if you're in Johnstown or in Windsor, we've got waves of private equity companies buying up veterinary practices and HVAC companies and plumbing companies and they're keeping the names now. They're not integrating them and mass marketing them anymore. They're making it all sneaky style. Like this is Joe Bob's veterinary still even though it's owned by this huge corporate thing. Yeah. And and then they teach their people how to sell you all the stuff that you don't need for your pet. And and so if we can know that and if we can celebrate local wherever local is and so that's the the vision I would say is we want to have oh and that so be local be the change. So it's going to require you to roll up your sleeves and do stuff and be you. And I think to me that signifies there's room in this country in this network for all kinds of people that celebrate being here together. And so and one of our members has the run Windsor running organization that she organizes a dozen races across world county. Man, that's cool. And you know she's a community builder. It's awesome to have that kind of intentionality in that's her community. And if we could have a movement of like you saw business not managed well in your father's business frankly. And you made some mistakes. But if you could multiply the effects of your becoming good at running business. Take that now times 4,000 small and medium sized businesses around for Collins even or Northern Colorado at least maybe it's 10,000. So and and how much more fun are most of your people having working for Heinz 2.0 than they did before. We're having a lot of fun. You're making more money. You're making more impact. You're growing. You're hitting your targets. You're not worrying about payroll. And like it's life is way better. You know life is way better. When you're running a really competent business. And it's easier to get there if you're not trying to figure it out all by yourself. And for you, you were backed into that corner of sorts of things. I was too arrogant to seek help. You know it really was a you know your back was against the wall wiped out humbled humbled into kindness or humbled into change humility. Yeah. And I mean it was the best thing that ever happened probably. It's definitely been that is definitely true. I try to be pretty careful. I do my best not to lie. And for a number of years, I was not able to say, Oh, I'm just so thankful for all these hard. I can explain a lot of days that it's made me a better. All these bruises are. No, I'd much rather not learn things. Sure. And I'd run much rather that success be easy. And I'd much rather feel like I was getting what I deserved. And that would always be positive. But in the last probably year and a half, I'm like, you know what? It really is my attitude that this hard stuff has happened. Yeah. And I'm becoming the sort of person that can live through that and serve and be curious about what's coming. And did I share our model with you in our last conversation? I don't recall. Ask of your needs and share of your abundance. And tell me about that. Well, it's it's it's it's a play on the buildings right there. And well, a little bit each according to his correct maybe, but not intentionally. But ask of your needs is something that you showed that you had a hard time doing, you know, until times were desperate. And most people do especially successful entrepreneurs. It's hard for them to confess they have any needs. It's you know, you can't be a politician and actually change your mind. You know, that's right. Yeah. At any level virtually. Right. So asking of your needs, I need to understand this better before I make a decision. But don't ask of your wants. These are the libertarian. It becomes. Yeah. If you have real needs in the community, but that 500 immigrants that we want to sponsor as a city, you know, some some towns in Michigan and Pennsylvania that got like 9,000 immigrants on top of their 16,000 previous population. Yeah. That doesn't that's anti-community. Yeah. You know, so don't ask of your wants. I want to ask of your needs and be thoughtful. And then share of your abundance is basically, well, don't take of my abundance. Don't tax me into being generous. Let me develop a heart that and a balance sheet that allows me to be generous in my community, hopefully. Yeah. You know, in in the town that I love in the region that's allowed me to develop the relationships and skills. And so to me, it's like almost a whole philosophy of sorts baked inside that that one little phrase. And I don't know how it's hard for me to see why people should be opposed to that. I notion. I don't think I think that probably 70% of the people out there, if you talk to them, they're like, man, that would be great. How do we do it? And I think that it's, I think the world is a big scary place. And we feel like if we don't put a law or a constraint in place. People take advantage. Well, that's where you get back to that values driven. You become aligned. You know, and I'm not trying to, you know, I became a Christian later in life. I was 25, 26, 27. I'm not trying to be, I'm not a Christian nationalist. You know, I don't want to convert everybody to my faith. I want to have a big tent. But I think if we could have an intentional national conversation, you know, it's clear that like some of these Somali pirates felt like they were basically entitled to the fraud that they were able to get through the system. Oh, yeah. Like they don't have the same values as people that I grew up with, you know, North Dakota, or you know, the people even here in Fort Collins and the business community. I have a couple of buddies who are Russian. And when this whole Medicaid fraud and then the fraud Minneapolis came out, they said, oh, yeah, that's, and they set a Russian word. And I was like, all right, what does that mean? And they said, well, if you live in Russia, if you go to the coffee shop and you set out your Mac and your phone and you're working and you get up to use the restroom and you leave your computer there, it will be gone when you get back. And the other, like, and you would say, I deserve that. Right. There is no, there is no expectation that your things will be there when you leave. And in fact, what you should expect is the happy coincidence that you might be able to take, liberate somebody of something they've left behind. There is not the neighbor concept. Yes. Culturally that says, hey, would you watch my stuff? I don't even have to ask. Right. Would you mind watching my things? Yeah. It is seen as a valid, largely culturally approved, yeah, but thing that you will be liberated of your things if you do not watch them at all times. Yeah, context. So I think that could be part of our application to become an immigrant into a country. Yeah. Is to have questions like that that are like, you know, it's hard to flush that stuff out, I'm sure, right? What does it look like to be, but you have to do that? I mean, I see that through LinkedIn and through all of these things, are you hire someone to come in and help you build a vision for your company? It's all about what is a shared set of values? What is the values-based game we all agree to play together? And I think that the vast majority of Americans share that set of values. It's just, I think, hard to connect to through social media, you just driven public. Right. Well, in the stuff you see on social media is mostly the five percenters in the fringes. Oh, and bots from Iran. Totally. In North Korea. Russia, they're all trying to influence the game here. You know, I'm sure China was probably running ads in Venezuela. Move to America. The gates are open. You know, Guatemala too. Well, so is USAID? Totally. I mean, taxpayers were funding a ton. Yeah, through things like Catholic charities and Lutheran charities or Lutheran brotherhood things and stuff like that. Because for those organizations, you know, Catholic charities made a gobbah money facilitating immigration and they didn't have any more betting or screening process than anybody else. And I don't get, I don't get the sense they're all that connected to the Catholic Church either. They have the convenient Appalachia status. Yeah, that's right. So yeah, so to me, that's what a local movement is, and it's not, so it's a mindset. It's more like what was that philosopher, emperor, Marcus Aurelians, one of our Stoics. Yeah. It's kind of trying to have that kind of conversation. And you know, I might be pushing a rock up a hill in that regard, but I do think so that our business model that ask of your needs and share of your abundance is very relevant. Because our facilitators are people that have had success in business. They don't need a job. They also don't need nothing to do. Yeah. And so so that they don't get volunteer fatigue. I pay them to be facilitators of these chapters, but they don't make a lot of money because we don't charge a lot of money. So I can't pay them too much, but they get to be part of this kind of journey of getting better at running a business and being held accountable to do the things you say you're going to do. So you've given us a few distinctives. What are some of the core distinctives that you're interviewing for? How do you have two people that are successful in business? Okay. How do you weed one out? And what are the things that would cause you to weed a facilitator candidate out? What would be a core distinctive or a set of core distinctives, you say, oh my gosh, this person's not going to work or not going to work. And then here's a guy or gal or that perfect. They've just got loco think tanker written all over them. Yeah. Yeah. The biggest distinctive for both our facilitators and our membership is that they really love their community. Whether they're investing in their kids sports team and coaching their daughter in basketball or they're investing in some way, you know, whatever feels right to them. It could be through nonprofit board or engagement or different things, but they're they're here in our town or here in Windsor or in Greeley and they're investing engaged and they want to make it the best community they can. Yeah. So that's probably a distinctive not being the answer provider, but instead being a guide to the conversation of the Socratic method, you probably stated that in some of your philosophy classes and stuff, but so I was 35 or so before I realized that the smartest person in the room didn't have all the right answers, but you've probably known that for longer than I have, but probably not. Sometimes I fall into that too. And like if you just listen and hear people out. And so having that that combination of of confidence competence and limited ego and humility, I guess is probably the right way to say it and awareness. You know, some of the things I coach my facilitators out on is, you know, how to drought the quieter people in the group and to be even harder willing to tamp down the person that will dominate the conversation in the room, even if they got a lot of good stuff to share, you can't let it happen. Yeah. Right. And so it's more about, I guess, probably emotional intelligence and community connectedness or two of the big things that are identifiers. So they're going to be people that are distinguished by their lack of need to get something from their group. They don't need anything from their group. Some of the members you mean? Yeah, if you're a facilitator, you don't need to feed the ego and you don't need to feed the bank account. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They should want to do it for volunteer. Yeah. Yeah. But like I know the volunteer fatigue will set in and I want them to know they're getting paid for this. So I have some expectation about how they're delivering the goods. But yeah, I would say that's true. And they you know, when you're a steward of your business, you want it to be the healthiest organization that you can make it be. Yeah. And the same thing is the case with with a chapter of local. They think it they get healthier and sicker sometimes the motivation level and and other seasons. They're like dang, you know, eight out of the 10 of our members are having their best year ever and they're hitting their goals and they're spending more time with their kids and their strong relationships. And so we're doing something good. Yeah. And they're comfortable being authentic and transparent in a room. Not easy. You know, do people value things that doesn't cost something or doesn't pay something? Well, our members pay to be in the group and the facilitators get paid, you know, so they get paid more when they have more members. But no, I don't I don't think so sometimes. That was I was going to do this for free when I first started local think tank and my buddy was like, you can't like your attendance is going to be terrible. If people don't pay for it, they're not going to be invested in attending. And then you'll be missing brains from the room and that's, you know, part of the equation. And that's the other thing is we're I like to say we're an excellence manufacturing center, not a rehab. Yeah, yeah. So we're not really there to take broken businesses and fix them. We can give you some resources, but if you're going to stick up half the groups time and that doesn't mean it's a it's a exclusive club. You better have three solid years of growth before you can be a member. Yeah, you got to bring something to the sauce is what it amounts to. Even if you're missing some some tools from the kit too. Well, I've been pretty involved with some rehab and recovery stuff the last few years. Okay. And the people that I'm getting to know and spending time with in that arena that are working the plan and sticking with the plan, it costs them something. So I think even in successful rehab or you look in at European countries that have been dealing with you know, extraordinary addiction and crime and homelessness issues. Right. We often perceive that they're very open and free. Successful countries have said, listen, we want to take really good care of you. We want to provide jobs and housing and all those things, but you need to go into rehab. And if you don't then you got to go to jail. And talking and seeing some of the ways they operate, they're like, how can you not? How do you how can you treat people the way we do? And call that protecting a person's agency or it's wild. So there's something about if you're not sacrificing something, if you're not paying for something in some way, you're not sure it has meaning. If you insulate people from the consequences of their actions, it's not a good recipe, you know, in some fashion. And everybody needs a friend once in a while. Absolutely. Well, it seems to make sense to the way that you've built that model. I mean, you hinted at it being free at some point. I'm like, I don't know that people pay attention when it's free. No, it wouldn't work. And thankfully I listened to people around me. That's one of my special talents is both identifying people with special talents and listening to them. So you're, I noticed when I, I don't know if it was four or five years ago, when I started seeing your name, you know, I saw it once and then it's sort of like that car. Once you start looking for that car, then you just see the day when I'm super, everybody else got a Subaru too. Yeah, I just, I started to see you everywhere. Have you always been a connector involved all over or did that start after you left the bank and started really focusing on this? I would say I was always a connector anyway. No, I don't, I don't need much. I just need to know who's doing what everywhere in our region. Yeah, yeah. And to make connections of value. But obviously I had a job to do at the bank, you know, but I did have, I had a thing called Old Town Tuesdays. Yeah. And the bank would buy a pizza once a month at Cooper Smith's and we would have pool table and ping pong table that was included. If you bought a pizza, you got a free hour. Yeah. And so we would hang out and play ping pong and pool and like just connect, not now work really. But the tenants of the group were kind of some of those libertarian principles like I'm the better designer for my business than the government is. You know, some of those elements, I joked that I had a philosophy kind of built in my mind and then I'd learned about Ron Paul. And I was like, oh yeah, what that guy said. And so that was already, I was kind of commuting back, you know, kind of values. And it's I shouldn't like, it's a lot more normal to think the way I do in North Dakota where I'm from. Yeah. So I didn't come up with it. I imported it from North Dakota more in some respects, but then saw a highly collaborative, highly encouraging, highly connective community here in Fort Collins that could take those values and really become something if they let. I suppose it's the right way to say it. Like even, even you, like why is, and you said because we're in Colorado was part of why Heinz is a market leader in the space because it's, you know, having had to hustle and navigate tough regulations like my friend and that wasn't the oil field business and moved into regular construction stuff. It's like, I should, this is easy compared to doing the oil field stuff that timelines are so generous. All the regulations is so easy comparatively. So, so same thing here in that business kind of like what regulatory hurdles do you face as a business? Not that many specifically, but what you do is help your customers navigate regulatory hurdles. We do. I think that the largest regulatory hurdles that we face, not, I mean, Colorado water laws is pretty insane and pretty brilliant. Every drop of water belongs to somebody downstream. Right. And the way that that was created and the way that it is managed for so long is there's a little bit of genius there. Well, it wasn't one person either. It was a collective. Oh, absolutely. Of court decisions, mostly. Absolutely. And just hashing through the specifics of how we're going to get water on that piece of ground and maintain stream flows. And so big challenges with population change and all of those sorts of things. Well, you know, we're going through another big rehash of that. What's kind of unique is the the places where we're working municipalities are really eager to find ways to do that because they're not sure how they're going to meet water demands five years from now. Right. People who are building projects or who own projects and want to do better, they're incentivized to do so if they can reduce cost if they can figure out how to manage their projects less reactively, more professionally. Yeah. So it is a pretty unique. So you've got a solid value proposition at every stage. Yeah. And I think it's driven one by we just happen to be alive during this time. And then I am. I hate when things don't work properly. Yeah. By my own definition. And so most of how we've built the company so far is just we've built process so that I don't have to do annoying things. Yeah. Things that are annoying to me. Yeah. And so now we're doing we're going through all those processes and be like, does this still make sense? Yeah. I don't do the process anymore. Can we make it better, faster, smoother for you? Do you want to write what things are annoying to you in your process? No. Yeah. And how do we make that a better world so that six months from now you're like, man, this is pretty phenomenal. I built my role. Yeah. Yeah. And we're doing that at every level in the company, every role, every level. And it's like it's part of our business acumen training. Yeah. Because I don't like the idea of asking people to do things that I wouldn't be pleased to do. Right. Or in a context that I wouldn't be able to do. Almost always watch the dishes here. It looks like tick. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's what I pay my staff more than I pay me. Well, that's really cool. Well, I mean, is it, or is it pathetic? We've all done that. It takes money to have good help. We've all done that around here. We have all done that. I don't know. Is that clock pretty close to accurate? I've got my foods there. Just want to be mindful. And Ben, do you have a hard stop octopus? You don't have a hard stop. Okay. What do we want to get into next? Well, I think we might only have like 20 minutes. It's six. It's five to six. Five to six. Then I think we should jump into the local experiences pretty soon. Because we're kind of accustomed that we close with local experiences. I love it. And so you can even just pose that question. Hey, Kurt, here's the local experience. Are you ready for us? All right. I think we're, yeah, octopus octopus. So Kurt, we're running short on time. We're getting close to the end here. We've almost got two hours here in the back. We should probably be doing four hours next time maybe. We're just going to go. But we always like to close here at the local experience with a question to you. What is a local experience? What's a crazy experience that you've had in your life you want to tell us about? I, when I told my team that you wanted to interview me instead, we kind of talked about what would be the right one experience to share. And so instead of that, I came up with a list and I haven't written here on our appointments today. So it's the top five times I've just about killed my wife and me. Let's hear it in a crazy story. And some are with motorcycles. You rode your motorcycle here today. We should go for a ride sometime. And it's a marvelous way to go. Okay, so the first, these are chronological. Before I was engaged to Jill, we did a put a river float. It went high. It was probably June, early June. And I was broke and I didn't buy a river tube like I should have in a inner tube. I bought like a $20 Walmart raft because I wanted to be on the same boat as my cute new girlfriend. Yeah. And so we were floating down the river, hitting some rocks and stuff. Pretty soon this thing is losing air. Pretty significantly. We've got a few beers, no life jackets. And on one, so we were sitting on the edges of it to keep from hitting the rocks too much because we didn't have enough air to keep us off the rocks enough. So on one section, Jill got bounced off of the boat. Like it hit her, bounced her off. And she's 4 foot 11, not a strong swimmer. And she was severely panicked. And I floated the raft for maybe 10 seconds, jumped off, set myself up to catch her. And she bolded me over and then we were both bobbin for a while. And somehow, maybe 15 seconds down the stream, I was able to like grab us and stop us in what was way steep water to me. Oh yeah. So I don't know adrenaline. I'm going to credit it with. But I got us stopped and got us over to the land, which happened to be an island. We had to cross the river again one more time to get to the shore and then walk back to where we were rafting down to. So that was the first time. The next one was engineer pass in a Jeep Cherokee 88 non ABS. And I didn't have it in low range. And it was 32 degrees and like get out of the vehicle and fall down because it's so slippery. Oh yeah. You've probably experienced those kind of conditions before. I've been through engineer a few times. So we were way, way, way above treeline. And there was a 270 degree turn that we were going down and I lost traction and can't break because you'll just slide off the edge. And so I had to accelerate and drift through this 270 degree curve, like right up on the lip all the way around the curve. My hair is standing up on my end. Yeah, that was, I told her a few years later how close we were to. Yeah, to 2000 foot drop before we started in the trees. So that was number two. We were that was on our first year anniversary trip. Deckers on a BMW K 1100. Not as close to death, probably severe injury, but I had a we were coming back from camping and flagstaff. Yeah. And got that K 1100. No sand the whole way until this one corner was full of it. And the back end was all the way like even with me. So like three big fish tails and then a couple of little wiggles and came out of it inside of the road. Yeah, I don't know. It was like we didn't crash. Well, it still rides with me. Yellowstone on a BMW K 1200. Bison, right along the Yellowstone River. There was a huge 30 foot embankment, 30 degree 30 foot or 50 60 foot embankment on a right. And Jill noticed at first a bison running to get a drink of water apparently because he was on a T-bone course with us in a big line of traffic coming down the embankment. And I swerved and accelerated, which I think caused him to hear me and he turned and 90 degree turn and went this way from closer than me and you away. Oh my god. Like his head was that close. It was right coming right at us and just turned. And then finally also probably not near death but risk canyon on the BMW R 75 slash six hit like a 200 yard ice. Like went up putter canyon down wrist and then all of a sudden we went into the shady spot. And it was the first ice we'd seen and just had to like you know don't make any sudden movements. Just the motorcycle wants to stay vertical. Oh yeah. It's not easy to keep it on ice. No, you just got to kind of not do anything really much but pay attention to what vertical is. How long have you guys been married? Be 23 years in May. That is wild. So you're just we're just a couple of years ahead of you guys. Yeah. I think we're 25 this summer. And most of that's a before I became a entrepreneur. I quit putting her through near death experiences. After I took her out of the upper middle class and brought us into entrepreneurship. Yeah, it's been fun. That's cool. I love it. You want to share a local experience with our listeners? Crazy experience. Been a motorcycle related one. We got a few of those. I um I lived in Italy for about a year and a half. Okay. When I was 20, 20 and 21. Okay. And I worked so I had been in college at CSU at a liberal arts school and I took three years off. I didn't really know what I wanted to do. Okay. And so I worked as a bouncer and why Italy? I had met a professor at college who's an expat in Florence. And he just said we had a great time talking philosophy art and I modeled for his drawing classes. Okay. And that was my on campus job that paid back. I had a full ride scholarship my first year. But I had to work eight hours a week. And I spent an hour and a half in the cafeteria and never ever went back. Yeah. And so I found this job for the art department and and so modeled for the art department. And he said hey if you're ever in Italy and want a job, call me. Okay. And so a couple years later, I called them up and said hey, I'm coming to Italy. And he said great. I think we'll have some students by the time you get here. He was before he passed, he was the world's leading expert in Rembrandt and phenomenal painter, phenomenal art historian. And he just had a small mentorship program for four to six students on a three year track. And he was training classically trained. And so I went, I got free room and utilities in exchange for modeling for the students. And then I got about 12 bucks an hour. Really ripped already then too. I was the only non-chubby model in Italy at the time. Okay. And I know that because the number of oftentimes you'd have a a person of advanced girth come in and model. And and the reason I figured out that there was a lack of fit people doing that is a lot of people wanted to draw. You were in high demand. Yeah. And so but I'd grown up, you know, high sense of justice is a fighter my whole life. Okay. Varsity box or in college and that sort of thing. Okay. And Italy, it's a little wild. It's a little crazy. And I whipped my neighborhood into shape. So I knew where all of the pit, pit pockets worked. I knew where all the personatures lived and worked. I had that kind of figured out in the first month or two. Interesting. And one night we're and you're you're justice enforcer level is way higher than mine. I mean, I'm not personality, but I don't work as hard of it. I mean, and I don't know if it's still this way, but the Mediterranean was pretty rapy when I lived there. So if you're a young lady on a train, someone's going to pull their pants down and show you something on the train. Oh, man. And a lot of saw a lot of, you know, young students over get drunk, get raped in an alley that I think. So I just went to work on that. And one night, a couple of guys, one of the ways this was being done is you're on a motorcycle, two guys on a motorcycle and they'll drive past a crowd of people and rip a purse off someone's shoulder and take off. And so I was walking home from dinner one evening, a couple of guys stole the purse from what ended up being an American girl group of study abroad students. And so I started sprinting down this alley after the guy. And about a quarter of a mile up, you know, three, four hundred yards up, they had stopped and we're looking in the purse far enough up that the wall didn't even know you're following me up. No idea. They saw me coming when I made the 100 yards out. Right. Jump on the motorcycle, try to start it. The second guy just gets in the alley and he's ready to, he's ready to fight me. Okay. And I ran around him quickly, just dodged past his buddies taking off on the motorcycle and I get a hold of his collar. And I can't pull him off the motorcycle. So I jumped on. Okay. And so he's driving down this alley, you know, 30 miles an hour or something like that on a little like a 250 or a street bike. And so I grabbed him and tightened up on him and he's trying to punch me, trying to hit me. I can feel the purse in his jacket. And so I tightened down on his throat and arm and he started to slow down. He can't control the bike. So he hits a car, swears the other direction. I pulled the purse out of his jacket and slid off the back and he crashed the motorcycle. Oh wow. And turned around. His buddy came around the corner and and so I just I'm I'm ready to go. I've been fighting people for weeks in this town. And he runs away and I turned around and you know, hey, do you do you want some? Do we need to do something about this or we're just going to just going to go and and by the way, find it. And I saw these guys for another year and a half. You know, you'd see him in bars, you'd see him in restaurants and stuff. But there was a level of really healthy respect that existed between us from that point on. It's really interesting. And interested wildly, the girl who had her purse stolen was the sorority sister of a young lady, I grew up with in Tennessee before we moved to Colorado. Oh, so small world. I thought you told me it was like the the became your wife. We got married. No, no, no, no, not earlier. Yeah, but yeah, the world was a much more fighting place, you know, 15, 20 years ago. Yeah, yeah, I don't. It wasn't in North Dakota really. No, no, I don't never really had a fighty. That's probably good season. Well, look at me. Yeah, it's probably good. I probably am suffering from all sorts of trauma and bullying and crap like that. Do you talk to a therapist about some of that? No, I'm never going to do it. Never? Oh, no, no. I definitely, I definitely talk it all out. I definitely don't get all the good podcasts and stuff like that. Yeah. Anything else you'd like to gather from me over here? Man, this is great. Like to share water first, I guess, Hinesink.com. Yeah, Hinesink.com is a fun place to go. Interesting to talk through water first stuff. And we do a bunch of work with whether it's paid or unpaid or whatever with developers, cities, architects, landscape architects, just how do we solve this water picture? There's a ton of waste to eliminate. We can eliminate it locally. And then you still get to have the kind of world that you want to live in that has plants that create oxygen and pollution out of the end. Yeah. You don't have to astroturf and rock the world around you. You know what they do is there's a really big federal subsidy for water savings. No, I know they don't. No way to dream is a lot. You're adding value. You're creating it already. No reason to turn it into graft. Yeah, I love it. Local needs that though. We do subsidy. No, playbook, the local playbook that helps small localities jump start and build their groups. Yeah. Yeah, that's ultimately such a cool. What needs to be such a cool thing to do. And that develops more of a it's less about you're creating a cosmopolitan vision for the world. Where individuals are creating successful, culturally unique ways to solve problems. Enterprise ecosystems. Yes. I know. And that was the beauty of cosmopolitanism. That is not multicultural. That's multicultural is our version of diversity today which is everyone must think the same thing but have different skin colors that you must think the same thing. Right. No diversity of thought, no diversity of approach. Cosmopolitan is the way to go. And we're encouraged to have this variation in what you bring to the sauce. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And you be you. Absolutely. Yeah. And be the best part of you. Yeah. Cosmopolitanism is okay with the idea that you're inadequate today but man, you could be much better tomorrow. Yeah. Grow. Yeah. There's no reason to grow if you're perfect the way you are today. None of us are perfect the way we are today. No. We're enough. Yeah. Right. Yeah. But we're not. Yeah. You're sufficient. You're awesome. You're just starting the adventure of your life. Yeah. And if you don't need to grow, there's no reason for an adventure. And if there's no reason for an adventure, not a whole lot of meaning in life. Right. Yeah. I was talking about how if Tesla robots just do everything for us and not too long and we don't have to do nothing. Like I'll be like, hey, who wants to go home instead a small community in Alaska with me. Yeah. Like in the Boondocks where we can be true Renaissance people and figure out how to build a cabin. Oh, yeah. Because I'd rather do that. I think most of us would. I think most people want to. Okay. I think everyone puts the phone down. It's on. And we, I mean, we've got a number of people that we've hired that are young people. Yeah. Work their butts off. Yeah. Desperate for coaching. Desperate for someone to I don't need desperate. They eager, eager to for someone to be like, you're not worth a whole lot right now. But man, that's okay. Let's get to work. Yeah. Let's go, let's go be worth something. If I was, I'm 48, I'm not worth a lot as a 65 year old today. And there's a great example of this is Ken Mitchell, who's a guy who lives here in town. Ken is somewhere north of 60. Okay. Got the energy of a 20 year old. He's a land man. Oh, and if you don't follow him on LinkedIn, do I will because that guy, the way he shares experiences and the way he connects with people and the way he ties all of his experiences to the political, social, business related challenges of today, the number of people he mentors is so compelling and so it's professionally inspiring and it's tender and it's it's it's beautiful. You don't tell stories like that. I'd be making it up today. I'm incompetent to do what Ken does. Yeah. I'm not enough. I'm an adequate to that task. I'm getting better at being a father to a 19 year old, right? Yeah. But 10 years ago, what a dumbass. So this idea that that were enough is kind of a red hair and being afraid or ashamed of figuring out how inadequate we are for the challenges of tomorrow, what an awesome thing to run toward. And I think young people know that no matter what we tell them, there is a world with big problems that they are not ready to solve yet and they need to get to work. That's freedom prize really. Baby. Let's let's go. Solving problems to make some money. Yeah. All right. Thank you, Kurt. Thanks for being here. Godspeed. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Logo Experience Podcast, proudly produced and sponsored by Logo Think Tank, Colorado's premier peer advisory organization. This is your producer, Ava Menus, to find all of our episodes or nominate a future guest, check out our website at thelogoexperience.com. You can also find us on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, X.com, and LinkedIn at the Logo Experience. To support the show, be sure to follow, subscribe, and share. Until next time, stay Logo.