EXPERIENCE 28 | Getting Real with RealWare Founder & CEO Ali Davachi

Welcome to the LOCO Experience Podcast with LOCO Think Tank Founder Kurt Bear. Listen in as Kurt digs deep into the business and life stories of business owners and thought leaders at different stages of growth from all walks of life. Launching and growing anything can be a crazy experience, so expand your thinking and level up your understanding of what it takes to find success in the world of free enterprise. Welcome back to the LOCO Experience Podcast. This is your host Kurt Bear and I'm here today with Oli Devachi and Oli is the CEO of Real Wear and Oli and I connected, oh gosh, probably almost a year ago now and I was just really intrigued by his journey, his heart for serving and creating and I thought we would have him on here to just tell you his business journey and a little bit about Real Wear and himself. So Oli, why don't you just start us off and describe Real Wear and your role within? Sure, thanks Kurt. So I'm CEO of Real Wear. Real Wear is a what we call a smart SaaS company. We build platforms and then manage them for people. Everything from large Fortune 500 down to startups, all different industries. We like to say we focus on our clients, not what they do. And we were formed in 1999 so we're an old school tech company at this point we've been around for a while and it's been a long journey as you say, sort of the journey. It started as a pure consulting vehicle for myself after a couple of exits and as I kept doing work for people, they kept asking me to do more and more and more and I'm just me and it's just me, right? And then it was more than me and then it was more than me and them and it was more than me and them and them and now here we are with the global workforce. We have people in every continent except Asia. We have multiple teams, we have development teams, we have ops teams, we have a lot of cloud focused work. We were 100% in our own data centers which we built until about two years ago where we made the move to Azure. But yeah, I mean at the end we're a tech company but we don't behave like a tech company. We're not about fear, uncertainty, doubt, we're about outcomes, goals, success, the possible. We're about the possible. What do you want to achieve and we'll help you get there. And it's really as a service business, right? Because you're building and managing and maintaining these things for all these others. Correct. So you don't have like this product, you're not Twitter, Harry Trial, this new product. I'm sure you have some base stuff though that you use for lots of people. Yeah, so we are, we have our own intellectual property that we built out over 20 years, lots of experience. So every time we find some new twist or wrinkle, we build it into the product, we build it into the framework and then we're able to then execute for clients much faster. Usually a large scale implementation that let's say let's just use a benchmark of a year, it'll take us 90 days. Well, because we're not building out everything. All we have to do is focus on those elements of your business that are your distinct value, not all the other, you know, back office elements that don't really add to what you're doing. So you become kind of a hub of best practices and techniques and fancy little tools that you've built to be efficient at things. Yeah, along with the strategy, along with the knowledge. So it's never we're never, here's the product, here's the framework, here's the requirements. Now we just go off and do our thing. We dive in and we really want to understand why do customers interact with you? Why do they choose you? What is that real value you're delivering to them? And how do we align that with what we're trying to do for you? So make sure that whatever we build reinforces and strengthens that, not just because or as an extra. The reason we interact with customers, our customers is to help them interact better or drive more value to their customers. That is our core competency and our mission statement is put users back in control. Like many tech, many, many tech companies, they want you to rely on them, you know, the current SaaS model that you that everybody participates in. Really, you take all of your eggs and put them in a basket, but guess who's also holding all the risks still? You, not the SaaS company, right? So you've put all that trusted those companies and then they're still pushing all the risk down to you. And unfortunately, we've seen so many, we've coined the term don't get SaaSed really because and SaaS is a four-letter word, right? Because we've seen so many organizations invest heavily in their SaaS platforms and their SaaS partnerships and then the SaaS company makes a right turn and leaves them behind. Sorry, we no longer support that element of our thing. Exactly. Interesting. So it sounds like probably a lot of real long-term relationships with your clients. Absolutely. We've been around for 20 years and some of our clients have been around that entire time. Yeah. Can you describe some of the clients? Like, help me figure out like a problem and a solution for somebody, something that people can understand that sure. One of the things that we do a lot of is e-business, e-commerce, e-business. So digital transformation where we're building platforms that are helping the organization do what we call meet the customer where they are. So as B2C businesses and the consumer behavior changes, a lot of businesses try to maintain their current communication mechanisms or current interaction mechanisms and that cost customer friction, right? Customers, for example, don't want to listen to voicemail. They don't want to go online. They want to go to a website. This was early days, right? They wanted to be able to look at their account information. No, no, you got to call us for that. All of these things. So we built an entire suite of tools to help our customers interact with their customers where the customer is securely, reliably meeting compliance, for example, one of our largest customers as a Fortune 500 healthcare company. Lots of compliance issues, lots of regulatory issues. We built that platform around all in that universe for them based on our technology. But also with an immense amount of strategic view to make sure that we're not just building tools to build tools. We're not just implementing technology to implement technology. We're putting it in place because it will improve the customer experience. Engagement will go up. They will be happier. They'll have more access. And you'll be able to see as a customer how your customer wants to work with you. I'm imagining early internet things and stuff where if you've got any problems, call us. Here's the number. Instead of a chat person and maybe a solution there where they've got this plan to staff it and then what's the next acceleration point if you're still having problems or whatever. Exactly. Or healthcare like you described where you want to give them as much information as they want as they desire, but you can't give them more than is legally afforded by that channel or whatever. So you got to put in all that smart correct. Correct. Very interesting. So how did how did realware get like you mentioned a couple of exits and things like that. But what was was was your prior companies that was also what you did kind of was develop that knowledge. So realware company. Yeah. So realware. So the two prior companies, one, both were B2C companies. They were not B2B. So realware is primarily B2B. And so they were B2C companies in the internet space. One was a dial up internet provider that was I sold to a cable company and the other was a hardware company like Adele, which focused on federal and education. And we rolled that out to roll that up into another large organization. So realware came out. I started my first business. Let's go there. Let's do that. Let me let me back a second because I think where did you come from anyway? I think we need to step back a couple. So I originally was a was going to be a physician. My father is a physician. I was going to be a physician. I was just that's what I knew a doctor. Thank you. I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing. And that was my plan. And I went off to school in an accelerated program. And after a year, I left and I said, Oh, my Lord, what am I doing? This is so boring. Doesn't move fast enough. I don't think I could do this. Yeah, you can't make like you can't really unfortunately, as a practitioner, innovation still because of all the regular, you know, all the reasonable regulatory requirements. So you just can't move quickly. And I had been tinkering with technology from the age of seven or eight. I'd been lucky enough to be able to go to bookstores and pick up whatever books I could get and start reading about circuits. And it was key. To me, it was very similar to physiology in the beginning. It was simple. It was very basic, you know, looking at CPUs and resistors and the flow of electricity and doing all these things. So I started building circuits at home. You know, here I am seven or eight years old with lead and acid. And my parents have no idea what I'm doing and circuit boards and burning my fingers and inhaling all that. Maybe that's how this all came up. Maybe. So yeah, taking the TV apart, putting it exactly like I, they would buy me electronics gifts. And the first thing I would do is take them apart. And then they would be amazed that they were back working again. They were always nervous. Like is he going to be able to get this working? So anyway, short, long story short, I went to med school. And where is this by the way? I grew up in New York. Okay. I'm actually no outside in New York in Orange County. So about an hour and a half north of Manhattan. Okay. Very similar actually to to Boulder County, where I live now, mostly rural, but you know, little pockets of say my urban area. Yeah, exactly. So what do we always do school? Yeah, it's fine. So I'm just trying to figure what the, so the school, I left. So after that, I came back home. I talked, spoke to my parents. I said, this is not what I want to do. I don't know what I want to do. I'm going to take time off, right? I'm going to take a year off. And I did every job you could imagine. I was, I worked as a landscaper. I worked waiting tables. I was, you know, I did all these things. And then the last thing I did was I ended up working in an audio high end audio shop. And there I was able to put my electronic skills together, you know, designing audio systems, you know, tuning rooms, building out, resistor, you know, crossovers and audio manipulation all by hand. And I really enjoyed that. I really enjoyed working with my hands, you know, taking the analytical part, you know, doing the mental part of it and then applying it to the physical world. Yeah. And then you get this experience at the end of it all. Exactly. You get to see it, right? It's done. It works. And if you make a mistake, nobody dies. So that was a nice benefit. So I finished all that and decided, you know, I didn't, still after that year, I didn't know if I wanted to go back to school or not. And so again, I told my parents that they weren't happy about that. I said, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to start my own business. And I had saved up, I don't know, $1,500 enough at that time to rent a one room office and build a single white box PC. Okay. And even back then, my objective was, you know, when you walked into a computer store in the late 80s, early 90s, they gave you three boxes and nothing to make it work. It was this as if you bought a toaster and it had no lever, right? They still had to go get something else to make it work. So my pitch and my unique proposition at that time, it was make it useful. Back even then, it was put the user backing control, give them a computer that they can actually turn it on. And it's actually going to do something positive for them, not just the blinking cursor because, you know, back in those days, you booted it up and you got a blinking cursor. And that was a pre window, right? Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. I've old enough to actually see that. Yeah. All right. So there you go. Most of our listeners, I'm sure aren't. Okay. Well, that's what it was like, guys. It wasn't like a phone today, right? Totally. So we sold the first computer and I sold it and then I was able to make it up, build another one and then another one and a so forth. And then then I got the idea, you know what? This thing needs actual software. So we wrote, I started writing software that we included. We wrote a word pro. I wrote a word processor. I wrote a database. I wrote a recipe thing. I so now when you bought one, a peak computer, which was the name of the company, you had not a blinking cursor, but a menu came up and you can make choices and then you could start using the computer and then we started doing classes and we would do in-home and we would deliver and all the things that nobody else was doing. So that started the journey and then we moved into education. We moved into the military. Well, there's always this combination. Foxes plus some software is useful. Exactly. And actually with IBM, we were the only non-IBMPS2 certified to run OS2 because I wrote all the drivers to get certified. Nobody else would take the time. And that was a big, that was like a niche that we ended up exploiting. And that's how we ended up selling because there were, the growth was explosive and the only option was to go out. You could buy three of ours for one of IBM's at that time. Wow. Wow. You had done this certification element. Correct. And that's why people where IBM would not allow anyone to run on their TwinX networks unless you had a certified driver. So let's talk about that business story just a little bit more before we leave it behind. But so talk to me about scaling. Like it was just you in this one room office, then you're building another one, another one, another one, and then that first hire is who and how? So the first hire was someone to help me with sales actually. Okay. So I was doing all the building and the buying and the selling and everything else. And we started to get a little bit of a name. So people were showing up in our office. So it was more of someone that could handle those clients or possible clients, those prospects. Yeah. Because again, things were just taking off. And then you can't be like needy bit of computing in the back and go so disengaging. Exactly. Yeah. And we were getting to the point that I didn't have enough time to build all the machines we were selling. So I needed to get some and take care of all the other things. So a salesperson was the first thing. Front office, salesperson. Yeah. I say that front office, but we literally had like a front room and a closet. Right. So entry door, a back door. Yeah. It wasn't my garage, but it was pretty close. Right. And then we had a bigger garage. You probably would have put it in your garage. That's right. That's right. And then we moved to another location, which was more showroom focused. So we could, you know, build something. Yes. At this point, we had gotten to the point of everyone in the area knew who we were. And did you have products? Like you had four different. Correct. Yes. We had pre-made machine. Yeah. We were basically modeling ourselves after IBM. Yeah. You know, we were, we had low-end, mid-end, high-end. We had customizations. We were doing enterprise work. We were doing networking at that time. We were doing servers. We were doing sizing and strategic consulting still back then because, you know, really nobody knew, you know, when you got it, when you installed a Novel network in the 90s, it came in a box with about 50 floppy disks in it. I mean, if you ever did that, you know how troublesome it was. You could get to the very last and then have to start all over again. Right. So we did a lot of that kind of work and training in the showroom as well. We did classes for free for everybody. Yeah. We did all that kind of work. Because it was always trying to educate, educate, educate, educate, let people know what it is. Yeah. That's fine. I have it. Same thing in Longbot. No worries. So it scales. You're hiring more salespeople to manage a showroom and more builders, probably eventually to keep up with that demand. And like, what was the company like when the first whispers of acquisition came along? So old were you by that time? So I was actually 19 when I started it. Okay. And I sold it in 23, 24. It's a long time ago now. Right. So it was about a four and a half year from start to finish, which is about right. You know, I think five years is good. If your plan is to get out, if your plan is your business is your product. Yeah. I think a three to five year window is a good window. Okay. I'm seven years in right now. Seven years. Yeah. Well, is that is your plan to exit or is your plan? No. Well, see, that's different. My plan was exit. My plan was fair enough. See, real where I'm in 20 years, it hasn't been my objective is not an exit would be aware. But with magic carpet and peak, it was always to move on to something else. So let's talk about that. Like, you plan to sell and then did you like put a put a flyer in the mail or did something people call around you? No, we were beating them pretty regularly. We were beating them in the big deals. Like, nobody really cared about retail at that time, even though we were doing really well in retail, nobody really cared. Everyone was pawning it off to partners. You know, you had the computer shop and you had all these different, you know, the magazine that you could do, you know, you could use for self-defense computer shopper, you know, the beat-a-seat that the direct consumer part of PC sales was not something that the big guys were really interested. Right, right. Probably Radio Shack was a big thing right then. Yeah, I think it was remember Packard Bell, Packard Bell, Gateway. Those guys were the ones dominating that space. Gotcha. Well, we did differently, though, as we took all the sensibility that we had working with people every day, face to face, and we applied it to our business approach, right? Yeah, your government agency that wants to have 27 computers or 127 or whatever, we want them to have just that same easy user experience right from the start as everybody else. Exactly. We would even do custom builds. They could send us their software, we would pre-install for them, set everything up exactly the way their IT team wanted it, and everything would show up, you plug it in, you're good to go. So that was our secret sauce, really. Is that personalization, that customization, that attention to detail? And so we started winning more and more education. We started winning more and more government. We started winning federal military contracts. I mean, here's this little company in Orange County, New York, and we're competing with and beating the big guys, the quote-unquote big guys. And that's when they started to realize, okay, we need to take these guys out. That's exactly the end. That's what they did. They didn't change what they were doing. They just took us out of the equation. And so now you're 24-year-old guy walking around with a pretty big pocket full of money by my guess. Started another company. And that was a magic carpet. Magic carpet. Yeah, so that was an internet company that provided dial-up access. And the idea there was, again, nobody knew what the internet was in, you know, 93, 94. How do you use it? What is it for? Yeah, exactly. So we built our own software so that, you know, that you could get it up and running very quickly. We had classes like we went into local malls and did classes. We had kiosks again. We consumerized democratized technology, right? We made it easy for people. So they didn't have to worry about what's a browser? What's a go back then? What's a go for client? What's a what's a news news net client? You would just put our discets in, discets, right? Three and a half inch discets. You got to stack them. And you did the installation. And boom, it would pop up. It would self-provision. It would get you all dialed in. You could then do whatever you wanted. We had a nice home page on it of our own. That would say, hey, if you want this, you can go here, go there, et cetera. So again, easy. We did it in home installs. So this this this theory of keep it simple. Nothing needs to be so complicated. Just because we know how to do it doesn't make a special. Yeah. That's a key element of my teams, even. You know, I tell them, listen, just because you're a great coder, just because I can code in whatever number of languages, nobody cares about that. I mean, it doesn't just deliver what they want. All they come to us, not because of what we do. They come to us because we deliver the outcomes they want. Right? Yeah. And so you can you can get all caught up in I'm a great developer. I'm a great cloud engineer. I'm a great security person. But what value the value you're delivering? You you execute and implement it based on what you know, but the craft is in making it easy for people to utilize. Yeah. Yeah. A really amazing machine that's too hard for me to use is worth listening. Right. Imagine if you got in your car today and had to do what you had to do for in a car 100 years ago, 80 years ago, whatever it is, right? Crank it up and then make sure I was watching some show that said you have to go push the pedal this way and then do the gear this way. And if you want to go in reverse, you had to push the pedal in a Ford model Ford, right? They're showing how to drive one. No, they never have the popularity you have today. You get in, you turn it on, you go. Right. Totally. It's so you don't even have to turn it on. Exactly. You don't have to be in the car. Exactly. Right. Yeah. And that's how tech should be taking me on the magic carpet, right? Of magic carpet. So we we caught that right at the beginning of the of the curve. So we built a very simple, very cost effective online dial-up platform, just like any other that was out at the time that are different differentiators. Again, we're great support, you know, beyond anybody else. If you wanted, you could call us and we would send someone to your house to do the setup. Nobody else was doing that. Right. We were doing again for businesses as well, we were taking that learning and we were we were actually delivering working everything you needed for a campus in a box. So we were built again, winning business again. And so who were we competing against there? Telephone companies because nobody wants to work with a telephone company. So we were we were faster. We were quicker. We were better putting the things together. We provided better support. And we grew one of the largest privately held dial-up businesses around. And then we got bought by a cable company because they didn't like the fact that, you know, we were in 1995 a month. And they were 49.95. Exactly. Exactly. They bought us and, you know, they bought up a whole bunch of others and then the prices started to go up. So touch me about the team of of an organization like that is that a lot of customer service and support, little finance and this and that. So we were very lean then. That's so the hardware company had more because we were buying and bulk. We were I mean, when you deal hardware, yeah, and when you deal with PC hardware, you're essentially in the commodities business, right? You know, chip prices and silicon prices and very, very sensitive to supply and demand, very sensitive. So you had to really make projections out. For example, we had to buy chips a year in advance. We had to commit a year in advance. We had to commit to all of our buys a year in advance because all those guys at that time, they weren't manufactured if they didn't have a commitment. So if you tried to get it after the fact, yeah, you had to buy retail from somebody and then we would offload. If we had a bad, if we had a bad month here or there, we mispredicted a people really don't want this processor anymore. I remember we had one, we had an issue with co-processors because back in the day CPUs didn't have math co-processors, right? So we overestimated our co-process or volume. So we just dumped them on the gray market, right? We had to get rid of them. It's cash, but you know, sitting there. So we had to make a decision and get rid of them before they lost too much of their value. Yeah. So talk to me about financial management a little bit of both of these enterprises, especially the hardware business. It seems like because it was a commodity's business and because you gave great customer service and because you were cheaper and because you were customizable, like where the margins slim and how did you manage that? So our margins weren't slim. And our prices were less than let's say IBM, but we were on par with every other third-party manufacturer. So our margins were quite good. We had a strategy. We always had a low price, a high price, and a mid price. And 90% of the people when you do some pricing like that, they go for the mid price. They don't want to stretch for the high price and they don't want the lowest price item, right? So little pricing strategy. So your best margins are on the middle price. Correct. You can use that at home if you're listening. Yes, absolutely. It's a very, it's a human nature, right? That's just the way it works. Yeah. You will have some people that go for the low price and that we were fine with that. We had protection for everybody. Again, we did something unique, which is as long as for as long as you owned your PC that was built by us, we would do upgrades for free. So you could come in and say, Hey, you know what? I want the new motherboard. We would just charge you the difference and no labor charges. So you never really were obsolete with us. So these are just like little things that we would deal with that people would come in and they be worried about, well, what about next month? What about next year? What's coming out in a couple of months? Well, don't worry. If you want that, you come and pay the difference and you don't pay any. Take out that obstacle to sailing it first place. So starting to get back to magic carpet. So not a real big team. They don't matter. No, very small because we used all the tech we could to skate to leverage. Right. So we didn't have a lot of customer support. We didn't have a lot of other than so we did have retail because we had people in the malls. Right. But those were primarily like we would hire high school commission sales people. No, we wouldn't even we would just pay them well because we didn't want them to be pushy. Like I would I want it. And all that we told them is when people come do a demo. That's it. No selling. Just do a demo. Show them what it's about. Educate them. Yeah. And if they don't buy, if they don't buy, they don't buy. Right. That that was it. I mean, we were very, very low key, very, very. And we would run regular demos. We would have sessions and actually in the malls, we would do scheduled sessions. We would go in on Sundays and do one hour presentations. Have a crowd of people have a big crowd. The mall would advertise it because the internet was hot. Right. It was like come and see what it's all about. They would get tons of people in a room. And I would stand up and do a presentation teaching people about the internet. You didn't get to repay you to come in. No, no, no, it was great. I mean, it was really good. That kind of crowded and think like that. What amazing thing. And you're 1999, 1995, a month for this. Yes, we started at 29 or 29. We started there. We started at 29 because the the telcos were at I think 3495 or something. I can't remember, but we were we wanted to undercut them because we were a nobody. Right. So we did that. We got a lot of press, old-fashioned press, like we were advertising their net in the newspaper, right? Well, how did you advertise those days? Exactly, right? Exactly. So we were getting a lot of press from the local papers and everybody was talking about us. And yeah, and that's where we went. Then we realized we hit some, we hit a critical mass as far as cost one. So we said, why don't we just pass it on? And then when we dropped the price to 1995, our competitors were not at it. Yeah, I just opened the door a whole bunch of new customers. Exactly. And every new customer at 1995 is about 1795 a month in profit. That's because you don't have to add a whole lot of people and stuff. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. So somebody comes along and makes that acquisition. And circling me now is this late 90s or early 2000s? It was 99. 99, okay. Yeah. And then you went right into real-wear. Yeah. So really what happened with real-wear is like I said, it was just supposed to be a vehicle for me to do some consulting. Yeah. So I told you the story about the first startup because I had basically nothing to start with. Yeah. And most businesses or most people who start businesses with basically nothing don't get any help. I mean, they really don't have anyone to they can talk to, the big business, the big consulting companies don't care. So I wanted to help as many people as I could. I just wanted a vehicle to, you know, manage liability, really. Right. So if you hire the other C that I can get, you know, insurance and all those other things that you should have, right? So as a consultant. Especially when this kind of pocket full of money kind of coming to a couple of exits. Exactly. So ultimately what turned out to be and then that's when the B2C, the e-commerce craze really kicked in. So because of all the experience I had, you know, magic carpet we sold online actually be computing at the tail end of it. We were selling some things online. And so then I started doing consulting for references. So people who knew me, people who had worked with me some capacity said, Hey, you know, this piece, these folks could use them out. Typically they were investors or board members. So I went in and just did some consulting. And that turned into about a year, year and a half of, you know, kind of just working when I wanted to, which was great. And then it was, Hey, you designed it. You helped us sort it out. We want you to manage it. And first few times I said, no. And then the third or fourth time I said, yeah, okay, I got some free time. I'll do that. And then it went from managing it to, okay, we don't want you to hire someone else to do the work. We want to hire you to do the work. Right. Well, hire your team. I said, I don't have a team. I don't have a team. So then someone convinced me then and I ended up hiring a team. And that's all she wrote from there. So we started building systems. We started deploying them. We started working on managing their data centers. So the next logical step was, well, you built it. You deployed it. Now we don't want to, we don't like the people we're working with to manage it. We want you to manage it. And so that old, I mean, it just became idea so that it went the process went from idea to implementation to business as usual management. Yeah. And that's where we are today. So it sounds like you really didn't have to like advertise for customers because you had all these referrals, mostly people trying to build or are better there online conduit to people to sell stuff online or whatever make that work better. So I guess my question is kind of how, when did you develop the outreach skills? And I guess the first two companies, especially built your ability to navigate like finding new customers and where do you advertise? And where did you find these? You mentioned the newspaper on magic cover. But is that it? Like was that just old school like ads in the paper and good customer service and referrals and any other secrets to that those growth plans there? So I would say B2C far more direct than B2B when it comes to client acquisition, customer acquisition. Because you can see the results even back when you were doing radio and TV and direct advertising, you can almost see a direct correlation if you're doing it. You can see a good job and a bad job pretty quickly, right? If you can't see it out. Exactly. It's something happened. The messaging was wrong or what we did. We did a lot of iteration. We were learning. I didn't know anything about marketing. I didn't have a marketing person. I would rely on the local newspaper person. I would rely on the local radio person or the TV in the beginning to learn. And I would say, okay, listen, I'm willing to make an investment. I'll invest in this ad and that ad and I'll tell them, you know, if it doesn't work, we're not going to work with you anymore, right? And so they would put their best people on it, right? And then we would learn from that. And then we would correlate, accolate and correlate those together. So we would look at, you know, how did this ad do? If we were advertising new tech, does it work? If we're advertising price, is it price, is it tech, is it information, is it education? And we just learned. So I think you have to, today you have much better tools. Well, you can actually tell people click because you're at or not. Exactly. And you can do better segmentation. Like we never knew who was going to walk in our front door. We knew we advertised in certain regions. We knew we were pulling people. And then when we went national with things like the computer shopper and other national magazines, we really didn't know who was going to be ringing the phone. We didn't know if it, I mean, we had people of all age groups. We had all different size companies calling us. We had our competitors calling us to buy gear from us and then remark it as their own. Would I have ever expected that to happen? Never. And if you would ask me no way, right? So I think some of it is just determination, persistence, determination. The other thing is, I think the one of the main drivers of success is self-awareness. For sure. Is not being so tied up in your own ideas that you can't pivot, even though I hate the word pivot. Change. Change. You can't adjust. You can't change. You can't iterate. You can't look in the mirror and say, you know what, that just was bad. I need to go something, you know, go get some help or try something completely different. People tend to stick with it, stick with it, stick with it, stick with it, stick with it and drive themselves right into a niche. Exactly. That's what I tell people over time that one of the biggest things our members get from local think tank is just a way enhanced self-awareness compared to what they normally would be. Did you see the signal promotion in the little flop with Facebook there? I love it. I thought it was hilarious. Our record show that you're a, you know, a golf fan, divorcee in a low tax bracket. Yeah, I love it. It was so great. It's so on the nose. I was reading them and I was just like, wow. Yeah, they killed it. Super smart. Fantastic. Everybody's going to get it. Nobody's going to read that and be like, huh? Right. No, it was classic. It was a, it was fantastic. Where were their marketing person as even though it didn't get in to the thing or whatever? Well, it got enough. We got more PR because it didn't get in way more way more anyway. So that's one of the fantastic things. In my early career of banking, we always used to joke, kind of joke, cry. Half of all marketing dollars are wasted. The problem is just impossible to know which half. That's right. And now it's not, you know, with digital marketing today's world, you can test these different things and, oh, I'm getting, you know, I get to get 75 cents for every quarter I spend on this ad, but I get a bucket of quarter on this one. So we'll go there more. Exactly. And the segmentation, you can drive the segmentation, you can drive the, you know, you can really focus. You look for soccer moms, you can shoot for soccer moms. Exactly. Which in my, you know, in the old days, I want to, you know, I don't want to sound like I get off my lawn guy, but, you know, you couldn't, you were guessing, right? Yes, you could tailor your message a little bit. You could, you know, you could change the language you were using. You could do so. But in the end, it was a lot of hope. Yeah, if you put your ad in the business section or in the family section of these paper or whatever, but yeah, a lot of guessing. Exactly. So, um, so real wear is starting to go now. You've got, I'm imagining a small team, three, four, five people, mostly just fulfilling these service agreements and, and stuff. Um, when did it get real? Like did you just sigh at some point that it was going to be a bigger multinational organization and you wanted to keep it for a long time or you just didn't find another company that you wanted to start and sell or tell me about that, uh, reflection. So I think, um, again, for me, the, the primary driver for real wear is helping, you know, you know, that's why we're so focused on the customer outcomes. That's why we do so much work pro bono. That's why we have a startup program which cuts our rates in half. Um, and I'm having fun, you know, the best part about what I'm doing right now is I have a great team. Um, I have great clients and I'm enjoying it. Um, so I don't think we'll change. Um, I haven't really started. It's funny. You asked a question about growth and what we might do next is we just started thinking this year. We, uh, started looking at, should we start marketing? I mean, we have all of our clients tell us you're the best kept secret in the industry. Nobody knows about us. Nobody. Yeah. And that's kind of part of the charm, right? If you, uh, we turn a lot of people away, um, you know, when I interview, I call it an interview, when I interview a prospect, I'm looking for, you know, are they really self aware enough to understand, um, what it's going to take to achieve what they're looking for? And do they really want to achieve what they're looking for? Um, you know, we have a lot of people that come to us that they'll say I want X or Y and they really don't have any idea what they really need. And I have story after story after story about companies that we're asking for A, but they didn't need A. They thought they needed A, but they really needed BC or D, right? And so when we went into the presentation or we went into the proposal, we said, no, no, no, you don't need that. And we're not going to even quote you on that. Yeah. If you want to do that, we'll leave now, uh, because it's the wrong answer. Um, and that's kind of been our approach. We're very opinionated. We're very focused on, um, uh, productive use of investment. So if it's past investment, we want to look at, you know, we get a lot of, well, we need this because that doesn't work anymore. And we want to understand why doesn't that work anymore? Why are you calling that a legacy system? Does it still do what you need to do? It's still cost effective. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I, why, who, who came in here and convinced you? Because that's usually what happens. We came in here and convinced you that you now need something else. And tell me what their rationale was. Tell me how they got to that point and convinced you of that. Um, and I would say nine out of 10 times wrong answer. Uh, and that's, that's what I enjoy doing. I enjoy going in and really looking, really understanding the problem, really helping people solve the problem. And does that really scale? Like when you think about scale, um, could I scale this business the way I scaled the other two? And the answer is probably no, uh, because a lot of it relies on my own point of view and my own approach to, um, how we do those things. I mean, I have great teams. Once we get to implementation, they're great. They're fantastic. But you're like involved with just what every, every client I work exactly. Interesting. Yeah. Um, so talk to me about like some of the categories of clients a little bit. You don't have to name names or whatever, but like I'm a, I was imagining mostly like really big companies, even including our previous conversations and, you know, those that have just huge amounts of data and they need automation and efficiency and things. But then I heard you say startups and I heard you say, uh, pro bono program. And I started wondering, frankly, if the local think tank software that I imagine at some point in the future is something I should be talking to you about and learning more about what we need. Yeah. So, so talk to me a little bit about that and maybe we'll even do a little case study here on the local software program. So we have, um, so our clients, like I said, they range from startups all the way to, uh, Fortune 500, Fortune 50. Yeah. Um, they're primarily using our platforms to accelerate their time, time to market. Remember, if you think if you have an idea, we probably have a platform we built already that manages 70 to 80% of that idea. So if you think about that from a cost and time to market perspective, it's a direct, direct reduction in your cost and a direct reduction in your time to market. So your revenue is much sooner. Correct. You sooner to revenue. You're also not hitting the bankbook as hard. Your cash flow doesn't get hurt as bad, right? Um, so our startup program, uh, what we do is, you know, I, it's very, I'm very selective. I want to make sure people understand what they're doing, how they're doing it. What's their distribution model? I don't know, the first few conversations I have, I don't even talk about technology. I, technology's not going to be the differentiator. What's going to be the differentiator is how are you going to sell this thing? Um, how are you going to get people to pay you for it? And what's your value proposition? And do, can you articulate it clearly so someone will take a dollar out of their pocket and give it to you? So sell this thing. It's typically a product, something. Well, whatever thing is a service or, you know, whatever, whatever we're enabling, we've done, for example, we have a smaller company that we're working with right now that is selling, um, um, product mix. Let's call it that, right? They're selling a product mix and they don't touch the product, but they curate it, they organize the supply chain, they do all these things, and they need it a way to scale that business. So we provide them with all the technology, the e-commerce technology, the integration technology that, so they can offer that product set, their core value is the product set and that effort that goes into building it, not the technology. But, you know, they don't know anything about EDI, they don't know anything about distribution, their supply chain integration. So you set up automated systems that based on demand, we're ordering this new inventory or ordering these new things. Right. So they're able to now take that, that intellectual property, if you think about it, right? That product set and then distributed efficiently to the people who are actually selling it in an automated way. Yeah. So they can focus on curating and making sure that intellectual property is the best it can be while their customers are able to leverage that and then grow their audience. Yeah. Our tech allows them to take those products, put them in the system and then distribute them to all those partners as well as manage the order flow, the fulfillment and all the other things. So it's a service, but you still need technology to enable that service. And then what's your continuing engagement with an organization, like that one, since we're there, like you're just doing patches and fixes and stuff like that, is it a fixed kind of engagement? It can be any, yes, there's a combination of all the above. So we can, if it's in our environment, we can manage it and make sure that you're secure and it's backed up and, you know, all the disaster recovery and business continuity is thought of, all those things that most startups don't think about, right? That they can security, you know, are they riding their whole thing on your servers then? In this case, this client is using their own, but we set it up for them. They're running in a cloud provider, but we did all the configuration, we did all the setup and then we handed them the keys and said, now you can continue to use the platform and we're here for support. And in this case, actually, we're also helping them with new features and things like that. Yeah, yeah. I would just interview Peter Melby not long ago with Grace Stone Technologies, which is a fairly large outsource IT service, but he doesn't have the software correct design element, but he can coordinate all those things. It sounds like you're kind of that plus the design. Yes. Sorry about that. That was good. So, okay, let's help me understand a little bit more. Yeah. So, I guess, like, even with like local think tank should scale at a rapid rate, if we could figure out how to find facilitators, the people that lead our chapters, which I think we could do pretty quickly. And then we could like find the right kind of members and then there's a sales team and all that. But then like helping all the local think tanks feel like Starbucks across, you know, broader and broader expanses is where I'm thinking that a software would be helpful, helping the members to share their their financial budgets and actual performance with their facilitators, helping those facilitators keep track of all these moving pieces to all these like, like you, you're trying to consult these organizations while you're still managing them. And so, you're pretty smart guy I can tell, but I have to think that sometimes all these different tracks and things, like just keeping track of it is challenging. I'm kind of trying to solve the same puzzle. Like, how do I help these people help other people so much easier, more efficiently? Well, you know, it's you have a framework, right? You have a you have a curriculum, you have all the things that you do. So, if you're looking to facilitate that, the first thing would be, I don't know how much of that is already online and it's available self-service and track. Yeah. Very little. So, I think the first step is a low-hanging fruit. The low-hanging fruit would be to take all your content and put it up in a fashion that allows people to engage with it when they want to engage with it and tracks that engagement and make sure that, you know, facilitators are seeing that engagement and understanding what level of engagement and process progress do they have, right? You could build an achievement system. Sure. You can gamify it, right? To get people to participate. Yep. And then as far as gathering information, you have you have to drive accountability, right? There's there's a very there's some simple online methods to drive accountability through reminders and again, gamification. Yeah. Exactly. If you have a thing where, you know, highest revenue growth of this quarter or this year gets this or whatever, we could really track that and it would help us in our marketing to really be able to say, here's the value. Our average member, you know, grows by 17% the year after they first join and 27% after that. That's right. That's right. That's right. So, okay. Well, that's starting to help me understand a little bit. Yeah. So, you start at the easy stuff. Like, well, it's what I tell all my digital transformation clients. Let's pick something easy. Yeah. Let's do that first because in a large organization, you need to build trust, right? So, you build trust with a success, success, success, success. Yeah. And so, once you build that simple thing, you know, because like I said, you know, yes, it might be a lot of work to build your curriculum into something that's engaging online. It'll pay dividends for a very long time. Super sustainable. Right. Right. Every person that I would have hired to train people in person for this would be $100,000 a year and they'd they'd all be different. That's right. Multiple of those or whatever. That's right. So, cool. That helps me really understand. I'll be talking to you after this. No problem. So, let's let's me and Ollie a little bit. You're wearing a wedding band. Did you fall in love during one of these first business journeys? No, before actually. Before even. So, let's. Yeah. So, I'm actually a very lucky guy. I met the most amazing person my wife when I was 19. So, we've now been together. When you were serving waiting tables or something. Yeah, it was worse than that when I met her. But she was kind of the spark for me to kind of make a change, honestly. Yeah. What's her name? Her name is Liz. Okay. And so, along this crazy entrepreneur's journey, she's been sort of the support that you need to have, honestly. You need someone who's going to be there to be honest with you. You need someone who's going to be there to pick you up when you make those mistakes and you come in and you're like, oh, I don't think this is going to where I got to do something different who puts you back on track. And, you know, she's always been that person. Yeah. She's amazing. What were some of those mistakes? Like, it kind of that first bless so many. There's so many. So, the first business I had, I was getting a little nervous. It was growing pretty fast. And I, you know, again, so again, what I did was I left school. Right. I never went back. And so, there's lots of gaps in your knowledge. Yes, I could build PCs. I could do all these things, but, you know, law, business, finance, marketing, retail. So, I went to night school and I took all the classes and I took a lot of law. I took a lot of accounting classes, finance classes, marketing classes. I stayed away from the liberal arts. I focused on what could help me every day grow the business. And then I got a little bit overwhelmed and I started to think about a partner. So, if I bring in someone who has a little more experience in me who can help with all these things and maybe I can focus on what I enjoy doing, which is the engineering and the design and the creative aspects of this thing and not have to get bogged down in all the minutia. Sure. That was my first mistake. I brought in a partner, good guy. But in the end, we grew so fast, he ended up getting to a place where he started saying, you know what, I'm good. I don't need to, we don't need to grow anymore. Right. My investment looks pretty good right now. Yeah, I'm good. I don't I don't want to work any harder. I don't want to go like he was one of the impediments to going national. And so in the end, I bought him out. So it was very costly mistake. I learned the hard way that you can't project your ambitions and your goals on other people. Yeah. Really got to dig in and ask the questions up front and make sure that that vision and that strategy, especially if you have co-founders that you're on the same page that you have the same goal. Like you don't want a co-founder who if you're if your objective is exit their objective is lifestyle or vice versa, or you know, you set an idea of when you want to exit and when you get there, they're not they're not on board because that's when, you know, all of that can come tumbling down. So that was one of the biggest mistakes, I think. And then over time, I think I've made a lot of people mistakes. You know, as a young guy, again, you know, full of success, I was pretty much an asshole. I hope I can say that. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I wasn't I wasn't really focused on, you know, what drives people. I thought it was all about success, success, success. It was all focused on, hey, if you're making more money and you're growing growing up the corporate ladder than everything it makes sense to you, that's what everybody wants, right? Because at 19, that's what I wanted, right? That's so let's be clear. What else what do I know better at 19 years old? I don't really know much. Yeah, I just wanted to be have a good job so I could take Liz out to fancy dinner. Exactly. Exactly. So again, projection and lack of self-awareness, you know, made a lot of people mistakes, a lot of people mistakes. I mean, the wrong people getting it is my passion now because I feel like it's the only thing that really matters is people. Yeah. Real where, you know, I focus on the people, I focus on giving them the environment they had, they need to succeed. I focus on coaching and being there, being the person that will always give them a straight answer. Never bullshit, never. I'm not a coddling guy, right? I'm not the guy, but I'm not all I'm also not that guy I was at 19 years old. So I'm always direct. The objective is direct and respectful. The objective is improvement. Yeah. You know, I'm the first one that'll pat you on the back when you do a great job, but I'm the first one that'll give you a little kick in the ass when you're you're not getting things done. So I learned, that's where I learned the most. I learned the most managing a lot of people over time, doing a lot of turnarounds. You know, I've done a lot of virtual CXO work, COO, CTO, CIO, working for other companies that are in trouble and seeing that in almost every one of those cases, it's a people issue, right? The wrong people in the wrong place, the wrong hires, the wrong information, bad communications. It's almost always that. It's rarely ever been a bad product or a bad financial. It's been just bad people. Yeah. Well, I think as people scale their enterprises a lot of times, they think, you know, once I get to be in that C suite, then I don't really have to spend so much of my time managing people. I can just, you know, do the important managing stuff and look at the financials and meet with the key customers or whatever, but it's almost more important than ever that they stay engaged with the people at that point. It's the most important. Yeah. In my mind, if the larger the company gets, the more disconnected you get from what's happening every day, what you're delivering to your customer, how they're being managed, how they're, are they really happy or you just getting, you know, a story, right? The PNL is one way to measure your business. Your balance sheet is in one way to measure your business. The only real way to manage your business is to hire great people around you and make sure that that is inculcated in the business that they're doing the same thing and at every level you're doing that. And if you're doing that at every level, then you're going to really, really have a hard time failing, right? Failing as a whole, you'll make mistakes, of course, but great people make great companies, right? Period. Well, in resiliency is one of the things that makes great people. Yes. And having that failure opportunity. So, what brought you to Colorado? You've been, because you were all in New York this time during this time, I suppose. New York in New Jersey, yes. New York in New Jersey. Yeah. So circa me like, when did that happen? So that happened. So we were just finished up a long-term engagement with a turn around. And I'd lived in the Northeast my whole life. My wife had as well. Our two of our kids had decided to make the journey west. One is in Austin. The other is in Sacramento. So, and our youngest who is 12 was going to a Waldorf school. So we said, okay, you know, let's look at what our options are. At this point, you know, we have the center of gravity has shifted west right on the east coast. Right. And let's see what's out there. So we started looking around and we found a large number of Waldorf inspired schools in this sort of I-25 corridor, you know, bold from Denver all the way up through. Fort Collins. Fort Collins, yeah. Maybe there's one of Cheyenne, I don't know. Yeah, but but basically a lot, a lot more than any place else in the country, honestly. And, you know, from early childhood on up to high school. And so we're like, wow. Just run the corridor from my house. Yeah, as we're like, wow, it's amazing. And so we came out to Boulder. Now, we always come out here to ski, but we went right from the airport to the mountains. Right. Never spent any time in between. My wife and I came out for a weekend. We loved it. We stayed in Boulder. It was in the fall. I think it was fall early fall. And we're walking back in the in the airport. I'm like, why are we going back to Jersey? What's there? You know, what do we have there? And so ultimately, we made the decision and did a four weeks later we were living in Longmont. Yeah, that's awesome. So it almost sounds like we described this turnaround and stuff that at times at least real where has kept a kind of a tight curated small group of clients or at least enough so that the CEO of real where I could go and just get his sleeves rolled up and be a real part of fixing something. Yes, yes. We've had larger. So we have done acquisitions in the past where we were trying new things. We did a we tried managed services for a while like traditional IT managed services. We had about 2000 clients at that time. We ended up selling that bit of the business because I didn't feel the connection with the clients. It was very mechanical the work. And frankly, it wasn't very interesting. It's kind of the boring break fix, move ad change. There's not a lot of strategic thinking going on. Unfortunately, no offense to all the MSPs out there. I think that our model is far more intimate. I do get involved and get to understand that people, even in a Fortune 50, I know all the players. They know who I am. They're sending the emails, you know, direct and asking me advice about things. And for me personally, that's very rewarding. Sure. And of course, that helps with the rest of it because I can see what their pains are. And I know that we don't want to contribute to any of that. We want to help alleviate as much of that as possible. Yeah. I like that notion. So has Liz been raising kids in this and that the whole time? Or does she have her own pursuits and passions? So she was, she's actually a licensed massage therapist. Okay. And so she had her own practice before we had our first child. And then she just decided that the most important thing, the hardest job in the world is raising kids. But you get free massages whenever you want. Yeah, I wish. I've heard that from everybody that's with a massage person. Yeah, yeah, it's hard work. I never would ask. Never would ask. But I think that she did, she did the most amazing job that can ever be expected. I never had to worry about anything. I never had to worry about anything around you. All the household stuff. The kids, the house. You probably have flexibility to go to sports games or this and that. But she was getting them there most of the time. Yeah. So I did, so I was pretty involved. I mean, I did a lot of coaching. I was on the board of a local club. I did a lot of volunteering around that. But yeah, she's just, yeah, I couldn't do what I do if it wasn't for her. We'll have a family section here a little bit more. But I was thinking about her just wondering about her career path as well. So you get out the long or long month here, Bulba County. And like, what would you say? How would you contrast the community that you spent most of your life in or the communities, obviously? And then coming out here to the wide open spaces and whatever. I would say that we were, excuse me, very surprised of the openness here. Unfortunately, in the Northeast, because of the speed at which everything happens and the self-imposed pressures that everyone puts on themselves, there isn't a lot of openness to help or of any kind. I mean, we lived, I'll tell you, we lived in a town in New Jersey for 15 years. We knew one of our neighbors. And we lived on Main Street. So it wasn't as if they were far away from us. They were right on top of us. And we had a relationship with one neighbor. That's been completely different here. I mean, I would say just personally, even with COVID, we know all of our neighbors where we live in Longmont. We know we've met a lot of great business people. You, for example, I mean, it's just an openness. There's a desire to participate beyond oneself. And that doesn't exist out there in a big way. There's people, of course, like I volunteer. There's other volunteers. And there's other, but I think that's one of the reasons you stood out with your prior enterprises as well is because you were kind of that helper person, intentionally helper business. And people could see that. It was different than what they were seeing all around them. Yeah. Yeah. So well, welcome to Colorado. You took it right in. Thank you. And what did you get here? October 2019. Okay. Right before all the COVID craziness. Right. Right. So, so yeah, you're probably just getting back up and learning the town, learning the communities a little bit. Yes. And get to know people. Yes. So we've been on pause for a year and a half. My 12th annual backyard sink with a mile party on Saturday if you want to come back up. Oh, so keep that in mind. That'd be great. Margaret is fish tacos. Yeah. So tell me about I guess the real where plants, like where are you don't intend to sell it. You probably don't intend to do anything maybe different before you hang up the spurs eventually. Well, so it's interesting because I have been having some discussions with some folks locally in the marketing space. And my thought is we have lots of employees. Those employees have families. At some point, I don't want to just decide, okay, we're done guys and leave everyone without a legacy of some sort that they can run with. So we have decided that we're going to try to go blue ocean with real where and try to grow it outside of the traditional norms. And so we're trying to find out the best way to market, the best messaging. What segment that doesn't rely on me. Like right now, you know, if you take I'm the sun in the universe. Right. And I want to be like Pluto. I don't want to be the sun anymore. Right. Right. So that's the objective is to figure out, you know, how do we take all the tech we've built, all the value we've created over 20 years. The teams are great teams that we have. And now build a business that survives my, let's say, becoming a board member or, you know, essentially saying, you know, what guys here you go? Pluto now. Exactly. Do you have a Charlie Munger or anything? I don't, unfortunately. Yeah. I think the issue really is the business has to change. Yeah. We have any revenues, right? Product will has to be product based. I think it can't be so much consulting. And it has to be more, again, I think that now the things that I do up here, I have to figure out how to put them in the user's hands. Right. So we're building some tools now, for example, to allow people. So we've been, you know, headless and no code for a long time. So all these new things that start happening that everybody starts making noise about, we've been doing it for 10 plus years. Yeah. So now I think what we want to do is we're going to start to build the product in a way that allows people, non-development, non-technical people to evolve the product without having to go to their IT groups. And so if we can build that capability into the system and that's our focus, then the idea would be that our teams then don't have to focus on that consulting piece. Yeah. Because the business, even though I spend, they know what they need, they know what they need, but dead on exactly. Let them do it themselves. No, it's perfect. It feels hard for me to figure out how you do that. We do a lot of that already. I mean, our platforms are composition-based, so you can configure them any way you like. You don't need a developer to do it. We just need to make it easier, make it more obvious, make expose some things that we normally wouldn't expose. But right now, our platforms, I can design a platform for you and implement it and you can run it. You don't need any technical people. I can do the same thing for three months. Exactly. I mean, if you take, I mean, there's, and yeah, maybe we'll see, but there's lots of, like I can come up with lots of companies that are running, you know, 100 million plus dollar businesses and they have one person running it on our platform where normally they would have tens and tens of people or tens of hundreds of people running that business. Wow. That's really fascinating. I'm starting to recognize the, I guess, the level of opportunity available that the efficiencies that you can enhance within some of these organizations and things like that are could, currently, if you can be your marketing, right? That's right. So how do you go about that? Like, is that you just talk to some local marketing agencies and be like, here's what we've been doing, here's what the customers we've been serving, but here's what we know how to do. How do we message it? Yeah, that's a great question. That's a simple. So one thing I know for sure is I am not a marketing guy, right, especially B2B, right? So I know what we do. I know the value. We have lots of use cases to, you know, white papers we could build and all these things. But the key is I think what it really came down to, we spent a lot of time internally saying, what is it that we really do? Like, let's get down to the essence of what we do. Yes, we build technology, but who cares? Yes, we do some management consulting, who cares? What we ultimately do, we came down to this core value is we're an enabler. Right, we're a catalyst. So when you come to us with an idea, we can take your idea, help you make it happen. When you have a business model that you need to grow and you don't know how to do it, we can help you do that. When you don't know how to go from point A to point B, but you have the energy and the drive to get there, we can get you there. That's what we've been doing. So that's our enabling. That's our enablement and our catalyst mindset. So that's what we started to talk about. And we've spoken to several marketing companies and we're trying to figure out now, how do we get that message across? Who should we be getting that message across? Right. Two are ideal clients. Correct. We've served 87 clients these last 20 years, and which were our favorite 20? Yeah, and all different industries and all different sizes, and you know, all different technology platforms. So it's like, you know, we are a chameleon. We can help anyone, but that doesn't help us sell it. That's right. Exactly. So that's what we're going through right now is trying to figure out how do we reduce everything down to a very succinct positioning statement and then a market segment that we want to focus on and then drive that through. So that's that's where we're at right now. And you'll have to hire some salespeople and things like that. We don't want to hire salespeople. I guess you don't have to. We don't. We don't. I I am kind of leaning towards a partnership model. So we want to empower partners again, enable, right? Enable partners who already have clients or are selling to then leverage our technology to either sell more or help or engage or grow. You know, one of the things I like to say is, you know, if you're a technology service provider and you're in the e-commerce space or you're in the web space and you're using someone else's platform, you're on the edge of the network for your customer. You're not in the core, right? So you're easily changed out. You can get a new marketing company tomorrow. You can get a new digital company tomorrow. But if you're using our technology in that customer, and now you're running the business and providing those services, you go from the edge to the core, right? Now it's very hard to swap you out, right? So your marketing messaging isn't even really to those end users. I'm imagining it's actually what are the partners need to hear from us about the glue that we're going to form between them and their customers. That's right. Interesting. So we'll see. Yeah. Talk to me in a year. Right. Yeah. Well, lots of big important decisions to make along that way. Yes. Well, and you're a young guy. You don't have to be Pluto right away. I'm not that young, but yeah, that's. But I think that, you know, having the opportunity to hike more and do Waldorf programs more and whatever is a big part of that, right? Yeah. So let's jump into the, we have a faith family politics section. You can talk about any or all of how much you want to on each. And then we'll jump into local experience. So let's talk about your family a little bit more. You're you're give three kids. I think I heard two off on their own and stuff and then one 12. That's right. My brother's 10 years younger than me. And so the youngest came along. Probably must've been 10 years 10 years 10 years different. Yeah. You're good. It was God bless you. Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I love kids. And you know, we were we had a matched pair really quickly. And then we were done. Right. And I think it was my 40th. Yeah. At this point, it would be my 40th birthday. I was like, what are we going to do? The kids are right. We still we got stuff. We got more to give. We can give more. What's what's the issue? And she was on board. I was so shocked. And there we go. And we talked to the kids because our our our youngest our who's our son is 10 years now older than Zara. And he they were both up for like, yeah, it's great. And they were fantastic during the you know, they were like another set of parents. I like to start with one word descriptions of your kids if you are willing. So my oldest, I would say. And this is a girl. Yes. And do you want to name her? Alina. I would I would name I would say well, I mean, I would say amazing for all my kids. But let's put we can do two word descriptions amazing and yeah. So I'm always amazed by her positive outlook. I mean, she her smile amazing positivity. Yeah, her her smile and her ability to empathize with people is second to none. Yeah, she's just phenomenal. Always carried a smile. Always doesn't really matter what the situation is. It's horrible to others. It's it's and she's so good at just you know, you know, today in consulting speak, we'd call it emotional intelligence, right? She it's just built. It's like wired in. She has an amazing amount of that. She never has to worry about court awareness. She knows what's going on instantly. Yeah. And how to lift people up. Yeah. It's fantastic. What a beautiful skill. Fantastic. And my son. My son. Um, it has to alley. Okay. Of course. Right. Analytical. Analytical. Interesting. And empathetic as well. Is Ali short for something? Nope. Uh, just Ali. Interesting. And Devachi. Uh, so Devachi. So I'm I was actually born in Iran. Okay. And uh, Devachi is how it's pronounced and it means giver of medicine. Okay. And my grandfather was a pharmacist. My whole family is is involved in medicine. Okay. Um, and that's where the last name is. Oh, and I'm I'm speculating here, but I'm guessing that them being in medicine allowed them to kind of leave Iran and no, unfortunately, we're first generation. Okay. Um, and all of the rest of our family is still there. Oh, it's interesting. Yeah. Yeah. What do you think about that? Everything to share? I think it's a shit show. Right. There's no other way to describe. Well, it's just a horrible, horrible situation for the people. It's it's like any, uh, a dictatorship. It just has another name. The people are sought. The people suffer. Yeah. Um, in private, nobody said nobody's in support of the current, um, either the military or the, uh, theological sure environment and everybody wants them gone. Yeah. But how do you do it? Yeah. Well, and I think I'm sure you're also a student of history. Just some extent, at least with Iran, right? And when I look at that situation, I see a country that had its flaws and its positives and things like that. But that I have a blog. I wrote the fixers and the nixers. Yeah. And it was really kind of the CIA's attempt to fix Iran that sets off. Screw it up. Screw it up. Put it all up. Exactly right. Do you want to share with people? No, I mean, I think you got it dead on. I mean, you, you had a, you know, you had the, uh, you know, migration away from, you know, uh, uh, socialism and, and all of those things and, and into a democ democratically elected government. And then they came in and put a dictator in the monarch and well, and all they were really doing was the, the brits and the Americans were basically stealing all their oil. That's right. Well, I didn't want to be so blunt. Here's a penny on the dollar for your oil. We'll send the rest to great Britain. Yeah. And you're welcome. And, uh, and they were like, well, how about we get two pennies per dollar of oil? No, we're going to, yeah, depose your president and install the that's exactly right. Fixed it. That's right. Fixed it for 12 years or whatever. Well, yeah, but the issue is that, uh, the shaw on the outside, the shaw did some good things for the country, you know, as far as, um, modernization and things like that. But he was also, he was a monarch at the end of the day. And he was a nasty SOB. Right. And the Savak, if you don't know that name, was the secret police train by our secret police and MI5 and they were the most, um, brutal, if you can imagine, uh, you know, the brutality of, um, the, the torture, you know, I, I remember as a small child, 10 years old, maybe I, we used to go back to Iran every summer until the revolution. I think I said something like, um, you know, why is the shaw so hated or something? And I was out on the street. Right. And my father at that time, she grabbed my mouth, like, immediately, yeah. And he whispered in my ear, never, ever, ever speak negatively in public right about the shaw because he has people everywhere. And they would grab people off the street and take them in torture. Exactly right. Just for saying things like, I don't agree with this, or I don't agree with that. And it was, it was just as bad as during, it was no better than what the current, um, government is doing to people there for not wearing a chador or not covering themselves or, you know, the, the, the situation is just horrible. People shouldn't have to live in that type of environment and they don't want to. But again, you don't have any way to defend yourself, you don't have any way to, to fight really. Yeah. Um, and no support from outside because everyone's getting their oil. Well, we see that here in this country, like when the government makes a decision, yes, not to drift into politics here, but when the government makes a decision, we can all talk about freedom and liberty and stuff, but the church is all shut down for three months this spring with very limited evidence that that was really what they needed to do. Correct. Things like that and nobody hardly peeped. That's right. And what do you think about that? We can drift right into the politics. Well, I mean, I, I feel like, you know, one of my things and I'm not talking about the COVID thing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, just recognizing how little power we have in comparison to the state. So I think that there's a couple different levels, right? Yes, we have, you know, even though we're, we're afforded freedoms that nobody else has in the world really. I mean, I think as a country, you know, unless it's funny that, you know, my sister and my younger brother were born here. And I know a lot of people who, uh, who don't vote, for example, and I didn't become a naturalized citizen until later in my life. So I earned the right to over time. So the perspective of someone, like if anybody tells me they don't vote, it just shocks me that they don't vote, right? So, you know, that's the number one power that we have, right? Is to be educated and to vote. If you leverage that power and you utilize that power, then you can have an immense impact beyond philanthropy, right? You can, you can impact your local communities by getting involved and getting off your ass and doing something positive. Yeah. Um, for me around these orders, you know, even right from the beginning, um, being educated is the key, right? You have to be educated. And that just me, and with the internet, everybody can be educated. You can get both sides of the point, you can get both points of view, you can get the third crazy view, whatever you want. At the end of the day, you can be educated. So why take, why be told what to thought, what to think? This is the one place in the world, I think even the EU, having a lot of time in the EU, where there's a lot of brainwashing going on there, why do that here? It doesn't, you don't have to. So get educated. And then, you know, from, you know, for me, patriotism is about, is not about what you do for yourself. It's about what you do for the people around you. So maybe there are some, some times where you have to not do what you want to do for a little while. Okay, fine, suck it up. Okay, do the right thing. And, but don't do it blindly. Be at, understand why you're doing it. And if you don't agree with it, you may not do it yourself. Like for me, this is like the smoking argument, right? Smoking in restaurants are not smoking is stupid. It's smoking is stupid. Like you and I, I smoked for 15 years. I don't smoke now because I got smart. Right. But at the end of the day, it took me time to learn, you know, what all the impacts are. And luckily, I stopped soon enough, so I don't have any of those things. But, you know, whether you're put on a mask or not put on a mask or you get vaccinated, whatever it is, get educated. Don't just take somebody's advice and listen to what they're saying because 99% of the people that are talking don't have any clue what they're saying. Yeah. I'm just imagining this. And, you know, I know a New York is a great melting pot. But I'm guessing that the suburbs north of New York are not as much of a melting pot. And you've got this 19 year old Iranian guy smoking cigarettes and killing it in the computer industry. And I suffered a lot. Yeah. I suffered. And I went to a school, you know, so it's funny, I was just having this conversation with my youngest daughter. Oh, we left off. We didn't get a third. She's my she's so so Zara is my fountain of youth. That's what she is. She's a fountain of youth. She's the most amazing. She's like, you know, she's very much like Alina with empathy and her smile and her ability to diffuse of, you know, just to be able to dominate a room. Yeah. But in the end, you know, she is, you know, when you have a child later, you know, you really I think can appreciate even more than when you have them in a younger age. And she just amazes me things she does. This courage she has. She does things I would never imagine. You know, she's a rock climber and I come up deadly. If deathly afraid of heights, I'm like, what the heck are you doing? Get up that wall. You know, she has shows no fear, immense strength. And yeah, that's, you know, that's my that's my little one. But I was just talking to her the other day about, you know, rate not really racism, but language and the use of language and why certain things should never be said, regardless of the context of the where what the power they're being said. And I said, you know, when I was in her age, I was, was during the hostage crisis. And I was one of two, happened to have another person who was from Iran in the class. And I was one of two kids. And that kid was always getting picked on and always getting, you know, they would tie him up and, you know, hostage, you know, and all this. And, you know, they would call us really foul names. And finally, I just said, I'm not going to take this anymore. And I would just get in their faces. And I would defend him and and still be the target of all that. And, you know, come home at night and just be like, you know, whatever, you know, you have to, I, I don't know why I just never let it get to me. I just always said, I'm just not going to deal with it. I'm going to fight it. I'm not going to let them not going to tolerate it. And then when my first daughter went to a private school that I was putting her through, I was on the board of diversity, believe it or not, you would think in the liberal haven progressive haven of New York in a private school spending, you know, five plus figures on a school tuition on a diversity board. This was right around 9-11, after 9-11. And, you know, one of the guys says something about towel heads. And I stood up in the meeting and I just looked at him and I said, and he was a British guy. And I just basically said, what the hell is wrong with you? What how could you even think about using those words? You're on what are you doing here? Get out. You're not qualified to be here. And that was, you know, 20 years ago. So it's not like it's been a long time. So I think you can do a lot with what the interactions you have with people. You can choose to let them affect you or you can choose to hell let them empower you. You have a choice. And for me, it's always been, you know, these are ignorant people. You know, most people who are, you know, I hate to use the Ist terms. But most people who are that way, who think that way, they're ignorant, period. They're either ignorant because of their experience. I mean, here's a stat for you that I've used before. I think it's less than 25 percent of Americans have a passport. Whoa, which is really sad. Oh, that is super sad. And my wife gave me a stat a few weeks ago that said, 72 percent of people live within 20 miles of where they grew up. Wow. So get out people. Yeah. Get on an airplane where I come from. Go see some other cultures. I got, I got, I got, I quit the Facebook last summer. And one of the things that got me in big trouble. I call myself a libertarian. I'm a libertarian. I'm a libertarian. You want to? Yeah, absolutely. And when the riots started, I commented, basically, you know, if the, if the blue guys have all the right answers for race, relations, and things like that, why are all these riots in all the blue cities that are run by blue governors and blue mayors and blue city councils? Like shouldn't they have fixed the problem by now? And it goes back to that. Fixers and nixers kind of a conversation. Like if they have the answers, they should have put the answers in. And, but frankly, where I'm from in rural central North Dakota, I graduated with a class of five. I don't think we were nearly as racist as I see sometimes in some of these cities and places like that, even though we, like we had one black guy in the whole town just about, but, but we don't care. We're about who you are. Not about not telling your skin is. And I think that narrative that, that the reds are racist and the blues are not is kind of a line in my opinion. Well, so, you know, just to touch on my view on politics for a second is I'm a policy-based person when it comes to politics. I'm not red or blue, but I'm a libertarian at the core. I think that, you know, you live in the greatest country in the world. If you have an idea and a dream and the will to make it happen, you can make it happen. Nobody can stop you. Nobody can stop you. I don't care what anybody tells you. It doesn't matter where you're from. It doesn't matter where you grew up. It doesn't matter what this color of your skin is. It doesn't matter what your education is. I didn't finish college. All right. I took one year. Now granted, I had been doing what I did for a long time. But still, if you, if you want to succeed, if you want to succeed in this country, nobody can stop you. The only thing that can stop you is you and the people you listen to. That's it. So, you know, so when it comes to politics, I think the problem today is, everyone in the middle just wants to keep the wolf away from the door. We just want to get our shit done. We just want to work. We just want to raise our families. We just want, we're not activists. Yeah. And unfortunately, the activists on the left and the right, they're not the best of us. Yeah. Unfortunately. Yeah. But they have more time on their hands. Totally. And they can do this stupid shit they do every day. And I don't, I don't engage. Honestly, I don't engage. I, you know, if you want to have a intelligent, intelligent, intellectually honest, unemotional discussion with me about any topic I will engage. But as soon as you start calling me a name or because you don't agree with me and you have no facts, you know, take a walk. Yeah. I'm not going to talk to you anymore. I don't have the time for that. You don't have the time because you're clearly, it's a religious argument now. Totally. Right. Really? It's a, it's a religious argument and you can't convince a religious fanatic about anything other than what they believe. You know, one of the other Facebook posts that I got in trouble for a young, young black lady that I really love. And she posted on her page, basically, you know, the N word, you can't use it unless you're black. It was among this big list of things that she observed. And I was like, I love all the stuff you posted. But I think having different rights for some people versus other people is really kind of what gets us into this place. So either the N word is all bad and nobody should use it or it's a word that's a word. And it's a dumb word that nobody should use. Right. But you can't go to jail for it. And, and I got hammered, shout it down like I was a terrible person for saying that thing that we shouldn't have different rights for different people. And I, I want you to think about that. Well, I think it goes to the argument, right? It goes to they don't have a basis for their argument. So all they can do is use the mob mentality, right? Once it becomes all about the mob, it's not about any type of intellectual discourse anymore. This is the problem I see in general. And you talk to when you even, even when you read the paper. So for example, I read a lot of different newspapers because I want to get all the different points of view because somewhere in all of that everybody's lying, right? It doesn't matter. Left or right? Everybody has their point of view. There's no more real news anymore. So you read them all. And somewhere in the middle, you can coalesce the real story, right? Like, for example, when I think about legislation, I go read the legislation. Right? I don't, I don't, when I have to read the newspaper, I do not, I do not. Because they don't even know what it's going to do, right? Right. So I really feel like we could have productive, you know, again, this country has gone through a lot of permutations and a lot of iterations. And because we have this free discourse, sometimes it's not going to be so pretty, right? The sausage making can get pretty ugly. And I think we're in just one of those phases again. I think what will happen is people have sore spots, people have things they want to talk about and grieve about. So let's let them. And then let's move on. Because at the end of the day, the only thing that really matters is progressing the country as a whole. Yeah, we're Americans. Exactly. We need to be that 100%. And I think both parts, like I, that's part of the reason I'm a libertarian. I think it's like appreciate the stretching of the, the, the left, if you will, and the progressives. And you know, like I think I've always thought that gays should be able to have at least the same rights. I kind of thought there should have been a compromise. Like don't call it marriage because the Christians are going to be all but hurt. So call it a civil union and give you the same exact rights and call it a day or whatever. I don't know. That was what I thought 20 years ago. Yeah. Then it tipped over like they voted all these, put all these anti-gay marriage laws up and well that it comes over the dyke and then that's right. But what my question, I had a question in there somewhere, which was oh, the statement, I guess, is that you have to appreciate the foundation that conservative side and stretch for changing to something different because otherwise you're going to just crumble because that foundation, if nothing is built on. So they're both necessary to a certain extent, I think. Yeah. I think evolution is necessary. Yeah. The world changes. People change. I mean, one of the big globalism, although digital technology, I think we missed, we missed the elites missed big problems, right? When they saw, when the technology industry started to build, they could have taken the time to train people in technology to change the curriculum. But they had such embedded issues with the way teaching is done in unions and blah, blah, blah. So they didn't teach people to be to not work in factories. They didn't teach. Listen. All the tools that are being built today in technology are about reducing the skill set required to execute the technology. Right. Okay. So why aren't we training people with the base skills they need to move from the physical factory to the knowledge factory? Yeah. We're still not doing it. Totally. People are graduating college and they're dumb as a stump. They can't work. Verily. Yeah. What is wrong with this system? I don't understand why I don't know. I mean, well, I think it's just this inculcated, um, we do it like you've always done it like we've always done it like they people should know these things because they should know these things and we're the smart people and we tell you what to do. Yeah. You know, again, I'm a contrarian in a lot of things and you know, my own success shows that I wouldn't expect it like I made my kids go to college and graduate. Right. But, you know, me personally, um, but if they'd have come to you and said, Dad, I don't know what I want to do. My son did. I gave me your off. Yeah. I did that. He took a year off and then get your ass back there. That's right. That's cool. Sorry. I cut you off. But you're right. It's exactly right. So, uh, family politics, faith, um, uh, I'm not, I'm not a, so faith. I'm not, uh, I don't prescribe to any man-made faith. Okay. In my mind, anything written by man is flawed. Okay. Um, I'm spiritual. I believe we're all connected. I believe we have, um, a responsibility to each other and responsibility. Is there a creator force or just a universal force? No, I'm, I'm agnostic. Yeah. It's a universal force. Okay. I don't, I don't believe in, you know, any specific entity saying, okay, yep. Now you exist. No, no. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think that's an interesting, well, because you said, like, agnostic rather than atheists. I'm not any of these. I'm not. I'm not. It's not real. I believe that there's a energy or force of spirituality that connects all of us and we're responsible to each other. It's kind of observation. Yeah. It's kind of, you know, when I think it's absolutely, and when I think about, you know, I kind of feel like the scales get tipped. If you, you know, I feel like, I honestly feel like the, the more positive things you do, the more positive will come from that energy source, right? You know, it's, it's a very kind of generic thought process. I consider myself a Christian and I, for a lot of reasons, part of which is just the complexity of the Bible and how it points to Jesus kind of thing and whatever and how would it do that if it wasn't intentional. But when I explain to people about my face perspective, it's like, I see a blurry lens for everybody. And, but it's all, they're all seeing the same thing. It's that force that unites us all into this common humanity and that does reflect, you know, karma is kind of the same thing as love thy neighbor. That's right. Right. And love God. That's right. And love the love people and whatever. And so if you're doing those things more often than not, the universe will come back around and help you. But sometimes it doesn't. And then your job and you're like, well, I think concrete. Well, I mean, honestly, I think at the end of the day, concrete concepts are much easier for people to grasp and organize around. And I think of Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and others as philosophers, very, very smart philosophers who realize that people needed to change. The system didn't work the way it needed to work anymore. And for the human race to proceed forward, there had to be a change. And the way to do that was to focus things, focus people on things that they could make concrete instead of make abstract. And so when you think about it that way, you look at them as the ultimate leaders, right? You look at them as the ultimate change agents. Yeah. Well, I was just thinking to myself like a thousand years from now, depending on what really just faith kind of evolves to and stuff, we'll be like, you know, Moses and Jesus and Muhammad and Locke and Russo and Adam Smith and whatever. Like, that's right. I don't know, but it certainly seems contemplatable that that could be the way it shakes down. Exactly. Yeah. Interesting. That's an answer. Or AI number three. Correct. A thousand years later, AI number three. I love it. So the local experience. Did I tell you about that before? No. The local experience is the craziest experience of your entire life that you're willing to share with the public forum like this. And I usually try to get people to drink more wine, but you've only had it once in one glass. So you're saying in this area, whatever, any experience that you've had in your entire life, if you almost got eaten by a shark and you stabbed that son of a bitch's eye with your thumb and got away or whatever, what's your local experience? And it might be, you know, meeting Liz on the corner of fifth and main and somehow she liked you. Yeah. So I would say I haven't had any life threatening experiences. So I would say the most life changing experience would be, yeah, I mean, I was at a club at that age, you know, and Liz did walk up to me and she grabbed me by the tie and she, yes, I was wearing a tie and said, dance with me and like it. And that was all she wrote. That's awesome. I sometimes women just have an inner sense and I love that story. So dance with me and like it. Dance with me and like I'm talking to a guy that thinks the world of you and I'm pretty positive, you think the same. Ali, tell our listeners, if you have some like a one, two, three or you know, things to self-examine, that self-awareness that you went back to, if they're looking at their business and they're saying, you know, I've been, not that it necessarily has to rely on technology, but I'm really talking about your consultant's brain now, but it may or may not have technology. But is there like a few things that you would always ask your clients to ask themselves and reflect upon? There isn't, there isn't specific like three questions, but we do have a process that we go through and it's the first step is research and we call it that for a very good reason and it's part of it is self-awareness, meaning understanding what you're good at and what you're not good at personally and then analyzing your organization and finding those, what we call human capital gaps. So look and see, I mean, if it's a smaller company, of course, yeah, it's a different story, but for somebody who has maybe 15 to 20 plus employees, this is something that I think you should do is kind of look at the jobs, look at the people you have and are they really the right, did you put the right people in the right job? Because that's a failing if you haven't of you, not them, right? So that's the self-awareness and the research. Gather all that information in a very, you've heard me say this before, intellectually honest and unemotional way. Data will free you, okay? And then build the analysis from that and both of these things have to be tied to your customer outcomes, not the customer outcomes you want, but you need to talk to your customers and find out why did they pick you over every other option in the marketplace? And understand those values. And what I want to do is have three to five values that the customer says or customers have said they interact with you. And then you need to map all of the things that you decide out of that analysis to those values. And then you need to communicate, communicate, communicate. You can never communicate enough with the people around you, whether it's your customers, the people inside your employees, your team members, whatever you call them, your peers, if you're in a large organization. If you're not communicating, you have to assume people don't know what you want and what you're trying to achieve. That's great advice. I'm actually reflecting in so many different ways on my own organization right now. And so I hope our listeners do it doing the same. And I don't have anything more. Oh, thank you. It's been a great pleasure. I've enjoyed hearing more about you, your family, your journey, and really especially the things that we both agree are important in life and in business and it's people. That's right. Absolutely. And the things, they're not things, they're people. People. Yeah, let's do it. Talk to you soon. Thanks. Thank you for listening to today's episode of The Locoh Experience Podcast. This is Kurt Baer, founder of The Locoh Think Tank, and host of The Locoh Experience. And I'm here with Rory Sharer, Locoh Business Developer, and host of The Locoh Shorts episodes. We hope you heard some new ideas and business perspectives in this episode. Our mission and all that we do, including this podcast, is to share collaborative business ideas and solutions that uplift the business community. Subscribe and follow us for you listening to podcasts to get new episodes as they are released. If you're curious about Locoh, you can learn more about us at Locoh Think Tank.com, where you'll find more information about our chapters, business resources, and events for business owners and if you're looking for perspective, accountability, and encouragement along your business journey, why not apply for a chapter near you today? Why not? Why not? Why not? We'll catch you next time on The InDesk Locoh Experience Podcast with me, Kurt. And with me, Rory, for Bite Size Business Lessons in The Locoh Shorts. Bye!