EXPERIENCE 29 | Jeff Beyle - Co-Founder & CEO of Sticker Control

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. My guest today is Jeffrey Bale of Sticker Control and he took the drive up from Boulder to spend a little time this afternoon and Jeff, why don't you just set the stage for our listeners by describing what Sticker Control is and what I said, Jeff Bale, Jeff Bale, you already told me, jump into it, set the stage for our listeners and tell them what you're all about. Okay, it's not the first time somebody's mispronounced my name, so don't worry about that. Yeah, it's Sticker Control's a software company. My partner's based in Bilbao, Spain actually, and that's where the bulk of our dev team is, but we are software system helping small and mid-sized manufacturers and distributors, automate manual tasks, get rid of spreadsheets and paper-based systems, and then optimize their operations. And interestingly enough, in the last year or so, more than a year now, because I actually met these people face-to-face, but talking to some people out of the senior care and assisted living space, we realized that our technology platform actually could be extended into that space and help them with their operations. And so we are just now launching in beta tests starting next month with three or four customers using our system there and assisted from communities where people are living independently, but getting some services all the way through memory care units, so we're pretty excited about that as well. Would that be Sticker Control, or the whole new division kind of seems like a funny name for an old person tracking? No, no, we're calling it Safe Ana, and the genesis of that name actually is somebody who's smarter than I am, said, well, actually Ana in Hebrew means grace, so sort of safe grace, or care for people who need assistance. Yeah, I love that. I think that's going to be a big new market opportunity for you guys. I think it is. There's a lot of money going into the therapeutics and diagnostics, and this is much more of an operational tool. And so it's making sure people do what they're supposed to do, help people get dressed or feed them or make sure they take their medicines, those types of things. But then also some technology that we're working on with a mines professor and a CU professor on using Wi-Fi signals to be able to detect where people are in a home or a community, and then also recognize some behaviors like when people fall down or are they washing their hands, they might be at the sink, but are they actually washing their hands and some things like that. So it's pretty exciting. I want to build up to there, because you and I met maybe three years ago or so at a manufacturer's conference. It was a while ago. And I think had some mutual affinity and interesting partakements on the world. Tell me, how does a guy come to be the CEO of a Spanish software company? It's a journey. Let's just start there, and we can, because I'm sure sticker control is evolved during that time as well. And so it will help us to understand the foundation for this newest offering, especially. Sure. And I think, you know, if you go way back in my career, I mean, I started out actually writing software and then fell in with a bunch of lawyers and decided I want to go to law school. But then decided I didn't want to work for a law firm and was fortunate to get a job offer from Coca-Cola in Atlanta, ended up working there. I really liked that sort of mix of business and, you know, really applying the laws opposed to solving somebody's mess and worked in Atlanta for a couple years and then moved to Hong Kong with Coke for almost seven years. And this is just like right out of college, virtually. This is, yeah, I mean, I was in my late 20s by then, by the time I graduated from law school and I clerked for a judge and that's when I decided I thought I wanted to be a prosecutor and put bad guys in jail. And then when I saw sort of how it all worked, I was like, you know, actually, that's all you got to do. You're not hanging out with nice people, so we could, we could delve into that a little bit. Yeah, that's a separate issue. But really enjoyed that and sort of enjoyed the, you know, when I left Atlanta for Coke and moved to Hong Kong, there were some people who said, well, why are they doing this to you? People go overseas and they never come back and that was like one of the last conversations I had before I left and it scared me. But then I got out to Hong Kong and I realized why that was, which was, I really enjoyed the autonomy and sort of, you know, decisions and projects that people in Atlanta would wait, you know, 10 years to get into. I was dealing with five or six of them by myself, wholly unqualified, but people said, yeah, we all are. Just go. Thank you. Right. Make decisions, move on. If you make a mistake, we'll fix it and, you know, off we go and so I really enjoyed that. Yeah, and it's a lot of fun. So then I've moved back after seven years or so and worked for a company called Getty Images and then did that for eight years and left to set up their business in Latin America as a startup that a partner based in Brazil and I set it up eight offices, which was a mistake. This was with Getty. It was an independent company that we ultimately sold to Getty. And once I sort of went from smaller company, a small company to a smaller company, I just once you start heading that direction, at least for me it was hard to go back and say, I'll get a job with a big company and all that and so that's, um, I actually, every step in my banking career, I worked for smaller and smaller organizations and made more and more impact. Yeah, more, more flexibility, less structure, less bureaucracy, you can do things when you, I think this is the right thing to do and there aren't so many people looking over your shoulder saying, no, no, no, don't do that. Yeah. I find that really rewarding. Yeah. So hands for it. Here's a startup thing coming along. Exactly. Exactly. And so actually the other co-founder of the business was the one with the original idea but when he was aware that we sold the Latin American business and he said, before you get in to anything else, you know, come join, think about joining me as a co-founder and a sticker control. Oh, I didn't realize. Yeah. I thought you were the American dude. They hired over here. Yeah, it was. That was sort of the idea originally and then it sort of evolved over a few months. He said, well, actually, you know, I want you to be a co-founder. Cool. So, yeah, it's been a great experience. Again, total lack of structure, making it up as I go along in a lot of ways, obviously you make a lot of mistakes, but you know, you, they're your mistakes and you understand why you did what you did. So fair enough. So tell me about like the clients that sticker control has traditionally served and those kinds of systems. Because I recall when we first had conversation, I had invested in RFID technology company way back in the, gosh, I guess it was the early 2000s and it never really worked that good for quite a while. It wasn't a big thing that I thought it was going to be. No, and RFID is still, I mean, it's obviously a lot less expensive, like any kind of hardware, you know, as time goes by, they get more powerful, smaller, less expensive, that type of stuff. But we're the software that uses RFID technology or barcodes or GPS or any sort of technology to help people solve problems like, okay, so you're more of a logistics company. Yeah, it can be. And so, you know, a number of our customers are, you know, one of them, they use a lot of returnable packaging, but actually it turned into one way because they weren't tracking it very well. And so they had 30% loss, which was costing them, you know, depending on who you talked with them, their organization, hundreds of thousands or several million a year. Right. Just keep track of that for us so we can cut down our loss rate, you know, help us cut down in the mistakes on customer shipments, nowhere inventory is how much we have, so no more warehouse. Automatic reordering things. That type of stuff. And communicate with our vendors and our customers automatically so we don't have somebody who's running around saying, what's the status of this project, though, because they want to know they want to know when it's going to ship so they'll know when it arrives, well, that all can be automated. So I think, you know, the big thing there is not to be overly complicated because certainly you can read a lot of articles or see commercials and go, wow, these guys have this system that, you know, does everything and it just oversolves the problem and causes other problems. That's what I was going to ask. Are you kind of like living in the land of giants, kind of with those AI from IBM and the oracles or this and that, like, hey, we can solve all your problems, you small business. They certainly can, but they're a lot more expensive and I think in many cases they oversolved the problem. There's just too much, too expensive, too complicated. You have to hire somebody to run it, right? Now you got the system, either the CFO ahead of operations has to work another five or six hours a week or hire somebody to deal with it and really we want to keep it simple, solve the problems sort of sequentially, like just move through all the problems that you have over time rather than the big bang of a super, super system. Interesting. And so is your software then like an overarching hub, almost like a, what do they call it, ER? We're not an ERP enterprise resource program, we supplement those, but I mean, a lot of our customers to say they don't really have an ERP. I mean, some of them have an SAP or Oracle that work wonderfully if the data is good at what they've gotten. So for though, when that type of situation comes up, we're behind the scenes. More about the data assurance. We're making sure the data is there for those systems to run all the functionality. They have other people have older systems that they've been using for 10 or 15 or 20 years, where we are more of a front end system to help them understand what they've got and then optimize whatever the process is that they're looking at. And so who's your co-founder? I should give a shout out to him. Yeah, no, it's a guy named Unai Lorari. So he's, you know, you can call him Spanish, but he will correct you and say, sorry, actually, Basque. Oh, yeah, separatists. Exactly. We have some interesting conversations about that. What maybe we should? Yeah. We'll have him on some time and he can tell you, give you the history of the Basque country and how he's basque first then Spanish. Interesting. Kind of like Texas here. Exactly, exactly. But a really good guy and we've known each other for 10 to 15 years now. Haven't seen each other face to face for over a year now. Which is good and bad. I mean, co-founders in the same room five days or six days a week. Yeah, there's two of them each other. Yeah, for sure. But also, you know, you do kind of miss that camaraderie and things. But most of the development team that is over there because Spanish wages for educated voters are way lower. 25 cents on the dollar. And we actually had somebody, I mean, you can find great people here, but then Amazon came in and threw a load of money at her that we just couldn't compete with. Yeah, I actually, do you know Patrick or tell? I don't think I do. You should all introduce you to him. Patrick is like a CTO kind of guy for a number of different startup e-things and different scaling things and stuff. But it's like not just him. It's him and eight Venezuelan people that he's made relationships with over the years. You know, so they're his strength. He just gives them good work in America. Right. There's a lot of good talent out there. It's just not as easy to establish those relationships and make sure you can trust to your working with. Sure, sure. But once you get them going, then that's a huge advantage. Well, that should be, you know, drifting to economics a little bit. Like that's part of the value proposition of even sticker controls model, right? As we can do some of this programming coding and whatever, you solve your complex problems faster for less money because you know, we're more nimble, more light. Yeah, I mean, we have had those conversations. Some of our customers have said we really want this functionality. And it was on our product roadmap. Product roadmap. And we said, well, okay, fine. We'll accelerate that. And some of them have paid for it. And he said, you know, this is going to take 200 hours of dev work. And they're like, uh-oh, here it comes. And, you know, at $0.25 in the dollar versus what they're used to here, we've had no pushback on pricing. You tell them the price are like, oh, okay. It's still twice. Yeah. Fair enough. So tell me about the evolution, maybe a little bit of sticker control, uh, in the years leading up to COVID. And then we'll want to hear about like how COVID specifically has, has impacted and awareness and things like that too. Yeah, I mean, it's been an interesting journey. And we actually participated in the inner sphere. Accelerator. Oh, you're going to start a program. They're based here. When did you do that? That was the summer of 2018, I think. Okay. Yeah, I'm pretty sure. So probably, yeah, we're probably near the time. Maybe in 2019, but it's times a little funny. Yeah, right. But anyways, especially pretty cool. It was exactly it. So that's all I know. That's all I know. But that was a really valuable experience helped us really refine our focus. And obviously talking to customers and you have an idea as to what it is that you want. I mean, I think our view of trying to keep it simple for our customers and not oversold the problem has been fairly constant. But then how you talk to your customers and who's interested in what changes over time. And that's not that unusual from what I understand. It's just a function of, okay, you know, we're getting a little, we're not getting much traction over here. So we're pushing in this space and people are responding to it. So, you know, let's go with that way. Yeah, basically. Yeah, don't push against the river. This is really tough. But this over here is like, we're going downstream. So let's go with that. Yeah, yeah. And so that was really good. And I think that we refined how we were going to focus in what customer segments we wanted to focus on. And that all kind of blew up with COVID. I mean, our sales pipeline went to nothing. Basically, everybody pulled back and said, we, you know, we're not spending anything. We're not spending anything on anything. We don't know if we're going to survive and all that type of stuff. And so it was kind of a long, do you have recurring revenue that your existing clients, they pay some, yeah, we're talking about your revenue model. Like how do people pay you? There's typically a set up fee, but that's, um, covers your cost, basically costs. I mean, and because so much of our cost is in Spain, it's pretty, pretty minimal. And so typically it's less, much less than $10,000 to get everything up and running. And then it's depending on the functionality and the size of the company, it can be anywhere from 1500 to 2000 a month up to our biggest customer now. I think it's going to be on the order of about 7,000 a month. Okay. But they have multiple plants and yeah, and they'll grow over time as they adopt more functionality. But we're really, like I said, we're trying to make it affordable for small and midsize companies who are like, I don't need something, all the bells and whistles. I just have some problems that are interfering with my ability to run my business. Interesting. Yeah, yeah, I like that. I think actually my friend Mike, if he listens to this, I tried to introduce you to him. And he just invested in a big fancy ERP system. Is it Mike LeBot? Yeah, that's Emily Bates. Yeah. LeBates, okay. Yeah, I talked to him last fall, actually, and then again, to somebody who's working with him. And I think we may still have some opportunities there. Maybe some opportunities there. Later this year, once they got the ERP in place. Gotcha. And that probably makes sense too, because you can make that more precise and stronger than it could be without those measuring tools. Right. Right. Interesting. Yeah. So, okay, well, I still need a six pack. If you sell him, I get a six pack. Six pack or bottle of one. Whatever it is that you want. Okay, fair enough. You're on there. So, yeah, I mean, COVID sort of took a bunch of customers off the table. One, they're not out of, or two of them are not out of business, but they are treading water. Yeah. All of non-essential expenses have been cut. And so we're like, okay, fine, you know, we're not going to try to enforce a contract and get a few thousand dollars in spoiled because the relationship, because I think they will come back. One of them, I've talked to one of them recently, it's a couple of weeks ago, and I think he'll help me back. So, was there a, like, I've heard a few of those COVID stories where it just bottom fell out, and then 60 days later, oh, actually, it's turned around. Is that not the way the story goes? It wasn't 60 days, but it was, you know, we started up with a number of customers talking to them in last summer, and the dose deals are closing now. Cool. So that's good. So you're kind of back into the, we're back now. Nine months pause and the growth plan, and then, but we're not too much smaller than we were before. Exactly, and, you know, it's not a, you know, get out your credit card and download type of sales cycle. It takes a while to get people with the program. So it's been, it's been interesting, you know, we learned a lot, and it was an interesting year or so with COVID and sort of coming out of that. I'm not glad that we did it, but I think we're better off now having gone through it. Stronger after. Yeah, so tell me about your team, like, do you have, like, sales team resources, and, like, how do you build these relationships and find the customers that need your stuff? Yeah, a lot of, we don't have any dedicated sales people. What we've done, I mean, I've spent a fair amount of time talking to a variety of different, you can call them channel partners for a lack of a better term, but anything from single-person business consultants who go in to small companies, smaller companies and say, you know, I'll help you with your process, or whatever it might be that they're helping with set up some, so they could be a, and so they could be a tool that they talked about. So they recommend this, and now we're getting into in the last sort of five months or so, we've found some more bigger channel partners, sort of not just business consultants, some of them are actually hardware resellers, so they sell barcode scanners and RFID printers and all that type of stuff. And so, they do sell you those too, yeah. Exactly, and so what they wanted was, you know, they've sort of gotten the customer over the hump on spending a bunch of money on hardware, and what did they wanted was a software system that wasn't another hurdle, but it was something that actually say, okay, here's with this software, you can do a lot more with all the data you're capturing, and it's not a bitter pill in terms of you. Yeah, you don't have to choose this or that. Yeah, you don't have to start saying, well, I guess I won't, you know, have that summer vacation because, you know, we got to write a big check for the software system, and so we're looking to keep building that. I mean, we've got three or four more in play now, so that's really good. We're happy with that path, and so I don't think we're going to hire any outbound sales people who haven't dedicated any time soon. Is this a funded enterprise? If you guys raised venture capital and stuff, or you talk about that kind of stuff, or you're just a bootstrapping along? We're bootstrapping. I mean, the nice thing is we actually found out last week that we were successful in a grant proposal with the Air Force, so that was nice. So that'll be a bunch of money. The work has to be done in the US, so we'll have to staff up here a little bit on the dev resource, but that's fine. And they'll also be the logistics command and some other parts of the Air Force will become customers as well, and so it's a pretty exciting development for us, which I'm sure my wife is happy with because I won't have to put more money in. Her paycheck has been bigger than yours for quite a while. Fair enough. I mean, like you, it's sort of, you know, I haven't been taking much of a salary, and as the business grows, then you can start... Well, you got to make those choices, right? Do I want to hire another employee that will let me grow even more, or pay myself more? Well, exactly. I want to grow, and so I guess I'll do that, or buy this equipment, or do what it does. Yeah, all those types of decisions, yeah. I mean, it's fun. It's exciting. I do occasionally miss the every other week, or twice a month, getting a big paycheck and all that, but on the other hand, getting paid while you're a vacation. Exactly. All that type of stuff. But in the hand, like I said, I do enjoy the flexibility and the freedom, and just like this is for us as a team to make these decisions and make it work or not. So, talk to me about that decision tree. Like, who are you? Is it you and... Oh, gosh, I should figure it out. Who are I? Who are I? Just like looking at each other through the Zoom screen, and making the big important decisions, do you have other financial people involved, or certain sales people, or... There's a guy here who we hired him as an intern in the CU Leads MBA program in the last semester. He worked for us, and then we made him a job off upon graduation. So, he's worked for us for a couple of years now, and he's got an engineering background plus the MBA. And so, his input on those decisions is really helpful. And so, as there are three or four of us in the company that are the ones making the decision, and then on some of the technology decisions, that's where the CU and mine's professors, and some of the dev team are much more, I mean, we'll do the sort of the directional stuff. They're leading in on the think, and then you're like, oh yeah, we can build that. And it's sort of okay, we can do that, or let's focus it this way, that way, depending on what we think our customers will want or what we've heard. What's in it for mines and stuff to help you in that way? Are they a stable community? They're consultants, yeah. So, there are a lot of different ways you can work with the universities, and we were actually in talking to some of the leadership at CU within their technology transfer office, and whatever division of the university that is. Typically, their focus is on how do you get ideas out of the labs, or the professors are working on, and we want to commercialize those. It doesn't happen very often when we say, we have some ideas, but we need some expertise to execute on that, and that's what we did when we came to them, so we want some of this expertise. And so, it sort of put them on their back foot a little bit, not too much, but it was a little unusual. But we were able to work out deals with specific professors who fit well with what we wanted to do. Interesting. I think that's a different way to just get a cat than they have. And then, so, basically, they win if you guys are really successful in growing because it takes their good ideas and makes the world better a place. Yeah, they get prominence. They give some substance to the alumni association some day. They also, they do have a financial stake in the company as well, these two professors. And so, I don't think they're going to be buying second, and thirdhand, some private jets and stuff like that, but that's not really my objective. It was our objective in sticker control. Yeah, that's a really good question. Actually, as I was talking about doing this podcast with you and with my wife last night, who wants to meet you, just because it's a different conversation. Yeah, that's good. You know, one of the benefits, one of the downsides of gets older is like, you know, my knee hurts and stuff like that. But one of the benefits of getting older is you have a bit more perspective. And it isn't all about, well, maybe 20 years ago, or something is like, you know, I want a big salary. I want to be important. I want, you know, all this stuff. And as we sort of, I've evolved a grown, it's less about how much money am I going to make. And how I want to have a product that's a good product that really helps people. And it's something I can feel proud about. Yeah, Coca-Cola isn't really that. I hate to say that. No, no, it's not, you know, it's not terrible. It's not oil and gas. No, I like a Coca-Cola. Pollution, nobody's going to get on you about pollution. But, you know, the empty calories and all that kind of stuff. And so it's sort of... Well, it's not, it's been around for a hundred years, right? It's been around for a long time. So there, you know, people get worked up with a lot of different things. But I don't think you throw it down and say, no, I'm really proud that I work for Coca-Cola. At least not, I wouldn't... Yeah, Coca-Cola taught you a lot of really important things. That were really important down the line as you did more things you were proud of. Right. But I think it's, you know, I want to have a product that I can be proud of that's really helpful for a variety of different types of people and their businesses. And their lives. I really enjoy working with good people. I mean, I think that's one of the things that, you know, when you and I talked a while ago, I think it was at a trade show for a while where things weren't, it wasn't that busy and all. And so we just had a quick chat. But I think, you know, we touched on, really does matter who you're working with and the types of people that you're around on a day to day basis. You know, it's good that they're, they work hard, but they're interesting. You know, I've worked with a really diverse group of people in the sense that it's been since the early 90s. Since then, I've always had somebody who was a director for poor who lived overseas. And I lived overseas for a while. So I enjoyed that type of just very different perspectives. It gives you a different perspective about the world and life and makes you appreciate a lot of things about the United States and also understand that, you know, the United States does stuff. And just because we do it this way doesn't make it the best. You know, I am proud of this company. I think this is a great country in a lot of ways. For sure. You can learn a lot from seeing it from a different view. Yeah, there's an experience there. I was just telling somebody the other day about, like, I don't have a huge salary, you know, but I get to work around upwardly mobile business owners mostly that are trying every month, every year to grow and develop themselves and get stronger and better. And I have a friend who's an attorney who makes, I don't know, $300,000 a year, but he's kind of always working to try to sue insurance companies for people who have been wrongly injured and all these things. He slugs it out for his, you know, seven times as much income as mine or whatever. Right. Right. Yeah, I would have a hard time with that. And by the way, I didn't mean to say oil and gas was bad. By the way, I was just saying that people got fired up about oil and gas. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And the same way they do about Coke. But, um, no, I agree. You don't want to get up in the morning and go, oh, Cali, I got to call in the restaurant. More people or whatever it might be. That's, you know, that to me, it starts to bubble with the top of, that's what I really want. I enjoy talking to people like you and the people on our team that are committed and really interested in doing a good job and have a lot of different perspectives on basic stuff or some of our Zoom calls sort of go off into politics and all this other stuff where we end up explaining why it is that the US does things this certain way. And then we get to throw that back at them and say, why is it that Spain or what's this whole thing about the vast country being more important in Spain? So it's a really interesting way to go through life. And I think that's what's more important. Yeah, I really like to hear diverse opinions and perspective shared. And it doesn't mean you're right or I'm right. I don't know what I'm right. You know, I just, my mouth and words come out. And sometimes that's what this interview is like. Right. Open my mouth and words come out and I hope they make sense. It's going to keep happening for a while yet here. So talk to me about like you're like a week in the life of Jeff Bile. Yeah, I mean, I spend a lot of time talking to potential partners who would introduce us to two customers, both now both on the manufacturing distribution side, you know, business consultants and channel partners and those, you know, hardware resellers and all. And then as we are starting to launch into the assisted living and senior care space, again, you know, talking to a variety. There's so many different types of businesses or communities out there. Because there are a lot of different types of needs. Right. Not, you know, we were focused. Oh, it's really seniors. And it's like, well, no, actually, what is it here? There's, you know, there's autistic kids. There's, you know, any kids who require or adults for that matter who require assistance in their daily lives. There are a lot of different groups who get a lot of attention but it's a lot more volunteer attention than our objective being, how can we help them operate those communities more efficiently, more effectively to achieve what they're trying to do? Yeah, so it's like a consultancy with a technology product in a lot of ways. Yeah, yeah, I mean, we try not to go, we're not going to tell them what to do or how they should run their business. But we will show them that our software, system, you know, together with hardware sometimes, sometimes without can help them be a lot more efficient, capture some data that can be interesting over time. And also just take some tasks off the table for their care providers. Sure. Being a care provider is not an easy job. I mean, I can confidently say that I would rather do just about any other job because I just, that's just not my skill set at all. I admire those people, their dedication but that's not really what I can do. Yeah, God bless them. Yeah, and yeah, not me. Yeah, feel that for sure. My niece has actually been in the industry for a while and she loves it. She's doing some other things and working some other directions and then started that and she's like, I just want to do that. Yeah, it's my, my wife and daughter are much more of that mindset and I, you know, that's great. I love them. I appreciate the fact that they're able to do that. I'm glad there's people that want to do that for sure. Yeah, my wife was a social worker for a long time and same kind of thing. I just, you know, it's always a hard story and sometimes they end poorly a lot of times, right? And I just get my heart broke. I'm too sensitive. Yeah, I actually tried to do some pro bono work in law school representing. So I wasn't a qualified lawyer. So you go in and represent kids who are, you know, in custody battles or whatever. And so somebody's looking out for their interests. You know, one of the, one of the both of the parents have issues around from up here. Is that like the CASA program or similar? Yeah, and I just couldn't do it because it was just, I can't adopt all these kids. That's the solution. This is a bad solution. This is a bad solution. This is a bad, you know, I'm all about the win-win win. Yeah, I just lose, lose, lose. I can't talk. I couldn't do it. It was just too heartbreaking for me. So I appreciate people who are able to, to, to be able to. So we're talking about your week and you're talking to, I can't talk to a lot of people. So you're, you're, you're the main sales rainmaker over here at least. That's right. And so, and so it's been a lot of time looking, talking to channel partners or people could help us introduce to different people who could become customers to potential customers. We've been introduced, introduced to you to try to move them down the path towards Sania. Sure. This makes sense and we can get it into our pipeline of projects that we have or talking to some customers who are, say, yeah, we've solved this problem. And now we're starting to think about, you know, what's the next thing we want to get on to? Yeah. And then dealing with, on the technology side, whether it's our internal team or the CU and mine's professors about like, okay, well, what is it that, you know, looking six to 12 to 24 months out? What do we need to start thinking about and starting to get some feedback around from potential customers and customers? Is that interesting? Would they pay for that? Is the, is there like a suite of different software elements to this, like a stage one, two, three, four in terms of the customer experience? For each, each product, the senior care assistant living and the manufacturers, they're different modules. That they can adopt or not. And that, you know, depending on how much functionally they adopt, we'll charge them different prices. Yeah. So it's kind of like the freemium model, but you don't have a free thing because it's too hard to integrate. Right. Exactly. And it doesn't help my income. Right. Yeah. No, fair enough. Not to be greedy, but, you know. So did you, like, how did this vision toward the elder care industry kind of come about and like, when did that start being a thing? Well, I think, you know, when I write my autobiography, I'll say it was a great vision that we all had and, you know, really an idea and all, but really what happened was just a few networking events in a row in the span of, like, three, four weeks. I happened to be, you know, as you stand around. So it's pre-covered, but standing around, waiting for the main event to start, talking to people who happened to be in the assisted living or senior care space and talking about what our system can do. And two or three of them said, well, could you help with this type of problem? One guy said, I'd love to get through a weekend without a family call calling on Sunday morning or Saturday morning or something and saying, we came in and mom was stuck in the bathroom where she was lying on the floor. She'd spilled water all over herself and, you know, we're paying $4,000 a month or more. And, you know, this is not up to our status. You know, that's not, that's not okay with us. And he said, I'd love to be able to know, particularly overnight, non-weekends, you know, that things are happening when they should. And if they don't, I want to know that so I can do something about it versus having a family calling yell at me. And some of those situations are benign. Okay, it's not great that, you know, somebody spilled water on themselves or something, but other times it's not good. Right. Yeah, somebody falls in the bathroom and then it's Saturday night and all day Sunday there. That's an hour's lying in the bathroom hurt. That's not good. And so, had a couple conversations like that, unsolicited and then went out and actively talked to some people who were from that space and said, look, if our system could help, you know, help solve these types of problems, you know, making sure people did what they're supposed to and you know when they did it. And families of care recipients could look and say, okay, mom's supposed to get her medicine at 10 p.m. or six a.m. or whatever. They could look on our app and sort of say, and say, okay, I can see exactly what's happened with mom. So I don't have to call, I don't have to stress. Like what, there's a little tag on the medicine pillbox. So if you shake it a little bit, they didn't know as it's been handled that day. They're a variety of ways that you can handle that. So to see, okay, at least somebody came in and checked on her at six a.m. and you know, without direct physical observation, you know, exactly what happened, but that is expensive and then also, you know, putting cameras in rooms. It's not good. And nobody wants those. Nobody wants those, yeah. Yes, especially elderly people, frankly, because they're like, I can take care of myself, you know. I'm not a, I'm not a little puppy or in daycare where you want to see how I'm doing halfway through the day because you miss me. It's like, you know, I have my privacy. And so, looking at how can you get that information to the care providers, but then also the families to say, you know, because I know, I mean, this was somewhat personal for me. My dad had dementia and it was undiagnosed for a while. And I thought, you know, my mom was just so frustrated with him. And I don't know how much experience you have of that. But, you know, there's a lot of behavioral issues that are, once you get the diagnosis, then you're like, okay, now we understand. My grandmother floored it with me pretty hard one time. Okay, that's, you know, you don't, yeah. It was flattering, kind of. Sort it up. Yeah. Anyway, you go. Yeah. So there was a lot of strange behavior. And I, you know, once you got the diagnosis, there's a lot, even when you had the diagnosis, there are a lot of challenges moving from independent living to assisted living all the way through a memory care unit. And so, and, you know, for instance, with my dad, he would, once he went into the memory care unit, his big thing was, I want to get outside and wander, just walk around. And it's not like he was caged up. I mean, they would take him out. And my mom would take him out for a walk, but that, you know, he, that was his thing. So he would wait for the FedEx or UPS person to arrive. And, you know, there's a bunch of boxes, people are looking at this and how he goes. And nothing bad ever happened. Thank you, Lee. But it's still not good. Yeah. And so it's like, okay, well, we can solve that problem. That's, you know, that's, there are FID tags. You can sew into clothes or put in shoes and they're very durable and you can wash them and all that kind of stuff. And they cost us $1, so it's not, it's not bringing the back. And the system can be like, they just went out, you know, like, and he wasn't quick. So it wasn't like, you know, they had to spread that. Most of them are. Yeah. Like two-year-olds. Three-year-olds. That's a lot harder. No, definitely is harder. So, you know, I saw the stress that my mom had. And even when she would go away, she's like, yeah, I arranged for care for somebody to come in and, you know, make sure he was doing this and doing that. But I need to call them to see, you know, did you go at 10 a.m. Did you go at 2 p.m. And you know, just to make sure. And so if you can provide that information to people, then they can relax about that. Could you, can you do something like that? Would it work with a smartphone to be like a proximity thing, like 20 feet away? Like it'll give me an alert if my two-year-old gets more than 20 feet away from me so I can know that it's time to freak out? That's a little tricky with a mobile phone because the reader is not that strong. But you can do some things like that or you can put a reader around doors. So it's like, okay, they went out the door. Or various things. I think about the child leash. Right. Without the leash. Yeah, it's more exceptionally acceptable because some people judge that whole child leash, especially when they're a teenager. Yes, exactly. But if you can just track them, you know. Anyway, I digress. There's other apps for that. That's not your guys' main thing. Yeah, that's not a thing. You know, we'll get to that later. So are you like, like this is like full on startup style and the fact that like, say fauna, like we need a logo and we need a flyer or something and you know, we're outsourced to this graphic designer or something because you got a bunch of programmers and stuff, but mostly it's you and a tiny team of deciders and planners. Yeah, and then some marketing people that we hire on project basis to help us with things like that. But you're right. Yeah, we're like, being a part of it was, do we really want to take this on? And initially it was like, well, I don't know, I don't know. But people kept saying, oh, that's a great idea. It's a great idea. We'd love to have, you know, I mean, the technology, part of the technology, for instance, is like an NFC tag by the sink or the bedside table and the NFC tags are in the credit card that little black box. And so you tap it with your phone and it says, yeah, okay, you were here. So part of it's just that. And then there's some other technology that we're building that'll extend that functionality and make it more powerful, recognizing behaviors and some other things like that. And so, but people kept telling us, yeah, this is really interesting. We really want this. There's a big opportunity we'd love to have that. And so, we find many different resources from serving more of our existing customers with what we got, or, yeah. But we also sort of said, you know, I think, you know, 10 years from now, we would kick ourselves saying, you know, people were saying, we want this product. Would you please do this for us? A lot of times, I, because I do business planning class classes and talk about the mission, vision values and things. And I say that the mission is like an internal document really to keep you from doing things that aren't really, like, did you, did this new Saifana, did it fit the mission or did it have to have its own kind of mission statement built because it was outside that prior scope? Well, it was definitely outside the prior scope. I mean, the benefit is that we're reusing 80% or 90% of the core technology so you don't have to rebuild a separate platform. But as far as marketing and all of that, that was a different kind of demographic channel partners all that is just all brand new. But the interesting thing that we're actually getting a lot of traction really quickly with this. And so the more we sort of put our toe in the water and say, this is, we're going with the river, again, not against the river on this one, we said, this we really need to pay attention. Right, I mean, the flow again here now, yeah, exactly. So talk to me about that decision tree a little bit, if you would, like, you're concerned that it's going to be a distraction, like what one out or what was the process that you and your team kind of went through to come up with that conclusion? I mean, part of it was being sure that the technology, we wouldn't have to double the size of the team and rebuild the whole thing. And so it's going to be very different. And it's like, OK, we want to make sure that we're really, we have a core technology that we'll keep building on that will benefit both sides, not 100%, but close enough so that it's not a real duplication or not duplication. But sort of starting from scratch again, scratch it. Because that's too hard. That would be way too hard. I wouldn't want to do that. The other thing was finding the right types of people who said, look, I don't, I mean, I know the community where my mom, my dad used to live. He passed a couple of years ago, my mom still lives. I know them other than a couple of people that have happened, it's not my world. And so we were fortunate enough just because of all the connections and the coffees and beers that I've had with a variety of different people to get introduced to somebody who that was their world. And she knows a lot of people. And I mean, she's a, is she part of your team now? She is on a part-time basis, but because she's got some other stuff going on, but she's a little diner, I mean, she just gets at it and like sets up all these meetings. She knows all these people. She's with, she really agrees with, I don't know if mission, but the goals of this product to really serve these communities and help them operate more effectively and safely and all that type of stuff. That resonates with her and so, you know, she was after that mission, I guess. That is more on the mission, right? Exactly. We imagine a world where facilities have the empowerment to track their people better. Exactly. So it costs us a little bit of money, but not a gigantic amount. And with her help, we've been able to get that traction really quickly. And so that helped also. I mean, because you like to think, oh, we made a hard decision last December, yes or no. And part of it was, well, no, let's be a little bit more systematic about how much of an opportunity is there and within a couple of weeks of working with her, it's like, yeah, no, are... You're throwing some praise out here. A lot of times I like to give people an opportunity to just say a name with a classic complaint to you. Oh, sorry. It's Barbara Penel-Jane from Positively Funded. She's great. I really enjoy working with her. She's done a lot for us. And so I think that getting Barbara involved and really helping her move down the path has helped us a lot. And it's sort of, we made that decision, but I think, maybe in the back of our minds, we're like, yeah, let's keep testing the water until we hit a big rock and we haven't. And with her help, it's actually like, oh, no, here we go. Wait, here's some easy-to-use stuff in all these long sales cycles and stuff like that. Because I think it's probably a more pressing area. In banking, we often say the scouts get the arrows. And so that's like, here's why Mr. Manufacturer, you should really use our thing or you'd logistics company or whatever, but when people are sneaking out of your facility and there's whatever. They're more immediate concerns. Right. And they're emotional stories so much more and you're just very aware of that biting need. And some of our customers are saying we want, we want to make sure whatever agreement we sign with you that we can use the fact that we're working with you on our marketing materials for attraction and retention, attracting new residents. Yes, I can. Yes, you can. That's not true. Well, let me think about that for half a second. So when you start to get that sort of feedback, it's like, yeah, okay, this is something we need to pursue. So what's the past for this year look like to you? It feels like you're gonna start getting split into a little bit unless you get a manufacturing sector, Barbara or something like that. Is that part of the scaling management? I think so and I think maybe this Air Force funding will help us do some of that where I think our first hire would be a channel partner manager or somebody to manage the channel partners, attract and manage them on the manufacturing side. I think I hope Barbara will want to continue to work with us. We've certainly enjoyed it and she's been very productive and so I think that working with her will help us moving on that path. We're also talking to a number of different players who are in that space and are interested in partnering with us maybe it will be a white label to supplement the functionality they have but there's a lot of interest particularly in the last year but even before that and telehealth and communication between care providers, doctors, nurses, aides. One of my college buddies runs like 18 nursing homes. Is that somebody you want to be interested in? That'd be great. Sounds good. But there's a lot of different products that are coming out to help, there's been a ton of money on the therapeutics and diagnostic side and now some tools, even as what you consider fairly basic just making communication amongst the people who are interested in a care recipient. Yeah. And so we sort of partner up with them and they've got a number, you know, they've got different size customer bases but they've been in the market for a little while and so I think again we're not going to go out and hire a direct salesperson because there are a lot of people out there that we can partner with where there's a little bit of product overlap but not a lot. Well, you can just go a lot more leverage on your sales force. You know, you can pay a salesperson 100,000 but they can't do as much selling as 100 really qualified channel partners. Exactly, you still need to manage them and so that's why I think we'd hire somebody to take over some of those responsibilities and then I need to focus some on the technology as well and just making sure that we're looking over the shoulders of the two professors we work with and the team that we build to say, yeah, this is how we want it to work and this is feedback from our channel partners about what they're hearing from their customers or users or whatever terminology they use to say that this is good, that's not as interesting. It seems like the size of the potential marketplace that you could serve, especially with this new element, like it seems like you could attract capital if you wanted to and then get bigger teams, do bigger splashes and try to do the old scaling trick is there is that something you've thought about and rejected or like what's your notion in that regard? Yeah, I think that's a fair point now. I think we've thought about it and I think we want to wait a little bit longer to go a little bit farther down the road and prove out the market. I mean, we feel very comfortable but I think we'd like to be in a better position so that when we talk to them. If you make it to the money, it's easier to say, no, you only get 17%. Exactly. I don't want to be in the position where we're like whatever money you'll give to us. Right, right. Tell us the terms, we'll take it. Yeah, are they good control, which I've seen too often and they're like, Bink, you're out of here, we'll just put our guy in there and you're like, well, but I had all these plans to succeed, you know? Yeah, and we've been fairly fortunate in the sense that obviously the Air Force money will help a lot but then also not having a big burn rate helps a lot and starting to meet a bunch of partners who have specific ideas and not just sort of like, oh, we want to help you go to market. But no, I want to introduce you, like you, only sometimes much bigger but like I know this friend of mine who owns this chain, I know this company, I know that company who could be really interesting for you because they want to do international sales and this would be a great product fit for them and great fun. That's, you know, those types of things. So part of, you know, part of our cross our fingers for a little bit is we can get enough customers so that our need for capital would be more of a conscious, like no, we see this as a big opportunity. If we write X amount of money, then it could go. But it also does play back to my comment a while ago, which is, I mean, we're not working to get so wealthy that we can all have private planes and all that type of stuff. I do want to enjoy the ride, not just sort of say, look, I'll, you know, in five to 10 years, there'll be this big payday and then I'll, you know, enjoy life. Yeah, yeah, fair enough. No, I think there's, it's like designing a car, right? There's always compromises. If you wanted to handle the best ever, you're not going to be able to go through a bunch of snow. Right, you know, those kind of equations. There's always trade-offs in life. Yeah, so let's get the, like a life story journey, just a little bit, because you have had a fairly interesting journey, you know, from the Hong Kong and Korea, we told me things like that. So let's figure out how Jeff got to be Jeff, but with kind of the flyover style. Like, where were you born, like, into what kind of family, what was, how was that all set up? Yeah, it's been an interesting life. I mean, I was born in Illinois. My dad was in grad school at University of Illinois. But we relatively quickly moved in North Carolina, which is where I grew up. And he was a professor at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. And my mom was a school teacher. And so I was a professor of what? Political science. Oh, interesting. So, you know, I fell off the family tree. I didn't want to be a teacher. That's not something I want to do. So I went off, you know, as I said, you know, started doing some software. Fellin, where are you good student along the way? Pretty good. Pretty good. Pretty good. I could have been a little bit more dedicated to my studies. I think, you know, towards the end of my college career, I got more focused. There was a lot of room for improvement in my first couple of years. Fair. Same here. Yep. And then, you know, I worked for four years, developing software, went back to, went to law school. Well, that was defense contractor. So not to point out your gray hair, but like, that was early for software workers, right? Like, there wasn't a lot of software industry. You had to establish it. It was just getting going. Yeah. It was early days. Not, you know, not 60s or anything like that. But that means you understand kind of that, I mean, it was worth, you know, it was IBM and mainframes and stuff for a long time and then, you know, it really was our generation where software started to get really useful and scaled into all kinds of operations. Yeah, it's come a long way since I worked on it, but it does give me a degree of comfort around, okay, what software can and can't do. What's easy? What's hard? Yeah. Yeah. And I'm not saying I'm not a technologist by any stretch, but it helps. And then you got the MBA, and I went, we got a law degree, a law degree, I'm sorry. Yeah. Went to Coke and Atlanta, clerked for a judge in Texas, which was interesting Atlanta for a couple of years. Let's tell me about the interesting judge in Texas thing because you thought you were going to go into prosecution or something, you said, yeah, I didn't. We dealt with a lot of immigration drugs, drug cases, all that type of stuff. And to me, it was just, the day to day was just hard because you're dealing with, you know, either people whose economic circumstances are such that they get into, they're the lower level people that are carrying drugs around across the border and stuff like that, and that's just kind of sad. They're desperate enough to take a huge risk. They take a big risk and, you know, they make some money, that's great, but, you know, odds are eventually they get caught and that's not good. And so it didn't, you know, you're not sending, they weren't the people that you thought they were. Right. Bad, bad options, bad decisions sometimes, but in some of them were bad people, but the majority were just their economic circumstances were such that they didn't, yeah, that was a rational choice. Yeah, people rarely steal when they're not kind of desperate, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the things that I've seen over the years is that, you know, it's a government. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, people basically have a lot in common no matter what the culture is. I mean, you're worried about your family and, you know, how you can take care of them and, you know, what's our economic and emotional well-being? Now, how can I promote that and make that better for everybody? And so, you know, when you go, whether it's in Asia or Latin America and you see people just in really hard circumstances, you understand why they make those decisions because they are trying to take care of their family. Right. That's not across the board. Yeah, well, like the sweatshops, right, or whatever, you know, yes, you can say those people should make more money, but you can also go over there and interview some of those people that are so glad they have that job because they make twice as much money as their customers. Exactly. It's a bit like when Nike was, we were in Asia when Nike was getting some slack from, you know, some of the factories that they were using. Right. People are thinking that, oh, well, you know, these kids will, you know, go, go home and play on soccer teams and all this other stuff and like, no, no, no, that this is a great opportunity for them, given their other choices, which is sad, but it's true. Yeah. So sadness doesn't make it any less true, right? And so, so it was in Asia for a while. I mean, I did work for the judge didn't really, I mean, that put me off a little bit on so that I don't want to. There are some bad people, but then a lot of the prosecutors sort of after 20, 30 years like, well, I got kids. I need to put through college. So I need to go, you know, not be a government employee. I need to go work and try the sector and so you're keeping people out of jail and the ones that have money to do that are truly the ones that should be able to do it. So I was like, that doesn't seem like a good life path for me. So I gave up on that, went to Coke, went to Atlanta, went to Seattle, worked for Getty Images, set up the Getty Images Latin America contractor, start up and then, then stick your control along the way. I forgot three kids. I've been married for 25 years now, happily married. And you've met your wife, Ramsey, Ringo. Yes. That's interesting. It is. And actually, let's just kind of delve into the next segment, we might as well start with family. So tell me about, I like to do one word descriptions of the children, you feel human me. That's interesting. My daughter is the youngest and she empathetic, sort of, she got all that from Ramsey, not me. Are you willing to call her my name? Margot. Margot. Yep. Very good. My oldest son, Thomas, is intense or focused, maybe I'll put that one off, it's good. And then my middle son Lee is, we call, my wife actually came up with this, but I think it's stealth, stealth, where he accomplishes a lot and zind a lot of things, but he doesn't make a lot of noise about it. And so he's quietly doing his thing. Do the amazing things. Yeah, and it's good. I like that. What's the ages of these kiddos? 35, 32 and 22. Okay. So they're starting to do things as early as they're old, it's interesting to watch over time, sort of their maturity, and then you get these vignettes where you say they're actually real adults, not just sort of like young adults, yeah, yeah. So he said recently that one thing we didn't realize when we were kids is that we were watching our parents grow up before our eyes. Exactly, exactly. That's true. And you look back and you're like, no, when I was that age, I was doing X, Y, and Z. And so I need to sort of, I need to reshape my vision of them, you know, really move the needle across the record, he's an old analogy, I guess. Yeah. So what would be some of, oh, by the way, did you have a family as well, brothers, sisters? I do have a younger brother, and then two sisters, one older, and then the youngest of the four is my other sister. Okay. And how did they, did they travel off to Hong Kong and things too, or did anybody become a college professor or teacher? My brother's a teacher. He's been, he's just getting ready to retire because he's doing 30 years. He's coming up on 30 years now. Yeah. But he's middle school, high school. So out of that career path that you just described, and I'm going to do a quick side trash, but it doesn't necessarily point to this big entrepreneurial bug. Like, was that a thing not until later you had to see enough life? You weren't the kid that was always like mowing lawns for saving cash. I did a little bit of that, but it was more because I, you know, I want to buy a bike or something like that, not sort of I want to have my own business. I think it was, I was fortunate. I think one of, you know, I hate to think about how lucky my life has been by just happenstance opportunities, you know, came up while, you know, when I was ready and in that particular spot, but I think it really was when I moved to Hong Kong and felt overwhelmed and like, why I'm making decisions, I'm, I'm not followed by, you know, way above my pay grade. And then having a couple people who are older say, you know, just get used to it. You're fine. You're making a decision. If you make a bad decision, just tell us and we'll fix it. And just, I mean, it wasn't sort of this big epiphany, but it was sort of like they said that a couple of times. And, you know, we made a bunch of decisions. It worked out. Made a mistake. We fixed it. And, you know, it wasn't the end of the world. I think then it was just when I realized, wow, you know, I am comfortable with this a lack of structure, some ambiguity, sort of making things up. Obviously, I like being part of a team and that makes it a lot better. And I think the smaller the company, at least in my experience, the more focused you are as a group. And this is what we want to accomplish. And there's a lot more camaraderie. And I really, I enjoyed that part of it a lot. And so that's what I think, you know, when I start to look around, what do I want to do? How do I want to work with that type of thing? Those are the things that come to the top where I like that lack of bureaucracy or structure. But I also like that camaraderie of people saying, yeah, we're just making it up as we go along and we'll do the best we can and, you know, we're having fun. I mentioned earlier that I'm a motorcycleist and there's an analogy that's used oftentimes to describe it to non-cyclists. That's when you're not a motorcycle, you know, it's you and the motorcycle like carving your way through the world. When you're in a car, you're just kind of watching the world go by. And it's kind of the same with a small team. When you're kind of a small team, it's like I'm envisioning like a Trojan horse or you're carrying this shield or whatever, you're working your way through the world. Otherwise, you're just on like a big boat or something, you know, you're like, hey, we're on Coca-Cola's boat. Let's turn the rudder. Well, it'll start to adjust a little bit. Yeah. But yeah, roboat versus ocean liner, right? Exactly. And actually growing up, my dad rode motorcycles until he was 65 or so. And so we had him growing up. And I, so I get that analogy, which is you're out on the road. The wind is just beating on you and you feel the temperature changes. Yeah. And the smells come across. And you're like, wow, that car is right next, you know, it's two or three feet away from me and we're going 80 miles an hour or whatever it is. It's scary at times, but also just really exhilarating. I agree. I agree. So, yeah, that's the fun of entrepreneurship, right? And especially a bootstrap startup, you know, there ain't nobody paying the rent next month. Exactly. That's why I keep asking you know, Ramsey, you got to keep working. Right. And you're going to keep us in. Fair enough. Hey, let's take a short break and then we'll come back. I'll pour us a whiskey and we'll finish up. Sounds good. Okay. Jeff, you were just about to tell me the love story with your wife, Ramsey, every time somebody comes in and they've got as much obvious affection for their partners. I do. I want to make sure we hear that. So, it was a good story. It's a good story. I mean, we met in Hong Kong. She was over there working for a company called Mr. Christmas. They do Christmas toys, but more, not like the little toys you give your kids, but sort of carousels and music boxes and some things like that. And they did all the production in South China, so they had a showroom where she worked and she was doing sales for them for, she worked, ended up working there for about 25 years. I saw that in her journey. Yeah. We talked about it. It touched you. Yeah. So, we met, actually, it was at a Coca-Cola function in January, it was the annual dinner so it was more around the lunar new year rather than Christmas because that's more what they celebrate rather than Christmas. And so, she was there as somebody else. She was there with somebody else on a date with a guy who was working in our office temporarily for, he was there for a month or two or maybe three, I can't remember. But you're like, get out of here and leave your girlfriend behind. Exactly. But so, I went there and I was the youngest expat and the one who, for whatever reason, connected most with the Hong Kong Chinese who were made up the bulk of the office. And so, I had to go up and there's the big sort of thing where they draw the numbers or balls out of the cage that they rotate. And so, I did that about 40 times and danced with the DJ and who was the local celebrity that I didn't know, which was the dance little awkward when she asked, what's your favorite thing that I've done? I was like, I don't know. I don't know. I'm sorry. But anyways, after that event, the four of us went out to go dancing and have a drink or two or whatever and Hong Kong is a very much of a, I think there are 150,000 expats out of 7 million people. And so, and people come in for a year or two and then they leave and so you can't be that picky about like, no, this is my friend group because all of a sudden they're gone. And so, we exchanged phone numbers but it was more sort of, okay, well, you know, I enjoyed talking to you and it was fun but it was so much of a good date. But it was like, let's, you know, go on a hike or do something later. Is it British English in Hong Kong, or they speak a lot of it or at least they did not as much as they used to, but yeah, I mean, it was a British colony up until middle of 1997. Right. And we were there from 94, 93 to 2000, so we were there and about that transition and things like that. So, you know, I called her, she was going on a business trip for three weeks. I said, okay, fine, I'll, you know, maybe you can call me when you get back and she didn't say this to me, but she was like, no, I mean, I don't, maybe, I don't know, but that's not my thing. So, I just made a note on a calendar saying, you should be back in three weeks. So, two days after she got back, I called and said, you want to have a drink. And I guess, you know, most guys are not that organized, so she, that was somewhat impressive. Right. But then we got a really nice date. It was a little bit funny in the sense that I wasn't sure how much I would like her. So, I said, look, I've got, let's go meet for a drink. And then I've got a dinner I got to go to. So, as an out, but the drink went really well. You're like, you know what, I lied. I lied. I didn't say that. I said, I'll call and cancel. So then we ended up having dinner and it kind of went from there. So, and it was fun. It was really nice and... Was it pretty instant? Whatever karma? Yeah, I think so. I mean, after the first date and first couple dates, it was like, yeah, this is really interesting. I really enjoy her company. I mean, there were a lot of people there in Hong Kong that you hang out with. But that, for me at least, it was, it felt special. What would she say was the reason that she fell in love with you? I think, well, she has told me that she had a handful of criteria that she was sort of evaluating. Okay. Guys, one is they need to be a little bit older than she is because she wanted more maturity, which I think is a good one because, as I've told my daughter numerous times, if you date guys your age, you know, at age 22 or 18 or whatever it is, they're going to be less mature than you are. That's just the way it goes. So that was that sort of... She wanted somebody who was engaged with the world and understood, you know, sort of politics and sort of all the stuff that was going on. And there were a couple others that I can't remember, but she wanted a sense of humor, which I guess I'd say that occasionally. Yeah. But it was good. And mine was just like, I want somebody that I really like and enjoy being with, you know, typical guy sort of... Right. Well, I often say one of the things I judge people by the most is how much they seem to like me. Yeah. And even today, frankly, my wife Jill, you know, she seems to like me way more than I deserve and so that's one of the reasons I love her. That's how I feel sometimes it's like, well, I can't be all that bad. If you're going to keep liking me, like, yeah, she likes me and me. And you're pretty awesome. Yeah. So I feel better about myself. I like it. Yeah, I mean, I think the only thing I'll say about that is both of them are a journey, at least in my, you know, you sort of go through the journey to grow up in a faithful home, for example. You know, my parents went to the Unitarian Church and my dad actually headed it was the head. I don't know what the elder or something like that. Yeah. Whatever the terminology is. But to me, my vague recollection of it at this point was it was kind of an intellectual experience more than sort of a southern Baptist church, which I've gone to where it's much more, um, they're singing and, you know, it's a much more emotional spiritual experience. Yeah. I don't think at least that church, I didn't get that impression. Yeah. No, I think that would resonate with, frankly, the, the Unitarians around the community. Yeah, there's a number of folks, pretty big church here and two of them, actually, that represented. I know a number of those folks. And so, yeah. Yeah. And I've engaged with church, different churches. I mean, obviously, Unitarian, but that wasn't my choice. That was my parents. Unitarian church, southern Baptist church that I actually really liked a lot, not so much the theology, but the spirituality of the services and the messages were very powerful and strong. I enjoyed that a lot. And it was also a big church. So you could really get into a community there, a community there, um, so I enjoyed that. And then again, back to Presbyterian church and we just haven't gotten it going so far. I mean, we just moved, we moved to Colorado a few years ago, but then lived in Denver for a while and then moved back out here out to Boulder just in time for everything to shut down. And so, you know, that it's a little hard on Zoom calls or whatever to get into a church community. Yeah. Can I dig into that just a little bit? Sure. You're kind of like as regards faith you haven't said necessarily that you want to be like, what do you do with, are you Jesus follower, would you say? Or more, you want to be part of a church that you can have good community with and hear good messages and whatever. I think more the latter than the former. Yeah. Definitely, you know, I think you can be a good person without being a follower of Jesus and vice versa. Sure. Yeah. Agreed. And so that's what scares a lot of people out for me. Yeah. Exactly. But I enjoy the community and obviously the Bible and God and Jesus is a big part of that. It's a focal point of that community. Sure. And so you can't sort of say, well, I'll just be part of the community and ignore all that other stuff. But it just kind of comes and goes with me and for whatever reason, that's just kind of how I've experienced it. And sometimes it's really powerful and other times, if I don't nurture it, I think is the big thing. Yeah. You have to nurture it. And if I don't, it sort of fades away. And so it's on me to say, no, I enjoy this. It's rewarding. It's satisfying. It's all that stuff fulfilling. There's wisdom in this book. There's wisdom in all this. I need to nurture this because it's not going to just sort of take care of itself. Like so many things. Yeah. Relationships and exercise, whatever, if you don't put effort into it, it doesn't just sort of happen. Yeah. I would agree. And whether it's, frankly, whether it's unitarians or Presbyterians or Catholics or whatever, like being a part of a community that's kind of striving to be morally better, you know, in some fashion, I think is really reinforcing on the do good, not bad. Yeah. And I like that emphasis on the works and how do you help your community, whether it's the church community or the larger community. I think that I find that very, very rewarding, as I get older in particular where, you know, so you get sort of past some of this, what, you know, it's not all about me. Whoa. Yeah. Fair enough. Fair enough. Would Ramsey say the same? Are you guys in alignment in that race? I think, to a certain extent, yeah. I mean, not 100%. But I think she grew up in more of a faith family and her parents, certainly her mom, goes to church regularly and, you know, we have it times and heaven to times. Yeah. Right. Fair enough. Yeah. Well, I go to church regularly, but sometimes it's a month between. Right. So politics, the, the hand grenade topic, yeah, I think we touched on sort of my, my overarching wish, which is there's so many commonalities that we all have that we don't tend to focus on right now. Yeah. And I think that if we were able to do that, then we'd be all better off, but it's easier to raise money. It's easier to get attention and all that focusing on the differences. Yeah. And there are some differences and part of it is, you know, what's your life experience versus mine? What's, you know, what was your family like growing up versus, you know, what was my family like growing up? And part of it is, you know, if you live in a rural community versus in the inner city, your day-to-day life is different, so it's going to impact your, what, what your prioritization is at this time. But a lot of it is, I think, you know, if you really could step back and say, well, you know, nobody wants bad things to happen to other people, we all want, you know, people would be safe, secure, you know, all those types of things, you know, the most basic needs and wants of people, and if we could focus on that more, I think we'd be a lot better off. But it is kind of discouraging. I'm not, I kind of, I feel like I'm moderate to a little bit liberal, you know, my parents were in Chapel Hill, which, you know, Jesse Helms famously said, we don't need a zoo in North Carolina, we can just put a fence around Chapel Hill. So I don't know what that is supposed to mean. Well, Jesse Helms is a very conservative, I mean, he was a segregationist way back when he was, so he just looked at Chapel Hill like it's a liberal zoo, it's where the university is. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I just put a fence around that and that's our zoo. Interesting. So coming out of that background, that would become more conservative over time, just by virtue of exposure to different cultures and environments and all of that. Well, a lot of times seeing the, to me, it's kind of seeing the negative consequences of well-intended, expensive programs sometimes. Exactly. I mean, when you look at, certainly when my wife and I talk about raising our kids, you know, you have to have people make decisions in their consequences to decisions and part of the government program mentality, the government will solve everything, part of it, not all of it, but part of it is the government can't solve all these problems, people have to make better decisions with their lives and... There was a, my dad's a farmer and there was part of this, the last aid package before the new infrastructure thing that got passed in December or whatever. There was a significant program that paid farmers, first it was, and I don't know, I was open to Hispanic and black farmers for two weeks before it was open to everybody else, regardless of other criteria and whatever. But and then it was 100% of your debt, it would pay off. Initially, it was going to be 120% of your debt, it would pay off. And it just, you know, rewards carrying a bunch of debt for just in time, just in case the next time there's another program. And I thought that both the structure and, you know, I don't like to see frankly, extra rights granted to anybody. I want to see equal rights granted to everybody, but extra rights seems kind of wrong too. Yeah, I think it's a little bit over, over-shooting the market bit. I mean, I think there definitely are times when people through no fault of their own, it's not a level playing field. For sure. No question. And I do like to see, I do like to see, like I was a pelagrant recipient, you know, and that funded a big portion of my college because my family was poor and I do like to see those kinds of hands up. But again, like I was referencing, like a program that says, oh, we're going to pay off all your debt for you. Well, then it really punishes like the student loan thing. Right. Well, I've worked hard and paid off my student loans, but I wish I wouldn't have. Too bad. No. Right. Exactly. And so those kind of things, like I think reward the wrong kinds of behavior sometimes, even though they're well-intentioned. I think that's right. And I think that unfortunately we just don't have as much a rational debate about sort of what are the consequences of making those types of programs available. Pelagrants, I totally support. There's some arguments around, well, it helps, you know, fuel the high cost of education. But really, I think the biggest thing is making sure that people have equal education, equal opportunities, or at least, you know, close to equal more, more closer, yeah, I'm a libertarian leaning, a small L libertarian, I guess I would say, and I have a podcast that said, better, not perfect, you know, and I don't let the perfect be the enemy of doing something that improves the lot of a bunch of people. So do you have any prescriptions, like either locally or nationally, for things you would like to see done different, for example, we've got a corporate tax on the table here with the Biden infrastructure behind, do you think that's a wise move? Do you think, you know, national debt is a big concern? That scares me a little bit, because it's like there's free money in there. I don't think there is such things free money. Well, 25% of the debt has been accrued in the last 12 months now. Yeah, that's a little scary, and I'm not enough of economists to say one way or the other. But it's just at a gut level, it's like, yeah, that doesn't seem sustainable. It seems leaning over your skis quite a bit to me, yeah. I think more, I think sort of my attitude is at least in the last few months is to focus more on the state and local, and environment and less around the theater that is our national politics right now. So do you want to talk about some hot topics in Colorado, then how about water policy? Yeah, I mean, I think that that, you know, water is going to be the big issue here going forward, or it already is, and, you know, I think that I've read something, and I'm not as educated on this as I would like to be, but the, you know, agriculture is a big driver. And so you and I collectively can save a little bit, but really it's how do we make agriculture? How do we make agriculture? And I think that that, you know, as a group, a community of Colorado on some of the downriver, you know, Arizona and California, what, you know, putting some money against making agriculture more efficient with the water, would be a lot better than, you know, spending $5 billion on expanding gross dam, I mean, gross reservoir, gross reservoir, which may or may not make sense, but it does, that's a lot of money, and it doesn't do anything to reduce the amount of water that's being used. Right. Right. I think we have to look at it from both sides and say, and not just sort of say, well, we're going to, we're going to put the screws to the agriculture community, and you guys have to spend a bunch of money. Right. So we're going to outbid you guys for sure, and so let's starve those farms of water. Exactly. And so that's, you know, I wish that we could have some of those types of, it's not sort of agriculture against front range, but it's more, how do we collectively look at that and say, what's in our best interest as a group? I had a mayoral candidate on the podcast. Yeah, so that actually wanted to listen to that. And Jenny, our new mayor won in a landslide, and I had never met her before. She came in for the podcast. So thanks, Jenny, for being on. And she was kind of advocating that element, and especially like above ground storage is kind of inefficient. It doesn't look that good. I'm sure there's a lot of evaporation then. Yeah, exactly. And what I wanted to say at the time, but you can't drive your boat on the aquifer store. Exactly. Exactly. So anyway, I digress, but, but yeah, it's a, it's a challenging topic. And I think it'll keep being a, a most important thing here. It's not going to go away. For sure. Yeah, no, especially now that everybody wants to move to the front range. Yep. You know, water is for fighting over and, and the rest of the stuff is, is come along later. So I'm hoping that you're right that, because there are so much more efficient ways to grow plants than the irrigation systems we have now. And especially with the sun baking as much as it does, you know, who knows? Maybe we can have a bunch of big hydro farms out there. Yeah, but I think you have to be fair about who bears the cost and say, for sure, you can't put it on these guys and say, you're the main user. So you need to change, as opposed to us changing. Yeah. Yeah, there's something to that, because otherwise, then like North Dakota, where there isn't any irrigation, like you can't put that burden of cost on Colorado and have it be balanced out. Right. Fair enough. So, let's get into the local experience, the, the craziest journey or experience of your life that you'd be willing to share in an open forum, Jeff. Yeah, I actually talked about this with my wife and shared it briefly with you before. And there's, there's a short one and a longer one. And the short one is just a trip that my wife and I took into China to a tourist attraction. And it's not sort of in the top 20s. If you're going to China once or twice, you wouldn't go to this place. Yeah. Great. Lynn, it's pretty though. And sort of at the end of the weekend, we were messing around in a little village. And I can't remember why I sort of on the way to the airport or something like that. And walking around and these guys were playing Connect 4. And my wife is particularly good at Connect 4. And I think that was actually one, I forgot about this, but when we were dating. One of the reasons you fell in love with her. Well, one of the reasons that she put up with me is because I actually did a reasonable job playing Connect 4. Oh, yeah. So, I think that was a big test. Yeah, Scrabble is my wife and I. I have a battle of choice. Okay. So, anyways, so they said, you know, do you want to play? I mean, they didn't speak English. We didn't speak Mandarin well enough or whatever the dialect was there. But so I said, yep, my wife will play. Yeah. And so they sort of, this other guy that had been playing went off and he came back with these two little shot glasses full of a clear liquid that I smelled and I was like, well, but then he brought out a dead snake and squeezed it, the blood from the snake into those two shot glass. Well, three of them because he did it as well and said, you know, here, and I was like, well, maybe it is good that that alcohol is really strong. Right. This is kind of a little. Antivent. So he went first. So I was like, okay, fine. If he's going to do it and survive, we'll do it. So that was sort of the, I mean, there's a lot of, did you win? She won. Yes. Yes. And that guy sort of went and hid after that because it's really embarrassing. No second shot of snake venom. No, no, no. But it was an interesting experience and I ate a lot of, you know, different food to the point where I said, I'm, I started saying I'm a vegetarian because I've just, you know, stuffed. Yeah, I'm fine. I don't want to eat that. I don't want to, you know, vegetables are safe for me. Fair enough. Are you vegetarian still? No. There was. Okay. Of course. But it worked to get away from stuff that I couldn't identify and was like, yeah, no more snake blood shots. Yeah. And stuff where they're just seeing if I'll eat it too, so because they don't even want it. So that's a short experience. That's a short one. The longer one was actually working for Coca-Cola, spent a lot of time in South Korea. And, you know, what the, what they wanted, there were four bottleers there that had been Coke bottleers since, you know, right after the Korean, like all of South Korea has four bottleers and they're heritage companies, like, yeah, they're, yeah, they're family on business. They're chain balls. So they're, they're not sort of, that's their only business. They use the Coke business to fund car dealerships and just, you know, all, sure, karaoke bars and just all kinds of crazy hosts, sure, because they've been making tons of money for a ton of money. And so they just put it in there. And so they weren't growing the Coca-Cola business. And so guys in Atlanta are like, no, we've had it with these guys. You know, you either fix them or we need to fire them or whatever. Yeah. So they tried to fix them and one of the mistakes they made was having somebody from the Tokyo office come in and, you know, Korea was colony and they just like Japanese just like that didn't work. Fair. So they finally said, okay, well, this isn't working. We're going to have to get rid of these guys. Said the young white guy out there. We'll send the guy from Hong Kong so they can't sort of say, I don't care if, you know, it wasn't even a Japanese guy that was coming across. It's the fact that he worked in Tokyo, bothered them. Interesting. He went in and I think that it was, you know, that sort of, you know, part of my journey, whether it's faith or professional, whatever is developing my empathy, not anywhere near where my wife or daughter are, but, you know, just developing that. I wish I had had a little bit more of that. And certainly Coke could have had a lot more empathy going in and understanding that, you know, these guys who run these businesses for 30 or 40 years, whatever it was, we're going in. We're threatening their livelihood. Right. We have stuff. We're foreigners from a big multinational, they're mixed emotions about Americans in Korea. I mean, obviously there's a strong relationship because the security relationship, you'd lie on you kind of and all that. And there's a, you know, there's a lot of, you're threatening that kind of, right? Exactly. We're threatening their livelihood. And, you know, in Americans, there's a big military base right in the middle of Seoul. And, you know, the soldiers, you know, no backtalk to American troops and stuff like that. Yes. The service, the agreement, you know, doesn't allow for prosecution of soldiers misbehavior. And so, not that they misbehaved a lot, but it does happen and that's the source of aggravation. And we treat them like the little brother in a relationship, of course. Of course. So, there's some, there's mixed feelings there. And so, I wish I, you know, and they also went through from abject poverty following the Korean War. Sure. Where North Korea was actually a much stronger economy into the late 70s, early 80s. And then they went through this industrialization process really, really quickly. So, they've dealt with a lot of change in a very compressive period of time. Yeah, almost no economy has developed as quickly as Korea did. Yeah. And so, they're a wealthy nation now and, you know, you go to Korea and it's beautiful. But, you know, they went from being basically at, you know, subsistence agriculture following the Korean War to, you know, somewhat similar to what Japan did. Sure. But really, you know, fairly traumatic for a lot of people. It's a lot of change. And I think, you know, if I had been more empathetic at that point, then I could have understood because I remember going in one situation where we were, we just had sort of had it with this one bottler, bottler, and it just wasn't working. They were resisting. We're like, no, this is what's going to happen. So, they sent five busloads of employees up to our office. So there were four or five hundred people outside our office banging these drums that were really loud and singing and, you know, doing speeches and everybody's shaving their heads and... Boy. Just all kinds of stuff. They activated their... That was the representation. Yeah, they did. And so they said, well, okay, you've got to talk to them. Hey, you're the boss, man. I was one of the two, the head of the office, and I worked, and he and I worked together. So they said, well, you got to talk to them. I mean, they're out there and the reunion reps are there. They may or may not string you up. Yeah, whatever. They're not happy with you. And so we had security because they had made threats against the head of the office. And the security said, look, they'll come in. They're going to be fired up, but if they make a move towards you, don't move. Because if you're stationary, then I won't, you know, you won't get in my way as I go to protect you. So I was like, okay, that's... That's... I can do that. All right. But I just remember thinking as these guys, it basically wasn't talking to them. It was basically them yelling at us. But I just remember thinking, you know, I think in high school, if somebody had said most likely to be sitting in a conference room in Korea being yelled at by, you know, in angry leaders, now, they wouldn't have picked me. I don't know who they would have picked, but not me or I wouldn't have expected that of myself. But also thinking, you know, this, it was really impactful for me because, and so it's not a crazy story. Well, you saw it from their perspective. I did. And over time, I've sort of reflected back on that sort of saying, you know, I've sort of appreciate different nuances to it or appreciate it more in different circumstances. So it was an impactful experience for me to see while we were going in saying our business objective is X. And so we feel righteous about our business objective. Right. But not necessarily appreciating the true impact and certainly not appreciating the whole context of this big foreign company, American pushing their way around, pushing their way around. It's going to be... This is going to happen. Yeah. You guys just need to get out of here, get out of our way. How much harder to make people do things efficiently and productively than it is to call them to do things efficiently and productively? Yeah, I think we could have learned from that. I don't know that it would have changed things dramatically, but it certainly would have made life easier if we had thought more about how to present the whole situation and talk to them in a different way. So would you say that that overall experience was a success or not really a success in some respects? It was a success. I think it could have been easier and it certainly was successful in a sense that I learned a lot from it. Right. Fair enough. Why don't you tell people that want to get some tags for their nursing home residents or some tags for their inventory or not tags, but software solutions and logistics consulting around making their business more efficient? Sure. I mean, again, my name is Jeff Bile. I'm the CEO and one of the co-founders. And I think the easiest way to go is to go to stickercontrol.com if you're a manufacturer distributor and think that might be interesting. If you have a bunch of small problems that you think are going to be too expensive to solve, give us a call or their contact surprise so that you might be surprised. I think you will be surprised. And on the senior care assisted living side or the website is safehonda.com. So S-A-F-E-A-N-A.com because spelling my last name is really hard. But it's J-B-E-Y-L-E at stickercontrol.com or J-B-E-Y-L-E at safehonda. There's a reason I said bail because it looks like bail. It's shit. You know, I'll just give back to that. Why is the proper French pronunciation is bail? Oh. Well, why don't you just claim it back then? You know, I can only deal with so much change in life, come on Jeff, why are you changing our name now? Just changing our heritage or something, I don't know. Well, thanks for taking the time to be up here today and, you know, good to have you on the local experience and I wish you much growth and success. I'm pretty sure it's happened to you as well, Kurt. Thanks. Bye-bye. Thank you for listening to today's episode of the local experience podcast. This is Kurt Baer, founder of the local think tank and host of the local experience and I'm here with Rory Shah, local business developer and host of the local 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. Curious about logo? You can learn more about us at localthinktakes.com, where you'll find more information about our chapters, business resources and events for business owners and creators. 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? We'll catch you next time on the in-depth local experience podcast with me, Kurt. And with me, Rory, for Bite Size Business Lessons in the local shorts. Bye!