EXPERIENCE 5 | Mike Gugliotto former President / CEO of Pioneer News Group and current LoCo Thinker Facilitator

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. We're back again at LOCO Experience Podcast. My guest today is one of the amazing LOCO facilitators, Mike Gugliato and I've been acquainted with Mike for probably a year and a half now almost and we got acquainted, he ran into one of my LOCO facilitators in the golf course and learned what he did and said, hey, when you have a chance, I'd love to have a group and so we took quite a while to birth that group but in February, Mike started his first chapter and I'd love to have him here to tell his story, his business journey and a little bit of his life. Mike, welcome. Thanks, thanks for having me Kurt. Appreciate being here. Yeah, it's an interesting thing to kind of take that step of curiosity to be like, what's a LOCO facilitator do, you know, and what am I going to do? But why don't we set the stage generally and say, talk to us about your career a little bit. Let's just, because you kind of came back to Fort Collins and that kind of brings you full circle from where you got your education. So maybe we'll start your story there and we'll delve a little further back in the life story as we go along but you came to see us for what I did. It's funny when you're first in school, you never really realize where you're going to end up down the road and I would have never imagined my career path. I'm not sure about you but mine was a pleasant surprise I guess but I knew early on I wanted to be a writer, a journalist, so I went to CSU as a technical journalism graduate and I graduated in the early 80s. I used to write for the collegiate and then it was hard getting a good job out of college at paid anything as a reporter, always less than a thousand bucks a month, usually in some remote area. That's why I ended up landing a job in Denver as an account executive and a copywriter took me to a bigger job in Houston. My wife and I married my wife and I hated Houston. We just said I knew you received, come back to Colorado and we lived my mother-in-law for about three months. Long story short, I could not find a job and I was a finalist for a job at an agency in Denver, Shankin Estilseats. I think they had to call her out a lottery and I didn't get it and I was just, I thought I had the job and I talked to the guy who didn't hire me and he was ironically the person we are hiring is also named Mike. That's why I said you're kidding me, so tell me about this guy. Well it turns out the other Mike is from Ford Collins, was from Ford Collins and worked for an ad agency up here, so I ended up calling him and getting his job. Oh no, yeah. I mean there's an opening so I called him, talked to him and we got to know each other and he felt good about me, we're pretty closely qualified. He was actually better for the job I didn't get than I was. Right. And were you better for the job that he left than you? I'm not sure I was better for but I was capable of doing a job, real small agency, just two and a half blocks south up here. What is that? It was called Alan Anderson Associates. Oh I've heard of that before. I think he's since passed away but he was a good guy and he was a small shop and you kind of did everything and I learned a lot from that and then. It helped me learn when this was, is this right after college or this is? I know it was about a year and a half out of college so I was learning my way around and from there I met some other people, did some magazine work and got introduced to the publisher of the Colorado one. Okay. Was that an independent newspaper at that time? No it was a spy down newspaper that just was becoming a net or just became a net. Okay. So I became the major accounts manager not having sold a newspaper out of my life, kind of bluffed my way into the job and then three months later I get promoted to the retail advertising manager at the age of, I think I was 25 years old. Interesting. So it sounds like a fast progression of a career path, not much writing necessarily. No, I wrote a little bit but not much. It was more sales and business and then I took a bigger job but the reporter Harold and Lublin after three and a half years. So let's go back. Did you say already your degree is in journalism? It is. And that was what you were intending in and I believe you married or made your way in school. We were neighbors. We were neighbors on Prospect Street. Okay. So yeah. You threw parties and she came over sometimes and stuff like that. Actually, I was dating somebody at the time who lived behind me and her best friend was my wife roommate next to me. Okay. I won't go into details but that was a really fun time in my life. Yeah. We won't go into details unless you want to. I don't. Okay. That was a quick I don't. Yeah. So let's actually let's say hi to Janet. Yeah. Janet. You've been happily married for how many years? We got married in 82. 82. And this is 2020. So yeah. 38 years. Awesome. Good for you. I bet you'll make 40. Probably make 50. Seems like you're both pretty in love and pretty healthy. So far 60. So far so. You got a good chance to make 60. That's a big number. Yeah. No complaints. So we both are. And so you get the career path going. You're you're in this kind of major sales role. Newspaper land and things like that. How does that develop from there? You know, I just I just worked it a few different papers and Loveland. The paper they're on. Loveland also own Longmont Canyon city. Weekly is around Boulder. And you know, I'm not sure how I advanced. I just the right place to the right time showed an aptitude for it. Uh, always kind of a self starter self motivated. Yeah. So I became the general manager of the Longmont paper and the Operations guy for all of their papers. Oh, wow. Okay. And what's that mean in the newspaper the operations guy? Like you're everything outside of news pretty much. Oh, okay. Interesting. So it's like a general manager, but not the news. Right. Yes. I was I had some news involvement. I was a need a tour of board. I wrote some. A lot of roles hiring and things like that. Exactly. But everything finance. Everything business wise. I oversaw. So advertising circulation. Work with the business office. Gotcha. Gotcha. Whatever we need to do to make the business work as an enterprise. Not just put out good news. Exactly. Or bad news or whatever it happens to be. Right. Right. Tell the news just what it is. Um, so was that like was that cornerstone was the writing and journalism drawn from just like a desire to explain things or understand things or where was that cornerstone? You know, I just, uh, I just like writing as a kid. And I was, I was fairly good at it. Yeah. You know, and I just enjoyed it. And I was good at it. And I thought, well, I want to make that into a career. I like it. And that's, it's a blessing to like, I was 35, I think, before I, a few people were like, you know, you're a really good writer. Yeah. And so, and not that I didn't get, you know, occasional praise or good grades in school and stuff like that. But I never really had that thing early on in my career where I said, hey, I have this talent. I should really cultivate that. So, uh, that's, that's a neat thing. I think that's an unusual, maybe I, you know, from the conversation I've had, I think that's an earlier start than many. Anyway, I digress. So let's talk to the newspaper business. So what, say, lay the, lay the stage of the newspaper business in those days. I imagine there was, you mentioned already that Gannett was acquiring and that there was probably kind of like the rollups of these smaller newspapers and the bigger ones and things like that. That's what's going on in this time in the industry. You know, back then, I mean, that was the heyday of the newspapers. So I've had a, I've had a good career, you know, from being younger and thriving times, working through much more difficult times in a challenging environment as I've grown older. But still young enough to adapt and apply myself. Yeah. And work with the business. But, you know, then, you know, for an example, then the Colorado in the mid 80s, I'll bet you 65 to 67% of the people here got the Colorado in daily and almost 70 on Sunday. Right. Which is huge. And I'll bet you now that's probably, no disrespect to anybody at newspapers like Colorado and but that's probably more like 20%. So back then. Yeah. And they do a better product than many in my impression. Yeah. Well, yeah. Yeah. But it's hard. Like, it's hard to put out a good product without a lot of revenues and it's hard to have a lot of revenues without a lot of customers. And it's a cannibalistic system kind of. Yeah. Well, the business model drives the journalism side of the business. Right. So you need advertising to produce pages. And the pages are filled by journalists. So you don't have the money. Yeah. You don't have the space to fill. Right. And so. And then you look, unfortunately, any darn thing to throw in that paper to take up some space so you can sell advertising. But it's hard to sell because it is hard to sell anymore. Yeah. Anyway, we can talk more about the decline of the advertising industry. I just reflected for the first time how like when I signed on in the banking industry, it was still pretty, pretty good. And I rose up pretty quickly through my career and advanced and things like that and got opportunities. Right. But it wasn't too much longer before, you know, it was an obviously an industry in decline. And, you know, the raises were slower coming. Maybe that's just because I hit my performance peak. I don't know. But you picked early. Yeah. Well, you know, frankly, my vacation package and benefits package was worse at the end of a 15 year career that it was at the beginning of a 15 year career. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So like right away when I got into the thing, I had like almost three weeks vacation and this and that. So, um, so you work your way into this basically a, like I said, what did you call it? It's not a general manager, but it was a COO or operations manager or something like that. Well, I was a general manager of times call. And I had operational oversight responsibilities over the other papers. So I would coordinate, you know, advertising strategies, circulation growth strategies. Gotcha. Financials and. And was this one paper among many that was owned by so far away? They owned. They owned six. Okay. So pretty, pretty small business. Yeah. In reality, like what? A hundred employees or 50 employees. Oh, no. Actually, you know, then I bet you the times call had almost 300 employees. Oh, wow. Yeah. Yeah, it was so much different than today. Right. Right. Now they probably have 25s. A lot of that's outsourced. It's another discussion. Sure. Interesting. Yeah. Like everybody knows the newspaper industry has been decimated. But what did it look like from the inside? And I don't want to get into that right now. But I think that's one of the reasons that people might want to listen to this episode. It is just to really understand that dynamic. And what's driven, frankly, the media to become what it has become. Which I think arguably we could agree is not what it used to be. No, not even close. Yeah. Sadly. Yeah. So. What's that next open door for you? So, you know, I was contacted by headhunters periodically in one in particular. And I remember he told me because, you know, you're not going to finish your career here. You'd be foolish if you didn't keep your eyes and ears open to look around. So I did. And I actually applied through him for a job with a company I ended up going to. But earlier on as a publisher for one of their papers. And they ended up offering me the job. It was an Idaho. Okay. My wife and I flew out there, looked at the paper or the money. There's a lot of parts of Idaho. What part of Idaho? It was Poca Tello. Oh, that's my wife and I went to Poca Tello in the first before we were engaged. Okay. See? And I was considering going to school either in Poca Tello or just right next door. I hope so. I hope so. I hope so. MBA program. Right. Yeah. So I was entertaining that I took the MBA test back in the day. But then the banks kept offering me like 8% raises every year in better positions. And I was like, well, grad school coming. Yeah. So anyway, but yeah. So I'm familiar with that area. We camped in your beer lake. Oh, yeah. Well, because if your last name is beer, you can't put beer. That's right. That's right. You probably own that lake. Right. So you moved to Poca Tello? No, we didn't. We came back. And I remember we're at the Salt Lake City Airport. And we're talking about it. My wife starts crying. I don't want to go to Poca Tello. Okay. And so I remember I mentioned, I mentioned this to my employers. Not to get something. But just say, you know, I have a chance to do some other stuff. And it'd be nice if I had some more responsibility. So actually, they gave me a great deal. Okay. More responsibility. A little more money. Right. All that. So I stayed. But I always kept in contact with the gentleman who offered me that job. And so, I don't know, maybe four years later, he called me up and offered me a COO job. A new position because they were growing so fast. Oh. And so it's kind of what I was doing for Lehman Communications, just bigger, right? Six papers. And there they had 24. Oh, wow. Okay. A little less than that. We grew to 24. And so. So they were whatever 18 or something. Quite a few more. Right. So I ended up taking that job. I moved to Seattle. Really site on scenic up, except for, you know, if you had any objections. And no objection from Janet on the Seattle compared to Poca Tello. No. Seattle was, you know, Seattle is nice. I mean, you were leaving Longmont. We were living in Longmont. Okay. Which Longmont is a pretty amazing town these days. It wasn't quite as hopping in those days. Right. So we moved to Seattle and, uh, yeah. So I was there 17 years, 17 and a half years. Hmm. So starting as a COO. Right. So what was the structure? Who was, who did you report to? And what does the business, what does the enterprise look like? To the extent that you're comfortable sharing, we don't talk revenues and stuff. But just, like, lay the groundwork of what the newspaper looked like when you got there to Seattle. And this is probably what, like, 1990 or 1990. It was, uh, no. It was, uh, 2000. It was 2000. End of 2001. Okay. Okay. I went there. 9-11. Yeah. Actually, yeah. Okay. Yeah. So, um, well, they had a president. Actually, a small corporate office, um, primarily accounting folks, HR. Okay. A president, me and a CFO who was also hired a month before me. So he and I started together. Your rival? Or was there a question? No, no, no. Actually, we were friends and we finished together, which was nice. Oh, that's cool. It was, it was a great guy. They made a couple of really good key hires right there. Yeah. You know, 217-year guys, right? Yeah. Like that were foundational. Yeah. So you get, was it what you expected? Um, I wasn't sure what I expected. Um, you know, it's, it's harder to manage from afar. I mean, it's one thing to be in a paper, be in a building with employees. It's another to manage, to manage other, uh, other publishers. Sounds much better now. Yeah. Sorry. No, you're good. I mean, you'd visit, but it's a lot of phone calls than video calls. And it, uh, it was different. Is the game different in, you know, 24 different markets is like back in those days. I assume there's a lot of classified ads revenues and advertisers revenues and things like that. But was it, was it the same game, just different audience in these different papers? And were they all homogenous or independent pretty much from each other? Uh, that's a good question. I, I'd say the same playbook with different pages depending on the market. So the, the strategy was, uh, they look for papers in or near college towns, in or near county seat, um, that had little competition. Smart. Yeah. That's pretty much what they had. So they had 8 to 9 daily newspapers and the rest were weekly, is that we're synergistically, uh, located around the daily. So they shared resources, shared printing, and they kind of protected the market. So really well thought out. Yeah. And, and part of a bigger group. So this group, uh, the wood family. Okay. Uh, actually goes back, uh, many years to the, to the 1890s. Oh, wow. And they owned at one point, I don't know, probably 75 papers across the country. They sold off these groups and they kept this group. Okay. Interesting. Yeah. You want to tell a little bit about like the heritage of that, that family, because that sounds kind of interesting or is it not, not really too educational for the family. But it sounds like they were very strategic operators of an enterprise, you know. They were. And, uh, a lot of it grew out of, uh, out of two brothers, not long after World War II, they kind of expanded this network. Okay. And, uh, but they, they were actively involved, not so much in my day, but, uh, the, uh, yeah. That's cool. They were actively involved for a while and they, they got the business and they had a long time commitment to it. I've worked for a pair of, um, family-owned banking organizations over the years. My, I, I started with a kind of a startup or a younger bank, um, but then went to work for the Bank of Colorado organization. And the, the Dinsdale family and met one of the Dinsdale brothers, the sons of the founder, um, I'm a first job interview. I didn't know he was going to be there. I'm like, oh, wow. The owner of the company is right here, you know. Um, but great family. And then the Adam's Bank. I worked for Adam's Bank in Colorado Springs. Right. And, uh, again, same kind of thing. Just long time Adam's family. Hey, Chad. Hey, Todd. Hope you listen to this podcast. There you go. Right. I'm sure they are. At Chris Dinsdale. I hope you're rocking. I hope the cows are doing all right. Um, but hey, you know, so that's kind of a neat thing to be part of. An organization and an operation that has this proud heritage. Um, like the wood family sounds like they did. And it was the same with the Lehman's in the Lehman's home on the right. Same thing. Yeah. But, but differences pros and cons to both. For, you know, Gennett is very corporate, very driven, very, very profit and revenue driven. But wonderful resources and families. Right. You know, you can make quicker decisions. They pivot faster. Yeah. A little more subjective. They care more about. I'd say they care more about the product as well as the business side. A little more balanced, but not always. Yeah. As business rational. Right. You know, they make too many decisions with their heart sometimes. Yeah. And there's family differences, right? So there's some cyclical stuff that happens. Yeah. As families change and evolve over time, interest change. Huh. I've never really thought about that. Like, there really is this because we do have a lot of big corporations. But we also have a lot of big family companies around this country and things. Right. And especially near industry, I imagine there was a lot of. There were. Like family papers. And there was a lot of corporate coming in. So my dad's a farmer. I think I'm sure you remember. And RDO. Uh, I forget what it's called. Right. RDO has got like, I don't know how many 150 dealerships around the country now and things in there. My brother works for an RDO dealership that had been a family-owned independent dealership for forever. Sure. You know, in so many ways, it's better. Right. They got all these resources, all this intention. Right. Um, but then, you know, it doesn't have the same heart. Almost just disadvantaged, though, as times got tougher because, you know, the corporations have more, more resources, more growth, more, more, uh, more fat to slowly melt away, more weapons to bear and, and, uh, you know, so a lot of the families have, have sold out and the woods, you know, ended up selling out actually to a really, uh, a much bigger family company who, who still goes, they're still going. Have they continued to shrink since then, I guess, or maybe not. That was only a couple of years ago. Right. Yeah. You know, they were on a hiring bench for a while. The, the family is the Adam's family. Okay. They have, uh, they have money from other sources as well. They own, uh, camping world. Oh, wow. They own vineyards and California and France and great, great people. Yeah. And so one of their sons runs newspapers, but they run a buying, uh, binge for a while. I'm sure that's slowed since then. Interesting. And they probably have more challenges trying to consolidate and unify all the different papers from different aspects of the business to, uh, to one direction, one step. Not easy. So terribly difficult, especially because when you say unify and, you know, merge and those are all people, right? You know, and, and that's ultimately systems, philosophy, right. And now they need to be more efficient and to be more lockstep, right? It's critical. And it's an interesting, uh, dynamic. So, so let's get back into the, the career path, just a little bit. So it, were the, the wood family, were they the president CEO kind of thing with you? No. It was completely non-family operated business. They were like on the board or something. Correct. So, uh, there was, uh, that the father at the time was a former publisher of one of the papers in Skagit Valley, Mount Vernon, just north of Seattle, okay. And his son took over as a publisher for a while and retired on my watch. Oh, but other than that, but he didn't really have a desire or whatever inclination to try to be more involved in the, the greater enterprise. You know, I think they were from a board perspective. So the board was comprised of their family and then some non-family board members. Cool. And through that, various committees. So they drove the business that way, but as far as the day to day stuff, they were out of that. And I think wisely so. Yeah. Yeah. So, describe your ascension eventually up to, uh, what became the CEO role in this organization. But how many years in, um, was that next step? I assume it was COO, then president CEO, is that the progression for you? Yeah. It was, uh, it was president and CEO at the same time. Okay. At the end of 2008, when my, uh, when my boss, the CEO and president retired. Oh, okay. So they had, uh, they had an external search, kind of nerve-wracking because like, gosh, if I don't get this job, what does that say? And I probably have, you know, I'm probably not going to say it. He might bring it to his own guy. Right. So, but it worked out and, uh, I'm glad they did a search and compared me to other candidates. And, uh, you know, I'm sure there are a lot of people who could have done that job. It just happened to me. A lot of it is right time, right place and, you know, well, and you do how to do all the things all of it already, right? Right. Like you had a bunch of relationships and obviously, like they were calling downstream to be like, what do you think if we hire Mike for this role, right? Like they had a lot of data on you. I'm sure they did. Yeah. You know, comparatively. Yeah. And, uh, you know, I, I would say your ability to make a good impression, you know, between just when we first connected. And then especially as you've tried to help local think tank, you know, you're like, hey, on this communication, what if you phrased it more like this or what if you did that? And if we let you, you'd probably be in here coaching us once a week or something too. I don't know about that. I think you guys do a great job without me. Well, I got a awesome team. But, but you definitely have always had an interest in, um, just, what do I say? I guess it's just that communication, that professionalism and communication. Oh, and one of the things I was thinking earlier is you have definitely rubbed elbows with way, way, way more really wealthy people than I have. Oh, well, they're most people, right? Probably. If you had a guess, like, like how many, how many hundred million plus net worth wealthy people have, do you think you, oh, I don't know dozens and dozens over the years, you know, I've never met one, really, except for maybe Kurt Richardson, Kurt Nancy, hey, okay, but my wealthy people in my vernacular are, you know, two million, three million, five million net worth, 10 million. And that's our community, right? Like those are the small businesses that have achieved and succeeded for quite a while, but they didn't hit that, that next level of the people that have owned the papers and stuff like that. The cool thing about my job was I got to meet a lot of people outside the business and that really helped my growth and my, um, my network. So I was part, you know, there were, it was a family newspaper and there was a group called the InWin Press Association that ended up becoming president of two years before the sale of the company. And that group was pretty much made up of family newspapers across the country. Oh, so cool. And that was their advisory a little bit like a lot of that. Yeah. I remember that. Very, very open, very, you know, you share the same philosophy. You come, you're cut from the same cloth, you have the same challenges. You did this starting when you were still the COO before you advanced or, okay, right away. So tell me about that journey, like tell me about the journey to finding a place to, did you have anything like that before, like in, in law month or anything where you had a sounding board or maybe just guys drinking bourbon or whatever, you know, a little bit. It was more, uh, uh, the Colorado Press Association, the Rocky Mountain ad managers association, nothing like this. So these were, you know, these were, and I got to meet the owners just, you know, I knew all the owners of these papers, okay, they were just like the wood family. So yeah, you get to, you learn a lot just by rubbing elbows and listening and I always ask a lot of questions and took notes because frequently I was not the sharpest tool in that room. Right. There were a lot of other sharper people and it just made sense to, and they were fascinating. It was very interesting to me. That's cool. I like that. So, so you get involved in this, in this group, I'm sorry, I just lost the handle on the name. Inland Press Association. Inland Press Association. And that's, inland means like you can't be on the coast or what? You know, I don't know. It's a good question. I don't know what it means. Okay. And I'm not sure how it, uh, how it came about, but it's a long standing organization. The headquarters are in Chicago, which were, which was where a lot of the founding papers were at the time. A lot of the papers to begin with were in the Midwest, and then it just kind of branched out. Okay. Interesting. I guess that's why inland, right? Right. Because Chicago is the big city. Now that you mentioned it, I would say. Thank you. Sorry. Not that you've had a chance or reason to use about that before. So you join this group or you learn about this group and decide to become a member, is it something that you pay for? Is there somebody providing structure or is just kind of volunteer driven, member driven? No, it's, uh, you pay a membership. Okay. And I got on the board for a little bit quickly, but that was a credit to the family. They were involved with inland before I was. So I just kind of followed that tale. Okay. And I took it. There were some other groups too. Actually, the Newspaper Association of America was for the bigger papers, and I was also involved with them. Okay. And I was on their board as well. Okay. So I got to meet, you know, all the family owners. And I also got to meet, you know, the big people like Dean Singleton, the people who own the Chicago Times, New York Times, Washington Post, Ellie Times, all that. So quite a contrast, but quite an exposure level of experience and knowledge. And they are all worth more than a hundred million dollars, because they're a worth way more. Right. So actually, I think that, that unfolds kind of a business learning or a business principle that's worthy of pointing out is just that almost nobody succeeds in business because they have just this endless string of great ideas on their own. No. There's so much imitation and just like, well, how are you doing it? Oh, I'm going to do it more like that, and it sounds smarter, you know, and yeah, you have ideas for innovations and things, but there's so much gained by learning from others. And that was kind of a blessing and a curse of newspapers that the industry as a whole was slow to collaborate, and I think they still are. There's too many walls between them, but through these organizations, you meet people that you do collaborate and you do share with. So everybody has their own network. And I mean, we would share financial information. We would, I'd call somebody up and say, I'm thinking about this new idea here's, you know, and I'd share everything with them. Sure. They knew me, they knew our company. I got their feedback. I'd have somebody come in and look at our office, somebody who had a little more financial back. I mean, I just laid out different. Exactly. We do it the right way. And I'd go there and look at them operationally, but that's just invaluable stuff. And totally. Well, and it's interesting, it's kind of like it's like these are silos institutionally because there's not like institutional connections, but through personal relationships, it's like tentacles that are like almost fiber optics or whatever that connect these silos. So at least you can understand and learn from each other, they're officially sanctioned in this case, right? Or whatever because it was an investment and intentionally in a connection point. But you got to still build those relationships in that trust. But you think from the outside looking in, there were organizations like the Inland Press Association, the NA, local media association, there were five or six of these. You'd think there'd be a leader that represents the whole group, right? Instead of Inland represents this family group, which is strong and big, NA represents the bigger group, which isn't as strong anymore. But each one represented their own bigger, silo comprised of these components, and nobody really represented the industry as a whole, and that continues to be a problem. Yeah, I suppose so, right? Like there is no bill by their saying, this is where we should go or whatever. There's not. Yeah, and they were mostly, they were a lot talking to each other and probably not talking outside of their industry either, focused inwardly on their problems more than outwardly on their opportunities, probably, I don't know. So you're a part of this Inland Press Association or whatever and learning from them how they're running their chapters or their papers and things like that, what to do, how to shrink properly. Is it already happening by this time? You know, that wasn't really happening until, actually until I got the CEO, right? They started to shrink it as soon as you got that job. Actually, that's when the economy tanked, and you know, that's actually when, you know, in 2007, people don't give this enough credit, but that's when the search really took off, really took off, both for content and really for advertising. So you didn't realize it at the time, but that was going to take a big chunk of the market. Sure. So that compared, and Craigslist was coming around, and people dismissed Craigslist. They looked at Craigslist saying, it's ugly, it's free, it's never going to work, plus we're making huge profit margins if we have pages and pages that pay classified, it's never going to change. And it was taken away in a matter of years, you know, that's a huge. And since then, you know, different, different verticals of newspaper advertising have also been attacked, legal advertising, auto advertising, state, all big chunks. Oh, yeah. So if you worked in it before, when I was younger, and remember what the Colorado one was compared to what it is today, and that's no disrespect to the, the very passionate and talented journal to say have, they're just undergunned. Right. It feels like a whale that got sick or whatever, and then the sharks are just coming in and tearing away chunks, but it's, but that's capitalism, right? Like, I guess Craigslist figured out how to do free ads and still make a book. But there was never, there was never an appropriate, the reaction was always slow, and there was never really any proactive people who were like, it can't, you know, it happened in chunks. Can't get worse now. No, and it did. And it just, and it accelerated when the economy went down and when search really hit sure steam. So, so let's talk about that. You get the job in 2007, did you say in a 2008, okay? So right after everybody knew that this stuff was real, right? Like Lehman Brothers was, I think that November or something like that, good time for my predecessor to retire. Right. Yeah, he's like, I don't think I want this job anymore. Good luck Mike. Here you go. So, so what's that look like to you? Like it is a big change as a whole bunch of new responsibilities, or is it more like did you get to hire a COO, and was that somebody that you already knew and had groomed for that role in some capacity, or you'd have a right hand? That's a good question. No, I learned a lot on the job, especially under challenging circumstances. And I look for a COO, you know, they told me about the job, I think, in November that I got the job. Okay. That's a retired at the end of the year, okay? So I didn't have my replacement for months, so I was doing double duty. So I would work, you know, everybody works hard, but I would have a day job and then I'd have a night job to do a list for both. And that went on for about six months until I finally found my replacement. Yeah. But at the time, you know, my first job was financially, we were just sucking, right? And so my first job was to announce, you know, wage freezes and layoffs, I was really popular. And it was like another good reason for the previous guy to retire, right? Yeah. Yeah. No, no, no. It was going to happen regardless, right? Right. But he would have handled it. What a, what a, what a, well, thankfully, I mean, you had some relationships, you had some, you've been around the organization a long time, so you had credibility with the people in it. Right. But I'm sure it doesn't make it any easier when you're telling somebody who's got a mortgage and two kids, we can't pay you anymore. No. You have to find new ways of doing things, right? So you're losing these people and you still have to find ways of putting out a good product. So that's just not a common train of thought. We haven't had to do that before. Yeah. You know, it's not like, oh, we're not going to replace a position that left. You are losing 5% of your payroll. So that means, and we try not to affect advertising and the newsroom as much, because that, that's your core product. Right. If you don't have those things, nothing else. So you're trying to cut from all the finance and admin and bookkeepers and things like that and things that don't directly generate revenue. Right. So things are seamless to the customer, things they don't see, although they do see some of it because over the course of time, you're going to notice, you know, smaller pages, paper, that's thinner, because you save money. You got protein out of your diet for a couple of years, your neighbors are going to notice that even if they don't see you not eating meat, you know, or whatever, with all apologies to vegans out there. No, that's right. But there were good things. I mean, we learned to do things that were smart to be more efficient, we centralized almost everything. We centralized payroll, payables, receivables, IT. We actually came up with our own central page building center. Oh, cool. So you see a lot of papers, the bigger papers like Gennett, all of their papers really look the same. You don't know it because you don't see the other papers. You don't see the Gennett paper in, you know, Michigan. But it's the same template and you have to fit the same template. So you lose page builders, right? You're just plugging in the exist same holes, they're faster to produce, you have less people doing it. So things like that, you know, technology made a lot of that possible. So we lost a lot of people on the back. And even outsourcing, one of the last things we did, we think we laid off almost all of our advertising graphic artists, which were, they actually see clients and all that went to India. Oh, right. And actually, their quality was pretty good. They do it overnight. So you get stuff back faster, communications for sometimes and issues you can imagine. But their wages are less and you don't pay benefits. So a lot, all that stuff, you outsource, you save benefits, you save on wages and you find ways to do it. And ultimately, you know, say what you want about outsource jobs and stuff like that. But if it wasn't for outsource jobs, China and India wouldn't be economically viable like they are today, right? And Philippines and things like that, like it's, it's, it's a roundabout way to make a sacrifice for your fellow human, but, but there is some opportunity there as well. So, well, first we look at, can we do it the same way they do? Are we, can we be more efficient internally? A few things, yes, but mostly no, you just can't compete with that wages and that job base. Yeah. Yeah. So, so your, like, tell me about that. Is that like 10% of your workforce every year or something like that is, is, or was it like a couple of massive rounds every few years or like, what was the, the landscape, 24 papers that it's peak and how many employees? You know, we probably had, when I started, oh, when I got the job, probably a thousand employees, why I left more like 600. Okay. And that was, how many years, that was 2000, fall of 2008 until about 10 years. Well, a little under, yeah, so we lost 40% of our workforce. So the real rapid bleeding, well, I guess, I guess in your case, you didn't shrink as much as some of these ones that you talked about, the Colorado would be in 300 now it's 30. That was the Long My Paper. Or the Long My Paper. I'm sorry, yeah, the times call. They were staffed. Oh, they were. But, but you know, money was, was coming in. I mean, newspapers had 40% margins on a lot around here. So you were already lean at this paper and then, yeah, the paper was run pretty well. The papers were run smartly. Yeah, yeah. You know, a lot of the family ones though, you know, were fatter. And so they had, they had a lot more to cut, which made them attractive buys to bigger papers coming in. I knew I can get my return on this and, you know, a couple years just by doing these things. Right. Right. Right. And there's a lot of times that mergers make sense. Right. You know what? You know, I think one of the interesting things about the world today that's unlikely to continue is that there's, you know, there's almost as many non-profit businesses as there are for real businesses, or maybe not that many. That's probably, that's actually not, not, not correct at all. But there's a lot of nonprofits and there's, in many communities, there's a lot of overlaps. And you know, each one of those overlaps has got a, got its own accounting function. Its own HR function, its own marketing function, its own, which you can't afford to have. Kind, not really. You know, you have to have most of your people in a business model world today. Most people have to be in the business of either creating revenues or efficiently doing the limited number of other things that happen. You can't take a two-value. You can't take a two-four. And I think, in my opinion, a lot of these companies have taken a two-four because revenue declines have just accelerated. Right. So a lot of papers don't have publishers anymore. They have a group publisher because it sounds good and looks good on the P&L. Right. I'm not sure about this, but I'm pretty sure the Colorado does not have its own publisher anymore. The publisher is based out of, I don't know, Kansas City or somewhere. Okay. So the managing editor, who's, who does a good job, takes over a general oversight, but, or you may have, that's different than a publisher though. Yeah, it is. And the publisher, you know, the, the papers reflect the community and you've got to have a connection to the community. And that means intending things, supporting things, really knowing things. And you can't do that without manpower and connections and priorities. And those just aren't priorities anymore. Right. Priorities are making your quarter to appease venture capitalists that have, you know, a high stake in your, in your business. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, so we, we shrink the paper, we, but we stay, you know, at least I assume the family is like, well, make sure there's a little bit of black ink as well as, you know, shrinking the revenues and stuff like that. So you got to maintain profitability, at least to some extent or maybe you don't, that's not that big of an obligation, but was that capable? Could you keep profits? Yeah. When you're shrinking. Oh, yeah. People are always profitable. Okay. Profit margins went down. Right. But we actually did increase our margins toward the end, ironically before the sale, but, um, no. Yeah. Yeah. We're harder to get the profit margins up before you sold. And there was nobody would do that, like, there was kind of a time where, you know, in between the, you know, when I first started as a CEO and in the end, where there were times where revenue was flat or slightly growing, you know, and you had a diversified revenue too. Right. So you had some new sources. Yeah. We grew commercial printing. We did a lot of event stuff. You know, digital was a big thing. Right. Although it's always, you know, advertising. It's a digital dime to a print dollar. Print dollars. Right. Yeah. So you lose a print dollar. It costs more. Oh, right. You don't make it up every digital dime you get kind of might be stealing a digital, or a print dollar from you. Right. And 90% of the digital dollars go to Google and Facebook, I mean, the remaining pool to fight over. It's really pretty small. Right. Yeah. No, that makes sense. So what's the, what's the exit, um, thing like, like, you had you been shopping the paper for a while, or was this like kind of a, uh, a kind of a planned approach, or unsolicited offer, or what, how did that, like, come about, and what did that look like to the extent that you can share? Um, you know, that was a family school. So we always had a three year rolling financial forecast, detailed down to distributions, capital, depreciation, everything, which is really hard to do. Right. But, you know, we did as a bank too, and it's easier at the bank because you got a lot of recurring income because it's interest payments. Yeah. And you're always afraid to say, well, if these trends continue, so you always want a hedge thing, I can cut a little more here, but, you know, we should be able to mitigate some of these losses by doing these things, or they don't happen, or other losses are higher than, so anyway, you know, the industry, um, wasn't doing very well, and the family at some point, uh, they had a family member die, um, dynamics were changing, uh, interest in involvement levels were, yeah, they weren't what they were before, quite frankly. Yeah. And, um, uh, they, you know, we, we knew some brokers, they, they were friends with some brokers, and so at some point, the brokers came in, kind of did a tabletop valuation of the papers, and they said, that sounds good. Yeah. And part of it was, uh, I had a contract. My contract was coming up at the end of 17, okay. And I told them, uh, at the, in the beginning of the year, I don't want to renew, I just don't want to keep going. Are you going to retire, or are you just kind of tired of that job? Um, I just didn't want to keep doing that job. Yeah. So, I could have done something else, or I, you know, I ended up retiring until I met you of course. Sure. I would call you semi, semi-retired, or something. But the job was hard. Yeah. Quite frankly, it was affecting me personally, you know, sleep and well, and very stressful, incredibly long hours. Yeah. And it's hard to make a difference on a lot of things outside of your direct area of influence. Mm. So, it just wasn't, I just didn't want to do that anymore. Right. You lose all these people. You, you know, you have an impact on people's lives. Your family business. You know people. Yeah. And I made it a point to know people. And, uh, you, you get to care about it all. Yeah. So, so you've broken a lot of hearts, mostly yours probably over the years. Well, you know, it's, it's my job, right? So, right. I can't personally complain, but it doesn't mean it wasn't, no, but, uh, it wasn't easy. I can tell your heart is breaking just for, like, is there anybody like, and feel free to, to me or, but is there any, like, really special people along the way that, that you just, that made a big impact that you had to, had to depart from? Um, now, we don't want to talk about that, I'm sure there are, but, you know, the publishers. So we had to get to certain levels. And so it's up to them to make recommendations on how they're going to manage their staff. So, and we had benchmarks. We also went with that compared our payroll and expenses and revenues to papers, our size across the country. Sure. So you got to get your stuff right. Right. And then we had an expectation for profitability and a certain level of operation. We have an obligation to meet that, but still make everything else work, which, which, which is very, very hard to do. Yeah. No. I don't, uh, I don't envy that job. So I didn't, uh, I didn't enjoy it as much on the last two years and, you know, I, and I was giving you a notice. Was that like a two months notice, a six months notice of, uh, the end of the year. So I mentioned that. I, I confirmed that in, uh, April, I think. Okay. And within two weeks, they decided to sell a company. Oh, wow. I think they probably saw that as, well, they would have to replace me. The CFO was actually, actually, they don't want to go to the driver's train. No. And, you know, if you, if you look at the forecast, if we continue on our current path, then we did projections. And so we had to do these things to hit these levels, but they weren't locks, right? And, and, uh, the future is uncertain. Right. And a lot of the new revenues you needed to create needed to come from new ways or something, right? Yeah. And a very difficult time. And a lot of other family papers have been selling. Right. And actually, it was the right thing. It was the right time. Actually, they probably should have done it earlier, because they would have gotten. They would have been worth a little more. Yeah. Interesting. But the company that bought us, um, had their eye on us for a while, and they were buying papers pretty quickly, and they paid a good, uh, a fair price for our papers. Right. And, uh, it's better, well, it was nice to sell to another family organization. Sure. Versus selling to, you know, somebody that made a lot of those, doesn't care. Yeah. Yeah. More like they were still part of the family. I think so. And it was a good way. And I could have stayed on. So the new company offered me a job to continue my role to manage those papers and a few others. But that just wasn't. So talk to me about that. This is at the end of 2018. Did you say? 2017. 2017. And, like, the, the latest clean, right, like you can do whatever you want to at this point, once the paper is sold and you're out of that job, what do you do? Well, my contract expired officially in January of 2018, so we also had, we also had commercial real estate was a diversification strategy for the company. So we had purchased and I managed for a large commercial buildings. Oh, wow. Three in Seattle and one in soccer buildings, or this is that whatever office buildings. One was more for manufacturing in Salt Lake City, but the other is wrong. So we had property managers I work with and, yeah, reviewed leases and capital and all that. So you were like a full on CEO because you were running the paper, but you also had all these other things, kind of, yeah, I guess not really see you with conglomerates, right? Yeah. And it was educational for me and I learned a lot that industry was doing better. Yes. Yeah. Yeah, those margins were like 60%. I mean, that was, that's a good deal. That was a good investment. Very cool. Yeah. So, so, but credit the owners for that for having the foresight to diversify and go into that area. Right. Put some of your capital here where it's got more opportunity, right? Right. And they had them, despite the building with cash. No loans. Right. It was good. Yeah. So, so we're pursuing toward this January 2018 departure date and then, like, somehow decided to come back to Colorado. It was at a foregone conclusion or like, what, what had you had since April to kind of decide where you were going next? Yeah. Did some exploring. We could have stayed, you know? Yeah. And our kids were around. We had a lot of friends. We still had friends, you know, from Fort Collins back in the day and ironically. I'm trying to remember when it was, but that fall, we have a, we had a condo. We still have in Westminster. Okay. We'd come back at least quarterly. We were there and my wife looked at a Facebook post from Tim and Jackie O'Hara, who you know very well. Okay, sure. Yeah, yeah. And they were giving away, we hadn't seen them in years. And they were giving away CSU basketball tickets at night and so my wife said, we should go. Oh, they go. So, we did. Oh, that's awesome. So, we came up and saw a bunch of people we knew. Had dinner with some friends of ours. We thought, you know, maybe we should go to Fort Collins. So, you know, the good thing about Seattle was, you real estate, well, if you're leaving Seattle, it's good. Right. Real estate is twice, you know, it's twice a value. But it is here. You can get the same home. Right. You have the price. Yep. So, coming here. That's why your house is so nice here. Well, we had a, we had a nice house in Seattle that we sold at the absolute pinnacle of the market. I mean, we couldn't, we couldn't get any more fortunate. Perfect. So, to a group of Chinese investors looking for a place to put their money, right? Cash offer. No contingencies. Here you go. I mean, it's interesting. Yeah. Well, so that just, but the timing was great. So, we had, you know, we had some cash by house here and the cost of living here is so much less. Gas, a dollar, a gallon, cheaper taxes, everything. So you arrive in the spring of 2018, I guess, then? Yes. We stayed. We sold our house April. April? April? Yep. And we, we had been talking to a realtor here that we met through some friends of ours. Okay. Now I play golf with. Great guy. Okay. Oh, is that a humble? John Huffle. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Larry's friend. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. We were thinking, I guess that it was a good idea, but that was definitely a good idea to be able to get a nice, beautiful cat and we found a place pretty quickly but my wife had been looking, you know, since, right, and so, we moved in June to 2018. And that was it. That's what that was. Well, I can just say for the Northern Colorado community at large in the business community, we're glad you're here, and I appreciate that. I'm really happy to be here. Let's talk about, like, I want to jump into your local experience a little bit. I don't know. But also, let's talk about, like, some of your best business learnings. I asked you once, I wonder if you remember the answer that you gave me, but what was the one thing that led to your continued path in your career all the way up to a president's CEO role of such a large organization? Do you remember your answer? I don't. It was curiosity. Okay. And just always wanted to learn how to do it better. Good memory. Yeah. No, I don't remember a lot of things. But the ask me what happened at certain points I can. So why don't we talk about like what were like if you had to say some pivot points or some moments, some a ha's about like just how business is done or how how we could do this thing better that would really make a difference, whether it's leadership related, whether it's financial understandings, whether it's margins, whatever that might be, let's just talk about some business learnings that were really a ha's for you. And if you want to give credit to somebody for helping you a hot, I think that's a great opportunity. Well, like I guess you're several, you know, working for the Colorado on early on and forget that that was, you know, they had a lot of resources. They were very financially savvy and financially motivated. I mean, I learned a lot there in three and a half years, you know, I learned ten years worth. Awesome. I never forget I was there. I got promoted to retail sales manager and the ad director came to me and said, I'll need your flash by tomorrow at five. I said, not sure what that is, you're revenue flash for the month. And he said, oh, how do I do that? He goes, figured out, I needed tomorrow at five o'clock. So I called other retail managers and I tried that out, but, you know, but you learned that stuff. They had a great training program. I went to a lot of great seminars. They really invested in their people. Oh, cool. And that was huge. I was not early on at a young age when, you know, I remember I had meet with my, my boss at the time, Sunday mornings in the office to go over the week's revenue and plans on Sunday. Yeah. We do that. Interesting. So, but, you know, then I'm, you know, we're young. I'm 24 years old or something. Right. I didn't know. I didn't know. People are tougher to do now, but at the time. So I just learned a lot in a short amount of time and I just observed and I was lucky to work around really good, talented people and learn from some people that didn't do everything right all the time. So you learned a lot of good things and learn maybe what not to do. Sure. And so, in the biggest lesson was people always make the difference. People drive the business. It's not, you look at the PNL and see where things end up, but you really got to spend your time with people and the product and your customers, honestly, to drive what the numbers say that you look at for, you know, a couple hours a month and otherwise, that's what I always say is that the financials are like looking through the rear-view mirror and they, and they really report what did your people do? Right. Right. And so it does become all about the people and how much value they can add for your customers with how much effort. It's not always about the people, but it should be about the people. Yeah. A lot of it sure is, you know, they're the ones that deliver the goods in the end. And that's why, that's why I'm so proud of the, like, such amazing people we get to work with and for local think tank facilitators. Absolutely. Like, it's just such a great group of people and I think you would testify to that, but absolutely. So let's talk about, let's talk about that journey just a little bit, whether it's like people that might want to be in your chapter, you've got a few openings in each of, Mike has two chapters of thinkers in this town right now, but whether there might be a one to be a member of a chapter or whether somebody is like pondering, being a local facilitator for a small business owner, peer advisory group sometime down the line, let's just talk about that experience because we, we hung you out there for a while like we were unable to deliver a new chapter for you for at least six or so months after we first met six seven months. I bet. But, you know, it, it happened when it was meant to happen. And I, we purposely, you know, when, when we're leaving the job, I had a chance to, I'm a pretty structured organized guy, I don't like to be surprised, always over prepare. And we didn't do that with this departure. So I thought, you know, we're just going to, which was hard for me, we're just going to take this as it comes. We know we're going to go back to Colorado and we'll just see what's there. I mean, the right thing will happen if it's there. And I kind of know what I was, you know, what I was good at. And I did some newspaper consulting that first year for other groups, but I just really wanted to change gears that I'd done that long enough and yeah, that wasn't the long term. Like the back of your hand. Yeah. That was part of it for me with leaving banking too, is like, you know, I'm a pretty good bank here. And I, you know, for me, I never became, I was an acting bank president for a while. Yeah. I probably could have, if I would have wanted to and stuff, but it seemed like a lot of extra responsibility for not a lot of extra money sometimes or whatever. But it was, I kind of know how this game works and it's okay. It's all right. You know, but yeah, so, so you were very open to just like, yeah, what should I do? Right. I'm going to see, because I thought I'm pretty impatient by nature and I thought something would probably come to me quicker. Okay. And so I kind of wrote down, you know, what I like to do, what I thought I was good at, things I weren't as good at, things I didn't like to do. And interesting. And that just... Can you share some of those with people listening? Let's start with like, what are the things you're good at and the things that you like to do? No, I'm serious. I love to hear stories like this. Oh. Well, I like working with people. I really enjoy working with people. I like figuring out, you know, how things run, operational challenges, operational opportunities, seeing and sharing successes. You know, I grew in the financial end of the business because I had to. I'm an accountant by nature, but I can certainly go through a PNL and a balance sheet and all that stuff. But I would never become a CPA or anything like that. It's just not me. European person. Yeah. It had to be something like that. And just looking for a chance to apply, maybe some of the things I learned, experiences I had to work with some other folks to hopefully help an effort, you know, to get better, to improve, to be in a better place and be part of that. So that was part of your list before you ever heard about looking at things like that? Right. And so the one time I met Larry, we were playing golf. He just joined for nine holes and I met him pretty quickly by the end of the round. You know, he had talked about you and I think I called you about me. And then you and I met within two or three days of that and it just seemed like this was pretty cool. And I went to a couple chapter meetings. So yeah, folks you have established and well, I even introduced you to one of your future members. That's right. That's right. Yeah. A shout out to a performance auto tune. There you go. That's a great guy. But local think tank was full of auto mechanic shops at that time. Right. I met Pat. He's a North Dakota State University alum. Bison? Bison. Go Bison. Go Bison. He probably says that every meeting. Every meeting. Awesome. And like he was one of those, but one out of every five people that are now members of local think tank, like five minutes in, they're like, I mean, you know, they're sold. And Pat, my conversation with Pat was kind of like that. But I was like, I don't have a place for you. But beat Mike and we'll build a chapter with with you. And like you said, we, it came along at the right time and we got there. But so, so you meet Larry and we meet and you're like, let's go and let's start kind of the local journey a little bit with when you, when we got the chapter launch, it's like right going into the COVID nation, right? Oh, yeah. So it was February. It was February. We met at the county building, right? Right. Yeah. And there were five of us, maybe. That's right. Yeah. So kind of small starting. We had a core group of three, well, one, one left. So we had four. We had four and then one left two or three months later, but we picked up some new members since then. Yep. Yep. And that is what are they? The thing, fantastic. Fantastic. With Jackie. Right. And that was so funny. You're like, hey, what are my good friends from college is Tim and his wife, Jackie would be a great member. Like, I've been trying to get Jackie for years. Let me call her and see if she'd be in your group. Well, she's a great, great person and she's really a tremendous business person. I mean, Tim's one of the first people I actually talked to about, not one of the first, but he's definitely somebody entertained that he should be a facilitator. He has a personality character. Absolutely. Yeah. Tim, I'm actually looking for a builder, chapter facilitator, probably starting this summer because we're almost full now of our existing. So, you know, call me up if you're listening to this podcast. Tim and I worked in the Collegiate together. He was a photographer. I was a writer back in the day. Awesome. And Jackie and my wife were pregnant at the same time. Oh, wow. So we go back quite a ways. So, let's talk, let's do about face. Talk about your family a little bit more. Talk about like how that fit in with your career. You have two girls? Son and a daughter. Son and a daughter. I'm sorry. Yeah. Well, yeah, you just said, yeah, anyway. So, talk about like that, like the building of the family while you're building of the career. And if you want to give Jen some extra kudos for taking on more share than she should of some of that time, you can sort of can. Like just talk about how that interacted with what was obviously, you know, even from the first COO job, you had a pretty responsible position for what was even then you were a pretty young guy. Yeah. I, you know, I always worked a lot, which I'm sure wasn't always in the best interests of our family. But thankfully, I married way up as I'm sure you did. I know you did. Obviously. Yeah. You married way up. Hey, similar. All right. Janet, Janet was always there for kids. And I missed out a lot of stuff, unfortunately, but our kids are great. And our daughter's in Alaska. She's a digital manager, actually communications manager for a large telecom or a husband's a pilot for Alaska Airlines. Okay. Hi, Carrie. Hi, Carrie. And our son just got married in Colorado. He's a teacher at a charter school in Highland Ranch. His wife is a emergency room doc, okay, but they're close by so we get to see them, which is good. And what is there a grand con? I can't remember one. There's none. None yet. Okay. Pressures on. If you haven't yet, pull the goalie, that's right. My wife says get busy. Yeah. Right. Get busy. So, yeah. So grandkids, sometime soon. That's one of the great reasons why you could be more available to actually facilitate two local think tank chapters. Yeah. Mike stepped in and filled in and took on another chapter this spring when another facilitator resigns. So, you've got the thinkastic and the thinking ears. Right. say like two, well, we had the two different kind of topics to a member that might want to be like, I looked at this mic guys profile and I, you know, why would people really want to apply to a chapter that has you as a facilitator? What are your strengths in that role? You know, it's not, it's not really me. It's the people make the, make the chapter. And honestly, you know, they actually, as each other's board of directors, defective board of directors, and you know, I'm still getting to know the thinkin' ears folks along the way and we're developing. But the thing's fantastic now, you know, after 10, 11 months. Right. Really a tight, good group. They love each other. Oh, they do. Good chemistry, smart business people, passionate, open, caring, sharing. You know, they really, and they talk freely. It's really, really, refreshing thing to be a part of. And really, I'm just, I'm just lucky to be a part of it. So, well, and I think that's sometimes just staying out of the way and letting that magic develop as a big part of the role of the facilitator. We don't need to overthink it. Right. Yeah, that's what we call it, the local facilitator. It's not the local bringer of all the knowledge of how to fix all the things that are wrong with my business. Right. Right. Now, I learned from each one of them and we have one-on-ones between meetings. Sure. And I ask a ton of questions about their business because I'm curious and it helps me understand them better, be able to relate to them and help organize some meetings to, you know, to, to more of their benefit. So that, to all mark that down on the whiteboard, the curiosity continues to be one of your strengths that it does. It does. It only goes, I have a lot to learn. And, and frankly, your love of people. You sincerely, like earlier Rory was here and you hadn't probably seen her in weeks and weeks, at least, if not months, probably. She works mostly remotely, so I don't see her very often either. That was the first time in a week. Probably I've seen her in person last week's podcast. But, it's just, I could see it in your, in your, in your eyes and here in your tone that you're like, you sincerely care about. Well, Rory, even though you spent six hours with us probably over the time and this and that, you know, but you care about people immediately. Well, you did after 60 minutes, frankly. So that's one of your strengths too. I got two, curiosity and your care for people. So I'm sorry, I'm a rabbit chaser. So we talked through the family stuff. Right. We talked into the local experience. So, so let's go to the other side of the equation. What have you gotten from being a local facilitator? You know, one of the things I missed from my previous career was working with smart people. We had a really good group of people that were intimate. We knew each other well. And, and I missed that interaction. I mean, all of our publishers younger, they were all, you know, 40 to 45 up and coming. Right. And I just got out of their way and, and I learned a lot from them and just tried to organize the best environment for all of us to be successful. Right. And I missed that interaction, that, that exposure that, you know, I still have something out of the hood, I think. And, yeah. And, and, and local gives me some of that. You're involved again with, with smart, passionate, caring people. You're talking about common challenges, common opportunities. You share more successes than you, than you recognize, you know, step backs. And, I think that's just so satisfying. I mean, that's, you know, you know, you, you could pay for things. You could pay, you know, to do a job. But really, you know, the money, it sounds bad. It sounds tripe. But the money is a bonus. I mean, if you really love your job, you do a good job because you approach it the right way with the right people. If you have enough money anyway. Well, yeah. Yeah. And, and, and you're paid fair for what you do. Right. You know, you don't do it for them. I mean, you, you need the ways to live. Right. But you're driving force going to work every day. It shouldn't be your paycheck in two weeks. It should be. I'm going to make a difference today. I'm, I'm going to, like those Hollywood actors that turn out good stuff every time, even though they're multi-multi-millionaires. Exactly. You know, they do care. They have a path. They love it. Not for the paycheck. Right. I mean, the money's there because of who they are and what they do. But, but more importantly, it's, it's what they do and how they do it and why they do it. Yeah. And I think that's a, yeah, I'm glad to hear that. I think that's part of you. I would say excellence is another one of your strengths. Well, I don't know about that, but very good-ish. Anyway, because, you know, you don't never, business isn't perfect. It's hairy. It's ugly. It's sometimes the clients don't come. Sometimes the key employees quit. Sometimes the, the this and that. Let's talk. Actually, before we move on to other other parts of our journey, um, talked to me about like some of those hard things that happened in the newspaper thing or those, we talked about some things that you really, that you really learned and that were, but was there any like, uh, head running into all kind of moments or just like those fingers in the door kind of lessons that, that taught you a lesson a different way? Sure. Um, you know, you try a lot of different things and everything works. And they're, and their lessons and, you know, in hindsight, looking at, uh, had misses mistakes, um, some do-over-moments. I learned a lot about that. So in that everything we tried work like it should have, but finished that first. Okay. We're talking about whiskey here. That's why we're distracted a little bit. So, I learned from that. And, um, but, um, that helps me now. That, that helped me, you know, as I grew in my career that, um, I'm thinking one thing, uh, one thing we tried to start was a digital agency. Okay. Newspapers in general, I think have been slowed to adapt to digital technology and, and, um, digitals move so fast. Newspapers make their money from printing. Even digital agencies have a hard time staying relevant as digital agencies. Absolutely. Like the last newspaper is creating a digital agency. So we try to, we try to create some, some agencies that were separate from the newspaper. That was important. Otherwise, if they run by the newspaper, they can be run by people who just care about the print product, right? So, so we went through, did poor, poor, performance started, uh, three agencies that were going to lose money for over a year. When we had to come up with hypothetical projections, right? So, just like starting on another agency, right? We're going to make so many sales based on these many calls, these products, these rates, this person, and the first cost. And, and we underestimated the long sales tail of digital sales because people aren't used to that. They weren't used to it then. There's so many products you can sell. Yeah, you kind of have to invest in it for six months before you really start seeing the results of your investment. Yeah. So it's hard to pay people. They're not bringing in stuff right away. And then it's hard to get closure as quickly as we thought we would. So, well, you can't recognize a bad salesperson. No. Because they shouldn't even get anything for three or six months. Right. And then when it's nine months, you're like, hey, is it going to happen? Right. So, failures. Yeah. So we actually ended up, you know, we had some, we had some success. We ended up rolling those back into the newspapers, kind of hybrid models. And okay, those still exist. They'll become part of the fractional revenue kind of thing. Right. So, right. But print people couldn't sell, you know, they're motivated. Their quarters are probably 90% print. So they have a 10% digital. Well, if they miss a digital goal, they're still going to pay a lot of money. Right. But if they miss their print goal, because they're spending too much time chasing the digital tail, you know, they're going to miss out on what what pays. And what fees me to borrow rather than what fees me at six months from now. Exactly. Yeah. So yeah. So a lot of lessons there. Well, what do you think was like, was there one key lesson? Like, when did you, did you have to pull the plug on that or like we did? Yeah. We did. And we just rolled it up. Well, it was hard to get good salespeople to sell it. Number one, he knew the product. They would stay. And then we just needed more sales sooner. And they weren't going to come. So at some point, you know, you can't, we didn't lose as much as we thought because we cut expenses. Yeah. But without investing in a new product too, it's hard to grow. So you're kind of betting on the common. At some point, you just got to say, based on where the family was, based on traditional revenue decline, we can't afford to keep feeding this. Although you could argue that maybe we'll get to the corner in six more months. Right. So, but it was just, it was just not right to keep going. So we consolidated did some other stuff and that worked out. Sorry, I totally took us back into a whole different chapter of this conversation with that. But how you do it, you need a, we need a restroom or anything like that. We're happy. Okay. We'll see how much longer we go. I've got another 15, 20 minutes before a party break. So, so let's talk now. We talked already about kind of your experiences of facilitator and stuff. Have you seen anything anonymized as necessary? But have you seen anything where one of your members really made a big change for the better since you've been engaged with them? Like, I know it's COVID-nation. And so a lot of things are different and weird or even in that vein, like is there something that maybe isn't for the better, but that they just really would have suffered through if it wasn't for for your chapter during this? Yeah, I can't think there were, there's several of those things that have happened. And you know, the cool thing is that happens, people are very open with each other and they get open feedback. And it's up to the member to take that or not take that and try it, right? But there's also a lot of interaction between the meetings. I've been really impressed by that. So, you know, these folks know each other really well and they have collaborated on things and called each other saying, you know, I thought about this and have you thought about that? Or I have this piece of technology that might help you here. I mean, that's so great to step back and just watch happen, but that's what it's supposed to be. Totally. Because you don't have that band of resources normally. And if you're a small business owner, there's not many people you can talk to about what you're really going through, who understand what you're going through. And, you know, this group does. And the other group is starting to do that as well. And they more than understand each other, the better they can help each other. Absolutely. And that just, that just grows on each other. So, totally, totally. So, like if you were, if you were going to say like three words to, to describe logo as an organization, pop on the table. I'd say passion, collaboration. What's the right word? There's only one word left. Yeah, I know what I'm thinking. Passion, collaboration, and commitment. I think folks are committed to each other. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that the groups have different dynamics. Some people are more outspoken than others or some are more insightful than others, but it all comes out in these meetings. And pretty soon, you know, people just speak pretty dog on freely. And it's all, it's all okay. And it's necessary. Yeah, totally. And so, all those things, I think all those things happen through those discussion points. Yeah, yeah. I appreciate that. I think that's one of the, well, you know, I've even had some conversations around, you know, we've got an organization where we've got passionate Trump fans and passionate Biden fans and passionate anti-maskers and passionate maskers. Right. And like in this time of at least superficially political division, these people, like even though I've been even both of your groups, you probably have people on both ends and around all colors of the spectrum in some ways. But they still care about each other. And they're, they're members of this group. And that's more pertinent than that they have this area. Yeah, I think, well, we make it a point and have to talk about politics and the meetings. Well, that's good. I think that the meetings are, you know, they're made for business focus organization. Yeah. I mean, they know each other personally because you get to know each other pretty well. Right. And we have, as you know, personal and personal dates very transparent. So you know, somebody's having a hard time if somebody is, well, in one chapter, two members lost their, their fathers within three weeks of each other. Wow. So that's tough. Right. But how significant was it to have somebody there that was like going through that same thing? Well, significant, you know, and you know, you pause and, but that's life. I mean, in your job, you know, you, you, if you get to know people and you should get to know them, you know, what, what, what they go through and it affects how they are in the job. You just can't expect blanket performance or, you know, with, you know, with your eyes closed. So, right. So, but you can show up the day after your dad dies and just be the same person you were the day before that. And we've had tears in these meetings. Sure. You know, but I'll tell you, if, if, if you come to these meetings and you're not prepared for that experience, you shouldn't be in it. If you're not prepared to be open, accepting committed, dedicated, sharing and, uh, and willing to embrace this experience and it's probably not for you. But I'll tell you, I think it'd be hard to function without being part of something like this. And I'm not just saying ask to advance local, but sure, if you're a small business owner in times like this, you need, you need a group, you need more than your spouse to talk to at night over a glass of wine about how hard your days need to talk about opportunities and challenges. Yeah. And I got to, I got to cut some costs. Oh, in my case, cost means a person. Right. Who do I do? Yeah. Or, or I'm looking at, you know, bringing this, this, uh, outsource service inside by investing in this equipment in this process. Does it really make sense for me to do so? Right. Here's how I look at it. What do you guys think based on what I'm not seeing? Oh, I mean, yeah, if you have a miss because you don't go through that process, that's a huge deal. Oh, yeah. It's easy to, it's easy to burn $20,000 or more in a small business. Right. And then like your wounds and pivot. A lot of times you're too close to an issue, also, personal issue. You know, you're, it's hard to pull a trigger on something or to make a decision on something else. You need to hear it from somebody else who understands you, knows your business, knows you, has been through it. Right. It's okay to go here. Or maybe you're going too far, but you need, you know, and that takes a little time. Like, have you noticed that like the, the seasoning of the group, like month three was great and useful. And then month six was that much more powerful in month 10. Now everybody knows each other. And it's just, yeah, yeah. We've noticed that a lot of times. And it seems like your group has, has really gelled in a, in a positive way as faster, faster than most any other group. So kudos to you on that. You've cultivated a rich soil. Well, again, it's a credit to them, not to me. Right. And that's, uh, you know, I, I, I, I have, you know, I know like everybody in the community these days, it seems like a Northern Colorado. And I've had that same compliment, probably no less than a half dozen times from totally outside people is Kurt, you've really curated some really amazing groups of people. Like your, your members, your facilitators, they're all like quality. You know, and that's not to say that people that aren't members of local thing think aren't quality. But, but if you're riffraff, we don't want you in here. Right. Right. You know, and, uh, and that's part of it. And it's hard sometimes to say no, especially if you're, you know, a small business trying to, to build your own revenue base like, like local thing tankers. Right. So, um, if you were, actually, I argue it's, it shouldn't be hard to say no. If you know the difference, you're right. You've, you've got to draw the line and say no because if you, if you say yes, and it's the wrong thing, it's going to hurt you. It's gonna hurt them. It always does. So it's always better to say no. I always say don't grasp for new members. We, we have to welcome them to what we have here. Right. Um, so I appreciate that you've, you've been, you've been such a sage for me in this last 18 months, uh, so that we've gotten acquainted or whatever or 12, um, no 18. So, let's, you know, one of the things that, uh, uh, we always finish the podcast with is, uh, don't tell me it's a song. No, we listen to a couple of them. Well, I think we're, we're, what else do you want the, the listeners, the audience to know people that are thinking about business, thinking about careers and journalism, thinking about being a facilitator for local think tank, thinking about like, what would you tell people just like reflections on the journey? Like what were some of the most important things to not just learn, but then to incorporate into that journey that you had? You know, I think the biggest thing is, is, uh, not be afraid to admit, you don't know something. And, um, uh, I've gotten good at that because I know, uh, there's a lot I don't know anything about totally. And, uh, but I would always take my time. I go down to the press room and I was a general manager. I don't know how to work the press, but if I represented them, I needed to know them and how they worked and how things worked. I mean, I, we can't cut 50% from the press room budget because that would leave just one person and we can't just have one person in there because they can't physically do it. Right. Or, or, or if I'm saying, you know, you've got to cut this stuff, but you don't understand if we do that, you're going to lose quality. Right. Or the same thing in the mail room or in the newsroom. So, um, it, uh, and it's, it's okay to say, you know, I don't understand that, you know, no, if I ask that, if I say that four times in a row on the same issue, then that's a problem. But hopefully I learned something. But I think it's always, and a lot of people, you can tell they don't know and they, they're just quiet. Or they say something that's off base. And I'd rather say, you know, I don't, I don't get it. I don't, I don't, you know, can you explain it to me again? Yeah. Like, or do you have five minutes because I need to understand this? And I, I really don't. Right. And I'll tell you a credit to our old CFO at Pioneer. Yeah. He really taught me a lot about financials quickly, uh, on a, on a higher level that I didn't really grasp. Just by grabbing you in those kind of questions. Or, and I'd ask him, I said, Jeff, you know, explain this to me. So, um, again, I'm not going to be a financial wizard at the end of the day, but I know enough to go through PNLs and balance statements and, you know, board books and all that to the point of being, you have to know that stuff. Totally. You have to know the, the end result of what it means, but I didn't as much as I needed to. So stuff like that, but I could have, maybe I could have bluff for a while, but at some point, I would have done the company and myself and others are disservice by not really knowing what I needed to know. And you just need to say it. Totally. I love that. I think that's, that's great advice. Um, oh, yeah. So I, where I, where I was heading here is, I was heading, well, because we always, because we're a politically semi correct organization, or at least this podcast is like, I have the opportunity here. We always finished with, uh, making sure we've touched on faith, family and politics. Okay. Only to the extent that you'd like to. And you're about two glasses of whiskey. And so I'm hoping that you're willing. We've touched on family a bit, but if you, let's actually, let's talk about family like, where did you come from? We, we started in college. And so, so lay that groundwork to the extent, like, could be your, your mom and dad, are they, are they from this country? Are they English immigrants or something? Cause you're Google, Leonardo. Juliato. Juliato. Italian. No. Actually, my mom was German. Okay. And my dad, I think, was conceived and rude from Italy. Okay. And my mom was actually the secretary to the mayor of Berlin, right into World War II. Wow. And my dad met her as a troop coming up from Anzio, all the way up through Europe. What? As an occupied Germany. And that's how they met. Oh, that's so cool. So they got married in 1952. I still have a wedding picture of them on my desk. Okay. And my dad was career army. And actually, he was in, uh, in World War II, in the beginning, in the Pacific, in the Navy. He got out in three years and enjoying the army and went up through Anzio. And oh, wow. My mom got a crazy fascinating. Yeah. Okay. And then, uh, and then how did they get? I guess he was from Colorado. That too. Well, you get here. He was from Brooklyn. Okay. Yep. Sir. Um, so, uh, just from the army, uh, transferred around. He retired in, uh, Ford Carson and Colorado Springs in 1964. Okay. Okay. And went on to work another 20 years in civil service. So I grew up in Colorado Springs. There you go. Yeah. Okay. I didn't realize that. I thought you grew up in Denver. I'm sorry. For some of my wife is from Denver. She's from Brumfield. Okay. Yeah. Got you. Okay. So that's the extended family. Um, we've talked about your son and your daughter a little bit. Is there any special message that you would like to transmit to them or to Janet, um, in regards to family or just extended family thoughts on family? Well, you know, families, everything. I mean, you, and I do regret, uh, I miss some things in my family by working all the time on hindsight. I didn't have to do that. I didn't have to work. You think you do when you do it, you know, but yeah, I could have been smarter. I didn't have to put in as much on some things as I did. And, and, uh, I've got a, I've got a great family. Just blessed and lucky and two wonderful kids and, you know, I'm just, uh, I couldn't be more fortunate. Really. Awesome. And, and really undeserving. Right. Um, so, uh, so we cover family. You want to talk about faith of politics first. Either one of those, I, I stay away from politics. Okay. To mix business and politics. No, it's cool. We don't either. Yeah. Absolutely from that. But I just, I, I, I, this is a small revolt against that we can't talk about politics. You and I have had some really good conversations. Yeah. And, uh, we agree in a lot of things. We disagree in a lot of things. And we agree that it doesn't matter that much. Yeah. Well, I think it's a relationship. What, what does matter, though? I think we need a country unity. Yeah. We don't have it. Agreed. And for whatever reason, we need, we're on the same team. We're on the same way. Totally. And we need to, we need to do that. And there's too many things that have been politicized that I think they shouldn't. Right. And, uh, we should look at each other, care about each other, care about improving ourselves. 100% and the people that represent us across the board that don't see that are really doing everybody to service that put them there. So partisanship is really a bad thing. I don't know how, I don't know how things improve. And that's, that worries me. And that word, yeah. And I think that's where one thing where we can really agree on is this kind of nation where the parties decide what the people that occupy those seats do largely anymore. They can't be as independent as they, they used to be. Yeah. And you wonder when those people first got their positions. Do they have more independence? Do they have a stronger, a stronger voice for the people that they're supposed to represent? At what point do they lose that and just become, you know, party driven or, or, yeah, our dancers of the drum. Yeah. Anyway, okay. We'll leave it there. Yeah. Um, care to talk about face it all. I think your Catholic background is that right? Uh, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, my dad was Catholic. Actually, I grew up in a small church. Um, it's kind of interesting. It's called the New Apostolic Church. And there's a church in Denver that I go to periodically. Okay. Uh, and apostolic. Is that like a, a, this, this cappella? No, it's no, it's actually, it's actually European. And my mom was in that as a kid. Okay. So when we grew up in Colorado Springs, it was this church in Denver. Okay. And so we didn't have a, I think we had a corveyor that wasn't very, uh, dependable to drive to Denver. No corveyor was, no dependable to drive church. So, uh, folks would come down and pick us up Sunday mornings, drive us to church in Denver and bring us back. Okay. And so then a couple other families moved in where we were South of Colorado Springs and wide field security. Okay. Uh, and so we started at church. Actually, my parents really in our living room. I had no idea that this is a part of your journey. So they would, uh, they were the, what was it called? New Apostolic, New Apostolic, New Apostolic. Okay. And so they would come in whole service in our living room. The altar was our TV set. Okay. And from there, they built a church in Colorado Springs. Well, I was actually, I actually helped. I know what he was doing, but I'd show up in the summers and help for concrete and do whatever. And that church is still there. Where is that at? It's on, uh, it's North security on Bradley Road. Okay. I've been down in that part of town a little bit. Not far from South. It's still called New Apostolic Church. It is. And there's, uh, so, you know, that church is consolidated as well. When I went to Washington and see, uh, you were several churches. Yeah. So harder to get people to subscribe to the religion than it is to newspapers. It is. It is. And it's a smaller group. Um, but I grew up in that and I feel comfortable there. And so I go when I can. Yeah. COVID that's been derailed a little bit. Obviously. Yeah. Uh, but yeah. So what do you think? Is that like, is it part of a large organization or is it really just a nation wide? Okay. Uh, it's worldwide. It's worldwide. So do you care to like buttonhole them in terms of what they believe? Uh, they believe in, uh, living apostles. So there's a chief apostol that is ahead of the organization. Kind of like a pope. Oh, interesting. Okay. And then they have, so it's like a spinoff of Catholicism, ish because they have a lot of, uh, tradition and kind of, yeah, maybe some Luther confessions stuff. So there's no confessions. They would be considered a, uh, what do they call it? What, like, what was the, the reformation? Right. Be considered a, uh, what's the, maybe some ties to Martin Luther. Yeah. I need to brush up my history. Right. I don't know that stuff very good. Yeah. But there, you know, the, for the most folk, for the most part, the, uh, the people that serve you priests and there's names for others elders and district evangelism. Yeah. You know, they're not paid. Okay. And, uh, contributions are voluntary. So there's no mandatory. So they can marry, obviously, a priest can marry because if you're not paying, you can't tell them not to marry anybody. That's right. They can marry. They can baptize apostles. We'll seal you, but it's all really volunteer driven and voluntary, uh, monetary contributions, which they rely on for, you know, keep these buildings going and everything else. Sure. Yeah. So interesting. Okay. But I grew up with that. So that's what I'm familiar with. Indure comfortable there and dabble in once a while and pop down and later. Yeah. But try to. Yeah. They don't have Sunday service in Fort Collins. They probably have virtual services. Now you could be hidden. You know, they don't have any out of Denver, though. They have national virtual services. But I wish I wish I could just tie in one there, but I don't have that. Oh, that's a bummer. Actually, it's so easy. If you're, if you're a member of the New Apostolic Church in Denver or Colorado Springs, and you don't have a virtual program yet, talk to Mikey. He'll help you get a set up. I'd love to do that. Okay. Um, is there anything last things that I think I actually have to pee? So we're going to go and wrap this up in about the like next few minutes, but anything else that you would just like to share with people. Oh, how about a local experience? Non-business related, um, a crazy experience. What's the, what's a crazy experience that you've had in your lifetime that you're comfortable with people hearing you share a story that with local in general? No, in general. Ideally, one that you learned something, but especially just a crazy unusual experience that not everybody is aware of or anything like that. You got any local experiences? One of our guests had their their home burned down, like like three hours after they first saw the plume of smoke or something. Oh, no. Yeah, we've been, we've been lucky with that. Another one or one of our other episodes he found it as dad wasn't really his dad, but it was actually his dad was an exchange student from Brazil that was in their class that year. Yeah. Do you have any local experiences? Uh, you know, one would be, uh, I looked nothing like my parents who've both passed away. So my mom is five foot, a hundred pounds brown hair brown eyes and my dad is like an extra out of the godfather movie. Okay. Five foot eight jet black hair. And you're six three six one six one look nothing like them. So and my kicks my ass and ping pong. Well, uh, for the record. No, you crushed me. I got you on an object. Yeah, whatever. So, so Janet, my wife, uh, thought for the longest time, I was adopted. If we go through this and through this. So finally, she actually wrote to the hospital. I was born in an Alabama to get a copy my birth certificate. Okay. She got that. So that validated, uh, you know, my entry point. Okay. So now the prevailing through in her family as well. My dad wasn't my dad. It was really the shwan's guy or somebody and my mom and the fair. So, you know, I just, I just don't want to know. I, uh, you know, like, yeah, I'm bringing that. So good. So, but, uh, okay. That's a pretty good one. I like that because it isn't usual, right? Like, how tall is your dad? Uh, he was five foot seven, five foot eight. Okay. Yeah. But a tough five foot eight. Right. Right. Yeah. Well, you don't know how things work sometimes. You know, uh, I always don't matter. I, uh, I talked about one time and it's very politically incorrect. But like, what an opportunity humanity has missed. Like, if we'd have been as intentional about selective breeding as we have with like, St. Bernard's and Chihuahua's and things like that, like, car designers would have fits. But we could be so much different than we are now. Yeah. Maybe. Yeah. Anyway. So I have two questions for you. Sir, two to one curious guy. So, uh, what satisfies you most about loco and, and what things would you like to have improved if you could improve them? Had a magic wand to say, well, we can improve these areas. Sure. possible. But first, you know, what, what, what does it for you? Oh, you know, the, the people, the stories, um, the, frankly, the, the fulfillment that the facilitators seem to get from the role is one of my biggest driving forces. I feel like it's an opportunity to take, like you said, you still had some, what, what under the hood? Oh, I just had some, some stuff under the hood. Right. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you've got engine still going. All this opportunity to bless people and share people into, to seek to understand in these meetings and stuff and that you get that loco thing taken craft of opportunity for the facilitators. That really drives me, you know, the transformative change that we see sometimes, you know, we, whether it's psychological peace or financial peace or emotional, you know, like just operational peace. You've had, you've had good feedback from members saying, oh, yeah. This experience really, really helped me in this way. We're full of fours and fives. We've, we've got a number of stories of just transformational change where I can point to like this moment, like even our building is owned by Chiba Hut and Scott was a member of Chiba Hut and, and kind of like the shift in his grow strategy was semi-sourced at least in a local think tank chapter meeting that I was that. So I got to see that and now they've got 36 restaurants and they're crushing it. You know, and it's still using that same kind of tweak to the operating model that really was empowered through that conversation of loco. So, so those kind of conversations like really drive me. Um, what was your question to or what would we change? Yeah, what could you improve? What could we improve? You had a magic wand to wave. I'd like these things. Yeah, a little farther, longer, a little better. You know, it's, it's, this is a relationship building business. And here in Northern Colorado, I've got tons of relationships. I got a lot of credibility. I've got, but as we try to scale and I think we can find people like you and Pocotella Idaho and in, um, whatever Cleveland, Ohio and places. I think we can find those people as fast as we want to. But then it's the relationship building of the chapter members around those people that like, and I think it ultimately, nobody's going to just apply, you know, one of my dreams would be so if I could change something would be like, people will listen to podcasts that we have with future facilitators in these different places down the road and be like, I want to just apply, but, but, but, but realistically, I need more resources in the sales outreach side. Right. Like we can generate leads. We can write big lists of people. We can touch as many people on LinkedIn as we want to and things like that. But to actually reach out to somebody and say, Hey, I like what you're doing with your marketing company, your, you know, property management agency or whatever it is that you're doing and, and just try to start a conversation there. I'm the big check valve in that right now and Rory and Deb do a great job. But ultimately that is probably the thing in the organization. We'll need to activate whether it's referral sales, partnership sales, you know, that relationship building element. We just need to build more of that so that so that we can serve more people. So how fast do you see that happening? I hope we get really good at it next year. You know, and figure out what really works well next year. We have a goal right now of doing three more local chapters next year. We have a lot of traction toward another next level here. We think we'll fill out on thinkers hopefully and have another one of those and then builders and other with those. And then we hope to at least have launched one builder, one thinker, one next level, not here. So that's a big pop. That's six chapters. And I don't know if we can do it all. We're not going to spread you a little thin potentially. Well, yes, but that's what we have to do to do what we got to do. And so part of it is what's our shift in strategy that we can empower the touches, the relationship building that we can do this, especially where we're not famous. Right, but we got some awesome people like you that want to be facilitators and we've got an off-and-off value proposition for those people that that might do it. So look forward to future episodes of the local experience podcast with some of those people that want to be facilitators in the Denver Metro in the Longmont region. You already heard one. Yeah, Lance, that was before he wanted to become a facilitator. But afterwards he's like, I think I want to do it. Let's do it. That's good. And so yeah, thank you for the top of question. I think that's that's where we need to, you know, in our flow. It's that that that direct sales that connection because we're just not going to be an organization where we want to touch everybody or we want everybody to be a customer or that people just apply and just join right up because they have to hear what it's all about before they want to do that. So last question for me. Okay, so what do you think the biggest takeaway is from the average local member experience? I would say a strong increase in their awareness of who they are as themselves. Like they get to understand themselves better through the eyes of others, through the transparent feedback from the eyes of others. And so therefore, they can understand better what they need to do and who they need to be to lead their business to the next level, which leads to the clarify. It is peer advisory not networking. That's right. There's no networking. Right. Yeah. No. This is an organization that's it's it's ultimately it's iron sharpens iron and learning from one another how to be my best self. Yeah. Well said. Thank you. Should we wrap it up? I think so. Should we clink our glasses? You've got to go to the phone. You've got to go to the bathroom. I do. I'm squirming. There you go. Okay. Thank you. Look at Think Tank and a local experience nation at Mike Gugliato. Thanks for your guest and we'll talk to you another day soon. 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 Mori Shar, 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 listen 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 teachers. If you're looking for perspective, accountability and encouragement along your business journey, why not apply for a chapter near you today? Why not? Why not? Why not? We'll catch you next time on the in-depth local experience podcast with me, Kurt. And with me, Mori, provide size business lessons in the local shorts. Bye!