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[00:00:00] Colin Keeley: Hello, and welcome back. This is Colin Keeley. Here

[00:00:03] Brent Sanders: And I'm Brent Sanders.

[00:00:05] Colin Keeley: we are two guys buying and building wonderful internet companies.

[00:00:08] Brent Sanders: Indeed. We are, taken on some interesting stuff, looking at some new deals this last week or two, specifically we've been looking at a handful of things. Outside of the us. And, it's been interesting to see. We don't really want to talk about live deals that are in flight, but it's been interesting kind of getting a crash course in, European law, as well as GDPR, gDPR affects everybody I suppose, in on the internet, but even more so when you're a European based company or a company with a lot of your customers in Europe. One thing that we, I think have been looking at is how do you manage a team if you were to have a company based in Europe and you're US-based and one thing we've been looking at is, around, okay.

Do we set up an entity in Europe and have employees and, try to wrap our heads around a law and structure that. There are probably are experts on, right? It's like we've, I've never run a European business. I don't know what you call it.

[00:01:04] Colin Keeley: Okay. I have not. No. Like we have, I always hired people abroad and never thought much about it. Cause you just use Upwork and it's pretty easy to hire contractors abroad. But when you're hiring full-time people, it's like a whole nother issue and there's a lot of compliance, a lot of local tax stuff to do.

And if you're hiring people across all different countries, it's get super, super complicated. And so what I heard about this company a while ago, and I never really looked into it that closely, but it's called remote.com. I think it used to be something else. They raised a bunch of money and rebranded, but it basically allows you to hire full-time employees in any time.

And they're calling it the first global employee API, which is like a pretty nice branding. And the way it is structured is they set up local entities in all these countries. So they're not in all countries yet, but they have like plans to expand to all of them and they technically hire your employees and they deal with all your compliance attacks and any local issues.

So like a brilliant like tech enabled solution. And now this continue to layer on more and more tech to do this.

[00:02:07] Brent Sanders: Yeah. The alternative is what would, we've already gone down this route where, you, you have to find an, like a law firm or an attorney in that country. But even so it's still confusing to me, like there's the EU, which is going to, give you some sense of rights, but each country has their own sort of civil code right there.

So it just is confusing to me So I can see why that would be a great service. Sure. You. You are, the alternative is you have to set up an entity, I would imagine. And then, yeah, I have an attorney that administrates this for you. And I would assume that's more expensive than remote.com, but maybe w do you know what the pricing is or what, how they charge.

[00:02:44] Colin Keeley: So they charged like SAS pricing. It's very much not a SAS. There's a lot of moving parts behind it, but it says, oh, they just changed it. Now it's the first employee free, but it was 300 a month, per employee per month. And then I think it, they're like enterprise plans and other things.

It's a pretty interesting, and it's, there's a lot of countries they're not in yet. So if you're looking at like a startup ideas, I think you could do pick a country they're not in yet like the Maldives or something, and you could become like the best way to hire people in the Maldives. And all you're doing is you're building a relationship with a local law firm and setting up your own legal entity.

And then you could charge 300 a month per employee per month as well.

[00:03:25] Brent Sanders: Don't free startup idea just to move to the Maldives or just find a great lawyer in the Maldives.

[00:03:31] Colin Keeley: right. So yeah, I, the countries that we're looking at, I don't think they're in them yet. So we're going to have to go down this like local law firm, local entity path until we can move stuff to remote or equivalent. But as a brilliant solution, and it's going to become a much larger issue as everything is moving this remote world.

[00:03:50] Brent Sanders: Yeah. I would say that as you mentioned, through Upwork or I've even hired people. Like I had a developer many years ago that was in Japan and worked on a project for a year together. And he's an American, a guy went to high school and junior high with, and he ended up moving to Japan and it was still pretty difficult just to get them paid.

Like he, he was lucky. Cause I think he had, no, he didn't even have a American bank account. He had Japanese bank and it was, I'm pretty sure it was all pretty under the table. Like we didn't. We didn't really know what to do. I just paid them. And I'm assuming, Hey, you're taking care of your taxes.

It's whatever your tax situation is, you're taking care of it on your end, which is great again for these more contract deals. But I think when you have, if you were to buy a company in Japan and they've got five, 10 employees, I think moving them all to contractors would be an odd move. Or at least be pretty disruptive.

Maybe it's not an odd move. Maybe that's. But, Yeah.

it's interesting business model, as everybody starts to distribute out and, remote work is at an all time high, I would say, we're going to see a need for that even more, just making sure things are compliant. And, the other thing is how do you do that?

Dismissing somebody, right? It's like in certain countries, I'd imagine they're more generous to the employer versus the United States or employee, I should say than the United States. So it's like knowing those rules, knowing, for example, what is the, the Philippines that was that 13th month rule that they have right around Christmas.

You got to pay one extra month.

[00:05:21] Colin Keeley: Yeah, that's exactly what it is. It's like a bonus that's expected and maybe actually written into law, unless you hire someone like in December and then you don't have to pay it, for like only one month of work. But, yeah. I wonder how our moat deals with all those like edge cases. They probably just tell you, expect an extra 20% or whatever.

You're actually paying them in salary because you have to pay these other things.

[00:05:40] Brent Sanders: Okay.

Not the fun part of buying a business. That's I think that these services to make, these back-office things go away is in charge of premium. I think $300 per employee per month is really expensive. If you think about the actual work that is probably going into it, but from a pain point perspective, if it is technically, I would imagine you're there also on a.

We had, a PEO with an old, my old agency we had basically all the employees were technically employees of RPO, which was, I don't remember what it stands for, but it was basically a third-party company that was doing all of our payroll and benefits. And so they would protect us from unemployment claims, or anything that went to fall. So we had zero risk and they took on all the risks. Any employee related claims, including unemployment claims. So I wonder if it's similar where it's like, Hey, we'll take on the whole burden and we'll make sure that everything's hygienic and well filed.

So I don't know. I think $300 as I think through it, I'm sure it's a good price point for it. We'll just take this off your plate, but over the years, I'm sure that adds up.

[00:06:44] Colin Keeley: Oh, yeah, I it's a great business. It is like high, depending on what country you're hiring. Again, like if you're hiring in the Philippines, like that's almost doubling their salaries over there and that's insane, but in Japan or something it's more expensive. It is not much at all.

[00:06:58] Brent Sanders: Yeah, it's interesting.

[00:06:59] Colin Keeley: So one of the things I saw this week is, or last couple of weeks, we haven't done this in a while. Sorry about that. I was in Ireland for 10, 11 days, not a lot of podcasts and going on. But, pipe is a way to basically sell your SAS revenue or any kind of subscription revenue. So you can sell your.

Like MRR upfront as like you get the full amount of the MRR minus like 5% or whatever and fees. And it's not invoice factoring. , I don't think they have any recourse is basically how it works, but they struck a partnership with micro acquire. So you can acquire businesses with their own revenue.

I thought this is pretty interesting. I was looking at, if you could do it, restrictions are, it has to be US-based. So that is a bit of an issue, but you also have to be pretty profitable because you're not getting that like monthly recurring revenue anymore to pay your salaries or whatever. So if it's break, even it doesn't make any sense unless you are very confident you could grow it relatively quickly and, outrun your burn.

[00:07:59] Brent Sanders: Yeah. What is the situation that you'd want to in my mind, the point of acquiring these businesses is the monthly recurring revenue. Is that monthly annuity is that like monthly dividend, right? So it's Hey, I'm going to convert a lump sum of cash into a, I guess maybe this is more so geared towards founders then.

And folks like us where, we're getting into this space intentionally, we're converting a flat lump of capital into something that's going to be this month. Amount of either distribution or whatever. So I guess know if you're looking for a payout for just a year of revenue or you're looking, technically it's not a payout, it's a loan.

You're getting that money up front, which, maybe if you're transitioning into a new business or investing in another line or R and D, or maybe that's helpful, but I don't see us.

[00:08:43] Colin Keeley: So it would let you use less money to buy a business so less equity. So it's not that different than like another form of seller side financing it's using the company's revenue to buy the same company. But it only makes sense when it's the company is like pretty profitable. If it's. Yeah, it doesn't make any sense, which I'd say most of the things we're looking at are not wildly profitable.

It'd be great if they were, but more of them are like closer to break even. It doesn't make a ton of sense.

[00:09:10] Brent Sanders: Yeah. And the other thing is what do we know what the fees are? Like? It seems like you're getting this at least on the site. It makes it seem like, Hey, it's just a couple of percentage points under 10% is what I've seen So far. But do you have an idea of what they do?

[00:09:26] Colin Keeley: So pipe, isn't the one, financing these deals and not holding the loans. So it's technically a marketplace. They call it like NASDAQ or so. So there's a bunch of investors on the other side. And the rate that you pay depends on the quality of revenue. So if your turns really low, if you're an, a net revenue, retention is really high, like your rate would be very low.

And so I think it is only like a few percent, but maybe it's up to 5%. Something like that. Basically their whole idea was that the SAS revenue is a pretty amazing asset class and a lot of investors would be interested in investing in it and founders shouldn't be selling their equity when they could get their money up front and invest in their own companies with their own revenue.

[00:10:05] Brent Sanders: Yeah, that's a great concept. I think that part of it makes a ton of sense, right? You don't have to give up your equity long term. You just need some cash. You need something to know, if you're going to acquire a different brand or whatever else that does make a ton of sense. I would argue that the capital markets, or the, I should say the ability to raise money right now is also at an all time.

I don't know. I don't want to say high or low. What am I saying? I'm saying that it's cheap to raise money right now. Money's cheap at this time for. People interested, you're giving up equity to that point or potentially, this could be a nice, without what am I trying to say without strings string free way to get, a lump of cash for a year?

Can you go beyond a year of MRR? I guess it's a marketplace. You can do whatever you want. Huh?

[00:10:50] Colin Keeley: I would assume so. Yeah. There's a reason it would be captured one year. It's also not to SAS companies. It's like any form of subscription revenue. So you could do like a, private equity management fees, or sub stack, subscription revenue, stuff like that. So if people are doing pretty interesting stuff, that our communities of communities get all that money upfront.

[00:11:08] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Speaking of communities, how's yours. Can we, your community,

[00:11:11] Colin Keeley: It's good. The course is going well. I just, spend money on my first ad. So like the conversion rate on the website is like two to 4%, which is really good. And like the top of the funnel is just not big enough, I would say. But if the conversion rates that good, you just need more people coming in the top.

So I should be tweeting more. I should be spending on it. And, so that's what I just started doing. So the community, there's some interesting decision since going on of like people in negotiations for business and I'm giving my advice. Other people are giving their advice, trying to find companies.

So it's been really fun, I try to be active in there. I try to check it every day, reply to anything that's going on. But yeah, the course has been really interesting is Me getting my learnings more concrete. So I've added probably 10 to 15 segments lectures, templates since launching.

So it's cool, to just keep adding to this and it's becoming like a great source of knowledge, I think for these people,

[00:12:04] Brent Sanders: That's great. Yeah. So check out. What's the address of your course

[00:12:08] Colin Keeley: IndiePE.com.

[00:12:09] Brent Sanders: IndiePE.com then?

[00:12:11] Colin Keeley: Yeah. Thanks. I appreciate the shout

[00:12:13] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Get a plug going. It is a culmination of a lot of what we talk about and what we're up to. And it's a, the general philosophy is like right there, rising tide lifts, all ships.

It's a, there's enough opportunity out. here that people just don't really know about, but, Yeah.

it's a great space to play in and, something we want to contribute back to and, I need to make an intro into that community. I keep meaning to, and then I get busy with other stuff.

[00:12:38] Colin Keeley: Yeah, no worries. Jump in whenever you like. So other things we want to talk about, you've been playing around with this idea of a Vern agency, and that's a larger question of like, how do you properly capitalize these companies? So like some of them, we buy them, they make it a little bit of money, but like the opportunity is way larger.

And I think I see that in Blinksale. Or in this next one, we're working on acquiring and it's you need some amount of money to close the deal, but then you need, more money to actually, grow the thing. Have you put any thought into that?

[00:13:09] Brent Sanders: Yeah, part of this has been a lot of, we've been having this conversation and I think we recorded an episode almost dedicated to the concept in history of having a, an internal agency that serves portfolio companies. And so I have a lot of expense. With that. But more so recently, I'm expecting our second child in October and.

I work on a mix of projects on our portfolio projects, businesses that are outside of Bern businesses that are consultant based where it's I've worked with them for a long time. And so as a software engineer, I give some of my time per week and I'm just trying to figure out, how do I get more leverage?

And so that's where I restarted this thinking is like, Hey, I've got to bring some help on. And so how can I leverage my time? Hey, everything can keep moving forward while I'm, on some form of paternity leave and be, I, we can serve these, portfolio companies to, to make sure we're hitting.

So with blink sale, to give a little background on our listeners, we're doing a lot of the work, right? We're I shouldn't say we're doing a lot of the work where we've hired a team, to. Rework the product, right? And so we have developers that are helping us out. I'm working on it, a fair amount of I've done sort of the redesign and getting my hands dirty on some of the new features, adding crypto-currencies adding ACH payments.

And it's, but it's like a tiny project in the future. I think the deals that we're looking at are, we're fine. Teams, we're buying a company that has four to five people, maybe even more as a tech team, develop developing the product that would continue. So this is like a weird state.

I don't know if this conversation that we're having is, more of a now thing or more of a down the line thing, but there is an element where. You build a bench like I'm doing right now, or we find ourselves in this spot where we have five or so engineers or designers, marketers, a small bench of folks that work well together.

We work on internal stuff together, but we also work in external stuff. So they can pay for themselves for. Internal projects and just I'm at the stage right now where I think it's just a matter of mapping out the value chain. It's like understanding, okay, this works now because there's enough external work and internal work.

And I think that's where I'm at right now is I think that's the main drivers is controlling demand, which is good for us. It's we can control the demand. Within the portfolio company, allocate people to projects within the portfolio. But in order for them to this to be cost efficient, you need to have okay, Hey, there's a, an external client.

That's going to pay sort of full freight or full fare, for your work. And that margin will go towards internal work. So it's a balance. And I know we, we raised a venture fund based on this, what three years ago, and that pitch resonated with people. But, the reality of is unless you have.

A glut of demand, both from external and internal, sources. It doesn't work. So that's the one thing that I know you have to keep going, but I'm still working through it.

[00:16:03] Colin Keeley: Yeah, the obvious one to me is almost everyone in our position has hired some kind of hired or created or acquired some kind of growth agency. And like for all our businesses, we're going to want to invest in writers and like SEO.

[00:16:17] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:16:18] Colin Keeley: Most of the companies right now just don't have enough to hire a person full time.

So we could hire these one off people that are really good, but they're also doing other work or we hire an agency and pay them for that. But yeah, at some point it probably makes sense to just set up our own and like extra writing time is easy to fill. The companies can just pay these people more money.

Always doesn't hurt to have extra, blog posts up.

[00:16:41] Brent Sanders: I think what's attractive to this is as, investors. The, this isn't, the fees aren't going to keeping these people onboard. Ideally, there's a balance where they pay for themselves, they, because there's a balance of internal and external work. That's actually not coming out of the funds fees, which, we don't have a fund, but we're intending to raise one in the future.

And as I think about what's the most capital efficient thing to do, that's a really big. Aspect, if you can have these value added services available there at cost for, internal customers, but then, a different rate for external, like that's the model we ran before. It's just a matter of you got to make sure that there's enough portfolio companies coming in and you have to make sure there's enough external clients coming in and you have to keep a person around to maintain that balance.

So it's, it is a little bit, yeah. You need someone doing sales top of funnel, like finding external projects and those projects have to be the right size. They can't be too big. They can't be too small. So it isn't easy. I'm just going to say that up front. It's I don't, I've been through this before, so I know I'm getting lopsided one way or the other, like you're only doing all internal or all external work.

It messes it up. It doesn't work. And but I do think that hard and fast rule that we felt followed in the past. It does make sense to say, Hey, this is not going to be subsidized by the fund in no way. Do you know, should fees be paid from the fund to keep people around? And I think the other big learning is, doing the space, with all contractors, which I think. it's ups and downs, but I think that's one thing we didn't do before we had a largely all full-time team and that put an immense amount of pressure on me to keep everybody busy and chasing internal and external works. I'm coming. I'm warming up to the idea. And I think that a lot of our competitors and other people in this space do this.

But in my mind, it's a bench of contractors. People that, can come in for a three to six month project, and then maybe we don't see them for another three to six months, but the downside is they may get busy with other stuff in the future. So to me, you have to build an even bigger bench of those people.

[00:18:48] Colin Keeley: Yeah, the contractors, it seems like it's a short-term split, right? Because once you have enough demand, then you would be hiring them. Full-time and you wouldn't be that concerned that you could fill the time. And then it's like the people on the outer ring become the contractors and they could do the flex work as you need more or less.

[00:19:06] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah. And I think where you hire full-timers is not developers or is not writers. It's not designers. I hate to say it, but I think those roles are largely commoditized. We can find great engineers pretty much anywhere. What I think we need to be focused on is like once if this agency were to take off and we have enough demand internal and external. we would want to allocate somebody is almost like a product manager. And this is where I landed before. Our good friend, Josh Parkinson on as a product manager and he, would run these projects. Cause that's the thing that I ended up doing and I ended up spending a lot of time on it. Yeah.

Writing tickets bringing together like what the business needs, what the designers want to do and what the engineers need to do. Or, on the marketing side, that might be more of like a marketing product, project manager. So it's more the person that's marshaling, the forces, that's creating the project plans and it's a difficult thing to hire for.

You need someone who's, semi-technical, who's semi, is going to be able to. Put together a design maybe, or put together a screen or understand user experience or so it's a very multidisciplinary job. It's hard to find four, but that to me is the thing that you invest in are the sort of, Marshall's the people who can put a project together and Right.

[00:20:17] Colin Keeley: So you need that. So I guess the question is like, what is the ideal CEO for this kind of thing to run this whole thing? And do you think it's more of a project manager than like sales oriented person?

[00:20:29] Brent Sanders: No, I actually, if it's a CEO, it's gotta be sales. That's the one thing. Yeah. I would say as if we were to get serious about this and beyond, we're going through this exercise for the next couple of months, because I'm going to be out, I'm going through this. I'm dusting off my old agency hat and trying figure out like what I need and how I can get it.

But I forgot that there is a profitable aspect to this with the external clients there's margin. And for every person you add to that project, you're making. You're getting that leverage. So for every hour, there's some markup on each hour, so you're making a small amount of money doing nothing, just by having the people in the project and controlling that demand. Obviously not gouging them, but you're also responsible for the work. So in my mind, there's a, an amount of margin there that's, ensuring that the project gets done, that it gets run professionally and there's something of value being delivered.

But going back to. What is the CEO look like? I think you need somebody who's going to be able to, recruit for those product manager roles or recruit for those project manager roles. Keep the leadership or put a leadership team together to run projects and deliver value.

But their main focus, if I had to pick one thing, it's making sure that the demand is still there. Like the top of funnel is full, that there are people queued up to. Use the demand once the current projects over and then something queued up past that. And it's something queued up past that. So building a strong pipeline of great projects with sane people, right?

Cause you can find work anywhere you can find work, but I think it's a matter of the thing I've cultivated over my career is like I have great projects with great clients, right? They pay on time. They, they respect and listened to them. Our insights and they're easy to work with and we deliver value to them, right?

So there is a sort of intrinsic value in finding good clients that I think is incredibly important. If you're going to have an external mix, because you can have bad clients that blow things up that destroy morale that, the money is just not worth. That's what the CEO I think would be focused on is like building that pipeline.

[00:22:28] Colin Keeley: I think the hope would be you hire someone on salary for a couple months, one to two months. And then if there's sales oriented, like hopefully with that couple of months of runway and insurance, Like that would be enough to get it going and get it off the ground. And then they'd be on their own to run from there.

And, we keep sending a business, we keep acquiring companies, but it's, they have to go find outside clients.

[00:22:50] Brent Sanders: Got it. Yeah, I would say so. It's the challenge though, is like they have to find out say clients, they also need to work and identify what are the internal projects. So there needs to be a balance and I don't want them to go out and just, find a. You can find a huge project, and then have to build a team and put that together. And that could be all consuming. And then the focus is no longer on the internal portfolio companies. And then you're just, you're bringing in cash, which is great, but that's not tax efficient. That's not like a, that's not a great business that I want to get into.

What I want to get into is something that can sustain cheaper work and build that equity though. And that's the hard part. So it's easy to, it's not easy, nothing's easy in life, but it's easier to go and sell and find an external client. That's going to pay you a great amount of money for a bunch of work that's, difficult.

But, this is a more, a little bit more nuance. We want you to be delivering portfolio value, value to the portfolio companies, delivering equity value, and then also generating cash to pay for the resources.

[00:23:51] Colin Keeley: Yeah, it is a interesting balance because how do you incentivize that you want to incentivize them to be along the same path as you, right? So basically after incentivize them with a good amount of equity, but then also responsible for the P and L and like some kind of profit share on the agency side.

[00:24:08] Brent Sanders: Yeah. Yeah, that was my role before it's difficult because unless they're incentivized. Towards the portfolio enough, they're gonna, they're gonna prioritize cash, which I did, I didn't have enough equity to, just disregard external stuff. It wasn't the right blend.

And so it was like I was shooting for, the way it was structured before was, anything over cost. I got to keep a portion of that, and that was more attractive to me to sell external projects. And yeah, that was the, maybe I would say the downfall of the idea that I didn't have enough equity in the portfolio or belief that the portfolio companies were going to see it in that.

[00:24:50] Colin Keeley: Yeah, that is another issue as well.

[00:24:53] Brent Sanders: Yeah.

Yeah, So it was like, why am I giving up, X amount of dollars, potentially up to a hundred thousand or some six-figure amount. Or I was like, Hey, I can just go sell external stuff and build those projects. But, it became difficult to do because, No, it's not the right sort of mix.

But what I would say is at least in the short term, is I'm trying to think about, what's the value chain here to me, it's driven a lot by demand, but what can we do internally to, with the portfolio that we are cultivating to use this agency as a catalyst for, to your point marketing SEO. Development, everybody could use and a little bit of extra bandwidth.

Everybody has a project that's, they want to get around to, but they haven't yet. And that's where an agency I think, fills in great, nothing, we had a rule with the old agency, with internal companies, no projects larger than three months. Nobody should be working with us for longer than three months, which I think is a really good way to cut it off.

There should be nothing. On your backlog that, if you haven't gotten to it yet, and it's more than three minutes, a six month project, that's an internal project. You guys gotta do it that way. And I think that's still a good, I have a lot of good lessons learned here and I think it's still a good way to make it work.

So there's no dependency on external services or my other one was a tiered approach where it's like, after a certain amount of time, it starts getting more and more expensive. Cause you're leaning on us and it becomes painful to the portfolio company, but I don't like that one as much as just, putting a hard stop on, Hey, we only do three months and under projects.

[00:26:21] Colin Keeley: Yeah, it's interesting. There's so many nuances. There will be a, we'll have to put this into practice while you're learning some of the previous one.

[00:26:29] Brent Sanders: Yeah, hopefully it goes better not to say other the other project. It worked out well. The other, it ends up, it's funny. We're now five years later. So maybe six years since the inception that, that, incubation, studio model incubator. We've got, it's funny There's one company that's moved on to the next stage and is likely going to see a pretty good exit.

And it's not at all the one we thought, there were what, three or four losers that just face planted and there's one that's doing. Okay. So you get one, one big win one. Okay. And the rest are largely, which is so funny because there aren't enough. We didn't move. It didn't get to 10. We were supposed to, but we didn't get to 10 companies, but, five or so we were seeing the exact like venture, sum up where you see, okay, there's one outstanding, player.

There's one or two kind of okay. Businesses. And then there's just a bunch of failures.

[00:27:21] Colin Keeley: Yeah, it's funny how that power law just always shows up, whether you expect it to or not, or plan on it. And it's so hard to guess in the early days, I'm sure you weren't thinking that was the one that was really gonna take off and be the big winner.

[00:27:33] Brent Sanders: No. In fact that was the one that the GP wanted to return capital to the investor. I I won't name the company or the GP, but you can probably figure it out if you want it. But, that was, there was enough friction between how it was performing and between the CEO and the GP or the board.

Where there just, wasn't a lot of confidence and thank God we, we would all say, you just have something stuck in your craw about it. Like just let it go. And thankfully he did. And because it is, it's doing great. Now

[00:28:00] Colin Keeley: Yeah, it's funny how that stuff works. It's gotta, enough shots on goal. One of them, maybe it works out.

[00:28:07] Brent Sanders: Do you have any other sports analogies you'd like to use for this

[00:28:11] Colin Keeley: Keep taking

[00:28:12] Brent Sanders: day at a time? Yeah, one day

[00:28:13] Colin Keeley: puck is going is, the Gretzky one. My other thought on this podcast is we need, I gotta start asking people to come on for interviews. Like it's stressful to think week to week, especially as they're not trying to talk about live deals, I think wanting to talk about, so I'm going to start inviting people to come on.

I think that'd be, more of what I am accustomed to is being a, not that the speaker.

[00:28:32] Brent Sanders: Hey, it's always great to bring interesting people on, having an excuse like a podcast is such a great excuse to just be like, Hey, love to talk. And normally it would be awkward to be like, Hey, can I pick your brain? Do you want to grab coffee? And I feel much better about emailing people cold and saying, Hey, we've got a podcast.

Love to talk to you.

[00:28:51] Colin Keeley: Yeah. So I've been doing interview podcasts for five years now and now there's, there was like no competition back in the day. And now there's so much, I want to, I don't want to talk about anyone's story. I don't want to hear anyone's story. I want to just jump right into some topic that they haven't really taught.

Before. So I want our podcasts to be very different than everyone else's of what'd you do? How'd you get there? What'd you do next? It's you could go find that out somewhere else. I want to talk about this thing that you're passionate about, that, it doesn't get talked about ever. So if anyone has any great ideas of guess we should have on, hit us up on Twitter and I'll start reaching out to folks.

[00:29:25] Brent Sanders: I agree. Yeah.

I'm putting some thoughts together. I'm of the mindset too. I'd love to start talking more so to some of the founders that it doesn't have to be people we're talking to, but the folks that have either recently sold their business or thinking of that are in that position, just to understand, where are they coming from?

How are they thinking about their baby as they, look to, to exit.

[00:29:48] Colin Keeley: Yeah, that was our initial idea with the whole creator stories, title. So getting back to our roots of our, I think, in there,

[00:29:55] Brent Sanders: Yes. Exactly.

[00:29:56] Colin Keeley: Anything else? That's kinda all I got

[00:29:58] Brent Sanders: Yeah, no, we're just plugging along and hoping to have some, interesting sort of acquisition updates, but we can't really talk about it until it's done.

[00:30:05] Colin Keeley: soon. Hopefully soon, some of them have taken too long, but they'll be done soon.

[00:30:10] Brent Sanders: Summertime we're in nature.

[00:30:12] Colin Keeley: We are in nature. I'm sorry for this. It is summer,

[00:30:16] Brent Sanders: Yeah, exactly.

[00:30:17] Colin Keeley: all right. Take care, everyone.

[00:30:19] Brent Sanders: Thanks for listening.