Episode 404: Exit Strategy with Darryl Bates-Brownsword

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. Have you ever thought about exiting or selling your business? Even if you haven't or don't feel like that you can, pay attention to this episode. I think you're going to learn a lot about what it is that makes a business sellable. And even if you're in a position to where you can't sell your business, some of the things that make your business valuable in the eyes of an acquirer also make your business more fun and profitable and scalable for you. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Darryl Bates, Brown Sword. Darryl, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Hey, thanks for having me, Bradley. I'm excited. It's a bit of a retro step, this one, isn't it? We had a yakka a while before when you joined me on my podcast and I got to pick your brains and I'm feeling that Um, you get the, the last say here.

Yeah, well, that's, that's right. I, I was fortunate enough to go on Daryl's podcast, so I was really excited to be able to have him to come on our podcast. Well, Daryl, we'd love to try to kind of go back into people's journeys about how they got to where they are. I've learned so much about people's, you know, experiences, um, that they've been on, so I'd love to hear yours and bring this to present day.

Sure. So I run a business. My arm of it is based in the UK. It's called Succession Plus. And what we do is we work with business owners to make sure that their business is exit ready when they are ready for exit and we make sure the numbers work for them. So that's what you get, those three pillars, you get a successful exit. How did I end up here? Well, I've spent 20-odd years coaching, working with businesses in the SME space and coaching them and helping them move through the various stages of growth and unlocking the various tools and resources in the business of what is required to unlock them, to get them to that next layer of growth and maturity in their business and kept unlocking them. And what I noticed is I always kept working with business owners to work on the valuation and think about, you know, working, you know, what the roles of the founders or the roles of the various people, what they should be working on. And a lot of them kept saying to me, well, hey, look, I've got a goal, I've got a vision. I want to build this business up to the point where someone would come and knock on my door one day and want to buy the business. And I wasn't focusing on exit planning. I was just focusing on growth. And to be honest with you, Bradley, after about 20 years, I was kind of going through the motions and just working with business owners to work with them for growth, for growth's sake. Because, you know, the old mantra, if you're not growing, you're going. Growing type of thing. And we were just growing and it was kind of a lot of them, it was almost meaningful growth and we didn't have any connection or purpose why. And they grow their business to the point and a number of people would get an offer and not just the clients I was working with, I was seeing businesses in the marketplace and they'd get an offer out of the blue and someone would come and say, well, let me buy your business. I've noticed you in the marketplace, you're getting some good numbers, you look like a good business and they'll make an offer. They'd end up signing a deal. And what would happen is that because they weren't exit ready, they hadn't specifically been working in their business to improve the valuation of the business. They'd just been focusing on the profit. What they would end up doing is they'd get an offer and the buyer would say, well, look, I love your business, but for me to take it over and for the trajectory of growth that you're on, for that to continue under my ownership or the new ownership, I just need you to hang around for a couple of more years to keep things going and growing. And they negotiate and discuss some sort of earnout arrangement. And the buyer would go, yeah, well, no worries. I can do that. I think I can work with this new owner for a couple of years and I can achieve the numbers that we forecast and I can get all my valuation. And there was a common thread, a common pattern that I saw what was happening time and time again with these guys is that once they no longer owned the business, they no longer had control. A couple of things would happen. And one of them is the goalposts were shifted on them because the new owners had to do whatever they had to do to include and incorporate the business into their structure and get the leverage that they were looking for. And the founder no longer had their hands on the wheels and they didn't like that. They were used to calling the shots and sometimes they go, well, this new owner doesn't know what they're doing with the business and they're doing it all wrong and they'll never do it. And because they weren't in control anymore and they kind of lost their passion and they weren't taking the business forward under their stewardship, they couldn't work for someone else and they just too often, it just became too much of a pattern that I saw business owners, you know, leaving halfway through the earn-out period and just walking away from the business and leaving a ton of money on the table. And it just ended up not being a successful exit. And the only money they got, or the only real money they got, was the money they got at the point of transaction, which could have been half or less of the money they were expecting or hoping to get. And to me, I just saw that as tragic and avoidable, you know, someone, a business owner sort of working for many years with an expectation or anticipation that something would happen a certain way. And it ended up being hope and just seeing those dreams shattered and just not getting the outcome they were hoping for and just setting them back a bit. And I just saw that as avoidable and And that's what led me to transition after, you know, to build, to work with a couple of partners and get Succession Plus going. So yeah, that's it.

One of the things you and I are kind of aligned on is the stages that business kind of go on. And so you and I, when I came on your podcast, I shared with you that the two stages specifically that we really work with is like the $300,000 to $3 million. But I see that as in two stages, $300,000 to $1 million and then $1 million to $3 million.

Okay.

And that the problems that a business is facing at $300,000 to $1 million and $1 to $3 million are slightly different. They begin to kind of evolve and begin to change. At what point do you believe, just in looking at those two stages, Darrell, when should a business owner begin the process of potentially looking at planning for and making decisions based on an exit in your, in your experience?

That's a good, the $64 million question, isn't it? It's when should we start thinking about getting my business exit ready? And, you know, I've asked this question a lot myself and, you know, everyone sort of says, well, you should think about the exit when you start the business and that's great. It's a bit like business planning on a spreadsheet. It's all perfect and really easy to do it on a spreadsheet. But, In real life, it's a bit harder. So when should you start planning for your exit? Today. You know, that's the answer that I'm gonna give. But if you really wanna maximize the value of your business and you've been working in your business or on your business or running the business and owning your business for years and you've been focusing on your growth, there's a couple of ways you can handle the question. If you go, look, I don't really wanna, you know, potentially leak out to the marketplace that I'm getting exit ready, even though it might be a number of years off. The first thing I'd encourage you to do is start looking at your business instead of just looking at profit and revenue growth. Like a lot of people are saying, hey, look, you've got to grow your business, grow your business. They normally mean the profitability and/or the revenue in your business. My encouragement to you is start, you know, make that mindset shift from profit growth to valuation growth. Get familiar with what are the elements, what are the levers that influence the valuation on your business. And start looking at your business planning from perspective of what's my valuation this year or my potential, even if it's a theoretical valuation, what's my valuation this year and how do I increase it over the next year? And you can increase the valuation without even increasing your revenue. So that's a bit of a surprise to some owners. But, and if you can implement that into your business, you know, you can do that today even if you, you only just started your business. If you're at the point in your career and you're starting to think about, hey, look, I've taken this business as far as I can. I've had enough with this business. I wanna start thinking about my exit. Then if you can give yourself 3 years when you are working with someone with a specific project of getting exit ready, that gives you everything in time to maximize the valuation of your business. And it's probably worth just digging in a little bit what I mean by that. If you think of the valuation of your business, it's the formula, if you like, the way most people calculate a valuation. It comes down to a combination of your profitability and that, and then there's a multiplier of that profitability. The multiplier represents the risk to the buyer of your profitability continuing or continuing to grow as it has been growing. So if you're gonna increase the valuation of your business and you are gonna start putting things in place to improve the profitability, they're the classic areas that Gerber suggests in The E-Myth where you're working on your business. When you're working on your business, you're working about 6 to 12 months ahead of your business. So let's say you're working on something for 9 months, you're designing it, you're building it, you're preparing it. Then 9 months later, it starts to hit your revenue. And then you want a year or two of revenue history. You're showing how that strategy has worked in your business to get the valuation kicker from that initiative, if you like. So that's why I go, look, if you allow 3 years, you can spend the first year working on all those strategic items, a couple of strategic projects that you need to, that are going to hit your revenue line, Ryan, in 6 to 12 months' time, and then get a year or two of demonstration that those initiatives of attitude evaluation and that your leadership team are running the business without your hand on the tiller so much. And the 3 years is the, I guess, worst-case scenario. If you leave it and say, hey, look, I want to sell my business now. An accountant, a CFO can only do so much to tidy up your financials and get everything in order.

Would you believe too, there's some people listening to this that are not at a place that they want to sell. They don't want to exit. They're, they're, they're really just wanting to be able to grow the business. But yet, do you believe that there are things that the same things, the same things that make the business valuable in the eyes of an acquirer are also the same things that make that business a better business for them to run and own?

Is that a trick question? That's 100%.

That's a nice question. I mean, I know, do you believe that?

Absolutely. Like why get your business exit ready? Because a business that's exit ready is one that basically that a business is more valuable and ready for the owner to exit means that the business can continue running in the best case scenario without the owner's touching it on a daily basis. So from an owner's perspective, a founder's perspective, that business is much better because when it's exit ready, it means they got themselves out of the thick of the business and they're just working on the strategic sides. I call it getting into a chairman-style role. You've got less stress, you've pulled yourself out of the firefighting mode of solving problems or keeping the plates spinning on a daily basis and never knowing what you're gonna face up to every day in the business. So you're no longer working 100 hours a week and being totally stressed every day you show up to work. So it's a much more enjoyable business to be in. You're making more profit, you got less stress and you got more time. What's not to like? So 100%, yes, I'm with you on that one, Bradley.

Yeah. Okay. Here are some of the things that I've, I've held and I want you to debunk some of the things that I know because I'm talking to somebody who's obviously a specialist with exit. You know, one of the things we talked about in your podcast, like fundamentally, I believe the business needs to run on an operating system. That's kind of like our whole thesis. And with that, that also is almost like we can get them to a certain point and then they can go and work with someone like you if they decide that they want to be able to begin the process of being able to, to exit. Okay. So here are the things that I've held. That I learned over the years, and you tell me kind of how you possibly see some of these. So one of them is that I never really understood SDE and EBITDA, and then I started to kind of understand EBITDA. Typically, if you're doing a million or more in profit, you typically start hearing measurements around EBITDA. Less than that, you're looking at a thing called SDE, which is seller's discretionary earnings. Secondly, is that the average business that is sold— average that is sold, there's a lot that are not sold— but are around 3 to 3.5 times that multiple, either seller's discretionary earnings or EBITDA. That said, when you get to a million in profit or more, you typically begin to see the multiples really go up. And so can you share with me kind of what has been your experience around that? And again, those have just been some of the things that I've read over the years, but again, I'm not in that space. So I'd love to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, no, look, the thing that helped me get my head around this, Bradley, is when, uh, my, the founder of Succession Plus, a friend of mine who, his name's Craig West. Craig started Succession Plus and his background is in accounting. He's got an accounting background and he explained to me that, hey, the multiple side of the, like the general valuation equation is a combination and the way I describe it is a combination of a profit number and a multiplier of that profit number. I use that generic vague language deliberately because sometimes it's discretionary earnings, Sometimes if it's a small business, less than a million revenue, you hear a multiplier of the revenue. Like sometimes in accounting practices, you know, you hear the terminology 0.7 to 1.5 times revenue as opposed to an EBIT multiple. And then it gets up to a certain size and it's an EBIT multiple. What Craig explained to me, he says the multiple is a representation of risk to the buyer. And what I understood when he said that, he said, look, what the buyer's buying is they're buying the business and that business is a tool, if you like, that generates ongoing cash flow and you want it to grow and increase the cash flow. And the business has been growing the business and increasing the revenue and the profitability every year. Now, as the business gets bigger, So if we take that less than $1 million revenue, that typically means you've got an owner in the business and maybe 10 helpers. If you unplug the owner, the level of employees in a business like that is typically that they're all junior or less experienced to the owner of the business. So they're unlikely to keep the business going without the owner. So the owner in the role they're operating needs to be replaced. Which if I'm buying that business represents a bigger risk. And because it's a smaller business, you know, the risk of that ongoing revenue is high. As you get a much bigger business and it's more established and you know, you've got a number of founders or key shareholders in the business, you've got a leadership team of directors, senior leadership team, you've got a middle management team and a whole lot of employees. You pull the owners out, No one notices. So what happens to a business like that is, and you start to see business like that at 2, 1, 2, 2.5 times EBITDA, 2.5 mil of EBITDA, I should be saying. A business like that is you take the owners out, no one happens. So the risk to buying a business like that is much lower. And all you need to replace is the board potentially, or maybe you know, you've got, you're getting some economies of scale and you might go, hey, look, they've got a part-time CFO. I don't need their part-time CFO because I've got a CFO over here and my CFO has the capacity to work across both businesses because they've got some spare capacity. That's the leverage and the opportunity to me. And then sometimes you hear this language thrown out there with arbitrage and that's what they're doing is they're throwing a number of smaller businesses together for this exact purpose that you are talking about, I've now got 3 or 4 businesses together in the same size, same sector, same area on a spreadsheet. They look perfect. They'll plug together and I can get all these economies of scale and now I've got a much bigger business and therefore it's lower risk to buy as an entire entity. That's true maybe 5 years down the track when you've fully integrated all of the businesses and you've ironed the culture out and you've got rid of all the clash and you've got a consistent set of systems and tools across the whole business and everything's operating as one. In the meantime, it's a super risky business of 5 businesses. I know I've kind of covered a few things there, but is it addressed the question? Do you think?

It does. What are the most of the— what size are most of the businesses that you work with?

Businesses we work with, our sweet spot is the It's that second bracket that you were talking about. You, it's kind of the 10-15 people up to about 50 people depending on the industry, $2-50 million revenue. It's, and for me, why is it that that's our sweet spot? Because a business of that size has gone, has just gone through the inflection point where it's transitioned away of that business owner with 10 helpers to when it's at about 15 people, they have to have a management team. You know, one owner can't have 15 relationships and keep control and of direct reporting relationships and still be in control and keep their sanity. Once you've got about 15 people, you've got 2 or 3 managers, people in manager roles, which means you can start to create that leverage You've got the delegation, you've got the authorities to the different people that have authority and make decisions in the business. Then we can really set it up and eliminate any sort of owner dependence in the business. We can really systemize it, leverage it, and prepare it to be maximal valuation.

I was writing down some off the top of my head as you were discussing. I was writing down some of the levers that I was thinking about that make, that reduce the risk to the buyer. And so obviously the one we spent the majority of the time on, which I'm going to assume is probably the biggest, key person risk slash owner dependency.

Yep.

Another one I wrote down is concentration risk. So customer concentration risk, like if one customer makes up 50% of your revenue, clearly that's, that's, that's very risky to a buyer as an example. But what are some of the are the other levers that a business owner works on to reduce the risk, thereby increasing the multiple that they could sell for?

Can I answer that in a specific way?

Of course.

And what I mean by that is, and it's almost as if I've set you up or you've set me up. I'm not sure who is leading who there, but one of the tools we work with, is actually called the 7 Levers. And it's the 7 levers.

I didn't even know that. I actually did, honest to goodness, folks, I did not know that, but hey, that's the levers you can pull on. Well, then I want to know what the 7 levers are.

Okay. So the 7 levers are the 7 levers where we work on increasing the asset value of the business so that each time I step through one of these levers, it's building a more mature and more robust business. That is addressing each of the risks along the way. So the first lever is the business where I buy, where I'm literally just buying your revenue stream and it's a smaller type business where I just buy your client base. I don't care about your accounting system, your CRM or whatever. I've got my own. I'm just gonna put all your clients into my CRM system. You go away and retire. I just want your clients. And the more that client base produces, repeatable, reliable revenue, the more I'll pay for that. But yeah, that's the lowest form. So that's the first lever. Then if I want to apply my next lever, my next lever is people and talent and culture. It's all the people related. What's the quality of my staff? What's the retention of my staff? How long do they, how well are they trained? How long do they stay with me? How well do they look after clients? How well do the clients know them? Yeah, so then I buy a business with a database of clients. And I add the staff as well. So there's two levers. I'll pay a bit more for that because that client base is, you know, there's less risk attached. The business is more likely to stick together if the clients are seeing the existing employees and there's some familiarity there. Next one, I go, okay, so what, how do I de-risk it? The next layer is I want some sort of systems. I want every one of my staff to be following a standard set of systems. Some processes and be everyone to be doing the same thing the same way, consistent, repeatable, reliable, efficient, profitable. All those things come into play with systems. So I've now got my third lever, which is, you know, on top of people, everyone following the same systems. And they're the hygiene ones, if you like. And then I start moving into the next one and I go, right, well, if I've got some IP, some specific methodology that people come to my business for, so they're no longer coming to the business because I I work there, Bradley works there, or specific people work there. They're coming to my business because they've heard about our methodology and the methodology has some reputation in the marketplace. So the next one is IP. After IP, I want to start talking about, okay, so how do I access my client base in the marketplace? I know who I'm chasing. Where do my ideal clients hang out? Where can I find them? How do I approach them and get them correctly? So have I got some sort of marketing machine in place to attract and, you know, keep clients and get clients regularly. So I've got some sort of marketing machine. 1, 2, 3, 4. After that, I've got, okay, so what's my marketing machine? And I've got IP and marketing machine now. So I go, okay, so what's my reputation in the market? Have I got some unique position in the market? Do people come to me because they know my business and then my business brand and the reputation of my business is even better connected to my methodology? So I've got position in in the marketplace and brand or product positioning if you like. And then after that I go, okay, what's the scalability of my business? Have I built, and this is a classic, I guess a Gerberism, have I built my business as a franchise prototype that I can plug and play and simply just copy all of those, you know, the marketing machine, the product, the methodology, my talent machine with the people. Can I plug and play all of those things into a secondary location and scale my business that way. So they're the 7 levers that I think of every time and they build on each other. And every time I build on them, the valuation of the business goes up because it's more mature, it's more robust, it's more consistent, it's templated.

How many times do people come to you and you look at their business and you say, geez, you're not ready for any of these? Your business is not ready at all. We have a lot of work to do the next few years.

Well, every— this, look, the thing about owning a business is there's no shortage of opportunities, right? You've always got plenty of opportunities of the things you can be working on and there's a million things competing for your attention every single day. And I think there's a difference between a business being sellable and the business where you can maximize the valuation. And the first tool we've got in our marketing funnel, if you like, is, and your listeners might be interested in this, is we've got a tool called the Business Sellability Score. We want to know how sellable the business is and we just got a really quick, you know, 20 questions, how sellable is my business today? And we can answer those questions and just give you and we'll rate you on those 3 areas I mentioned earlier. Is my business exit ready? Am I exit ready? And do the numbers work? And it gives you a bit of an assessment in those areas. So having a business that's sellable is not the same as having a business where I sell at maximized value and being able to exit on my own terms, i.e., without some sort of earnout arrangement. So it's always, you know, a balance between can I sell my business now and aspirationally, here's what I'd really love to, how I'd love to exit my business.

Tell me a great story about someone who came in doing low, maybe $1.2 million, $1.3 million, something like that, not doing already $25 million as an example. I'm sure you have those, but what, what's somebody, a story of a business that has, was doing a low couple million in, in, in revenue, came to you guys. Started to pull on these levers and had a really fantastic exit?

I'm gonna give you, yeah, so I've got a story in mind where I remember one that I worked with and he said, look, I wanna get this business to $5 million valuation and then I'm gonna sell it. I said, okay, I said, but I reckon this business has got $20 million valuation just on what you've built because it's a bit unique, it's a bit different and it's a bit opportunistic in the marketplace. So what we did is we worked with them, we showed them because it wasn't an employed business, i.e., they didn't have employees. It was a contractor type of model, hybrid where the people were licensing their methodology. So the first thing we did is we said, let's build teams in the business. So each of the licensees doesn't have the ability to basically come in, work with you or your brand, get your clients and then run away and keep working with those clients long term. So let's build the business so that there's at least 2 relationships with every, every client has a relationship with at least 2 people and they've got, and that way they stick to the business and not just the consultant type person they're working with. We then start, or we also did, so we built a team-based structure and that's lever 2 if you like. We then did, started to go, okay, so you're a professional service type of operation. Let's build some IP that explains to the marketplace when you go into a sales call about the methodology that you're going to use to address solving their problem. And this, by having this IP and this methodology, you can explain and show the client that you understand their problem better than they do and that you've got a solution. You're not just in there going, buy me, I've done this 100 times before. Trust me, I know what I'm doing. I've got lots of gray hair, you know, buy me, buy me, buy me type of thing. We're going, here's the methodology. So it gives the clients a lot more comfort. And with that, they're able to put their price up by about 30% over the next 2 years.

Yeah.

And all new clients came on at that newer rate and gradually other clients did as well. We did that. We did a lot of work on their sales process with the methodology and we had to teach the client on the sales process and working in teams. And then we started, we also started focusing on a standard, you know, with that methodology, a standard way of doing things and then reporting. So we got all their KPIs in place and reporting so that the management team knew that things were happening the way they thought they were happening. So that meant they could grow their business. Now what happened is the business grew and it went way beyond $5 mil. It's 4 or 5 times that today. But the owner sort of said, well, look, back when I was at around $2 mil, I was thinking that at $5 mil I would just be exhausted working every hour. But we've built the business, we've got some controls around it. I'm having a whole lot of fun running this business. It's like a next career for me. Why would I want to sell it? So they've totally changed their mindset from their exit that they had in mind that they were gonna do to the— they still own the business today. They've brought their sons into the business who came from all walks of life, trained them up and they're the next layer of the management team. Dad is in a chairman style role of the business today. And look, the business from an ownership perspective, the business is not going anywhere. So it's kind of an exit. It's gone from an exit story to a succession story.

I love it.

It was the owner's exit. I love it.

That's great. Darryl, people want to contact you and reach out about how they can look if they're even wanting to consider having an exit at some point. Where would you point them to? How can they connect?

Best way is our website, which is succession.plus. And depending on where you are in the world will determine where, which site you land on. Or if you want to contact me directly, you've got my name on the screen. There's only one of me in the world. There's only one of me on LinkedIn. If you type that name into LinkedIn, you'll find me. You're guaranteed to find me. And then there's also, yeah, that's probably the best way. I'll give you those two options.

I love it.

No confusion.

That's great. What does working above the business mean to you, Darryl?

Working above the business. So I've touched on Gerber a couple of times and I know that you're a fan of Gerber and the E-Myth and it's a solid principle. Think, think, think. Okay, here's what it means to me. When we start, when I start working with business owners, we'll have a look at the business and we'll go, hey, look, We're looking at business ownership and we're starting to unpack the business for exit. And one of the common things that people do, let's say we're in business together, but it, you know, is I treat the 3 areas, the 3 beneficial areas of owning a business. I bundle them together into one and I treat them as one. And those 3 areas that I'm referring to is if I'm a business owner, I benefit by getting some income. So I get some revenue out of the business and the income is linked. Well, I'll just say the 3 areas first, the income, the other area, the second area is I get ownership of the business. So there's some benefits of owning the business. And the third area is control. So income, ownership, and control are the 3 beneficial areas of owning a business. Now, when I work with a business, I tend to treat those 3 things by default. Most business owners by default bundle those together and go, Hey, look, if I'm in, in business with you, we split the income, we share the income, we share the control, and we have the same amount of ownership, generally speaking. I know there's a lot of situations where that doesn't happen. Working above the business, what I try and do is I go, actually, those 3 areas of the business, what we need to do is unbundle them. And income is the role. I get income when I take on an employee type of role in the business. So when I'm doing a job in in the business, sales, operations, delivery, client service, accounting, any of that sort of work, working in the business, I unbundle that and I get income. Now, control is exerted through the board. So if I want to control the business, the board controls the business in terms of the strategy and the key decision-making. So control is the areas of the responsibility of the board. And ownership is where we get the— okay, so what are the benefits of ownership? Well, that's where I get share growth and/or valuation growth. I also have a responsibility to fund the business, but I also get some dividends out of the business. So I unpack income, ownership, and control. Now, each of those three areas have a responsibility. The income is the employee's responsibility. The direction and the control comes from the board, and the ownership They have a responsibility of going, this is why we're in business. They set the vision and the culture for the organization. And in a small business where the owners are still present in the business, all the employees take their cues from the founders, from the owners, the shareholders in the business on how they should behave. And for the inspiration and the energy source of the business of saying, we're heading in this direction, this is where we're going, this is why we're in this business. This is what we're doing. So I would say in a long-winded way that working above the business is the shareholder's responsibility, which is all about the ownership. And they are setting the direction and the purpose of the business. This is the, the reason, our big idea of why our business exists. They give that information, that big idea, that vision, they give that to the board and they go, here, take this vision, take this big idea and turn it into a strategy. Tell us how we're going to achieve that. And then they give that, that board, they go, look, that board gets that strategy and they give it to the leadership team and they go, here's the strategy, turn it into a business plan. Show us from year to year how that business plan is gonna move us towards using the strategy or the 4 strategic elements moving us towards our vision and achieving the big idea. So that's the unbundling for me. So I've got working above the business, got working on the business, and I've got working in the business.

I love it. I love it. What a great answer. Darryl, appreciate you coming on the podcast, my friend. Learned a ton from you today. Some of the things that really stood out to me, uh, just even the, when you talk about exit planning, the profit number and multiplier, decreasing the risk to a buyer increases that multiplier. And just whenever you went through The 7 levers. I loved those by the, you know, you're acquiring the client base, the people, uh, the talent, the culture, the systems and processes, which is obviously an aspect that I really love with an operating system. What's the IP, the methodology? Do you have a marketing machine in place, your reputation in the marketplace? And then do you actually have this franchise prototype that allows the business to be able to scale. Daryl, appreciate you coming on.

Thanks, Bradley, it's been great. I've enjoyed yakking with you today.

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