Episode 434: Employee Engagement in a World of AI with Rasmus Holst

Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hamner, your host. On today's episode, we have Rasmus Holz. Rasmus is a serial entrepreneur and transformational leader who believes putting people at the heart of business is the only way for companies to succeed. And one of the best ways I've heard that said is business is a team sport, and I fundamentally believe that. He's the CEO of Zinzi5, which has helped to bootstrap an AI-powered learning management business on the fact that humans are on the engine of innovation, and the company's shared mission is to make humans more successful. One of the things that we get into in this episode, we talk about employee engagement. We even get into a little bit of AI. I have wanted to continue to bring different thought leaders in around AI. I think that all of us can have the sense that we need to try to lean into AI. But whenever somebody is leading a company that is really AI-powered business, you start to get some insight at a deeper level. And I also think that it's interesting because you have an AI tech-backed company, but obviously you still have a large team. And so how do you blend the, the two of those? Uh, you, you'll be able to tell, obviously, he has a tremendous amount of, just a wealth of knowledge around AI productivity, workforce engagement, HR, the future of work, etc. We don't get into all of those topics, but he's currently living in Copenhagen. This cool thing about Zoom and being able to connect with people around the world. And I think you're going to get a lot out of this. I think you'll pick up a few things around, around employee engagement that you can apply back to your small business. Obviously, the companies that he's working with are typically a little bigger than most of our listening audience, which is in that $300,000 to $3 million range. But I love to hear from people even at the bigger levels, even though I know— won't necessarily understand what it's like to have 200 people on a team. Um, you can still take and distill down some of the principles, and I think those are timeless. All right, without further ado, here's my conversation around AI and employee engagement with Rasmus Holz.

Rasmus, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

Thank you, Bradley. Ready to go.

Excited to have you. I've enjoyed getting to, to talk to you and learn a little bit about your background coming to us from, uh, Copenhagen, uh, Denmark. So it's great to have you. I love being able to connect with people from around the world, and that's one of the advantages certainly of Zoom and other platforms to be able to do so and be able to bring to our audience people like yourself to be able to help them to, to grow their small business. Rasmus, we'd love to start, um, with background and origin story. And I think that, that reason I like to ask that question is it gives our listening audience, if they're not familiar with you and your work, it can give them a little bit of a background and help shape the narrative of some of the things that we're going to talk about today to ultimately help our audience to grow their small business. And you obviously have a, a lot, tremendous amount of experience, and even with bigger companies. And so for audience today, I think that what we're going to do is we're going to pull some threads. We're going to pull some threads from some of the bigger companies that Rasmus has been able to work for, be a part of, uh, raising money. And so even if some of these things are not things that are exactly applicable to your business, I do believe that we're going to be able to pull the thread and pull some of these business principles that are going to be able to help you. So with that, Rasmus, why don't you give us your origin story and how you got to where you are today?

Oh, my origin story starts in rural Denmark. So that's out farmland. That's where you grow the crops and everything like that. Son of two teachers with a younger brother. So it was never in the stars that I would be doing anything in terms of business international. Very great upbringing. A set of parents who always at the dinner table actually said, boys, if you have anything to say, articulate it well and give us your arguments for why you believe that. And we would be heard. And sometimes we actually won the summer vacation to go to where we wanted to in terms of windsurfing and all that. So I've been brought up in a way where speaking out your mind and articulating that is a core fundamental of who I am. And I was lucky enough. I mean, I'm past my 50s. So my— the great revolution when I kind of got out of university and started my career was mobile. I have said publicly that I never wanted to own a mobile, and yet I started for Nokia at the time selling 300 million phones a year and all of those types of things was my first job and actually stayed with mobile for a long time. For the first many years of my career, I was a product manager, got to build a lot of fantastic products and all of those kind of things and traversed a few others. I did billing systems. Which was actually very small. It was out in even more rural Denmark. We were 16 people when I joined. We managed to get to like 240 and then come back down again to 2000. So it's not always great to grow fantastically well, but there are some lessons we can talk about later from that over a large-scale oracle. And then I went into 10 years of actually clearing most of the world's roaming traffic. And that uniquely gives me a perspective because I got to manage teams in 15 different countries and across all time zones. And that led me to live in Luxembourg for 7 years, and then from there onwards to the Bay Area for 7 years with both Huddle and a company called Wire. And then finally back again 2 years ago to Sensai, where I've been for 3 years. So I started the first year of that, it literally happened out of, um, out of, um, out of the US as well.

What do you think in some of the companies that you've been a part of. I know you recently had raised, uh, $20 million, you know, during a recession, as an example. And you've been a part of other raises, uh, for some people that— most of our audience, our members, are all bootstrapped, right? I mean, they, they, they have to balance growth and profitability. They have to do it well. Some of the profitability they will keep and reinvest in more people and in marketing, etc. And then other of the profit they're literally distributing to the owners, which in most cases is themselves, um, right? And so they're kind of doing, doing that. And, you know, I have a friend that's in the high-tech venture-backed, uh, and in some cases pre-revenue space, okay? And these— so he's in a super unique space, and he tells me often that, you you know, he's on the banking side, but a lot of the VCs that he works with, they care about one thing and one thing only. I was actually duck hunting with him just a few, just a few weeks ago, and we were talking about this very thing over dinner, and he said they care about one thing, one thing only. It's growth. It's just growth at all costs because they don't really care about the profitability. If they're growing, those VCs will just continue to pump more money into it. And he said something interesting, which leads me to my question. He said, but you know what, the best, the best companies that we've worked with were the companies that did not have an unlimited budget. They were forced to build a solid company and they were growing and profitable, then went and raised money to accelerate what they had already done. What has been your experience?

And so true to form, I've raised capital loads of times and been fortunate enough to sit and celebrate the first $50 that came in, starting from zero. And I've also managed $300 million businesses just to give everyone a perspective. It is absolutely true. And it's also true with the company I am CEO for now, since I, for the longest time, actually ran on a bootstrap, in a bootstrap fashion, trying to balance everything out. And got very, very far with that and could probably have continued. The one thing I think that then you sit with when you say, okay, so where do we go? Do we raise capital or do we continue to do this? As you— as we had this growth engine in Sensai, we also ran on very limited cash resources, which meant that everything was more or less short-sighted. We could deal with like a quarter at a time. In terms of the capital that we are able to deploy, right? And the safety net and all of those types of things. Then comes an inflection point where you need to say, are we continuing to just return money to the owners? And the one thing you're true about is that as soon as you're not the core owner anymore, there are other folks and it's other folks' money that you need to answer to as well. But what it gives you is it gives you a longer perspective and ability to plan. You can reinvest the money in, in, in, in the business and actually invested in products, investing in growth. And then what I think many don't see from the outside is that essentially what you do is you build a curve to invest, and then you want to swing it back up to cash flow, profit, cash flow positive again, and then back to profitability with every cycle. The problem has been that in 2021 and before, the cycles were so quick that even when you were halfway through the burn rate, somebody else would give more money because they thought, oh, we can make more money. Um, so I think if you take it at a prudent level, it's, it's not a bad thing. But you— there are two things that you need to say if you say yes to that level of capital. It is to say, I want to build something that's world-class, because you really push the boundaries of— you need to be pushing to be the leader in a certain category. There are so many small, medium businesses that do a great job every day. They make money, it's profitable. But as soon as you strap it with money, you need to then try and see, hey, can I become number 1, 2, or 3 in my market? And it's not the local market in maybe Dallas or something, or Denmark. It's then the US. And that's where traditionally a lot of the capital goes to and where a lot of people try to find, find, uh, find the luck to build a large-scale business.

I'm not going to ask you to try to, um, predict by no means, but there's just— boy, there's so much about AI right now. And I mean, I have an AI tool sitting on the Zoom right now as a recorder, right? Uh, so, you know, I, I, I think I use AI maybe daily, something like that. I mean, to, to be able to— I was using it with the kids' homework last night. There was a question I was stumped with, and I took a picture of it and sent it in there. I was like, oh yeah, sure, that's the answer. So there's some of that use. It's helped me to be able to write some things occasionally, to check, check things like that. But I feel like I'm just dabbling in it a little bit, you know, and there's a little bit of a this thing of, yeah, I want to lean into it, I want to, I want to adopt it, I want to be able to, to, to see what all it, it, it certainly can do. I mean, there's some stuff, and, and then there's also a little bit of a, I don't know, there's a little bit of fear, I guess, you know, of, uh, uh, I don't want to be, uh, I don't want the, the AI wave to, to flip me off my board and, and crush me, you know, in a few years. And so What's the right honest mental approach to take in with, with AI?

I think I'm, I'm, I'm trying to embrace technology as much as I can and I've always done throughout my life. So I'm trying to embrace it as, as much as I can. And if I look at, again, at, at your example, right, with the kids, I'm, I'm actually that, that there's one, there was one thing that scared me. Actually, with that, where I got like, okay, this, this is going to be quite scary. Because as part of a story that my son needed to hand in for a school paper, he wanted to write about his great-granddad or his granddad and a fishing trip that they went on. One of those where you remember what the weather was and all of that. And he's a 19-year-old boy. So usually he just gives it like 10, 10 quick things from the day of how they were at the harbor, how they never caught any fish. And he was sent out at age 6 to get things from the other fishermen and all that. And then he asked it to just explain the city, how it looks, how it smells, because it's a fishing village and his granddad grew up there and it wrote it out, AI. And I read it and as his dad, I got emotional. It was like I could feel the tears come and I went, okay, at this level you can actually make interesting, you can make content that touches me by writing AI. The only input was 10 lines of a 19-year-old boy trying to explain an experience he had at age 6. And me as his dad could basically see that. And then I'm going, okay, in the dystopian world where they know things about me on LinkedIn, on Facebook, on everything, they can actually make content that is directly touching me and, and all of that. And that I think is a, is a scary future thought for marketing purposes, all those kind of things. But on the other hand, in our business and how we use it, I think there's a lot of tasks that we've already eliminated where people were sitting, moving things from databases to PowerPoint presentations for us to do a board presentation that we're no longer doing, or simple service tickets answers that's just basically much more quickly and much in a much better way fixed in that, in, in those kind of ways. So I'm, I'm very pro that, that AI is gonna, gonna do something for us as humankind. But I also think, remember that the business I work, work in is, is an HR tech business. I think we need to think about how we talk about people because the weird thing is we call everyone a human resource and AI is a resource. We need a different word for the people who actually work because I think AI will lift up most people who work in technology or in white-collar jobs for sure. And I think there are lots of blue-collar jobs that it can't even replace. But at that point, we need to make sure that the teams stay together and that they have something common to, to, to huddle around and not just have AI bots. I mean, my, my, there's no point in having an AI bot sales bot trying to sell an AI software solution to an AI procurement bot and then they agree that that's a great idea. I can't see why that would, that's just busy work. Yeah, I can't see that that's ever gonna, gonna happen. And I still think that a lot of business is gonna be done between people and there's still the input to the problems that needs to be done by people.

I'm gonna ask this next question, but I'm going to tell you a quick story. So I have not had to— just haven't had a reason to walk into a physical bank in quite some time, but I did about, uh, 2 weeks ago. Yeah, it was around Christmas time, something like that. Walked in, there was one person in there, a customer, and then, uh, waited my turn.

2 people there.

Quickly kind of realized that one person was training this new teller. And when it got to my time, she made a comment to the person she was training. She said, no, no, no, no, no, you, you don't have to do that. You don't have to do that. Whatever they told you in training, you don't have to do that. And she looked at me and she said, I mean, they pay me for only one job, right? I'm not going to go do too much work because they're then, then they're getting more for them what they pay. Now, this is a big bank that I walked into. Yeah. And she looked at me and I thought to myself, wow, if you knew who you were talking to about this being a business owner. And I was like, you know, I didn't acknowledge or certainly agree with the comment. You see probably where I'm going with this. It's employee engagement or lack thereof in that case. Yeah, he's going to do the bare minimum to get by. Now, this is what you pay me to do at the bank. I'm going to do this. I'll be doggone if I have to go and do just a little bit more. Now, if it is a company that's raised $20 million, or if it's a small business that has 5 team members, or 25 team members, we all want to build a healthy culture, a performance culture, a team where people are bought in. Because especially with the teams that we talk to and people listen to this podcast, like, every role on that team is significant. Yeah, I mean, at a 20,000-employee company, you can kind of get lost. I mean, you know, it just is what it is.

Yeah.

When you got 20, no. I, you got 10, no. So the smaller the team, the more important every single role is. And so whether you're small or big, we're trying to create employee engagement. So I know that was a long intro to the question, but how do you, how do you define and, and look at employee engagement? One, I think a definition would be nice from your perspective. And then number two, How do you do it well? Okay, I mean, we've had people on that have talked about employee engagement from different, you know, different angles at times. But what is the data shown that you've seen about how to actually do that well?

I think that if you start with the data, it's like 2 out of 3 really don't care about their job. So I think your, your experience is actually very, very true. Then I think that a lot of people, they, they put the emphasis on on leadership to drive the engagement. And I actually— I, you, you will never see a sports team that survives just by the coach jumping up and down on the sideline. When you hire people and when you get people into the business, make sure they believe in, in, in what the business is doing. Our business is 200 people. Um, instead of going for a, a, a monetary ambition, we do have a monetary ambition, but our mission is actually to change the name human resources to human success. And create this engagement, performance, and training. So for me, that's the number one thing. Create something that people want to be part of, a company that wants to succeed, whether you produce paper or whether you produce software or anything. Have them show up every day and want to be part of a winning team because the contrary is also true. There are very few people who want to be on a losing team every day. And, and, and if you have 6 employees or 200 employees and they're all looking at each other and going, we don't care to be here, then it's really terrible. And I think that only the companies that are able to get engagement between the employees, um, is, is actually the— they will be the ones who are winners. And one of the things we've done is we've— I say this is, this is free, and I wrote about it on LinkedIn not too long ago. On a year with 200 employees, we had 14,000 kudos internally. So every week we check in how we're doing. And we've created a culture where it's really great to give other people kudos because it's free and nobody will say, hey, that was not a great kudos. It doesn't matter if you're the CEO, if you're the janitor, whoever you are of the business. If somebody comes and says, Bradley, I really love what you did. It actually starts to build a camaraderie, and we're really terrible at that as businesses, but we are great. I mean, I'm an— I was an athlete in my, in my youth, and you can feel that in, in team sports, and we don't harness it in, in companies, and it's free of charge. And again, it doesn't matter if you're 10 people. Actually, what happens when you're small business, because everyone knows each other I know your kids, you know mine, all of that. There's a plethora of these kudos or support, or you know when to push me because, hey, I'm doing great, or you know that my wife is ill and therefore I may not be doing so well. You know that. But we're really terrible at harnessing that in businesses. And I think that's one of the things where you really need to put your finger on as a business owner and as a leader in general. Because it's not up to just the business owner to generate that. It's up to the team. And if you generate that from the team, it starts to lift up. And I think management theory for so many years has been top down. Whatever I want needs to happen, and sometimes that's what it is. But the engagement that comes from the team up.

So, uh, I have a background in sports. I'm a competitive son of a gun, son of a gun, and I like to win too. And so I totally agree. I want to build a company that— and with that, there are times that you're not winning. Yeah, to be clear. Okay. So just because, just because you say you want to win doesn't mean that we're always winning. I mean, Michael Jordan didn't win. I mean, he won 6, but he didn't win all of them every year, you know, Kobe, etc.

So, you know, there was a bad boys Pistons in his way, right?

Yeah, the Pistons were in the way and, you know, for sure. And, you know, some other teams were there. Um, but I mean, clearly had a lot of success. My point is, so how have you— whenever you say, hey, people at our company, they want to be a part of a winning team— how have you been able to define what winning and losing is? And like, tangibly, like, actually, what are some of the things that you all are doing that help you help the team feel like, yeah, we are winning? What does that actually look like in practice?

So I think if we stay in the sports analogies, it is like when you start building a team. So, you know, you, your last season was not particularly great and stuff like that, and you want to build a championship-winning team. Most coaches and owners for that, they actually set a 2, 3, 4-year plan. They know it's not going to happen next year. So if you were as a business owner, you were able to say, and this is what I do, I try to set a 3-year plan. I try to use objectives and key results for lack of a better, but essentially what I'm doing is just writing headlines of a book. So I take 3 years and say that in the first year we want to have these things solved. And what I told the business was we wanted to have a stable financial underpinning of the business. In the year we've just passed, I told them we wanted to be a product leader in the years to come. I want to be a top 10 great place to work. I want to have a brand built, given that our platform is built on Microsoft. I want to have a brand that stands next to Microsoft and could stand on its own two feet and stuff like that. So what I'm doing here is I'm writing chapters out that everyone can see that we need to get to, like, our end goal. And now what happens is there are all— what many business owners judge on is the result. So you always, especially, and we are also guilty in that in sports, hey, you lost 24 to 21, so you lost the whole game. But if you listen to all of the coaches afterwards, they will always go, yeah, but I like that play, or I like that, I like that. And when you start to blend like your numbers, so your quantitative output with your qualitative, because I've been able to say to the team, you're still on track. Because we have changed our name from LMS365. We built a brand that then won an international award for that. And I told them that we were gonna be a brand in 2028 that could stand next to Microsoft. We started this great place to work because I've said my ambition is we wanna be a top 10 great place to work in the world. And then we started last year and we were actually for the first time when we did that survey thing, we were top 100 in UK and we were top 10 in Denmark. This year, all of our operating entities are in that. So they can always see, oh, there's motion towards. Then we told them we're going to have not one product, which was our original product was Learn. We're going to have more products. We acquired Weekly. So after the financial stability, we acquired Weekly 10. So they've seen that's happening as well. And what, what now happens is actually, uh, Joe Montana versus the Bengals story. Which is my favorite American sports analogy because I've seen a small clip told by the Bengals defense and they are up, I think they're up by 4 and Joe Montana starts on his own 90-yard line or something like that. And the Bengals defense tells that, hey, they can see the 49ers believe that this is going to happen. When they step up to the line, they know they're going to, and I think the first 2 plays, they only take like a few yards. They don't even get to a first down. The next one, he slings it to the middle. And then the Bengals defense actually tells, now we even believe he's gonna do it. The rest of the game was just a, it was almost like it was not a match. They knew it was gonna happen. And then what's, he scores like 19 seconds before time. And what it builds with the team is a belief that, hey, and, and for Sensai, we didn't have a perfect season at all. There were some hiccups with some brand changes and some products and some stuff like that. But when we recap the year and we go, oh, on the long run, did we do a lot of the things we wanted to be doing? Yes. Did we hit exactly the numbers we wanted to?

No.

But when you blend it, it was an above-average season. Now we go into the next, and we finally, and we ended the season with a good win in December and, and good close of business. And now we go in with a new season where we go, okay, team got stronger. We've built some, some building blocks for next year, and now we build on top of it. And now obviously I have to move the goalpost to 1 year out more. So as a leader, it requires you to actually sit and take the time to think. And I think often as business leaders, we, we, we chase this very short-term, what can I fix tomorrow? But if you don't have your chapters written out of what you want to be doing, it's really, really difficult to, to keep that motivation and keep people looking at, at, um, at, at the long-term goal.

You mentioned something there I would love for you to share, just your experience with it. Look, I think ideas are everywhere. Implementation and execution is everything.

Indeed.

But, uh, oftentimes as a CEO, the most important thing that you can do for the business is to spend time thinking about the business. That's actually fundamentally what I believe. Now, it doesn't mean that you sit around 40 hours a week just meditating and you don't actually go do something.

No.

But a lot of times there's emotions involved, and if we take— allow our emotions to take— to, to take the wheel, so to speak, in, in our decision-making at least in my own experience, that has— that's not proven to be, to be wise. Talk about your own discipline of actually whatever that looks like for you, if that's getting away quarterly, if that's getting away, having a discipline of weekly thinking, uh, going to a coffee shop, getting away from all the meetings. Like, you, you're a busy person, you have a lot of meetings around the world with people. We were talking about that before we hit record. Um, just the importance of you creating white space really in your calendar just to be able to ponder, reflect, think, um, uh, because you're you know, the decisions you're making impact a lot of employees, number one, but then the downstream impact to a lot of customers who then impact those companies, et cetera. So can you just talk about your discipline around that and maybe even how that's possibly maybe evolved over the years?

Um, then let's start with evolved over the years because I am, I started out hot in Nokia. I was part of a product management team that included 2 young guys and, and 4 real old guys and 2 in the middle. And, uh, I planned out some server. That was when you actually had to buy real servers and they were Unix. I planned out how you would migrate stuff. I sent it to the management in that division that I was in. They came back and said, said like, oh, we're gonna do this, this and this. And half of it I thought, you can't even do that because this is not gonna be. So I wrote everyone and said like, you are all idiots kind of thing, right? I've never had so many people call me in 5 seconds. So my discipline there was by just, Hey, I am so clever, I'm so wise that I can tell everyone what, what really happened. So years have passed, I've mellowed down, all those kind of things. At least it was a good lesson learned very early on in my career. So number one, what I do is this 3-year plan, which keeps me honest also with decisions, because as I communicate that, I can always hold myself accountable. I can hold my management team accountable for does this actually stack up against where we want to be? So that's my— it's my own chapter writing. And sometimes I have a difficult time trying to explain to other executives that I use it as a book. I'm very— I'm good with words, and I use it as a book to always explain where we're heading. So that's how I keep myself honest and also keep the team around me honest. And are we really building this second product line and all of those kind of things? Is that happening? How are you thinking about making it happen? And I'll have to keep myself honest. I'll have to keep the team honest. So that's my way of committing to the team as a CEO. And then having a 1-year planning cycle on that, because that gives calm. What people don't like is these knee-jerk reactions where you go left, right, left, right. And that means my work with my CFO is in the same pattern. So we have very few knee-jerk reactions in terms of what happens with the business. Thereby it's a stable forward motion rather than a knee jerk. And then you asked about how I find space for that. Um, I will say I'm, I'm still a decent runner and I'm also a decent, uh, bike rider. And those have for me provided a lot of, uh, calmness to think, uh, for myself and, and just be out on a bike riding, uh, 100 kilometers. Or running a 10K, I can switch off and just let thoughts flow through my head, um, is what I do for myself. And then I am fortunate enough that at one point in my career when we actually moved to Luxembourg, my wife, who's also an engineer, similar education, we met at the university, um, decided to take care of everything we have at home, um, and also of me, I sometimes say, because, um, for many, many years, and that's more than 20. We didn't walk around so early now, but what we do today is we take long walks on Saturdays and Sundays. We have a little, a little dog, uh, very active Mini Australian Shepherd, so it needs to be long walks. And actually, she's my sparring partner because the one unique thing about her is she knows me. She knows everything I've been through. She knows all the— most of the decisions I've had to make in during my career. And I know that not everyone is so lucky, but for me, that's actually my number one thing. And sometimes she just lets me talk. And the good thing is she's a very strong-headed woman, I should say, or whatever. She dares to say, Rasmus, you're not thinking about this right. And sometimes that's actually the best because It's away from the noise. It's in, often in the mountains, in next to the ocean or something like that. And, um, that allows me to think about what matters. And, and we've kind of accepted that that's part of how our walks are. And then there's also time for, hey, how's the family going? Where are we going on vacation? And how are you feeling? And all those kind of things. Um, but that's provided a very, very solid baseline for me for many, many years.

Love that. Rasmus, people want to connect with you personally but also learn a lot more about your company. Where would you want them to go?

To my LinkedIn. I'm pretty active there. It's Rasmus Holst. And then otherwise, the business is called Sensai, S-E-N-S-A-I.com.

Awesome. You know, some of the things that really stood out to me in, always circle on my piece of paper my own personal key takeaways, things that I love. I think it just, again, the value of leaning into AI, be forward-leaning into technology, even though there's just a small nudge. It just is like, how can I continue to, to find ways to integrate it so that I feel like I'm riding the wave and not going to get crushed by it? Secondly, employee engagement. But, uh, did the team really believe in what it is that you're doing? I love that reframing of human resources to human success, being a part of a winning team, being proactive with the kudos you mentioned. I agree with your 3-year, 1-year. We actually call that your business blueprint. I think it's a 3-year, 1-year, 90. So 3-year vision, 1-year OKRs, and then quarterly targets. So naming conventions may be slightly different, but the concept is exactly the, the same. I love that, that structure of a 3-1. Rasmus, been great having you on the podcast. Thanks so much for coming on and serving our audience.

Thank you so much, Bradley. It was a pleasure. Absolutely.

Well, you know, we talked about employee engagement in that episode.

We talked a little bit about AI.

I think probably my biggest takeaway from this episode, and it's maybe it's just something that's paramount to me, is just his comments around— I mean, he's running a big company with a lot of employees, and yet the, the value and the importance to be able to sit and think as the CEO of that company, to go on running and cycling and long walks on Saturdays and Sundays. And I think he called his wife his sparring partner, which I kind of love that. That's not necessarily going to be applicable for everybody else, right? But I think that the, the further you want to go, the faster you want to go the bigger you want the company to be, the more it takes you to actually take time to, to go and go on these walks as Steve Jobs did. Steve Jobs did. And I think there's a clearing around that, and it just even made me want to revisit myself. How much am I doing that? How much am I actually taking the time to, to go on long walks? And sure, there's a time and place for sure on strength training, etc., and really getting you sweat. But sometimes just being able to go on a long walk— and it's tough around this time of the year whenever it's, it's cold and it's rainy and it's a little gloomy outside. It's not usually the— I mean, we just came off a week where it was down into the single digits in Alabama. That's not normal. It's hard to get out early in the morning or at any time to, to be able to go for a walk. But I do think that's just a great reminder of the value of that, of going and thinking as the CEO of your company.

All right, big shout out to our podcast sponsors: Autopilot Recruiting, Coach P Consulting.

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