The Four Forces of Growth with Kevin Lawrence

We don't need meeting notes, but it's really cool that we can do them, but it's actually not solving a problem. So internally in our firm, we call it party tricks versus adding real value.

In today's episode, I'm really excited about this because this person's book absolutely had a huge impact on me.

When you're young and getting going and getting started, generally we use the thing called self-sacrifice to get results and get ahead. And it works really, really well until it doesn't one day. As your business grows, there's tons of problems. The problems multiply. And if you're undisciplined or not a good enough strategic thinker and you start thinking, if I just fix all the problems, my business will be great, you lose because your business will run great, but there'll be no time left to focus on opportunities for growth because the problems never go away.

Kevin Lawrence, welcome to the Above the Business podcast.

I'm thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me, Bradley.

Excited about this conversation. I came across your book a number of years ago, your first book, Your Oxygen Mask First, and we'll get into that. And then obviously your latest book, The Four Forces of Growth. But before we get into those things, take us, our listeners, back. We'd love to kind of know people's origin story and background story about how kind of how they got to where they are. What's your story?

Yeah, you know, I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. Like when I was young, I was the kid that knew the ditches that had tadpoles in them. And would catch them and sell them to my friends and painted rocks. And at that point they had like throwing stars imported from Asia. So I was always an entrepreneur hustling, selling, and I put myself through college with my own landscaping and yard cleanup business. And then when I got, you know, finished college and started working, I worked in media and worked in advertising business, which was really fun for a while. But then I just felt there was something else. And at a very young, at the age of 24, I just started doing what I'm doing now. And which was, you know, I started marketing consulting, but then I found that the, the, the, for the businesses I worked with, the marketing ideas weren't the problem. It was this thing called execution and follow-through. And I heard of this thing called coaching, and this is back in the '90s. I'm really dating myself here, but back in the '90s, and I heard coaching, you partner with people to help them follow through and get the results. And I'm like, huh, that sounds like what my clients need. So I started studying it back then. And one thing, you know, grew to the next. And next thing you know, I find myself in different countries and boardrooms around the world and consistently working with, you know, larger and larger businesses as the businesses grow. And then, you know, helping the CEO and executives to grow with the growth of the business. So just, you know, not, not, not the official background that people normally have in the work I'm doing. That's for sure.

I think if I ask the question, says, what has changed since you first started, started doing coaching and consulting? The easy answer and the layup would be starting currently what AI has done over the last 3 to 4 years. I'm actually going to ask it a different way. What has not changed?

Sure. All the core principles of business, creating, finding a customer and solving a problem, like creating value for them. The right people in the right jobs make all the difference in the world. You know, healthy gross margin leads to profitability. Having your customers thrilled and referring you is the best way to build a business. All the principles of the technology like AI is an enabler. It's an accelerator. It can be wonderful, but it doesn't change the principles of the game, which is solving a problem for a customer.

Yeah, totally agree. I've seen AI as it's something that can create leverage for you when done right. But it's unbelievable. And I don't want to go down too much of this rabbit hole around AI, by no means. But, but I have got caught up in the whirlwind of creating something or a solution to a problem that doesn't exist.

Exactly. It's called entertainment.

Yeah. It's become entertainment, right? Which is like, I've, what has Open Claw done for somebody? Right? I've yet to see somebody of like, well, what do you, what is it actually doing? And I think people are creating cool things. Now, granted, there are some AI tools that have been incredibly helpful, by the way. Whisperflow is one of my favorites. That is an incredible AI tool. So I do totally agree with you with leverage, and I love the word, it's an enabler, but the core principles of business have not fundamentally changed. I love that.

Yeah, one thing I'll comment on the AI, we have a number of clients doing great work and it is making a notable difference, like notable difference on quality of data, data getting fully processed without humans having to touch it. Like we've got a bunch of people that are making some like even recruiters where they're doing outbound calls with voice AI, like that is working very well. So we have a whole bunch of really, really effective things. The challenge is, the best example on that is I've been in a meeting where someone's like, yeah, hey, we can do AI automated meeting notes. I'm like, great, but we didn't want meeting notes before. Yeah, right. So we didn't, we don't need meeting notes, but it's really cool that we can do them. But, but it's, it's actually not solving a problem. So in our internally, in our firm, we call it party tricks versus adding real value. Party tricks being it's really cool, you can do stuff, but it's not, it doesn't solve anything. It doesn't actually create any real value. Um, sometimes it creates more work, but there, but there are things that do. And, and, you know, but the key is to find it and not have meeting notes for meetings that don't need them.

Yeah, totally agree. So in our framework of helping people, uh, get above the business, think like an architect, and design the blueprint. In a business blueprint, we, we look at— there's, there's 3 things, and one of them is a personal leadership track. And I want to— you don't, you don't know that, you didn't know this until right now. Your book, Your Oxygen Mask First, was a big part of helping shape my thought process around this. There was around that period of time that your book came out that I, that I came across it and really helped me in a tough time that I was a little overwhelmed. And I was pouring so much out to everyone else that I did not think about putting my oxygen mask on first. For people that have not, you know, read the book, first of all, you have a great title, right? But for a business owner and entrepreneur, What is the high-level idea? And then we can get into some tactical ground-level things that people can do today.

Yeah, for sure. Well, I mean, the ground-level idea is based on my own experience of burning myself out seriously 7 times as I built my company. And the idea of the book is when you're young and getting going and getting started, generally we use this thing called self-sacrifice to get results and get ahead. And it works really, really well until it doesn't one day when you push it too far and the system starts to melt down. And when the system starts to melt down, it happens slowly, slowly, slowly, and then very quickly. And essentially your brain starts to deteriorate and your sleep gets messed up. Basically mental health kicks in and, and, and your brain starts to get seriously injured. And the idea is, one, how do you prevent that? But two, when it does, because it happens to every successful person that pushes themself, um, how do you deal with it properly? How do you get the help so that you don't end up in a very, very precarious position? And, and the truth is a lot of very successful people end up in so pushing themselves so hard, because when the going gets tough, the tough get going. And next thing you know, they're in like a red zone of mental health where their life is on the line. They could have suicidal thoughts and have thoughts of hurting themselves and It's pretty straight. And even if you, that's the extreme, but if you don't get there, it's just knowing how do you consistently charge your own batteries so, and be charged up and strong and resilient. So you have lots to give at work and lots to give to your family and your friends. And the problem is we, you know, if we were an electric car, we would know to plug our car in every night.

Mm-hmm.

But we don't realize our own batteries sometimes and we deplete ourselves so much that we, uh, don't have anything left to give. And then we start pulling on our own reserves and depleting ourselves. So, the book is, is how do you manage that? And it's all the different tools and skills you need to thrive as your company grows as a person. It's all about scaling yourself.

So, what did you learn in your own journey? And what have you seen with other entrepreneurs and business owners that you've worked with around the idea that we can— we do it to ourselves themselves consistently. So this, this, this, this important. There's been some people that for sure have burned out, retooled, and then have never gone back. But what I've actually seen is more so because I've done it myself. You said you did it 7 times. What are the things that actually work so that And I know this is a long framing, but this is important because this is a real, real thing.

This is key. This is important. This is life and death stuff right here.

So I, okay, I get myself in a really tough state. I get a little overwhelmed. Okay. I start pulling the ripcord, as I sometimes call it. All right. Hey, delete my meetings. I gotta retool. So I get a little bit of space. I get to be a little okay. Maybe I go on a vacation, da da da da da, all these kind of things. And I start to feel better. And that happens for a few months, Kevin. And then I do it to myself again.

Yeah.

And now the cycle continues. How do I break the cycle so this doesn't keep happening?

Well, that depends on how thick-headed you are, right? Sometimes we learn and sometimes we got to keep hitting the wall. Like I have burnt myself out seriously. And, and it's sometimes first time I did it took like 18 months to get back. Now I had one, I could, I could probably say I've done it 8 times because I think I had one earlier this year. I had 14 weeks, the first 14 weeks of this year, I was in a different city somewhere in the world each week. And that was a lot. And I, so the thing that I've learned and I see through that you learn the early warning signals. So I know if I start to get sick, that's, I've pushed it too far. I don't, I don't sense it naturally. If I push myself so hard, some people have a real high self-preservation. I have a high must achieve, so I just push through stuff naturally. I'm not, you know, I don't, I don't sense it when I'm starting to deplete myself. So what I've seen is there's a lot of people who chronically burn themselves out cuz they just push too hard and, and they, they, they don't even realize it, which I, I am one of those people. So two things is the early warning signs. What do you watch out for? And then two is what I call in the, in the book, resilience rituals. What are the habits that you use to stay charged up? And we look at like body, mind, and spirit. For body, everyone knows about exercise and most people have some goal about activity. Almost every CEO and executive I work with, 98% of them. And then something around eating healthy or not drinking too much or whatever that happens to be. You know, for the mind, there's some mental practice that people do that want to stay in a high-performing mode for a long time because In high performance, there's high stress. So, and there's some mental practice. So that could be like meditation or writing or some mental practice. And then spirit is what sparks you, what lights you up, what brings joy into you and, and almost fills up your joy cup so that you got lots of good stuff inside you. And so those resilience rituals, residuals rituals are like, they're the, the The key to staying on it consistently, but then people like me sometimes will still blow it up. And that's where you gotta understand what to do when your brain goes too far. You guys should have a counselor to talk to when your brain starts to melt down or some support. So again, you don't end up fully in the mental ditch or when you do that, you bounce back.

Yeah, I think, um, I think every time that I, I, I've had maybe not necessarily burnout, but I've definitely hit a wall around some things. A couple years ago, honestly, about this time, this period of time, 2 years ago, my mom was going through some really tough health concerns. And unfortunately, she ended up passing away in June of 2024 from cancer. But I say that not for empathy. I say that from the perspective of like, that was a very understandable period of time that was incredibly difficult, right? I mean, hospice care and financially, that was difficult to have around-the-clock care. And so I'm using that because, like, sure, everything about my routine slipped. Okay? Everything about it. Of course, I wasn't doing anything right during that period of time that I needed to do. But oftentimes, when I look back on the periods that are almost self-inflicted, as you called them, And I agree. It is a slip. It's like this— it just gradually, gradually I don't work out. I don't eat great one week, one day. And then it just happens. And then all of a sudden, you said it— I thought, great. It happens slowly, then it happens really quickly. And then all of a sudden, I'm like, oh my gosh, I've gotten completely away from my structure and process and routines and all those kind of things that give me life. And I got to go back to all of those things. And I think that that's so common with entrepreneurs.

It is because you're so focused on pushing through and you don't, you don't notice the pain and being a little bit tired or stressed is normal for you. And then it shocks you. The key is, as you described it, you described it very nicely, but sometimes that's not what happens. You wake up in the moment, like you get, you get an awakening of in the middle of a rage or saying something or being rude or disrespectful or some sort of outburst. Like at one point during COVID when I realized I was, I teach this stuff, I know this stuff, I've been through it. And in the middle of what I noticed is, is one of my passions in the past has been racing cars. So that's been an outlet for me. And so I'm in a sports car that I had at the time and I'm driving towards this resort spa to go for a massage, like to go relax. And the person in front of me is driving very slow. And I'm like, this is a beautiful windy road. I want to drive this thing. Well, I, and I'm very comfortable at speed, very close to other cars, which most humans aren't because of racing. So I go and I am charging this car like a bull. I'm charging it and then backing off and, you know, charging it and getting like a foot away from their bumper because I want them to get out of my way because I want to drive the way I want to drive on this road. Now that is completely insane, but it wasn't until I was lying on the massage table for my treatment that I went, wait a second. And I caught myself like, because in the moment it was just a reaction because I was exhausted and I was in what, in the mental health continuum, McCallen, the red zone and acting like a complete idiot, totally wrong. And, but it was basically my version of road rage, but I didn't even realize I was totally fried until I actually did something totally stupid.

You know, that does bring me back. Um, I, I can, I can only think back a couple times where this happened, but I was in a, a team meeting recently and something— I, I walked into the team meeting in a heightened, heightened state, and then I just, I, I just snapped. I just snapped. I got so frustrated that I actually ended, like, I got off the call. And I haven't, I don't know if I've ever done that. And then to your point—

Smart.

Good move. Yes. And then I was a little embarrassed of like, man, what was in me that, what was going on inside of me that made me kind of go there? And that's the part where I had to kind of reflect and be like, oh boy, you know what? I think I might need to go back and do a little bit of work because my central nervous system was incredibly activated in that moment. Going into that meeting. You know, your second book, The Four Forces.

Before we do, can I just say something else on that? That's why it's so important to constantly have a reflection process. Sometimes, we're so hard charging and getting— we do get stuff done. But the biggest part of growth as a leader in a business and an owner of a business is reflecting on yourself and looking at what can I do to do better? What can I do to be a better version of my person or handle that situation better? So all those things happen. I think they're fine. And if we reflect, we grow from those things. And that is the, that is the key attribute of people who continue to scale their businesses. They take when they do good or bad things, particularly less than ideal things, reflect, make a better choice, and they continue, like upgrade their operating system half a percent or a percent at a time from all of those situations. That's what's, that's what's different about the people who get to 10x wherever you're at today. They do a lot of that.

How often do you recommend doing it?

I reflect. Look, one of my resilience rituals is writing. So I, when I write or journal, uh, that is one of my best points of reflection. And, and I try to do it a few times a week at least. I wish I could do it every day. It just doesn't happen. But a few times a week and just reflecting, because look at the world is always giving us feedback and we can always recalibrate if we choose to listen and pay attention. So obviously learning, listening to podcasts like this are wonderful inputs and, and, but the, the, the growth comes from the reflection and saying, how do I do better next time? Hmm.

That's good. Your newest book, which came out, uh, tail end of 2025, The Four Forces of Growth. I love the idea of defying the odds. I, I oftentimes have done some research. Just on small businesses about, you know, there's some statistics that, you know, 90, 96% of businesses don't see their 10th birthday, 91% don't cross a million. So I really love that idea of defying the odds or beating the odds. What are— where, where did the idea of the Four Forces of Growth— what were you seeing with your clients that, that came out of you?

Wonderful question. Again, I've been doing this for 30 years. I like— I've seen it all. And what I would find is when we started 20 years ago getting deep into strategic planning and working with CEOs and their teams to get aligned around, around scaling the orgs, and there's another book that I was a key contributor to called Scaling Up. We would implement that operating system in all kinds of companies, you know, in the, you know, small market to mid-market. But what I find again and again, if we let them just follow their instincts, people would make choices to optimize the business and not grow it. And super smart CEOs and their teams would experience periods of growth for like 5 or 10 years, and then the businesses would bonk and they would almost flatline or they would slow down. And they were like, oh, you know, there's not enough new— they make excuses about, you know, there's not enough market, or people like to use the word TAM, total addressable market. Like, look at you don't run outta TAM for most businesses until you hit like a billion or a few billion dollars. And there's always more. So I started seeing really smart, successful people lose their growth trajectory when it was still available, but they, they lost it. And I started looking for, okay, wait a second, they set these beautiful strategic plans and they have an aspiration to grow, but it doesn't work. And, and I started to see, and I had this amazing client, uh, BP, whose name's Brent Parent out in Ohio. And he had this model he shared, or had one of his guys share, which is in the opening story of the book, um, about the focus on opportunities versus problems. And it, it got me thinking. And what I noticed is as your business grows, there's tons of problems. The problem, you actually get, the problems multiply. And unfortunately, and if you're undisciplined or not a good enough strategic thinker and you start thinking, if I just fix all the problems, my business will be great. You lose because your business will run great, but there'll be no time left to focus on opportunities for growth because the problems never go away. And you'll, you'll have your Superman cape on because you'll be like chief problem solver. Like I talk about in the Oxygen Mask first, you will get all the awards for quality and all kinds of great stuff. You'll hit your profit targets for the current year. Well-run business. It'll be awesome. It'll just slow down. The growth will slow because no one's putting energy into the actual growth activities. Everything's going into improving. And these are smart executives and, and CEOs, and they don't even know it. They, they, they can't even see it. And so that got me thinking, I need to write a book about this. You can have a, a beautiful strategy, but if it doesn't have enough focus on actually driving the growth of the business, You'll end up with a beautiful Swiss watch. It just won't grow.

How do you think about helping a business with setting goals? I just finished reading a book that was interesting to me, and there, there's almost like, depends on what book you read, around, uh, what makes the most sense. There's some books out there I mean, there's the Grant Cardone book, 10X Rule. I, I'm not, I'm not necessarily advocating that, but you know, there's this like, you gotta 10x this. 10x is easier than 2x, as an example. And, uh-huh, yeah. And, and, and like, where, where does, where do you land on like, oh no, you got to have a massive impossible goal, versus no, we're sitting here running a legitimate business doing $10 million in revenue and they want to double the company in 3 years. Okay, great. Well, then you gotta grow 26% a year. But yet then you hear people go, no, no, no, you don't need to do that. You need to go $100 million. Like, and there's this conflicting thought around this. Yeah, I got it.

There is. Well, first of all, you gotta be careful who you listen to, right? And then you gotta filter it well. Like, we go back to the enduring research that Jim Collins did about building great companies. You know, we just, I just actually got a copy of, of his, his new book that's coming out. next month. Uh, What to Make of a Life. I appreciate him sending me an early copy. Um, we, we've taken about 100 CEOs to go spend 2 days with Jim in his lab in Boulder, 20 at a time, which is a wild, wild— so we go back, I go back to what's the truth and the source code, not the hype. Right. And, and in, and in his—

so that's a great comment right there. I love that.

Well, because, well, there's, because there's a lot of people that think they know the business and they know the game of business. And some of them do, they all have a good intent to help, but just not everyone actually knows. A lot of people are making stuff up and don't know. And again, it can still be helpful. I just go to what is the most credible source of truth. And, and then we, and we've been testing Collins's principles in our clients for 20 years. So what do we do? We, we go back to, you should have a BHAG, which is a massive goal, which would be like that 10x goal. That you want in 10 to 20, 30 years. We, we, it works. We use it. And so you should know what you want to be when you grow up. Let's say BHAG, 10, 20, 20 to 30 years is ideal. And you should, in our world, in the Four Forces of Growth, I call it, you should know your 3 big moves to double in the next 3 to 5 years. If that's what you aspire to. But like, so for most of the companies that we work with, they will have a BHAG, which might make them, you know, a billion-dollar enterprise, but they want to double. Usually I like to focus on profit, not just the size of the business, because revenue is vanity. And that's why we get down into Xs as defining the metric of growth in a business. Your core unit or widget is really what you should pay attention to. Revenue can be deceiving. Profit can also be deceiving. But your core unit growth of your business, I think is the best indicator of growth because there's no inflation in that. And you're not, you don't have skewed margins or other things to throw it off. But so we, but you know, most of our clients do want to double in 3 to 5 years. But they also have the 25-year goal where they would be 10x. So I think it's an and. It's both. But the key is, what do you want? Like at the end of the day, there is no right and wrong. It's about what the owner wants. Some people want to keep their business small and have a lifestyle business. Right. And that's, that's okay. Some people want to build an enterprise. Okay, great. That's a, that's a different mountain to climb. And some people want to build a portfolio of enterprises. Okay. It's all about what the person wants. But, but you should, in our, our work, and if you go back into Scaling Up and, and actually I'd even go to Jim Collins's Source Code, having the BHAG, 25 years, 3 to 5, how are we gonna double? What are our goals for this year that we're gonna focus on? And then we run every 90 days.

Yep.

Better would be every month, but every 90 days just, and that's, you know, we've got a lot of companies around the world that we run that 90-day process and it It, it makes a difference because you get accountability, you get learning, and then you get an opportunity to iterate and, and do a, a better sprint for the next 90. I wanna ask you this. So the long answer is it's, you need both. Go ahead.

Yeah, that's great. That's great. What, what high level, what are your 4 forces of growth? You can kind of give us the 30,000-foot view of those.

Yeah, it just takes the 4 forces of flight from what makes an airplane fly. So you've got the lift of the wings that takes the plane up, and we call that focus on opportunities. We can— there is the thrust of the engine that takes the plane forward, and we call that courage. Hmm. When you have lift and thrust, you get altitude. And for a business, when you have opportunity focus, which is new things you can do for your customers or new customers, and courage, you get growth when you combine those two. I'll, I'll spare the rest of the model. But growth only happens when you focus on doing new things for existing customers or existing things for new customers. It's all about driving your core unit or your axis. So for example, in our firm, you know, we've got just over 100 firms that we drive and do quarterly strat planning with to help them get to their long-term goals. Well, our X in our business is number of CEOs and their teams that we meet with every quarter to help them drive their growth. It's not rocket science, right? And if I'm an accounting firm, it's the number of companies we do year-ends for. And if I'm a, a SaaS software company, it's the number of users or maybe number of clients that use our platform. And if I'm a, a bed manufacturer, it's the number of beds I sell. Like, it's real simple stuff. So, um, The, the idea in all of this is, is being focused on those growth metrics and, and they only happen in that growth quadrant where most people in their goals will have all the improvement metrics. And that's improvement is this, the lower quadrant where you have courage, but you focus on problems. Hmm. And that's called improvement. And that's important. It's really important. It just doesn't create, it enables growth. It doesn't create growth.

Let's say that the business has a company scoreboard, and you could give your comment on this, whether or not that scoreboard should be tracked weekly, every quarterly, so 13 weeks in a quarter, or if it should be tracked monthly. Either way, let's say a business does $5 million. They've got their company scoreboard on there. They're tracking it weekly or monthly. Do you then put that core unit metric, like the one number that is like, this is the thing, do you then put that at the very top? Like, how tactically do you get with a, with a, with a business once you've identified that? You've set their BHAG, you've set the 3- to 5-year, you know, vision, etc., so on and so forth. How do you actually, once you've determined that, how do you actually help them to, to to, to keep score. Yep.

That's great. Um, people get all lost in scoreboards and dashboards and most of 'em are a waste of time. Like, and whenever someone talks about automating dashboards and things, I'm like, oh no, here we go. We're gonna burn a lot of energy, come up with something that some, somebody invented that's a, a waste of energy.

Yeah.

So in, in ours, we try to simple it down to the basics. Like simple. So if we take a weekly meeting, right? Normally you'd have 3, 4, 5 key numbers that indicate the health of the business, right? Scoreboard, KPIs, you know, whatever you wanna call them, but a handful of key numbers. Most of our energy goes into our strategic goals that we've picked, and we have 3 to 5 of them every quarter. And how are we progressing on those goals that we say are most important? Because that's how we move the business ahead. So a handful of metrics. Um, and then the goals, but we, we put most of the energy into the goals because the goals is strategic progress. That's where we, where we focus a lot. But as you know, it's gotta be so simple. And I, I know I'm, I know I might, I might over-index a little bit on how scoreboards can be dangerous. I just seen so much time and energy put into them and they complicate it. Like at the end of the day, it's like if I'm a, I'm a I don't know, a services business like we were talking about. It's like there's gonna be the number of inquiries that came in last week.

Yep.

The number that we made a pitch or a proposal on and what closed. And then there's gonna be service breakdowns of some sort. And then there might be a measure about how many people called in sick on our team. I'm making it up. But there's, there's a few metrics we gotta pay attention to.

Yeah, that makes sense.

And a deeper dive on a monthly for sure. But usually in a weekly cadence, it's, are we— the numbers are, are we operating well? And secondly, are we making the strategic progress we need to? Like pushing, pushing ahead on our objectives.

Kevin, this has been great. I've been looking forward to this conversation and you certainly have delivered. If people want to learn more about you, the work that you guys do, your books, where would you point them to?

Yeah, you can just go to our website, Lawrence and Co., lawrenceandco.com. Everything we get, we have, we have hundreds of articles, resources, case studies. We kind of share everything we can there. Lots of resources on the books. It's all there. And the books are available on Amazon or, or, you know, a bunch of bookstores, but Amazon's usually the easiest.

Awesome. Awesome. Kevin, what does working above the business mean to you?

It means spending time focusing on the future. It's getting away from today. So in The Four Forces of Growth, I talk about the two bicycles that business owners or CEOs ride. The strategic bike, which is about the future, and then the operational bike, which is about this week or this month or this quarter. But so being above the business is all about that strategic bicycle. And it's what are we doing that's going to benefit us next year and laying down the foundation for our future growth.

I love that analogy because you can't ride two bikes at one time.

Exactly.

Intentionally get off of one bike to go ride the other one. That's really great. Kevin, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Yep. Thanks for having me.

Well, I hope you enjoyed that episode with Kevin. That was a pleasure for me to get to interview him. Go and pick up both of his books, Your Oxygen Mask First and The Four Forces of Growth. Want to give a big shout out and thank you to our podcast and brand sponsors, DirectClicks, Coach B Consulting, and Autopilot Recruiting. You want to grow in 2026, you got to invest in marketing. But if your marketing feels like a guess, just doing a lot of random things, you can actually have a partner that can help you with that. And that's where DirectClicks comes in. Go to directclicksinc.com/above-the-business, book a call, and they can help you start making sense of your numbers and understanding what your cost per lead is, your customer acquisition cost, et cetera. So you can put your money where you get the best ROI. DirectClicksInc.com/above-the-business. If you're going to invest in marketing, it's kind of assumed that you're going to have a team to be able to execute on that. And look, it is critical that you get some of the best people. I've just been reminded of this over and over and over again, how important the team is that you bring on. If you want to always be recruiting and make sure that you're, you know, don't miss out on great people, Autopilot Recruiting can help you with that. Go to AutopilotRecruiting.com. Autopilotrecruiting.com. You know, David with Coach P Consulting has become a good friend, and he really does understand what are the specific plays that you need to have in an insurance agency that can help you scale, because he's done it. But more importantly, he's helped other people to do it. Go to coachpconsulting.com and let him know you heard about him on the Above the Business podcast. All right everyone, till next time, lead well, And go be great.