Meet Len Bruskiewitz

You're one of the few.

I'm one of the few. Len Breskowitz. Len said, wait, before we start, you should learn how to say my name. I'm like, well, let me try. And I got it right. So, okay, so I switched things up a little bit. I still never know who's coming on, but right before I find the website, because we're going to go through your website, Len, just for a little fun, because I really love doing that. And I put the bio so everyone knows who he is, but I don't know who he is. I just know that his name is Len Bruszkiewicz. And I know he's brave, he's bold, brilliant, good-looking. And if I could just say, Len, excuse me for one second, my bangs, everyone, just take a second. They look finally decent.

Look awesome. Yeah, awesome.

So introduce yourself, Mr. Bruszkiewicz.

Uh, so first off, it's great to be here. I appreciate the invite. So I'm Len Bruszkiewicz. I'm a business coach and a certified exit planning advisor, which means that I focus my attention on helping business owners get themselves, really importantly, and their companies ready to transition out of on their terms and on their timeline. And I live just outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Boston. So you probably recognize the name Cindy Stumpo.

No, it doesn't, doesn't bother me.

Business developer, amazing. What female, woman, business developer, Stumpo, um, amazing. But anyways, I am a Connecticut girl.

Okay, great.

Born and raised. Do you ever get to Connecticut?

I do, you know, and I'm gonna, I'm gonna pull up an old joke here. It's usually I drive through it on the way to someplace else, but I, I have been to Connecticut quite a few times.

Okay, next time you're in Connecticut, get off the highway on Route 10 in Cheshire where it says Toy Museum and visit the toy museum that my parents left as their legacy to the state of Connecticut and to me, the world. 80,000 curated toys, so it'll bring you back to your childhood.

Awesome, awesome. I have to tell you, I went to the sock monkey museum, which is just outside of Chicago. Very exciting. Like, I don't know how many thousands of sock monkeys they have, but there are very strict rules on what a sock monkey is and isn't.

So I want a sock monkey. All right, let's talk about business coaching. So first of all, who are you? How do you even know? What do we know anything about business, Len? Do you share with us what you know?

I do. So I'll start really early on. I grew up in a family business. I'm a third generation in, in that business. I, I When I say I grew up in it, I lived above it. So I understand how running a small business is a 24-hour-a-day job. And so I worked in the business as a kid all the way through up, up until I left for college. And, uh, then I started, I, I went in a corporate career. I decided not to take over the family business. Uh, had a really long corporate career. Uh, what's interesting about it is that with very few exceptions, my entire corporate career was working for companies who served small businesses as their customers. And so I interacted with kind of tens of thousands of small business owners over my long career, uh, and I worked at some really recognizable names. I was at Intuit, uh, you know, with QuickBooks and TurboTax. I was at Constant Contact, the email marketing provider, Grasshopper, a virtual phone service. A website startup for restaurants. So you might guess that my passion is around, uh, small businesses. And so when I, I just got a little bit tired of the corporate life and decided, uh, I'm going to go off and do something on my own, but I'm sure it's going to be helping small businesses. And, and what I really enjoy is coaching. And so coaching small businesses, um, is where I came into and And I started off just being kind of a general coach. You know, I can help you with a lot of the same things you do— growth strategy and things like that. But I'll tell you a story. So one of my early clients was a 72-year-old woman who started a very successful retail business with her husband over 50 years ago. And they ran it together for over 50 years. Unfortunately, he died. And when he died, she was involved in the business, so she knew what was going on. But not all of it, right? There were pieces he did, she did, all those kinds of things. So when I was introduced to her, she said, Len, I can't sleep at night because I don't know what's going to happen to my business, which, you know, had a pretty profound impact on me. And so I said, okay, let's figure out what your options are. And so we talked through the options. You know, you could sell it to a third party, you could pass it along to a family member, you could sell it to management, or you could maybe just shut it down, Maybe you're just done. And so we talked through the pros and cons of each of those options, and she ultimately decided to pass it along to a family member, her daughter-in-law, who actually works in the business. And we implemented that plan. She got things going in the right direction, and she called me later on and said, Len, I can sleep at night now. And immediately after hanging up the phone, I thought, I said, I think I found my why. Right? I mean, this is— this was really compelling to me. And because I'm a really analytical kind of guy, I didn't just go with what my heart said. I went and did a little research, and I found that over 50% of the small businesses in the US, of which with 1 to 20 employees, about 6 million of those, over 50% of them are owned by people 55 and up. So there's a big need for what I do, which is exit planning. And it's really just about getting that business ready so that, you know, the business owner can move on and preserve their legacy if that's what they want. So that helped.

Yeah, it does. It does. Thank you so much. Interesting. So what is the benefit of just dumping the business?

There really aren't many, but sometimes people are— well, I'll tell you a couple of examples. So a guy who does some masonry work for me, right? He's about my age. He used to have a team of people, and over time he's just said, you know what, I don't want the hassle. So it's down to him, a truck, and some tools. And for him, I said, look, you don't really need an exit plan. Like, when you're done, you just stop. So maybe you could, you know, pass along your customer list to somebody, but to be honest with you, it's, you know, so that's one example where you might just say, I just want to shut it down. I see that as, uh, the option of last resort, because when a small business shuts down, it doesn't just impact the owner, it impacts their family, their employees, their customers, their vendors, and their community. You know, think about the small businesses in Cheshire, right? I mean, if one of those shuts down the community feels it. So it's not my right to tell people what to do, but I always try and say, look, if there's a way to preserve your legacy, that's clearly a, you know, a good outcome.

I love it. Before I forget, what business did you live under? What did your parents have? Okay, I guess I'm thinking, I think I can't help but think if you lived above, it's either a restaurant or convenience store.

Nope, a funeral home.

Oh no, were you— did you have to be quiet like when you were upstairs? Like, kids, the funeral is downstairs, stop trampling and jumping.

It was a pretty big building, so, uh, we didn't have to be that quiet. It's not a traditional New England funeral home that looks, you know, like an old house. This was a purpose-built funeral home, but I did all the jobs. I drove the hearse, I went and, you know, picked up flowers and Uh, did all those kind of tasks necessary to, to keep it running. But the, the reason I say it was 24 hours is if somebody called at 3 in the morning, you know, my mother answered the phone, right? So there was, it was an all-the-time business.

Well, I totally understand that because obviously I watched 10 seasons of Six Feet Under. That was the best TV show. If you haven't watched Six Feet Under, do it. It gives you really a good example of the crazy families and running a funeral.

Yeah, what I, what I heard is that the early seasons were very, very, uh, accurate, and then as the, as the seasons went on, it kind of veered from reality.

But oh no, they had to talk about exit. It's fantastic. Wait, I just— for my friends out there, we could keep this quiet— any sightings? Any spirits come turn around and see like Am I really? Is that me in my— in the coffin? Anything?

None. None. My mother's famous quote was, I'm more afraid of the people that are still alive than the ones that are dead.

I love that. Oh yeah, I grew up in a family business too. So I know when you say that, like, it's in your blood, it's not just like what you did. It's everything that surrounds the whole business. I did SCORE for 8 years just to kind of get my feet wet in the mentoring. But I love what you do. Okay. So then the next big question is why Focal Point? What was that decision to— and then I have another question after that one. Let me just say it out loud. So I want to talk about like someone like myself that owns a business, but I'm just one person with one brain. But first, why Focal Point?

Yeah. So Focal Point's a coaching franchise, but there are about 250 of us worldwide. And it's based on the teachings of Brian Tracy, who's pretty well known in the business development sales world. Right. So a lot of the content is based on his teachings. The reason I chose to join Focal Point, um, was one, the content, uh, right? It's great to have already written content rather than having to do it yourself. But to me, the real value in joining this franchise was the other 250 coaches. So it's an incredibly supportive organization, and when I pose a question to the group and I say, has anybody dealt with this kind of business inevitably somebody has and they say, here's what I did. So it's unbelievably supportive in terms of getting questions answered and just, you know, sharing of ideas, sharing of content. So those were the big reasons why I decided to join.

Yeah. Like a mastermind within itself. That, that is absolutely— wow, you really kind of opened the door and answered, because I was always like, what, you know, what would make you go to whatever that looked like, focal point for you. All right, so what, what is— what, what, what's— once I'm— what am I gonna do? What am I gonna do? All right, so I have professional global etiquette, right? And this is— this is— go get yourself a podcast so you get free help, everyone. Just get— make a podcast and there you go. This is what you do. You get free therapy. You can do whatever you want. Okay, so let— so, all right, so it's just me. Doing a variety of different things under my Professional Global Etiquette. So how can I— I can't give that to anyone because, I mean, I could ask them to cut my head off and take my brain out and put it onto someone else's. But like, literally, what can I do in my business? I don't, I don't want to call it a hobby business, but I guess, or lifestyle business maybe. But what's in it for me?

Yeah, so just because it's only you doesn't mean there's not a business that can live on. And I'll tell you, this is the same advice I would give if you were running a company with 25 employees. Okay, so the biggest piece that I work with, or the biggest challenge I have that business owners face when they're getting ready to transition, is that they don't have any independence from their business. What I mean is everything's up here, right? All, all the decision-making, all the processes is in the owner's head. And so the advice I give is start to get separation from your business. And a good way to do that is to document the things you do. No, it's not physical. It's not physical separation, it's mental separation, right? So document the things that you do. One. Two, focus your attention on the things that you're you're really, really good at and figure out if there's a way to teach somebody else how to do those things, right? And, and then what you can do is you can start to separate yourself out and get it to a point where, you know, you probably aren't going to franchise your business, right? But you could absolutely have a set of content that somebody would be interested in taking over a set of clients maybe that somebody would be interested in taking over. But you have to get it out of your head and into a different format because anybody that wants to buy your business doesn't want to buy you, right? They want to buy a turnkey thing that they can go and run. And again, this is whether you're a 1-person or a 25-person business. So those are my, those are my words of advice.

That's interesting. So let me ask this question. Does it matter if I build a great website? My website's 10 years old. It's got a ton of, you know, blogs and content on it. Is that worth anything? The business name Professional Global Etiquette.

So I look at about 40 different factors that either add or subtract from value of the business when it— when you try to sell it or pass it along. Doesn't really matter the option. I look at about 40 different things. Website, you know, branding, content, all those are important components, right? The, the key to it is, you know, does it really matter? It depends on your industry as to whether it matters whether it's cutting edge or not, right? If you're selling industrial piping, your website probably doesn't matter as much as if you're doing, you know, website design work where it really should be a showcase. So the The business, uh, depends. But what's really crucial to it is that as you get, as you start to prepare for this, you know, it's not just you, right? So you're, you're, you're bringing in expertise, or you're at least showing that this is something that somebody else could take over, right? If everything's just about you, um, that makes it tougher. And what you're doing right now with me is a great example, right? Somebody else could host this podcast with the same name or whatever, right? So this feels like something that has legs beyond you personally running it.

Wow. Hey everyone, I'm looking for a co-host, or maybe you'd like to be a guest host on Professional Global Etiquette. So we got like 5 people watching per episode, so join me. All right, so let's have a little fun. Who wants to have fun? I'm gonna go and check out your website, and I'm gonna do yours. So I think it's this one. Let me know, am I on the right one? Yes, Greater Heights. Oh shoot, no, because you're— this one, see how it doesn't come up? It doesn't come up for me. Shoot, shoot, shoot. Okay, that's okay, because let me stop my screen. Hold on everyone, stop sharing, go here. I think I can share the window and you are, um, another— darn darn darny darn darn. I'll make sure I have you over here. Hold on, hold on everyone. Okay, yeah, because this is— it's a nice looking site. Okay, hold on, I want to just show off your site. Window.

Um, the perils of live demos, right?

Yeah, I, I— because you know what, because it's on a different program that I am, so I'm on Chrome and that's the problem. Shoot. Let me try it again. Why is your site not coming up? Um, I need it. I need someone to help me with this one. It's weird. I guess I don't have my files or whatever. I'm not I'm not cash, but okay. So we can't do that. But I do, I'm going to peek at your site because I want to ask you some questions. So I'm going to have a little fun and you guys aren't, and that's just the way it is. All right. So I love your bio. Tell us, talk to us about the business valuation calculator and how does that really work? Like, what is that? The business assessment?

Yeah, I think it's the coolest part of my site, to be honest with you. So It's a free tool that I offer. It takes about 15 minutes to go through. And what it looks for is your revenue and net income for the past year. And then you pick what your industry is, and then you answer about 15 questions. Okay. That's about, you know, where is your standing in the market? Are you a leader or follower? How do you compare yourself? And once you answer those, uh, dozen or so questions, the tool will actually generate, uh, an estimated valuation of your business, right? It'll tell you this is how much it's worth today, and then it'll also give you some ideas about where it's lacking and where you're kind of, you know, above the curve. So it'll give you ideas of the areas that you can work on and, and actually takes a guess as to how much those would be worth, uh, in terms of the value of your company. So it's a really cool little tool. Um, like I said, takes 15 minutes, doesn't cost anything, and gives you a, a nice little idea about the things you should be focused on if you want to increase the value of your company and make it more ready to sell.

Interesting. Did you create this pre-AI or after AI?

It's a tool I licensed, so I didn't create it myself. There's not a lot of AI in it. It's pretty much you answer this, you get that. But it does base it on industry and then on your real numbers.

Yeah, that's great. I'm going to try that too. Everyone go on and try it too. And then let me just— let me peek again. I'm sorry you can't see.

It.

I get to see it. I like it. I like the picture of you. I like the shirt. Seen on CNN, ABC, PBS, and Wall Street Journal. I like this. All right, so I'm gonna get off of it right now. I'm having too much fun. Let's talk about actually the value of getting a business coach, because a lot of people are like, I don't— why do I need a business coach? I could, I could coach someone.

I don't—

like, what are you gonna do for me? And I think, first of all, a business coach is an accountability partner, which I think a lot of business owners do not have. And that's worth its weight in gold. But what else? What else? So I talked to you and I'm like, I'm professional global etiquette. Business is good. I'm enjoying what I do. I love every minute of what I do. But it's just me. How can I scale?

Yeah, I mean, that's part of the, the reason you, you hire a business coach is, uh, we can help you scale, right? But let me go back to— so accountability I see as important but not the big driver because most business owners are driven, right? So when they decide they want to do something, they'll typically— they don't need anybody to hold them accountable. What I see as a huge value in hiring a business coach is having a sounding board. Running a business is really lonely, right? Even, yeah, it's lonely if you only have one person, but it can be lonely even if you have 25, because when you are the boss, there are things that you can't necessarily share with your employees. A lot of times you can't get feedback, you know, honest feedback from them. So a business coach serves that purpose, right? Business coach serves that idea of somebody to bounce ideas off of, that sounding board. The other piece is that what a business coach really helps an owner do is get, get above, you know, get a, take a, take a higher view of their business, right? So we talk about, uh, there's a concept called the 3 I's. Of the entrepreneur. Uh, and the highest level is kind of the strategic eye, and that's forward-looking. They're thinking about strategy, they're thinking about the future, right? And that's where you want to be spending your time. Like, that's the most productive. The next is kind of the managerial eye, and that's, you know, kind of backward-looking. You know, hey, how are the metrics looking? You know, scorekeeping, those types of things. And it's valuable, needed. You have to spend some time doing that. And then the lowest level, or the third eye, is called the eye of the technician. And this is you are in the weeds doing the thing, right? And look, if you're a dentist, you have to work on teeth. There's, there's no doubt about that. But if you're running a different kind of company where you are not the product, then you want to be spending as little time as possible on that. And I'll give a little bit of an example. If you think about a McDonald's, For example, the person working on the fryer is making, you know, $12 an hour, right? The man— the manager of that store is probably making $40 an hour. Maybe the owner of that store should be making $300, $400, $500 an hour, right? So the, the moral of the story is you want to be working on the— where you add the most value, not the least. Right. And so you want to get out of that technician space and pay somebody else to do that, you know, because if you're, if you can earn $300 an hour, anything less than that, you should be paying somebody else to do that work. So that's, that's interesting.

I, but I do see that businesses don't think that way. They just want to have someone. So they'll take someone that's higher up doing something that the receptionist could do. If you had a receptionist.

Exactly.

Yeah, I recall that happening a lot. I just want to take a second to talk to my, my friends out there. Listen, nobody wants to hear about your business. They may say their friend, tell about one, so they may be nice enough to say. If you start getting asking advice of your friends, especially those that don't even have a business, if you have friends that have a business, that makes sense, or you create your own mastermind, but No, I wouldn't like it if someone called in every day, talked to me about their business and was like picking my brain and asking my advice. No, no, thank you. So don't do it. Get a coach because we really— there's so much value, right? And I always feel bad when someone like, you know, just don't ask, can I pick your brain? Say, I'd like to speak to you, but I want to pay you for your services. And then reach out to Len. Okay. But I got off the soapbox there, but I just like, I had to just stand on it for a second. You're 100% right. I hear that all the time. And then people, when I was a SCORE, like, I was thinking about starting this business, but then my friend told me blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, oh, your friend had the business? Like, you know, like, people will dash your dreams before they even have the ability to understand it. So you can't have a business unless you have your vision, right? So, and when a teaching business with SCORE, what's the first thing we teach? What's your vision? What's your mission? What's your exit plan? So you really can't start a business without knowing what your exit plan will be, right?

I completely agree. Like, start with the end in mind, right? And, and it's funny because I, I typically am working with older business owners, right, who are getting closer. But the, the things I teach are just as valuable to a 22-year-old starting their first business, because if you think about it, When you start a business, you want to say, where do I want this thing to end up, right? And if you can decide what that is and figure that out, then it's pretty easy to work your way back and say, what are the steps I need to do to get there? And I think that's a, you know, it's not a condemnation at all of the younger generations, but they think on much shorter terms than my generation does, right? Did, you know, my generation started businesses and said, I'm gonna run this until I die basically, right? Whereas the younger generation say, I'm gonna do this for 5 years and then I'm gonna move on, right? Which is really healthy because they start to think about how am I gonna, what do I need to do to exit rather than just run the business on a day-to-day basis. So completely agree with you.

But then there's no process. Like I think of the conversation I had with a woman and I was asking her if she had a CRM And as I was going like, what processes she used, how does she, you know, where does she, what does she use for invoicing and accounting? And oh my God, so crazy. She like held up a folder and I said, you're going to sell your folder? Like nobody was going to want to buy a folder. They're going to, you have to have processes. So talk to Len about what makes sense for the processes you need in your business. Because you know, if you say to Len, everything is, it's not the worst thing if it's all on an Excel sheet, But if everything's on scraps of piece of paper or your sales or you're not using a good system, yikers, yikeronis. All right. So, Len, right? Totally agree. What is, what is some of the biggest challenges that you're seeing in 2025 with businesses?

So a lot of what I'm seeing in terms of the small business environment is uncertainty is causing a lot of issues, right? Uh, it's, it's better to know than to not know. And so I think, again, with my typical client base, they're getting to this point and they're saying, should I sell now? Should I wait? So there's— but there's this uncertainty. And, uh, I think the other parts of the uncertainty are just, you know, what's happening around tariffs, what's happening around The ability to hire qualified people and all the, you know, all the kind of typical ones. The one that's, that's definitely different is tariffs. Nobody really knows what's going to happen with taxes. So those are, those are things that are weighing heavily on, I think, every small business's mind. The ones that I'm dealing with, again, because of the demographic, they're very much, should I sell now or should I wait? And This gets back to a little bit about why I try and get action sooner than later. In my opinion, it really takes about 3 to 5 years to get your business ready to transition out of. So if somebody's saying, I, I think I want to sell today, you know, anything's possible. But if you are not ready and you want to sell your business today you're going to take a huge discount on the price if you can even sell it. So that's, you know, that's my advice is it's even if you're thinking soon, you know, it really takes a long, kind of a long time to get it ready. So don't put off thinking about this. That's, so that's, that's the big thing I'm seeing is, you know, the, the now or later decision, really there is no now. It's always later, and it's just how long and how prepared you're going to be.

So, Len, I want to bring up the dolly. I want to bring up the digital elephant that could be in the room, right? Someone saying to you, oh, well, why do I really need a— I mean, I talk to ChatGPT. It's really my therapist helping me with my personal life. I think I could just ask AI. How I exit my business. And I don't even need a Glenn. I'll just go right to AI. How do I exit my business? Can you please share why that is not a good strategy?

Yeah, look, there are, there are benefits to AI. I'm, I'm not going to discount those at all. The part that it doesn't, that it cannot do is understand motivation. It can't understand, you know, feelings. And a lot of, a lot of what I do— if you think about an exit plan, it really relies on 3 things. There's the personal financial, like how much money do I need to do my next great thing. There's the personal, which is what am I going to do next, right? Am I going to volunteer? Am I going to you know, start a nonprofit, whatever, start a new business. And then there's the business side. So can you have AI generate the steps? Yeah, pretty good. You know, you can generate a blueprint, but it's really about getting to the core of why you're doing this as a business owner, what your goals are, and, and then again, being that sounding board based on experience, like real-life experience. So, you know, if somebody wants to try it, it still, it still doesn't serve— solve that lonely part. I mean, I don't feel any less lonely when I'm chatting with, you know, with ChatGPT than I do when I'm just sitting at my desk. So those are the reasons that, you know, there's really the pieces to it that that AI is never going to be able to understand.

Can I— I'm sorry, I have to yell at my dog to stop. Brrr. I also think that you won't know the— if you're using AI, you're not going to know the right questions to even ask it to begin with because you're going to be relying on AI to ask you the questions. And if you— and that just won't work. I mean, what people say, I use AI all day long. And people are like, oh, so it writes for you? No, it's all my thoughts and ideas. Everything is still coming from me, and I'm still able to massage it and ask the questions. But if you don't know anything, how would you even be able to communicate? You're not, you know, I want to sell my business. You know, like, it's, it, it may not ask you the important questions, and you can't rely on that. That's why business coaches are important. They are needed, and they don't go down like ChatGPT went down this morning anyways.

Fair point.

Right? Unless someone is sick, he's like, he'll be up the next day. Kind of like AI, I guess. Ellen, is there anything that I didn't ask you that you wish you would ask me, or do you want to talk about your, the biggest success story?

Well, I think, I think you've asked a lot of great questions, right? The, the question about why a business coach, you know, why, uh, why not AI, I think are really valid, valid. I think to me the piece that I would— a couple things that I'd like to cover are there are many options to exit your business, right? It's not just selling. It's, you know, succession, management. It could be, you know, some kind of gradual transition to employees or to management. There are lots of options out there. The key thing is understanding that each of them have pros and cons. And that's one of the things I do is I sit down, I say, these are the pros and cons. Let's talk through these things. What's the best thing for you? And what I would say is that, you know, every business owner is different as to what matters to them in terms of their exit. So some business owners say, I just want the most money. That's okay. That's their right. Typically, when you say that, you're not going to have a lot of say into what happens to your business when the check clears, right? If you want to have say, if you want to have legacy, a lot of times you're going to have to pick a different option, right? Or really find the right partner. So there are lots of options. That's one. And my final thing would be to say, I talked about this a little bit, there are things you should start doing today even if you're years away. And let me just talk about a couple of those really quick, right? Start documenting your processes. This used to be painful, right? You used to have to write everything down. That was awful. You can now start a Loom video or just record yourself on a Zoom and document, this is how this works. Right? You can do that in 5, 10 minutes. That's perfect. You can update it if you need to. So document, document, document. The next thing I'll say is start to get— I talked about this early— start to get independent from your company. Start figuring out the things that you no longer need to be involved with, right? What that does is makes your business more saleable, more valuable, and has the added benefit of destresses you as the owner, right? You can start to let go of things. One of the crazy things I do with clients is I look at their customer base and I ask them to, to tell me about each of their customers, if I'm assuming they don't have 50,000. Um, and I say, you know, tell me about this customer. And they'll say, oh, it was one of my first customers. That guy is an absolute pain in the you-know-what. I probably lose money on him, you know. And I say, get rid of them. Like, fire that customer. And they say, well, but, but revenue— no, nobody wants to inherit that customer, right? So, so do those things that you've always wanted to do because they're going to make you happier, less stressed, and they're ultimately going to increase the value of your company. So I'll close on that. Like, just start to focus on the things you're really good at. Get rid of the rest.

I love that. I love that. I had to fire a client once. It was a good feeling. Yeah, we have to enjoy what we do in our life. And I love what David Meltzer says: if you love what you do, then learn to love the things you don't love to do. And right, but then give them to someone else to do. Len, it's so interesting. I love it. I love that you, uh, I love that you came from the funeral home. I think that's got to be one of the most interesting, you know, like just careers, you know, and doing it and learning and handling people and understanding. And you must have had many people that passed away and had a business, and that was probably discussed. And I just think it's great. I used to sell to funeral homes, say, when selling promotional products, because I love, I love going out for funeral homes selling lip balm tissues, hand sanitizer, all the things that you need. Umbrellas for when it rains, ponchos for, you know, the cemetery when it's raining. Anyways, uh, always fascinated about that. I remember having some clients that had the most beautiful pens, and that's what they would hand out— beautiful, like, $10 pen as a gift for buying the, you know, $20,000 casket. So And your parents had to sell. I'm really fascinated. I, I love that. How many of your family went into the— how many siblings went into this?

Just, just one. Just one. So my younger brother, my young younger brother is running it. Yep.

I think that is so cool. And if you haven't watched, by the way, Six Feet Under, guys, just watch it. It gets better like the fifth episode on. That's where it gets really juicy. All the crazy things happen. Anyways, Len, it's lovely talking to you. I love that you about the focal point and why it's good to be involved. And you can see Len has the website. You could Google him, he'll pop right up. And I will have the show notes. So this is live right now. It will be turned into a podcast about, unfortunately, about 3 months. So I'm glad we're doing a live now so you don't have to wait. I got a backlog. But Len, you have a lot of information. You should do your own podcast because you have a lot to, a lot of information to share. And oh, and are you writing blogs too? Do you have articles? What do you do about that?

I, what I am tending toward is doing, uh, it's, it's a bit of a, a bit of a, uh, hybrid. I do Q&A sessions with people who are associated with me. So I'll do a Q&A session with a financial planner or with a business broker or with a business lawyer, right? And we'll just go back and forth, uh, really short, you know, 3 to 5 minute just super educational.

Love it.

And then, and then I'm posting those.

I love it. Yeah, that's kind of hot right now, the daily cafes. So just the daily quick conversations that you can absorb very quickly. Len, thank you so much for your time and energy today. I absolutely enjoyed, joy, joy. And so thank you everyone for joining us. And Len Breskowitz. And if you have a business, you better be on the phone, like pick it up now and call. Len, what's your phone number?

617-356-8102.

You guys write that down. I'll put that in the chat. Come on, just pick it up.

Let's do it on the website as well.

Okay, so, um, call Len. Now don't be calling Len and like, you know, calling him with like weird things like, how much is it to cut my dog's hair? No, no, this is serious stuff. Don't be bothering Len unless you have business because he's you'll look— make me look bad, and nobody wants to make me look bad, especially my bangs look so good. All right, Len, what's your phone number?

617-356-8102.

And Len, just so you know, my phone number is 386-631-4577. I tell everyone, don't be afraid to give your number, because you know what? If you're afraid to give your number, nobody's gonna be able to reach you. And that is crazy how many, you know, and that to me is almost like the start of looking at a business. So I do LinkedIn for people and I cannot tell you one of the first things I have to do is like go to the contact. Is this your phone number? No, I haven't had that phone number 5 years. Is this your website?

No.

And I'm like, how are people supposed to reach you? LinkedIn is so high up. Get your Google My Business page. Even that Google My Business profile, I'll go through it and half of it isn't is not any information, or you have a website and you have zero way to get in touch with you. People, I mean, like, it's not rocket science, right? Like, how many clients have you had that when you do the deep dive, you're like, finding you is like having to try to find the phone number for Elon Musk? Probably easier to get Elon's phone number.

Yeah, you know, and again, it really depends on the business, but, uh, It's, yeah, people complain, nobody calls me yet. You make it impossible for them to do so.

So, right, get a burner phone if you're afraid of it. I don't know, I never have fear. My phone number is all over the place. Len, thank you for your time today. Have a great— today's Taco Tuesday, so I hope you have a taco in your future. I got 3 or 4, or I could eat 5 corn tacos, but don't tell anyone. All right, have a great rest of the day. Thank you so much. It was lovely having you.

Awesome. Thank you.

You're welcome. That was fun. Wait, the