Maxwell Nee: The Hidden GTM Risks No One Talks About

Welcome to Go-To-Market, a podcast for RevOps, sales, and marketing leaders to dive deep into industry insights and best practices. Go-To-Market is sponsored by Fulcast, the Go-To-Market Cloud. I am so excited today to introduce Maxwell Nee, CRO of ScoreApp. Maxwell, how are you?

I'm really good, Amy. Good to see you.

It's great to see you too. Thank you so much for coming onto the show today and chatting with us. And I know that it's very early for you right now in Singapore. It's 7 AM. Is— are you in Singapore right now?

Yeah. Yeah, that's right.

Yeah. So how is it living out there? Do you love it?

Yeah, it's good. You know, Singapore sort of emerges like this, um, you know, one of the world's other tech hubs outside of Silicon Valley, uh, for investment as well, as much as tech. And, and it's cool.

I love it. I've heard nothing but great things about it, so I'm glad you're enjoying it out there.

Yeah. Are you—

um, your, your accent does not say Singapore to me? Tell me a little bit about your background.

Yeah, so I am Malaysian by heritage, but I was born in Australia, so lived there my whole life and left Australia about 8 years ago, traveled the world. I have lived in like Toronto, bit of time in Chicago, Mexico, Bali, Barcelona, Singapore. Yeah.

Oh my gosh, wow, world traveler! That's amazing. I love it. So which, which place have you enjoyed the most?

Oh, it's a good question. So, you know, I always find this question hard to answer. Like, it's a bit like the question of what's your favorite food, right? And, you know, I, I think that everything is optimal for a certain scenario. Uh, you know, that might sound a little bit robotic and lame, but, you know, if I want a really cool, fun European summer, old buildings, mountains, Mediterranean Sea, then it's got to be Barcelona. If I want, um, you know, a really fun, energetic city where everyone's in a good mood, uh, you know, really fun place to drink and party and that type of thing, it'd probably be Chicago in the summer. Uh, if I want, uh, to relax, chill out um, you know, do things a little bit more spiritual, a bit more hiking, that type of thing, it would probably be Bali or, um, the west coast of Mexico, uh, any time of the year. So, so yeah, you know, I've got my little favorite, um, hot spots depending on what time of the year it is.

Oh, I love that. That's amazing. So just like you've traveled the world, you've done many, many things in your career. You're currently the Chief Revenue Officer of ScoreApp with thousands and thousands of customers. And I love that I'm getting the chance to chat with you right now about, about how you can de-risk your go-to-market. Clearly, it's something that you're passionate about. You have tons of experience in. So tell me before we get started a little bit about your background professionally.

Yeah, so I studied finance, I worked in corporate banking. For Australia's largest bank, uh, for about 5 years. You know, worked really hard. I was in love with it at the beginning, got like 3 promotions in 5 years, and then totally burnt out and hated it because it just became like— I was— I, I think what's one of my values is I have to always be learning and growing. You know, as soon as I feel a little bit stagnant or stale, I lose interest. Like, it— the interest just just literally dries up. So then I quit my job, uh, mainly because I just couldn't do it anymore. Like, it just felt so painful, so hard. So it wasn't planned, you know. I didn't have, uh, 50, 100K worth of savings to tie me over whilst I worked out what to do. I just had to get out of there. So I got out of there, moved to Toronto, and then, uh, tried to work in maybe 2 more jobs, and they didn't work out. So I thought, wow, you you know, I really need to try this being an entrepreneur thing. Um, I've got no choice. And then, uh, you didn't earn any money, uh, for like a year, year and a half. Bought courses and programs, try to learn this thing. So, you know, a lot of people ask me what's, what's the toughest thing about— what's one thing I could teach to another entrepreneur or person in sales or whatever, and You know, what I would— what I really didn't know at the time is that there's always a learning curve, you know, whether you're moving to a different role, different company, different country, different sector, different industry, um, moving from corporate to entrepreneur, there's always a learning curve. And I totally underestimated the learning curve, you know. My learning curve took about 18 months until I sort of really understood how you need to run your own profit and loss. And, um, you know, what I learned is that there's 3 ways to go through a learning curve. The absolute worst way to go through a learning curve is to self-fund it, which is what I did. So it's not just that I wasn't earning any money, I always had to invest my own money to learn what I needed to learn, right? So self-funding is the worst. Then in the middle, uh, there is you're not self-funding, you're learning for free, um, but you still need to self-fund your personal expenses. So like rent, food, or whatever, right? So that could be like working as an apprentice for someone, which in hindsight, that would have cut my learning curve down by half, you know. And then what would have cut it down to zero is if I, um, happened to work for an entrepreneur like a really good entrepreneur in the industry I wanted to go into, which was just anything online at the time, but to work with them in a paid job, you know, so getting paid to learn basically. And in hindsight, I should have just taken anything I got my hands on. I should have just been an EA type of thing. So, hey, look, let me follow you around, let me pick up your dry cleaning, let me check your emails, let me do all these little things that wouldn't mentally stimulate me, but they give me an oversight. They give me like a really, really close to the tree learning experience.

They get you into the game. Yeah, absolutely. I self-funded my own learning curve as well, and I can agree with you. It's very, very painful. I agree. Yeah, yeah. It is. And so I have a lot of respect for you doing that. And me too. Oh, thank you. You. Yes. And we, and we are, you know, we are weathered now, aren't we? Right? Learned it all the hard way.

Yeah, I didn't have this, didn't have this wrinkle before this one either.

Like, my, my, my Botox is heavy right now. So, so, okay, so you became an entrepreneur. What was your first entrepreneurial, uh, job that you did?

Yeah, so I started off, you know, I think when you leave corporate and you become an entrepreneur for the first time, the the first thing you're stressed about is, um, is cash flow, right? You're like, how long is this going to take? I'm going to get cash in. So I basically started by just selling what I knew. So I bought a course about online advertising, Facebook ads, basically like go-to-market stuff, email marketing, learn to chew it up, um, like just work 17 hours a day to chew it up and learn and test and stuff. And, and then I, um, started selling services. Selling services, selling services, selling digital marketing services. Digital marketing was fairly new back then because this is like 10 years ago now, but now it's quite mature. You know, you could, you could find a digital marketer with 10 years experience. Back then it had— you had to pay for a service, right? And I, um, you know, got my first client, paid me like 2 grand. And work with them on a $2,000 a month retainer. And I thought, wow, you know, this can really work. And that just like opened my eyes. And, and it was like, it was like, wow, I could have the freedom. I could work from a laptop. Like my, my vision board, which I didn't make one, but in my head was, you know, work from a beach on a laptop whenever I want, drinking, you know, mimosas, uh, and just texting with a laptop on my lap, sand in the background type of thing. But that was the goal. And then I achieved that a lot— it felt a lot faster than what it did, but it was actually 18 months. Because, you know, when you're learning, you're enjoying what you're learning, time flies. Oh yeah, yeah. And then I happened to meet some business partners. I said, hey, look, we want to do this thing. We've been selling services for a while. Why don't we, um, try selling products? I said, okay, you know, let's try selling products. But we weren't selling physical products. We were selling basically our service as a product. So our service is like an— as a course. So how I got into the industry. So I knew it worked. I believed in it. So then we started selling courses for $1,000, $5,000, and $10,000 wrapped around my business partner's expertise because he had 10 years experience at the time and he was like the spokesperson. He was like the personal brand. And, um, you know, that did really well. We did $2 million in the first year, uh, first 2 years, and it was a crazy ride. And, you know, totally remote. That's why I lived in so many places.

Yeah, that's incredible. So then what led to you wanting to do ScoreApp?

Yeah, so when we were doing that business, we're doing like on, on average about $200K a month. And but we needed about 1,000 leads at minimum, ideally 2,000 leads per month to, um, to sustain that. And 25% of our leads actually came from quiz marketing, which is what ScoreApp does. ScoreApp didn't exist back then, so we, we learned about quiz marketing and then we Frankensteined like a very, very crappy version of ScoreApp which took 8 weeks, cost $10,000. And then now, you know, people can use ScoreUp for free because it's a tech company that has all the scale in the world. So we Frankensteined it. Changing things was hard. It was out of date. We had new ideas for it every day, and it took a week to change things. So, um, when I— when Daniel emailed me, said, hey, look, I'm working on this thing called ScoreUp, do you want to be involved? I was like, yes! Oh my God. Like this is a no-brainer. Like, I know this works. It brings in 250 leads a month for us, but it's just so hard to maintain. So he worked out all the hard parts because he had a business partner. One of the co-founders is a tech guy, really, really brilliant tech guy, Steve Oddi. He's now the CEO. And he said, you know, would you like to invest? Because this business, you know, needs investment. It's not like a service business. It needs a, it needs runway, right? Until you get to your first 2,000, 3,000 clients, you're, you're losing money every month. So you got to be really, really tight, really smart, really sharp. So I said yes, and I invested 3 times. So I really know what it's like to put money at risk, to be an owner. And this is one of my, obviously one of my good investments. This one's up like 800%. From, from when I originally got in, uh, probably more now. I calculated that last year, and, uh, but I've lost a lot of money, you know. I've lost a lot of money, a lot of investments, and I spent a lot of time not making money. So, you know, even when things are going good, I've really learned that, uh, bad decisions are made in good times, you know. When we were doing $2 million a year, we hired, we overhired like 8 people we didn't need to hire. We paid for coaching and services. We paid like $50 grand for a website that we didn't need, but we thought that, you know, if you're doing $2 million a year, you have a really, really good website, um, that could add an extra half a million bucks, right? So it made sense at the time, but that was in a really good time. And then what was working well was that we were in COVID and people were just sitting at home doing nothing. So when you're selling online courses, the online course market exploded, right? And my—

so the seasonality of that is seasonality, huge seasonality. Yeah, that makes so much sense. You know, I love talking with you because it's so fascinating to get into your mind, and I'm there with you. You know, the first We did the same thing. We, um, when I ran my marketing agency, I got into it because my husband lost his job. We had 4 little kids to feed and we couldn't move. And well, I got to see if I can see what I can do. And I had— I was a writer, and so I started off just trying to do digital content, and then it led into one thing that led to another, and we were making a couple of million bucks a year, which was in revenue, which was awesome. And then, um, and then we thought, well, I had a, I had a, a partner that I worked with as a fractional CMO for another company, and he said, hey, we've done services, let's try product. So you're— it's funny because your experience is very much mirroring my own.

I think a lot of people go through that evolution. I also think that in the service industry, um, like when I see people be in the service industry for like 10 years plus they are business operational geniuses, like, to be able to scale that. Because what I was learning when we had the service-based business is every time we got 10 clients, we had to hire 3 people, you know. So it's actually services— unless you're very, very good at keeping the margin up, being really efficient, you scale with people, which is just— doesn't scale, basically.

Yeah, it's a— it becomes very complicated very quickly. And there's a lot— not for you, meaning like it's not your cup of tea.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, I'm not that— I don't have that personality type to thrive in there.

No, I feel the same way. And so I kind of got to the, the point where I was like, you know what, I am literally working 15 hours a day and I've got up to you know, 5 and a half, and I've got it. I can't work any harder than this. And so I either have to hire someone who knows how to scale better than I do, or else I need to try something different. And so now I kind of reached the, the limit of what I was kind of interested in doing, and then I wanted to try something new. But as you, as you've gone through so many of these things and so many different types of business models, How do you, how do you de-risk, you know, back to our original question, de-risk some of the things that you've done? You mentioned, you know, there's the learn yourself model, there's the apprentice model, and there's the, you know, you learn from a really amazing entrepreneur. That's one way to de-risk your investment. What's another way that you would say to de-risk your go-to-market?

Yeah, so, well, now I've learned most of the lessons, I think, now to see, you know, what's, what's going on, right? So there's— I was writing this down the other day, you know, I think really simply, uh, you know, first of all, you got to learn your personality type. Yeah, like, for example, your personality type will determine how you thrive, how you don't thrive, what lane you're, you're best in, and where your gaps are. You know, and no one can master their gaps 100% type of thing, you know. Like, for example, it doesn't matter how great you are, there's a lane that you thrive in and there's lanes that you don't. So I always relate this to sport because you could see it very clearly in sport, you know. Michael Jordan, one of the greatest athletes of all time, uh, undisputed in terms of awards, couldn't make it work in baseball, you know, because he just— his brain, his mindset, his passion, his pace, his cadence, his endurance, everything was set to basketball. And, you know, it doesn't matter, um, he's the height, he's the frame, he's the muscle mass, it doesn't matter because, you know, you're a killer where you're a killer and you're not where you're not. So I really learned that me personally um, there's a few different types of people. There's like, uh, like a lion, uh, a lioness, and then there's, you know, a worker bee. There's more types, but these are the main ones that I sort of relate with. So a lion is someone that is really, really good for short sprints, uh, because when a lion— the way a lion goes through the day is they sleep all day, they pretty much do nothing Uh, and then they wake up, but they wake up at 5 AM and they hunt. They hunt before every other animal's awake, and they take down an elephant when an elephant is sleeping, right? Then they go back to sleep by 12 and they sleep for the rest of the day, and their brain sort of operates at like 20% capacity. Yeah, that's me. I'm a lion. I'm like an early morning sprinter. That's why this 7 AM podcast is actually getting me at my best time, to be honest. And then I'll be brain dead past 12. Um, And I also do my important emails, my important spiritual— I do everything important in this, in this window of time.

Yeah.

Um, and I, and I rest a lot. So my wife is a bit more like a worker bee where she, she has to always be doing something, uh, every moment of every day. Like, she's like a— like worker bees, tick, tick, tick, tick, tick, and they tick, they, they chip at the wall, uh, every minute. You know, and they take a regimented lunch break, they go back and chip at the wall, and they need to feel like they're chipping at the wall every minute to, um, to feel like they're making progress. And then when she sees me resting and lying on the couch, you know, 80% of the day, she's like, you don't work. I said, no, I am working. You know, like, um, a lion needs to rest to take down an elephant. Yeah, you know, uh, a worker bee can't take down an elephant. You know what I mean?

It's just a different working style.

It's a different working style. And, and I think the first thing is you need to learn that about yourself, because then you need to learn it about other people. Because the first pillar is like team, team, team, team, team, team, you know. Like, you— when we scale that business from zero to $2 million, we had, uh, 3 A-players. Uh, one of them sort of Uh, when he would get complacent and he would drop down to a B player, and we had to keep pulling him up. And then I learned that, um, if there's a single B player in the team at any one point in time, uh, the whole team at best will operate as a B team. Because what happens is that you go down to the level of— yeah, you get pulled down because, you know, one, A player gets frustrated, two, think about leaving, but they think about it quietly, you know. So it's like this quiet toxic, quiet quitting uh, like chain that you're chained down to, that you, you have to really know how to pick out. And, and that, that person might be a B player not because they're lazy or whatever, but they might be in the wrong role. It could be in the wrong lane, it could be in the wrong business, and you just have to be able to spot that to pull them in, in or out, put people in or out, because team is like the first pillar.

No, I love that. Okay, so real quick though, what's the lioness like? I'm still so curious about that.

Yeah, yeah. So the, the lioness is, um, so the worker bee works like independently. The lioness is like, uh, like they could— a lioness can take down an elephant, uh, but in a team. So lioness are like the team work people that, um, they take down a pack of hyenas together. They like doing things together. So they're, um, they, they're capable of the same of a lion, but they have to be in teams, you know. And they also have to know and like who they're working with.

Yeah, I love that. I think there's, there's so much applicability in all of these things. That's amazing.

Yeah. And, you know, I'll tell you another one which I think is funny, and I've totally made this up, by the way, so You know, this is really great. You don't hear this anywhere else. Yeah, yeah, might put in a book someday. So, um, my sister is like a dolphin. So a dolphin, um, work randomly, like they're, they're a huge pain in the ass to work with. But I think a lot of entrepreneurs are dolphins, where that they'll get inspiration at 3 in the morning and they'll get their laptop at 3 in the morning, you know, like they don't have sleeping hours, they don't have working hours, they don't have they can't schedule anything because dolphins are awake randomly because dolphins actually, um, need oxygen, you know. They live in the ocean, they need oxygen, so they only take micro sleep. They take micro sleep, they take micro work, they swim in random places, and they always have to go up for air. So my sister's like a, like a dolphin, just, um, you know, unfortunately dolphins can very easily be unreliable because they're just so random. Um, so she's a bit like that.

Well, so, um, one thing that I've noticed too is that when you have a lot of creative geniuses or dolphins, right? And when you have someone that's getting inspiration, you can't shut it down. Like, so that was one of my challenges of running a creative agency was trying to keep everyone on deadline, but out the creative genius out of everyone. And so that was a real challenge for me because when I tried to make the create— the super highly creative people more regimented, it killed their creativity. And so I was like, hmm, how do I do this and keep my clients interested, keep them happy, keep them on task and on budget, but then still pull out this creative genius that is needed? And so that was another challenge, um, you know, for me when It was a little more risky from a, from a GTM. But anyway, back to what you're saying. This is— I know that we're like 10 minutes over what we normally do for podcasts, but this is so fascinating.

I hope you don't mind. No, it's okay. I, I, look, I'll tell you another thing. So I also think that, look, we saw podcasts materially influence the election, right? And, and that teaches you a lot. It teaches you that The world wants, uh, transparent conversations, unscripted, because the world wants to make up its own mind about things. Because everyone's wise to, um, you know, the scare tactics and the posturing, the positioning that media companies use. And, you know, a really crude word to describe it is that it's manipulation, right? It's, it's, it's It's, I'm not letting you make up your own mind. I'm telling you how you should be making up your own mind by posturing things, you know, and you don't like that in the workplace. You don't like that from your parents. You don't like that from your partner. You don't like that from your kids. No one likes that shit, you know, and, and say what you will about Donald Trump. A lot of people might say Donald Trump's, you know, liar or whatever. But I always say that, yeah, he might be those things at times. But he's a transparent— like, he's, he's so transparent, you know? Like, if he's, you know—

yeah, I totally agree with you. And the thing that I found fascinating was the way that he disintermediated the, um, the media. Like, he went straight to talking about things on Twitter. Yeah, great to talking with people on exactly what is in his mind, good, bad, or ugly. You knew what he was thinking at any given moment, and I think that there's value in that.

Yeah, there's value. Like, he, um, so if you look at the numbers, he clocked up 120 million views. Oh, right, 120 million views. And Kamala clocked up 40. Uh, Kamala scripted, Trump wasn't scripted. Uh, and he, he only won by like 3.5 million votes, you know. So each one of those views could have easily been a swayed vote. But at the same time, you know, being transparent, some people might have said, okay, I was right about him, I'm definitely not going to vote for him, right? But, but you trust that more.

You do trust that more. And it's very interesting because even though the media, um, right or left, they had their favorites, right? And they were very— I thought they were very, very biased. It— both sides were very biased.

Yeah. And they pretended not to be biased. That's even worse.

It is even worse. And they said things as fact that were not fact. And I think that our, our, um, you know, we as the public have been trained now by so many years of this type of thing that we're almost deaf to it. So people want to make up their own minds. And I think that's one reason that being, you know, unfiltered, unscripted, transparent is working better, because we are so tired of being talked down to by pundits, and we're so tired of feeling manipulated, to use your word. I think, I think you're absolutely right about all of it.

Yeah, so, you know, coming to the podcast length of time, um, I don't think it matters, you know. All the, all the top podcasts in the world are like 2 hours, pretty much all of them. Because, you know, if people wanted to— if I was a best-selling author and people wanted to get my insights and my nuggets and whatever, they just go read my book, you know, they just go read the audiobook or listen to audiobook or whatever. But obviously people listening to a podcast because they, they want a layer deeper, you know, they want me a layer deeper, they want you a layer deeper. Uh, if they're hearing the same thing everywhere, what's the point? Of absorbing that content.

Mhm. Yep, I totally agree. That's very interesting. Well, so as we're talking about, um, you know, just wrapping it up a little bit more, um, de-risking our go-to-market, the things that we've talked about is under— are, um, understanding the styles of team. I think that's so important. Understanding the way that people access media and access marketing, super important. Is there one other point that that you want to make about de-risking go-to-market? Um, any other insights that you've learned about?

Yeah, so there's, there's two more. Um, so the, the next one is, uh, the money, right? So everything costs money. You got to remember that everything costs money. There's a profit and loss that someone is running. If you're taking a fat wage, you need— and, and the business isn't profitable yet, you need to know that's unsustainable. You know, I've been offered roles and jobs and teams where someone said, yeah, you know, we'll pay you $10K a month. Okay, well, what am I doing? Um, well, you know, all we need you to do is go around, shake hands, and build partnerships. I'm like, yeah, well, that sounds like a really cool dream job, but it's not— the business isn't profitable yet. Like, what's the plan? So I was, I was extracting out of my hiring manager, um, for this team what is your go-to-market strategy? Because if it doesn't smart pass the sniff test with me, then it's probably not going to work. And this job wanted, wanted me to move to Dubai, by the way. So I was like, I need to know that my wife, my kid that's going to change and go to international school, that this thing is going to be sustainable. And he couldn't answer the questions. And so I basically turned down the job. And he came back to me like 3 times saying, we really want you. We really want you because we want someone.

Of course, you want— they want someone smart and strategic like you are, which is you asking those questions like, what's your plan for sustainability here to make sure that I'm going to have a job in a year? Yeah.

And money should drive two things, you know, and these things actually sort of polish them from Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett says that when you go into any business, you can't beat human nature. So human nature is, um, salespeople should be incentivized because incentives make you work harder. They make you game the system. Uh, hopefully you don't break any laws when you're gaming that system, but you're gaming to, to, for the growth of the company. And, um, there should also be the opposite. So the carrot and the stick. There should also be accountability in that if compliance drops the ball, if accounting drops the ball, if anyone breaks the law, they're out, you know, they're— and they're financially penalized, their severance is halved or taken away or whatever. So if you set up those incentives correct and set up in a way that the business can self-fund itself and it's sustainable, what happens is that it's like a waterfall where you put all the rocks in the perfect places so the water just always falls in the right place, you know what I mean? The water always falls in the buckets you want it to fall in. Because gravity will just drive it there. So set up the gravity in your business so that things go to where you want them to go, and you use money as a tool to do that.

I love that. That's excellent. Um, what is your— what was the final point on the de-risking thing?

Yeah, so the, the final point is, um, you know, a lot of— like, when I invest in companies now, because I invest probably more than I build companies now, The first thing that I look at is do they have a sales and marketing budget? And how big is that budget? Is it 50% of the budget? Is it 25%? Do they even know, like, is that just Mark Zuckerberg money that goes to Meta? Is that to hire BDMs to sell something, to sell a new product that's never been brought to market before? How are they going to know how to do that? There's no instruction manual. You're going to give someone no instruction manual and say, hey, look, go sell his $120K a year. So if someone has a large sales and marketing budget, then I don't invest. If they have a sales and marketing budget that's, that's, you know, more than 5% of the total budget, I don't invest because they haven't worked it out yet. They're just saying, this is our throw shit against the wall and hope what sticks money, and, and it's your money, you know. It's 50% of my money's throw shit against the wall. I'm like, no, no, no. So how do you, so how do you have the opposite? You know, the opposite is someone's done the thinking, the planning, the thought process. They've looked at the market, the seasonality. They've listened to the market. They've spoken to the market to the point where they have spotted a gap in the market, like an overhang of demand and a scarce supply, right? So, you know, when someone pitches to me, oh yeah, we're going to build a platform for life coaches to help them build their business. Okay, well, are they going to use that? Does anyone need that? I got pitched that, you know, once a week, to be honest, because I used to— the courses that we used to sell used to help life coaches build their business. Like, I pitched that a lot, and they're like, oh no, we're the first. I'm like, no, you're not, you're not the first. And then they don't listen to me, you know. And that's another thing, like, just it— you're talking to an expert investor in this field but you're not taking the feedback. So, you know, if you can spot a gap in the market, you can position yourself so well that you don't need a sales and marketing budget. And that's like, that's like nirvana, you know, when it drives itself. Yeah, yeah, yeah, when it drives itself, you know. So if you think about it, all of these podcasters, right, these business podcasters that have tens of millions of viewers, you know, they could launch a million, $5 million company once a month just by launching like an ad agency and then a health agency and then, you know, um, a branding and styling agency and just washing their, their followership through each one. But they know that that's short-lived, you know, because there's no specific gap in the market for that. Like, any, any YouTuber could sell to their audience, but they want to they want to pick that holy grail story where it's like, you know, all of a sudden George Clooney gets into coffee and he's just killed it, right? Or George Clooney gets into tequila and he's triple killed it, you know? Or if he's Roger Federer and then he gets into Uniqlo and Uniqlo gives him 5% of a company that isn't on the map and he puts it on the map single-handedly that's a gap in the market, right?

Love that. Wow, those are such interesting— I was expecting when we first decided to do this topic, I was expecting much more granular, you know, specific, like de-risk by doing this messaging instead of this messaging.

Yeah, tactical.

Yeah, this is so strategic and so important. And the way that you're looking at this from an investor lens, from an operator lens, from an entrepreneurial lens, and a sales lens is just absolutely fascinating. And thank you so much for coming on and giving us some of your insights and some of your, your unfiltered and your unscripted thoughts. I really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you. No, you, you could tell I've, I've lost a lot of money. So, you know, when you lose money, you reflect and you think and you're like, okay, what went wrong here?

Oh, well, you obviously are doing very well now. And the last question I ask all of my guests is, how do you stay at the top of your game? How do you get to where you are now?

Yeah, good question. So I love this question because I've, I've, I answer a lot and I've, um, I really like, I've fallen in love with my answer to this question. So what I've learned is that, um, there is a way to keep your battery fully charged. Energetically, uh, spiritually, work fulfillment, love life, relationships, bank account. Like, I don't know what that is, the 7 batteries of life, right? You can keep that fully charged. And what I've learned is that when 1% is down in one of those areas, it drags the others down. Sometimes I'll, I'll say, hey, I need to go to the gym. I need to go to gym now because the gym is one of the ways I keep my battery fully charged. So my, my, my charging routine is I make sure I get a lot of sleep. I need sleep, um, because my brain is just like a machine gun in when it's awake. Uh, then I wake up, you know, 6, 7 AM. I like to get up before the sun gets up. I don't know what it is, but when it's dark and then I watch the sun come up, um, there's just a a peace in my mind. And then I go to the gym. The gym isn't about putting on muscle, losing fat, looking good. The gym is about— the gym's like meditation. It's another mind-clearing, you know, exercise. Uh, and then I like to walk a lot, you know, and I'll walk a lot and I'll carry my, my notebook and, and, and, you know My favorite part of the day is I finish the gym, I feel accomplished, um, I've done the— I've done a few emails, so I just know there's nothing urgent. And then I go to the cafe, I have like 2 matcha lattes with oat milk because I can't— because I'm lactose intolerant. And, and I'll just write my notebook, and that keeps my battery fully charged, you know, like being able to creatively scratch an itch every day, uh, keeps it fully charged for me. And then I come home, eat good food. You know, I'm, I'm pretty anal about like eating things that are organic and, you know, not, um, not putting stuff in your body that makes you feel bad or that drags you down or that, you know, isn't good for you long term, uh, because I used to do bodybuilding, so I know what it's like to, to really feel optimized. I know what it's like to not, because I used to be a banker, you know, they sit at my desk for 10 hours a day. Yeah.

Well, you've lived so many lives. How fascinating. And I love that answer too, how to stay fully charged so you could continually, you know, be working at your optimal abilities. So, Maxell, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for being willing to do a podcast at 7:00 AM. And thanks so much for giving us some really great actionable strategic guidance on Cool, amazing.

Thanks, Amy. Cheers.