Funded or Fumbled? VC Meets Janitorial | E11 – Hard Refresh – An ISSA Podcast

Sam. Welcome back everyone, to the hard refresh. We've got quite the different topic actually today. This is going to be really fun. We have Brian Snow who joins us today. Brian, welcome to the show, my man. Take it away and introduce yourself for a brief second first.

Thank you guys very much. Brian Snow calling in from not sunny Southern California. It's a little bit overcast today. I lead a family office investment firm called Impala Ventures. We focus on investing in both early stage startups, which I know we're going to be talking about, as well as larger sort of later stage mature companies through our private equity strategy. But we focus only on the built environment. We invest in companies that impact how buildings are built, how they're operated, and also sort of how they perform over time.

Amazing. Well, today's topic is going to be funded or fumbled, but we will get to that in a minute. Brian, before we start, I know you haven't had much time to think about this, but we are going to do Two truths and a lie and yeah, take it away and then I'll hand it over to Korina afterwards. But we're, we're pretty easily stumped, so don't overthink this.

Two truths and a lie. Do they have to be in that order or, you know.

No, no, no. Otherwise we'd guess it right away.

I am the son of Jon Snow, if any Game of Thrones fans out there. And so, you know, anytime I walk into a coffee shop and they asked for my name and I tell them Brian Snow, immediately I get, do you know John Snow? And I'm like, yeah, he's my dad. He's also my grandfather. I grew up in this industry. So a lot of people ask me, you know, how we ended up investing in companies that touch the built environment. And then more specifically for the show janitorial. Right. Janitorial is a sector that gets overlooked. My family started a company in the 1950s, 30s. I am happy and proud to say that I grew up in this industry from sort of a toddler working in the industry. Our family company wasn't janitorial. It was an adjacent service in the restoration and maintenance sector of architectural services. So, you know, I grew up washing trucks in our service centers in different cities around North America. And when I got out of college, I lived overseas running projects in Germany for a big New York developer who was building buildings after the wall fell. That is the Berlin Wal. So dated myself there a little bit. You've got to pick, you know, which of those are the two truths and which of those is not really a lie, but, you know, maybe an embellishment.

There was so much detail. I have no clue.

I was going to say I definitely know which one is the truth, but Kaden, you go. Because I know Brian. And so maybe it wouldn't be fair if I guess. I normally guess and I'm not. What is my record at this point? Like 80% wrong.

But are you a kid about 80% wrong? Yeah.

So much so that my family has started to watch and they're like, karina, you're so bad at it. Like, and I, and I come across, like, very confident because I went to school for communication. So I'm like, okay, non verbal communication. He's leaning in, he's doing all this. And always wrong, always wrong. So. All right, Kaden, you guess. I'm pretty sure I know.

All right. I'm a little fuzzy on what actually was the third one, but I think the first two were truths.

So you think that Jon Snow.

Jon Snow, Caden.

No, no, no, no, no. That was the first one. Okay. Again, there were so many details. I was like trying to track them all the first one time.

Yeah, Jon Snow. Definitely not.

Right. I haven't seen Game of Thrones at all, but okay.

Yeah, dang it. I should have. I should have answered for you then. That's my fault. I should have commit.

You have a good excuse, by the way. My dad is Jon Snow, but he's obviously not the actor.

Not the Jon Snow?

Yeah, not. Not.

That's crazy that his name is actually Jon Snow, though.

You mean the actor or my dad?

No, your dad's name is actually Jon Snow. That's fantastic. So technically you weren't lying. But wait, did you say the actor is my father?

No.

He did that. No, they never get that far. But they, they, they're always dumbfounded when I use that last name. And they don't realize that the Game of Thrones is, you know, a great production of fiction and that I'm a real person ordering a coffee and that somebody could have a last name. Yeah, I guess it speaks more to that my last name is not very common. Sort of like Neff.

Yeah.

Maybe put that. I don't know anybody with those two other last names. Maybe that's the real story.

Yeah, actually, no. I actually know a few Snows. So in my mind I was like, oh, that's common.

I know Jared Snow in your neighborhood.

Okay.

You know, there's not many people with the last name of Snow.

And by the way, Kaden, your homework is to watch Game of Thrones like to watch it. It's incredible. Like, who doesn't. Who hasn't seen it?

Like, I've seen clips from it, and I was just like, this does not interest me. Which is weird because, like, my wife's absolutely not interested. But I like certain genres, and that one just.

It's fantasy. Growing up, I'm not a sci fi guy, but Game of Thrones is like this mashup of sort of historical, you know, fiction and fantasy.

Well done.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I love Lord of the Rings, so I can't say.

Come on. If you like Lord of the Rings. Yeah.

Maybe it's more so that my wife just absolutely hates that stuff. So we just don't.

Yeah, in your own time. Okay.

Yeah. When I have my own time, the only time I'm alone maybe, is when I am on an airplane and even then I pull out my laptop and start working. And usually when I'm traveling with my coo, he's like, dude, watch a movie for once.

Reminds me of when I used to work with Chase. This is like the funniest story. What? Every time he was on a plane, we would all know because we would get, like, text messages, emails, phone call, like, all the things you can imagine. We're like, oh, Chase is on a plane. That's what's happening right now.

I'm nodding my head because I'm the recipient of those email and text messages from your old esteemed leader.

Unbelievable. So funny.

That's funny. Okay, well, Karina, let's dive into some quick control real fast, and then let's dive into our awesome prepared topic.

Yes. Okay, so we are gearing up to go to the business growth series Strategies. Never know which one it is. June 10th through the 11th at Issa. So Kaden and I are doing that workshop. We do have a code. BGS10, exclamation mark. Did I get it right? Yeah, I did got it.

Karina did it.

And then we are doing. For our CLX next round, it is on robotics. So check that out. June 24th. We'll have more details coming up.

And.

And then last but certainly not least, we are doing our first live webinar. Gerald is leading from. Right, go. And that is going to be July 15th. We don't have a topic on that right yet.

Not quite yet, but we'll.

We'll provide more details next time. All right, that's it. Let's get into it.

Let's get into it. So we got fumbled or, excuse me, funded or fumbled for our clearing the cash today. Resetting mindsets here. Karina, I'm actually going to let you start us off with the first question. Diving in with Brian.

Yeah, no, I'm super excited. So fun fact, before we get started, Cora, as you all know, is my the platform that Chase and I pioneer built together. And Brian's daughter's name is Cora as well. When I found that out, I was.

Like you that she is the inspiration.

She is. She really is.

I showed her. You sent around the other day and I'm like, see Cora, it's in bright lights.

The beautiful, the magnificent. Truly is. All right, so one of the things we did have the team from Zan Compute over here. So the first we had Janath as a guest. I think it was the second guest, Kaden, or the first guest, but I'm going to ask our first guest. Yeah, he was right. That's what I thought.

Y.

Okay, so first question is Impala Ventures invest in companies like Zan Compute, which utilizes AI for predictive. How do you assess the scalability and long term viability of such technologies in a traditionally conservative industry?

It's a great question. I think first you have to understand that when we invest in venture stage companies, we are first evaluating what is the addressable market, how large is the problem, and then it's our job to go out and find sort of winners and losers that can go out and really capitalize on that opportunity. Because of the stage of company that we're investing in, we're taking on a whole lot of market adoption risk. And so Zen Compute's a great example. You know, they are probably one of our early vintage investments. We started our family office in 2017 right after I sold Pristine Environments, which was a integrated FM business that I had built with private equity. Xancompute I think was the second or third investment that we had made, but it was the first janitorial specific investment. So fast forward, that's know almost seven years. And so when we evaluate, we don't have the luxury of evaluating an investment like I would in our public equity strategy. You know, Berkshire Hathaway Warren is finally retiring and my partners are going to be doing a podcast on sort of the long hold, you know, qualities of a public equity. But you can get in and out of public equities and you can sort of pick winners. It's really hard to pick winners in venture. So you're taking sort of market risk that the company that you're going to back is smart enough, has the perseverance and the grit and Sort of the table stakes is that they have the technical capacity and capability to develop the product. But we're, we're investing many times pre revenue. We invested in Zan when they were just barely revenue. Wow, maybe 25 or 50,000 a year in revenue. They might have had a few hundred sensors deployed. Deployed. Now they have hundreds of thousands of sensors deployed.

Wow. Okay, so I have a follow up question. This is one of the things that I've been reading is like this concept of unicorn founders. Right. And so what do you think, what is, what would you say is an actual definition of a unicorn founder?

Well, I mean the, do you think it exists? Yeah, well, I mean let, let's, let's break that down. A unicorn is a company that has a billion dollar valuation. Now in order for the founder to be a unicorn founder, they either started the company or they themselves have a billion dollars worth of, call it wealth from that business. Those are few and far between because even if you have a billion dollar valuation business, it's probably gone through, you know, four or five rounds of sort of successive capital infusion. And the fact is that founders probably been diluted by 90%, by and large. Many, you know, there's very few Zuckerbergs, you know, in the world that control 50%. Well, at this point, like 20% of the equity in its business. You know, those are real unicorn founders, but most get diluted so heavily that by the time it's a unicorn, they're not a unicorn founder. I, I digress. But in, in our business there's maybe one or two and that would be in, in a much broader sense within janitorial specific applications, there's none. So, you know, we've yet to christen the first unicorn founder in our, in our sector.

Very cool. All right, Kaden, do you have one? Because I can keep going. I have tons of questions.

Yeah, so, so Brian, the interesting thing to kind of switch a little bit, but talking about addressing the technology that exists in the facilities space, maybe not from an actual software perspective, but what insight could you offer to the end users of the industry about how they should be thinking about adopting technology, knowing what's being built, what's being invested in, for typically an industry that is very slow and kind of fights against technology adoption?

Yeah, well, I think you have to first ask the question of why is there so much friction in the adoption of technology? And I think by and large most people overlook janitorial first and foremost. Foremost, many people look down on it. Right. This is a entry level job for Many people. And let's face it, you know, blue collar work doesn't get the level of respect that it deserves. That's sort of one end users, whether it be the landlord or the mega tenant in the space or the single occupier. You know, their historic view of Janitorial is as long as my complaint level is low, everything's fine. As long as we can contain cost, then everything is fine. And so you have very few customers that feel like they would get any value out of the technology that, you know, BSC companies are going to put in front of them. And so I think that's just the foundation from where we start. And how do you scale a company like Xan or any of those others in our portfolio that are focused on the sector? Those are quite challenging dynamics. And then the largest companies, and I will, I don't want to name any companies because I talk to CEOs of these companies all the time. They'll tell you the same thing, like we would adopt this kind of technology, but not all of my customers value it. And so you have to then embed it into the cost structure at zero. And that was always our goal when I was an operator, is how can we identify best in breed and then how do we implement it at scale. But if you're trying to sell it as an added value, it's a very long sales cycle. Janitorial having the ability to sell technology on top of service is complicated. And the best way to get adoption is to make it part of your offering. And this is what we did. Many of the companies that we have invested in were companies that were, we were a partner of when I was still running a large national FM. BrainCorp is a great. I think you're gonna have maybe Brain Corp on the first customer. Brain, they're a San Diego company. We were headquartered here and it made sense. They needed a beta partner in a company that really valued technology. And so I got introduced to the original founder, Dr. Eugene and before Dave Pin became CEO and we became his first customer because we believed that we had customers that would value robotics. And we brought it in as part of our solution and that's how we pushed it into our customer space. We didn't want to take the time for them to say, sure, we'll pay that extra little bit, because at the end of the day, the goal is to drive cost out of the business and efficiency into their space. And that takes time to do and customers aren't always willing to pay for that.

I'm curious, when was that when did you guys do introduce robotics? Because this was when you had the cleaning company, correct?

Yeah, we introduced, I'll tell you exactly. We introduced the first BrainCorp robot into two facilities. One under Armours HQ in Baltimore. We had their whole campus. They just built a new innovation center. Great, great customer who was very tech forward. And then we introduced it into numerous robots into an oil and gas client in a bunch of their. They manufactured also a bunch of drill bits for oil and gas fields and we put brain into large spaces that we already had, walked behind technology and ride on scrubbers. And so we convinced that customer that this was a great application and they loved it. But you know, seven, eight years ago. Eight years.

That's what I was going to say. That's a long time ago. To introduce that, that pioneer that's like, I mean I think in a lot of ways you're, you were having conversations that most of most cleaning companies are scared to have or like to your point about if you are going to adapt it, adopt it, you have to lead that and not say like let's do this, is it okay to do it to the customer? Like you're just going to do it and show the value instead of. That's what I think a lot of BSCs get tripped up is like they want to use technology but they want the clients to pay for it. And so it just, it's never going to work like that. You have to embed it into your point Brian.

Yeah, I mean there's an alternative here. At least in the case of Brain. You know, if you have an application where you have to acquire and invest in a ride on piece of equipment, that's a big investment anyways. So we looked at the marginal cost of adding the sort of autonomy as marginal. It wasn't really going to cost us much more and frankly the labor dollars that we were going to save by not putting a physical janitor on that ride on scrubber would more than offset the cost of the autonomy with Brain and then drive some level of savings. But for us it was about reducing slip and falls and other sort of risk exposure. And then it just integrated more purely into the solution that we were looking to drive for that customer.

Very cool.

So a follow up question to that. These building service contractors, facility managers, hesitations on both sides depending on which environment you're talking to. What, what's like the number one thing that you would say they just need to overcome. They're trying to bake it into the costs of doing service with someone. But internally what's, what's a process, what's a behavior, what's a cultural thing? What advice should they really go internally look at from your perspective that needs to change in order to overcome the fear of not embracing technology.

I actually don't think it's a fear because you know, most customers, whether it's a owner, developer or a third party real estate services firm, they're even though they've been slow to adopt technology, they are far ahead in their own business of deploying technology than the average janitorial company is. So it's not fear on their part. I think it is, I think viewing their service provider is less sophisticated. And you know, why would we believe that you have the capabilities to make a recommendation around technology? You're just the cleaners, right, with air quotes. And now I think several companies, especially larger scale companies, you know, pioneer included, I think have convinced sophisticated customers that you can bring a level of sophistication around tech specific to your domain area and they'll listen to you, but you have to be able to sort of prove that, prove that out. A lot of our customers in the industry are also competitors to a certain degree. The large scale real estate companies, many of them have their own service arms, whether they be self performed teams like Cushman and Wakefield has C and W services or JLL has been invested in various asset light platforms. Same with cbre. So they're all in fm, but they're also a competitor when it comes to technology. They want to deploy their suite right back to the day when Corrego was still a standalone brand. Corrego was acquired by JLL because they couldn't build it on their own. So at the time, thankfully we were a partner of Carigo and we were integrating some of our other applications into Carrego. But if we brought that solution to anybody else, you know, they would probably look at it as an inferior, you know, you know, there's a lot of legacy tech out there that becomes a bit of a barrier to new technology because it's been in place for, you know, so long. And it's one of the reasons that we've invested in a lot of point solutions. We were never going to invest in a, you know, CMMS platform, for example, just because there's too much competition and all of the big customers and market makers, they've already made a decision around who they're going to use. So we wanted to build and invest in the product that was driving outcomes, but could integrate with those larger platforms. But you know, the challenge there is, you know, you've got a bunch of disparate, you know, point solutions and there's no single operating system or os, you know, for, for cleaning if you will. I think there is a world where that could exist, but we're probably a decade away.

It's interesting because Korina and I have talked about this with so many guests on, on the podcast. These large scale enterprise type software solutions meet a very specific audience. But the amount of commercial building service contractors in this industry is staggering with the majority of them being like mom and pop, shop sized and then maybe a big chunk mid market and then very few amount of businesses actually scale to that large size. So this point solution tech that you're talking about, where do you see it going? And I know we're, we're skipping some things out of order. Karina, I'm sorry, where do you see that, that future outlook going of these point solutions which obviously most point solutions are focused on your mid market, SMB type markets that are just looking for this problem to be solved aren't quite ready to go to this full on enterprise integrated solution.

So I'll give you one great example and it's, it's actually a very active dialogue we're having. I think I shared with you. While we have our venture stage portfolio, we also have a portfolio of private equity investments that we co own with larger institutional funds and we were verticalized. We own a Healthcare FM company, we own a data center maintenance business, a life science maintenance company as two examples. And one of the things Impala likes to do is sort of push our venture stage companies into those operating companies because they're users of it. Our Healthcare FM company uses brain. Yeah, they've looked at a lot of the other applications and it's one way we can activate our companies. One to speaking specifically to the question that you just asked. Data centers, data centers, obviously all digital infrastructures getting a lot of attention lately. It will get a lot of attention in the foreseeable future. Data centers are a real estate asset class, a very fast growing asset class. And if you look at all of the deployment of the, you know, hundreds of billions of advanced chips like Nvidia's Blackwell. And so one of the ways that you know, we're looking to deploy some of our technology companies and other companies that you know, we are close to but didn't invest in is to be able to deploy a particle count solution that has a variety of other sort of sensors where we're monitoring for particle count, temperature, probably moisture, we're synthesizing that back into a cleaning workflow and it triggers then a work ticket for when cleaning needs to be proactively done in order that that environment continues to maintain this optimal performance standard. So like this is where cleaning can drive outcomes. And I don't mean outcomes that are very esoteric and very subjective around cleanliness and tenant satisfaction. I'm talking about driving outcomes that have, you know, the impact into the trillions. You know, when you think about the go forward investments that big tech are making and this is where we see the confluence of a lot of the investments that we've made into making cleaning front and center. It's the reason that we invested in data clean, because we know that it has a direct impact on the performance of a data center. Now we need to be able to drill that down into having an impact on the performance of a chip that can cost, you know, a Blackwell chip I think is like 250 grand, you know, in capital investment, you know, not what most people realize.

Yeah, I love those. That's expensive. And cleaning extends the life of that by a few years for a better environment. That's, that's a major ROI's impact, major.

ROI kind of backlog in manufacturing these chips. You know, it's about downtime and when you have downtime in compute, the impacts are just, there's numerous derivative, you know, impacts.

When I was going to ask you. So one of the things that I heard was a lot of synergy. Right. And so from a portfolio perspective, how important is it for you to kind of connect the dots for the companies that you, that are part of your under your portfolio? Like, because you guys are essentially not moving the pieces but like, you know, you guys are seeing where there's commonalities between these companies that you're investing. Right. Is that something that you kind of lead with when you're trying to get new companies or purchase new companies? How does that like kind of unfold? Is that the standard for VC to be able to connect the dots within their portfolios? Does that make sense?

Yeah, yeah, it makes a lot of sense. You know, for our strategy. It is the only way we could be relevant player. And what I mean by that is the tech companies that we've invested in, they will tell you that, you know, our capital is no greener than another investors. But where we have an outsized impact on our portfolio company is connecting all those dots. And it many times is connecting the dots to customers. We spend a lot of time talking to, you know, large global real estate companies. Sometimes they've invested alongside of us. Other times they're just, you know, 20, 30 year relationships. And, you know, so we sort of wear a business development and sales hat on behalf of many of our companies all at once. I mean, there are many times that I'm on a conversation and I might intentionally or inadvertently touch on half a dozen of our companies because they're relevant to, you know, to that end user. And so that's very helpful, you know, to them. It's also very helpful to us because, you know, the best way to get a return is to sort of pull that company forward. If we can help, you know, a company identify a customer that can drive a few million dollars in ARR in a market that typically uses, say, a 10x valuation on ARR, we're actively creating value for ourselves and for, you know, shareholder. And so my job every day is to make sure that I know exactly, you know, where all of those points of contact are. And it's probably the most fun part of my day is when I can connect those dots for one of our, you know, founders. I mean, I was doing it for June last week, you know, on a call, you know, it just, it happens multiple times a week.

I know. I will say you have a very good pulse on not just what's happening in your space, but like in the cleaning industry as a whole. Right. Like you, we had connected because of Pioneer and things like that. But then we talked about the podcast and then you were actively advocating for Braincore and then Stan Compute and Eden and like, it just feels like it's more of a collaborative and like obviously if they're those companies are successful, it's successful for you. But it feels like you're, you're generally wanting people to succeed, which is, which is nice coming from that space, which I think is very like cutthroat a little bit. But it feels more like you're hoping that people are successful. If that sounds too cheesy, then my.

Apologies is all about collaboration. I have not met or invested with or worked on an investment with another venture investor that wasn't collaborative. It's sort of this, you know, mantra of it takes a village to raise a child. And that is the analogy that I think is most appropriate because these young companies many times are matched by young founders. The average age of our founders are early 30s for our venture stage companies, for our private equity stage companies, there's a bit more gray hair, you know, in the boardroom. But as far as, you know, we find and first meet our founders typically at A leading university. They're either coming out of undergrad, many times you're going through a PhD program and we're one of those groups that get in front of them. Most of the time we're put in front of them and we get to know that founder and the tech over a period of time. I mean, our, our investment cycle is not short. It probably takes us two years to invest a dollar of capital. We take those two years to really get to know the founder, to make sure that they, by the time we invest that they. We sort of have this minimum threshold of a million in ARR. Many times it's under that. But we want to see line of sight to a million an arrow. And we know that we have a big impact on their execution between the day we meet them and the time that we invest. Otherwise we just don't invest in the company. But these are young, smart, driven, creative people. But many times they've never built anything on their own before and that requires a lot of handholding. And so you get to know people intimately, well and you've got to invest in the person and in the team. Otherwise it just is not going to be a great outcome.

What characteristics are you looking for, though? Because I asked you a question offline and in terms of like, I've been getting a lot of questions about decks and branding and like, how important is it when you're pitching. And one of the things that you said was like, I'm actually looking more at the people, like the people is what matters. So what are you looking for when it comes to like founders, characteristics of founders that you're like, oh yeah, 100% this is going to work.

Yeah. I think we look for, as I mentioned earlier, sort of table stakes is, you know, sort of intellectual horsepower. Most of them are, almost all are coming from great universities where I feel like, you know, they've already demonstrated that we look for the intangibles, grit, tenacity, integrity and just, are you going to do what you say you're going to do? And I look for people that have had a level of adversity in their background and where I've made mistakes on investing in an individual, it takes time for them to sort of show who they really are. It's typically a founder that sort of grew up with a silver spoon in their mouth and the outcome wasn't really going to change, you know, how their next opportunity was going to unfold. But for many of our founders, you know, they started, you know, at a point in life and maybe Even in a, in a foreign country where they had to overcome a lot of adversity to get to where they are. And for me that means a lot. I don't want to be in the first situation of adversity and that a founder has had to go through. And you know, that's very different than how we think about investing in our later stage sort of mature companies. There it's all about cash flow and EBITDA and growth rate. But when it comes to early stage companies, you are investing in, you know, a handful of qualities in that founder and they could be brilliant, they could have a great product, but if they don't have the grit to get through, as you know, there are more bad days than good days in early stage tech. Yeah, you know, it takes a lot to get over that hump and if you don't have it, you're just not going to get. It's like we're not a charity. We do need to get a return, we do need to get our money back and get a return on our investments. We can't get it on all of them, but we, that's, we have to start with the expectation that we are and you know, if we don't think that that founder is going to be able to get to that point, then otherwise we're just, you know, throwing good money after that.

Man. Solid, solid advice. I, I looked down at the clock and I was like, man, we're already nearly at 40 minutes. This is flying. I have so many questions, but maybe to, to cap off the topic, I'm curious if you'd be willing to, to dive into. A few months ago Service Titan went public and that was in, in my opinion, you know, shockwaves for maybe the future beliefs of the facility services, services industry as a whole. I mean it's, it's no small feat. They went public. $9 billion IPO, like what from, from your standpoint as an investor, what does that say to the industry as a whole, the market that it's serving and what we can expect in the next decade as far as technology and investments in this space.

It made me think that I wish I got in on that deal back. It is a company that we have tracked closely. It's probably one of the best performing prop tech, larger proptech, you know, businesses of all time. We have invested in several, what I would call marketplaces. Service Titan is really a dual sided market and when you think about their success, many marketplaces build product for the customer. But in order for a marketplace to be successful the groups selling into that marketplace, in this case service providers, blue collar service providers, they have to be able and show that they're adopting the tool. Otherwise you don't have a balance of supply and demand. And where we have lost money on investments in marketplaces, at least around this issue, it's when you know, they weren't as focused on building product for the service provider. It was almost like hey service provider, we want you to be on the platform. We don't really care what you think about the product, you just have to use it. If you want to work with us and you want to get revenue and customers from us, you have to use it. As opposed to what would be a product that we can build, that you'd love to use, that you would respond to quicker. I mean think of Service Titan as sort of the Uber, you know, you know, H vac plumbing, you know, electrical, you name it. There's other apps out there that those companies are getting leads and service opportunities through. But Service Titan is the main platform. That's the ecosystem they want, want to live in. So we're very bullish on that market. You know, we're working with a, another founder, you know, out of the Austin market that I'm going to see a couple of weeks ago, Karina, that I think I introduced you to. I'll even, you know, mention the business because he's built an incredible business business called Worksmith that is also a two sided marketplace. Very successful, multi exited founder knows what he's doing. He built the first technology, first marketplace for multi site real estate. Think luxury retailers, big box retailers and they've gone to excruciating lengths to build products for the service providers that are on their platform. They've even built a credit product to get them paid faster if they need, you know, better cash flow. So we're a big believer in marketplaces but it's got to be for the right type of customer, you know, big, you know, Apple is probably not using Service Titan to deploy services to Apple locations. Now they do use service channel, that's another, another animal. But we're a big believer in marketplaces to drive adoption within fm specifically man.

Fascinating the future of this industry. I mean this is why I stick around in IT and push and resilient to the changes that we've gone through over the last 22 years. It's just exciting to be at the forefront of. Karina, any final questions from you?

I was just going to ask what advice would you give a tech company that's coming into our Space that is trying to leverage new tech. Not new tech, but just advice for companies that are coming in that want to come into the cleaning industry. That historically is a little bit archaic when it comes to tech adoption.

Boy, that's, that's a tough question. I mean, first sort of know what you're getting into. You know, unfortunately, the janitorial, specifically the janitorial business, it's very fragmented, as we know. There's lots of points of distribution both on the service and the, you know, the product side. And the best advice I would give them is, you know, partner with a customer that can be an investor to get adoption at scale. The, the beauty of PropTech is that the investor community by and large is also the same as your customer base. You know, one of our best performing portfolio companies is a company called Measurable. They built the world's largest and first ESG monitoring platform. They do a lot more than that. So if Matt Ellis is listening, I know you do a lot more than that. But they were very smart in that almost all of their early customers were also investors. And that flywheel creates success because if that customer is willing to deploy you within their portfolio and write a check, you're going to have them for a long, long time. And for janitorial, I would say the same. Get a large BSc as an investor. There's plenty of them, whether it be founders or some of the public companies that have invested in companies and get them to adopt your product at a regional level first and then at a national level. Because all it takes is having one of those customers to be national. And if you pick the right investor and customer, it's going to open up a million doors. And frankly, I would argue it's going to, it's going to blow those doors down. Unfortunately, within Janitorial, nobody has taken that approach. They've all tried to raise money from classic either Silicon Valley investors who don't understand this area, but they haven't gone after sort of strategic venture arms and funds within end users, but the ones that have, have had a lot of success.

Very cool. That's great advice.

Well, Brian, it has been an absolute privilege to have you on the show today and thank you for sharing your insights and knowledge with our audience. Last Gold Nugget. If there's one thing that you would want our audience, facility managers, BSCs, as they are the end users and listeners, one gold nugget that you want them to remember from today's discussion, what would that be?

I think One Gold Nugget is just go out and try different products. The beauty of janitorial is you typically have, you know, a very large base of employees. Those employees are looking for ways to make their job easier. This is hard work. You know, I was in an airport the other day, and there was a lady cleaning, going into the women's bathroom, and she had to have been my mother's age. This is an industry that offers jobs to people, you know, in high school, all the way up through retirement. This is laborious work. It's backbreaking work. And so I think companies have a responsibility to be looking for and searching for products and technology that are going to make the lives of their frontline workers better and safer and more enriched. Because when they don't, you know, it's a tough, tough business. It could be a lot easier.

My gosh, I love that so much.

Hopefully everyone was writing that down and it meant something. I always said not I've always said, but I often say lately, it's not what is taught, it's what is caught. Hopefully you caught something that was inspiring from today's episode.

So good.

Thanks, everyone, for joining.

Thank you.

Thanks, Brian.

Cheers.