Leading in Harmony: How Two Co-Owners Made a Smooth Transition at Custom Channels

Today we sat down with the CEO and COO of Custom Channels. They create custom licensed music and playlists for businesses. One of them was already working in the company and the other came in from the outside. Now they're co-owners figuring out how to lead together. And what's interesting about this episode is that it was actually a pretty smooth transition. We talked about how they made that work, how they decided what to focus on and prioritize first. And what it takes to make change stick without losing any momentum. I think it's one of those stories that makes you think about what good leadership really looks like. So you definitely want to take a listen.

Bought the Biz is a podcast for ETA entrepreneurs who've gone from searching for a business to actually running one. It tells the real story of what happens after the deal closes, the day-to-day operational, emotional, strategic, and leadership challenges that just don't show up in the highlight reels.

The show is story-driven and practical, sharing real experiences from operators along with clear, actionable takeaways you can use in your own business today.

I'm Garth Fossano.

I'm Christi Loucks. Welcome to Bot the Biz. Joe and Curt, it is great to have you on the podcast. Can you just do a quick introduction of Custom Channels and who you are?

Sure.

Thanks, Christi.

Appreciate you having us on. Joe here, CEO of Custom Channels.

I'm Kurt, I'm the COO of Custom Channels. We are a music for business company, an in-store experience. So we provide music playlists, platforms, and services for brick-and-mortar locations. You walk into a retail restaurant space, hospitality, medical, dental, you hear music, you experience the brand that's That's, that's us. We power those experiences and we co-own the business together.

Yep.

This has been around for 30 amazing years and we acquired the business earlier this year in March. So we're 7 months into the operating seat. What's unique about our scenario is Kurt has been at Custom Channels, was actually an intern at the business 11 years ago.

Yeah, I interned in 2014 while I was still in school. Joined the company after graduating and have kind of been with it ever since, um, you know, really working my way up through the ranks, uh, to say the least. Um, it's just, you know, we're a small company and it's an exciting new chapter now that Joe and I are at the helm.

So one, maybe give— to help people understand a little bit about what you do, you've got these, these bookshelves of these things that, you know, some people might not even know what those are anymore.

You're not—

you don't— you do those anymore, do you?

Yeah, so I mean, this is a testament to how long the business has been around, right? So what you're referring to, of course, is our, our wall of CDs. Uh, this is what you would call physical media. Uh, it doesn't necessarily get a lot of talk these days, but the business used to actually import music from CDs into a, you know, streaming platform and then relay that up to our clients. Now, of course, everything is completely cloud-based. But that's how long the business has been around. And we've retained sort of that really like hands-on music curation and charm of, of a long, longstanding music technology company. Yeah.

And Garth, many people when we first talked about the company, they're like, I didn't know this existed. What do you mean you don't know that businesses— don't they just use Spotify? Right. And so a lot of people don't know is that businesses are legally required to play compliant licensed music. So we pay for the umbrella royalties and rights for those music albums and libraries and have the ability then to kind of COVID the customers from a licensing standpoint and provide that as part of our service.

Interesting. Yeah, I probably would have thought you just play Spotify, like hit a playlist. Yeah, but that makes a lot of sense and probably gives the company a lot more control of what that music is like. So, um, when you said you've been running the business for 7 months, uh, Joe, but Kurt, you've obviously been there for a lot longer. Um, also it sounded like you guys really developed a good working relationship before you stepped into this together. And I think that that actually sounds like it has made a lot of the process pretty smooth. Can you tell us a little bit about that and how that came about?

Yeah, I mean, I think especially in the ETA space, we are pretty atypical in that I found Joe and not the reverse in a way. Right. I mean, Joe can tell his side of the story. Of course, it's always good when we have both sides of the story. But we were introduced through a mutual friend and just kicked things off, you know, understanding we had similar interests in business and life. And, you know, Joe had just moved here from New York. To Denver, which is where I grew up. And it became clear that we had some overlap in, you know, in our interests as long-term, you know, business owners. Joe was looking for, you know, a place to land and start and run a business. And I was looking for, you know, well, I've been at this company for 10 years, what's next for me? And I had— I didn't really know much about the ETA space until Joe came in with this big, bold idea of, hey, like, let's do this thing, right?

Yeah. And so Kurt and I actually met through a mutual friend here in Colorado a couple of years ago at his wedding. Yeah, yeah, their friend's wedding. And, you know, flash forward 6 months, my friend comes up to me and he's talking about the opportunity of one of his buddies that he went to high school with where, you know, his existing business has been around. I'm like, they do what? They make music playlists for businesses? Okay, very fascinating. Like, let's learn more. And so Kurt and I actually met for coffee about 17, 18 months ago and talked about that exact vision, the company, where we were coming from. I think a little bit about, yeah, my story. I mean, coming from a family of small business owners, it was always kind of a dream of mine to really build and grow NurtureOne one day and, you know, got introduced to, right, kind of the ETA or myself as Kurt and I kind of really being more self-funded searchers than the traditional kind of search fund model. Introduced to each other, you know, and obviously really kind of hit it off from in terms of like what both of us from a personal and career standpoint were looking to get out of our next phase. And then of course the sheer timing that, you know, just so happened Custom Channels was for sale.

Yeah. So to answer your question, I mean, our working relationship actually is longer. We've spent more time together not running the business than we have running the business.

That's probably a good thing. Yeah.

Yeah.

Right.

We had a, we had a nice little test phase there of, of working through. I mean, as anybody who's gone through this process knows, the, the getting the deal done is, is, is one thing that's, that's a business in itself. And so we were able to kind of work through our working differences during that period. And now it's, it's all, it's all harmony from here, right?

It's over on the other side. And, you know, after we got introduced, it was right, kind of taking over the reins of the company, very great segue from the former sellers, everyone was kind of wondering like, so that's why your door was closed, Curt, for so long. And meanwhile, I'm hogging all of his time with you know, legal, uh, investors, you know, the bank, etc. So fun story.

So then how did, how did that translate into the transition, right? How did you actually go about bringing Joe in? What was that like for you, Joe? And what was that like for you, Kurt, with just given the fact that you had such a legacy in the business and you had seen such evolution over those 10 years?

Yeah, I mean, it's a good question because No transition is straightforward or easy. I would like to say that this was fairly smooth. The previous owners, some fun characters, right? Like great people. And the way that they announced this is they got the team together and said, we have sold the business, but full stop. And, you know, everybody's kind of looking around me like, oh, what does this mean? Like, do I still have a job? Like, what's going on? And then it was— and one of the owners is in this room, right? And then they kind of turn to me and say, Kurt here is, you know, taking over the reins, blah, blah, blah. And he's come in with a business partner, Joe. And I texted Joe because he's waiting in the hall to walk in the door and have a walk-up song queued up.

Yeah, I feel like that would be appropriate.

It probably would have made me a little bit more relaxed. And I think what's funny about the story is that, I mean, Kurt and I, you know, employees are the most important thing about the company. We're really methodical. And I remember I started like a document of like, what is our talk track? How are we going to frame this? The first thing everyone's going to think is, oh crap, like what is going to happen to the company? Maybe my job, just kind of be a little uneasy with such sudden change. And yeah, but it truly was opens the door, I walk in, and then there's, you know, 12 people just staring at you. Who is this guy?

Who's this guy, right? But I will give Joe a lot of credit. Um, something that he did, you know, which you'll probably find amusing, is, you know, he had essentially like a scouting sheet, right? He had the LinkedIn headshots of all the employees and like the bits of information that I had given him over the last, you know, 10 months of working together about who they are, what they do, that kind of thing. Because You know, he wanted to come in and know as much as possible about the individuals at the company, right? He wanted to know who he was going to be working with, who was going to maybe be looking up to him or be wary of his presence, right? And, you know, he did his homework, to say the least, right?

And did that help Joe?

It did.

And even funnier is we actually did it before we closed.

Right. We announced it about 3 weeks before closing.

Yeah.

Wow.

Just for all takers.

There's a pot boiling around. Word might get out. How do we make this as seamless for the employees? Right. And so we made a mutual decision with the 2 sellers who also uniquely co-own the business together to make it happen.

Yeah. I mean, one of the reasonings behind that actually to the seller's credit was that they wanted the employees not to feel caught completely off guard, right? It's not like they announced the transition, someone raises their hand and says, I don't want you guys to do this. And they say, okay, you're right, we'll pull the plug. But they, you know, they wanted to say like, look, we are working towards getting this deal done. We're bringing everybody into the fold now so that you know it's happening and that there's going to be a transition period and a process to go through this, which was actually like, to your point, yes, it's, you know, it's a risk. You don't have that pen to paper yet, but it obviously worked out.

I think at the end of the day, I've heard of other companies doing that too that felt like they had good alignment announcing beforehand. I mean, it doesn't seem like it's really a risk to you guys. It's more of a risk for the sellers to do that, is my understanding. So I think that's, that's great.

Well, risk to me since I was employed, you know, Kurt was kind of In the middle of, uh, yeah, right, the business buying love triangle through all this.

And I still didn't get my broker's fee for this whole thing, but hopefully you got some step up from Joe or the investors in that process, right? Yeah, right, exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Um, so I mean, Joe, you probably haven't done this before, but it also feels like this was a pretty unique situation where you actually had a partner inside the business, and so you probably had a lot in many ways, better information than a lot of other, like, a typical searcher. So do you feel like there were, it was all smooth sailing and there were no surprises because of that? Or did, you know, anything still sort of come up over time?

Did I hide anything?

Yeah, where are the bodies buried, right? And that's another good point to kind of always maintain the seller relationship, which is kind of one, one small anecdote too is that has been extremely important, is always talked about in ETA and search and kind of the transition is really maintaining that type of relationship for the sellers where you can call them when anything's going wrong. And actually, we're going out to dinner tonight with them, which is really serendipitous, 6 months after the fact, right? Yeah, to celebrate the transaction. And so, you know, because of the relationship, I mean, Curt and I sometimes joke that we almost talked more, you know, during the preceding, like, few months about, you know, all these myriad of, like, transaction items, just kind of get it across the finish line. And like, what are any employee business operations, the financial operations of the business, like, what are we gonna have to kind of keep our eyes on and deal with in the first, you know, 3 to 6 months of ownership? And so I think that the biggest surprise for me, and it's really an exercise of change management, has been, you know, a company where, you know, the average employee has been here for probably about 7 years, right? We're 12 people as a small add-on. We do business with, you know, 10,000 businesses across the US and Canada. Um, and so we have a large employee base and a massive customer base, right? And so everyone has been operating at this company under kind of a certain way of, you know, your traditional lifestyle business. Kurt was really doing, um, the work of the GM, really, the last couple of years of like overseeing all the operations. And so For me, the biggest learning is how do we both, uh, take the existing, um, modus operandi, for example, of the business, the employees, what motivates them, and then really try to rewire that for, of course, the fact that we bought the business under the assumption we can and want to grow it, right? So kind of really rewiring everyone and flipping some of the ways things have been done on their head has certainly been that change management piece that, you know, we are consistently working on from an employee and operational standpoint.

So many questions about that.

Yeah.

Because I think this is what every searcher is coming into a business to do is like, hey, here's a great solid business. I can jump in. I can make some easy, simple changes like the classic, oh, I'm just going to digitize it and then everything's going to work better. But, you know, here you're saying like there is a lot more to it than just like, implementing a digital system and you guys are already a SaaS company. So like, what are some of the tactics you've taken to try to build that cultural momentum? What's worked, what hasn't too?

Yeah, absolutely. So, right, like we, you know, it'd be facetious if we thought that we could kind of just start investing in marketing, right? And everything would come. We would love if that's been the case the last 7 months. Of course it hasn't, right? And so I think first, you know, it's a lot of really what is our 2-5 year vision. And of course that dovetails into what is the strategy for the business. And then, you know, kind of our first project was really trying to think about the market we operate in, talk to as many customers as we can the first kind of 3 months to learn about why they love us, what they, what else do they want from us from a service or purchasing standpoint. And really take that and then kind of realign the priorities of each employee. Like, some of— such a common thing with any small business, not unique to us, is that everyone is involved in every single thing, right? Like, every shared inbox from your accounting to your customer service to your support inbox, every 12 people, you know, every single one is getting all of those emails. And so really just trying to reorder the priorities of each person to go from generalist to like more specializing in their job function. So creating those job functions, creating, you know, I mean, we're working on things like career pathing and just really trying to realign the team on priorities, to put it short.

Yeah. You know, carving out, like just said, those specialties and then and building, you know, the team has a lot of trust already inherently just by working together for so long. But then, but building a new type of trust of I, I can do one thing or a couple things very well and trust that the things I'm used to, like, pick up on here and there, that the person who is in charge of those is going to either, you know, get those done independently or ask for help when needed and not think about trying to all, you know, like, yes, it's a team effort. Everybody's pitching in all the time, but really trusting each other that look, the ball's not going to get dropped. You know, that email might not get answered within 10 minutes, but maybe it's, you know, 3 hours or the next day. And is that breaking the culture of a small business? You know, we don't, we don't think so, right? Like it is just re— like Joe said, rewiring the way that, you know, employees think about the way that we can serve our customers.

So you've worked here for 7 years. Now you're telling me we're a startup?

All of a sudden, right?

So I have a— okay, can you talk a little bit about the dynamic between the two of you in terms of prioritizing these things? Because I think it's really interesting, Kurt, that you have this in-depth knowledge of the business and probably a lot of biased opinions on what needs to change. How did that align with, you know, newbie Joe coming in? Were you kind of always on the same page, or like, how did you kind of talk through new ideas while setting aside some of maybe your experience with the company? Can you just like, what was that dynamic like for you? Because I imagine it's very similar, not entirely the same, but for people who are coming in and working with some key employee or kind of GM of sorts, um, that does have probably a stance on where the business needs to go. I think that's pretty common. So can you just explain how that worked for you?

Yeah, I mean, I think both myself and Joe were fortunate in that we, you know, everybody will say this, like you balance each other out in terms of, you know, the— I've got a, you know, technical product in, you know, internal tooling sort of brain and vision. And Joe has the experience and, you know, vision from a sales marketing, go-to-market, strategy perspective, right? And so this was a lot of the, right, the laying the groundwork of our working relationship, you know, prior to the transaction of understanding that I was going to be able to let go of, you know, some of the sales and marketing initiatives in terms of not completely take myself out of it, give my experience and like market vision of like where I've seen the market, where I see it going, but allow Joe to really push the boundaries of like, well, where can we execute? What tools do we need to do that? Who do we need to hire? Right? Like, how can we really drive that? And at the same time, you know, he understands that like Kurt has run this business again from like a GM kind of level for at least the last few years and has been here for so long that I don't have to dive into, you know, how our playlists are being made and delivered and how the software is being developed, right? Like, and under— and trusting that what we're building is on track to match our go-to-market vision, right? So, of course, huge benefit that our working styles aligned in that way. But I mean, there was— we sat down at like, this cheap steakhouse near like my old neighborhood at one point, you know, right before the sale went through, and we're like, you know, talking about like, well, what is the strategy of, you know, the next phase of this business, right?

And we're still talking about it.

We're still talking about it. Like, I am, you know, I told Joe then, like, here's where I think we could go. And Joe's absorbing and learning, which is a great, you know, trait to come in, I think, especially from the outside for anyone, is to, to really be open to like absorb information. And then, you know, now 7 months in, I, you know, see him really distilling all of what he's learned and bringing it to the rest of like our sales team to say like, these are our differentiation points, our target customers, and really how we can package and sell, right?

So how you guys have been talking about some of the changes you've been making or thinking about making, and how have you balanced sort of implementing those, creating change versus what you just described Joe as doing, sort of absorbing and learning. So what is your pace of change? Anything that you think should move faster or maybe you should have moved slower on? Yeah.

So the first, you know, I'd say 4 months really until up until recently, Kurt and I tackled every single problem together. And I think we've really hit the, the tipping point where, um, I feel onboarded and, you know, knowing that there are certain things that I'm actually just not going to learn right now about the business. Like, if the music stops playing in, uh, you know, one of our 400-unit location customers, I mean, Kurt can fix that, I can't. And like realizing that that's all right. And so we tackle all these problems, hit the tipping point of now like separating our different functions and kind of relying and trusting on each other to— we're going to, you know, execute to our best ability within those functions. And that really will allow us to scale. And it's interesting because we're also talking about the same thing we mentioned a few minutes ago with the employees, is kind of really specializing, finding your lane. And so from a what did we change, um, you know, the first, you know, 3 months, just really kind of, uh, putting an attitude towards, you know, the growth mindset and you know, really trying to really understand the opportunity that this business has in the market we play in, which is the music for business space. Um, you know, some of our competitors are like Sirius, Pandora, you know, those things. And how do we— how are we unique? How do we differentiate? And then install some like core new operating rhythms, right? Which is a whole nother— you know, you can do a whole other podcast on where We started the first monthly all-hands and then we instituted some KPIs at the company. We instituted an OKR program that we owe the second half of the year OKRs on next week in our monthly all-hands. We instituted kind of like a weekly standup within the R&D function or the sales function and just trying to get everyone aligned in terms of what we change. And, and we have had, you know, employees that have departed and, you know, a couple new people on board. And so ramping them up has been another change as well from the company standpoint.

I mean, I think that employees actually really enjoy some of the transparency, or like, and especially the types of employees that want to come along on this type of a journey. So, you know, I gave a handful of my key employees The Great Game of Business early on, told them to read this book, which is For those of you that hadn't read it, it's all about exposing basically P&L level metrics for each department and making people responsible and take ownership of that. We tied bonuses and things like that to that, and people really appreciated that, it seems. I think it's actually fun and empowering to start to do some of those types of things, but there are definitely people who feel like the change is sort of scary and risky. Every business owner is concerned about sharing those P&L level details. So like, how far did you go? And what was your, like, are you sharing full P&L or is it just sort of the right unit level KPI metrics?

We go both top level P&L. We set a revenue goal for our business, you know, being SaaS or software based, right? It's an MRR, monthly recurring revenue or annualized number of that figure. We set that target. We also set what's really important is North Star metrics across the company. For us, it's the number of locations we service with our music platform. We have, you know, different figures like the average amount of units or locations per customer, you know, net retention figures. So we haven't dove into the actual you know, kind of below-the-line metrics. Because from my experience, and actually kind of what you hear from other small business owners as well, is it doesn't often resonate with employees. And you kind of have to slowly introduce these types of concepts. And so even just the level of transparency of sharing the revenue figure and a target, I mean, it's already beyond what the company—

I mean, I can speak to it, right? Like, we've gotten even just feedback from the, you know, first, you know, 4 monthly all-hands that we had of, of like, oh, wow, like, we love seeing actually how the company is doing and how we're growing. And, you know, what each new customer actually does to, you know, to our achievement towards goals, right? Like, it sounds silly thing to say, especially I stayed here, you know, 10 years without any sort of really real, like, goal attainment, like framework, at the company, right?

I'm laughing so much because I remember the first time I shared the revenue growth, like immediately after that all hands had never been shared before. I got messages from employees that were like, oh my God, thank you so much. I had never seen this before. I thought the company was doing terrible. It's so cool to hear that we're doing well and we're growing. This is exciting. Like, so yeah, it's, it's, it's— yeah. And then for the first time though, but it shouldn't be.

Great, great.

Yeah, in month 3, we launch, and this is where we're moving, moving fast in terms of— we launched, yeah, an incentive program. Like, okay, we've just stated the goals. Why do you care, right? And how do we motivate not just, you know, the entire company and even ourselves, right, from an incentive program that's tied to these goals? And, um, you know, even in our, uh, TV in the main part of the office, we put up a list of those goals and our top customers and then how we're tracking. And so it's an in real time, right? And so just everyone, everyone appreciates that. And when it's new and fresh and you can see, you know, how you become intrinsically motivated to kind of all work together, it's, uh, it's been definitely a very rewarding part of the last year.

That sounds pretty awesome. So it's all been easy then? No hard moments between—

Yeah, this is so smooth.

Yeah, yeah, running a business is, is very straightforward, you know.

I think there are a couple things that are really unique about this. First, You know, you guys are running a SaaS company, not the typical searcher-type business. Second thing is, you know, Kurt, new owner, like you've been deeply embedded in the business for, you know, over 10 years. And another thing, this is sort of a partner search team in many ways, which— so those are 3 really unique things to the search space. So in some ways it does make sense that you've had a little bit of a different experience. And I'm not implying that it's all been perfect. I'm sure it hasn't.

Yeah, no, I mean, you get the benefits and the downsides to, you know, the, the partnership dynamic from not just our interpersonal relationship necessarily, but from a, you know, employee and strategic vision perspective, right? You know, like, one thing we had to do was institute a like reporting system even, right? Something as simple as like, okay, I will take some direct reports and Joe will take some direct reports, right? Like previously, 'cause it was also two owners, the previous owners of the business, it was two individuals and it was just sort of like, okay, they're our boss, right? That's our bosses, you know, there's no reporting system. And like we flashed that up on the screen at an all hands recently, just the fact that some people reported me, some people reported Joe, people were like, gasp. They were like, whoa, like, this is like, you know, you're thinking you're like presenting it like a, you know, a gigantic matrixed organization. And it's, you know, it's not even as big as my family tree, right?

Like it's tiny things. I gotta ask questions about this, about how you went about showing that, because I did it in apparently, or in what I now know was a really bad way. Um, so about 45 days in, I think it was 30 to 45 days in, I had an idea of what the org chart should look like. And it was trying to correct a lot of the things that you mentioned, like, hey, everyone does everything. Everyone's in every inbox. Like, we had no one in account management. We had no one in sales. Like, it was just everyone was kind of doing a little bit of everything. And so I started to create a draft of what that would look like in my classic sort of like consulting training way and started to socialize it with people. And I got to one person and they basically hung up on me. And, um, and so like that part did not go well. Um, so I'm curious, like, how did you— and by the way, from my perspective, I was like, hey, this is a draft, this is a proposal, I'd like feedback. And I got like click. Um, so, uh, how did you go about that? Because I think that that could be really scary for some people.

Uh, well, first of all, we did it in the— in this room, so no one was able to actually hang up on us. That's good, that's good. But, uh, I mean Yeah, I don't know, you want to speak to that a little bit?

So we didn't do it in 45 days. We did it after 6 months when, you know, the same kind of tipping point part of, okay, well, you know, career pathing and performance reviews are important, but, you know, doing that, you know, all together across the existing base, like, it just, it makes sense, right? And so, um, yeah, we did share up, uh, an org chart on a PowerPoint slide and yeah, it always looks silly for a small business, but I think there are pros and cons where you think about people that have more than one eventual manager. There are things to bring real life HR issues, personal things too, and I think having that one person, we realized kind of outweighed the vague dotted line into both of us, and so from what we understood, it was well received, but I think at the end of the day, I mean, people know, And this is where Kurt and I have had to be in lockstep in so many little syncs before meetings just to make sure we're aligned and figuring out, I think, the best way to move the company forward.

Yeah, and the other piece of that also is that this came shortly after our second hire in, you know, really 3 months, right? Which, that's a whole conversation.

Yeah, we're on the phone giving an offer, which is so exciting, Yeah.

And then you think about it, who's your manager, right? And, you know, like these are the things that like, again, with a small company like, like ours and, and like Joe said, the average tenure here is quite, you know, quite long, you know, 6 or 7 years. And, you know, I'm the longest standing employee here, but many of the employees who are here joined, you know, a year or two after I did. Right. And so when you do start hiring, that's a big change because we don't hire very often. We don't change, we don't grow and contract very much, right? The business scales without having to scale workforce. It's a really nice business model in that sense. But as we made our second hire, that was one piece of formalizing the process, thinking about career pathing, right? Because like when you're trying to attract right talent, like those, those systems and processes have to be in place. I mean, I remember when Joe You know, this was 2 months or 3 months after we took over and we're like, let's, let's hire somebody. And Joe's like, okay, where do I go? And I'm like, what do you mean, where do you go? I'm like, you, you make a job posting. He's like, where's our job board?

Right.

And we don't have a job board.

Great small business moment where, okay, we have to hire, don't have a job board. How do we make one? I'm like, you know, Googling for way too long. Employee tracking systems, 'cause I'm like, everyone's not gonna email us the application, 'cause that's how it was done before.

That's how I used to do it, right? 'Cause I was doing hiring.

Where do we post it? And then, you know, I think something that you definitely saw is the seriousness in like actually running a, I mean, a pretty big and time-intensive hiring process. I mean, we're, every person we bring in right now is close to 10% of our culture, workforce, right? And it's so important. But the hiring story is quite funny because as a small company, that is an extreme challenge and lift for us in terms of the amount of people we screen and brought in.

And the resources that it takes away from like the day-to-day to be able to do that, right? The two hires that we made since we took over, both were three, sometimes even four-round process, you know, screening, interview in person, right? Like all all of that. And it's just so funny to me being like, what do you mean we need like a process to do this, right? It's like, you know, I've, I've had pretty good success doing this kind of ad hoc in the past. But it definitely is different when, you know, we're, we've got the goals and the scale that we want to achieve.

So you mentioned something so important there that going, doing this hiring process in a small business takes away like somebody you generally don't have someone whose job description includes recruiting and hiring. And so that means it lands on you or somebody else and takes away from all the other strategic objectives. So if you are planning to grow like a classic ETA or searcher, like, that is— that needs to be accounted for. And you probably didn't put it in your growth model and financial plan before you bought the business, right?

And I mean, and the other thing to consider is that it's It's also likely not in anybody's job description to train or onboard someone. Right. And that, like, these are, you know, these are the things that we've obviously come up against in the, you know, the first few months.

So yeah, that's all things people need to be thinking about.

This is where you insert the ad for the HR recruiting company, right?

Yeah.

We don't have any sponsors yet, but if you, if you know them, let us know.

No free ads. No free ads.

Exactly.

Yeah, the hiring and then, you know, all the operation pieces. For me, inheriting accounts payable, we have, you know, someone on our team in operations that's been great on the receivable side. And just, I mean, with 10,000 customers and thousands, you know, another interesting story you'd probably love, Garth and Christi, is we receive hundreds of paper checks for $30 to $100 a month.

Right.

And that shows the legacy of the business that it's been in. And so, you know, I'm coming in, not really like having the ability to understand that this is an actual thing.

He literally laughed out loud the first time he saw the first stack of checks. Like what he's like, what do we, what do we do?

Do people still do this?

And I actually, I have to write some checks out and doing the AP. And I, so I think the financial operations and of course, like we've helped gotten assistance like onboarding the accounting firm, like the seller has been fantastic at helping and even reviewing our books, right? Because he essentially ran that whole process and realizing that it's not the best use of either of our time. It's like, how do you find the ways in which you can scale your time by outsourcing the things that are not having us focus as much on our customers or as employees as we should be?

Right. Yeah. And it kind of goes back to your question earlier about you know, what were you able to like scale or change or, you know, spin up quickly, right? And it's, and, you know, automations, automations, it is the buzzword or whatever. But the, you know, we, you know, we had, you know, one employee had to leave, taken, you know, took another position, no, nothing to do with the transition. But that person was in a role that for many, many years, the company had talked about, like, there are a lot of automations and things in place that we could do to alleviate this. And we took, you know, a full-time role and made that into, you know, 20% of someone else's time, right? And, you know, the check processing, right? Like, those are— these are all things that little, little tweaks in efficiencies, like, when a huge— like, made a huge difference, right? They go really long.

I'm in the middle of that right now with my business, just in terms of automation, I had the opportunity to hire either a person to kind of be like, I don't know, GM of sorts, fractional, you know, leader, or hire an automation engineer. And I decided to go with automation first, just because of the scale factor, you know, with these particular projects that we're doing, it's just going to be so much more efficient and get us to a place where we can run so much more effectively. And then, you know, we're going to talk about hiring that person. So I think that's a huge thing for people to think through. And there's so many incredible ways to automate businesses these days. Like, it is mind-blowing.

Absolutely. Right.

Yeah.

Yeah. Right.

Yeah. I mean, we, you know, talk about some of the other operational efficiencies or automation we launched a chatbot, right? And a lot of that is automatic responses. And we also launched, you know, a support ticketing system, right? It was all email-based before. And, you know, so I think, you know, a mix of all those processes. And one other point I think it's not worth overlooking for, you know, small business owners and operators like us is the, you know, the ease of ability to find those automation people. Or Christi, I know you've done a great job of this, is those freelancers, right on platforms like Upwork and Fiverr and Post a Need. Like, they're doing a lot of work for us on, you know, both the marketing and some, you know, lower, uh, you know, skilled labor, and to do it at great scale and also very quickly, right? And so to really lean on those types of freelance jobs where, of course, it doesn't, you know, warrant a full-time hire for, you know, a business of our size, right?

How have you felt about, like, managing those types of folks? Because I've I think there's a fantastic podcast on how to sort of outsource and delegate tasks. It's Tim Ferriss's podcast with Sam Korkos. I thought it was sort of great, great structure for people who are new to that. But one of the things I've always felt like with Fiverr or part-time folks like that, it sort of creates a large managerial burden. And a lot of times that was on me as the sole owner. And, you know, over time that would eventually like they would either need to figure out how to run it on their own or I would move on.

Yeah, I mean, it is a really good question. And this is actually very topical for us right now, too. It's like we are, you know, trying to really enable and, you know, lift up the— our employees in their specialties to lead some of these initiatives and manage them. Right. Think about the things that they would have accomplished themselves. Can you spend a fraction of that time managing some of these other outsourced individuals or projects with a better return in terms of their time spent? Right. And we're definitely involved in that process. And it's new. It's a learning curve for everyone, right? Like some of our employees actually have used this in the past for the past 5 or 10 years. Some of them, don't even know that these tools exist, right? And, and it is a, you know, it's a, it's just a, a learning curve.

And, and really, uh, it's an enablement and autonomy part of the business where for us to appropriately scale, right, like each employee needs to feel empowered to make these decisions. And what it takes for us, whether it's, you know, assigning a budget or someone responsible to something like this, it really has built, it has allowed us to kind of really operate, you know, I think much more efficiently than in the past.

That's amazing.

That's great.

Anything, any other closing comments for folks or anything else you feel like we missed?

They say the partnered searches have great success and, you know, Kurt and I are, you know, running to first base and hopefully a game that's many, many innings long. And I think it really has been testament and of course the benefit of Kurt, who's worked at this great company for so long, the ability to, as someone coming from the outside, identify who is going to be instrumental to the company's success and who can really help continue to row the boat and then have someone new come in with fresh perspective, new ideas, the ability to have worked at maybe bigger companies and come in and instill some of these practices. I really have been amazed, I think, at our ability to really kind of do the partnered owner model. And it's been very fun so far. I mean, it hasn't come without its challenges in so many days of, I can't believe we're dealing with this again moments. But all in all, I mean, we're here to grow and learn and have some fun along the way. So it's been great.

Yeah.

It's awesome.

Definitely can't beat that wrap-up. So that's, that's perfect. Thanks so much, Joe and Kurt, for joining us. Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having us.