Interview with Tariq Malik

You're listening to One Sharp Sword cutting through to what Matters Most with outfluencer Dr. Wayne Purnell. Welcome to One Sharp Sword Cutting through to what matters Most. I'm your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell, your host, your guide and your coach on this journey. Today I have a guest who I am calling the reluctant cpa. Tarek Malik got into accounting and a, a path of finance. He now runs and is part of a fractional CFO organization and he got his start in finance after going through engineering. And it's an interesting circuitous route that so many people take, not on the path to finance but on the path to success. So it's like we never start or we never finish necessarily where we think we are going to finish. And I also have a sense that Tarek's not done also. So let's find out about Tarek's story. Tarek Malik, welcome to One Sharp Sword.

Glad to be here Wayne. Let's, let's get the show started.

Let's get the show started. All right, so, so behind you on your screen you have Chief Financial Officer CFO Services. And this is a fractional CFO company which means that if, if an organization needs some extra help and it could be a small organization that doesn't need a full time cfo, that's where you come in. Is that right?

Yeah, you put it absolutely right on the money. We service small medium sized companies who cannot afford a full time CFO because a full time CFO will cost anything, upwards of 300,000 a year for the full time services. At times they do not necessarily need the services five days a week as well. So that's where we come in. We fill in that opportunity where the need more than just the bookkeeping, more than controllership, they need strategic advice. And we come in typically on one day a week basis and kind of help the owner think it through, help them guide, strategize which way they're going, expanding, contracting, whichever way they want to. Maybe he wants to do an exit and so on. So we help them make that decision.

That's great. So you CFO services are everything from strategic planning to basic. Let's get your numbers back together so that you know what's going on all the way to. If you're thinking about selling, this is what the future looks like for you.

Typical small medium sized business will have enough resources to put the numbers together. The question is what do you do with those numbers? Most of the time the average Mr. Owner will file those numbers away to look at another day which never happens. So we basically help them get over that little bridge. Say your numbers are indicating that you're losing money on some of your ventures, you're making money on the others. Let's have a sit down, let's have a look at this. Should you be doing this? Few ventures, supporting the other ventures. Example will be 10 restaurants, three losing money and seven making money.

Gotcha. Right?

So cash flow will be another area where a lot of the business, businesses are profitable, but they may be in a cash crunch for various reasons, no fault of their own. So we kind of try to project in future three months upwards, rolling forecasts for next 13 months to see where they could benefit from that kind of insight.

I mean, plan ahead right forward planning is super important. I think any small business owner and actually any individual running their own life could use that kind of advice where it's, take a look, take a look at what's going on for the next 13, you know, next quarter, right? 12 to 13 weeks, to 12 to 13 months. So what's it look like a year out for yourself? What are you projecting for yourself? Where do you see yourself going? What are your needs? All those happy things that a lot of times it's easy to put off for someday. Someday I'll look at those numbers because I know what I really want. And it's really important to have the numbers because they tell a story.

And typically when we do this without knowing in our personal lives the daughter is going to university or new car is needed for the young son who's just grown 18 and all that type of thing. And we plan ahead and say, okay, next year, September, I'm going to need a car. What do I do? Where do I put the money away on a monthly basis or whatever the resources may be. But in businesses, you're so busy working in the business rather than working on the business that you have no time to think ahead. You're always putting out fires, you're always dealing with something, some new challenge. And that's where having a fractional CFO can be tremendously helpful. Sounds like it sounds like a commercial, but that's the reality on the ground.

Oh, it does. If you, you, you sound like it's, it's almost like fatherly advice is what, what I'm picking up.

You know, I, I hate to say it is fatherly advice, but it is.

Yeah. Yeah, it's and, and not bad, right at that. So let's talk about your journey because I'm looking down at some notes that I have. And you were, you, you told me earlier that you know, at 17 and this is like so many 17 year olds, you didn't know what you wanted to do. And you, you came from Pakistan and, and so it's like, well, at 17, what do I do with my life? And you started down an engineering path and then left Pakistan. Can you talk about just sort of like as a, as a late teen, how do you make decisions for the rest of your life?

What happened for you, especially in Pakistan? The career advice is not necessarily easy to find. It's always your uncles, elder brothers or whoever you can get your hands on to find what you want to do. And even having the idea that you need to have various options available to you, you're potentially looking at options. So I went through the science program where I was heading towards engineering university, got admitted to one of the world known universities in Lahore, Pakistan for engineering, only to find out that okay, I love engineering, I love playing with, fixing things and so on and so forth, but maybe that's not where my heart was. And I started to look around and another question at that time was to go for higher education potentially with the mother country called England. Because Pakistan came out of the colonial era not too long ago, England was the place to be. Second best was us. So I started to think and started to look around what can get me to England within my resources of my father who was a businessman slash a professor of English. So there was a little bit of affinity with England and it turned out to be to, after talking to various people, there was some program called ca, which is Chartered Accountancy, which is similar to CPA in us. So that kind of led me to England and I, not knowing and somewhat reluctantly became the accountant. I never wanted to be known as a CPA or accountant. So that's where the reluctant part comes in. I went through the training program three plus years, wrote the exams, passed them, and so on and so forth, only to realize I didn't want to do taxes, I didn't want to do the backseat accounting stuff. And so where do I go? This is five years after that initial discussion and I said, okay, if I go to industry, I will still be dealing, monetizing my qualification, but at the same time, at least I will be closer to the action rather than being an auditor or a tax, which is absolutely the furthest away you can get from the real business. So that's got me into industry. Started as a assistant controller, worked my way through different levels, vp, finance, and then eventually to cfo.

Well, I think there are some details you shared with me that I'd love to share with the audience. Right. So that you, you chose chartered accounting partly because it trade paid you while you were training, which I think is a, it's a really good, great avenue is if you can get paid along the way while you're learning. It's. It's amazing.

Yeah, sorry, go ahead.

Well, I was gonna, I was gonna, going to ask you about being recruited to Canada. The work you did with Ernst and Young and how you got to where you are now, which is in Florida.

So I graduated, did my training and so on with Ernst and Young right after qualifying, joined. As I mentioned, one of my clients was working with them and kind of getting bored in England. I think I had an itchy feet so I have to move somewhere. And that got me looking around the globe. Go back to Pakistan, that was the initial plan. Go further west to U.S. canada, Australia, New Zealand. Those were a few options. I applied various places, got accepted to Canadian provincial auditor's office, which is similar to being a state auditor. And here I was after some interviews and all that in minus 35 degrees. Canada. Didn't even know what part of Canada I was in. This is prior to Google Maps. This is prior to all the maps being available. So I went to a library to find out where Saskatchewan was. Saskatchewan is one of the provinces which is right above North Dakota. Nobody knows about it. Even Saskatchewan Saskatchewanians would like to leave that place rather than go in there. And there was about six of us who got recruited by provincial auditor's office. We were the backfill. Everybody who qualified in Saskatchewan as CPA or a CA will leave to go to Vancouver or go to Toronto. It's a prairie town, old fashioned farming community. Nobody wanted to stay there, not be known. There were six of us who arrived in Saskatchewan. Population. The city I was in was the capital, Regina, Saskatchewan. Population 175,000 people. It shouldn't even be called a city, but it was. Got there and thinking, okay, I left London, England to come to this place. It took about four or five years before I said, okay, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna move back into the industry. Joined a firm who was serving industry and then gradually jumped over to industry. Worked a few years and then found myself in Middle East. So my journey has been all over the world. I worked for a firm in a company really LNG producer in Abu Dhabi UAE for 10 years after that. So I kind of became a little stabilized after that and enjoyed every minute of it. My part of my assignment was training local people and having my bosses being trained under me because they just qualified from wherever and they will come over, they'll go through a two or three years training program. So the most interesting part for a lot of North American listeners was it was part of my mandate to train my successors. And in 10 years I trained about three or four. Three of them actually became my bosses because that was a protocol. Experts were there for training, running the business and so on, but they never became the cfo. So I was always number two. I was number two CFO or number two controller or senior controller and so on and so forth. So it was very interesting scenario. They were reporting to you. You're training them to become your boss and you have to swallow your pride a little bit and be real about that. And if you didn't like and if you didn't like that, you have to simply wasn't for you. But they were very respectful and I give it to them. They always called me the teacher, the ustad in Arabic, which basically means with a lot of respect, eyes down, you're my leader, you taught me everything and I respect you for that.

That's so great. You know, and it is, it's a tough position to. To know that the person that you are training is going to at some point be your boss. It's like that's tough. That's very tough. And. And it sounds like the culture allows for that where you, you did say that they're very respectful, you know, that they, they acknowledge that. I, I love that too.

It's changing now. It was in 90s. At that time the idea was that country UAE needed Dubai, Abu Dhabi and UAE overall needed expats to help them get to the next level. And they've done a great job with that.

Good. That's really great. So you got to South Florida from.

So I did that assignment. Then I had a number of other international assignments working with Coca Cola, British Petroleum, power generating companies in Nigeria, mining company in Argentina and so on. And about 10 years ago, my dad is at that time about 88 years of age. His discussion that he lives in South Florida and the idea was he needs some help. And culturally we do not put our older people into nursing home or a home for that matter. So it was my turn and my sister has been looking after him. So it was my turn. I jumped in at that time. I'm doing consulting as a fractional CFO anyway. So that made a lot of sense that instead of staying in Canada and doing these either international assignments or local assignments. I was in Alberta Oil Capital, so I was working with a lot of oil and gas companies. So ideal choice would have been going to Houston, but because my dad was here, it made sense to come over. So I came over, had my clients with me, which I served remotely and then basically established myself in South Florida a few years ago. I needed a bigger platform and basically looked around, looked around a number of companies and joined the company I'm with, which is called Focus cfo. So I've been doing this fractional CFO work with small and medium sized businesses for almost now 18 years.

That's amazing. I think you know one of the lessons as I listen to any of my guests, I always listen for what are the lessons along the way? What can we pull out? And here you've given us an example of you followed your heart and you followed your kind of the, you followed the service path that took you all over the world. And so you stay, you stayed in service to other people and then when it came time to be back in service to your family, you found a way to create balance for yourself where you have a stable location and you're, you have been had been in service to your dad. I think that's kind of amazing. Thank you.

And I feel very blessed that I had a qualification, CPA/CA, which is reasonably well marketable and literally that became my passport for traveling and I could go effectively anywhere where my skill set was a good match and find decent living conditions and decent earning potential. And don't forget most of my international assignments were for better money without paying taxes because once you're away for more than six months. I hope IRS is not listening, but even if they are, that's okay. Most of the time you can get away without paying taxes because you're a non resident or you pay lower taxes. And I was a Canadian citizen at that time and that categorically allowed that to be the case. If you're away for more than 181 days, which is six months, you could be tax exempt. And I'm financially stable, I'm financially independent. And the biggest takeaway from all of this was that I bring to the table the type of experience you learn when we are with big corporations like Coca Cola, British Petroleum and so on, cascaded down to the level of small medium sized businesses. And obviously you cannot bring those sophisticated systems to a small medium sized businesses because there aren't enough people in that business. They don't need it either.

They don't yeah, they don't, they don't need it. Right.

And you, you can just bring the best practices, do a cherry picking like cash flow and so on.

I think that's one of the big mistakes that makes people stop or, or not pursue doing kind of the financial piece of their business is that they will think about it as so complex or so big that they have to take it all on. And the truth is you don't need that much. It's just, it's like a step at a time. And that's for any part of your business really. But the financial part, it's a step like what do you need? And you know, it's not, you're not running a massive organization. So it's a lot of the time.

Wayne, a lot of the time the small medium sized businesses are very busy trying to generate the top line which is the revenue. And they have no time for either controlling the expenses or the bottom line. And typically they will be profitable. Obviously if they're billing something out for 100 bucks, they know they're going to make 30 bucks out of or potentially more. They have no visibility into future as to where they're going. If they want to expand, they don't know which route to take. They're very good at what they do. But most of the time they do not have number two, number threes and so on and so forth. They don't have infrastructure in place. Accounting is being done by the receptionist who came in as a receptionist who was bestowed a keyboard and a computer and said can you enter this data as well? It's very easy.

Right? Here's, here's an Excel spreadsheet. Can you start to track some things for us? Right, yeah.

And typically the owner and his family at times, typically his wife will be helping and after three, four years they get tired and wife says okay, you know, I had enough of this and you continue with this. So he's working or she's working for that matter, 14 hour days and have no time to think ahead, have no time for future planning and suddenly they find themselves, they're in their 60s now. Young Johnny who was supposed to take over has decided that he likes his girlfriend in California and South Florida is not for him. And he decided it's amazing almost 90% and above do not take over their parents business. It's this Downing statement which I'm making, but that's a reality on the ground.

This is an important statement because there are a lot of business people who are thinking that, you know, I'll Just leave it to my kids. My kids will take this over. And you're saying over 90% have kids that go, no, thanks. Yeah, I was one of those, Honestly, I was one of those. My, my dad wanted me in his business and I just couldn't. It was not like it probably would have crushed me had I had, I taken that on. So, you know, everybody has their own path and parents have this big desire and, and at the same time it's like, well, what does the individual want or need? And that's a discussion that needs to happen. When you, when you're thinking about multi generational planning and legacy, you've got to be including the kids in the conversation because what is it they want?

So the irony is that when they're in their 20s, they want to be free to travel, do this and do that. And at that time, obviously they're not necessarily thinking about what would be their path once they are in their 30s or early 40s and so on, and most of them drift along the way and then they find a little eddy, as in, in case of a water, in a stream where they're going around and they say, okay, you know what? I could have taken my dad's business. That would have been a head start. I would be starting at a certain level, not starting from scratch. And that does happen, but it doesn't unnecessarily mean that they can unwind the last 20 years of their life. Some of them do come back at that time if their dad's business is still around. But depending on their family dynamics and so on, dad may have already sold the business a little too late. But that's what we live in. We're very fortunate to make our own decisions. A lot of parents will also feel okay that if their kid doesn't come into. Although they're regretful and they are seeing the things from a different angle, they're looking at it from the top of the mountain, whereas the kid is still climbing the mountain, if you will.

Right, exactly.

And he's not, he or she's not able to see where they, where they want to be. And when they come back, they're very blessed if they do come back and pick up a business which is already doing, let's say 30 million a year. So they're not starting from scratch. Those grind from 0 to 10 million is the hardest. And after that it does become a little bit easier. So it's, it's a blessing. And I, I do mentoring with a lot of young people and I do point it out to them that this is your options. Some perhaps may take that advice, some may not. But that's okay. That my job is to let them know.

Yeah. Yep. Because advice is out there. Yeah. If they want it, you're there for them. Let me ask you something fun. What's the like if you, if you think about all of the businesses you've consulted with and for what's been kind of the most successful, exciting, heartwarming story of, you know, I came in, this was the business, it was sort of upside down and I pulled everybody together. What, what's that story for you? What stands out for you?

I would say a restaurant chain which I helped to turn around. And it was a typical example where mom and dad started their business. Build up one restaurant gradually over a couple of years. And then they started buying similar. It was one of the famous chicken chain and I'll leave it to that. And then they bought a few more. But as they were expanding, they could not really keep control on it. There was inventory, bill fridges, there was inefficiencies, the quality was going poor and so on. People actually started to avoid those particular chain members who were owned by them because they knew they will be not so hygienic and so on and so forth. And I was approached through a family connection saying these guys are struggling, they're doing good numbers, but they're not necessarily getting where they want to be. So I basically got involved, put away my financial hat a little bit, got myself into more operational side of things. And their problems were more operational, not necessarily just the financial numbers and help them build infrastructure where they could actually expand further if they wanted to. And to best of my knowledge, that was about 10 plus years ago. They now own approximately 30 restaurants and they have a very nice infrastructure. They are actually able to work fewer hours. They're doing both. Husband, wife are still very active. Their kids haven't come into the business. So it was a very heartwarming for me to be able to give them their life back in a way that's amazing.

That like that's the right. Don't we all kind of step into our business.

I mean they went from 14 hour days down to about four or five hours because they do have area managers, they have operational managers, they have number twos and potentially number threes. And they can, they're in their 60s now. They can actually easily retire if they want to or sell. And that was another objective they had. They wanted to say, okay, when we want to retire, we should have the privilege of Deciding when and if, if we can do that, we, we want to be ready so that we literally give the keys over and say, okay, you know, you can walk out now. Whereas a lot of businesses would like to retire in, let's say, 20, 26, they are not ready and it takes about two or three years for them to get prepped up. And the worst scenario is when the main contributor to the business has a heart attack or something and the other member of the family or spouse is trying to sell the business. And it does not necessarily get them the best value because they're so owner dependent. And the owner dependency is the one, which I learned that along the way, that you could be the best operator, but if you're, if your business is dependent on you, it's not the best formula at all.

Huge, huge leadership lesson there, which is you work to start a business. You work in and on the business, and you work so that the business is not dependent on you. Exactly right.

And you, in the industry we use working in the business versus working on the business on is always better because you have oversight. But you are not necessarily running everything. You're not involved with every decision. But don't forget, a lot of people are not necessarily coachable in that direction. They want to run everything themselves, including, you know, who's going to be doing the cleaning. You have a schedule set up. Assign somebody and move away, walk away. Don't worry about the, you know, the, the way they're going to do it. And I used to do it this way. And why are you doing it this way? That doesn't work.

Yeah, I, I, it takes a while. Like if you own your own business, it takes a while to let go of certain pieces. There was a, I have a, I have a brand manager. She's, she helps me with keeping things kind of uniform and everything that goes out needs to look or sound the same. It's always, always my voice. And because it's always my voice, the, the first real challenge to let go of something. I argued with her about a single word that was in one of the things that we were releasing. And I'm like, I don't want to use that word. And she's like, like, it's not that deep. It's, it's, it's one broadcast message and we're not, we don't need to change it. Like, stop arguing about this one small thing. And it was a great lesson for me. Like, yeah, you know what? It's still my voice. I did use that word at one point. I wouldn't use that word again. I don't even remember what word it was because I'm just, I'm very focused on language, especially when I write, and I don't even remember what word it was. I just remembered that it was the. My leadership lesson was, you've got to let go of the small stuff. You just gotta let go of the small stuff.

And, and at the end of the day, it's interesting observation. It's very much my personal observation. It may not be true universally. A lot of people who are well educated tends to be more clingy to the methods and procedures they want to do. And the guys who are not necessarily gone through the university make better business people, actually. And you look around you, very few technical hands, if you will. The guys who are very good either at the manual plumbing businesses or at a PhD level, like yourself, do turn out to be good business people because they believe, rightly so, that they know everything. But unfortunately, when you're talking about expanding and making a business larger than yourself, you have to let others do it.

The good news is I know I don't know everything. Like, and, and for most, my experience, because I do consult with firms internationally, you know, my business is leadership development and culture. I do, you know, speaking and coaching for organizations and organizational leaders around the world. And my experience is that most people do know that they don't know everything and they're reluctant to let go of the things they do know. And so, and so one of the, one of the key lessons that I bring is assume that you're missing something, right? And stay in that place of curiosity, what is it that I'm missing? And start to ask, like, you've hired people, you've got smart people around, you start to ask those questions, what is it I'm missing? Is it about the context? Is it about the other person? Is it about myself? Do I have blind spots? What am I missing? And I think that actually makes for better leadership and it puts leaders back in the place of, well, I know about my product or I know about my service, but I don't know about the biz ops, Right. The business operations piece. And that brings you back to maybe I need a fractional cfo, right?

So a lot of the time we find that with businesses who are doing reasonably okay, but they sometimes don't know what they don't know.

Right, exactly.

And the owner is very good at generating revenues operationally and so on and so forth, a single piece they sometimes overlook is a marketing side or financing side. A lot of the time when this fractional marketing person comes in or fractional finance person comes in, they say, well, you could do this same, same thing in this and this, in this manner with lesser effort and lesser cost, potentially. They're somewhat surprised. Most of them will say, yeah, I didn't know that. But some of the stubborn ones who stick to their guns and say, ah, well, I knew this all the, come on, if you did, you would have done it by now. So you get to know these personalities and you work with them. And that's the part where me personally and my team, we bring to the table, we say, okay, you know what? We respect you, that you build a business from zero to $30 million. Where are you going to go from here? Are you at a plateau? Are you likely to wind down? Or what's your plan? When they start doing some soul searching, they do come up with something. Well, I didn't know this thing and I didn't know I could do this. Half of them don't know that it takes two years plus to sell a business. A lot of them want to sell it next month because they had a medical condition or their spouse had a medical condition. But reality is, if you sell it at that time, you're selling at a discount. You got to be prepared. You got to button down and, you know, have procedures in place and so on. And a lot of people, when they hear about procedures, they say, nah, nah. Now we work, we operate based on gut feeling or this and that. Yes, you do. But there is also a procedure to write that down, to use your gut feeling at that point. And a lot of people who can let go are actually better business people because they. The benefit does end. I mean, somebody will make a mistake once or twice here and there, but eventually they'll get it together. Most of us are able to learn from our own mistakes. It's not a problem. And that's a leadership lesson. We should always experiment. I suggest that.

I love that. I was just going to underscore that exactly that. It's, it's about experimentation and, and not seeing an unexpected result as a failure as much as it is as a learning opportunity and truly learning from it. I mean, it's one thing we always hear, oh, it's a learning opportunity. It's like, did you learn from it? What did you learn? So this is, this is really good. Tarek, I wanted to just ask you, was there something we didn't cover that you wanted to make sure we hit? And if people want to reach out to you to ask you about what you do or, or maybe even engage you. How would they find you?

I am on LinkedIn. Very much so. And as well as focus, CFO.com is our company. It doesn't cost you anything to have a consultation with us. If you are, if we are a good fit with your company and you're a good fit for us, we'll be happy to work. Otherwise we'll say, look, you really just need a bookkeeper, we'll hire you on. We don't do bookkeeping, we do strategy, we do cash flow and so on. So as long as they're okay with it, just because they connected with us, we'll be more than happy to work with them. And at times we had people who connected with US back in 2022, they were not ready. Now they have crossed that, you know, basic threshold of 5 million or something. Bottom line, they, we could be valuable to them.

Let me ask you this because you've been talking in terms of 5 million and 30 million. And, and what about an organization that's, that's not even at the million dollar mark. Are you working with them?

We typically don't. And the reason is not because we are snobbish or anything. They don't get much value out of it. They're not at a point where the owner cannot handle most of the things him or herself. Typically, 2 million is the bottom line where you're 2 million in earnings, where you start to see things which are beyond just number crunching. They are more strategy. Where are we going, the direction, the number of people, infrastructure and all of those things. By infrastructure I mean the setup of the departments and various departments and so on. And also a lot of the time the affordability becomes a question. I can quote a number, but if you, you know, you got to have at least $5,000 a month to afford us. Our basic price is 3,900 for one, for half a day, for a day, it becomes almost $8,000. So are we bringing some value to the table? And if your accountant is doing it, okay, you don't need us, you're in. So why waste money on us? And we're very transparent about it.

That's pretty transparent, is right. Here's just as you were talking, one of the thoughts that I had was how it's inspiring, actually. It's kind of like, who doesn't want to grow their business to a point where they actually do need you, right? It's like, wouldn't it be great to grow the business so far that you actually need the infrastructure, you need the systems, you need the, the CFO and or controller in there with you. And I think, I think that's good for everybody. Right.

This one final thought on a number. A lot of people ask me this question. If you have, how many people do you need to have in the organization to request a fractional cfo? It doesn't necessarily tie in because if you're in a SaaS, SaaS business, you're typically dealing with very few people, but with a lot of dollars and so on. Whereas in manufacturing business you may be 50 plus people. And then so I would say rule of thumb, if it's more than you and your wife and probably three other people do start thinking about what do I need to do. So typically 10 people plus will be an ideal situation to bring in some fractional cfo, even just as a starter, one half day a week, every week, and if necessary, even just bring them in as a consulting once a month type of thing just to bounce off the ideas where you're going with it.

It's great. Yeah, I think it's important to bring in outside expertise because the outside expertise has a perspective that you don't have. And I think that's, that's true of financial consulting. It's true of any biz ops consulting. It's true from my perspective as, as I do leadership coaching and, and mind state coaching, breaking people through to their next level. It's the outside perspective because you, it's an independent perspective.

Plus the fact that it frees up some hours for you to have a breather.

Very good. Exactly.

Refreshes you and you can kind of come back a little bit better charged up and say, okay, I can do this now that I don't have to take care of the minutiae for the next three hours. Because just imagine, businessman walks in, back into his office after day out selling and all that. First thing he hears is, boss, can you look into this computer is broken. And he's saying, could you not have fixed up that thing? Or the printer is not working or the AC is broken or something as simple as that. But that's just a very basic example. But there are bigger examples such and such places flooded or such and such. Restaurant closed down because there was a shooting or firing or something. And so you got to have people to take care of those routine things, as I call them.

That's very true. All right, Derek, thank you. I was looking to, to end this on a, like a peppy note of some sort and not the hey, maybe there was a fire or shooting. So, so the, the bottom line is outside expertise helps. I think your, your journey of, of international adventure has been amazing. And, and so Tarek Malik, thank you. If people want to find you, it's T A R I Q M A L I K. Tarek Malik on LinkedIn. Tarek, thank you again for being here.

Thank you, Wayne. Take care.

Very good. This is one sharp sword cutting through to what matters most. I'm your host, Dr. P. Dr. Wayne Purnell again your host, guide and coach on this journey. My guest today was Tarek Malik and I appreciate you being here. Thank you. We'll see you next time. Keep tuning in. Thanks. Thanks for listening to one sharp sword cutting through to what matters Most with outflensor Dr. Wayne Purnell from For more information, please go to onesharpsword. Com.