113: Behind the Scenes of Raising Debt Financing with Mike Montogomery

Welcome to DSO Secrets. I know what it's like to be an entrepreneur in the dental industry. I've had my ups and downs, just like you. There's so much opportunity to be excited about, but so few resources to get answers. From here on DSO Secrets, we get you those answers so you can change the lives you're meant to bless and achieve your personal success.

When I was working as an associate rat at a school, I never imagined I could own these many practices with this amount of support. So thank you.

You have helped build my marketing mind

to a whole new level. You have this natural talent, this unique ability. Happy day to you. This is Ken Kaufman welcoming you to another episode of DSO Secrets. I am especially excited about our guest today. His name is Mike Montgomery. He is currently the VP of the Healthcare Middle Market Lending and Sponsor Finance at Live Oak Bank. He has a Bachelor's degree in finance from the University of North Carolina. Mike, thanks so much for being on the show today.

Hey, Ken, thanks so much for having me. It's been a long time. Great to see you again and looking forward to seeing you in person in the near future.

Yeah, that should be coming sooner than later. Are you going to be at the dicoma conference, by the way?

I will be. We're actually the keynote speaker sponsor. So I'm here. And I might get to walk Mia Ham on stage, so that would be a bucket list. And even though she went. She went to North Carolina, I actually went to North Carolina Wilmington. So I'm a Seahawk, she's a Tar Heel, but I'm a big Tar Heel fan, so.

All right, there you go. All right, we can't miss it now. So let's get this started off. Our guests kind of appreciate this question. So walk us through. What brought you into the DSO industry and what in the world are you still doing here?

That's a great question, Ken. So a little backstory about myself. I've been in banking about 16 years. Started with a regional bank in the Southeast, if you can tell by the accent. Been in the south all my life. Came to Live Oak bank in 2013, and that's when I really started focusing in the dental space. And for the past number of years, I've been working with private practice groups all over the country. More specifically, using the SBA program to help those folks obtain real estate financing while they were expanding their practices. Personally, I've done about 45 loans in 45 states, so seen a lot of countries, seen a lot of the trends, and probably in about early 2019, started to get a little bit bored with the same type of transaction every time and saw that there was trends with consolidation in the market. And as a bank, we're in about 30 different industries. But as for dental, really our only product was working with dentists and the real estate. So we kind of started brainstorming how can we help the industry outside of this space? And what made the most sense was working with the emerging DSOs and DSO because we saw there was a huge need for debt financing. So to me, I took it as a big challenge. That's why I'm still here. It took a couple years of building out with a lot of different folks in the industry to help. We've got a lot of other bank partners with other banks, a lot of attorney groups, a lot of accountants. DEO is a big one, obviously. And here we are on the other side of a crazy year. 2020 dental is probably as hot as it's ever been. And so business has been good. Right now we're seeing a lot of DSOs doing a lot of different things, and we're here to help all of them. So that's why I'm still here. There's a huge opportunity, and it continues to be a challenge day in and day out. Every DSO is different, so it's probably. I could say this is probably the most fun I've had in my career so far.

That's fantastic. Well, appreciate what you're doing in the industry and the way you're contributing on. On so many levels. Let's start off with this question. It's kind of a bit general, but you have this interesting dichotomy between debt and equity. And when you're financing growth with debt, it means you get to keep your equity. But sometimes there are limitations and restrictions or just walls that you hit where debt can't get you further. And then it's time for private equity. Love to have you kind of talk about. You see so many groups, you have so much experience here in the space. If I'm trying to maximize my utilization of debt and not have to give up equity as long as possible, what are some of the key things I should be thinking about and planning for? Because I realize if you have the right plan, you can probably do that. So I'd love to have you build out, like, a little bit of an infrastructure for people to think about if this is their target or their objective.

Absolutely. And again, every. Every group's a little bit different. What we really saw, why there was a need for us to enter the Market was there were so many groups that, let's take an example, it's a general group practice. They've got 10 locations, a million apiece, they're doing about 20% margins, they've got maybe 5 million in debt. That typically is going to look on paper, it's going to be a little bit messy and typically they're going to have several banks that they've been working with. It feels transactional to the owner because they're now working with other banks to get financing. They're essentially bootstrapping their financing. And as you get higher up the market, you start to see more and more covenants being put in place on your loans. Take for example a leverage covenant, a debt service covenant, but there's also a lot of covenants. You can't get financing elsewhere without permission from your bank. So we see a lot of these banks kind of pigeonhole or excuse me, a lot of these groups pigeonhole themselves through doing financing through different groups and they find that they're either in a technical default pattern and the bank's not willing to lend to them anymore, or it's just really hard to obtain financing. And so they feel like they have to, to go private equity at a very early stage and have to give up that equity at an early on point where they might not get that valuation they're looking for. So we saw that with so many different groups, we came in and tried to educate them, hey, if you are that 10 group practice, you've got 2 million in EBITDA. Let's look at those trends, let's see how we can help you. Let's see what your growth plan is over the next five years. And probably the biggest thing to us, you know, number one, we love to see Dr. Control, love to see the clinical autonomy that leads to the best culture. We like to see the track record if, whether it's de novo or acquisition or a combination of both, we like to see a track record of how you've grown, those look at the revenue trends, the margins, et cetera. And then we like to see a little bit of, you know, how have you built out your non clinical structure? It doesn't have to be perfect, but you know, if you're at, you know, five, six, seven locations, do you have a controller in place? Have you switched to, you know, cash to accrual accounting? Most important to us, if we see a group that's got 2 million EBITDA and we ask for consolidated financials and financials have not been consolidated and they don't have the sophistication of being able to provide monthly KPIs and things like that, then it gives us reason for pause. But if a group has sophisticated themselves with their financial planning, has the right CPA in place and has a great track record and a good business plan in place, then we're willing to come in and clean up that debt form and then give them a facility in place so that they can grow for the foreseeable future. And whether it means we're here to incubate them for the next step to go to private equity, or if they, you know, if they're, if they're comfortable with continuing to grow at a more conservative pace, you know, if you're at 10 locations, you want to do four a year, then you can probably continue to grow with debt for the foreseeable future. If you're at 10 locations and you want to double in size year every year, then private equity is probably right for you. So we like to have those conversations with these groups, figure out what's best for them and a lot of times we can find a good solution for them through debt.

So, Mike, let me this is a great perspective. I want to unpack a couple of things there. The first one is what was implied in what you were talking about is that there are investments. And when I say investments, you got to spend money on things that generally you like to try to grind on and drive down. For example, your bookkeeping, you say, hey, I'm going to get that cost as low as possible. I'm trying to maximize my ebitda. There's nothing wrong with that mentality until you get to a certain point where you're not going to be bankable, it sounds like, unless you make some key investments. So I want to see if we could maybe get that list a little bit more clear from your perspective and realizing right you are the bank and these are the things that make you look more favorable and give you more opportunities to be bankable. I'd love to have us go through a list. I think this would be really helpful and key for our listeners.

Yeah, love to. And it's been interesting, Ken. We always have a debate with what comes first. The is it the cart or the horse? You see some groups that they only have several practices, but they've built out an entire infrastructure that they can now grow 10 plus practices without having to add anything. On the non clinical side, that's rare because that's expensive. You know, you've got to be able to put the money in and obviously with that, as you're growing all that, it will affect your ebitda because we're looking at two types of ebitda. We're looking at four wall, which is your practice ebitda and then we're looking at your consolidated corporate ebitda. After all the overhead of the non clinical. So for us it's not a perfect recipe for across the board, but typically what we like to see is once you're at five or seven locations, do you have an operational manager? Do you have somebody that can help with compliance, you know, insurance credentialing, do you have a call center in place or something set up? And do you have, you know, nothing against some of these CPAs out here. My mom, my, my wife is actually a dental CPA and they're really good at the one to three practice levels. But as you grow, you know, you can outgrow certain, certain groups. We like a certain number of CPAs across the country that we work with that have proven they understand the DSO space. They can provide those consolidated financials because it's really tough. You know, if somebody comes to me and they say, hey Mike, we need, we need financing and they've got 15 locations and we have to look through 15 different tax returns, it's probably not going to be a good fit because they haven't been able to move everything over to where they are now. They're not a small practice anym, they're more middle market and they're in a different growth stage. So we want to see a partnership with a good CPA and probably at that point they have some type of controller in house, at least have a bookkeeper where they really have a good pulse on the financials. And then of course again, you need to have a good founder CEO that I love the groups that grow organically, that's doctor owned. And for somebody that can be a good clinical director. Because again, back to my previous point, you know, this is not, you know, the early 2000s anymore where you saw DSOs were not necessarily dentist centric. You lost the culture there and you tended to see a little bit of, bit of issues. So those are probably the big points that, you know, having somebody from an operational, somebody from the financial and then having a good clinical director is especially important to us.

And do you care on the clinical director side if the like, for example, if the clinical director is chairside five days a week and working versus do you want. Versus they're not chairside anymore. Maybe they do one or two days a week, but then they have the rest of the time to mentor and you know, work with the other clinicians and help create some consistent mindset around standard of care and things like that. Do you guys care about that? Does one look a little bit better from how you, how you want to underwrite a deal?

Yeah, I'd say there's not necessarily a preference. I would say looking at all of our borrowers, currently the best clinical directors are probably those that they might do chairside one day a week, or maybe they're in for some high producing cases a couple times a month where they can teach some more comprehensive dentistry to the younger folks and be a mentor to them and then also be a recruiter. You know, if the strategy is to do de novo offices, do you have a clinical director that's well networked and has a really good reputation in the region that you're looking to grow? Those, those are probably the most important things. You know, to be in chairside full time is rare, but to do that and then be able to do those other things is pretty difficult for some of them. So we usually see a lot less time chairside.

Okay, that's really helpful. So let's kind of recast this a little bit. The typical scenario, a dentist comes out of school, they buy a practice, they start a practice and like you said, they get themselves where there are three or five practices. They've got loans out with different lenders and gotten to this point

when they

want to professionalize up to the next level. So they've got to get operational, clinical and your accounting record keeping stuff up to another level. As you do that and as you would start to think about what the next level requirements are from a lender perspective, walk us through some of the differences of hey, I've got three or four or five loans over here, I'm making my payments and everybody's happy and fine. And sometimes they ask for the tax return or they just want some, some validation that we still exist and we're not going out of business. What types of things should be expected when they step up to this next level?

Yeah, you know, I think the most important thing for, for folks to think about is, you know, a bank should not be transactional. They really need to understand your business and be a partner with you and really know how you want to grow this. If it feels transactional and every time you want to have, you know, if, say you're, you're doing acquisitions and you have to go to the same bank and provide the same mail information every time and it takes Three months to close. That's probably not going to be the relationship you want to stay in as you scale this now, you know, there are banks that are, that are good about that, especially some of the regional ones. And SBA is actually good for this because, you know, one thing that I've seen is as these groups are scaling and they get to the point where they need somebody like a live Oak or a Citibank or whoever it is to kind of take over the relationship, prepayments can become a pretty, pretty big issue for them. And so with SBA, for example, right now there's a 90% government guarantee that still remains through 2020. That started then due to the pandemic. But there's no prepayment penalties on a leasehold acquisition. So, you know, there's a couple different things to think about when going in and trying to scale as, you know, you're going to outgrow a bank at some point. The biggest one has really been those prepayment penalties where people come to us, they just got their last loan and the bank has told them, well, we can't lend to you anymore. We've kind of met our threshold because every bank has a lending limit. We have our own lending limit. We can only lend so much money to one particular client. You don't want to be stuck with that one lender. And they just tell you at close that they can't lend to you anymore, and you've got a three year prepayment penalty on this loan. You feel a little bit stuck. So that's, that's one thing to look out for.

Great. And as, as you're looking out for that, give us some tips on how do you sort of build out the plan so that you don't hit that roadblock or you don't hit this kind of stalemate with the bank where they say, hey, we're not going to lend you any more money. And that situation occurs. How do you plan for that and try to try to get out ahead of that?

Right. I mean, we always recommend if we enter a relationship with somebody, we want to have a conversation with them. What is your goal, what's your plan, what's the vision and what's the timeframe? And if we don't feel like we can meet those needs in the time allowed, then we're probably going to recommend something else. So I always recommend to, to the owners out there, you and your financial folks, when you are looking for financing, have a list of questions that's important to you to ask your bank and interview your banker and interview several and find out what's the best for you. It might be personality, it might be how far they're willing to grow with you. There's a number of different things that matter in that relationship. So just like if you were interviewing somebody to hire into your practice, I feel like you kind of need to go about the same with your bank relationship. I mean, we often talk to folks for, you know, three or four times before we even start looking at financials, and sometimes we go ahead and meet them in person. So. And it's important to the bank, too, that we know who we're working with. And again, when it comes down to it, it is a partnership.

And then when you get up into this partnership, we're introducing new things that they're not used to, like possibly personal guarantees, covenant ratios. Walk us through what the differences are between having that single practice loan and maybe having a few of those just at the practice level, versus doing more of what we call an enterprise lending solution, which is what you're talking about. And how do the personal guarantees work and how do those differ from those sort of original loans and, and interest rates, covenant ratios, things like that?

That's a great question, Ken. So you think about the. When you got out of school and got your first dental loan, it could have either been most likely an SBA loan or a small conventional loan, probably really good introductory rates. And obviously there was probably a personal guarantee. If you were doing sba, you might have had to pledge a home or pledge some other assets, or once you get up to this phase of growth, you're going to see rates are going to be slightly higher and you kind of get what you pay for. I mean, what you're getting with this is not a transactional loan like you're used to. With those low rates, you're getting a partner that's going to help you scale and provide some flexibility. So we often see a lot of folks that come in and say, well, I've got an interest rate over here that's 3%. We're not willing to move forward. Typically, you're going to see rates maybe in the fives or so. We're giving you the ability to continue to scale without giving up the equity. And so you have to think to yourself, what's that worth? To me, we're going to be able to provide a lot of value, and we think that's worth that because there's a lot more that goes into it than if you have a half million dollar loan out There versus a couple million. As far as the personal guarantees, you bring up a great point on that. That's another roadblock for a lot of folks. Obviously if you go private equity, there's no personal guarantees and it's regardless of the EBITDA amount. So a lot of groups that will come to us, they expect not to have any personal guarantees. They want to have a completely non recourse loan. We can maybe get to that level. But if you're at 2 million in EBITDA, you know, we're going to still need to grow because you've got a lot to still do with building out the infrastructure, continuing to grow out those practices. And to us it's typically, you know, call it maybe $5 million in EBITDA, that's when we can maybe do a burn off. So what that means is you have a personal guarantee and for, you know, once you hit the next threshold of your corporate ebitda. And then Ken, as you mentioned, some of these covenants, we do quarterly compliance covenants, maybe we have a set in stone, once you get through six or seven covenant periods where you're in compliance, plus that EBITDA we can reduce or completely remove that personal guarantee. So we're going to work with you as you continue to grow and scale. And then the last point that you made, you know, covenants are going to start becoming more important. Typically, you know, you're going to see some banks in the early phases. They might either be a asset based lender, collateral lender. For us, it's always been about cash flow. So we're always going to have a, you know, covenant in about your cash flow. Usually you're looking at about a 1.2 times. And I know, I won't even try to explain it. Nathan Chitty, I know was on a couple weeks ago and he was a master at explaining those calculations. But essentially as long as your cash flow levels are around there, we're comfortable. And then the same for leverage, we're looking at, there's two leverage points that we look at. A senior leverage, so senior debt to ebitda, senior meaning a first lien with the bank. So that would be for example, any loans with live oak. And we obviously want to have first liens on the management company and those operating companies. And then there's a total leverage covenant. And that would also include maybe there's some seller notes involved, maybe you're getting your equipment financing through a Patterson Benco, Henry Schein, something like that. There's a completely different ratio that we include There and those are important as you continue to scale. We saw during COVID during the shutdown, the folks that really came out on top were lower levered companies. Typically you're going to see banks not willing to go over about three and a half times on senior leverage and more like three. Some groups we even see two and a half, we're a little bit more flexible and you know, it's not a black and white credit box, but it really depends on a number of things in your practice. Again, coming back to the infrastructure, what's your ebitda, what are your margins, what's your revenue growth, et cetera. But typically you're going to see a senior leverage and again that's a debt to EBITDA ratio of around three and then maybe a total that could be four, even five times. So that's going to give you a little bit of flexibility as you're trying to grow and scale your practices.

That's great. I think you've just laid down a really powerful summary actually of when you want to graduate up to this level of debt, what those expectations are. And my advice, I'm just going to layer this on top of being on the operator side, not the lender side. We spend a fair amount of time modeling out to make sure that where we're taking the business is going to keep us within covenant ratio. And so it's not that we get to the end of a quarter and we prepare the reports to send to Mike and realize, oh no, we've got a problem. So there's a discipline that comes with this too and a little more sophistication of really being thoughtful about your forecasting and understanding what all your growth plans are going to do to those covenant ratios. Especially if you got to do some things in the short term where you know, you've got to take EBITDA down a little bit before it's going to come back up because you've got to make some platform investments or do, you know, do things that are going to add value. There is risk to doing that and you can mitigate that almost completely if you do a good job at forecasting or modeling it out. I'm just throwing that out to the listeners as like just an extra thought on the, on the operator side because as lenders you're like, great, thanks for these covenants. Great to see you're in covenant ratio. Good job guys. The operators should be stressing about it every quarter, forecasting and planning around it to make sure that they keep their bankers happy and stay in alignment with them. Any interesting.

We just need every group to have a Ken Kaufman as CFO when we're in business. Right.

That's extremely kind of you to say.

Thank you.

Mike, one other big question and then we're going to jump into the lightning round and this is an unfair question because there's no perfect answer, as are a lot of these questions. There's no perfect answer. I get this question a lot. I know you get it a lot. I'm interested for your perspective, what is the optimum place to go to private equity and to go there and how would I feel good about, hey, I've done everything I can and now I need to start sharing some equity with an outside partner. Maybe you've shared equity already with associates or something, but you've got to bring in an outside partner that can help you grow. What are some benchmarks or what are some things you would think about? And knowing because you've got clients that have graduated up into this space, you've also helped certain groups graduate into the space. So I'm curious for your thoughts and your perspectives on this. And again, the listeners will get a ton of value out of the perspective.

That's a really, really good question and I agree a hard one to answer because there's no right or wrong response to really depends on what you as the owner want to achieve. I'll give you an example. We've got independent groups that we work with right now that's over 30 locations. They've got quite a bit of EBITDA. They've got everything built out. They've got an acquisition de novo strategy and we understand their vision and we actually came into a relationship with them last year and brought in a partner bank with us so that we could continue to scale with them for the foreseeable future. They don't necessarily have a desire to sell to private equity anytime soon. They're happy with how things are going and with their growth plan. They don't necessarily need to sell the private equity Now. I feel like everybody has a price and I know they've been approached several times and there's been some enticing numbers. But I guess it really depends on what your financial future plans look like. You kind of need to sit down with your financial planner and your CPA and decide what is that point that I, that I want or need to go to private equity? That's more of a want for these guys. And then we've got groups that will need to go to private equity at some point. Like I mentioned. If you're at 10 locations scaling four a year bank debts for you. If you're at 10 and need to go to and want to double in size every year, you need to probably have an equity piece because with equity involved, those partners are going to be able to provide not only some capital for you, but then also some additional expertise and experience. And the banks will still come in and lend around that, but that gives them a lot more assurances and you can have a little bit more aggressive growth plan that way. So it really depends on how quickly you want to grow. I think as long as groups are conservative, they can continue to stay the course of debt for a very long time. Again, every bank has a lending threshold with how much they'll lend to any one borrower. But you'd be surprised. There's a couple banks in the country right now that I don't foresee any of them as competitors. I look at them as partners. There's a lot of opportunity out there where some of these groups are growing and they're getting over 20 million in debt and they're over 10 million in EBITDA. And that's when the banks get together and we work together and we do what's called a syndication participation where one bank is going to lead and be your go to for servicing and then the other banks are going to come in behind and be a silent partner and provide additional debt. So there is a way to continue to scale without going equity. But there's also benefits too. We're working with a lot of private equity groups. We like what they have to offer. They can, you know, they can offer you. You know, I'm hearing a lot of stuff right now. A lot of, lot of groups are going to market that have been backed by private equity. And we're hearing, you know, once you get in the 20 million in EBITDA or so, we're seeing 12 to 14 times multiples and that can typically happen in a three to five year spread fan. So if the plan is to get out sooner than private equity is going to be for you.

Yeah, it's interesting. I'm glad you talked about the syndication piece because you'd mentioned about partnering with another bank and really I want to mention one thing there and then jump to something I think that's much more critical. But banks have concentration risk that they're concerned about and when certain clients start to take up bigger and bigger portions of their total loan portfolio, they get nervous. And banks generally just are nervous. That's what makes them bankers and they're conservative and they want to mitigate that risk as much as possible. And so that's where you said, Mike, and I've been hearing about this more and more as well Zions and Citi and others and Live Oak that are willing to say, hey, we've brought this client in, they've done great, but they're the total loans that they need. We can justify it, they're well within covenant ratio and everything else, but it's just bigger than our concentration risk will allow. It then gives you the chance to say, rather than them go to another lender, why don't we bring another lender in on the back that will bring additional funds and that syndicates. And so it's an interesting trend that I'm seeing to start happen more and more and I'm hearing more and more about and I think it's great for the industry and I'm grateful for the role that Live Oak and others are playing to do that. The bigger thing. There was a takeaway from what what you're talking about that made me think, it really comes back to you. When is the right time for private equity? You've got to decide what you want to accomplish. And sometimes it's more than just financial, right, Mike? It's, hey, how I want the personal growth associated with trying to be the CEO of a company that gets to 25 practices or 50 practices. And I want to learn. And I'm going to join groups like DEO or others where I'm going to get the coaching and the feedback and the training to help me get there and help me build my team. Others say, ah, this is just tiring. I'm kind of done and I'm good with the impact I'm making right here. And I don't want to do the crazy growth. It really comes down to you deciding what's important to you, getting a team around you that believes in that vision. Then your financing strategy comes right, and it's, okay, guys, can we go with debt or do we need to. At what point do we need to go to private equity? So to the degree you feel unclear on your financing strategy, it probably means you just need to go back to you personally and your immediate team around you and redefine the strategy. Does that resonate, Mike?

That's perfect, Ken. And I mean, nobody has been through this by themselves. I mean, there are so many people in the industry that have done this before and everybody's willing to share that secret sauce. You know, there's so many great folks out there. You know, again, deo, there's so many great folks in there. I mean, network talk, talk to people, you know, interview different people. You'll get some best practices, and it's really going to help you. You don't have to be on this path by yourself.

Awesome. All right, well, we're going to get to the section that I think a lot of our listeners like and look forward to. I like to insert this little lightning round. We're going to get to know you a little bit more, Mike. Looking for short, quick answers, seven quick questions. You ready?

Let's go.

All right. What are you currently working on?

Quite a bit. I actually looked at my pipeline today. We were working on about 15 different platforms right now.

Outstanding.

All right.

What are you the most proud of?

You know, I've been with other banks. I've been with Live Oak for eight years. I'm proud to be a part of this bank. It's very different than any other bank I've been with. I know you said short answers, but it's going to be tough on this one. I would not have been able to develop our DSO program with another bank. This bank has a lot of transparency and we work together. So we work with our credit folks on a daily basis, our analysts, our closers, our servicers. And there's just a constant willing to continue to grow and be better. And it's just been a great organization to be a part of. So very proud to be here. Spent eight years and hopefully I can stay here for the foreseeable future. That's great.

Favorite sports team?

Sports team. North Carolina, born and raised. You know, the sky is Carolina blue for a reason. Tar Heel. For college, I went to uncw. We did not have a football program, so basketball at Seahawks and then big NFL guy, Carolina Panthers. It's been a rough couple years, but still holding on. There you go.

Things are looking up.

That's right.

And favorite hobby.

So we live at the coast, so I love to go out on the boat, fish. Anything having to do with water. That's where the weekends are spent.

Nice. Favorite app on your phone.

Yeah. So probably right now, and it's been so for a while, this is kind of a weird one. But I would say waze, not because it gets me places quicker, but it gets me there without getting pulled over. I've got a little bit of a lead footage and you know, they put those little police officers on there. And so it tells me when to slow down. So it saved me quite a bit of money over the Past couple of years. Too bad I don't have it in the city sometimes.

You heard this here first. DSO Secrets Inside track to those who have a lead foot. That's fantastic. I love it. Favorite spreadsheet function.

So I was a finance major, not an accountant major. I would defer this question to my analyst who is amazing. I do spreadsheets, but. But I am pretty elementary on them.

All right, awesome. So your favorite spreadsheet function is hire a really smart analyst.

That's right.

All right, cool. We're wrapping up. We've covered some great topics and again, can't thank you enough. Any parting advice for these emerging group practices, you know, that are forging their way and building out their organizations? Any parting advice from your perspective?

I'd say again, continue to be eager to learn, continue to grow. Don't be afraid to ask for help. There's plenty of great people that can help you with it, whether they're in finance, accounting, management, operations. There's a lot of great sources out there. So looking forward to talking to folks at DiComa and the next upcoming conferences.

Yeah, DiComa is coming up next year in July. No, that's going to be a great one. Listeners that might want to get in touch with you if there's something you said that they want to follow up on or if they want to pick your brain on any elements around financing DSO growth, what's the best way for them to track you down?

A number of ways. Feel free to go to our website live oakbank.com feel free to hit me up on LinkedIn or feel free to email me. Mike Montgomery. Happy to answer any questions and looking forward to talking to you.

Outstanding. Well, there's been some great takeaways today. Growing up, sophisticating into that next level of debt, how to try to stretch that out as long as possible before you have to start to share equity. A lot of action packed things happened here today, Mike, so really appreciate you being on.

It was fun. Thanks for having me, Ken. And happy Father's Day to you.

Yeah, thanks so much. And to all the other fathers out there as well. And many, many thanks to everybody who's joined. This is a wrap for all things financing to the next level with our great Live Oak partner, Mike Montgomery. Happy day.

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