Bring Business Practices Into Your Relationship | Patrick Campbell

Most people suck at relationships, and it's completely their fault. I'm an entrepreneur. We help subscription companies with their pricing, sold it for over $200 million. I took many of the things I learned and I applied it to my marriage.

There are a couple frameworks you've put together with your partner, your wife.

We have a family notion, shared budget, weekly one-on-ones. We align our schedules as close as humanly possible. Having a partner that you are perfectly or mostly perfectly aligned Like, holy cow, like, what a life.

Alright, Patrick, how you doing?

I'm doing well, man. How are you? Good.

It's good to see you. We're at this retreat still, and, you know, final day. But Patrick, we've done a couple of these already in person, actually, at conferences as well. And I guess for those that don't know you, who are you and why should people listen to you?

Who am I? Who am I is the ultimate question, right? No, I'm an entrepreneur. I grew up in the Midwest, went to school in Illinois, then ended up Going to Boston. I never wanted to go into business though. I was like not one of those kids that like was doing stuff, you know, like hustles when they're in high school or college. I wanted to go kind of save the world. So I worked for the US government for a while in the intel community, and then all of a sudden was like, oh crap, I really hate the pace of the government. I want to go faster. I want to go faster. And so the best place to get speed is, you know, entrepreneurship. And so started a company, and I didn't know this at the time. This was all a little bit more kind of pushing forward. Company called ProfitWell. We help subscription companies with their pricing and their retention. Worked with everyone from DoorDash and Blue Bottle Coffee all the way to Autodesk, Notion, Lyft, et cetera. And then bootstrapped that company for about a decade and then sold it a couple years ago for over $200 million. And then worked at Paddle, which is the company that bought us as the payments company. And recently just started working on the next thing.

Okay. And whatever you're comfortable revealing here, but it seems like there are a couple frameworks you've put together with your, your partner, your wife.

Yeah.

Are you willing to share some of those frameworks?

Yeah, totally.

Yeah. So here's the hook here. So what are the best questions to ask with your partner to have an unbreakable bond?

An unbreakable bond. Oh boy. High bar. Here's the premise. Most people suck at relationships and it's completely their fault. And when you look at all of the research around relationships, all of the like studies that have been done, etc., there's this researcher named Gottman, G-O-T-T-M-A-N. M-A-N, I believe is how it's spelled. He, you know, has researched this for his entire life, his entire career. A lot of stuff comes down to limiting resentment, and the way you limit resentment is through communication and alignment. What is a beautiful way to do that that we've all learned, especially if you're listening to this podcast? All the stuff we learn in business, right? And what I get a lot of crap for when I talk about this is I took Many of the things I learned in trying to develop to be a decent, if not a good manager, and I applied it to my marriage. Now, there isn't a power dynamic and all this other stuff. Everyone who's like clutching their pearls listening to this, you know, I can kind of calm those particular nerves. But what ends up happening is like my wife and I have weekly one-on-ones. Like, why do we have one-on-ones? Well, there's so much stuff that goes on during the week. Oftentimes you can be living with your spouse, your girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever, and you don't actually have any conversations or you don't push anything forward for maybe a couple of weeks because you're both busy. You know, you're just watching some Netflix, you're getting dinner, whatever it is. But for us, it was like my wife would ask me to do things right before I went to bed, which is the worst time to ask me, and I would commit to those, which makes this ultimately my fault, but then I would forget about it, right? Well, now it's like throw those into the one-on-one because now it's like, oh, I need to get all this done. Okay, I'm gonna schedule it. I'm gonna go figure it out, right? But I've just limited resentment because she's not gonna resent me when I don't do it because I'm gonna remember to do it at this particular point. But the other thing, and this is the thing that you're getting at, that most people mess up is what is the shared vision for your marriage or your relationship? And it doesn't need to be like world domination and revenue and all this other stuff, obviously, that you do get into in the business world. But like, what's important to you? What do you want out of life? And having those conversations when you're dating, like on my third date with my wife, I had gotten out of a long relationship that was just terrible for a lot of reasons, my fault, her fault, etc. My third date, I was like, listen, this is what's important to me. Like, this is going to change. This is not going to change. Like, if you're on board with that, fantastic. Let's keep going. If you're not, let's not waste each other's time. Right? And it was said more sweetly and less cool than I'm giving off right now.

What were some of those boundaries?

High integrity, no lying, none. No white lies, no even smells of white lies. No, like, oh, I'm gonna go get coffee here and you go somewhere else. Like just none of that because that for me, I'm someone who trust is very difficult, incredibly insecure. And so it doesn't manifest well within me because it's not like, oh, is she like hooking up with someone else or something like that? It's more of like, it's more of a deeper insidious thing. Like if I can't trust you, I'm not going to be your partner. I'm going to be someone who just lives with you. Right? And so, like, that's where a lot of, like, arguments that we might have are, is like something might happen, or I said, hey, we agreed to go do it this way, and then she doesn't. Like, that's one of my things. One of the other boundaries was around, or the things I talk about, is like constant communication. Like, no, like, going to bed, you know, unhappy.

Angry.

No going to bed angry. Nothing like that. Like, if something bothers you, Like, say it, let's talk about it. Now, you might not understand it, so let's like have a good environment where we can talk through it. But none of this like, 2 weeks ago you did this thing, nothing like that. Basically limiting resentment as much as humanly possible. And then like the third big category was around like, you know, essentially, it was very— it was a selfish one, which was me of like, this is really important to me, like building a company, always like pushing for stuff. I'm never gonna be the white picket fence guy. I'm never gonna be the 9-to-5 guy. I'm never gonna be the big vacation guy. guy, and that has some major benefits, and then it's some major trade-offs. And so we explored a lot of those over like our first 6 months, but within our first 6 months, we knew like this was it. And so, yeah, we've been together about 9 years now. And so, yeah, but the bigger thing that you were getting at, we do off-sites twice a year. I know that sounds, you know, crazy. We have an agenda.

Yeah.

But it's like we go on vacation, and we have an agenda that we talk through at dinners and lunches and stuff as we go forward. And sometimes there's a little bit of research that we got to do, you know, while we're sitting by a pool or something like that. But one of the big things that we did early in our relationship and then very formally, literally we got married and then that weekend we did this, was a series of questions just around like, what do we want? And there were questions like, and I can share them if you want to post them in the show notes.

Yeah.

But it's like, you know, like actual physical things like what stuff do you want? Emotional things. What do you never want to feel? What do you always want to feel? What is important to you? Service and experience things. What do you want to go do? What's really important to you? Stuff like when you're on your deathbed, what do you want to have done? What do you want to be remembered for? What do you want to make sure, you know, people when they think of you, they think of X, whatever X is? And it was just a series of like introspective questions, and then the process was spend 90 minutes just writing. So we just wrote, spent 90 minutes each, and then oftentimes, you know, you sit with it, and then we come back to it a day later, spend another 90 minutes, and And then what we do is we switch lists. I look at hers, she looks at mine, and we just ask questions, not in a judgmental or any way, but literally just to understand, like seek to understand on, okay, did you mean this? What did you mean by this? And then we get those notes so we both understand. And then we spend some time literally going through each other's lists together and being like, line by line, I agree with this, I support this, I also want to do it, or I don't care, but I support you, or I disagree. Like, I don't think this is good, or I don't think that's what I want our life to be. And we were together, you know, the last time we did this, we've been together, I think it was 7 or 8 years at that point. And so it was one of those things where there were very few things where we disagreed. But imagine we were together for that long and we had major disagreements. Like, that would be insane. But that's how a lot of relationships are, because you get into loss aversion and you're like, I guess I should marry this person.

Right.

And I think those things are really important compared to kids or no kids, like stuff like that, because those are going to be really easy to figure out. But for example, like, I want to fly private everywhere. Well, if she disagreed with that or disagreed with what it took to get to that, it's like, that's a major difference, right? Or if she wanted, you know, basically to have dinner every night with the kids, That's not gonna happen. Now, it can happen a lot, but it's not gonna happen every night because there's gonna be travel, there's gonna be stuff going on, etc. But it's just a lot of really important stuff. And then what's really important is the action that comes from that because we then kind of align our life and then we start to figure out, well, this year we're gonna start doing this because we both agreed that that's really important to us. Or for her, time is a really important thing. So what we've started doing is we align our schedules as close as humanly possible. We wake up at the same time, we go work out, we end up— Walking the dog for 20 minutes. And then the rest of the day, like, there's no expectation that we're together. And then at 6 PM every single night, I'm done. And between 6 and 8 is hers and family time. And I basically started doing that because when we have kids, I just wanted to be in that rhythm. And then all of a sudden at 8 PM, we start our evening routine and go to bed. So I'm literally beginning and ending the day.

And that—

I didn't have to give up much to do that. And she had to give up a little because she had to wake up earlier because I wake up early. But like, I'm— she's getting so much. She's getting so much of the thing that's really important to her, which is that time and that connection, which, you know, I'm more than happy to give. And so, yeah, it's all just about alignment. And you can't align if you don't know what you want. And so many people just have no freaking idea what they actually want.

How many questions is this?

It's like 6 to 8 questions, but it's not Again, like, the purpose isn't getting exact questions. The purpose is having a prompt to have these conversations, right? Like, some stuff came out of this where, like, Jenny wants— like, and you'll be surprised too. So, like, Jenny wants to go hunting. I like hunting. Like, I love hunting. I never knew that, right? Because we never really talked about it. I haven't been able to hunt in a long time because, you know, work and all this other stuff. Now all of a sudden it's like, cool, we're gonna go do an elk hunt next year, right?

That's cool.

Like, it's just a lot of stuff like that came out of it that's both surprising. And also there's other things like Oh, she really wants to visit her family. Okay, well, in the clarification, it's like, well, how much? Do you want to live next to them? Do you want to see them twice a year? Does it matter that we go there? Can they come here? And those, those are amazing questions to have because I don't want 3 years of resentment building up because we didn't see her mom enough. And I didn't even know. And then she's like, yeah, we don't see our mom enough. And I'm really frustrated. And now I'm starting to have a conversation from like a very negative place because I can't make up for time that's already passed, right? And so that was— that's what was really, really powerful is because we could design our life. And then the other things that come out of these offsites are the shared budget, which we talked about a little bit. That budget's really important. Like, thankfully neither of us are like hardcore spenders or anything, but like all of a sudden it was allowing us to be like, no, we should be looser. Like objectively, we should be looser with certain things. We should totally spend the money to do that, that thing or this other thing. And then like our shared calendar, basically like a shared schedule of like what trips are we going to take this year and stuff like that. But it's just all about alignment because alignment limits resentment.

I love it. And I mean, 6 to 8 questions, it sounds like you guys are being very intentional about it. It's almost like the Amazon narrative where it's like a 6-page narrative. It could be 3 to 6 pages or whatever.

Yeah, like she wrote a lot more like paragraphs and sentences. I wrote a lot of bullets, right? Like it's not— and like what came from that is, you know, a shared doc and it's all in Notion. We have a family Notion that's basically like, hey, this is, this is what's important to us. And prior to this, we, we have shared values as a family. We have We have a mission as a family. We have— we're going to like create a family crest. We're going to do some branding around it. And this is just more around like, it's important to us. Like we are a unit. And if you're a unit, you should, you know, be really, really like successful as a unit. But obviously the aims are very different. It's fulfillment and whatever you want. Like if you're hedonistic and you and your partner want to like, you know, go and party all the time, that's okay too. Like it's just making sure that you're aligned to it because that's what limits the resentment.

Love it. Are you happy right now?

Yeah. Yeah, I know. I'm like, right now I'm tired and like ready for more hydration. But like, I think that, yeah, I'm— I am— I have reached a plane of peace that I never thought was possible. Anyone who's listened to me before, I often talk about this when we're talking about more personal stuff. So I grew up in a pretty abusive household, like rampant insecurity just as a human. And there's part of that that I'm never going to get rid of. But there is nothing more peaceful than understanding your personal mission. And we didn't really get into this, but I did a lot of exploration the last couple of years of like, what do I want to do now that I have this big pile of money? Do I want to be an investor? Do I want to do a holdco? And it's like, no, I want to go after something big. And I want to— like, I'm an operator and I want to continue to be a bigger and better operator. So I know that. And then there's when you mix that with just such a level of peace with having a partner that you are perfectly or mostly perfectly aligned, because perfection is probably not possible. Like, holy cow, like, what a life. And frankly, like, it's hard to say because, you know, I do have money now. But I think that I could have had this also prior to money. And so I think it's just, it's one of these things where Yeah, the money does help me sleep at night. But even in the beginning of money, I had more anxiety than I had before because I'd gotten to such an even keel as like an operator and as a founder and like a really even keel. And then that just threw it all for a loop because it just changed life dramatically. But I could have had this level of peace before as well.

Happiness is, uh, you decide if you're happy or not.

Happiness is a choice. I think like there are things that make that choice easier and harder. But that's what's really funny about getting money is like, earning money, depending on how you want to look at it. And I guess your political affiliations.

It's—

what was amazing about it is the realization that now none of my excuses are real. None of them. Like, oh, I don't want to pay the money to hire a coach, like to lose weight. Well, You can hire a coach. You can absolutely afford a coach. Like, I think money amplifies the best and the worst of you because like if you are undisciplined in a certain area of life, now you can really be undisciplined in a certain portion of your life, right? And so I think that it's like, that's the thing that a lot of people don't realise is like I thought, oh, all these problems are gonna be solved. I'm gonna be fit. I'm gonna do this. I'm gonna do this. It's like, nope. Like those are emotional problems that no amount of money is actually gonna solve. So you gotta work through that, which is something I did. Yeah.

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My instinctual answer is immediately. I don't— but obviously with a caveat, like not just cut all loved ones out.

Yeah.

Um, blood is not an excuse to have terrible people in your life. Um, and that's hard because society— there's probably an element of biology and genetics make it so that You want, you know, you want, like, to care for those people on some particular level. But that does not mean that you have to. Obligation is the enemy of everything. And to me, I cut my parents out really early. And that was really difficult. But it wasn't difficult because it was the wrong decision. It was really difficult because I was like, well, what will society think? Oh, am I gonna have an obligation? And then there was an element of like, well, if they died tomorrow and I hadn't talked to them in years, would that be okay? Um, but I got to a point where it was like, the answer was yes. Now, since then, um, my parents are back in my life. We've repaired some things, we figured some things out, but they— I will never like have what you have with your mom. Like, I'll never have that. And that's okay. Like, right? And that's not like a good or a bad thing. It just is. And so I think a lot of people, They hold on to really crappy relationships that are family members, friendships, etc. And if you're listening to this, you are likely in a place, even if you're poor, even if you're struggling, you're likely in a place where you can choose your family, you can choose your friendships. And a lot of times those will be people who you share blood with. But a lot of times, they're not.

It's very deep. And what does one do after selling their company for $200 million?

It's, it's, it's actually a really interesting question because I think that this is the least relatable thing depending on who's listening to this. But, uh, you go through like selling your company pushes you into an existential crisis because you sit there and you've had this purpose for a really long time. And then all of a sudden there's like an end. And not everyone builds their company that way. We were building our company to scale like as big and as quickly as humanly possible. But all of a sudden there was this like endpoint. And then you as the founder, as an individual have to go, oh man, like all of a sudden my life just has dramatically changed. Uh, you kind of lost your purpose, like because you sold the company. And even if you're going to the company that bought you, things changed dramatically. And then you have like a giant pile of money in your bank account and that causes Like, again, it's a net benefit, don't get me wrong, but there's a bunch of little like, well, now I have all these like choices. And so I went through like a good year of what I call like cocaine energy, where basically I was like, well, I can almost do anything. I can hire this many people. I hired 17 people. I bought 19 gas stations. I did a crazy amount of stuff. Some of those were really smart decisions. Some of those were really dumb decisions, but you have to kind of like—

Yeah.

Learn to have wealth and then learn how to like deploy or, you know, maintain that capital, which, you know, is a problem that not a lot of people talk about because it's, again, not really relatable to talk about.

So when you sold, was there a period of time where you— do you feel like you were wasting money to a certain point and then you decided you had to stop? Or were you pretty— you're still pretty frugal once you sold? Yeah.

Your concept of money, when you get wealth, your anxiety or a concept around money doesn't really change. That's a really interesting thing that I learned. Like, I have really high anxiety around money because I grew up relatively poor and money was always like an argument or a big issue in my household. So even with, you know, a significant amount of money now in the 0.1%, I still am like, oh my God, am I spending too much money? Like, we're staying at this hotel. I went to the grocery store and got Stoke Coffee the first day that we were here. Because I was like, I don't wanna pay $8 for a coffee, right? Which is insane. Like, I shouldn't do that. That's so dumb. And so I've had to learn over the last couple of years how to not like be a complete idiot, um, when it came to like my time. But also, I also have had to put in things into place because now the sums of money are much, much larger.

Yeah.

So the amount you're paying lawyers, the amount you're paying accountants, and the result of that is all of a sudden like you will have these high anxiety moments where it's not $100 here, $100 here. It might be $100 grand here, $100 grand there. And so I have a spreadsheet that basically I go to that just like tracks not our budget down to like the dollar, but just our general budget. And that allows me to like, every time I get this anxiety, I go, oh, there's a lot more coming in than is going out. And that like calms me down basically.

How are you tracking your budget? Are you using like Tiller? Like what are you using?

No, I don't use any of the fancy apps. Jenny and I, my wife, we, um, we have a spreadsheet. It's just got, here are the big categories. Um, you know, and we have a big plug in there. Like there's a big category that's just like other, which is just a sum of money. And then what we end up doing is every month an assistant basically like plugs those numbers in, and as long as we're within, you know, like 10-15% one way or the other, we're like fine. But again, it was more around the anxiety of like, I don't need to look at that information like objectively, but because of my anxiety around money, it like calms me down. But it also helps me realize like, oh, we have this much money to deploy, for lack of a better word, whether it's in philanthropy or buying stuff for ourselves or experiences for ourselves. or making that money work for us rather than like miserly just putting it into a bank account and like, you know, just hoarding it basically.

Yep. And you know what, one thing, I mean, when you think about people like Elon or even our friends here, right, people, it doesn't matter what level of success you're at. The most successful I've observed in general, entrepreneurs are pretty frugal, right? So why is it valuable for entrepreneurs to be frugal?

I don't— I almost— I don't know if I accept the premise of the question because I think that frugality can be a massive crutch. And I've seen that in myself where I have been penny-wise, pound-foolish many times, right? And so for me, when I even think about building a business, my frugality was a huge advantage because it allowed me to figure out how I could get leverage Because I was like, I don't want to spend a quarter million dollars on something. How do I spend $100 grand? And with thinking, clothes and creativity closed that gap of getting even more than what I was gonna get for $250,000. But it's a crutch too, because having some level of anxiety over $1,000 of this in a, you know, multi-hundred million dollar business, like, doesn't make any sense. Right? And so it serves you well because it allows you to think better, but I think that the issue, especially even in my personal life, is it causes like some level of undue stress. Again, very champagne problems.

Yeah.

But it causes some level of undue stress, and so this is where just control comes into place. This is why we have the budget, and I'm like, we've agreed on the budget. This is what it is. And like, then we're slowly being able to like be very thoughtful about the money. So I guess in summary, like, Frugality is often a crutch for like not being thoughtful for where like your money is going. Very similar to someone who's on the opposite end of the spectrum and just spends a lot of money.

It's interesting because yesterday when we were sitting here and this— he will go anonymous— he, one of our mutual friends, said, why would you ever pay more than $180,000 for an individual, right? But there's no anxiety in the way how he said it. He's very sure in how he said it, right?

Sure.

So how would you respond to that?

I think that, and it was for like a team member, like paying $180.

Never paid more than $180 for an employee.

Yeah, for a team member. And I think that like rules like that, and I have several rules that I've said that are similar to that, you realize very quickly how dumb you are, right? Because it's not about, like you can't have a hard and fast rule like that on anything, right? Like I remember when I first started traveling for work, I was like, why would ever anyone buy business class? Why would you ever do that? Why would you waste the money? We're all going to the same place. But then you're on the road for 175,000 miles a year, And you're like, no, I'm basically— this is a bus. I would like the best seat in the bus so that like I can get a little bit of sleep or I don't have to waste an hour in line or anything like that. And so I think it's more about what are you trying to do? Like money is a tool just like your time and they're fungible. So you can actually gain a lot of time with your money, right? And so it's one of those things where it's like, I don't know, $180,000 like engineer, that actually might not be a great engineer. You might need a half-million-dollar engineer if you're trying to do some sort of innovative type product. Yeah, or work. But in his business, our friend, like, yeah, I do think it would be dumb to have that type of person because he's not trying to do those types of things. Um, and so it's all about trying to figure out what you can get for— what leverage that you can get for those dollars or that time that you put in, and then using time and money to basically make sure that you're netting out in whatever model of value that you put into your head.

Right. So what I'm hearing are Is basically that there are many variables to this and it's kind of stupid to have hard and fast rules.

Yeah, well, but the funny thing is that the hard part of it is those hard and fast rules, like, that's humans, right? Like, that's how we are wired in order to basically survive if you really want to get to a biological foundation. Like, in the reality, it's we're sitting here and we use those hard and fast rules to try to make decisions and survive, but you have to always be challenging yourself. And I think that's what entrepreneurship is. Entrepreneurship is basically sitting on the precipice of like really, really strong opinions and then thinking, oh my God, I might be wrong. Holy cow, am I wrong? Am I wrong? Am I wrong? And that indecision plus that exuberant confidence, I think that's what creates the best entrepreneurs.

Strong views loosely held.

Yeah, yeah, very nicely said.

This message is brought to you by Single Grain. Single Grain is a marketing agency ran by yours truly. Single Grain does paid media, SEO, SEO, creative, conversion rate optimization, and has worked with a handful of companies such as Uber, Amazon, Airbnb, Salesforce, to startups, venture-backed startups, a lot of different companies. And ultimately our mission is to do innovative marketing that drives customers. If you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com. Again, it's Single Grain, grain like wheat, and we'll see you on the other side. You have, you've had a history of running some interesting marketing experiments. I think there's one video where on YouTube You said churn 100,000 times, you didn't pee for a while. I think there, you actually, and then you had a talk, you know, where you said churn. Your talk was all churn, right? Where you were going through your slides. And then the other thing I'll say too is, we used to go to this conference in Dublin. You would, I think you got 2 booths, not just one.

Yeah.

And then you really hooked people up. You had a stage at your booth.

Yeah.

You hooked it up with the best coffee. Like, you really went above and beyond. So are there any interesting or like crazy marketing experiments that you can share that really worked well?

Sure, but let's back up for just a second of why we did those types of things, right? People, I would argue, people are incredibly lazy and waste a ton of money and time because of that laziness. And it's almost out of ignorance than it is like people are inherently lazy. And what I mean by that is if you think about an event, If you just have a generic booth, like, what do you expect? You're gonna get generic results, right? Like, conventional output just produces conventional results. The problem with being unconventional is that it can produce outsized results, but like, it also is really, really hard, right? And so when we look at marketing, we do all the conventional things, but we try to do them in an unconventional way based on like first principles, right? So for example, our marketing. We had, um, you know, we did content, we did sales, very traditional type channels, but we did the basic things. And then we said, well, how can we get outsized returns? Well, if you look at content, for example, if I write the 30th blog post that we've written about how to do your pricing strategy or this aspect of pricing strategy, people expect it. It's going to be good. We're going to get some conventional results. But now I need to break through the noise in some particular way. And so what we told our marketing team, particularly our media team, is every quarter you need to be doing something that is purely for awareness, because most subscription or most software companies suck at this. And so we said, take inspiration from everywhere. We're not gonna measure what the actual ROI of this is, at least on like a, you know, micro level, and just figure out how to get as much attention as possible without hurting the brand, which is really, really hard, right? Because then all of a sudden you put a constraint on it. And so this is what led to, hey, we're gonna— I'm gonna do the MrBeast-style video where I say churn, which is one of the main keywords for us for one of our products. I'm gonna sit in a chair and I'm gonna say it 100,000 times. It's a 9-hour vid— 9 hours and 3 minutes and change video. And then we're gonna cut it up and we're gonna do a little marketing campaign around that. Now, what's beautiful about that is one, people listening to this are like, oh my god, there's a reaction to it. Like either, oh, that's so cool, or oh my god, that's so weird and like gross that they're gonna hurt the brand. And what's amazing about that is that's the reaction I want. And so then when we were going and doing keynotes, I've done so many keynotes at different conferences, I was like, well, how can we like break through, right? Like how can we break through and like get something that everyone at the conference is talking about? And so I gave a talk where the only word I said was churn. And the slides had like material and data and all this other stuff, but it was this like, what is something that's somewhat unconventional that people are gonna talk about? And then people are going to either talk about it at dinners, or they're gonna end up coming to our booth and being like, what the heck was that, right? And so some other things that we've done that are kind of useful, um, you know, and you can rip those things off for your own industry if you want, um, but some other things we do that are a little bit more scalable for most businesses are like in your outbound kind of email sequences, one of the biggest mistakes I think people make is they essentially allow their later emails to just be the weakest emails, right? Which is completely inverted of what you should be doing. Because if I send you a generic email on that first email and you respond, like, that's amazing, right? Because that means the demand was already there, so it's really easy for me to capture.

Right.

The problem is, is that if you don't respond, all of a sudden, your demand is gonna be harder to capture for that particular lead. But most of the time, when you look at email campaigns at most companies, it's like the first 3 emails are good, and then the last 16 emails and touchpoints are super generic, super automated. So what we did is we inverted it. We sent a still personalized, but pretty, like, straightforward, and I would argue, a really good email, but it wasn't— it didn't take a lot of work for us to do it. And that was our first email, our first bump. But then that third email that you got, It was a customized, personalized video that was really, really well produced. So not this like, here's my whiteboard with your name on it kind of BS that some people do, but it was literally like, hey, I'm Patrick, um, or hey John, uh, Patrick here from ProfitWell. Love what you're up to over at Level Up, um, how you guys do XYZ. And then the rest of the video was actually— there was a cut and the rest of the video was like the same for everybody, but all of a sudden you have a thumbnail that's like really well-lit and good-looking, and then you have this email that we're like, I'm saying your name and I'm saying your company and giving you some references, and then all of a sudden I'm offering, you know, maybe an offer to get on a call, right?

Mmhmm.

And what this ends up doing is all of a sudden I break through the frame. I'm looking unconventional, but not in a way that hurts the brand, and ultimately that allows you to be like, oh, this guy's legit, or this guy like actually put in work to talk to me. Little do you know, on the back end, I got that down to $1 per video in like 180 minutes of you know, 2 BDRs' time per week to basically measure and take care of, but it's one of those things that's really important. Some other things that we did in that campaign, we offered $250 Amazon gift cards, and you're like, oh, the people who are gonna get on the phone for a gift card are the worst leads. No, like, we have VPs at, like, Fortune 500 companies who are like, oh, if they're willing to offer that, there must be something there, right? And, like, I never click on ads, but, like, a lot of people click on ads, right?

Yeah.

It's the same thing. Like, I would never take a call for $250, $50 Amazon gift card, but there's a lot of people who do.

Yeah.

And then we offered things like, hey, if you do a trial of our product and it doesn't work, we'll send you a Peloton, right? We've never had to send a Peloton because we, like, believe in our product and have a good product, but stuff like that really gets people to kind of break through. And then if you didn't get through any of those emails or those touchpoints, and there's some that, you know, I'm not going through just because they're not as interesting, then we'd send you, like, an actual box. And we send you a box that, you know, the packing material was earplugs, and we talked about how, like, we reduce the noise of your churn, right? And then we had a box, an AirPod Pro box, that we would put in there and said, if you want the AirPods, let's get on a call. And we bought— we didn't buy all those AirPods, we bought boxes off eBay for, like, less than a dollar per AirPod box.

Yeah.

And then essentially, like, all of a sudden, again, it's another moment of, like, Holy cow, these guys are crazy. And so the results of all that are, I think our like contact or our count to call was like 25%, and that scaled through, you know, 2 leveling ups of the teams, or 3 actually. And then by that time we had gotten bought, and so I couldn't scale it to 4 or 5 level ups of the team.

Got it. And so let's, let's go a little deeper here. What was the offer for the $250 gift cards? Like, hey, we got Some questions for you, or what is it?

No, it was literally just like, if you get on a call with us, you know, $250 Amazon gift card, no questions asked. And we tested $100, we tested $150, we tested $200. There wasn't that much of a difference between $150 and $250, but like, we didn't— our lifetime value of our product was so high that like, giving out an extra $100 wasn't gonna hurt us, and like, it could have potentially dropped the number of leads that we got on the phone, so like, it wasn't that big of a deal.

At dinner yesterday, I went through my presentation, and something— sometimes as a marketer, as an entrepreneur, you're so deep in it that you forget some of these basic things, right?

Yeah.

And you actually brought it up. It's like our business is so— on the ad agency side, it's so tied towards just order-taking.

Yeah.

But, you know, that's like maybe the top 10 to 20%, and you're like, you're forgetting about the rest of the 80% or so, right?

Totally. Well, if you think about it, And this is the thing with your marketers and your salespeople, like, and there's a whole thing about pre-automation that we can talk about here too. But it's like, I don't judge my marketing team or my salespeople off of like the 20% of customers that we're gonna buy anyways. Like, if you think about 100 customers coming in or 100 leads coming in, 20, and these numbers are all made up, they're just metaphors, but like 20 are gonna buy, it doesn't matter. They're just taking an order. 20 are not gonna buy, like, I don't know how they got even on the call. I judge them on that middle 60.

Mm-hmm.

Because those middle 60 are the ones that like, they actually have to work to create the demand. They actually have to work to sell them and handle objections. And the issue a lot of us get into is like, oh, let's just increase that 100 to 1,000. And then yeah, we're gonna get that 20% that is gonna like convert, but that's not how it scales normally. Normally that 20 stays constant and you just end up having 1,000 extra or, you know, 900 extra leads, but you don't necessarily have that conversion rate coming through. And so this is why it's so important to be extremely fastidious and very, very, very focused on those different ratios coming through the funnel before you like set up some scaling, before you set up all these automations.

Yep, and I think you said this too, and we had another mutual friend that said this. It's like, I've seen this in most service businesses, right? These are agencies that are doing $100, $200, $300 million plus. All the forms look the same, right? There's marketing budget and all that. And I think the argument that also came from you is like, dude, just take marketing budget out. Like, you don't need that.

Well, what frustrates the hell out of me is like the early automation. Marketers and salespeople early automate everything. And it's much like a production line. If you start doing too much automation too early, you don't understand the steps that actually produce the car, or you don't understand the steps that actually cause a conversion. So one of the conversations I had with you was like, what are these salespeople doing all day? And if you're having all this automation, like you're actually losing people in all of these different steps of a form or all of these different steps of the funnel. And what we would do is we would actually send an email that was like plain text. It was automated, but it was just like, oh, you downloaded you know, thanks for— or I saw you downloaded, um, like, hey Eric, saw you downloaded the pricing book. What are you trying to figure out with your pricing right now?

Mm-hmm.

Like, I just want a response. I'm not looking to try to close you or convert you or see if you're a good lead. Like, that's what sales is for. Now, yes, you can take this to a logical extreme and all of a sudden you have way too many, like, conversations, but I want that problem first before I automate. I hate, hate, hate, and I— it's a, it's a really good judge of a marketer or a salesperson or a sales leader that is immature and not experienced enough is, oh, we need to like pre-optimize and pre-automate. It's like, well, do we have that problem yet?

No.

Okay, well, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna have a webinar email go out and I'm gonna not have them go to a landing page or a form. I'm gonna say in that email, respond, and if you respond, we'll get you on the list and we'll send you a calendar invite. Well, why am I gonna do that? One, because I'm gonna get so many more people to sign up because I'm not gonna have them go to this form where there's gonna be a drop-off, but 2, my salespeople are then gonna be able to have a conversation with them and all of a sudden go, oh hey, by the way, what are you trying to figure out with your pricing, you know, for this pricing webinar? Oh, I'm trying to figure this out. Oh, do you just want to get on a call with one of our like pricing specialists and like have a conversation? Oh yeah. And like they show up to the webinar. I don't care. Like the webinar was to get the demand, to get the conversation, right? And I think the issue is, is like we scaled that to thousands of people On a webinar with like our BDRs because we had all this other automation that made it so that they could have that conversation and get them on the phone. And then, yeah, if we went up another like level with that product, we probably would start to have using some sort of a form, but I don't want to automate that until like the moment where it's absolutely necessary and the moment where I understand how can I create that demand or how can I get that conversation. Yeah.

And for the BDRs, how are you incentivizing them? Because they're, they're helping a lot with It's marketing and sales activities.

Yeah.

So how are you incentivizing them?

Well, I think BDR— I mean, this is not a universal rule, but in the products that I have sold or the products that I have advised, BDRs should typically report to marketing because they are a function of demand. Now, that does cause a problem because many BDRs want to be AEs, but that's a problem that's a lot easier to solve than trying to get salespeople or sales leaders to focus on the concept of demand generation. Right? And so the incentive was, well, your inbound reps— and to maybe back up a second, the way that we had this structured was you have all these sources of leads coming in, for us at least, because of a content play. So we had referral traffic, we had blog post signups, we had ebooks, we had—

Webinars.

8 different podcasts and video series that all had lead capture somewhere in the videos or the podcasts. So we had all this coming in. That came into one particular feed, and someone during working hours and even once or twice during the weekend had to always be on call looking at that feed because time was such an important thing that we found to responding to a lead. It's like anything, like if you want to go buy something, if all of a sudden you have to schedule a call 2 weeks from now, you're probably gonna lose your momentum depending on if you wanted to buy that particular thing that much. And so our thing was we needed a response within 5 minutes. So our inbound reps had more, um, more hours that they were covering, and during this time they're also doing chat. And then our outbound reps, um, basically would have to do one chat shift per week or maybe 2 chat shifts per week. And frankly, like, the inbound reps got all the credit for any of the opportunities created from inbound, but what I told the outbound reps is this is just part of being on a team, right? And I think when you're on a team, like, Those, just those incentive structures. And if there was any inbound rep that just wasn't pulling their weight, which caused resentment on some of the outbound reps, like we would fire that person and move on. Um, and so, yeah, I didn't, I don't think this needs to be complicated. You don't need like a lot of incentives. Um, but you want to put the incentives in the right place. So where we did put incentives, for example, is one of the biggest mistakes, uh, marketing and sales teams do is they allow their reps to write the emails. And what I mean by that is like, you're taking a 22-year-old kid, oftentimes smart, hungry, hardworking, amazing, and you're then saying, please go write a bunch of emails in context to a 45-year-old VP or C-level or director at a company. That's dumb.

Yeah.

Like, that is absolutely idiotic. So what we did is we basically ran it like a codebase. We were like, here is the core sequences for this particular vertical or this particular persona that we were targeting, and you had to follow the core. Now, if you thought you could beat the core messaging, we had this thing called the Beat the Vic system, because Vic was the growth marketer who was kind of in charge of this.

Right.

Where basically you could branch off that email, change the subject line, change the email, add the email, whatever you wanted to do, run it for 2 weeks in like a very controlled test, and if it beat the Vic, You got a spiff, you know, anyway, I think it shifted from a couple hundred bucks to $500 to $1,000, depending on what we were trying to do, and then we merged it so that everyone else took advantage of it. In the early days, even, if you were ramping, like, even if you're in your first 6 months, every reply you got, even if it was a no, needed to go into a group channel or into the manager's channel and basically be like, I got this reply, here's the response that I wanna do, what do you think? And then they would give feedback and get the response out really, really quickly. Because again, these leads are so precious. And if you just let, again, 22-year-olds who just don't have a lot of experience left yet go, you're just missing out on all these different margins and you're missing out on all this different stuff. And then you're sitting there and you're like, oh, maybe it's the fact that we don't have these features. Maybe it's the fact we don't have this. It's like, no, you have demand. You're just like letting it go by. Right.

So leads, by the way, just to clarify, leads in this context is a response?

Well, a lead in this context is like someone that we're targeting, right? And so in this case, when I'm referring to leads, I'm referring to someone responding to an email, basically, or like a qualified response or something like that. Yeah, qualified response.

And are you using a shared inbox for all this too?

Yes. Yeah, yeah. So shared inbox, I think, I believe we use Front. I think at some point we switched to something else. I don't remember what, but yeah, Front was it.

Got it. This message is brought to you by Leveling Up Founders, and Leveling Up Founders Founders is an invite-only event for founders. It happens once a year, usually during August, and past attendees include people such as Ali Abdaal, Cody Sanchez, Neil Patel, Vanessa Lau, and the list goes on and on. And ultimately it comes down to the quality of the group of the people. We try to keep the group high caliber. That's why it's invite only. So if you are a founder at the top of your game, you can go to levelingup.com/founders to learn more about it and you can apply. We'll see you on the other side. I want to sit on this for a little longer. Again, I think where service companies get this wrong is—

I think all companies get this wrong, by the way.

I mean, I specifically study service companies because I'm in the— you know what I mean? It's like, you know, oh, they're doing $100 billion or whatever, right? It's like it's all the same forms and they're only targeting 20%. What you do, I think what is— what most people forget about is you got to target the 60%. And I guess let's talk about compensation real quick. So these BDRs, what are they? What's the base and what's the OT?

I think before we get to that, I'm happy to go for that. But before we get to that, I think in reality, it's a misunderstanding of where demand comes from. Demand is a continuum, right? So if you think about like a spectrum, you have the people who love you, they're already aware of you, they absolutely need your product. They're like right over here on the spectrum, and they're like gonna raise their hand and go talk to the salesperson, right? And then all of a sudden, if you take like one step up the spectrum, what ends up happening is you have people who are aware of the problem, they are playing around with your content, they need to kind of be tipped the scales. Then if you go up one level on the spectrum, all of a sudden you have people who are aware of the problem but may not know that you exist. Then you go one step on the spectrum, all of a sudden you have people who, like, they want the thing that's downstream from your problem— more revenue, more growth, whatever it is— but they don't know that your thing that you do is something that can help them actually do that, right? And the issue with most companies and the issue with most leaders is because they're so tool-based, meaning, oh, let's add this tool, let's do this, which is not a bad thing necessarily, but because that's the focus of what they're doing, they only focus on the stuff that's like right next to where sales is on the continuum, because that's basically the stuff that all these tools help with, right? And you need a really, really good understanding of that continuum to be successful. So a BDR can't be successful at that because they have 1 year of experience, right? But to answer your question and kind of switch to compensation, um, the beauty of sales and the beauty of sales-like things is like compensation is very, very variable, right? So this is one of the reasons why we opened up a Utah office, because when we had— we were headquartered in Boston, you might have like a $50K base, and then, you know, $20K, $25K, $30K on top of that depending on experience for variable compensation. In Utah, I can get down to a $35,000 base depending on who it is, right?

Mmhmm.

And so that structure up and down, the most important things that we found with BDRs, at least in our experience, was Having the feeling of progression, right? So if I'm okay with $50,000 in my model, like with my lifetime value, I might start you at $35,000, but within 3 months you're up to $40,000, and then with 3 months after that you're up with $45,000, etc. But I'm okay with that give and take because that gives you a reputation of doing, you know, actually giving out more money when someone's performing well. But I don't waste a ton of money and a ton of ramp when all of a sudden someone really isn't like gonna be there, and I can just get rid of them and make that mistake as small as possible.

Got it. And you see your expected ramp time is generally 6 months?

No, ramp time is 2 weeks.

2 weeks?

2 weeks. Well, think about what they're doing. I've created a system. I basically have a— like, I have a complete, you know, I have the emails for them, I have this whole system, I have this whole like mail system for the boxes, I have this whole video system for them. I've created everything to create demand because I did that from a leadership perspective, not from a let's just let the BDRs throw a bunch of stuff up against the wall and see what sticks. Well, if you're doing that, then what's your job? Finding contacts, putting them into a sequence, handling responses that you're getting help with, and doing some logistical stuff to make sure this other stuff goes out, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, so you just need to understand what we're selling, who we're selling to, and what looks like a good contact. And then even then we found out, well, that's actually a little bit hard. So we put quality assurance into the process by having our sales manager, or a BDR manager, basically review the contact list, like spot-check everyone's contact list on a weekly basis. Because now all of a sudden, we're controlling for that particular problem where they're putting bad stuff into the system, right? So you should be able to ramp, like, your first week you're creating a list. And then from there, like, yes, there is some extra ramp because you get better at handling chat shifts, you get better at doing a bunch of things. I think training where people do 6 to 8 weeks of training and then the person starts doing something, even in sales, right? Like we have people who come to us who are AEs. They're pitching their first week, not to a customer, but to their trainer. They're basically their manager because that's how they're going to learn. Like, I'm not going to have them like learn the product for like 8 weeks. We made this mistake. And then all of a sudden they start pitching. Well, I have to restart that process all over again because now I'm actually doing the thing and coaching them. And no amount of knowledge is gonna, like, make up for that experience for that particular AE. And so, yeah, the ramp for an AE is probably 3 months, just because of our sales cycles with those products. But yeah, for BDRs, like, a couple of weeks.

Got it.

And I know within a month, like, if they're gone or they're there or not.

I think it makes a lot of sense for sales. Have you read the book, The First 90 Days?

I've heard of it. I'm familiar with the premise, but yeah.

The title, right? So the whole premise of the first 90 days is like, you know, the more senior you are, let's say you're VP, SVP level, you're just supposed to sit and listen for the first, you know, 30 days at the very least and not take any action. And then, you know, goes on, goes on. What's your philosophy on that?

For executives? Let's go executives.

I think we went junior. Let's go executives.

I, I'm cautious here because we, we developed a lot of executives. We didn't hire a lot of executives. And so that's, that's a little bit of like my bias. I think that the problem— it's, it's right and it's wrong, right? It's the first 90 days sitting back and like listening is really important because I myself have made plenty of mistakes based on the, the hard and fast rules I thought that we talked about earlier in the conversation where I was like, well, this is how it is. And then all of a sudden, like 3 months in, you're like, oh, that's not how it is at all, right? Because I got more information. I care less about the timeline of how long someone's gonna take, and I care a heck of a lot more about their process and the framework that they're using. Because a lot of times, oh, we're just gonna like learn, is an excuse to just kind of like hang out. And they're not necessarily consciously doing this. It's like they're just expecting the information to come from them. The best executives I've seen, and I worked with a fantastic executive who was brought in after I started at Paddle post-acquisition. He had a process. Like, he had a framework for how he thought about, um, you know, his particular, uh, function. And then he gathered information within that framework, adjusted the framework, and very, very quickly was implementing, um, things that he knew that he could fix right away that are just, like, very resolute. Like, meaning, like, you don't really need to learn a lot to change this system or implement this or to solve a particular problem, and then the big stuff that had wide sweeping implications, like, this is our philosophy for this function, or, this is how we do things, that's where he, like, waited a little while longer, and then put together a plan. But then, what was really smart about what he did, and I believe they talk about this in The First 90 Days, is he then went and battle-tested that plan with everybody.

Right.

And he didn't listen to everybody, because that's not his job. His job is to have judgment, and take that information in, and then ultimately make sure that he's putting that into the plan and how he needs to get to his particular outcomes. But yeah, I think, I think if you have someone who's like, hey, I'm gonna, I'm gonna spend my first 90 days or my first 30 days who I'm just gonna be learning, I'd be like, how are you gonna learn? What's your process to learning? If they can't answer those particular questions or they have to like scramble and like go and like come up with something, probably not an experienced exec, and you should really question if you're hiring them.

Yeah, and that happens during the interview process.

Yeah, but the interview process— totally. But the interview process gets hard because it's like weird dating, right? Because you're sitting there and you're like, well, instead of dating for like a year, whatever the normal dating, like, amount of time is to figure out if you want to marry someone, we're trying to like figure out if we're gonna marry within a month. And it's like, I don't know, I, I think referrals are really important, but referrals can be terrible, especially if they're— especially if they're not blind referrals. And even with that, I like to put them through a challenge. Like, I like to put them through, like, can they think in a first principles framework basis, or are they just gonna copy and paste stuff? I made this mistake with a head of BDRs, head of demand gen. They came in and basically I was like, oh, you know, they're experienced and they have, like, really good, like, you know, really good recommendations, really good references, and they did this at 3 other companies, and they were good, but they were really good when someone had a system that was already in place. They were terrible at coming up with a system. They were terrible. They didn't, they didn't know how to write a sales email, and they were just really good at management, really good at people management, but we brought them in to like build the team. Like, they were terrible at that.

Right.

And so that was on us because we didn't test for that. We didn't talk to them about that, but I think it's just one of those things where you have to understand what you're looking for and then talk to as many people as humanly possible before you start that hiring process.

And what would be an example of a challenge?

Um, so like for a salesperson, it's pretty easy, like come in and pitch something. And then they would always want to try to pitch the product. And we're like, you're going to pitch like our product and you're going to pitch something we know everything about and you know nothing about, like probably not a good idea. Pitch the thing that you're pitching right now. And that gets a little bit hard too, because oftentimes like their sales pitches suck. Not— and it's not their fault. It's just because most people's sales pitches suck. They're just like features, features, features, features. There's no discovery. There's nothing, right? And so you kind of have to like read through the lines of like, we're gonna retrain them. If not, they're really like— there's really good experienced folks we don't have to retrain, and you ideally want to find those types of folks. But other challenges like, you know, engineering challenges are easy. Like have them like work for a day with you. You're paying them for that? Typically, depends on what it is. Like, I mean, it might just be like, you might be working with them like on a whiteboard, right? And so in that case, like, we're probably not paying them for that. But if they're in like the— if they're shipping something, like, I would have people back in the day, like, for marketers or writers, like, write a blog post. I'll pay them for the blog post even if I don't use it.

Yeah.

Because, you know, it's just, it just makes the most sense. But I'm trying to think of a challenge for like a director or something like that. I think for the most part, We'd have them, we'd give them like a set of information. Like I'd give them basically a case study where I'd say, here's all the information about a company and I'd make this up. And you know, you put some red herrings in there and I'd basically say, what would be your plan given this information? And this is complete information to 3x this number or 10x that number, depending on what the role is. And then they would come in and they would like basically have like a conversation because I'm just trying to figure out, can they think in a like strategic, critical way, or are they just someone who's like, well, I'm gonna implement Drift? Well, why are you gonna implement Drift? Well, because we need chat. Why do we need chat? Oh, because we'll get more leads from it. You hear answers like that, they can't play on that level.

Right. But by the way, we were talking about this at dinner yesterday too, how chat has been such a boon. Like, we've done chat in the past, right? It hasn't done much for us. I mean, we didn't implement it correctly, but chat seems like it was big for you guys Chat was big for our other mutual friend too. How big was it? And then I want to move on to the more personal wealth stuff.

Yeah, yeah. I think chat was— chat's another channel, basically. I think chat, but it's also like a channel that supports other channels, right? I think that for us, it wasn't like, oh my God, we turned chat on and doubled our business or anything like that. But it cannibalized some of the email, and then it also created some of the you know, people who just didn't want to get on the phone type stuff, especially inside the product. So we had a free product where a lot of our leads came from, and those folks, they're already in the moment, and that allowed us to kind of get after them. So not really answering your question, I think it was just one of those things that where most people suffer, where most people get chat wrong, is they allow those basically to become emails. Chat, you need to reply. Someone's there, right? So someone needs to reply. You need to be able to train your sales team, your support team to basically like push those folks to the right place. Most of the time that is a call for our product, but other times it's, you know, basically a self-serve signup.

So it was fine.

It was fine. Yeah. To answer your question, I was trying to find like a better answer, but yeah, it was fine.

Got it. By the way, Neil and I have an agency owners group called the Agency Owners Association. All you have to do, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. Once again, marketingschool.io/agency to learn more. And now back to the show. Patrick, what is— this will be the final question— what's next for you?

So I am jumping into the fray of healthcare. So we're starting a company in the healthcare space. No idea what it is yet. We have some ideas, but yeah, just in explore mode, which is fun because you forgot the chaos and the anxiety And, or I forgot the chaos and anxiety that comes with the start.

Ready to be waterboarded again.

Yeah, just ready to be waterboarded. But you're like, oh, this won't be that bad. And you're like, oh, this sucks. This sucks. Especially when you're kind of switching spaces. Like, I thankfully have a network and obviously, you know, money helps with some of this stuff too. But it's like one of those things where you're like, you know, problem, like no amount of money is gonna help you figure out what the problem— oh, sorry, it will help you figure out the problem, but it's not gonna give you the answer. give you the answers. Like, you have to still explore, you have to struggle, you have to build judgment, you have to talk to a lot of people, you got to mess a lot of stuff up. So what I've been telling a lot of people who I've been asking for like intros or help is like, we know we're gonna make a lot of the mistakes that the same— like the same mistakes that other companies do because you have to earn that wisdom. But I'd like to limit those as much as humanly possible. And so yeah, jumping into the fray. And I think one of the other things that I told Jenny when we first started dating Is I was like, no matter what the company is or what the outcome is, like, we need— like, are we comfortable? I'm comfortable. But I was like, you kind of need to be comfortable that I'm gonna put all of it into the next thing. And so that's kind of the mindset that I have where I'm like rolling it forward and, you know, want to build bigger and better.

All right, I love it. Patrick, what's the best way for people to find you online?

For this crew, I mean, I have a personal website that's pretty basic at patrick It's got some ways to contact me, but I don't really look at LinkedIn anymore, and then Twitter is where I'm at, and it's just @pattakiss.

Pattakiss, double T, everybody. Pat, thanks so much for doing this.

Absolutely.

Thanks, brother.