Evan Carmichael Radio Show - Episode #24

Hello and welcome to the Evan Carmichael Show. I believe in entrepreneurs and this show is all about helping you become more successful, helping you realize your business goals. And you may be at the point where you feel like you're not getting the momentum you need, where just things aren't where you thought they were going to be, where you feel like your time is worth more than what you're getting out of it. You're putting in a lot of time, a lot of effort, a lot of dollars, and you're just not seeing the results that you thought you were going to see. That's what this show is all about, and I'm looking forward to helping you. Now, today's episode is really important. I mean, all the episodes are important, but today's episode is extremely important because I'm going to be sharing with you the fastest way to grow your business, and I've used this strategy multiple times, and it literally saved my my first business and had a huge impact on my life. And so today I'm going to be sharing that with you. So what's the strategy? The fastest way to grow your business is through alliances. This is so important. A lot of entrepreneurs, this is how they start out. They start a business, they have a product or service that they've poured their energy and passion into, and you go out and you try to get one customer at a time. one customer and then another customer and then another customer and another customer. And it's so slow. It's such a momentum suck. It takes you so long to get to where you need to be because you're closing one customer at a time. And the path can still work. It just takes so long to get to where you want to be. And a lot of times entrepreneurs will give up along the way because you're just not getting the momentum you need. The better way to do it, the faster way to do it, is to work with alliance partners. So what do I mean by this? What you want to do is find people who are already selling to your target market and find a way to work together. These are not your direct competitors, okay? You're not going to go to your direct competition and say, "Hey, you want to work together?" I'm talking about people who are selling other products and services to your target market. Target customers and working with them on some kind of arrangement. There's a million ways to skin the cat. We'll get into it later in the show, but working with them to help introduce your product and service to their clients. That's the fastest way to grow because now instead of going one customer at a time, one customer at a time, one customer at a time, when you close an alliance partner, they may have hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of your customers already. And if you close just a handful of those alliance partners, they'll do all the work you need to grow your business because they already have the voice, right? They have the customers who are listening to them, and when they say, "Hey, you need to go check this out," people are going to do it. So I'm encouraging you today to look at who you can partner with, form alliances with to help spread your message. Now we're going to get into some specific strategies and examples later in the show, but I wanted to start with a story. This is a personal story of how this strategy really impacted my business and my life. In my first business, it was a software company. It was biotechnology software. And, you know, science was my worst subject in school. I dropped it as soon as I could. I had no computer background. And I'm sure my high school science teachers would be laughing at me thinking, "You are running a biotechnology software company? That's got to be some kind of joke." Anyway, so I was struggling. I had this business, I started it up, I had two partners and we were struggling. And we weren't making a lot of money and it sucked because up until that point everything I had done I had been great at. I had always excelled and here I was trying to run this business and I wasn't doing well. I was making $300 a month. $300 a month. You can't survive on that. I was eating beans for lunch every day. And it took its toll and it just pounded on my sense of self-worth and I felt like a total failure. I felt like this wasn't working out and I didn't know what I would do. And I remember one day I called my business partner up and I told him, "You know what? I quit. This is just too much. We're not getting where we want to go. I'm so frustrated. I feel like a total loser. I got to go do something valuable with my time. I quit." And just hearing those words come out of my mouth was a shock, 'cause I'm not a quitter. And I hung up the phone and I cried. I bawled my eyes out for 20 minutes. And the next day I woke up and went back to work. I went back to the company. And it was just too important to quit on. You know, what we were doing was too important. And I didn't want to have this stain on my resume, you know, saying that I quit on this, 'cause I didn't want to quit once and always have that be a part of me. I had to figure out a way to do it. And the light bulb moment went off for me when I realized, you know what, I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before. I'm not the first guy to try to do this. And even though I don't have any background in science, I have no background in software, and now I'm trying to run this scientific software company, I'm not the first guy to try to do this. Let me model success. Let me find somebody who's done it and apply that strategy to help me grow my business. You know what? I had nothing else to lose. I was already at rock bottom. I had nothing else to lose. And there was no big player in my industry, biotech software. So I expanded the scope and looked at software in general. I looked at, okay, who's a big software company? And I looked at Microsoft. Microsoft was the number one company in software at the time. I said, you know what? How did they get started? How did Bill Gates start this thing up? And I don't care how Bill Gates makes an extra million dollars now, but zero to one, how did he make that first million? That's what I want to do. That's what I want to learn. And I looked at their story and I dug back into their archives and I found that Microsoft made their money through alliances. They consistently found alliance partners to help them grow their business. When they launched their software, they weren't out there trying to sell one piece of software at a time to one customer at a time. That would have taken way too long. What they did was try to find people who were already selling other things to the customers that they wanted to reach. So they had to define customer type. These are the types of people who we want to reach out to. And they thought, who else is selling to these guys? Let's find a way to make a partnership. And Microsoft's big deal came with IBM. And IBM agreed to sell all of their computers with Microsoft software on it. And it was a huge deal. Computers need software, and they chose Microsoft. And IBM was the biggest computer maker at the time. And now every single IBM computer that was shipped had Microsoft software on it. By Microsoft making that one partnership arrangement, that one alliance agreement, they were able to explode their business. And they said goodbye to selling one at a time, one at a time, one at a time. Let's attack these channel partners. And the funny thing is, looking back at their story, that was the deal that made them. That was the deal that made Microsoft huge. That exploded the business up. But they were a $7 million company when they approached IBM for that deal. Now, $7 million is not a huge company, but it's still a $7 million company. I would like— I would have liked to be a $7 million company that was having these problems. I'm making $300 a month. Show me how to get the $7 million. I'd take that any day of the year. And so I look back to see, well, how did they get the $7 million? And it again was through alliance partnerships. They continued to find people who were selling to their target audience and partner up with them. And some of the deals worked out and some of them didn't, but that was their focus. And that's how they became a million-dollar company, a $7 million company, the billion-dollar company, and beyond. It's such a fast way to grow your business. And Microsoft came out of nowhere. If you look at how long it takes companies to get started and to grow and to build a client base, A lot of the biggest companies in the world took years, and years, and years, and years, and Microsoft came out of nowhere to explode onto the scene with their software because they formed alliance partners. So if you have something really good, I'm assuming you have a great product, a great service. You're ready to go. You're ready to hit the market. You know, you're not in testing phase anymore. It's like, "I want customers now. Show me some momentum. I am ready. Hit me up." Instead of trying to sell, one at a time, one at a time, one at a time, look at who else your customers are buying from and make a list. Make a list of everybody that your customers could potentially buy from before they buy from you, after they buy from you, and reach out to those people. Because those people are going to be great potential candidates to talk to you. And it's so much easier, a sales call, to call up somebody and say, "Hey, I want to explore if there's a way we can make a partnership together." than, "Hey, will you buy my stuff?" Makes a big difference. It's a lot easier call to make. It's a lot easier sale to make. And it can have a lot bigger impact on the growth of your business instead of trying to sell one at a time. So this whole show is dedicated to showing you how to make those alliance partners happen. Welcome back to the Evan Carmichael Show. I believe in entrepreneurs and this show is all about helping you reach your business goals. Business goals as an entrepreneur. Today I'm talking about forming alliances and it being the fastest way to grow your business is instead of selling one, one, one, one customer at a time, you work with alliance partners who can reach that audience for you and spread your message for you. So I was talking about Microsoft. I was talking about how I was at my wit's end. I almost gave up my business. I was making $300 a month. And I didn't know what to do, and I thought of quitting. I told my partner I quit. And I thought, you know what? I'm not the first guy to try to sell software before, and I copied their strategies. And I said, you know what? I got nothing else to lose, so let's give this a shot. And I started reaching out. So my customers were going to be scientists, researchers. And I thought, okay, you know what? I'm going to make a list of all the different researchers that I know and think about who else they buy from, other types of companies that they buy from. And I would start reaching out to them. And that's what I did. I reached out to them one by one, those alliance partners, and within a couple weeks I had my first deal. And it was for $13,500. $13,500. You know, that may not sound like a lot of money to you guys listening right now, but to me, man, I hit the jackpot because I was making $300 a month. $13,500, are you kidding me? I was so happy when that check came in. I couldn't believe my my eyes. More important than having the $13,500K was I had a system now. Like, I finally found something that worked. After trying all this stuff that didn't, I finally had something that worked and I could replicate and do again and again and again. And so I started closing more partnerships and more deals and looked for more alliance partners. And that was my main role. That's what I ended up doing. I want you guys to go out and look for partners. I want to get to the calls. I have Robin on the line. Robin, where are you from and how can I help?

Good morning. I'm from California, Bakersfield, California.

All right. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

I'm calling today because I have a blog. It's called The Curvy Momager. As a result of that blog growing, I have created a product line of t-shirts and a few other items and have started to do—

events.

And so I'm thinking to myself, it's time to register myself as a company and get some of those things in place, and I just have no idea what to do.

Okay, um, is it just you in the business?

It's just me.

Cool. So there's a couple ways to do it. Right now you're set up probably as a sole proprietorship, and the The risk is it's under your name, right? The bank account is, you know, you, it's your bank account. And the biggest risk is if somebody sues you, you are on the hook for everything. They could take your house, your car, everything. Now you're in a blog, so you may not get sued as easily as other companies would, but the best way to do it is to set up a corporation. So you set up a corporation, you call it whatever name you want. Maybe off your blog name, and it protects you. It can protect your company name, right? So nobody else can take that company name. And then if anybody sues you, then the worst case scenario is they could only take what's in the company's bank account, not what's in your personal bank account.

Gotcha. So like if I had an event, some trips, broke an ankle, that's—

Right.

Gotcha, gotcha.

Yeah, exactly. And you can get insurance for your company as well, so that if somebody does break an ankle or whatever at an event, then your insurance could help cover it as well and you don't bankrupt your company. Definitely worth looking into.

Oh, cool.

Yeah. So I mean, I'm part of a salsa dancing company here. I've invested in a salsa dance company in Toronto, and that was one of the first things, like, okay, we got to get incorporated. And we have to get insurance because if somebody comes to one of our dance events and they hurt themselves or they slip on the floor and there's water or whatever, you want to be— I don't want to lose my house and my car because of that. Exactly.

Exactly. And these are the things you don't think about when you are starting a business.

Yeah, and it also helps with your numbers so that it's important to keep your personal bank account separate from your business bank account. and it helps you when you're filing your taxes. You can pay a lot less taxes as a corporation than as an individual, so there's a lot of tax planning. You may not be making too much money yet, but as those dollars come in, tax planning is going to be super important. And so if you keep the money in your company and you're reinvesting it, then the money you make as a corporation is taxed much more favorably than as a, as a person, an individual, right?

Well, thank you so much for the advice. I, I have a little bit more direction of where to go.

Cool. Do you see this as being always yourself in the business, or are you going to bring on partners?

Um, well, the interesting piece is I've had people contact me about partnering with them on different things, so we may be adding some additional people.

Okay, so you can form alliances, this is what we're talking about now, where they have their own company, you have your own company, and you're trying to find ways to help each other out, and maybe you're in a commission back and forth. Partner is more, you have somebody who owns a piece of your company.

I like the alliance piece better.

Well, it's a good way to do it, it's a good way to do it. I mean, some people, if you're going to grow, you're going to need investors, you want to sell shares, shares in your business, if you're ever going to bring on a partner, you have to get incorporated. Uh, what's going to happen is when you get incorporated, you get issued a number of shares. And so right now you're going to own all the shares. You're 100% shareholder. But if you ever do want to give some equity to somebody, maybe it's a really important employee that you bring on or an investor in the business, uh, then you can sell them some of your shares. or maybe even one day sell all your shares if you want to get acquired. Somebody says, "Hey, Robin, you know what? Here's $10 million for your blog business." Love it. Take it or leave it, right? You got it. So you can easily sell those shares off to somebody. Easily. Okay?

Easily.

Yeah. All right. All right, good luck, Robin. Thanks for calling in.

Thanks so much. Enjoy the rest of the show.

All right. Yeah, and for everybody listening, it's super important to get incorporated. I mean, it's okay to test out at the start, test out to see if you, you know, like this business, if you're going to keep going with it, if it's something that has some traction. But there's a big risk of somebody suing you and taking everything from you. And so the way to prevent that is to get incorporated, launch a business properly, have a shareholders agreement, you know, have all the shares that you own yourself in case you ever want to sell, and go look at getting some kind of insurance policy out. It's something that, you know, not a lot of entrepreneurs think about at the start because they're so focused on getting, getting customers, getting our business off the ground, but you've got to protect yourself, right? You want to protect your business name. You want to protect your personal bank account, and you want to be able to make sure that you're still around in 5 years, and being incorporated is a great way to go. So go check it out. It doesn't cost a lot and definitely worthwhile for everybody launching a business. Today I'm talking about forming alliances and it being the fastest way to grow your company. Find people who are already selling to your target audience and find a way to work together. I talked about Microsoft and how how they formed alliances to grow. I talked about my business and how I went from $300 a month to closing my first deal at $13,500 and then having a strategy I could use to grow from there. And I closed partnership after partnership after partnership, and in a couple years, we grew so quickly that we had customers in 30 countries. I had NASA, I had Johnson Johnson as customers, and my company got acquired. And that was from nothing, from $300 a month to being acquired and having that massive growth in 3 years. That's what happens when you form solid alliances. Now I talked about Microsoft and how they used that deal to help them grow. They still did it later on even as they grew, as they were big companies. When they entered into new deals, into new markets, they always tried to look at who they could partner with. So here's an example. Microsoft owns Expedia, the popular travel website. And when they went into it, they realized, hey, you know what? We don't know anything about travel. We need to find somebody to help us get into this space. And so they partnered with American Express. And American Express American Express had a long track record with their credit cards and their traveler's checks in the travel world. So they went into it together. And after a couple years, the deal was Amex would drop out and Microsoft would own the whole thing. And they used that partnership to understand the business, to get leverage, to get traction, and then grow. And Expedia is massively popular right now. So they still use it to this day. This isn't just a strategy to start off. This is one you can use ongoing continue building your business. What you want to do now is think about you being one of many people that your customers buy from. And you want to think about ideally, who are your customers buying from before they buy from you? So as an example, I was talking about with Robin in our last call about the salsa company that I'm involved with here in Toronto. Who is our audience? Typically it's people who are moving into the neighborhood. Those are going to be the best people who will then look for something new to do and want to sign up to take a salsa class. So, who can we partner with? Think about who are those people buying from and working with before they move into the area, right? So, maybe they're working with real estate agents. Maybe they're working with home inspectors. Maybe they're working with insurance brokers, right? These are all people who you have to look and work with before you move into a neighborhood. And so, what I would do is partner up with the local real estate agents, local home inspectors, local insurance brokers, and find ways to work together. You may be thinking, well, these guys, they don't care about salsa. Why would they be promoting me? And how can I help them? The point is, you've given them an opportunity to show some love to their customers. You're giving them an opportunity to say, hey, welcome to the neighborhood. Here's a great service that you might want to go check out if you're looking to make some friends. And as those agents develop relationships with their clients and they know their needs and they know what they're worried about, our salsa company could be a good solution for them. You can get lots of referrals that way. So ideally you want to look at who your customers are buying from before they buy from you and reach out to them to form alliances. There's a lot of different ways to skin that cat, but that's how you want to do it. So here's another example. If I'm trying to sell to entrepreneurs, this may be a market you guys understand because you're entrepreneurs. So I'm trying to sell to you How would I form alliances? To try to sell one entrepreneur at a time will take too much time. So I might talk to insurance brokers or financial advisors or bankers or accountants or lawyers or web designers or PR agents or management consultants or staffing companies. These are all people that we work with as entrepreneurs. And if you work with a lawyer and you've worked with them for years and you love them and you respect them and they know you have a specific problem and they say, "Hey, here's a solution." You're going to check it out. So you've got to find those alliances so that they can spread the word for you. All right, get to the call. I have Tiffany on the line. Tiffany, where are you from and how can I help?

Hi, I'm from San Francisco, California.

That's back-to-back California. All right, welcome to the show.

Thanks. So I just launched my first business. It's a product. It's actually a scarf with a built-in neck pillow, so speaking of travel. and we launched on our website and it's sleeperscrap.com and we want to know, you know, we're having a lot of success online. We're looking also at selling, you know, on eBay and Amazon, all the online outlets. When is the correct time in the startup to consider retail? We don't want to, you know, muddy the waters. We want to make sure our customers, you know, have a seamless, you know, supply chain and transition and delivery. So, we want to know when do we consider going to retail?

Are you guys profitable yet?

At this point, our goal for the first year is to break even, of course. We've only been in business for the first— for 3 months now, but we've seen, you know, several hits to our website and a lot of success. We've hit all of our goals in the first few months.

Right, okay. So the thing with going for retail, and it depends on how big an order you get, so typically when a new company comes out, you start with mom-and-pop shops. And they're not ordering huge quantities, right? You're not selling to Costco here. You're selling to, you know, Maybelline's fashion accessories. And so maybe they're only buying 10 from you, okay? The challenge is when you go for a big deal, if you're trying to get into, you know, I don't know what the price point is of your product, but whatever, like the big retailer, Walmart or Costco or Nordstrom or whatever you're trying to get, when they make an order, they might be buying like in the tens of thousands. And so how are you going to produce that, right? If you're not profitable yet, you don't have steady cash flow coming in, then you're going to have to go and get money. So it could be from a bank, it could be from an investor, uh, to finance that. And if it doesn't sell, they're going to ship it back to you and you have to return the money. So you could be potentially holding a lot of, uh, product that you're— you thought you would sell, but they're shipping back. So it's a risk, and it's really when do you want to take that risk? Some entrepreneurs, they take it right away and it works out, and others, they take it right away and it doesn't work out. It's just a calculated risk. So I mean, if you have a more, you know, play it safe mindset, it would start online, have success there, build a following, start creating a movement around it online, and you could do the social media stuff and create campaigns and start with your local area and show that it's working. Maybe even start— if you can get on the Shopping Channel or QVC to promote it that way. But then to go and make the bigger retail orders, what's your appetite for risk? Because if they say, okay, we want 25,000 of these sleeper scarves, then how are you going to fund that? And what happens if they don't sell?

So essentially there's no particular business metrics that you look at financially in a startup and say, okay, hey, now we're ready to go to retail, now we're ready to take that risk. Is it when you become profitable? Or is it when you can get the funding?

So how have you been funded so far? Is it your own money or you have—

Yep.

We've funded our— funded the business through personal savings and then through an SBA loan.

Okay. So, you know, if you had to fund 50,000 units to make it, how would you do it?

We have been approved for a line of credit, but of course, you know, we don't want to necessarily use all of our line of credit for inventory at this time when we could be using it for like marketing and product awareness. So that's kind of the catch-22 is that we don't want to— we do have money, but we don't want to put it all into inventory. So I guess that should tell me that if we don't have money to market the product, then it's not time, correct? And we don't want to give away a piece of the business. You don't want to, you know, get an investor this time. So I guess our decision has been it's not time. So Just wait?

Well, the difference is, you know, you don't want to just order this product without and be sitting on inventory without a sale. But if a Nordstrom comes and says, hey, we want 50,000 units, you're now producing to fill a sale. It's a big difference. And if you have the money to do that, then you can do it. The risk is like now you got to work hard to make sure all of those things sell at Nordstrom, right? Like you're pumping Nordstrom. You're putting stuff out on social media and YouTube campaigns and go to Nordstrom, buy our stuff, because you don't want those things to be returned to you, right? So if you have the line of credit backing to be able to go and do this, then it's still your appetite for risk, right? If you're safer, then you may say, okay, I'm going to wait till I have some cash flow coming in and I am profitable, because a bank isn't really going to look at your business until you have profits and have been around for 3 years. That's typically what they want to see. So it's your judgment call, but I would say if you have the money and you get a big order, then go for it and work your butts off to make sure that those products are selling at Nordstrom. Like, whatever they want from you, you're there promoting and driving people into their stores.

Okay, perfect. Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

No problem. And it was sleeperscarves.com? That was it?

Yep, yep, it is.

Thank you.

"Okay, sounds interesting. I'm going to check it out." Yeah, definitely. You'll love it. Yeah, and for everybody listening in, it is a tough call. At what point do you take the risk? And there's no solid answer. It just depends on what your appetite for risk is. Are you willing to bet the company right now, or do you want to go for slower growth? And it has to be a personal decision that you're not going to look back on and say, "I really wish I did it." Do you have that regret or not? So good luck. Today we are talking about alliances, and I wanted to give you some specifics. So great Evan Carmichael, I found who I want to talk to. How do I structure a deal with them? And there are a lot of different ways to do it. The first one to think about is do they want to get paid or not? So if you are talking to somebody who could potentially refer you a lot of customers, are they interested in it because of the money, or just because they are going to offer value to their clients? And some people will do it just because they love what you do, and they want to provide value add to their service. Remember, by making a good referral to somebody, it makes them look good too. But some people want to do it for the money. So you have to figure that out, and you have a coffee with them and talk about it. If you're going to do a commission, is it a lifetime commission or just a first-time commission? Hopefully, you know what is the lifetime value of your customer. You want them buying more than just one thing from you one time. So what's the lifetime value of a customer? And a common method is to give up the commission off of the first sale. All the profits you're going to make off that first sale, give them away. You give them a margin to motivate, right? You want to give them a margin that's good enough to motivate them to talk about you. And then you make all your sales off of the backend by selling more products, more services to them. You want to think about what is the value add to their clients, right? So if I'm selling salsa services, salsa classes, and a real estate agent is going to refer my business, why would he do that? Well, it's because it's giving this person who's new to the area, who doesn't know anything about this community, is moving in, something fun that they can go do, and new friends that they can meet, right? If it's a, you know, 90-year-old couple, maybe they won't be coming to salsa classes, but if it's a young single woman just moving in from Vancouver and doesn't know anybody in the city, then, That's a good potential fit. And so you're providing great value to her by telling her about the classes. And then last is think about how you can overdeliver for them. It's a common theme I have in my shows, how to overdeliver like crazy. So what else can you do to help your Alliance partners as well, right? So can you put them up on your website and showcase their services, or interview them for your blog, or put them on your social media, or follow them on Twitter and engage with them? Think of how else you can help their business beyond just sharing this one client that you worked together on. I have Marcus on the line. Marcus, where are you from and how can I help?

Hey, I'm from Fayetteville, North Carolina.

All right, welcome to the program. What's going on?

Nothing much. I'm having the— I own a hair salon. I'm having an exotic hair odyssey. Hair show coming up, and I do want to, you know, promote my business and promote the show. But I'm wondering, like, for my business aspect of sponsoring the show, how can I go about getting like big-time sponsors, like for the hair show, like Crown Ford or Dodge, or, you know, big, big hair industry people to sponsor the hair show?

Okay, so what's so different about this hair show?

Uh, this hair show isn't just like a cut and color hair show. This is like a fantasy hair show. We have like spinning pieces off the head, we have lighting pieces, we have— it's just not your typical hair show. It's a fantasy hair show. So it's not just a sit down and, um, look at someone cut hair. This is an actual production.

Okay, and who else is involved in this?

Um, it's Rick— basically my salon, it's Marcus Doll Salon. Uh, we're based out of Fayetteville, North Carolina. This is our 8th annual Exotic Hair Odyssey, and we were just, um, starting to reach out to other people to get involved, um, you know, in the hair show because we've been doing it for 8 years. So now it's kind of getting like a little bigger than us, and we're trying to see if we can get some big sponsors, you know.

Cool. Well, I'm excited for you. Uh, so here's the thing, okay, companies are looking to sponsor, right? They have full-time employees at their business whose job it is to decide who are we going to sponsor this year. And you have to make the case now why it should be you instead of somebody else. And the two things that you want to show is one, how is this thing really different? So if you're doing really innovative stuff with hair that's never been done before, then the partners that you want to partner up with are people who value innovation, right? The companies who love different and who want to be associated with a different innovative type of show. So you can look at the brand and see, well, who cares about innovation and who doesn't? So that's one mark already. Second, they are going to look at the reach. So you've been doing this for 8 years. That's great. You can say, okay, here is our growth. Here is how many people are coming out. But what I would do is, the topic of the show is form alliances. I would look at who else you can partner with to 10 times the size of the show. Who are not competitors to you, not hair salon people, but other people who offer complementary services who can bring their audience out. So you have your audience coming. Right? So if you're approaching me, if I'm the right partner, say I'm Ford and I really care about innovation and I really care about what you're doing, this is great. I'm looking at, okay, how many people is this thing going to reach? And you've done, you know, you have your track record of 8 years. But if this year is now the one where you bring in on 20 different partners who are all going to bring in their expertise and promote to their communities and their audience, and everybody is going to come together, now I'm a lot more interested as a sponsor to get involved.

Yeah, [Speaker:JASON] because we have TV. We have commercials, VH1, BET, OWN. We have TV commercials. And we also have internet, social media, radio, but it's like I can't find someone that can sponsor the caliber that I need for them to sponsor to. I don't understand.

Well, these guys are available, right? Like, you can, you can look at— I would look at jigsaw.com. I don't know if you've heard of Jigsaw, but check out jigsaw.com and you can find the names and titles of people at companies to call them up. You can say whoever's in charge of sponsorship at Ford, and you will get an email address and a phone number, and you can call them up. Getting the list—

Perfect.

Getting the list isn't super challenging. You can also try to connect people. So when you do Jigsaw, it will cost you maybe $1 per name, which isn't crazy expensive when you are talking about big sponsorship dollars. And I also look at LinkedIn and see if you can connect to specific people at companies through your own connections. But getting the list is one thing, it's then closing them on why this is such a big deal. And again, standing for something important, really showing how different this is, and making this the biggest thing ever, bringing on new alliance partners to help you promote this. All right?

Oh, that's perfect. Yeah, Jigsaw and LinkedIn.

Yeah. Good luck, Marcus.

Oh, thank you.

Yeah, and for everybody calling in, I mean, definitely check out Jigsaw and LinkedIn, great ways to reach out if you know what specific company trying to reach in a specific job title, check out those two websites. LinkedIn is free. Jigsaw, again, is about $1 per lead and a great way to be able to help you grow your business and get the people you need to get to. We are at the hour already. It's crazy how quickly time flies. I want to thank my, my producers, Christy and Josh. I thought you guys do a great job. Thank you for stepping in, Christy. Daniela, I hope you feel better. We'll see you in two weeks when you come back. And to everybody listening, continue to believe, continue to build your alliance partnerships, continue to grow your business. And I will be back in two weeks. I look forward to hearing from you, and good luck.