Ryan Alford | On the Homefront with Jeff Dudan #54

People are generally good, but when you're an entrepreneur, you have to realize that some aren't. I think I always knew that. But it's funny, when you work for other people and work for another company, you're sort of shielded by the negative stuff that other people could do because you have the company kind of surrounded around you a little bit. I'm not saying that you couldn't physically have harm done to you, but some of the actions of others don't hit you as direct. Yeah, but when you're an entrepreneur and you own a company, when bad employees do bad things, or even the right intentioned employees do bad things or miscalculations, it just has a very direct and immediate impact. And I think learning and understanding that has a length of time that it takes. I think you come in and you think you know what to expect and people will surprise you.

Hey, everybody. Welcome to on the Home Front. I'm Jeff Dutton. Thank you for tuning in. Today we took the on the Home Front podcast on the road to Greenville, South Carolina to drop into the studio of Ryan Alford with the Radcast. And what is the podcast right about now? Right about now with Ryan Alford, one of the top marketing podcasts on the Internet today. So, Ryan, thank you for hosting us and also being a guest at the same time. I. Can you, can you keep that straight?

I know it's like role reversal, but I like it, man. I like you being in the. In the host chair, you know, here, so it's good to have you, man. We've been getting to know each other really well and respect a lot of what you've been building and love what on the Home Front's doing. So just pumped we get to talk some.

Well, we're very excited about the partnership. You guys have really spoken into us into the Homefront podcast and working together on it. We've. It's really been a high value to us. So we appreciate it and get to spend time with the team here today.

Exactly.

You know, we've been walking around your beautiful building and out there, what is it, the Swamp Bunny trail?

Swamp Swamp Rabbit trail. Rabbit trail, yes. Hey, I like Swamp Bunny too, you know. Yeah. Who doesn't like a bunny?

Well, we saw a huge falcon thing carrying like a bag of trash and eating out of it. So I don't know, you know, if. If all the swamp, if they've eaten.

All the swamps, we've got wildlife here coming them, they pay them to, you know, hang around. The Greenville Zoo is right down the road. So who knows, you know, birds escaping.

Yeah. You would have thought it could have gone over there to grab a little something.

Exactly. But glad you guys are here and it's pumped to have you guys on the radcast network.

Yeah, 100% super excited about it. What I want to dig into you today, which I'm particularly interested in your feedback on, is entrepreneurs, like, what makes an entrepreneur. But maybe let's go at it the other way. Is there anybody that shouldn't be an entrepreneur?

Yeah. You know, the first thing I'll say, if you don't like change, do not be an entrepreneur. I. I'm not saying you can't overcome it. And let's, let's be clear. I don't think of like someone that's consistent or has repeatable things. I'm not saying that you got to have that. You gotta have consistency. But you have to embrace change. I think to be a great entrepreneur, you have to at least tolerate it well, because I will say, like my friends that I grew up with that are very successful, but work for other.

People.

Versus my mindset, which is I kind of adapt well to change. I like change. I can tolerate the unexpected nature of, of what comes with entrepreneurship. And I think if you can't embrace unknowns, because I think, you know, it's. It's that, that fine balance of change and what's unknown, because I think a lot of people want to mitigate risk and know what's coming at any time, and they don't like change. And I think as an. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you have to embrace that on some level.

100%. We use assessment tools both for employees and for our franchisees. And what we've learned is that there are certain profiles of people that fit certain roles. And if you hire outside of that, it generally doesn't work out. But if you hire inside of that, it's about a 76% chance that the role is going to work out for that person. So what that tells me is that we all have these things that we're comfortable with and things that we're not comfortable with. There's certain people that are technicians, and there's architects and there's coordinators and influencers and all these different types of people. And if that's true, then there are some people that simply will not be able to tolerate the daily challenges of an entrepreneur because everything goes. There's not a day where something doesn't go wrong, something doesn't change. There's this great book called Bounce. I don't know if you've ever read it. Have you read.

I have not, but I'm familiar with the premise and the summary.

Well, here's the only thing I remember, right. Some people, when they have change, it's like they're a. An ornament, like a glass ornament. So change comes at them, and they hit the ground. They break into a million pieces. They crawl under their desk or, you know, hide in their car or whatever it is. Other people, they're like a bowling ball. They hit the ground, and they just go smack. And they don't run away necessarily, but they don't leap into action. They don't react. They maybe just wait for it to be over. And then there's other people that are like a super ball man. All right, here you go. Boom. Now I'm off in another direction. Faster than. Somehow super balls, they leave the ground faster than they hit it.

I'll use the analogy fight or flight. And I think, and I don't mean it necessarily, like when you're in a physical fight or maybe terror around you, but in entrepreneurship, I think those that make great entrepreneurs tend to want to fight, I. E. They want to battle the problem.

Right.

Versus it, be solved for them, or to run away from it. Because when you're the boss, when you're the owner and you've got either people, whether you're a solopreneur and it's your own hide and your family's hide, or you've got 50, 100 employees, you've got to be able to tackle the challenge. You can't run from it. And I think when you aren't an entrepreneur, you typically have some safeguards around you, some things that are built in that keeps you away from the fight every day. And I think as entrepreneurs, we're sort of fighting those challenges all the time.

Ryan, I wonder what types of backgrounds that people could have gone through that were not entrepreneurial. And I have heard that people that have an entrepreneurial experience early in life, I share that with franchisees that have young children, get them involved in the business. Yeah, an early entrepreneurial experience. Lead and a failure leads to future entrepreneurial success because they failed and they figured out it's not fatal. They didn't lose their house. Everybody didn't hate them. They were able to get over it. So then they're like, okay, well, I. I see what I did wrong. I see the field clearly, and if I fail, it's not fatal. Athletes in. In particular, I mean, just so much failure. Growing up as an athlete, football players, basketball, baseball, whatever it is, you know, or swimmers, man, who just have to stare at the line on the bottom of the pool for five, six hours a day for their, you know, one minute of glory on a weekend, forcing their family to spend eight hours in a hot, steamy room to watch that one minute. But, you know, like, what other backgrounds have you found with all of your work with entrepreneurs that prepare people for what their people are going to face?

Well, I. I do love people that have played sports and I. I want to give a story because I think it would be good for people. Back to what you're saying. You know, failure first and then learning that it's not. You know, my first foray into entrepreneurism was a flat on your face failure. I lost a million dollars.

Oh, my gosh.

Literally. Yeah.

And how many millions did you have to lose?

Not. Not many.

Not many.

But let's just say it wasn't all of it, but it was a lot of it.

Yeah.

So I worked for others for 15 years, you know, in the ad agency business, living in Manhattan, in New York. Ad agency big, big, you know, Madison Avenue. And. But it was, you know, under the umbrella of an agency. You know, you'd like to think that you're running the show, but, you know, let's be honest, you're working for a big conglomerate, working with big brands. But I moved back to South Carolina. I started. I really had the Carvana idea before Carvana, and I always had the vision of, you know, follow your passion. Well, I love cars.

Okay.

I'm like, okay. So got involved. We did on demand car buying and selling online. This is like 2013. It was a lot of what Carvana did, it was a little bit of a spin off of it because we would let people custom order what car they wanted. We'd go buy it at auction, you know, used cars. We had like connections with BMW, Priya and Mercedes. The idea was great, the marketing was great. But, man, the operations of the car business was not great. And a lot of learning and, you know, three or four, three and a half, four years later, million dollars less, crash and burn and, you know, tail tip between the legs. But to your point, I did learn, you know, it didn't kill me. And I learned a lot. I learned to, you know, stay in my lane. What are you good at? You know, you follow your passion well, you follow what you're good at. You know, like, I was good at marketing. It's good at, like, facets of business, but operationally, Running a car business I was not good at. And so I think that's important for people to hear because it's not all rosy and shiny at all times for entrepreneurs. But you do learn a lot from that failure. And it either, it either makes you or breaks you, because I think you do either go, okay, I'm going back to the, the land of being employed, you know, by someone else. And I did consider that and did have a short stop about a year. You know, I caught my breath, right?

Yeah.

The chief bargaining officer. About a year at a place and then, you know, turned it around and it's like, okay, because Jeff, this is the funny thing. I spent 15 years successful years at an ad agency. I'm going to go start my own business. What would be the most logical business for me to start, Jeff?

I would suggest marketing.

Now I go the car business. So read it that. And so seven years later, you know, podcast in the. In radical our agency. And it's been a good seven years, finally doing what we should have been doing.

Yeah. So that's an incredible story. But for that million doll, you could have got an MBA from Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Harvard and maybe Carnegie Mellon. All in, you know, Duke, all of those for a million bucks.

But they might not have been as valuable as the. Is the failure.

I think that's the point because, you know, you can, you can read about it, you can do all the case studies you want to, but man, when it, when it's hitting you in the wallet, that's, that's the best learning that you can have.

Yeah.

So now, as a successful entrepreneur, how have people sometimes surprised you? Now, I'll give you a second to filter out some of the stories that popped into your head first.

Oh, well, look, you know, it's, you never know. You're always going to be surprised. Even when you don't think you're going to be surprised anymore, anything can come at you. I mean, I've had employees steal. I've had employees do wonderful things. I mean, I will say this. People are, are generally good, but when you're an entrepreneur, you have to realize that some aren't. And I, you know, I think I always knew that. But it's funny, when you work for other people and work for another company, you're sort of shielded by the negative stuff that other people could do because you have the company kind of surrounded around you a little bit. I'm not saying that you couldn't physically you have harm done to you, but some of the actions of others don't hit you as direct.

Yeah.

But when you're an entrepreneur and you own a company, when bad employees do bad things or even the right intentioned employees do bad things or miscalculations, it just has a very direct and immediate impact. And I think, you know, learning and understanding that has a length of time that it takes. I think you come in and you think you know what to expect and people will surprise you.

Somebody told me once that you go through your whole life trying to find the few people that you can truly trust. And when you're working for a company, it's just something goes wrong, it's a rumor, it's maybe a gossip. You see something change, but you're not having to clean up the mess.

That's right.

The mess is being taken away to HR or to the police. I mean, we've had situations, we've had people. I'm standing inside of a facility, I lock the door. I said, nobody walked near the mag lock that unlocks it. And I've got a guy pounding on the door with I think a pistol. You know, one of our technicians had a drug problem and we're just waiting, hoping that the police get in there before he gets in, gets back in the building. Yeah, I mean like thing you would. Things you would never think that you would have to deal with as an entrepreneur, but all of that stuff is yours to clean up.

That's right. And you know, I think all you either back to what we said before, either embrace it and enjoy it and thrive in that on some level, you know, not nobody wants that situation to happen, but you either kind of, I don't know, either shine or it's like be, be ready or go home. And I think the people that really want and embrace it on some level. It doesn't mean you're perfect at it though. I think, I think we always think that, you know, kind of just like success, we always think it's a destination when it's the journey. I think entrepreneurship's the same thing. It's like there's. You can read every book, you can do it for 20 years or whatever. It's never going to be perfect. And you've got. And I do think if you're a perfectionist, it's really hard to be an entrepreneur because it's never perfect. It doesn't mean you can't be. But that's a difficult, I think, thing to follow.

Perfect is the enemy of good. I've had four major inflection points building my business that I sold in 2019. And what I learned in the last three of them was to take stock of the people in the business and look around the room and say, have I earned these people's respect and their trust that if I make this investment or I take this path, that they're going to be with me because it's going to be a little harder for a little while. And we all get that where there's like, hey, we just have to work the weekend to get this done or we've got to stay late and get this done. And you, you learn pretty quickly, who are the clock punchers, who's going to say, you know what? I, I understand that this is critical to the survival of the business, but I've got to, I've got a, I've got a yoga appointment, you know, or something, and like that. And like, you need a certain amount of people that are in your corner that are willing to work as hard and as long because they feel like you've made their lives better or you made a commitment to them. One early example was we had a business that was doing a lot of reconstruction, a lot of fire damage and a lot of the big heavy stuff. But our franchise model was going to be a lot of the lighter stuff, higher margin, complementary services, things like that. And we were growing the business in such a way that we were doing more of the heavy stuff and less of the lighter stuff. So one day I just said, we're never going to get this business switched over. So we had 33 main clients, and this was in the days of a fax machine. I printed out 33 letters to our 33 clients and I hand signed them and I went in on a Sunday and I faxed them all that we would no longer perform these services, which, oh, by the way, was 90% of our revenue. Oh, and I left them all laying out on the conference room with their little fax, you know, used to get the confirmation.

Yeah.

So I laid them all out on the conference room and just, you know, and all over the place so that when everyone came in on Monday, they would see what I had done to the business. And sure enough, our phones stopped ringing. And it was only. And I, and I thought, people, I said, they're either going to leave or they're going to rally around this new opportunity. And now we had the time and the space to make this shift in our business. And that's what we did. And it was maybe three or four weeks until we had a full plate of the new type of work that we were looking for. But it was only because the people were willing to follow my lead and to make that shift and then to work really, really hard because they knew at some point we were going to run out of money.

It brings me to what I think is a perfect. Another attribute of what you can or can't have as an entrepreneur. What you had or you hoped for was trust. If you can't trust, you're going to have a hard time scaling as an entrepreneur. You have to learn to trust others. And I think people that struggle with trust will likely struggle with being an entrepreneur because you won't sleep at night if you can't let go of that on some level, especially once you've done what you just described, you've built the credibility, you've done these. You made some hard choices, but you just had to trust the right people, stick around to make it through.

That's right.

And you did, and it did. It happened for you. But there's people that couldn't sleep at night making that decision.

Well, I'm not saying I slept or sleep at all.

So, you know, and there's something. If you value your sleep at all times, you may not want to be an entre either.

Well, and I think that comes down to what's the motivation and maybe we move into like, ego. I'm interested in your opinion on what the right ego is for a, a business. I've seen it where, when people are in a, you know, all businesses start in a scrum. A small group of people, everybody's wearing three or four hats. You're trying to figure out and build the systems and, and you, you've got to get revenue coming in, but you're building the plane while it's flying. So you've got to have people that are, that are really, they're willing to be diverse, they're willing to be flexible, they're willing to work together. And, and so like you, you have to, you have to be a part of that team in such a way that people are going to want to be a part of the team. And then as the business grows, like, like what, what do you think is the ideal ego for a business builder like yourself? And then controversial contro, you know, to the contrary. What do you think might be detrimental to an entrepreneur from an ego perspective?

I think it's a fine balance, number one. I think it's. I don't know that there's a perfect formula. I think you want the team to feel like you're in it with them and you're Doing it. And I've always, like, tried to show credibility with my team with, like, they need to see me perform and do what we're asking them to do. You know, like, that was kind of the quandary of the first foray into a business that I didn't know or understand. I knew how to do great marketing. Our marketing was great, but, you know, the operations weren't. And the people that I hired in operations, I couldn't really train and I hired the wrong people. But then with the agency, you know, being able to do every job and having your sleeves rolled up in the early days, having to do it, I think building credibility, you know, goes a long way. But I think, you know, my form of leaving, leading with, you know, ego is probably confidence.

Yes.

You know, like, I. I think it can maybe come across as ego and too authoritative at times. There's like that fine balance. But I think, you know, the right. If you're not confident, though, and you're not displaying that, you're gonna have a hard time garnering the troops to be in it with you, you know, And I think that's. I think if you take it from that standpoint, because when you're confident, you kind of get ego out of the way a little bit if you're really digging under it, because then there's just. It becomes about passion versus, I don't know, any one person's. I don't know it. I think confidence is where I go.

Yeah, I think you need to be a strong leader. You need be demonstrative, you need to be visible, you need to lead from the front. People want to follow somebody. I mean, whether it's. What is it? Sarah Blakely with Spanx. I mean, just. You find these. These power, you know, strong, visionary, but, you know, in the trenches type leaders, man. And that's where companies get big. Now on the other side of it, it. I think it becomes evident to people if you're building a hobby business, if you're building a business, that's just. That's not really going to go anywhere. And you're doing it to meet your needs and pay for your. Pay for the next car, pay for your next vacation. Nothing wrong with those businesses because they're great, they're great businesses. But are they going to scale? Are they going to meet their full potential? So for me, when I think about ego is. Is. Is taking the business and making sure that I am serving the business in the same way I'm asking the employees to serve the business, even though I do different things. Even though I, I make, I make different choices, I might not do the same thing that the employees do. They, I might, the business might need me to do something else, but I'm always serving the business and I'm willing to sacrifice and personal things in favor of the business that we all agreed that we were building as opposed to just saying, well, do this for me so I can have, you know, three days off and another really nice vacation.

Yep, exactly. And I do think there's, you know, it brings me to like the transparency, you know, like that's always a struggle, I think for tube, you know, like as a business is growing, like even if you've been hyper transparent, like where the balance comes in over sharing, under sharing, I think that that becomes a challenge and you have to know, you know, when you're bringing the team along with you and when you also need to shield them from things that might hurt more than they help. You know, maybe you could make the argument on either hand that maybe we could share this.

Yeah.

And you're not keeping it a secret to keep it from them. But I think you finding that balance is always difficult.

As you're scaling, how do first time entrepreneurs think about persistence and how hard and how long the journey is going to be for success? Do you think that they see it clearly or do you think people underestimate the challenges that they're going to face in starting their first business?

Yeah, I think, I think it's situational, depending on the person, but I think likely it's under. Yeah. Because it's just the every. There's not a tried and true formula with entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

And that's why, you know, your business is great, like franchising, you're giving systems and processes. That's why if I was, you know, if you have any doubts on these, we've got a really good payoff of where to go because we could cancel out some of these. But I think in any outside of like franchise business where there's established things, I do think that it's a struggle because you think it's going to be A plus B equals C, you know, every time. And I can just, I can apply this formula and I get there and I get there and I get there and it's done. But the pencil's never down. You know, it's like. And it doesn't mean that it's not rewarding as hell. It is, but you have to. It's so cliche. But if you can't start to really take joy in the Journey.

Yes.

If, if, if your only joy is results and destination, you're going to struggle because it's, you have to take joy in overcoming this challenge of propping up this employee, of dealing with this insurance gap with whatever it might be. Yeah, you know, it may suck like hell during that time, but you, you have to like take, I don't know, those micro victories have to mean something to you.

And I, I think, and I'd love to get your opinion on this or maybe your experience, but when entrepreneurs are building a business, there's always people in their life that care about them or they're responsible to care for parents, children, spouse, all of these people. And you had this great plan, you started this business and at the end of the year it's like, and we're still investing in the business. You made enough to survive, but you didn't make enough to thrive. And everybody is concerned and everybody is impacted by that because you might be responsible to pay for, you know, everything around the house and stuff. And you might have to make some choices around vacations or schooling, you know, public versus whatever it is. And then as you grow, and this was my experience, you know, the faster a business grows, it's like a teenager, like, you know how much teenagers eat when they're like that's, oh yeah, yeah, you got a bunch of them, you got a whole gaggle of them that you're, you're feeding and you know, like teenagers eat, you know, half their body weight in a day. And so does a growing business because it's like, it's the next project, it's the next thing. Oh, we had, we had this software and now we got to go to this software. So we got to make a deeper investment. And every time that you see clearly where the business is going to go, it is not without other investments and sacrifices and change management and higher level people and all of these types of things. So the business never seems to catch up to the, to the spouse or to the, to the parents. Because it's like, when are you going to, you know, when are you going to start taking a lot of money off the table? Well, when the business stops growing.

Yeah, exactly. When you cash out, when you sell, maybe a lot of times it is.

That and so you generate cash flow. I mean, you know, especially as businesses, you know, get up in the 5, 10, 15, 20 million dollar range, there's going to be a normal profit that comes out of that. But like to get to those that size of business. Yeah, it takes investment. So does how, what's what's been your. Your experience with that and how would you counsel entrepreneurs to. To message to the people in their life about those things?

I think you got to, again, you got to embrace a little bit of delayed gratification. And I think that's kind of what we're talking about a bit.

Yeah.

And. And I think some people do it, some people don't. And I think we all. No one has it down perfect. It's not like we don't all, like, whether you're working out and you're wanting results faster.

Sure.

Or you're running your business. You know, we can all get anxious to see the results, but I think at the end of the day, you. It's back to like, setting clear goals and like, what's your goals? How are we getting there? And like, again, some people's goals might just be they start a small business, like you said, it's a hobby business, but their goals are disapplied. They want to work for themselves, but they just want to pay for. They want to make their own paycheck. But if you're trying to build something, you know, over time, and something that's going to have a real liquid sell, like 10, 15 years down the road, then I think it's just really setting and planning and mapping out what are those growth stages that fit within the cash flow of the business, you know, for yourself, you know, what you can pay yourself, what your standard will look. What's the standard of living? I've always lived by this premise. Like, I've always gone and gotten what I wanted. Like, you know, whatever my standard, I wanted to live. I'll go, the business is over here and it's fine, but I'm going to go make whatever we got to get to get to where I want to live, you know, within reason.

Isn't it funny? Like, you're building a business and then you have side hustles.

Exactly.

Yeah.

I mean, you got to find, you know, your way to get there, depending on what you want out of life.

Yeah.

And I think that's sort of the. The key to an entrepreneur is, you know, you go, you know, hunt what you want to kill. I mean, to a degree. And I think you can have those avenues. And in today's world, you do need multiple streams, different things like that. And so I think diversification is important as long as you've got the blocking and tackling. Right. With the main. The main honcho.

That's right. Well, you know, real estate, I mean, if you look at most successful business owners, they end up just over time getting a real estate portfolio, which is a great way to build wealth. I always, you know, as I was building the business, I had great belief in the business, but I also knew that if everything went away, I had these, I had a short term bucket of money, I had a midterm bucket of money and I had a long term bucket of money. And I would make sure that I would make investments in all of those different buckets so that if one of them didn't work out, that, you know, everything wasn't in the same bucket. And with that, I mean we, we developed just over 25 years a nice little real estate portfolio. We didn't touch it. We were able to, when times were good, we were able to borrow against it if the business needed cash. So it was like my own little banking thing. And without that side hustle, you know, I just, I figured if I had one rental house, when each of my kids was born, I either built or bought a rental house and I knew that by the time they were ready to go to school, I would be able to sell that house and probably pay their tuition. Yeah, but then you also hit the 529 plan, so they also have money inside of that. And then, you know, fortunately the businesses actually worked out so all of that. So sometimes entrepreneurs, they get nervous, they have an idea and they, they want to start this business and they go out and raise money and they dilute themselves really, really early in the business. What would be your thoughts around when somebody should take cash? When you know, how early is too early?

I'll say this, I've never taken cash. Like I own five businesses and they're all 100% Ryan Alford. Well, one is shared, but you know, so I can't speak from the known position of having ever take taken liquid, you know, but I will say from my perspective, the way I look at it is you try, you either not confident enough in what the idea is, but, or it's so big and so good you need gas on the fire immediately.

Right.

I think it's like two roads, like. Yeah, you're not quite sure. So let's bring some partners on. Let's, let's mitigate the risk and bring in some help. Yeah, then, so I have no problem with that. I mean it's a different strategy. But I think then there's also, there's times where maybe the evidence, the early evidence of an idea or business is so good that you can't spread the fire fast enough. So you got to bring that on. And look, it's all weighing the calculated risk and opportunity costs. First loss. You know, it's funny, you know, I just talked to guy that, you know, the co founder of College Hunks who had that very opportunity to give 10% away early on on Shark Tank.

Yeah.

And would have given up, you know, 250 grand for 10%, which at the time was a very fair offer.

Sure.

But now the company's, you know, worth 3 to $400 million.

That's right.

You know, that'd be, that's quite a loss, what they would have given up in equity. That's right. And so, you know, how much do you believe in yourself?

Yeah, well, cash, you know, cash is like oxygen.

Yes.

You, you don't know how bad you need it until you don't have any. And you know, sometimes if you make one or two mistakes, all of a sudden you're looking at it saying, whoa, we've invested in all this and now we've got to pivot and turn around and go the other way. And we've just, you know, time, money, energy, salary, investment, you just, you just did all that. But I think, but, but, you know, if cash is king, I would say equity is the kingdom.

Yeah.

And you need to hold out as long as you can. But there's, to your point, there's different scenarios. I know guys that have built some of the biggest and most well known technology companies today and they're doing a new deal and they raised, they didn't before, really a proof of concept because of their track record. They just went out and raised $30 million. Like, we don't need to have our own money to do this. There are people that will give us the money. We're comfortable and we want them, we want them to have a seat at the table. So they just went out and raised $30 million and they're building this, this next, this new technology that's consumer facing. And I feel like they're going to get it right because they've gotten it right in the past.

But there's also this. Would you rather have 50% of a lot of something or 100% of nothing?

Yeah, that's right. So that comes down to partnerships and making sure that like you're taking smart money and you're taking long term money. Because I also know people that gave something up and then, you know, what they thought they were going to get, they didn't get. So now they've just got this anchor they're dragging behind on their cap table that's really not contributing. And then they're going to work for the next 10 years to make a big payment to these people.

Or if you didn't take the money and you needed it to breathe life or opportunity into it and you end up going bankrupt or something else, you know, so the answer is it depends. But I think surrounding yourself with wisdom and learning from others, whether it's coaches, mentors, boards of trust, whatever that might be. Yeah. You know, is key.

Yeah. And I think speed.

Yeah.

How fast you really want to go, is there. Is there some compelling reason? Is there competition? Is, you know, it all depends. So. And that's what makes business so great. That's because no two deals are the same. And any anything, nothing is 100% and anything go to zero.

There it is.

Yeah. Well, Ryan, this has been great. I appreciate you hosting us for on the home front Roadshow, of course. With Jeff Duden and Ryan Alford today. Last question for you. If you had one sentence to speak into someone else's life, what would that be?

Believe in yourself. You know, at the end of the day, if you aren't, I think the belief in yourself is the key to entrepreneurship, and you either have it or you don't. And it starts there. Because I think if I looked at every entre, I know the ones that have been successful believe in themselves. And if the ones that have doubt, you usually have doubt.

100. Well said. Ryan, where can people get in touch with you?

Yeah, Instagram's my jam most of the time. Where I spend the most time.

That's where we met, sir. Yeah, you slid on into those dms.

Hey.

I was like, hey, this is a real guy here.

A lot of friends on the dms, but yeah, man, on Instagram is good. Or ryanalford. Com has all my stuff.

All right, thank you.

Thank you, brother.

Ryan Alford, Jeff Duden on the home front. Thanks for listening.