061: Scaling Boutique Businesses with Greg Alexander

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This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello everybody. I am super excited to be here today with Greg Alexander. Greg is the founder of Collective 54, innovating solutions to the problems that owners encounter when trying to grow, scale and exit their professional services firms. He's the author of a fantastic book called the how to Start, Scale and Sell a Professional Services Firm and and a frequent contributor, not the host of a podcast based on his book in business called the Boutique. That's how I discovered Greg. My brother sent me the podcast and we're both consistently blown away by the top 10 lists at the end of every episode. These really handy quizzes. The episodes are short and powerful. Greg is a frequent guest and then the clarity of just running these checklists as a business owner are really inspiring. And they're in the book too. So make sure you check that out. Greg, welcome to the show. I'm thrilled to have you here.

Thanks Jenny. That was a kind introduction. Hopefully I can live up to those big expectations.

Oh my goodness. Well, there's so much to talk about. I love how clear you are about who your audience is. You share the statistic that a boutique professional service firm. There are approximately 1.4 million firms in professional services and 4,100 of them have reached scale, meaning that they have more than 250 employees. You say that this is one quarter of 1%. Those are what you call the market leaders and that the other 99.75% have between 1 and 249 employees. And these are the boutiques which I would imagine that myself and so many others listening fall into that 99.75%.

Yeah, it's pretty amazing stats. And those all come from the federal government bureau of labor statistics. I believe that we're in the golden era of of professional services, which is defined as the North American industry classification code of 54. That's the reason why the firm is called Collective 54. It's the second largest industry in the US trails only the energy sector, if you can imagine that. And it employs 9 million people. Is $2 trillion per year spent in professional services with an organic growth rate of about 5% per year. And what's happening is, is that as the world quickens its pace through digital disruption, large corporations, which are the majority of purchasers of professional services, they can't keep all the talent in house. It's just the world's moving too quick. You know, one day you need somebody who's good at xyz, and the next day you need somebody who's good at abc. So they're going to these boutiques, as we call them, which are highly specialized domain experts and kind of renting the expertise, for lack of a better term, you know, on a periodic basis. And that's why it's created this incredible opportunity. And I think we're just getting started. I mean, professional services, which think about as, you know, consultants, lawyers, accountants, marketing agencies, financial service providers, pretty much anybody that markets and delivers their domain expertise on some version of the billable hour. That's what we mean when we say professional services. It's just, it's a great time to be in this sector and it's once in a lifetime opportunity. So that's what the book is about. That's what Collective 54 is about. And that's what I hope to share with your audience today.

What's particularly tricky, that we all have in common is this notion of trading time for money. And a big focus of your work is not just the starting of a boutique, but particularly scaling and selling it and getting out of that hamster wheel of every time you add new team members, you need the clients to support them, or every time you add more clients, you're adding more team members. And it can be so easy for the owner to just not only be the bottleneck, but be stuck in this cycle of unprofitability. You talk about the difference between a lifestyle business and a sellable business. Can you share for listeners? How do you define a lifestyle boutique owner who maybe is happy to stay that way? There's nothing wrong with that. Versus a boutique owner who, who does have an interest in building to sell?

My opinion is a lifestyle business is a business that gets started, and the operator of that business intends on operating that business forever. That's the goal of the business, is to fund a lifestyle. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, there's great examples of that. A boutique is different than a lifestyle business in that the founder founds the business, operates it for a period of time, but his intention or her intention upon founding is to scale it beyond themselves. And its objective isn't just to fund the lifestyle of an individual, but rather to create jobs and create a real firm and in the process create lots of wealth and create something that somebody might want to buy someday, a real asset. And we call that an exit. You know, when you sell your firm, it's an exit and it's a, It's a wealth creating opportunity. And myself, you know, that's. I had a firm from 2006 to 2017 called SBI and we were a consultancy. And I went on that journey myself and learned the hard way, you know, and how to stop trading time for money and, and build a real asset that could be sold. And I was lucky to sell it in 2017. So I'm hoping now to share what I learned in my individual journey with a larger collection of people.

It's interesting you talk about even before we hit record. You said, because I asked you if it was strategic not to host the podcast, but just be a frequent guest on the collective 54 on the boutique podcast. And you said you're trying to move out of the operator role into the owner role. So tell us about that shift for you because that's not easy for people to do, to move from being the operator to the owner. What have been some of your bigger challenges in navigating that?

So my journey, I like to describe my career in three chapters, and in doing so, I'll answer your question. So chapter one, I was an employee. I worked for a large Fortune 500 company called EMC, which is now part of Dell. And during that time period, you know, I learned how to be a good employee, how to execute somebody else's plan. Then I started my own firm, and that's chapter two. And that was my time as an entrepreneur. And I literally started my firm at my kitchen table in my boxer shorts with no clients, no employees, no money, no services, no nothing. And, you know, that's the ultimate test. And, you know, entrepreneurs, many of your listeners, just through the sheer will and desire to be successful, you can build a firm that way, but the firm largely becomes them. And, and clients require their presence all the time. All the big presentations, the big sales calls, the Big milestones, et cetera. Well, because of that, I mean, there's only so many hours in the day. And even though you might be a workaholic and work 80 hours a week, it's still only 80 hours a week. And there's only 52 weeks in the year. So unless you're going to work Christmas Day and every other holiday, I mean, there's a finite amount of opportunity there.

So the task then is to make the firm a firm that can run and grow, that is not dependent on the founder. And about halfway through my journey with my firm, sbi, I was. I started getting focused on that, and I built a succession plan and basically replicated myself and all the things that I was doing in others. And when that happened, the growth rate of the firm really kicked in because I added a lot of capacity. But also, you know, people, when given the opportunity to grow, rose to the occasion and actually did what I was previously doing better than the way I was doing it. So client satisfaction went up, you know, that resulted in more positive word of mouth, and the firm just kicked into growth. So when I came time to sell the firm, which I sold in 2017, the thing that I'm probably most proud of is I never met the buyer, and we had a large exit. And I don't say this to brag, just to give your audience context. I sold the firm for $162 million, and I literally never met the buyer because I was irrelevant and obsolete and not required for the business to be successful at that point in time. So that was chapter two. Now, chapter three, which is the chapter I'm in right now, is that as an owner, so I spend my time thinking about how to allocate capital as opposed to running the business. And when I say allocate capital, I mean the three precious resources, money, time, and people. So I look at placing bets. So, for example, this company collected 54. I don't run it. I own it. And, you know, I wrote a check to get it off the ground. I hired the management team. I allocated their activities, but they run the business. And that's the big. That's the big difference in making that happen. Now, the second part of your question was, what's standing in the way of that? So much of it has to do with human psychology.

Founders have courage. They decided not to work for the soulless big corporation and hang their own shingle and start their own business. And it's a very courageous thing to do, and it comes with a lot of risk.

So they feel validated when they're, when they're needed. So when a client says to them, hey, I'll give you the work, but only if you do the work, it makes them feel good and they say, okay, and they do it. But what they don't know is that's an insult. That's the client telling them that they haven't built a business, they haven't hired the right people and trained them the right way. And they're not hiring the firm, they're hiring you. So basically you're just a freelancer at that point. And if that's your objective, that's fine. But if you want to scale beyond yourself, that's, that's the wrong thing to do. So what's required of a founder to make that transition is self awareness and seeking their personal validation and professional validation in places other than the workplace. And their validation should come from, you know, the P and L, the bank account, the employees that are developing over time and taking on more responsibility, not directly sourced from the client.

I love what you said too about the dream is that you train a team and they do the job better than you. I think that's probably something that holds a lot of people back, especially owners, is that the reason they meddle is deep down they don't trust their team. And you're right, if the client is saying, I only want to work with you, the client is saying, I don't trust your team.

Yeah. And that's usually the founder's fault because they, they've communicated to the client in such a way that, that, you know, made the client feel that way, which is, you know, very unfortunate. And when it comes to, comes to trust, what I found, at least what worked for me and what works for the members of Collective 54.

Trusting an employee is kind of table stakes. You know, you trust them to work hard and not steal and tell you the truth, things like that. That's really not the obstacle. The obstacle is trusting in your methodology. So if you've been able to take out of your head what you've, what your expertise is and codify it and make it teachable to others, that's what you got to trust. Is your expertise good enough that other people can do it so an average human being can replicate what it is that you do? If you haven't done that, that's the thing to be worried about. Not trusting the employee, but trusting your ability as a founder to teach the employee your wisdom.

This is really at the heart of a lot of your work, which is creating methodology, wrapping Everything around that. But also you talk about how in order for boutiques to scale and ultimately sell, they often need to leverage intellectual property. And you say that a lot of boutiques, in the early days, it's kind of a hodgepodge. They might train employees in their method, but it's not documented or they don't, or they have IP but they don't realize it. Can you tell us about what do you think is the hidden IP that exists in a lot of boutiques that's not being properly excavated? And then what does it mean for a boutique to create intellectual property so they aren't a commodity. So both, I guess on the internal operations there's IP that can be leveraged and then also there's a more intentional sort of, let's say external facing ip.

If the goal is to scale and sell your firm at some point, you can't be a body shop. And a body shop is defined as a client hires you because you're an extra pair of hands, your capacity. That's not a scalable or sellable business.

What differentiates kind of a body shop or staffing firm, staff augmentation versus a professional services firm, is there's professionalism, there's methodologies, tools, an army of trained people. There's a way to do things. And the way to do things, the methodology, the process has value and the client is willing to pay you for that, either through a license for the actual methodology itself, or through a higher bill rate, an hourly rate, which implies not staffing, but they're paying you a premium. Because it's not just a body, an extra pair of hands, it's a well trained body who's going to follow your process. That's the real difference. And what I would advise your listeners, if they find themselves in this awkward stage where they're trying to move away from being a body shop, is to start with the intellectual property that the client's willing to pay for. That's the most important part. And see if you can validate that what it is that you have to offer solves a mission critical problem and that clients are willing to pay to solve that problem using your proprietary methodology. Once that's done, then you can figure out how to get your team to be able to deliver it. And that's the internal IP that you're talking about. That's very well worn territory. There's employee certification programs, there's knowledge management systems, there's skills training, learning management systems. That's an easy thing to do. The hard part, that's Why I recommend you start there is market validation that someone's willing to pay you for your proprietary method.

And yet it does create so much value. And it's one of the few things that can differentiate these firms. But because, you know, I would imagine like within lawyers, of course, you have specialties like family law, corporate law. But the only way to differentiate, once you get to a certain point of your niche is with this ip, the external, what clients are willing to pay and also the internal how you run things.

That's true. Yeah. And these days, because most services are tech enabled, it's never been easier to create real intellectual property and therefore have a different monetization strategy. So, for example, many professional services firms now are licensing access to assets. So let's say you've got a set of tools and you do a project for a client and the client says, hey, I can't afford to keep you on in perpetuity, but I would like access to your tools so I can kind of fish myself, so to speak. Well, you can sell them a license and have access to your tools. Or let's say in the process of doing your work, you collect interesting data. Well, if you put that in a database, you can sell a license to that database. For example, many consulting companies sell access to compensation benchmarks. You know, so what should, you know, the director of XYZ in my company make? Well, because consultants have access to that type of information, you know, they can create a compensation database. That's just one example of many. Sometimes professional services firms get into events. So now they're selling tickets to an event. Very, very profitable, you know, one event with fixed cost and sell as many seats against that event as possible. So that's almost, you know, kind of scaling a service in one day at a time. Instead of selling a workshop to a single client, you sell a workshop to 300 clients and you get into the events business. And once you do that, you can start selling sponsorships and et cetera. So there's all these new and exciting ways to generate revenue and profits that don't require the time investment of the founder. And that's why it's so exciting right now to be in professional services. And why we're in the golden era of the boutique.

Yes, I agree with you. And also the golden era because of how much of the operations can be run from our phones. You know what software is? Enabling is just incredible. Here's a question from my brother. So he is building a real estate startup. It's small, but he's growth oriented. So I don't even know if it would count as a boutique. But here's this question. How do you strike the right balance between growth and profitability? How do you know when to reinvest those profits? And even at a loss versus stockpiling.

Yeah. So there's three natural stages in a boutique's life cycle. There's a growth stage, the scale stage, and the exit stage. And the answer to your brother's question lies in understanding which life cycle stage you're in. So let me briefly describe those three. So the growth stage is typically years one through five. And during that time period, you're figuring out, you know, who your target client is, what problem you're going to solve for that client, what your solution might be. Maybe you hire your first group of employees, you figure out what your pricing strategy is going to be. It's very much the early experimentation days. And you should not be concerned about profit there at all. You should pour every dollar back into the business and run at barely break even. Once you leave that stage, you go into the scale stage, which usually is years 6 through 10. And this is a different program here. You need profits, you need ebitda, and you need them at scale because you have to invest in a new set of things. For example, you might enter a new market, you might make an acquisition, you might invest in tech solutions, you might offshore some of your labor, you might buy a building. You know, there's all these things that you might do during that season that requires money. So profitability, focus there is really important, because the pace upon which you scale and the size upon which you reach depends largely around the available capital. You have to reinvest back in the business. So more profits equals bigger and faster scale. Then you leave the scale stage and you enter the exit stage, which is stage three. And that usually for most firms is between years 11 and 15. There, it's all about profits, because the price you're going to get for your firm is going to be driven off of a multiple of your profits. So, for example, when I sold my firm, we had a little over $16 million in EBITDA, and we sold for a little over 10 times EBITDA. That's how the purchase price of $162 million was determined. So when you hit the exit stage, you want to sell your firm for as much as you can get. And what dictates the price largely is the amount of profit. So you become much, much more profit focused later on. So as you can see. So if your brother was on the call with us today, I would tell him he's in the growth stage. Don't worry about profit right now, just prove your model. Then once your model is proved, you move into the scale stage, then you start shifting more towards profit. Not because you want to take it out of the business and stick it in your jeans, because you want to reinvest it back in to do things. And then down the road, someday, if he chooses to sell the business, it's going to be all about profit at that point.

Yeah, I loved your story in the book, how that was a very high multiple, by the way, for any listeners who haven't studied exits, which I went down a reading rabbit hole of this at the start of 2021 last year. 10x EBITDA is quite high. And you were saying that the initial category of selling your business was, was not the right one and that by shifting the category and your comps where you were positioning yourself, that that alone made a huge impact on the sale. I thought that was fascinating.

Yeah, that's very true and it's often overlooked and it's a lesson that I had to learn the hard way. So the way you think about categories, an analogy might be since your brother's in real estate, think about neighborhoods. So when you go to buy a house and you look at a bunch of houses and you determine one that you like and you say to your real estate agent, what should I offer? Well, the real estate agent goes into the database and sees comparable homes that sold in that neighborhood and what they sold for. And that's how you come up with a price that's called comps, the same thing that happens with businesses. So you want to make sure you're in the right neighborhood. And neighborhoods and businesses are called categories. So in my example, early on we were miscategorized as a sales training firm and we didn't do any sales training, but people just lumped us into that category by default. So we repositioned ourselves correctly into the management consulting space, which was a nicer neighborhood with more attractive comps. And that added to the EBITDA multiple quite a bit. So the lesson for your listeners is to ask yourself the question, what category am I in? And is that the neighborhood I want to be in or should I be repositioning myself in another category?

I would also add that the reason sales training was a mistake was that, and this is, I think, also helpful for people to consider is that that might be one of the activities that you help facilitate, but it was not the outcome you were Driving it wasn't about the training. That's a means to an end. You were delivering revenue and operational efficiency, and you were just delivering so much more value to the bottom line. Sales training was one way that you got there or you got companies there, but it wasn't the one and only aim of your business. Is that right?

That's correct, Jenny. And again, you bring up a really good lesson. Sometimes services firms get focused on the activity and they lose sight of the result. The client's not hiring you to perform a set of activities. They're hiring you to deliver a result. So in our case, there were two results we were going after. We were trying to increase for our clients the lifetime value of each of their customers.

And decrease the cost to acquire a customer. And all of our projects would start with a benchmark to calculate the entry point in those two numbers, customer acquisition cost and lifetime value. And the way we structured our agreements was, is that after our project was completed, whatever the performance improvement was across those two dimensions, we shared in that. So it wasn't a negotiation around, you know, my bill rate or the team composition or.

You know, percentage utilization or anything like that, because that's trading time for money. It was, here's how much value I created for you, Mr. Client. What percentage of that value you willing to share? Share with me. Now, of course, I tried to get as much of that value as I could, but just rephrasing and reframing the pricing conversation around value instead of activities, around results instead of activities is what allowed. Allowed us to prove to a client before they decided to hire us what the return on investment would be.

Okay, here's a question for you that I don't even know how to ask it. How many people do you and I both know who could run businesses 30, 40, 50 years and not figure all this stuff out? And what I'm trying to understand is you ran SPI for. It was about 10 years right before you sold it.

11. Yeah.

11. Okay. How did you shift out of the blind spots or the common pitfalls or the quicksand? There are so many little quicksand moments in business of, you know, creating too many products or too many different services or not billing correctly. And Your book has 48 chapters that you have so clearly laid out frameworks and checklists. And I am just wondering what that drive was in you. I know you did have your. Your eyes on exiting with, you know, before not too long, so you already had that in mind. But how did you bootstrap your way from that? You know, you were first an employee in phase one, and in phase two, you built a business, but you exited at a remarkable 10x multiple in a remarkable amount of time, when many business owners would spend their whole lives kind of stuck in the weeds. So I don't know. I don't know what I'm asking you, Greg, but I want you to take this somewhere because there is a special sauce here, and I'm trying to figure out what it is.

Well, I'm glad you asked the question, Jenny, because our members at Collective 54 come to us for this very reason. You know, if I was to strip away everything, you know, why do people join a community like Collective 54? And it's. It's because they want to figure these things out. So what happens is, and my advice would be to answer your question directly around how I did it is I had a very clear vision of what I wanted to accomplish. I knew my why, so to speak, to steal from Simon Sinek. And I really knew what that was. Before I started my firm, I started for a reason. And that reason for me was I needed to prove to myself how capable I was. Which is embarrassing to say because it's ego driven, but it is the truth. I had a lot of success as an employee, and it bothered me when people attributed my success to who I worked for instead of who I was. So I had this internal intrinsic motivation to answer that question. So that's why I started, I started my firm. And then as you get going and the years pass away in pursuit of that why, what ends up happening is your ambition expands. You know, when I first started, if someone told me I could support my family as an independent contractor, I would have been thrilled. Because when I started my firm, I walked away from, you know, the perks of a Fortune 500 company, salary, bonus, all that. And then, you know, I quickly accomplished that. And then you say, okay, well, there's got to be more to it than that. So then it was, what's the next mountain to climb? What's the next ambition? So the vision moves, and I would reset my vision every year. And then I'd ask myself a very important question. And this might be the most important thing we talk about on our call today. And that is, what are the obstacles standing in the way of that vision becoming real?

And by asking that question frequently, you get really good at discovering what you don't know. And that's really important is constantly trying to discover what you don't know. And then as you start understanding these things, you start Looking for resources. So I believe in learning from peers. So I joined EO and then I got big enough, I joined YPO and then I got big enough and I joined Tiger 21 because I found that learning from peers was great. I wanted to spend time with people who had been through my journey and they could tell me, here's what you should be thinking about. They exposed me to what it was that I didn't know, and many times I didn't know when I didn't know. And just by being around the right peer group, I learned it. And that's what I'm trying to replicate in Collective 54, in the unique spin there is that we're focused on a single industry, the services sector. We're focused on a single person, the founder, and we're focused on a single segment, the small boutique. And when you can put a collection of people together that have the same problems, the same opportunities, same challenges, it's amazing what happens. You know, people start swapping war stories and there's all this tribal knowledge that goes around really quick and that's what ends up happening. So that's what happened with me, and I suspect that's what happens with others.

I love what you're doing and just how clear and specific you are. And it's so true that when you get all those people together and where you, Greg, have done them the favor of curating so that they're all in such a similar place and can trade those stories and lessons learned. And I know many people who've gone through yo ypo, Strategic Coach, Genius Network, because what you were saying was asking that question, what are the obstacles standing in my way? You don't know what you don't know, as you said. So without those peers, it can be really hard to sometimes even get an honest assessment of what those obstacles are.

And at times it can be brutal, you know?

Yeah.

I mean, your peers kind of cut through the BS and they say, hey, you know, hey, knucklehead, you know, you're doing xyz, you should be doing abc. And it's like, you know, it hits you in the face, which is very different than kind of an academic setting.

Right now you're in this next phase. I love how you say in the book self actualization and sharing and really being of service, you and you have a lot of funds that you can invest. So this was another thing that came up in my conversation with Tom, my brother, is how do you decide where to invest your resources? So I think as business owners, I've Always joked with friends, like, I'll buy server space before I buy new clothes. You know, I'll buy. I'll buy the craziest things for my business, like I'll buy a brand strategy for 50 grand before I fix the air conditioning in the house, you know. So what's your personal philosophy or take on investing in new businesses, acquiring businesses, your own real estate crypto, you know, how do you approach this?

Well, this is another area where I'm standing on the shoulders of giants. And one of my favorite investors is Warren Buffett. And Warren talks about a thing called the circle of competence. And what that simply means is investing in things, you know.

So I know the boutique professional services space inside and out. I've spent years acquiring that knowledge. So my personal investment philosophy, and I have an investment firm called Capital 54, is I invest exclusively in boutique professional services firms. And I do so really for three reasons. One is idealistic and two are capitalistic. Let me start with the idealistic one. So I love being around founders. They're. They're my tribe, my peeps. So if I can invest in them, it's in. And help them reach their dreams, it's fulfilling for me beyond any type of return that I would get. So that's the idealistic component of it. The capitalistic component is, is I can add value beyond the dollars. So I could invest in Jenny. And along with my dollars to fund her growth plan comes my advice and counsel and mentorship. And therefore I feel as if in the proper situation, I can significantly alter the future. My value add is clear and. And that tends to lead to the second capitalistic reason or the third reason overall, which is it delivers outsized returns and asymmetrical returns, meaning the downside is capped, but the upside is uncapped. So that's what I'm always looking for. I'm looking for.

The founder I'm willing to bet on. And when I find that person who happens to also be in the right niche that has positive growth characteristics, I look to back up the truck and make a sizable commitment to that type.

Of business that fits who you like to surround yourself by as well. Has your brain always worked in these handy frameworks and rules of thumb?

No. You know, I was an English major.

I graduated University of Massachusetts. I was going to be an attorney. And then I found my way into sales and went in the tech industry. And then what ended up happening was I got an MBA at Georgia Tech, and Georgia Tech taught me how to think and introduced me to a concept called Structured thinking, which is what you refer to, referring to things like checklists and that allow humans to process abstract, complicated items. And I really learned that at school. And then of course, put that to use on behalf of my clients as a consultant, which is what consultants do. And now, you know, we're doing it as a community.

See, I'm so happy you said that because it is a skill and you employ it so well. It's one that as a fellow author and podcaster, I'm always thinking about. And sometimes I think people think that it's purely natural. And in some ways maybe it is. We can have a propensity toward it, but also realizing how that structured thinking and communicating is so helpful for others.

I don't know about you, but it does make me want to take the time to say, how can I put this into a framework or a structure, or as you so clearly do, like, even when you're answering questions on this podcast. Well, there's three things. Well, there were three stages, and it's so helpful. Like bumpers at the bowling alley of, like, framing the conversation for listeners. Yeah, I love it.

You know, I had a mentor of mine. I was very lucky as a young person. He was a leader at emc and he told me the goal of communication is to be understood. And I always kept that in mind. And I said, you know, before I open my mouth and try to prove to the world how smart I am, what if the person I'm speaking to doesn't understand what I'm saying? So before I say anything or think about anything, I ask myself the question, what's the simplest way I could communicate this so it's understood? It's a really good reminder, especially in today's world when we're suffering from information overload.

Okay, last question. Greg, this has been so fun to chat with you. If you could give business owners, or let's say boutique owners in this case, permission to do something differently or drop something, what would it be?

That's a good question. There's so many things I could say, but I would say I would give them permission to make an investment in themselves.

Most founders are investing in their people, they're investing in their clients, and sometimes they don't invest in themselves. And there's lots of things you can do to invest in yourself. It could be as simple as listening to Jenny's podcast. I mean, that's an investment of sorts. It's a 30 million, 30 minute investment. It could be enrolling yourself in an executive education course at Harvard University, which would be an extreme example of an investment. It could be joining a community like Collective 54 and investing a little bit of money and time and meeting your peer group. It could be any number of things, but there's no greater investment than an investment in yourself. And I think small business owners, founders sometimes forget that. So that would be my permission slip.

I love it. Thank you so much. Greg. Where do you want to send people if they want to learn more?

Yeah, I'd send them to maybe three places. So the easiest one is collective54.com and there you can find the podcast and what we're doing. You can look up the book on Amazon. The title of the book is the Boutique how to Start, Scale and Sell a Professional Services Firm.

Or you could reach out to me directly I guess on let's say LinkedIn and it's gregalexandercollective54 and you can find me easily that way. And I enjoy hearing from people. I do a few podcasts and it's always great when they reach out and ask questions.

Perfect. Well, I'll put all those links in the show notes. Thank you so much Greg, for being you and all that you do, and for not just teaching us how to run better businesses, but how to think.

Thanks Jenny. I appreciate it.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

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