The Exit Engine Podcast Episode 42: Meet Duane Williams

Welcome to the Exit Engine Podcast, episode 42. Good afternoon, John.

Good afternoon, Joe.

How's it going today, man?

It's going great. And yourself?

Excellent. Yeah, going really well. I'm really excited today because again, you know, it's podcast day. I love podcast day. But I'm particularly excited today because we've got on the podcast today a special guest, Duane Williams. And many of you don't know Duane, but Duane has had a very storied career. He has been everything. Right now, he's obviously in our line of work, you know, kind of an M&A advisor, but he's been an entrepreneur, an investor, a consultant. He's been doing technology, strategy, finance, operations, you know, a lot like us. He's one of us. I consider him. And he owns a— he's a partner in a company called Silicon Road Advisors. And prior to that, he's been with SAP. He's been a CFO, a COO. He's basically done everything in here. He's got an incredible career. But here's the most important thing about him. He's also an economic historian.

That's what I'm excited about today, is to learn about that from him today.

So we're going to— that's what we're going to talk to him about, is that where are we with this notion of uncertainty in the economy, in the larger economic picture, what's going on, what's really happening here, and as a small, medium-sized business, what are the things that we can learn here about what to do starting today to look forward. So without further ado, I would like to introduce to you Mr. Duane Williams. Duane.

Hi, John. Hi, Jo. Thank you so much for having me on today. I think we're going to have a fun conversation, and I'm really looking forward to it.

My pleasure. Really, really great to have you here. Thank you so much for taking the time.

My pleasure.

Healthcare has become a— is a major contributor to this, right?

Yes, exactly. Well, and I'm actually using healthcare as an example, but we'll finish the healthcare point because we're spending somewhere between 20% and 27% of household expenditures are on healthcare these days for negative outcomes. So there's a couple of issues there. The first is that's clearly unsustainable. There's just no way that can continue. So that system is destined to break. And unfortunately, because we're not doing much of anything to fix it, it's destined to break ugly. By the way, roughly about 60% of the federal deficit— I'm sorry, federal debt that we're sitting on today is due to healthcare spending over just the last 20 years. But I'm actually picking on healthcare for a reason, which is how many other Uneconomic activities are we doing in aggregate in our economy because we've been able to get away with them for 40 years on an increasing basis?

Right.

So I'm using healthcare to illustrate a larger structural problem, and I can give other examples of it. We know we've been overcreating college degrees, particularly, unfortunately, economically less than useful college degrees.

Mm-hmm.

We know we've financialized virtually everything. Again, without going into politics, you know, whatever anybody may think about X, as far as I can tell, the platform still seems to mostly function after Elon Musk went in and laid off 80% of the people in the company. So when we come back to labor and capital issues, it's, it's my very distinct impression that we've gotten very lazy and very fat and very financialized throughout the entire US economy.

And inefficient, right? And inefficiently sort of deploying our capital.

Yes. So what does everything look like when that changes? It's something that every business owner and every management team and every founder should be spending some amount of time thinking about because it's already underway. It's been underway for about a decade, but like many things, it starts out very slow and then it accelerates and then it moves very fast. So back to the perception of uncertainty, we are at the beginning stages of where it begins to move very fast. And hence the reason why a lot of people are perceiving change that may be uncomfortable and uncertainty. Right.

So it's, it's, we're, we're, we're snowballing at this point, right? So we're basically, the precipice has already passed and now we're basically in a down, we've started our downhill Of juggernaut, right?

Yes.

And Dwayne, you know, based on what you just mentioned in the last, let's call it 15 minutes or so, like, what is your advice to, you know, are there specific areas of the economy that you think will get hit disproportionately hard because of these, because of these changes? Because I mean, every company is going to feel a problem, but are there, are there specific areas, like you mentioned Twitter, just, you know, dive into that a little bit or dive into that area a little bit if you could.

Absolutely. So, I mean, from a labor perspective, and I have an MBA, so I'm shellacking my area a little bit, but, you know, an interesting question to ask, which I believe already hints at the answer, is on an economy-wide basis, have we overproduced professionals? And underproduced people that do real stuff. Plumbers, as an example. Yeah. So, um, so I'm gonna intersect labor and economic activity a little bit. Uh, if the result of a person's labor is something tangible, in all likelihood, that's a fairly sustainable real economic activity. If the result of a piece of technology is the making of a real product better or faster or more efficiently, that's probably a real area. If the result of technology is watching more cat videos, that's probably a less than useful economic activity. And when you begin to use that paradigm of real versus unreal, things begin to come into focus. I think one of the issues with that is we've been patting ourselves on the back for at least 20 years about pushing ever more digits around in the US economy without necessarily resulting in a tangible, concrete real economic output. So that's the lens that I begin to use on things. It's not that all technology is bad. Any technology that results in a real thing being produced better, faster, cheaper has a future. Any technology that doesn't result in that, I would wonder about. And when you begin to look at major tech companies through that lens, you begin to see things. When you look at venture-backed companies through that lens, Well, you see things when you look at labor through that lens, you see things.

Yeah, well, you know, one of the things we've seen in, in our business at our, at our current company as well as at our previous company is all these roll-ups, right? These roll-ups of, of insert the name of the company, HVAC companies, plumbing companies. I worked with a company that was rolling up roofing companies for a while that was just buying up, you know, making more efficient, to your point, bringing in technology and rolling up all these companies across the Midwest and the South that use technology to enable the physical business as opposed to a SaaS business, right? A purely technical, technology-driven web service. And I think that's what you're sort of— that's what you're leaning towards is you'd be hesitant of just the technology in the future or technology investments in the future.

Yeah, again, it depends on what the technology does. So, um, uh, we didn't go into my background much, but, uh, I spent a number of years at SAP, which, you know, some people love and some people hate. For anyone who's not familiar, a very large enterprise software company. Um, you know, ERP, uh, enterprise resource planning software, uh, had a real tangible impact on the world.

Sure, yeah.

And when I was at SAP, you know, there was a saying that as far as I could tell was actually true, which is in one form or the other, 70% of global GDP touches an SAP system. Now, I don't know, you know, what SAP's future looks like has a lot to do on what SAP does, but, you know, it's intriguing to me. We have these companies that are not by any stretch of the imagination rock stars in the tech world, the SAPs of the world, the Oracles of the world, the Accentures of the world, the HPs of the world, you know, nobody's darlings for the most part, that actually have made the world run more efficiently.

Right.

You know, with some hiccups and some overcost projects and everything else along the way, you know, that's technology that's had a real impact. You know, can we say the same thing about a lot of the consumer I'll just Google, I'll just go there. How much value does Facebook add to the world?

Facebook, yeah, right.

It's arguable. I'm not saying Facebook's gonna go away, but when you look at the share of the economic pie, does that economic distribution make any kind of sense in a world with real labor and real capital costs?

Well, isn't that the problem? I mean, isn't that potentially one of the biggest issues that we've got, which is that essentially is that is that the reality is is that Facebook will survive despite not being not being able to bring something tangible to the world because of the nature of the users and the nature of human beings, right? The the the idea that the idea that that that I'm what I think I'm doing when I you know and again I'm not a Facebook user but I'm you know but I'm you know but I I'm a LinkedIn user like a significant Right? Like, so just to, just to use the social media in general as the example, there's entertainment, right? There is commerce. There is, there is, uh, you know, there is connection, right? Whatever. There's learning. There's all kinds of things that a social media platform can provide, right? The question is about right now is, is whether or not a thing like Facebook, in, in terms of what you're saying, it's a matter of like Facebook doesn't actually provide anything tangible or real.

Right?

Yes.

And the problem— but the problem is, is that there are literally millions and millions of people who are on it and rely on it for their dopamine hit.

Yeah. The— so, so first of all, I wanna be careful because I don't think any of these things go away.

Yeah.

Right. We, we, we always have activities that have an economic value assigned to them. that don't necessarily produce anything tangible or real. So let's use something like sports. Human beings have a need to have entertainment and enjoyment and other things, and it has— that has an economic value that's hard to quantify. So I want to be careful that we don't seem to be saying that those go away completely. I think the bigger issue is, is what is the economic value that gets assigned to those activities, um, as well as what do we on a societal basis choose to continue to spend on them vis-à-vis other activities.

Mm-hmm.

So my, my answer to, uh, your statement/question is I, I don't think it goes away. I think, you know, they continue to exist. I think the broader issue is, um, in an economy where A lot of people wind up having to go out and find different occupations on a system-wide basis. Are those things that continue to get prioritized at the level they're currently prioritized at?

Right.

Yeah. And let me ask you a question. This is sort of not related to what we just discussed, but it sort of got me thinking about sort of your thoughts on artificial intelligence and like, do you think that artificial intelligence and the way that it's, you know, agentizing or becoming into the economy, what is the impact of artificial intelligence on these changes that you're talking about?

So Joe hinted earlier at my extremely strange and eclectic background. I have to say I've been blessed and I've had a lot of fun in my career. So an interesting thing about me and AI is, The first AI I ever invested in, and unfortunately I am not ridiculously filthy rich because of this, but I invested for— into AI for the first time at some point in the mid-1990s.

Wow.

So I have to also say that I've been hearing that it was— that we were going to be worshipping it and it was going to take over the world and that humans were obsolete since some point in the mid-1990s. Um, and I don't want to downplay AI at all. I just think a lot of the conversation around it is, is in the wrong direction.

Um, fear-based.

It's fear-based and it's lack of understanding-based. Um, my current stance on AI is that it is another incredibly powerful technology tool. that a number of people are going to learn how to use quite effectively. And it's not a great analogy, but I like to use the analogy of when we began to have office applications. And, you know, again, I'm of the right age where I can, you know, I remember a little bit of what that looks like pre and post.

Sure.

You know, the idea of having an executive assistant with a typewriter who took all your phone calls on like a conventional phone line and all of that kind of stuff in 2010 would have been just, you know, completely absurd. 20 years earlier, that was still more the norm than not.

Sure, sure.

So one of the things that I've heard, it's not unique to me, it's somebody else's statement, I just don't know whose it is, is AI is not Going to take your job, right? But somebody who knows how to use AI is going to take your job, right? So we are definitely there. Uh, that's my overall view of it. Um, the, the current focus on AI, I think, is missing, um, is missing some important things. Where AI is, is showing itself to be incredibly powerful is much more in niche use cases. Which the ordinary person hears the least about. You know, so a great one is from the military arena. If you look at what's happening right now in the Ukraine war, you know, it's effectively— I mean, there's still some user operations, but we are so close to effectively unleashing swarms of things that go out and very, very—

Automated everything, right?

Well, yeah, that's— you release a swarm of relatively tiny flying objects that on a more or less fully autonomous basis go and kill people.

Right.

Um, and I'm using that as an example of, like, unfortunately, that's something that's very easy to figure out how to do. Um, you know, because it's a very specific use case. You know, the idea that you're going to have some godlike entity, um, that's going to wake up and decide that it wants to replace humans, you know, seems to be what most of the discussion is about. while, you know, literally every day this other thing is happening over in Ukraine. And you see that in category after category. These specific, you know, very specific use cases for AI are extremely powerful.

Right.

The large language models, for the most part, still seem to be toys and fantasies.

But this is what— this is what people can— this is what people can relate to, though, right? This is the— that's the stuff that people can kind of understand and wrap their brains around because they can see that at play. You know what I mean? They can— they understand the AI X bot, right?

Right. Yeah.

But they don't. But the understanding that, you know, right now that the best use of AI that I've seen right now is in airports, figuring out how to basically streamline lines and congestion and stuff and using that, right? There's like, and that's just one small example I just happened to see the other day. But this is where, again, to your point earlier on, and let's just real quick kind of bring this back to, you know, the M&A world and kind of business accelerating the value of your company and basically is understanding strategically what can you do, right? Because, you know, again, what we're seeing is that, again, it seems to me that we're— what you say is that we're in the middle of this kind of profound change, not going to judge it as positive or negative, just a change. And maybe it's a change that goes back to something that we were there where we were 80 years ago, but we're not actually back where we were 80 years ago because what we've got is all this technology and all this learning and all this other stuff that we can't unlearn, right? And so What it seems to me becomes the key to success here is the same thing it's always been, which is, make sure that you basically have your— that your business is buttoned up.

Yes.

Make sure it's the healthiest it can be. Make sure that it's got a growth trajectory. Make sure that you've got the ability to— that everything that you're doing is in line and that you're examining all efficiencies and finding all the ways And using the tools to make yourself efficient in whatever you're doing, right?

And Joe, I love that viewpoint. I want to tie it back to the fluffiness in companies in our economy, um, because one of the things we've seen with these technological waves is there are many ways that you can go wrong as a business owner. Um, one of the biggest problems that companies have over and over again And since we're in polite company, I'm going to use polite words. I call it the more stupid stuff faster trap. Because every time we have one of these massive technological waves, what a lot of business owners— a lot of business owners are afraid of it and don't touch it when they should be touching it. But another problem that creeps in is, okay, I have all of this activity. Let me just go do more of it faster.

Right.

And what we very rarely have is a thought process where let's use this as an opportunity to decide how much of this activity actually provides any value, and then do it faster, and then see if there's any additional activity I should be thinking about doing faster as well.

Right.

And my very strong suspicion is we're going to see an awful lot of AI Used to continue things that probably should never have been done in the first place and add many more things that should not be done as well.

Because you can do it fast and easy.

Exactly.

It's like what I think about when you just said that is like pets.com and, and Webvan. And when the internet was going crazy, like just because you, just because you are able to sell pet food online, Doesn't mean you should do so.

Yes. Well, and I mean, there's an even— that's a great example. And there's a great overarching example there as well from the dot-com boom, which is, which we're living through right now, which is everything that we thought the dot-com boom was going to give us was probably exceeded 20 years later. That didn't prevent us from having a massively overwhelming level of financial hubris and hype at the time of the dot-com bubble. Right. So my suspicion is we can't even begin to foresee all of the amazing things that are going to come out of AI as a technology. It will probably massively exceed a lot of our expectations that we have at the moment.

I agree with you.

Yeah. That doesn't— there's nothing about that that prevents us from being very wrong about what those specific areas are going to be and massively overexcited and terrified about many aspects of it right now, particularly from a financial perspective. Right.

Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think it's an excellent point. I mean, the reality is that— and again, what we're seeing on the ground every day is that, again, let's just take it back again to the general kind of business owner. I'm at a $5 million, $5, $10 million company, right? And I'm right now, what's happening to me? And again, as the smaller you get down, the more, you know, the closer you get into individual businesses and industries and things like that, things change. Manufacturing is a whole other situation, right? There's, right, that's much different than if you're a service company, you know, for instance. But the reality is, is that the, it's always been about harnessing, it's Business has always been about efficiency, right? It's always been about profitability, right? And it's always been about, to some degree, about service delivery, customer service, which is all also— and all 3 of those things are all tied together, right? And so, no matter what you're selling, no matter what business, particular business you're in, or what particular vertical market you're in, or industry you're in, the reality is that this, the stuff that we're going through now, Does not change one iota what you should be doing to your business to set your exit trajectory and look about what you can or cannot do moving forward in terms of how you take this asset that you have and and maximize its value, right? The the reality is there are going to be some people, right, who are going to be if you are in import and export right now, it's going to be a very difficult time for you if you have. If a large part of what you're selling or whatever, or what you make or whatever comes from these other countries, and especially things like China and that kind of thing, it's going to be a difficult thing for you. You're going to have to find more efficiencies to stay alive. You're going to have to find better labor situations. You're going to have to do all those things. And so that's where you might be up against some of those things. But the reality is that no matter what spin you put on it, or no matter where you look at it, The principles come back to the same principles. I gotta have a healthy business that's sustainable, right? I gotta have, I gotta have, I gotta have customers that like what I do. I've gotta have, I gotta be able to grow that, and I've gotta be able to get capital to be able to do, to, to, to be able to perform that growth. And I can get capital, cap, like, you know, capital's not, capital markets aren't going away. The capital markets might be more expensive. The capital might be more expensive. It might be harder to get because unless I'm, unless I'm really buttoned up, but that's just another reason for you to be buttoned up.

I think it's— I think everything you said is absolutely spot on. And the only caveat I will throw in there is I think in an easy money environment, a lot of people can get away with, again, what I'm just going to call uneconomic activities.

Right.

I think the good businesses that provide real services to real people are going to do spectacularly well. amongst other, because A, I think we're going back to that kind of a world. I think as we go through this transition period, you know, we're gonna see a lot of noise, but, you know, again, real companies doing real things for real people will be even more differentiated in the middle of all that. And with the, tool sets that we're beginning to see come out of things like AI and technology generally, your ability to provide those real services in a real fashion to real people, I think has never been greater.

Right.

So I think, yeah, the business fundamentals have never changed. I think we got away for, on an increasing, In an increasing manner for 40 years, it's been possible to get away with some not real activities.

Right.

I think we're now converging back to, actually, despite AI, a much more human-centered world in some respects, because I think that real activity is going to be increasingly demanded and stand out, and your ability to provide it is going to be better.

And your ability to provide it on a human, one-to-one kind of human basis.

Yes. Right.

Right. And that will be a premium, right, to your point, Duane, is like that, you know, or those businesses that can use the technology that comes up in improving their business by delivering a real service in a human way will probably thrive more in the future because of that.

Yeah, and absolutely. And, you know, I don't have an answer to this specifically. It's— my guess is it depends very much on what kind of a business you're in. But, you know, if you're a business owner or somebody in charge of various departments, an interesting question to ask yourself is, do I increase the amount of human interaction? And do I use AI and other tools in the background to free people up to spend more time with humans? Or do I do what tends to be the default action, which is put a cloud of AI In between, yeah. In between me and normal people.

And the big question will be a matter of whether or not anybody knows the difference. So, I mean, at the end of the day, right, I mean, one of the things about that AI, you know, potentially gives us is the ability to be able to replicate that experience, you know, relatively, you know, exactly. If you've got the ability to be able to think through this stuff, and again, I think some of the chat things that we're seeing on customer service stuff suck. And, you know, lots of people are using older versions of that stuff that hasn't even been updated with real AI stuff and, you know, real agents and things like that yet. But the reality is, is that we're going to be— you're going to be in a situation where you do not know that you are not talking to a human being.

Yes, except that's going to be interesting because if you are— if that's being portrayed to you that you're having a real conversation and you trust that it is true, if you then find out that it is not, or you suspect that it is not. So, one thing that's interesting about this as well to be thinking through, we're talking about giant economic trends, but the technology trends are fascinating as well. And I do believe that another thing that I'm very bullish on over the coming decade is trust. Right. So along with the technological changes, along with the large economic changes, I think what we're going to see an increasing premium on is trust. And so, you know, again, what are things that business owners and management teams are going to have to think about? You know, again, depending on what business you're in, but more generally than not, abusing your customers and employees that we've seen a fair amount of over at least the last 20 years, I do not think is going to be a valid business strategy over the coming Right, right.

There's gonna be too many.

I don't want to single out, you know, certain internet providers and cable providers, but their business is changing for a lot. But like, the customer service at some of those places is just horrifically bad.

Yeah, well, you know, I don't know if we can get away with this on these kinds of videos, but, you know, for example, we know that Google, you know, which used to have this amazing search engine, this amazing franchise, you know, it came out that around 2016 they began making their search suck on purpose. It's fascinating to me that that is a valid business strategy.

Yeah, right.

So, you know, again, when it comes back to if you're a founder or a business owner or, you know, a management team, We've gotten, we've gotten into some really bad habits societally over the last 20 to 40 years in particular. It's time to start rethinking those. So running a fat company where you don't necessarily treat the employees as well as you might, flip the script.

It's almost like it's a new scorecard, right? And I know Balanced Scorecard went out a lot sort of a while ago, but in popularity, but it's almost like you need to— what you're saying, Duane, is that you really need to make sure that, A, you're providing value to your customers and treating your employees well, because if you do not, it will— it just will come back to bite you in economic activity coming to your company.

Yeah, it's— you're gonna live in a world where You're going to have to be showing the value on a very real basis to most of your customers. It's not clear to me that the reduction in the disposability of consumer products, as an example, is something that can continue apace. The treating customers as if they are monetizable assets. You know, again, the fat employment environment where we weren't necessarily, you know, we've gone through what, 2 decades now of referring to our people as capital, which always seemed to be much more of a buzzword than an actual thought process around investments.

Or resources, right?

Human resources, right?

Yeah, exactly. Break down that term. You know, so it's, you know, it's ridiculously oversimplistic, but to me, it's when you really sit and think about trends over the last 40 years or so, particularly accelerating over the last 20, almost, I don't wanna say almost every one of them, many of them, you can just stop and go, okay, when I really look at what happened here beyond the verbiage, What the future probably looks like is the reverse of that process.

Well, and let me ask you a question about sort of like taking the macro sort of to the micro in the sense of, you know, have you seen either a management team or have you learned something from a management team you're working with that they're doing it right? And I don't really want the name of the company, obviously. I don't want to talk about clients, but like, what, what have they done to adjust to these sort of this environment? And, or what are they doing now to adjust to the future environment that you think is worthwhile to share with the audience?

Yeah. So I have to say that I have not seen, you know, because these are very large factors, I've not seen an example of anybody adjusting to it and it mattering now.

Okay.

What I have to say is throughout my career, and I'm sure you guys have had a similar experience, you've run across people who do it well. And people who do it poorly. Um, and what was always interesting to me is even sort of in this period where it seemed like you could kind of get away with this stuff, um, it still seemed like there were always long-term consequences.

Yeah.

To getting away with doing it poorly.

Right.

Um, and sometimes there were short-term consequences for people who were doing it well. Because you're not necessarily creating that big yet artificial financial hit right away.

Right. The long— everybody is willing to give up long-term steady growth for the big hit that comes at the beginning and the ability to be able to get there quickly.

Right. Yet it always seemed like the people who wound up winning in the end were the ones who were doing it right. Right. What I do feel like I'm seeing is the early stages of Well, I would actually argue it's getting more extreme before it gets better. In some places, you're seeing more pressure on doing the wrong things, and in other places, it does seem like you're beginning to see a sea change toward we need to be thinking about this a little differently. And I think otherwise, it's too early at that micro level to really know how it's going to. Play out. But, you know, I'm an optimist from the perspective of I do believe that the good and right win in the end.

Yeah, that's an interesting thing to say. I think, you know, after all of this, and I think again, what, you know, what we're seeing here, you know, from, from you today, and thank you again, you know, so much for, you know, for doing this, Dwayne. It's been fascinating. You know, I think the interesting thing that we're saying is like, as you said, it's like, it's like we're gonna go back and we're gonna just take Take the last 40 years or so, right, and kind of unwind it, right, and start to kind of go back the other way. Now, what you can't do is you can't lose the technology. You can't unlearn the things that we've learned as a species, you know, as a— right, all that kind of collective knowledge and information is there. And so if you could take this, if you could go back to 1940, right, and basically have this technology and the information, the knowledge and the stuff that we have right now, Right? What would happen? So in other words, what I'm trying to envision is that again, a world in which some of this is correcting, right?

Yes.

Like it's correcting for something that's happened over the last 80-year cycle. And we know about the 80-year cycles, right? But the interesting thing is, to me, is that this way of going back to the— I think this is one of the most positive aspects of this. Is that— and I am seeing it basically, by the way, in LinkedIn. I am seeing it in a lot of social media stuff and the way that we're— the collaboration, the ability to be able to do more things together with other companies and other people, right? The lack of— it used to be about, this is my fence, this is my thing, and it's about competition and about being able to, you know, to keep people out of the way, whatever, right? Now it's more about collaboration. The human— on top of that, this notion of getting back to our roots as humans, right? And the fact that we've created a society for ourselves in the last 80 years in this last cycle. The other thing that's happened in this cycle is that we have created a situation which is untenable for human beings.

Yes.

Right? And I don't just mean financially. I just mean, like, actually, like, from a living standpoint. You talked about healthcare before and the whole thing. I mean, the uncovering of all this, and I call it discovery or the uncovering of things that were always there, whether it's neurodivergence and things like autism and ADHD and things like that, which are looked at as medical things. But the reality is, to me, they're not medical things. These are things that— this is human evolution that we're watching happen in real time. Right? The ability to be able to say, hey, look, I am adjusting to the cycles and the pressures and all the things that have happened to us. And it starts as small kids because we're getting it, you know, from the top down from our parents. The pressure, the pressure to be productive, the pressure to add value, the pressure to be scheduled up the wazoo, the pressure to be able to make sure that you're filling the ever-living minute with 60 seconds worth of distance run, as Rudyard Kipling it, right? But the ability to be able to is an unnatural state for the human, for the human brain to be in. And on top of that, you're adding into it the social media thing and the ability to instantly compare yourself to anybody, any number of millions of people across the world. Your ability to be able to look and examine at other people, your ability to fight, your ability to have to, to, to, to get yourself into a feedback loop, right? All the things that are conspiring here Uh, you know, basically are at the same time. There is a, like you said, there's a pushback, I think a natural pushback that's also happening about getting away from that stuff and getting more human and creating more human connections, right? And being out in the world where in a place in which you can actually breathe, right? And I don't mean climate-wise, that's a whole other thing, but I mean to be able to actually have the room to be able to exist. as opposed to having to be on a hamster wheel in order to keep yourself going. And I think that one of the biggest issues that we see right now, at least on the ground, is unwittingly an unknowing about what's really wrong. And then so I'm taking the— putting the blame on false things, right? I'm putting the blame on immigration. I'm putting the blame on Solving the wrong problem.

Solving—

trying to solve the problem that isn't the problem, right? The problem here is that we are asking people to do more things than they are really designed to do. And the technology— the reason the technology helps us so much, and AI and all that, everything, whatever, internet in general, all that stuff— is because it helps us get more time back, right? It helps us do things faster and better and cheaper or whatever, but that's really, at the end of the day, a function of Humans trying to cope, right? In a world in which we have built for ourselves that basically walls us in, keep and keeps us on a hamster wheel. And of course, all the economic stuff that comes back from that, right, is a backlash, you know, kind of a backspin or whatever that's happening when that that that basically is is just making that happen more because I can't get a manufacturing job where I work. You know, 8 hours a day and, and can afford to, you know, 2 cars and a house and a, and a, and a chicken in every pot, right? Like, that's the— that's where we are. We've basically built ourselves a situation that is untenable.

Yeah, Joe, I think you nailed it. And, and the, the return of things that are economically real, I think, are directly related to the return of the real everywhere.

Right.

Real human relationships, treating people like real humans, doing real work. I love your point about the technology, but to part of what we were talking about earlier, I'm afraid to a large extent we haven't used the technology the right way to make life easier.

Right.

Now perhaps we will. And I think the more noise we create around things that aren't real, and I think that's a very late-stage systemic behavior, the more it's just going to cause us all— and to your point, yeah, I haven't seen it at the micro level with management teams per se that way, but I'm definitely seeing it on a broader societal basis. You can see it, you can feel it, you can hear it, you have conversations with people. You can see it somewhat in economic numbers. It's happening everywhere.

Right.

And these things are very interconnected. So you would expect to see it happening everywhere. So I think you were absolutely correct in everything that you just said. And I don't view any of this as negative. Systems perpetuate to failure points, and then they undergo paradigm shifts.

And then they go shift, right?

And you build a different system.

Right.

And that's what— that's part of the evolution of things, right? I mean, it's all part of the thing. It's test, optimize, and scale. It's like, that's the thing. And so the next thing that comes in, right?

And not all those tests go to optimization and scale. That's the point, right? There's way more tests.

Exactly.

So there's a ton of tests, there's a ton of optimizations, and then the scale is small, right? The cone goes like this down to down to, down to scale, because a lot of those tests fail. A lot of those companies, products, and systems end up failing.

Yeah. So if we bring it back to where we started, in a sense, with the perception of uncertainty, because I don't know if I've done a good job per se highlighting this, but I think you just did an excellent job of pointing these things out. To me, it's a reason to be optimistic.

Right.

You know, it's like going into a company that is in need of re-engineering, and sometimes re-engineering is a bit of a bad word, but, you know, companies can go out of business if they aren't fixed.

Right.

And if they're fixed well, or any system that's fixed well, it can go on to, you know, resume or even have a better bright future, you know, for everyone involved. Nothing lasts forever exactly the way it is. So we're in a period, both globally and in the United States, societally, demographically, economically, where a lot of changes are happening at once. We're not necessarily comfortable with change. I believe the end state of this is something better than what we experienced over the last 24, 20 to 40 years.

Right.

There's no reason for it not to be, particularly if we choose Individually, collectively, on a societal basis, that we want something that functions a little different and better than what we've had over the last 20 years.

Yeah, and you're right. I mean, the reality is this, this is the thing, is that sometimes, again, the change and the catalyst for change isn't always what you want it to be. And it always— and the change almost rarely happens, you know, in an orderly and kind of like, you know, managed fashion, right? I mean, we try to do that in business, to the best that we can. But the reality is that life is messy. Human beings are inconsistent and broken, you know, basically almost from the beginning. And the reality is that we reap what we sow. And at the end of the day, you know, we are a bunch of— all of us are just human beings trying to make our way in the world. And regardless of politics or anything else, Our ability to be able to, you know, on our own and collectively start to realize that, hey, look, this is where, you know, this is what I'm gonna do, right? Like, I can go in and say, look, I'm gonna be the kind of person who's— I'm gonna do, you know, I'm making the choice to do the internal work, right? And I mean that both on myself and on my business.

Yeah.

Which, and by the way, That's another thing that I think that we haven't really touched on exactly, but that is another thing that is burgeoning right now, right? Which is that it's always been about, you know, your ability to make yourself better. 1% growth every day, right? Mindset, growth mindset, man. Between sports and, you know, some of those, some of the motivational people that came out of the '80s and '90s and stuff like that, whatever, right? We've grown now to a place where, and now you've got the coaching world, Right? You've got things out there that are basically where, where it is about individuals helping other individuals, right? And at the same time, there's a, a large movement towards this more internal examination. And I'm not talking about like even therapy and stuff like that. I'm talking about a whole other level, right? Of like the therapy thing, you know, has its own problems, but the, but the notion of just being able to inter— you know, the, the, the, the ability to be able to self-reflect in a meaningful way on both yourself and your business is something that's going to— is something that's going to be— people are going to be feeling and should be experiencing right now.

Yeah, absolutely. And am I providing value? Right. The growth mindset somewhere, you know, we've had the word value for a very long time. It's had— it's been misused in many ways. And I think what I hear you saying is something that I'm experiencing as well, which is people are beginning to ask themselves internally and beginning to look at their businesses from the perspective of, am I actually doing anything of value?

Right.

Because a PowerPoint set of PowerPoint slides, quite often in business, are just a set of PowerPoint slides. A good set of PowerPoint slides with the right things to say can actually have a lot of value.

It can change the world. I mean, it's still— that still exists, right? I mean, we are, at the end of the day, we are humans. We have— we want what we want, we need what we need. And the reality is, is that the more value that anybody, any business can provide to their customers in that way— and I think we go back to even the way that we're looking at our own business, right? Is that, I mean, John and I were literally having a discussion about this this morning. It was like, you know, How do we kind of create this? You know, how do we create this value? You know, and one of the things that we decided to do early on was, was this podcast, right? We're not making money here, right? We are— all we're doing is trying to provide value with, for, with nothing in return. Like, we don't ask for anything. We're not trying to like solicit business through this way or whatever. My, our, our mission, and we thought from the beginning, was to help 1,000 you know, 1,000 business owners successfully transition on their own terms by 2030. That was it, right? But there's nothing in there about how much money we make or whatever that is, right? And in fact, what we've seen early on, and especially in our business, is that people are asking you to show the value, you know, before they, they, before they want to pay you. And the reality is, is that that's a very difficult thing, a place to play, because And again, our, our business, as you know, and, and in the, the broker world and the places that we came out of and all that stuff, are, are very much still tied to that because the only way they ever thought that they could make money was to basically do something and get paid for it afterwards, right? And, and, but to do— but to limit what they did.

Yes.

Now I think what we're seeing is that a matter of that, that the market is calling for, you know, give me— I want to pay on results. Right? Not on promises, right? And I want to be— and I want to be able to know what's going to happen.

And I want to be provided— to your point, I want to be provided with value before I give over my money, right? Yeah.

And I want to be treated like a human in the process.

Yeah. And in the process, treat me like a person, right? And be able to know and talk to me and let me know what's going on and be— and be transparent and honest.

Not a lead, you know.

Are those different things than what we've ever wanted?

No, except for, for a while it seems like we were buried under something else.

Correct. Right. That's it. We got buried under the, under the, the pace. We got buried under the technology that was there to try to solve that pace, right? The speed at which everything happened and, and, uh, and the ability to keep up with the Joneses. I mean, frankly, you know what I mean? It is, it's a, it's a real thing looking at this stuff and going, why aren't I a million? Want it 3x, 5x your thing. We say it.

Yes.

We say it because, because it works, because that's what people want. Yes, yes please, I would like to 3 or 5x my company. Yes, yes I do. Of course you do. Everybody wants that. The question is a matter of what are you willing to exchange in order to get it? And, and I think what we're seeing right now is That is very much a time where people are like, as John just said, it's like, show me the value of what you're doing and how you do it and how you think and who you are before I sign anything.

Yeah. And we still have a place for those 3 to 5x companies, but I think a lot of people are, uh, are beginning— I think a lot of people always wondered about that, even if they followed that trajectory. I think it is now becoming safe to wonder about whether that's the thing that you should need to go and pursue, or if there's a different way to provide value, you know, with a company that's maybe growing 2x. Right. What is the right trajectory?

Yeah.

What is the right trajectory?

But again, I would bring it back to this, which is again and again, it's a, you know, again, we have— we believe in a process and we believe in a way, you know, kind of in a way of doing it. But the end of the day, As a company, the sooner you think like this, yes, the better off you're going to be, right? And so the lesson today, guys, is this, um, you know, the ability— there's a lot going on here. There is a major sea change that we are experiencing and living through right now. There's no question about it. Maybe it's a reversal. Maybe it's— maybe we're going back 80 years in certain ways or whatever. And maybe, as, as Dwayne is so acutely pointed out today, maybe a lot of it is good, right? In, in, in many ways. Um, the difference here is that, again, it's a matter of, as you're— as a business, as a business owner, small, medium, large, whatever, right? The answer is going to be the people that are, are here 5 years from now at this point are not going to be necessarily the people that are basically pulling the wool over people's eyes. They're not going to be the people potentially that are basically not providing real value. They're going to be the people that basically have a fundamental understanding of how their business operates, where it does well, where it does not, the ways in which they can use technology to create efficiencies, to be able to, you know, the right technology in the right places to make their business efficient in the right ways, and anything that helps them do a better job relating to their customers. And again, technology may not be the answer there, but whatever, whatever you can do to do a good job, better job in terms of your, in terms of relating to your customers and providing that real value. And, and again, I think that the good news out of all this is that if you start doing this now, no matter where you are in your, in the business ownership journey, right, chances are you're going to actually come out ahead and you're going to do fine. This, the uncertainty here is more about the uncertainty of ourselves being able to understand what's happening and being able to correctly and, and, and, and, and, and honestly and openly examining ourselves and our own businesses for— to, to make sure that we've got the— we're turning the right screws in the right way over the right time so that I can, I can raise the value and salability of, of whatever it is that I'm building. And again, a lot of that value and salability is going to come out of What you just said, it's still going to be about efficiencies. It's still going to be about the customers and how you deal with customers. It's still going to be about reputation, right? All those things are still going to matter. And the beautiful thing is that hopefully, you know, as a business owner in general, you know, once you see that and once you think that uncertainty meets alarm, you can relax a little bit, right? Now I know what to do. And so, What we're all here to do at the end of the day is give everybody, you know, a path. How can I go? What should I be looking out for? And Dwayne, you've given us so much information today about this stuff, and I for one feel a lot better actually about where we're headed after this conversation. No, honestly, with you today, honestly, because I think again, it's easy for us to get caught up in this, right? And our alarms are going off and oh no, and the fear kicks in and, you know, and what's going to happen to me and my family? And, you know, all that stuff, right? So stay calm, right? Carry on.

Yes, absolutely.

Doing what you're doing, but just make sure that you're doing it in a way that creates real value, right? That has efficiencies and that you're treating the customers and your employees with, you know, the utmost humanity that you possibly can. John.

And Duane, where can, you know, just for the audience, where can people get in touch with you? Just give a little plug and What's the best place, the best way to get in touch with you?

Absolutely. So I'm Duane Williams on LinkedIn, and Joe and I are connected. John, I believe you and I are connected as well, so I can be found through that venue. My email is duane@siliconroadadvisors.com. Excellent. Duane, go ahead. Oh, I was gonna say, I wanted to thank you guys so much for the conversation. It was very stimulating, amazing. And yeah, I'm glad we came away with an optimistic note. John and Jo, I think you've summed it up perfectly. This was, this was absolutely a brilliant time talking to you guys today.

I couldn't agree more, Duane, and can't wait to talk to you again. We'll have you back for sure. And again, thank you so much.