How Are Payroll Companies Growing in 2025? Takeaways from the IPPA Spring Summit with Jason Gullett

Welcome to Payrollin', the show where you will learn how to operate and grow your payroll business from the most dynamic minds in the business. If your company offers payroll services, this is the podcast for you. And now, here's your host, Matt Vadie. Let's go! Welcome back to another episode of Payroll. And in today's episode, we're going to break down the most recent IPPA Spring Summit, Independent Payroll Providers Association Spring Summit. So this one is for our payroll people. If you're an industry vet and you missed out, you want to hear our recap of it, great. If you're somebody who was there and in attendance and maybe you missed a few sessions, we're going to break down our biggest takeaways from the event. The things that happen around, kind of give a little bit of a recap and just talk through some of the things that were valuable to us and shoot the breeze about what we did and didn't do during our time there. But I had a blast at the IPPAJ. I mean, what were some of your biggest takeaways? Let's just dive right in and talk about— you went to the management workshop, the frontline managers workshop. That was the first day, Wednesday. So we kicked off on a Wednesday, had a frontline manager training, leveling up your frontline managers workshop. What were some of your biggest takeaways from that session?

Yeah, so it had 3 key speakers. We had Lee Roberts there, we had Rhonda Champion, Kelly Landry. On Lee's end, uh, he ultimately talked about being a manager in an entrepreneurial company. Some of the biggest takeaways I had, it was focused a little bit more high level, but he spoke about the privilege it is to lead people, which I could not agree with more. One of the other big takeaways that I had not really thought about before was just because an employee is technically good at something does not necessarily mean that they are good at growing people. You know, I operated on a mindset of if you are good at the technical aspects of your job, you get promoted. When you get promoted, you're expected to lead people. One of the things you don't think about is, is that person that's technically good also able to lead people? The last thing from Lee was, you know, never get out of the client game. Um, so he stressed the importance of staying in the client game no matter where you are or where you're elevated to, because nothing undermines your team more than not being able to solve issues. I personally have, you know, struggled every once in a while with thinking, am I too in the weeds with certain things? And I realize, you know, it helps me solve client issues, client problems, and I love to be able to do that. Makes me more valuable to my team. They rely and depend on me. To be able to do that. So some great stuff from Lee.

Yeah. Yeah. You remind me two quick things there. Uh, so Salesforce, I've read a lot about their leadership team and they spend their leadership team at Salesforce, one of the massive most enterprise SaaS companies in the world worth billions of dollars. Their leadership team spends 30% of their time customer facing, which I think is amazing, right? Like such a great example to set. And so many, I mean, as a leader, so many of your greatest things you're going to glean are going to be from talking to your customers. And then you kind of nailed there, like the Peter Principle, and I'm going to butcher this a hair, but it's basically like you get promoted to your level of incompetence. So like eventually you hit that rung on the ladder where it's like, oh yo, you've gone one too far, man. Time to take a step back down. And yeah, I've been there and I've also known at times when not to take that next step. You know, in sales we always talk about like, oh, I can get promoted into a leadership position where I earn less, work more, am way more stressed and have to deal with leading a team instead of just leading myself. Like, oh yeah, it sounds like a great deal, but you know, not everyone where is it that that's set up. But, you know, in sales, it almost always happens as soon as you go into a leadership role, your upside is capped compared to where you were as an individual contributor, and you've 10x'd your stress versus just managing your own quota. So I understand that. I know Lee's from the sales world as well. So Lee, what up, dude? I never saw him out there. So Lee was there for that day. I was just thinking about him today. I was busting his balls about avoiding me before that, and then he avoided me there apparently. So What else from the Frontline Leadership training?

Yeah, so we had two other speakers again, Rhonda Champion. She was doing a session here on driving culture from where you sit, hit on a lot of the elements of culture, which is always a good reminder of what the culture stands for, how it impacts your business. One of the little nuggets of truth I got out of her session was serving with purposes goes beyond pleasing the clients. It's about improving customers. I really, really like that mindset of improving customers, not just doing things to please the clients. You know, I think we sometimes in the week to week, day to day are just so focused on just doing the initial, pleasing the client and not actually improving them, looking beyond the initial issue and saying, hey, is there a plus one that we can do to this client? Something that we focus on here a lot at Guru is What's the plus one? Well, this little nugget kind of reminded me of the plus one mentality. It's about improving the customers beyond that interaction. What can we do to go above and beyond, set them up for success in the future? Kelly Landry spoke on HR compliance. It's always a good reminder, the hiring dos and don'ts, what a good offboarding looks like. Know there were a lot of questions from the attendees on What do you do for offboarding? Or what do you do during hiring? What does your hiring process look like? Do you have a phone screen and then you go to a hiring manager, or do you do it all at once? So always good to get some different viewpoints on what other people are doing to make successful hires.

I'm curious to learn more about the offboarding piece. That's always a tricky one, right? Because like people work here for days, weeks, months, years, whatever it is. They become friends. They become, you know, brothers, sisters. They become part of the, you know, we don't ever want to call it a family. I subscribe to the Netflix philosophy. Philosophy in that we're not a family, we are a team, we are a high-performing team. And the expectation is that you're going to do your job and you're going to do it well. That's what teams expect of one another, right? And so you come to the end of the road, and like, you certainly want to make sure that you treat that person with dignity, respect, and you wish them well, and you, you know, kind of there for them as a friend, peer, mentor going forward. But at the same point, like, you don't want to glamorize leaving too much, right? Because you don't want to like, oh yeah, they're so cool. Every time somebody leaves, it's just no big deal. And there's a little bit of balance there. I remember we made that funny cake for Jenna when she left that I thought went well. It had a GTFO meme on it and, you know, it fit her personality and she had a great run here and we all were, you know, super proud of her and where she was going in her career as a young lady. And, you know, we've had others that we literally wanted to give them that cake along with a, you know, a cease and desist to pound sand and get off our property. What were some of the other nuggets kind of more in the weeds on like offboarding and things that people did to make it? A positive experience?

Well, to be honest with you, we hit more, and this was the offboarding practices were coming more out of the questions from the attendees, and it seemed like a lot of people had questions around negative experiences from offboarding, right? When you have that involuntary termination, Kelly had really stressed the importance of keeping it brief, not giving too much information, you know, the liability that sets you up with. She spoke about some anecdotal references on, you know, they went into the weeds and explained too much of why and how, what was happening and why it was leading to the termination. And all it leads to is people trying to argue. It leads to people trying to claw their way back into their role to justify their actions. And ultimately that's not something you want to open yourself up to. And so keeping it brief is, is really truly important, even though it might seem a little dismissive of the employee or not as kind as it should be. Keeping it brief really, you know, is the go-to route there. And it sounded like quite a few others agreed with her on that. We didn't talk too much about a pleasant offboarding experience. Didn't seem like there was too many. If it was overly pleasant, they were trying to keep that employee engaged as long as possible.

Yeah, we've had that. So, so we once had that scenario where we had, like, 2 people at the same exact time and one of them, we gave a very brief, like, hey, we've made the business decision, it's time to move on. The other one, we gave her the reasons why, sort of the business case, because we thought it was bulletproof. Well, the one that we gave the business case to attempted to sue us. The other one took her severance, and we all moved on happily with our lives and kind of made progress forward. So, so it is— I, I saw that firsthand of exactly what you're describing, of like, you know, if you give somebody the reasons, they're going to dispute them. If you, you know, unfortunately, if you leave it a little bit more of a you know, the time has come for this relationship to end, which is not really where you want to be. It's not how you want to have these conversations. But unfortunately, sometimes people don't always agree with why you're terminating them, and they're buffoons to begin with, and they're still going to be buffoons when they leave. So you might as well just part ways and move on. Uh, speaking of which, let's move on to Farshid Ferdowsi. So Farshid was the opening speaker of Wednesday, and I've loved— and I, for those of you that were there, I, I definitely asked for my flowers on the Wednesday content versus the Friday morning content. So we made the big change last year. IPPA Spring Summit used to be Thursday all day content, Friday morning a little bit of content till like 10, 11 AM, then everybody's hopping a flight home. Well, Friday morning everybody's waxed from the night before. Nobody's really showing up to this stuff. It's partial attendance and people are getting flights. If you're going back to the East Coast, it's hard to get a flight later in the day and not get back in the middle of the night. So we said, hey, look, everybody's already here Wednesday afternoon. Let's shift the content to Wednesday afternoon. Now it's been greatly attended. People seem to enjoy it. I think it's a great shift in the event, and I'm looking forward to see how that continues to grow. But we opened up with Farshid. So Farshid's an industry vet. He's been in business for 45 years. He corrected me. They were— he said 40 on his profile, and I was getting up to introduce him. He said 45 years, and it said 10 businesses he started. He corrected me again. He's like, it's 12. And so the— you know, it was really cool to hear his story, though, because he was one of the more innovative early movers in this space. I mean, he started Power Payroll in the late '90s, or excuse me, Power Payroll and then Paymax, or Power Payroll was the product at Paymax, excuse me. Paymax was selling more enterprise. He had a bunch of huge logos. He claimed to be the first, the person who invented PEPM, which I loved. That was like the best thing up there. He showed an invoice with a per employee per month pricing on it from the '90s. And he's like, look, if you're '80s, maybe even it might even have been sooner. I can't remember which, you know, again, he's going through all these different companies he started. But to me, the biggest thing, you know, he hammered this point home throughout, and I bought his book. I've cracked it. I haven't got into it much yet, but if you're not growing, you're dying, which is, you know, all right, a little cliché, but makes sense. But then what he got into, which I thought was really interesting, was the new cycles of growth. So once you start to plateau, then mixing in a new cycle of growth. So he gave these, I don't know, it looks like 8 or 10 different things. So new or improved products or services, new modes of sales and marketing, new leadership or management, new technologies, new or expanded markets, new venture or mergers and acquisitions, new venture capital or M&A, a new round of capital, a new name or brand, a new package or bundling. So I just thought that was really interesting where, you know, like if you're starting to hit a plateau, to innovate and to bring something new to market is probably the answer, not trying to figure out how to do the same thing you've been doing, only more.

Yeah, I took the same from that. I think it was a little bit eye-opening. For me, you know, not having been in the business as long as you have by any means, seeing the graph on the screen was definitely impactful. So they had the straight line going up and you could see the plateau, but then they had the offset where innovation comes in and it just shows you how it's going to continue to rise as you innovate more and more. Say he, you know, the 6 different methods of innovation were eye-opening as well, right? Ideas, methods, products, services, and solutions, you know, it's not limited to just offering a new product. I know I've been, you know, resistant to some change. I'll be the first to admit it, right? But it was definitely impactful to see the way that, you know, new ideas, new products, or new ways of just offering the same thing can elevate your business to that next level.

Now, I loved how open he was with the financial side because here's a guy that's made a few exits. He's raised He raised $10 million for Inovo, which is his most recent venture, which he recently stepped aside as CEO. And he's sort of pseudo-retired now. He'll probably start another— he's probably already started 3 more businesses today. But I love that he gave some metrics on the values that he sold at, what was the multiplier on trailing 12 months revenue. But he really got into it with Inovo. And a couple of things he said here, to build a $10 million company, you need $10 million, which was fascinating, right? Because if you think about how long it's going to take you to Bootstrap a $10 million company. I want to say his goal. Yeah, his goal was $10 million in 5 years with an exit at 3x the trailing 12 months revenue. And if I'm not mistaken, I think he said he hit it in 6 years of that $10 million. And he broke down exactly how he got there. You know, this is how much we did in organic revenue. This is how much we did from this acquisition. This is how much we did from this acquisition. And just really got into the nuts and bolts of it. The type of stuff that you can only get at IPPA, man. Like I hate that this podcast sometimes kind of turns into a big long IPPA commercial, but this is why, because nobody's out here talking about this stuff anywhere than behind closed doors with a, with a pack of their fellow peers. And, you know, the cool thing I thought when he was starting Innova, a couple of cool things, but he said he called 20 to 30 former clients from his last bureau and asked them what they hate. And the 3 answers were annual price increases, they hated getting a different CSR when they called, and they hated getting nickeled and dimed to death. Now, I was excited because, you know, these were things we have like known for the decade we've been here. We didn't do any price increases for the first 8 years. We have dedicated support model and we have a flat, a online, like you can go to our website, see our pricing doesn't change. We don't add a bunch of upcharge fees for every little thing. And again, that's like, yo, that's how I want to buy stuff. So why would I sell it anybody any differently. All right. So that's where I give you the big, long, bloated pause. So you jump in and say something. A really good captain. For those of you who are welcoming Captain back, I know he met some of his biggest fans out there in Vegas. It's been a few years since he's been on the pod. Jason Gullett is our Director of Client Success. We call him the Captain over here. Recently a birthday boy 2 days ago and turned 31 2 days ago. Might as well just put your full history, what social security number is, benches.

Dangerously close to personal information here. How much a bench.

Um, so, so yeah, I would suggest, you know, I'd love to hear some of your takeaways from his, but I mean, I've got some of these numbers in here. If you know, they started in June, they had 100 clients by the end of the year. Again, they had started with $10 million. I think that's the only way you can have 100 clients by the end of the year is to be adequately liquid. Um, they then added a couple more acquisitions in there, you know, et cetera, et cetera. And once the growth slows down, they add a new cycle of growth. Their most recent one was him leaving and a new CEO taking over. And now the one big thing I have in here, the last thing I'll say, and I'll leave if you've got any notes you want to fill in there, is like he wants to be at $200K plus per FTE in revenue. So this is a metric we track and we're trending towards that same goal of $200K plus per FTE. And in the age of AI, of leveraging offshore talent, like we believe this is it. A very doable thing. It was good to hear him say it. Yeah, now he's a little bit different because he's in the enterprise space, but I think as our PEO continues to take hold, like, we're going to be in a great position to be over that here by the end of the year.

Yeah, I definitely think it's achievable. It was good to hear that. I think we've also looked at this from an industry benchmark perspective, and I want to say it was right around that 150, 175, 200 mark. So just seeing his input and throwing that $200K number out there just kind of reconfirmed what we were previously envisioning there. Yeah, I mean, ultimately the biggest, biggest takeaways for me from his session there was the business life cycles, right? You said it initially, it's if you're not growing, you're dying. To avoid decline and death, you must innovate. To me, that's the most impactful. Did love the metrics that he was pulling out there for rev. Per FTE, as well as, I think he had on there, payroll should be 50% of the top line or under. You know, as I start moving more into the finance world here, that's definitely helpful information for me to take away from this.

Well, and it was interesting the way— so somebody had kind of prompted him with that of like in the crowd that knew him, labor with benefits and taxes. So, the whole employer burden should be less than 50% of the top line. Which is definitely a good metric to, again, somebody that's done this for as many decades as he has to kind of confirm and validate that number was powerful because, you know, oftentimes if you're not getting this benchmark data from your peers in the industry, you're just using general professional services data, which is not super effective for us. Tell me about the next one, operations, bridging the gap, transitioning from sales to operations and finance and payroll. So this is a session about, you know, what happens when a deal comes in? How do we make sure that the relationship stays intact? Creates a great experience for the new client. Sales does their part, operations and finance do their part. We had Brian McVicker from Paragon Payroll. Shout out my boy McVick. Janelle Emanuel, she's a badass. Am I allowed to say that on here, Jason? Are we allowed to talk like that? I don't know if I've ever met Brittany. Maybe I have. And I apologize if I haven't. Sean Shanks and Deborah Sandman, just absolute titans in the industry. So certainly a powerful panel. And if any of y'all are listening, I want to thank you again because this one, you know, spoilers, I was the planning chair for this event. And this was the last session to come together. This was a last-minute session that Brian and Chanel so graciously offered to contribute to and then recruited a couple other amazing people to contribute as well. So tell me about some of your key takeaways from this one. I heard it was great.

Yeah, it was more of a roundtable discussion and it was pretty funny right off the jump. Brian volunteered himself as the sales guy in the room full of operations people, just ready to take the beating. And he did so gracefully. That was awesome. Yeah, it was, it was just full of a bunch of nuggets of what other people are doing, right? So the prompt was, you know, transitioning from sales to operations and finance, you know, what are the successes you've seen here? Where did things go wrong? Interestingly, got a bunch of mixed viewpoints on whether sales should be handling data collection or whether that should be the job of implementation. Between the, the 4 or 5 people up there, I think we had a couple of different views, a lot thought. Implementation should handle it. They're the experts in the data. Why don't they take it? On the other side, you get the inverse of that of, hey, I expect sales to collect as much as they can about the client so that it leads to a smoother transition. There is valid points for both. It was, you know, there was no clear consensus. I think it becomes ultimately it's how are you guys currently doing implementation, where that line falls, who are the people that are involved, you know, So it was just interesting to see that there was mixed viewpoints on there. Never really thought about, you know, the responsibility of data collection. Do you trust the sales guy who just want to sign the deal or, you know, or do you, you know, allow the implementation people to take it and run with it?

Now I may be too close to this one because I remember sitting in an ADP office where I had to listen to a 21-year-old fresh out of college calling the IRS pretending to be a business owner who he's got his security number. He's got the Fed ID. He's lying to the IRS. I'm sure that's probably, you know, federal offense. And to collect some data on behalf of a customer. And so, and that's just like, that's just the beginning of it. I watched these guys, the small business services reps, they're just running the road like crazy at ADP. They had all this sensitive data, payroll reports, 941s, all this stuff just in their cars. And mind you, I mean, it's like on top of case of beer and it's like, you know, like this is the person, you know, you're going to, you think this is a better process than having an implementation person collect this over a secure, you know, channel. That's, you know, that's kind of where, and, you know, spoilers here, we have our implementation team collect the data for that reason of like to Jason's point, it's, you know, while the salesperson is being incentivized to collect as much data as humanly possible, Do they really know what they're looking at and looking for? I'd rather wager that they don't and put it in the hands of somebody who's more qualified, aka Implementation. But I'm curious if you heard anything there that made you think twice about our existing process.

No, I think what it ultimately came down to, uh, the general consensus on this, even though there's mixed viewpoints, is have clear defined lines of who is Who's responsible for what? Mm-hmm. That is nuts and, or hands down, you know, what everybody said is we know what's expected of our sales team. We know what's expected of our implementation team. So accountability is in both spots, right? Where people seem to run into issues is where implementation is always expecting sales to do something, but sales is not following that process or those same guidelines. And so now it creates discourse amongst the company. Implementation hates sales because they're sending half-baked deals over. Sales hates implementation because there's always pushback on the deals that they are sending over. There was another session down the line that, you know, poked into some of the same viewpoints here, but ultimately have a clear line of what is expected of implementation. What data points are they expected to collect? Same on the sales side. That makes for a happy medium and everybody knows where their role starts and begins as it relates to implementation.

Everybody's not saying hands are above board like you described the— now go ahead. Sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off there.

Thanks for calling me out. Yeah. A couple other things that came out of that meeting outside of that is some of the things that other people do. One thing that I really, really liked was they were talking about the stress of the first payroll. One of the things that this company did, and I cannot recall who was utilizing this process, but ultimately they define what is the perfect first payroll look like that leads everybody towards the same goal. Everything that they need to do in order to hit that first perfect payroll is defined beyond that, right? No one ever has a perfect first payroll. It just doesn't happen. That was also a consensus among the group. You know, there's always going to be something that comes up. But if you define what it looks like initially, that helps you back into all the steps that you need to do in order to try and achieve that. One other quick nugget of, you know, one of the processes that they did was signing off on aspects of an implementation. So their implementation actually had, you know, somewhat of a checklist where before the first payroll, each relevant department, whether that's tax, whether that's payroll, whether that's HR, had to sign off as a confirmation that they have completed all the steps in that bucket prior to the first payroll. They really stressed on, well, this was to eliminate stress of the first payroll. I know, you know, it's always stressful going into that first payroll. There's so much work that has gone into getting a payroll up and running. Everybody's a little bit on edge. They really said that, you know, signing off on the different aspects of saying, yes, this is complete, really made a difference in, you know, de-stressing to a certain extent there.

Love it. It reminds me of the Airbnb 11-star framework. We worked through this and I think I mentioned it on the pod before, but they, They do sort of like a, hey, what's a 5-star experience look like? 5 out of 5. And then like, all right, so if we were going to keep expanding on that, like, you know, what is 6-star? What is 7-star? What is 10-star? What is 11-star? And like in their example, it's, you know, at 5 stars, it's knock on the door, the host opens and lets you in equals the expected experience. You get exactly what you paid for. You're very happy. You know, you go and you leave the 5-star review. As you ratchet it up to 7 stars, you knock on the door, the host personalizes the experience. I know you like surfing. Here's a surfboard. Here's my car. Also, here's a surprise booking for the best restaurant in town. Like, it's way beyond the 5-star experience. And then 11 stars, you show up at the airport and Elon Musk is there. Elon Musk just says, you're going to space. And you go with Elon and like, you know, and they back it all the way down to a 1-star where it's knock on the door, no response equals refund to me. You know, and I think we've gone through that exercise before and it's really, really valuable to kind of see like, okay, hey, if everything's working exactly as it should be and they're going to give us that 5-star review, what does that look like? But now let's take it a step further and see like how much further can we go here? I know we've gleaned some really good insights from that over the years. All right, let's pivot into the next one for time's sake. So I'm going to hit on Kevin Hennessy. I know you weren't in this one. So Kevin's session was titled Cultivating Sales Success: Hiring, Compensating, and Developing a World-Class Sales Team. So Kevin did a really good job. I mean, he basically basically put like his hiring manual up on his slide deck. So like if you went and they distribute the slide deck, I would highly recommend checking it out. Kevin, for your sake, I would recommend taking a few words off of it for in terms of presenting. But the, in terms of like, hey, I can take this slide deck and use it and it's super useful. It's awesome for me as an attendee to get after the fact. So like there's the good and the bad of that one, man. If you took it down to the, you know, like there's, there's an old adage in pitch decks, no more than 10 slides, no less than 30 font, and there should be an image on every slide. And so, you know, what is it? And then there's like a number, no more than 5 words, no more than 10 slides, and no less than 30 fonts, something like that. So anyway, it's not, not picking on that because it was an awesome session, but I love— he, he, he does a really good job. So I've, I've known Kevin for years. He does a tremendous job of having like clear pathways for everything. So for example, you know, he, even on his HR team, Jay, he's got this thing where it's like, you know, Once you're here for this amount of time and you've hit this milestone, then you go from a junior HR business partner to an HR business partner. And then once this happens and you've been here for this amount of time, then you go from HR business partner to senior HR business partner. Like, he has good tracks for everything. So some of his things were like, you know, he has to— you have to book a meeting in your first month. Like, that's one of your sales, like, milestones. You know, he spent— he took his team to P Club early, like, you know, as early and often, right? Like, as soon as you can afford a P Club. And even when you can't, like, if you've got salespeople, you can afford a P Club because an incentive trip should pay for itself, right? If I'm telling somebody, hey, I'll take you on a $5,000 cruise if you book $200,000 in new business, well, yeah, that $200K is going to pay for that $5 grand. Like, it's just a little gravy on there to incentivize somebody a little bit more. He's got quotas for each channel. They sell a lot of different stuff. And, you know, he just really— again, like, to get your hands on this slide deck, if you weren't at the event and you want it, drop me a note or, or a DM on LinkedIn, and I'll send it out to you with Kevin's permission. But I thought it was fantastic. You know, he did a really good job getting into, like, their adjustments, audits, clawbacks, a lot of in-the-weed stuff, but really, really good and just provided a lot of good details in terms of how they manage their sales compensation strategy and incentives particularly. So I thought that was good.

Question on that for you. Yeah, please. So you had mentioned that the HR individuals, you know, it's based on time in order to go from junior to senior. Now, is it solely time-based or are there actions in between that timeframe that you have to hit in order to reach that next level?

I think it's more outcome-based than time-based. So like the, you know, I know for him it's big on like get a certification, you know, do this thing. Like in sales, obviously it's a little bit easier to measure than like CS, but you know, sales. And it really kind of dovetailed nicely into what Tim shared, which was my next session. Tim Hester from Alliance HCM, like he had a really good sort of track. It was kind of interesting to see these two sessions back to back because I, again, like this, that part I know about Kevin's track, he didn't necessarily share there on the CS side because he was talking about sales, but he has a similar thing on sales where it's like, you know, go from a junior SDR to an SDR to a senior SDR or whatever it might be. Like Tim made the point, and I guess I'll just dovetail right into Tim's session of, you know, I'm going out here and I'm recruiting college students, trying to get them for internships or jobs fresh out of school. And I realized like what was compelling to me in an interview, one of the many interviews he did when he was trying to decide where he wanted to work was somebody had, you know, kind of this sheet that they put up in front of him and said, hey, here's your career track. Like here's where you can go once you do this and you do this, you go here. Once you do this and this, you go to here. And, you know, that's, that's big company stuff that a lot of companies have in place. And, you know, we've, we've played with some of this stuff over the years, and I've actually done a better job implementing this for clients over the years than we have executed it internally. But I do think it's a valuable process because it does give people, you know, in a small business, there's a lot of ambiguity over what's next, right? Like we used to do that future org chart over and over again. Oh man, look at Tim's headshot on the website. Tim, you handsome son of a gun. As soon as you walked away, I hope he's listening to this. Jason and I were both just like, we talked to you that one day at the session. We're like, man, Tim is just the coolest guy. Like he's just cool as a cucumber, handsome, funny, easy to talk to. Tim Hester, big fans over here from the Payroll and Podcast. But his session was really good. I know we're going to bro out over here for just a hair of Tim. You know, they focus a ton on mindset. So, they're super metric driven. It was funny because you could see Tim. Told him afterwards, I was like, he's a little uncomfortable at first getting into some anecdotes and doing what you got to do as a speaker, kind of setting the stage. And then once he got into his numbers, man, you could just tell the comfort level got in there. This is a guy that leads a team really, really well by the numbers and then does a great job of turning those numbers into one-to-one weekly meetings with his team to say, what are the numbers telling us that we can now work at on during this one-to-one session? So, you know, for example, if they're not converting enough conversations into meetings, Well, let's talk about your talk track, right? So you got your— you made your 100 dials, you got your 10 conversations from those 100 dials, and you didn't get any meetings. Well, then we need to focus on your talk tracks. Oh, you made 100 dials but didn't get 10 conversations. Well, then we need to focus our time and energy on the list that you're calling into because you're not getting the conversations, which means you're probably calling into a bad list, which means we need to clean up the data. So he just does a really, really great job. Of, you know, managing by data. And I think that's what makes him and that team so special. But here are a couple of quick things in that, you know, can't coach mindset that I just loved, right? Like, you cannot make somebody a killer. Like, they either are or they're not. Like, there's no training for it. He's got 4 things on his tracker: dials per day, dials to connections, meetings scheduled, and meetings ran. And this is after a lot of refinement. So Tim's been there for almost 10 years now. Started as an SDR and has built out that SDR program. And, you know, how many, how many calls did you make today? How many people did you connect with during those calls? How many meetings did you schedule from those calls? Did those meetings actually happen? I mean, that's it, man, right? Like, we got to get people on the phone. We got to get those meetings scheduled and we got to actually have the meetings. They can't no-show everything. He said the dials are the most consistent metric to track. Those are sort of the biggest indicator of success. If people, you know, you can't hide it nowadays with all the tracking and all that. You're either making the dials or you're not. Oh, let's see. And they said they get 100 dials. Like what I just mentioned is their actual number. So 100 dials per meeting on average. So 100 dials turns into 10 conversations, turns into 1 meeting. And they do have weekly one-to-ones to review those meetings. They will push it out a little bit longer if somebody's been there for a while or they're just having a great amount of success. But they have that documented progression on paper of what the career path is for an SDR. It goes from associate SDR to SDR to senior SDR to account executive. And this first 3 steps, I believe he was like, look, this is all— they had one guy go from associate SDR to senior SDR. So leapt up 2 rungs on the ladder in 3 months. And that has just having that process, that framework in place, he said, has really accelerated their ramp time because everybody sees that next hurdle. And they're sprinting to try to get to it, right? And I could see how that works. So that was really impressive. Let's see. Yeah. And they're a bit— their holy grail right now is on getting cell phone and direct phone lines. They use a ton of tools like ZoomInfo, 6Sense, Apollo, Cognizant. I mean, these tools are out there. We're Apollo users over here, but we are not nearly as sophisticated of an operation as it turns out in sales. If anybody attended my LinkedIn in session, they definitely know that to be true. But yeah, all around fantastic stuff from Tim. I thought he really brought it and, you know, you could tell by the amount of questions people had when he was done that everybody was really engaged and just eating up what he had to say.

That's awesome. I really like the, the, you can see the track of progression there. I feel like that would certainly encourage people to, hey, let's see what's right above and let's see if we can start working toward that early and often so that there's no question that I'm prepared for the next step in my my career. I really like that.

Let's talk about the leadership session with Jacqueline Silk. Jacqueline, my homie, served on the planning committee. She's awesome. So nice to meet her and get to spend some time with her. She's with Bangor Savings Bank, Bangor Payroll out of Maine, VP of Client Services, VP of Client Success and Solutions Manager. Sorry. So she was talking about change management, responsible AI in your organization. Obviously this is near and dear to our hearts, something we're focused on a ton. What, what were some of your big takeaways from her session?

Yeah, so the session was split into two things, her presenting, and then we also communicated around the tables getting the insights from the other attendees that were there. You know, one of the things that I really liked is the recommendation to take a project management course if you haven't already, really to help identify a framework or where AI fits in the framework. What I'm able to see from that is, you know, okay, if you take project management and you understand all the steps that go into a project, you're better able to identify where AI can plug in gaps, automate certain things. And ultimately, having that project management course helps, you know, identify ultimately where those things are going to fit. A couple other things that she hit on, you know, is your culture able to sustain AI changes. I think she had a case there to be made that not everybody's culture is able to sustain AI changes in the immediate. Maybe you need some additional changes within the culture in order to incorporate AI into your business. She didn't touch too long on that, but I think, you know, if you start thinking about it, you can understand why. She shared a ton of resources for AI. There are a lot of forums, a lot of different newsletters that you subscribe to. There's some courses on Udemy, LinkedIn, a couple other tools where you can get plugged into how others are using AI, you know, grab the prompts that they're using so that you don't have to start from scratch again. Then we had the, the table discussion, learning how other companies in our industry are, are beginning to utilize AI. And I stress on beginning because it doesn't seem like anybody has a fully formed, fleshed framework for how AI truly incorporates into all the aspects of their business. So very much on the forefront. But it was interesting. We also went over the timeline of AI, and apparently machine learning AI has been around since the 1950s, just starting to pick up steam now here in 2020s. So it was pretty interesting to see the timeline of how all this has progressed over the last 70 or so years.

Yeah, it was interesting when I was doing a lot of talks on AI when it first started getting hot and had to do a lot of research into like what exactly is it? How do these models work? What's the difference between machine learning and actual artificial intelligence and LLMs and all that? It is fascinating. I highly recommend there's some Google training out there that's free and I think it's worth looking into. All right, for time's sake, we're going to keep plowing forward. So Eric Maddox was the keynote on these first, or on Thursday. So we've got this half day on Wednesday, Thursday, sort of the main event, the big day. You know, it was pretty fun because about 8:30 is when it's supposed to kick off. And I've got a little spiel I'm going to do to kick the day off, about a 5-minute thing up there. And Eric's still not in the room yet at 8:25. We can't get him on the phone. And mind you, this is one of our two paid keynote speakers out there. All the rest of these people are there pro bono as industry experts. And here Eric is, MIA, and this is our guy. This is, you know, Eric Maddox, for way of introduction, led the intelligence gathering that led to the capture of Saddam Hussein, interrogated over 2,700 people. I mean, the guy is about like as intense as it gets, right? When he looks at you and he talks to you, he's looking right into your soul. You can tell this guy has done a lot of interrogations. We've had several conversations over the last few months. And he is, uh, he, he's very good at what he does. So finally he shows up right at 8:30 and he's like, oh, I thought it was on at 9:30. I thought I was here an hour early. And it turned out we had sent him an email early on that said 9:30 and it never got corrected. And so heart attack averted. We were pivoting quickly where I was about to have to give a LinkedIn workshop to an entire room of people that were expecting a motivational keynote. And so thank goodness that didn't happen because I think only about 10% of the people in the room would've been interested, uh, at least based on the number that came to the workshop. So, so Few things from his session, which again was awesome. I'm sure you can go out there and consume a bunch of his content online. I highly suggest doing it. Trust is everything. You know, he talked about when he's sitting down with a prisoner, he's simply trying to get them comfortable to start because they'll talk, but they won't be transparent. And he talked about the need to empathize. Is this about me or is it about you? He said that was kind of his big breakthrough is when he really needed, he really started learning how to make it about them. His discovery questions were brief with zero assumptions. And the interrogators he works with always thought they were listening, but they weren't. And he went into his categories of distractions. Like, I'm not going to butcher all those, but the thing that he— his biggest point that I think was really interesting is every one of us is the lead in our own movie. Every one of us is alone on our own stage. And he talked a lot about getting onto other people's stages and really trying to how they see things from their stage. Because when you look at everybody else, you think of them as sort of character actors in your movie, right? Like, I mean, this is my life. Like, I live in this head, this body all day, every day. And so selfish, being selfish is just like, it's, we kind of have to be, right? Like, you have to be selfish in a lot of ways just to like take care of yourself and maintain it. And once you know exactly what somebody else is going through, and he narrowed it down to two things that people want, want, which is interesting because I only have one of them on here. One is a life that matters. I don't know if you have a note for that. It says we all want two things, and then it just says a life that matters. So I don't know what the second one was. But you know, the question is like, do you get me? Do you want to get me? Like, that was the question he kept asking over and over again in his head from his prisoner standpoint, is not only do you get me, but do you want to get me? And then he talked about this concept of breadcrumbs. I'm gonna pass it over to you for your takeaways after this. But this, this breadcrumbs thing I used Immediately as soon as we walked out, I'll tell you about it here a second. But like, you know, how you ask somebody a question, hey Jay, how was your weekend? You know, it's a great question. It gives me a peek into your personal life. It helps me understand, was it good? Was it bad? Like, how did things go? And then you say, I had a long weekend. And most people just go, oh, cool. Like, you know, of course you did a long weekend. You got a kid and two more kids on the way, like probably a long weekend. I get it. But like, long. What happened is the right response, right? Like, that's a breadcrumb, that word long. And it was so crazy, dude, because I walked out in the hall and literally asked one of my good friends out there, hey, man, how things been? Crazy, he said, was his answer. And I just sit there. I was like, damn, a breadcrumb just right in my face, right? As soon as I finished with Eric and I was like, hey, Michael, tell me more. Like, what does crazy mean? And then he expanded on like, oh, our market's so competitive. We've had all these new competitors move into our space and this is going on and that's going on.. And it just helped me to open up like a really thoughtful conversation with him and a guy that I really respect and wanted to get to know better. So it was perfect timing. And I was able to get on his stage for a minute. Tell me a couple of things about some of your takeaways from the session.

Yeah. One word response of crazy. That's like a whole loaf of bread. That's not even just a breadcrumb, right?

Yeah. I'm snacking on that bad boy.

Yeah. No, I love the breadcrumb. Piece, I, I talked to 5 people after that, that, you know, they told me anecdotes of how they were using the breadcrumbs and it was really, really cool to see how immediate the impact of that was. I also had a situation where I was talking at the table with someone well above, you know, my league in terms of experience and, and leadership and everything, and just trying to make friendly conversation. And they had mentioned something about where you, we are trying to do XYZ. Immediately locked onto the trying as a result of trying to identify breadcrumbs, and that led to a fantastic conversation that I learned a lot in. So yeah, immediately helpful. You know, it's funny, you know, thinking in your head while you're talking to people, oh, there's so many breadcrumbs that you could poke on in everyday conversation. And it's been really, really helpful. As far as, you know, the rest of the session, you know, I thought it was interesting. We only hear 25% of what someone says in a conversation. Could not agree with that more. I can't tell you how many times I look back on a conversation, it's like, wow, I really only got about 25% of that. Whether that's, you know, through the different levels of distraction that he talks about. I think one was personal distractions, what's going on in your home life. There are a bunch of other distractions, whether that's the wind in the room or how muggy it is in the room. Yeah, there's a ton of distractions and I think it's a a great reminder to be a little bit more mindful of, you know, what is someone else saying, you know, what are all the, the components of this conversation. Ultimately, it just makes you a better listener. But yeah, very, very cool session by Eric. Immediate takeaways from that.

Yeah, and he gives the 10 categories of breadcrumbs. I've gotten a picture of the screen when he pulled these up. I don't think I'll do them justice, but I did just quick search in like a couple of his keynotes around YouTube Highly suggest consuming this breadcrumbs thing. Again, like anytime you hear somebody that they can pull something from a, like from a talk and apply it immediately, I literally took what he shared with me and walked down the hall and used it. Like that's testimony enough, right? Like how awesome is that? All right. For time's sake, let's get cruising here. I hate that we're getting to some of the keynotes and we're having to cruise, but man, it was just so packed with great stuff. Talk, I'll talk about Eric's workshop in just a second. I think the biggest thing like for me is like the, you know, just role-playing conversations. It was like, he's just like, look, you cannot expect to be successful just walking into conversations without practicing them first. So your sales team, your support team, everybody, like you should be doing internal role plays all the time. And I couldn't agree more. And sadly we don't do them here. So that's, you know, something we did a lot more with the sales team, less so with the CS team. But I can tell you I've learned a ton from those. And it's funny, I like the 80% of the time someone asks a question, they don't really want your answer. It's a pivot to what they want to talk about. And I'm super guilty, as you can imagine, of this. I'm like, hey Jason, tell me a little bit about, have you ever done this before? Well, that's great. Let me tell you about my experience with it. I really don't care anything about what you're about to say. And I'm a very selfish person, so a lot of this resonates with me as I continue to try to improve on my ability to, to hear the people around me and speak to them. Jeb kind of worked in reverse because he was the closing keynote. So I'm going to hit on his like workshop first and then you weren't in his workshop, you were in—

Yeah, progress.

Why don't you hit on real quick before we go to that, like takeaways from Chris Caputo's session. I'm so bummed I missed this. Shout out Chris, freaking love that guy. Loved getting to meet his team, more of his team this year. Boys with some of my friends from Long Island I went to college with. Every time I see Chris, I got a smile on my face. So I was super happy to see him. But tell me a little bit about some of the key takeaways from that leadership session.

Yeah, Chris was an amazing speaker. Definitely locked right in as soon as he started talking. I don't know if it was the New York, Long Island accent or whether it was just the content that he had to talk about, but it was very engaging. So his session was how a small change in mindset changed everything. And so he talked a lot about where his business was and where it went to just based on a couple of mindset changes. He spoke about how before on their sales side, they were fairly apologetic. When they knocked on doors, they were saying, sorry for bothering you, Sorry to interrupt your day, to changing that mindset to more of, hey, we're here to help. We're going to go in there with confidence. We know our self-worth. We're going in there because we know that what we're offering is valuable to these people and can change their business and improve it overall. They said it had a tremendous change, especially as it relates to the sales and implementation team dynamic that they had going on. I think I mentioned earlier there was more on the discourse between sales and implementation. He actually threw up on the screen there a couple of slides that showed Salesman 1, 2, and 3. It gave feedback scores from the implementation to the sales side of how was the interactions with the sales team during this deal or during the scope of, you know, 3 months or whatever it was. And he showed the before and the scores were, you know, out of 1 to 5, they were 1, 1, 2, 1, And so some really, really negative scores. It seemed like they absolutely hated each other based on the scoring. But then they changed that mindset, right? They went and embraced their good, so to speak. And that changed completely. They did an after report of what does that feedback look like now? And now we're talking 5s, we're talking 3s and 4s. I think he even called out one of his teammates for being an absolute dick because of the feedback that was on there. So it was very cool to see exactly how that applied. We are also opened up to ask questions from the leader of their sales team and some of the leads on their implementations. So it was really cool to see how he was talking about something, but it actually showed in his business. The people that it impacted the most were there to tell us, yeah, this is true. This isn't just made up for a session's purpose, right? We got firsthand examples of how that was working. A lot of questions came up around, you know, from a sales side, how did that impact the sales side? Well, they started moving a little bit slower. They started moving a little bit slower, a little bit more intentionally. There was a couple of questions on what does your day-to-day look like as a salesperson? A lot of prep work going into that. But yeah, it was, it was a very cool structured session. I don't know if I've seen another session where they opened it up to two of the teammates on Chris Caputo's team. It was kind of funny seeing, I think they have have a thing called timeout. That's Chris's thing, apparently, when they're moving too fast, or they're trying to jump to conclusions. Chris goes timeout. And I think both of the individuals that were on that stage used timeout on themselves or in reference to something while on the stage. So kind of cool to see the mindset trickle down through the key leaders in their team. And I'm sure that's trickling down even beyond that, right? So Awesome session. Again, Chris was an amazing speaker. Really liked the format of that session and the ability to ask questions to the people that are actually doing it too.

Yeah, whether we like it or not, the organization as the owner, it's going to mirror our personality, our, our, the culture that we kind of come forward with. It's not going to, it's not going to mirror what we say. It's going to mirror what we do. Right. And so that's an important thing to recognize, get your arms around. And listen, dude, I'm going to tell you, you mentioned about the Long Island boys, man. I went to school with a bunch of Long Island guys up in Oswego and they are absolute savages. And I bet you those dudes get down at their President's Club. I would love to be a fly on the wall for that. But who told me the other day flies are actually deaf? And so being a fly on the wall, you would only see. So there's a fun fact for you for the day, Jay. That might be a good thing. Yeah, for real, for real.

All right.

We're going to skip fraud risk and payroll for time's sake. I'm sure it was awesome. Ellie's amazing. Romeo's awesome. Just big fans of both. Let's hit on Jeb and then Neon Knights. Of course, I know you want to talk about your outfit. Jeb kind of worked in opposite because he was the closing keynote. So he did a workshop first talking about omnichannel approach and sequencing to increase the probability of engaging the right prospect at the right time. Now, listen, here's the reality of sequencing. Like you have to sequence in sales. It has to be omnichannel. There is no one touchpoint and there is no one touch that's going to get the job done. You know, one of the beautiful things about sales is that nothing has changed. Everything's the same, yet the tools change slightly over time. But in real— I mean, he showed some of the same stats we've been looking at for the last 20 years I've been in sales. If X percentage of deals don't close till after the 12th touch, like almost zero close after one touch, right? And so like, we have to sequence, we have to put a lot of things in. But he was really pressing on like the in-person stuff. And the synchronous communication is back according to him. So I say according to him because love him, love Jeb, huge fan, gonna have him back on the pod here, hopefully. But obviously it favors him for synchronous to be back because that's very in line with what he's coaching. And again, we have to have some new twist in order to continue to sell our sales products and services. But I do agree with him because I can tell you right now, I don't get very many cold calls. We've been in business for 10 years. There's not that many people stopping by this office. There's not that many people calling this office. And we are a sizable enough company that we should be getting substantially more. I get a ton of emails and a ton of LinkedIn DMs, but very few phone calls, almost no drop-ins. And there's like no barriers to entry to get in our door. You literally just walk in. And you could just walk straight into my office if you don't ask anybody what's going on. I mean, you just be in my lap before you know it. So I think he's, I think he's onto something there. And I love doing drops. I love getting out in the field. So that was news to me. And I did like the one thing he said about his sequences, you know, and look, so we've been drawing these up in sales for as long as you can remember where it's like, hey, first we're going to email you this, then it's followed up with a phone call, then it's followed up with a LinkedIn request, then another phone call, then another email, et cetera, et cetera. But he starts all of his sequences with a phone call, which is interesting because he made the very valid point of like, if I just get them on the phone and have the conversation first, then the sequence is over. And so I was like, well, duh, we've always had this sort of soften the beaches approach, or I'm going to send you a mailer, an email, a LinkedIn request, and then I'm going to call because I got something to call about. But it's like, I wouldn't have needed to have done any of those other 3 things if I just call you and get you on the phone. So I might have saved myself a lot of time. So I was like, well, that's duh, right? So good stuff there. I mean, he hit on the acronym again, that's as old as time, WIFM, what's in it for me? Me is all that matters. You have to make sure that you're calling that out in all your communication. What is it for the person? Again, like, get on their stage. What matters to them? What's important to them? It's all any one of us care about. So a lot of crossover there between his and, uh, sessions. But his objectives are to educate, convert, and familiarity with his, his campaigns. Like, it's those three things. Going to educate you about what we do, hopefully convert you to the next step of the process, not necessarily to a closed deal, and to build familiarity. And I've got a ton of notes on his. Unfortunately, we're running up on time. So a ton of stuff though. He, you know, his keynote, he talked more on AI and I know you were in there for that, but 5 ways AI can help you sell more, buying window identification, enhanced communication, pre-call planning, discovery questions. I loved his use of for discovery questions. He talked about using NotebookLM, which I've been playing with a lot for learning about a topic or an account because NotebookLM is like like an isolated language model where it's only working off of the data that you put into it. So if I put a bunch of articles, a bunch of documents, a bunch of things in there, then I can ask it about those things. So it actually might be a good tool, Jay, for what we've been talking about for our internal knowledge base type stuff. Now that I'm saying this out loud, you know, just because AI can doesn't mean it should. I liked that. And, you know, AI is creating a ton of cynicism. So here's what I would say is if you want to learn more about Jeb, I interviewed him on here a few episodes back. So go just search Jeb Blount in our archives. Here, but also in a recap I did the first time he was there. You know, the thing that stands out to me about Jeb all the time is his focus on storytelling. He told 4 stories in the last 10 minutes. That was when I started counting. So that's an average of a story every 2.5 minutes on stage. And so if you're somebody who speaks in front of groups, and we all are in some way, shape, or form, just think about that, right? Like, stories sell, stories plant ideas. You know, there's a— I've got a book on the shelf behind me that It's about sticky stories, but it talks about the old— it gives you the breakdown of like, if you ever heard the one about the guy falls, he like goes out, meets a woman at a bar, wakes up in his bathroom bathtub at the hotel with a note that says call 911 and his kidney's missing, you know, and there's that the old kidney missing story, like it has all these elements to the story that make it sticky. Made to Stick is the name of the book by the, by the Heath brothers, Chip and Dan Heath. Great story, but I cannot encourage people enough to become better storytellers. As leaders, it's so important to have a couple of storytelling frameworks up your sleeve, uh, just to be able to get your points across a little bit clearer. And nobody's better than Jeb. Again, like, if you watch these guys that are paid keynotes and you do that, you track how many stories they tell— I mean, they're going to tell, you know, Russell Brunson is famous for, you know, I think in an hour-long keynote he tells 50+ stories. And so that, that's something where, you know, we can learn from the masters as leaders ourselves and understand how are these people selling us on their ideas and their concepts They're telling stories, so we should be getting better at storytelling every day. What were some of your takeaways from old Jeb?

Well, I really liked his healthy skepticism around AI, and I don't know if I would even define it as skepticism, but, you know, he, he told a couple of stories, right, where the AI is telling him how great he is and, you know, how wonderful he is and how smart and intelligent and he worked that into, you know, how AI has a tendency or it will hallucinate or give you incorrect information. He referenced the lawyer out in New York that quoted a bunch of precedent cases that actually turned out to be false. While huge, huge fan of AI, you know, just reinforces how much you need to double-check, double-check, vet the sources, make sure it's legitimate. One of the other things he spoke on was is how AI should be truly used so that you can have more face-to-face conversations, right? If AI isn't allowing you to talk more to people, make more phone calls, or have more in-person and human interactions, then you're using AI wrong. So that was pretty impactful. As you start to use AI in your day-to-day, it's, you know, you don't want to use AI for the wrong reasons. It should be used to automate automate, you know, cut down on the tasks that you really shouldn't be doing. I think he went into a little high-level, low-level activity mentality there. But yeah, overall a really awesome session. Like you said, great storyteller. It's very cool to see how AI is working its way into just about everybody's life, even someone like Jeb, right? Very cool stuff.

Yeah, I think he's very keen on the same thing we talk about around here a lot, right? Automate, delegate, and the thing I've been sharing with a lot of people and two quick points on this. If you go over to @MattVady on YouTube, my session that I did, which somebody just direct messaged me on LinkedIn and said they put it as their favorite session from in the survey follow-up. It was just a LinkedIn workshop on how to grow your reach, your leads, your impact on LinkedIn. I recorded the exact same session and put it up on my personal YouTube channel @MattVady. Be not super relevant to Guru or payroll or whatever. So I put it over there. But I also put one out there about an exercise we do all the time, 3 lists of freedom. Jason just recently did this exercise as we were getting ready to place a virtual assistant for him, was like, hey, what are the things you don't like to do, things you can't do, and things you shouldn't be doing? Now take that list, and the first thing you want to do is go like, hey, what can AI do for like $30, $40, $50 a month, or even free sometimes? That I'm spending an hour a month, 2 hours a month, 3 hours a month, and I don't even like it. And then secondarily, you know, then we look at delegating to a virtual assistant or somebody else on the team that's more appropriate for it. Captain, thank you so much. If you hung in there this long on this, we like to call this the gentleman's agreement and the lady's understanding. Like if you've been here this long, like we've provided free content. We've taken now almost an hour and a half out of our day to prepare and record this. And then more people will go into editing it, posting it online, putting up a thumbnail. Do you know what a pain it is to pick out the right thumbnail. The ladies' understanding— the gentlemen's agreement, ladies' understanding is, is simple. All we need from you is a subscribe. Just smack that subscribe button, hit the little like button down in the corner. That's, that's the agreement. We do this for you, you do that for us. It's simple, right? Thanks, Captain. Appreciate y'all. We appreciate you stopping by. Have a blessed day.