How to Scale a Business Past $10 Million (Without Losing Control)

Welcome back to the Matt Paulson Presents YouTube channel. Today I've got my friend Vlad Streisus here today. He runs an agency called Vovosa, does Google Ads for a variety of clients, and Vlad said, hey, can we sit down? I want to ask you some business questions. And I said, sure, but how about we do it on camera and then anybody else who wants to can benefit from, you know, the conversation as well. So Vlad, maybe as a starting point, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and About your business, Vevosa, as well. Sure.

Yeah, thanks for having me. So my name is Vlad Strejus. I run Vevosa. We manage YouTube ads for info businesses, SaaS companies, and people that sell online services. And we've been doing this since 2019 and trying to grow now. So hoping to learn from somebody like Matt who's very successful. And yeah, I'm excited.

Awesome. So Vlad's got some questions for me and try to answer them and we'll kind of, kind of go from there. So that's the first question.

Yeah, so I'll start with one that I really like. So not long ago you posted on X or Twitter advice for 20-year-olds to try a bunch of different things essentially. And then I said, you know, I just turned 30, what's your advice for me as a 30-year-old? And you said edit, delete, and essentially eliminate distractions. And I guess my question is, how do you do that while still having integrity? Because we committed to some things early on, like Let's say lifetime memberships or something, or paid newsletter or whatever. So do you have any advice on that?

Yeah, so the context of this conversation is that my advice to 20-year-olds is to try a bunch of things, because in all likelihood you're not married yet, you probably don't have kids yet, you have fewer commitments dragging you down, your parents are still healthy. So like during that time of your life, you should do as many things as you can just to get experience and like see what you want to do with your life and what you don't want to do. And then when you turn 30, you get into this editing period of where you decide, okay, I'm really good at this and this, but maybe not this and this. So maybe you get rid of the things that you're not great at, like aren't what you were put on this earth to do, and just kind of focus on your top 2 or 3 things. And then by the time you're 40, which is kind of now where I'm at, like you're really dialed into your top, you know, couple of things that you want to focus on, that you want to spend your prime 20 years of your career on. So I was in the same spot when I was 30. I was involved with different businesses, and I did want to wind some of them down to focus on MarketBeat, but I wasn't able to do it all at once. It takes time. If you commit to something, you typically do want to follow through with the commitment, even if that commitment is 2 or 3 years. Like, for example, I started a new venture capital fund about a year and a half ago, and I've got to keep working on that for at least 2 more years. And if I wanted to quit, like, the time to quit would not be like today, like, that would be— because then that would be like not following through on the commitments I've made to my investors. But at the end of the fund, whenever all the investments have been made, like, that would be the time to step off. So the key is like when these natural commitment cycles kind of come to an end, That's when you step off, and that way you don't ruin your reputation or leave a bad taste in somebody's mouth.

What do you think of giving out refunds if that's an easier, quicker way to do that?

Yeah, if you've got a product and you don't want to sell it anymore, and you've got an annual commitment, either give out refunds, or if that's really expensive, you can offer refunds, and then if somebody wants a refund, give it to them. And maybe they don't care and don't want a refund. That's perfectly valid to do too. We just stopped selling lifetime memberships because we don't know if MarketBeat All Access is going to be a product 10 years from now. So we don't want to just have a whole bunch more lifetime members that are looking for something that doesn't exist a decade from now.

The next question is, how do I know whether I am the problem versus a client in a business relationship?

If you have the same problem with 5 clients or 3 clients, um, where it's like the same problem with different relationships, it's probably you. If you only have a problem with one client, it's probably them.

Yeah, I like that.

Yeah.

What kind of problems can I expect at or beyond $10 million a year in revenue? And follow-up question, which are the most challenging to overcome and why? And the context for this question is that's our goal right now. We really want to shoot and get to that mark.

So, yeah, you know, when I think about what happened at MarketBeat when like 'Cause before COVID we were $2, $3, $4 million a year in revenue. And then we shot from like $7 million in '19 to $14 to $25 like in 2021. So we really saw a lot of rapid growth. And what I realized was like a lot of our systems, like just they were set up to be a small business. Like our financials were a mess. So we had to go hire a CPA to be our vice president of finance, get all our financials cleaned up, get an audit done, all that stuff. So it's like something cool happens in your business, but then your systems are caught behind. So then you have to go catch up your systems to get where you need to be. A lot of the scaling part of going from 2 to 10 or something like that, is really figuring out what your key value point for your clients is. Because if you've got an agency and typically when you first start an agency, you do everything because you just need the money and you'll do whatever. But then over time you figure out, oh, we don't just do ads, we do Google Ads, or we only do Google Ads for info clients. And then once you've kind of really honed in on what that thing is, That's really when you can scale up is when you found that one thing. And then, I mean, it's just, it's more, it's the Hormozi more, better, new of like, how do I go get way more clients? How do I fulfill better? And then eventually, if you nail all that down, then you go do the new thing.

Yeah, I've been kind of obsessing over that ever since you said to delete, edit things. So I've been giving it a lot of thought this year. I don't know if you ever see any of my posts, but I'm pretty much going all in on YouTube ads for very specific businesses. I don't know, what do you think about this scaling approach? So we're thinking of instead of taking on a higher volume of clients, just going upmarket and retaining a certain amount of, a relatively small number of clients, but essentially just continually going upmarket.

Yeah, well, I mean typically if you have paid advertising clients for Meta or Google, you're getting paid a percentage of spend, right? So if you're averaging, you know, 10% of spend or whatever that number is, So if you want to be a $10 million business, you have to manage $100 million in spend. So that means you've got to get really good at what you do, and then if you can help your clients develop profitable funnels where they're breaking even in 30, 60 days, they'll be able to scale up their spend, and then ultimately you'll be able to scale up your revenue. And I feel like that's what you got to do.

Yeah. What I've come across is So we obviously scale people. I would say we do a good job, 'cause we're always competing against other agencies, and we've retained some of our clients for over 6 years. But at some point, there's only so much we can do to continue scaling them. And as you know, a lot of businesses get stuck around the half a million a month range. So that, my thinking was to start going for more clients that are doing million plus a month in revenue. And that's kind of the approach.

You know, usually bigger clients, tend to have their stuff together more. They're a little bit less needy and like, this campaign absolutely has to work today or I'm screwed. So that's better, but you do have to kind of earn the right to work with bigger clients by showing that you can do that. And usually the needs of working with a smaller guy that's got an info course, it tends to be that person and then a couple other helpers. When you work with a big company, you might be working with a marketing team, and that's just a very different dynamic.

Yeah. Oh, I guess this is a relevant question. What are the pros and cons of working with agencies versus in-house advertisers? Because people like Hormozi suggest or recommend people to take advertising in-house, whereas you're probably going to reach $100 million in revenue within the next 2 years, but you're still working with agencies. So what is your thinking behind that?

Yeah, MarketBeat as a business, we decided a few years ago we are going to be an in-office team. People can work at home a couple days a week, but we're primarily in office, which means we decided to not have any remote employees. We found that the employee experience for people in Sioux Falls versus people that are away just wasn't the same thing. It wasn't good experience for remote people. So we just decided we're not going to have remote employees anymore because we can't make a good place to work for them. In doing that, we also kind of limited our talent pool to Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and just the number of great marketing people that I could hire to work here that know how to run a half a million dollar a month Facebook ads account, that person probably doesn't exist in Sioux Falls. And if it does, they already have a job or they're already making $300 grand a year somewhere. So it's very difficult to hire that person. And you might hire somebody where you think they're decent and it turns out they're not very decent, and then you fire the person. And it's just, for me, it's easier to hire an agency where it's— you can give them $25,000, $50,000 a month budget to start. If they do good, scale it up. If they suck, they've got other clients. You can get rid of them and it's not that big of a deal. Just for our setup, that's worked pretty well. We've got a Google Ads person, 2 Meta Ads people, a couple newsletter people, and that's having different people work on different things. It's worked pretty well for us.

Nice.

Cool. Yeah.

Another agency question, and I'm really curious about this one. So what sales approach would you recommend to get companies like MarketBeat that spend over $1 million a month on ads As clients?

Yeah, every industry has their own communities and people do hang out in them. Like for my industry, there's this event called Financial Marketing Summit, and then we've got a Discord group and different communities where people show up. Like we had an event with 50 people at MarketBeat this summer, all in the same community. I think the key is to go find the community and join it. And then like be that trusted resource. So like there's a guy named Nathan May with Feed Media. He showed up at our event, he showed up at FMS and just like, hey, you wanna chat Meta ads? I'm your guy. And then eventually over time he's built a roster of clients doing that. Like generating that in-person trust is, is really hard to replicate. If you can do that, like that's how you, how you can lock down some of the bigger clients. Yeah.

Nice. Okay, so I have some leadership questions.

Sure.

What is your hiring and firing approach? So some people suggest to hire slow, fire fast, and some people say do both fast. What has been your approach?

I think, you know, I wouldn't say we're like the world's best, like, at hiring or firing, but my approach has always been to hire slow and fire slow. It takes a lot to get fired from MarketBeat, honestly. And only a couple of people in the history of the company have. We really want to hire slow. So like, we'll— if we think we're going to hire somebody, like, we'll probably start talking about the job description 2 or 3 months before we post it. We'll take applications for 30 or 60 days. We'll do— we'll screen— we'll score all the resumes that came in. We'll pick 5 or 6 people to interview. We'll pick maybe a couple people to do a second interview. And once we've landed on the person that we think we like, we'll bring them in and have them meet the team. And hiring a person could take a couple months, and that's okay.

Yeah.

And if we do the screening up front, we tend to get pretty good people. And if somebody's screwing up, we're like, hey, this is not working. You need to go do something else. And we give people a few times to go do the thing better. There's some very high-growth companies that are like, we need to hire a million people tomorrow, and if you're not working, you're out. And just like, that's not how I want to run my business. I want people that are going to work for me for a very long time. I want them to have a good time while we're here. So if we take a little bit more time on the front end, and then we work with them if something's not jiving, that's worked pretty well for us. Yeah.

So what do you think of the approach? I think we both have mutual friends that believe you should just hire people, not necessarily for any particular position, but just kind of throw them in the work and see what they're good at and then find them a better position within the organization. What do you think of that?

Not a fan. I think when you— if you hire somebody who already knows what they're doing, that can work. If your finances are a mess and you go hire an accountant and say, go fix everything, that could work. But if you just hire somebody and say, go hang out and try to figure out how to be good and do valuable things, that's not going to work long-term in my opinion. That might work if you have 5 people and it's a very simple kind of business, but that falls apart pretty quickly as you scale.

Okay. How do you spot or develop leaders on your team? Or do you hire them as leaders right away?

The leaders on my team, some of them have been hired for that job because they are leaders. Others have worked their way into a leadership job over time by doing good, and then like, you're really busy, you probably need a helper. Let's go hire you somebody to do what you do, and then you can tell them what to do. And then eventually somebody will have 5 people reporting to them. Like, you have to demonstrate it, whether you've demonstrated it somewhere else or you demonstrated it at MarketBeat. But it's, you know, can you deal with other people's drama? Can you manage a team, tell them what to do, keep them focused on the right things? Can you do a good job yourself? Like, are you bringing me more solutions than your problems? Kind of stuff like that. Mm-hmm.

So how do you, how much control do you give up to leaders or people in your organization when it directly impacts clients' results? For instance, if they're managing people's money as an agency, for instance, we have account managers that manage people's money, essentially their ad spend. And how long does it take to build that level of trust where you can say, here you go, you're in charge, take care of it?

Yeah, I'd say, so we have, other than me, There's 4 people on our management team at MarketBeat. There's Erin, our CFO. She has full control over our accounting, bookkeeping, HR, that kind of stuff. She says, hey, I think we should switch benefits providers. It's like, you know what you're doing. I trust you. Go do it. Stuff like that. We have Jess, our editorial manager. She's in charge of all the content at MarketBeat, from the written stuff to YouTube. If it's MarketBeat content, she's in charge of it. I trust her implicitly to do that well and better than I would. Will manages all of our advertiser relationships, so people that have CPA deals with MarketBeat or IR clients promoting a public company or a Reg A kind of campaign. And then Rebecca, who manages our dev team, and she knows what she's doing. So if somebody makes it into management at MarketBeat, You're trusted to go do your thing, and if something's not going right, yeah, I'm gonna step in there, but I'm gonna step in through the manager and not go directly and tell the person, you're screwing up, stop screwing up. So I think once you get to 20 people, you can't, you have to trust your team at some point.

Mm-hmm.

And sometimes that means, You screw things up that cost you money, and that's just kind of how it is as you get to that scale.

So what are some big red flags to look out for in a potential partner or employee?

Oh, like the main one would be like if you're going to hire an employee and they're trashing their former boss or their former job, or if you're hiring a partner and they're like trashing their former partners, like That means they did something and they're blaming the other person. And then if they're partners with you or your employee, you're going to be the next person they're trashing. That's a very common one. When I look at people, I like to look at their career trajectory of, does this make sense to me? Of, yeah, I worked in this marketing job for 4 years and I kind of felt I was maxed out. And then I went to this other place because it was a better opportunity, and I've been there for 3 years now. Now I'm looking for something new, and here's the thing I'd like to do at MarketBeat. That kind of story makes sense to me. When the narrative doesn't fit the resume, that's usually a red flag of, huh, you've been at 6 places in 8 years. What's up with that? Usually it's because there's a lack of contentment more than they've been at shitty jobs for 8 years.

Okay. I have some advertising questions and I'm really excited about this.

Cool.

So the first one is, what advertising metrics do you care about most and why?

Yeah, there are a lot of metrics that you could care about. The one that I care about the most, like in our space, people will worry about cost per lead and like that's not a good metric because it doesn't really matter what the cost is. what you pay versus like what you get back. So for me, 30-day ROAS is very important. Like if I spend $100,000 on Google Ads or YouTube Ads during the month of May, I want to know by the end of June how much money did I spend on those people and then what did I make off them. Then like if I know that, like I know where my profitability curve is going to be over time. Typically I'm looking for a 60-day break-even. By the end of 12 months, I'm looking for 3x ROAS on my ad spend. If I get those 2 numbers, I'm happy. And like everything else that's like underneath that of like cost per lead, activation rates, stick rates, sales, clicks, open rates, conversions, like all of that like really ties into your ROAS. Like that is the number to care about.

Yeah.

More than anything, because Like, what I've learned is like there are some channels where you can get really high quality leads. You might pay $12 for a lead, but you're like, the return is there. And there are other places where you're paying $1 a lead and like you're not making any money at all. It's like you get to focus on, on just the revenue per what you, what you spent. And like some of the other numbers that people focus on are— Not important.

Yeah, I agree 100%. I mean, we've seen this even promoting webinar funnels. Sometimes the ROAS can actually be higher at like a $25, $30 cost per lead versus like a $15, and I'm talking at scale. So it's interesting, a lot of people in the marketplace like to focus on all these vanity metrics, I would say, but they're all really supporting metrics. Like you said, it does tie into the ROAS, but—

Yeah, because you don't— like, if you're doing a webinar, right, you Your cost per lead doesn't actually matter if somebody doesn't show up. So it's like, what is your cost per engaged lead that showed up for the webinar?

Yeah, I think of them as we optimize for intent, like high intent leads, people that actually care about showing up, watching the presentation, and buying the offer.

Yeah, because when you're doing retargeting, especially on Meta, what people often optimize for, the signup, but then you're just getting a bunch of cheap leads because Facebook's finding people that are gonna fill out the form versus people with purchase intent. So for us on Google and Meta, we try to upload our buyer data to say, these are the types of people that are actually buying stuff. This is who we want to advertise to versus somebody who maybe doesn't have any money, isn't investing in the stock market, but loves filling out forms and getting free reports. That's not our customer.

Yeah. Very big one for anybody that scales and knows, they're gonna know exactly what I'm talking about. So how do you approach overcoming ad spend ceilings?

Yeah, so I went to the Hormozi Marketing Workshop and like I asked him like that very question of like, you know, my business is working, like how fast should I try to scale this thing up? And you know, the answer was like, it depends how big your balls are. Like really, that's what he said is like, how much guts do you have? And it's like, yeah, that's a good way to put it. Ad ceilings are real. We run into them all the time because we'll advertise like Meta and Google and YouTube, like that's fishing in the ocean. Sometimes the best ROAS is fishing in ponds of like, my buddy Charles buys leads on Google and he sells them to me, but there's only so many I can buy. And then if I try to buy all of them, the ROAS goes down. So it's like you kind of have to understand the channel, know when you've kind of hit your limit, and then have the courage to stop spending more money. And then if your ROAS goes down, you dial back. On the networks though, that's kind of a different thing than a lead share deal or buying newsletter ads from somebody or co-reg. Those are very different kind of things. On the networks, You know, it's more creative volume is kind of the thing that everybody goes to today. It's different types of targeting. It's more networks. Is there magic to it? I don't think so. Just keep trying different stuff.

So would you say you expect the ROAS to decrease continually year after year, or do you just try to find a way to maximize the volume while maintaining a certain ROAS?

I'd say our ROAS has actually gone up over time. Because we've gotten better at monetizing leads.

How about the initial 30 to 60-day ROAS?

That's actually improved this year.

Really?

Yeah. Because we used to only have, like, when somebody'd sign up, we'd sign them up for MarketBeat. Now we sign up for MarketBeat and our beehive list, American Market News. And then it wasn't until about a year and a half ago that we added an SMS opt-in form on our kind of cold traffic landing page. So we were getting email, now we're getting email, second email list, SMS. So it's just more opportunities to monetize, and that's really improved our 30-day ROAS.

Kind of a similar question. When assessing ad performance and making scaling decisions, would you say you're more of an optimizer or a maximizer? And specifically in the sense of, do you care more about having healthy metrics or maximizing backend profit at the expense of frontend performance if necessary?

I think maybe a thing to understand is different channels have different performance curves. Like with co-reg or co-registration, like, you know, the person's not on your website when they sign up, so your initial monetization is lower, but the leads are also cheaper. And then since you're getting more leads for a cheaper price, the ROAS over time grows at a faster rate than like an ad network where like they're on your website, maybe you've got them in a funnel, you're making more money on day 1, but you paid more per lead, you got fewer leads. And then the growth curve is kind of slower over time. So knowing where a channel should be at based off the type of channel that it is is important. So if they're cheaper leads and they will have a faster kind of growth rate as you go further back in time, that's good. If you're doing an ad network thing, you want to break even probably a little bit quicker, but then knowing your ROAS will be— the curve won't be as great over time. Mm-hmm.

So how do you decide how to allocate the budget per channel? Is it based on who's performing better in that 30-day period or?

Yeah, so typically I look at like a trailing 3-month period of like, so if it's the end of August, I'm looking at my September budgets. I'll look at June, July, August and say, okay, who's got the best ROAS for the last 90 days? And then who also like, most of my channels are maxed out, so like I couldn't give my buddy Charles more money if I wanted to 'cause he's selling me all the leads he's got.

Yeah.

So then it's like, okay, of my channels that aren't maxed out, what's doing well? Can I put more budget there? And then if something's not doing well, can I cut the budget or just get rid of it entirely? But then also like to set my ad budget, like I'll take the average of our last 90 days revenue So let's say we did like $18 million in the last 3 months, I think was the number or something like that. I averaged that out, so we're at $6 million a month, 30% of that monthly number, that's my advertising budget the next month. So my September budget would be like $1.8 million based off $6 million in revenue. And that's okay, where do I think that $1.8 million is going to go? And then try to allocate it accordingly.

Okay. What about when it's a new channel you just launched? Do you cap the spend based on a certain number or do you allow it to— Do you allow it to tap out on its own by setting lower bids or whatever?

Typically my experiment budget is about, you know, I'll do, it's probably about $30 grand for a test campaign. You know, $15 grand for a couple months. If it's going well, we'll scale it up from there. Sometimes channels just like can't scale up because the inventory doesn't exist. Like we're having great results with Beehive's ad network right now. Like not the Boost thing, that's like their co-reg, but like Actually running ads to Beehive newsletters. Like, it's working great for us. The ROAS is break-even month 1, but I can't spend more than $20,000, $30,000 a month no matter how I try. Like, email the guys and like, hey, we got more money for you, do you want it? Like, yeah, sorry, can't fulfill it. Like, there's only so many investing newsletters on Beehive, so it's like, all right, we'll take what we can get then.

Yeah. So I have some lifestyle questions.

Okay, love it. Yeah.

How do you— I guess this one's still kind of business, but how do you approach paying yourself and building personal net worth?

Yeah, so with MarketBeat, we do distributions every quarter. Like, I pay myself a good salary that covers like my wife and I's lifestyle expenses, and like that covers your credit card bills and all that stuff. On top of that, we do quarterly distributions, and we do it at the same time taxes are due. So that's like January 15th, April 15th, June 15th, September 15th. So whenever it's tax time, you know, we leave about 3 months of operating expenses in the company because we're very profitable, revenue is consistent, like there's no need for us to keep a lot more money than that in the company. So anything above that number we'll distribute. Right now half of MarketBeat is owned by my irrevocable trust. That's like an estate planning thing to keep money away from the government when you die.

Mm-hmm.

So you do a dollar distribution, $0.50 is owned by the trust. So that goes straight to my wealth manager, a guy named Jesse Haller. He'll invest it for me. Then of the other half, about $0.30 on the dollar goes to the government. So really only $0.20 I've got to live on, which is more than enough. And that's kind of how things are set up. My wealth is kind of split between the stock market and real estate. I own a bunch of real estate here in Sioux Falls. It's been a pretty good investment for us. I want to do more of that over time. But it's just, for me, it's— I try to keep maybe 10-15% in cash, and then maybe I've got maybe 10% in private equity for things like Homegrown Capital, and the rest is kind of split between the market and real estate. I don't mess with crypto anymore. Like, that's too much time for me to invest in something, but certainly have in the past.

Cool. Big one, really big one. So how do you recommend approaching marriage and building a family life as an entrepreneur?

Yeah, it's sometimes tough because like, you know, whenever you want to start a business, like, that's where you're at in life. Thankfully, I was in college when I wanted to start my business, so Like, I didn't have kids to provide for or a spouse, and like, I just kind of go do it and take whatever risk that I wanted to. And thankfully, by the time I'd gotten married and we had kids, like, we were doing pretty well, so like, I could go full-time on my business and, you know, do that. Like, if you're later on in life and you've got commitments, like, it's a lot harder to go start a business. And like, you got to ask yourself, like, I've got to go take care of my kids every night, and I've got to work all day. Do I really have time to do a business? If I don't, am I willing to make some sacrifices to make that happen? For me now, I've got an established business, married, 2 kids, a couple dogs. I'd rather cheat on my business than cheat on my family. So when somebody says, hey, can you come to this business thing from 5 to 7? It's like, yeah, I don't think so. I'm not going to do that. So I end up saying no to a lot of stuff just because like, yeah, I just don't want to do that. Like I'd rather be at home with my kids and, you know, I'm going to have a high schooler next year. So it's just like the time you got with your kids is very minimal, like in the grand scheme of things. So like I'd rather be around my kids than be at yet another business event.

Yeah, I decided to become an entrepreneur when I was 20. So that's 10 years ago and I've been— I'm not married yet, but I'm thinking, you know, soon.

Sure.

So yeah, I really like that advice that you gave. The very first question I asked was to edit, eliminate distractions, all that stuff, because it actually allows me to be more present. And honestly, I think it's been a big blessing to my business in general, not to mention freeing up extra time.

So yeah, I think one, I think we think we have the capacity to do a lot more than we actually do. Like, I load up my calendar and then I end up regretting it with Just stuff. And really it's like those long spaces in your calendar where there's really nothing there, where you can just kind of work on stuff. That's usually when the magic happens in your business. And if you don't give yourself space to do that, the things that are like the big unlocks that get you to the next level typically don't happen because you don't have 3 and 4-hour blocks just to work and think about your business. Mm-hmm.

Here's a fun one. By what age do you project you'll become a billionaire by net worth, and is that something you're aiming for?

Honestly, I think it'll be when I'm 50. I think I'll be there if MarketBeat keeps growing from investments plus MarketBeat value. I'll probably be there. It's not something I'm aspiring to, but the trajectory I'm on will get me there.

In the back of your mind, you kind of know what's going to happen, right?

So yeah, you know, probably worth $300-400 million today based off like investments in MarketBeat net worth. So like, just that's the natural, you know, investing in the market and investing your business. Like, that's probably what'll happen, and it happens, it happens. I just changed my life accordingly to deal with it.

Yeah. Okay, last question: at what revenue or net worth does it make sense to buy a private jet? Just for the thrill of it rather than the cliché time investment argument?

Whether or not you should buy a jet, like, yeah, you need to have a lot of money to do it, but it really depends on how much you fly. Like, unless you're going to fly like 100 hours a year, which is more than you think, that— I mean, that would be, you know, say it takes 3 hours to fly across the country. You know, then back would be another 6. So unless you're doing like 16 or 17 cross-country trips a year, like, it's like you don't fly enough to really justify owning your own jet. Like, at that point you should charter or you should do NetJets, um, or like JetLynx or any of those. Like, if you're flying 50 hours a year, like JetLynx, NetJets, one of those is a better solution. Like, if you're going to own a jet like I do, um, You're basically running a business, the business of the jet, in terms of like you're gonna— your jet's gonna have its own company and it's got its own accounting and it's got employees that are pilots and you've got somebody to manage the plane. And it's like this whole nother thing to manage. And if you just do the charter thing or the NetJets thing, it's a lot easier to manage. So even though you might pay a little bit more in doing that, you save yourself a lot of headaches by not having to manage the business of a jet.

But would you say there's a certain revenue or cash flow point where it makes sense? Let's say you really want a jet, you've always wanted it, and let's say you don't need to travel a lot, but at what point do you have FU money and you're kind of just like—

Well, um, you know, a decent starter jet's probably $4 million, so you, you probably need $1 million down, $3 million on a loan, and then you probably got to be prepared to eat Quarter million a year in just like expenses. Like, like if you're gonna fly your plane, like it still costs money. Like there's still time on the engines, there's still fuel, there's still pilots. Like it's, it's gonna cost you more to fly your own plane than it is to charter somebody else's plane. So like if you got a million bucks for down payment, you can find a management company. Um, And then you got to be prepared to eat some losses every year. Like, that's probably when I think I started flying private, like as a charter, you know, when I was about $2 million a year in revenue. And then it wasn't until MarketBeat was at like $30 million a year in revenue that I bought my own plane.

Cool. Yeah, that's all I got.

All right. Well, Vlad, somebody wants to learn more about Vivosit, where do they go?

Just vivosit.com.

V-A-V-O-Z-A.com, right? And then I assume you're on social media somewhere?

Yep, I started posting a lot on Facebook and a little bit on X, I guess. Yeah, I'm usually behind the scenes, but I decided to start being out there.

So yeah, I love your Facebook stuff. That's been a lot of fun to read lately because, you know, there aren't a lot of people in Sioux Falls like watching Hermosey or some of those other people. So it's fun to see you comment on some of the, some of the gurus out there and like being part of that. Yeah. All right, well, thanks for watching. If you guys enjoyed this format, comment in the comments below. Maybe I could have other people on and interview, talk about their business and give them advice, and maybe you guys could get some value from that. So if you like this, let me know and stay tuned for the next one.