C. Suite Unfiltered: Car Wreck Edition

Welcome back to the Mike Andy's Podcast, where we discuss the ins and outs of owning a small business. If you're new here, the Mike Andy's podcast is all about taking your business to the next level. We're back with C Suite Unfiltered with your hosts, Mike Andes and Lee Park. Today we're podcasting in the memory of P2, a great truck that was gone too soon. Mike shares everything about the recent car accident, how he processes these events in real time, and what should your priorities be in a situation like this? Lee is still holding on to Virgin Galactic stock, Liz is writing a book, and Mike isn't going anywhere near submarines anytime soon. You can catch the video versions of these episodes over on Se Suite and Filter's YouTube channel. But let's get into it. Here's Mike and Lee with the show.

What's up, everybody? Welcome back. Another episode, C Suite Unfiltered. Mike Andy's Lee park, we're coming at you. And Mike is down in North Carolina, and, boy, does he have some updates. Things are crazy down there. Yeah. Starting a new business, starting multiple businesses. How's it going, man?

It's going good. You know, I have to say, after yesterday, I think, Zach, I both really just want to get home at this point now. So that, that's the current, I think, motto is like, we have one more week. Well, one more week of filming. But then we got. We got the last couple days that we're here. We're still going to do other stuff, so. But I, for me personally, it's one more week in my brain.

Yeah, fair enough. So the YouTube channel released the, The. The biggest drama. Because I know our last pod, you were talking about how you didn't want to feel like you had to manufacture drama or manufacture stories, but at the end of the day, sometimes building a business does have very boring phases of it. Right. Like I've, I've helped you build some of your businesses, and they're very boring, monotonous phases. But you had one of your general managers getting to a car accident, so let's just jump right into that. How what happened? Explain it from your perspective behind.

Yeah, so.

Essentially he moved out here from Texas, and so he didn't have his car here until his family moves out. And so he got an apartment quite a ways away from the shop space. And that's always a massive red flag for a GM. Like, we've just consistently seen. If the GM lives more than 40, 45 minutes away, it almost never works out.

And so that was that was not good. But like, you know, he. It's up to him to find out his living situation. So he got an apartment that he was going to count the short term until his family got here because he has a bunch of kids. So anyways, I figured I would give him the truck to be able to drive back and forth.

We've always said no to guys driving truck outside of business and I've always done that because of the risk of potentially someone getting in an accident.

Yep.

So sure enough, the very first day that he drove up to that new apartment, literally on like half a mile away from his apartment to pick up the keys, he got in an accident. So it was his fault.

So went and picked him up.

And.

The truck front, like the driver's side, front corner is the one that got hit. And so at first we thought, okay, bumper's messed up. It's like the quarter pounds definitely messed up. The back panel got hit as well. Like they hit it and it spun and hit the back probably.

So I'm like, look, it's drivable. We changed the tire because the track tire blew out. There's some cracks. We gotta change our light bumper needs replaceable. We can bunch this thing up and finish the challenge. And you're gonna see in the video. Yeah. Tomorrow morning the video comes out.

You MacGyvered it.

So in the video, I was quite elated the fact that, hey, we gonna MacGyver this and make this happen. And turns out that something happened. We don't know yet what. We just have sent send it into the the repair shop so we'll see what happens.

But.

Yeah, the tire would not spin. Well, you couldn't turn the tire. I almost drove it. And like, I was like, okay, it's probably not a good thing if I can't turn the wheel. So had it towed and yeah. So essentially in that moment, determined that we were going to.

Like you'll see in the video, I don't know how much.

Zach's gonna leave in, but I was very much debating as we were driving in a car accident and all I had was a six second clip of him saying, I was in an accident. My phone is about to die, here's my location kind of thing. And on the way I was like, okay, look, I don't want to get caught up in the drama or like what we're trying to do with the media. Ultimately, like, I've got a, you know, a few weeks under my belt. I think it was a good kind of run and enough for Augusta Long Here to kind of know the steps of those first few weeks. And I could just finish out this week, hit the 1500 dollars per month per day, because we can. We can hit it this week, no problem, or next week and call it a win. And then just, you know, cam the location. Right.

And so then what happens is five to 10 minutes after. Well, five minutes after, I told Chuck that, hey, I'm gonna, you know, this is what happened. Obviously, it's not great because all of our trucks are on the same insurance policy. We've never had an accident on that policy, so it's going to kind of crush it. So.

After talking to him five minutes later, I'm like, hey, let's sit on for a few minutes. I got to go pick up a jack for this tire. Think about it and I'll call you back. So call back five or ten minutes later. In that time frame, the Concord GM put his two weeks notice in. And Concord is literally where his Airbnb or not his Airbnb, his. His apartment was at.

Yeah.

So on the other side of Charlotte.

Yeah.

So in the moment, we said, okay, we are going to. This is not an optional thing. This is not like, what do you want to do? This is, there's one option, and if you don't want to do it, you can, you can leave.

And so it was. You're going to become the general manager of Concord, so you're closer and you can get. You can get an Uber back and forth from work until you get a car, if that's on you. Yeah, he's very creative though. Like, he thinks he potentially might get a, like, get an Uber for, like, to do Ubering on the weekend because he doesn't have family here. So he can do that. And then that would allow him to be able to get the vehicle. Okay.

And then, then there's an employee of Connor's who is the GM in Huntersville, who lives down towards closer to South Park. And he'd only been working for about a month, but was really, really good and showed a lot of promise and what, you know, has the caliber of being a gm. So he is now my GM as of today. That was last night. Nice. So I literally was calling him, calling him, waiting on the tow truck. It's like 10. No, it was like 9:30 at night. I'm like, hey, man, like, I need you to come. My general manager tomorrow morning gave him like, you know, a job offer essentially. Yeah, he rolled the punches. His name's Chandler. Looking forward to it. And yeah, we'll just keep rolling, rolling with the punches.

What would you say is the. The biggest thing that you slash Chuck learned in that instance? Is it like, the speed of decision? Like, like, speed over accuracy? Or are you just, like, flexibility? Like, what do you feel like you guys have learned since that happened?

First off, I just want to say, I think it's got to your head, the comments that, that, that on the last two pods ago, they were saying that you had such great questions. So now I think you're taking your questioning abilities, like, seriously.

Sorry, I'm not supposed to roast you. Last episode was a roast festival. Lee Park. Yeah.

If you want to talk about comments, someone in the last episode said they felt bad for me so hard. And I was like, please don't feel bad for me. It's all good. This wasn't recorded. Mike and I left together, but I.

Even felt bad for you. I apologized slightly afterwards, just, like, offhandedly.

But, you know, you know, the only. The only, you know, real. This is hilarious, dude. So check this out. Oh, man, this is so funny. Okay, so this is your favorite stock.

Yeah.

You see what happened today?

The day that you. The day that you posted this, like, a couple days ago, it went up 27. Okay. Yeah, yeah. Today, down, down 19.

Diamond hands.

Dude.

The pod released.

I was like, if you would have released it right here, you would have looked like a genius.

I'm not gonna say I'm a market mover, but.

The question has to be asked at that point.

Jutes up. I don't know. I'm just saying.

Oh, man. From the time that we recorded last, the time that the peak, like, the day after was 25, 26% up, and now. Now we're still down.

It's fine.

We're good.

We're Diamond Hands, baby. It's, you know, we're good.

Diamond hands. This is what diamond hands looks like on this talk.

Diamond Hands look great.

Oh, man. Okay, wait. So I was apologizing for roasting you, so I apologize for continuing.

You just kept going your question.

You're back to your question.

I would say we learned anything. If anything, I'm starting to slow things down in terms of decision making. I think we all, as a management team, kind of default to speed. So it's not necessarily something I'm like, oh, we need to make fast decisions. As a. As a management team, we. We are. We skew very heavily towards speed. It's as the organization trying to move everyone else towards that goal. That's a harder thing to keep that level of speed. And then like balancing it out with that. People need stability and things, so I don't think we've ever defaulted towards that. So. But yes, in a matter of, you know, 30, 40 minutes, making that plan was definitely, you know, I'm not gonna say it's the right decision. We don't know. The only time will tell. But having a decision to be made and being concise and clear and not having a whole bunch of like, let's think about it sessions, it was, it was, it was good. Um, I have a lot of confidence in you, Chuck and Liz, in terms of the speed of decision making. So now it's, it's just really a matter of like, what's fair for the team, what's fair for the individual, and then what's not too jarring for them. But in this case it was a matter of like, there is no option, there's no thinking about this. This is the option or it's out, it's done.

So yeah, I agree with that. Do you feel like, okay, let's, let's jump in. I'm not leaning into my questionability. I'm just trying to get better.

You're doing great. You're doing great. You're doing fantastic. You're, you're, you're, you're interviewing his man. This is, this pod has probably been super good for that.

Yeah, I, I appreciate that. You know, I'm hoping maybe one of these days, landscape summit to me with my guy.

We do it live. We should do a live C suite unfiltered.

That's hilarious. I would love that. Like subscribe, share. We need more followers.

So my live this live on stage podcasts are the worst. I hate them.

Yeah, I know. They're, they're a little less than ideal in my opinion. I think live like panels are good and then you can record it and then release it as a podcast. I think those are good.

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But the question I was going to ask was what is like your response in terms of employee text? You like now, now you have, now you have such big fires that can happen, right? You have multimillion dollar businesses. Like the fires for you are very different than some first time entrepreneurs. But employee texts you got in a car wreck. Here's my location, Phone's about to die. Like, scale of 1 to 10, where's the stress meter?

Dude, that's so funny that you said that. So we literally on the way we started talking about. Yes, we started talking about stress meters, perfect days where I was like earlier in the day and then like currently, et cetera. But this is what's funny. This is 100% truth. I was more stressed and mad when Zach knows what I'm gonna say. I was more stressed and mad when on like day two or three, I was left at that spot without my phone and I didn't know where Zach was and he didn't know where I was at. Like the address thing. I was so mad right there. Like, I haven't been that mad in a long, long time. Yeah, yesterday was a breeze compared to that. I, I, but yeah, like in the moment, it's just like this is the, this is the difference. That's the different factor.

For someone that was actually starting their business out and they were struggling, that happening is crippling. Yeah, I'm very aware, like, I'm in a different position where like, okay, I was about to go buy two other trucks, you know, a couple, you know, last month. So like lose one is horrible, but like, it's not going to put me under. It's not, there's not even a risk of that. Right. So I say that because for someone that has a truck that gets hit, it's not like, oh, I should be like more stoic like Mike. It's, it's different levels of risk. Right? Yeah. Someone else, like, they might have $5,000 in the bank. That happens, that wipes them out, they go into debt and I would be, yes, meaningfully stressed out of my brains. So that that needs to be caveat. But secondarily I would say, number one, there was kids in the other car and they were going to the hospital not because they were injured, hopefully, thankfully, they were just getting checked out. But just knowing that was probably the biggest stressor at the moment. And, and then the next biggest stressor is my responsibility in having someone move across the country. What's my level of, of responsibility for that?

And should I even Be thinking as my responsibility when obviously this is a employer business relationship, and I need to consider that first is. Is. But then balance it out with the humanity of the situation. So that. That was where my stress is at. I was like, the truck is the truck. The insurance is going to be brutal. We're gonna pay for the truck probably three times over the next few years as we scale. That stinks. But, yeah, that's what I was thinking.

0 out of 10. Give me a number.

Just for content.

Yeah. Yeah. I would say a six.

Yeah. Okay. Well, I mean, hey, that's about halfway. I mean, like, even though the fact that you have bigger fires, bigger issues, like, it is still a stressful event.

Oh, I'm far more stressed if, like copilot goes down for five minutes. Yeah.

Not recently hasn't. But like, but like during, like beta. Like March, April, maybe. Dude. Yeah. Like, when it goes down, heart rate goes up, blood pressure goes. I can feel it. It's really bad.

You got your. You got your monitor. It tells you.

Yeah, it tells me it went down last time. Thirteen minutes on May 23, I believe. And that. That was. That was horrific. Like, it. Every minute seems horrible. Like, you can talk to the guys in the copilot. They know. And like, I. I freak out. Like, I. Yeah.

Partly because you're out of control. Right. Like, if I knew how to code and fix the bug, I'd probably be okay in this situation, like yesterday. I know it sounds horrible. Like, money kind of fixes the problem. Right. You can buy a new truck, you can replace a truck. As long as no one's hurt, we're fine. When it comes to copilot, you have customers that you're failing. Right. This is not an internal issue. This is an external customer facing issue. And that affects me a whole lot more than internal stuff.

Real customers with. With their own customers. Right. Because you're B2B your business to business. So they also have their own customers that are not mad at them that now that kind of cripples them, raises their stress level. And now they're coming at you. Right. That's. That's. It's a whole different dynamic at that point.

Yeah, I feel. Yeah, I. I know what their pain is when that's happening and their sense of being out of control because they can't control the software either. And they. They have less information than I do. And so that's why usually when. If and when it happens, I'm immediately trying to communicate with them because I know there's the most. The Fear is wrapped up in like they don't know what's happening, they don't have any information. And so I try to convey that as quickly as possible them to hopefully use that. But ideally we, that never happens. So we've had a lot of improvements even though the past four or five weeks that should prevent that from happening. We changed our whole deployment process two weeks ago and so that should be much more improved. It's been really. It's nuts. Bug free software sales go through the roof.

Yeah.

Bug software drops like a rock. So I can literally just look at the sales graph. Like new subscriptions on Copilot directly correlated with how bug free we are. Yeah. So we're, we're implementing more of a bug free policy now that we're losing so much money. I'm like, okay, we gotta, we gotta start thinking about new sales.

That makes sense. Appreciate you bringing up Copilot. Get the Copilot shirt. Still waiting on my Copilot hoodie.

Give the people some developments, man. I feel like I personally haven't even heard other than the Copilot Facebook group. I feel like we're making some massive strides. I think you're integrating AI a little bit more. So what's the newest, coolest feature that Copilot has developed recently or we just focused on bug free software?

Most of it has been bug free stuff since the last week. Three weeks ago we did the integration with OpenAI to be it can write your emails from inside the software using ChatGPT. That's kind of cool. But yeah, really we've been trying to stabilize the software. A couple things that we've changed is the budget hours break down for every single week on the calendar view. So you can look at your calendar really quickly and see how many budget hours versus what your capacity is and then have the recurring number of budget hours versus one time projects.

Can I interrupt right there? Did you share that in the co pilot group? Because I saw it in the, in the private franchisee Facebook group. But did you also share that information in the co pilot group?

I shared, I shared the, the like a screenshot with the feature. But yeah, they don't really know how important it is to Augusta. So yeah, I know for us it's.

Huge integration of a calendar that auto calculates your budgeted hours is, dare I say, invaluable. Having run a location that did 1.6 million in annual revenue, that is such a fantastic tool to have. You don't even have to think about it every single day. What's in the back of my head is like to be a little bit facetious is budgeted hours is my religion. My religion is budgeted hours. I have to make sure this company is successful.

So.

So I must pay attention to budgeted hours. Right. And the fact that your software is integrating and I'm not even pitching copilot, I'm strictly saying this as a user of home service CRMs that having that integration is such a time saver and allows a certain element of security for you as a manager or owner of a service home service business. Right. Like, I just love that. I love that it auto does that. I don't think people understand the volume, the impact that that has. The auto calculation of budgeted hours on a calendar.

Yeah, I think the ultimately this is why we built copies because we need, we had things that we need to fix and solve. And so I think even this next two weeks there'll be a couple pretty big features we're rolling out that are again solving like our problems.

And you know, I, I've been pretty consistent saying you got to get me to the end of the year. So I still have six more months to kind of make it where it'll solve the majority of the problems that we face for a long time and have never solved but are solvable. And so, yeah, it's been fun.

Yeah. Cool. What's next in the pipeline? Just give us a teaser.

Right now we're working on a RingCentral integration so that when a customer calls, if they're in your database, it automatically opens up their profile. So it really helps people in the office. This Sprint is really for the office. So multi user login for command center to be able to track each user instead of like right now. Mike Andy does everything inside of our CRM because we have one user account for all of command.

So having that and it will track time in each each location. So we can use it for Augusta in terms of billing, make it more efficient. But then RingCentral integration, the marketplace. So a place where instead of us having to do system templates and automations, there's a place to download so you can selectively choose what you want. You can share documents and templates etc.

And then also is coming the next big one is price, price matrices and job costing. So that's coming in July as well. So those are all the big ones coming down the pipe, like technically supposed to be starting on those all next week. I'm gonna say July. Okay.

All right, fair enough. Now I'm switching it up 100. This is not a prepared question. I just thought of it off the cuff. You got a week and a half, two weeks till you're done in Charlotte. Where's the YouTube page going? What's next? I feel like obviously you guys have a plan. So in the interest of more teasers, co pilot teasers now, social media teasers. Where are you going? Like, honestly, if I had to guess, no idea where you're going next on the, the media team meetings. I know, I know all the guys, they're fantastic. They do great work, but I don't sit in on those meetings. So I don't know what's coming next. All I know is I say, hey, if you guys need content, let me know. So what's next? Do you want to give us a teaser there?

Yeah, like, obviously something Zach and I talk a lot about. Zach kind of being more on the strategy side of the media side with me. So.

You know, we, we playing with a lot of things in our head right now. We don't know 100%. We have a lot of content backlog because we've been gone for a month. And then while we've been gone, the other media team has been going out and filming other, interviewing other franchisees, following other people's stories. We have like at least two or three franchisees that filmed all of the spring rush. So we're going to cut that all up into vlog series. So those will probably carry us like throughout the summer. And then we got conference. And so it's really like, okay, what are we going to do after conference is really like, then what would be next? And we definitely, like, although this challenge hasn't necessarily been like a home run in terms of like the social media side, in terms of views, like new viewership, it definitely brings our core audience together. You know, that core 10,000 kind of people that watch every video. Right. And so, yeah, we'll see. You know, we have some other challenges that we are. Have thought about. They're definitely not gonna be a month long. It's too long. I don't like being away. I don't think I can convince that to go away anywhere else for another month. So we have some other ideas though, that we think we could do locally. And also we. The really, the big thing is reaching a broader audience, right. Like, lawn care is still a niche of a niche of a niche. And that is like, it's a subset of business and businesses subset of entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs. Like, then you got lawn care very narrow, right. So there's only be so many people interested in that kind of content. So, you know, we got, we had some ideas. Um, but obviously we, we don't want to. We're not moving away from lawn care right now. Like it's, it pays the bills. All of our products and services are revolving around it. And so the only reason we would ever want to diversify is just for wider reach and wider impact is because like, from a media perspective, I, I want to kind of do what Dave Ramsey did for personal finances. I want to do for small business. Right. But like, I think that's a long, long game. Like even for him. If you look at his actual career, it's been years and years and years. And so I'm not in a big rush. I still think the next at least two to four years will be still the majority, like lawn care based. But we have some ideas to kind of like start something separate that is a little bit more detached from myself and requires less of my time. So we have a lot of different ideas. But the challenge thing in terms of like my main channel is probably something that we will think more about and create more thoughtful content that's more entertaining and, and gives different angles to not just my thoughts, but in like business in general.

Fair enough. I like the video you guys did recently with the, the chalk riding on the, on the ground.

That's cool. Hey, yeah.

From a, from a media perspective, just cool editing. Very cool editing. I think also it, it whets the appetite of the person who does enjoy the numbers more. Which. That's. I'm. That's me for your audience. I am not a big YouTube guy. If someone's going to talk about like how to actually impact your business, how to change things. Let's talk about the numbers. Let's talk about the logistics. I will listen. And if they're just giving me foo foo, like, I don't listen, I don't care. Right. It's just not my style. So just kudos to you and the media team on that. Love that thought that was very cool idea.

Yeah, it was, it was kind of spare. The moment we kind of knew eventually we need to break down some numbers. So it's like either a, I could do it like my remarkable at the whiteboard and then I don't know, I think at the same he sent me a WhatsApp saying hey, we should with chalk. And I, I had thought about it, but I was like, you know, where are we gonna get chalk? And it's like, dude, we just get like any store like Walgreens. Sure enough Walgreens down the corner. So we got a big bag of it. And then at the storage facility, it was, like, really kind of on the edge of being too wet because. But it was. It was fine. It was good.

I liked it. I liked it. Once again, switching gears because this just popped in my head. So this is where we're going right now, because I want to give her the plug. Okay. Your chief operations officer of Augusta Lawn Care announced on her YouTube channel that she's writing about. Have you heard about this? I'm assuming you know about this.

I'm about it. I know about it. Yeah. I don't know. I haven't. I haven't seen a good draft or anything.

No, no, me either. All I got was a text that said, can I use your real name in my book? And I said.

Not gonna say no.

Like, what story are you sharing?

But.

That'S funny.

Yeah, I. I mostly just giving Liz the plug because she's great, but she's releasing a book, which is actually really cool. And I could be butchering the general concept, but from what I understand, it is more of an operator's manual for, like, someone supporting maybe an entrepreneur or a small business owner, and, like, how to build up from. You are an office assistant to a manager to HR and all that. And I just think it's really cool. I didn't know if you had more insight. If you don't. This is not a prepared question, but.

Yeah, like.

You know, obviously Liz's kind of goal in that is to kind of help other people, and she's trying to do that in different avenues and things. And so, like, I've always told her that, like, going after the market of, like, my audience isn't necessarily necessarily the play. Potentially it is going after the person that works underneath that, like the number two and is a supporting role. And I think that's a huge hole in the market that is actually a wider audience because for every really great entrepreneur, usually like, five or 10 people that support them very directly, and there's not a lot of content for that person. Right. Like, how. How do you support. How do you deal with their, you know, hyper mania? How do you deal with, you know, when they're depressed? How do you deal with them when they're pushing something through that you don't agree with and, like, you know, merge them back into reality? And so I've always kind of pushed her in that direction. And I was like, try to. Try to be a support of that person, because most entrepreneurs are probably going to look at someone like her and be like, oh, she doesn't have a big business herself, when in reality, like she operates, you know, from a daily operations level, more revenue than I do. But it's just a matter of the optics. Like, she would do great to be able to say, okay, look, if you are the spouse of a general manager of, in an executive position to an entrepreneur that's very like, thought, like strategy and like moving and doing a bunch of stuff, here's like how you deal with them because they're not easy to deal with. And so, yeah, I hope that I don't know what direction she's going, but I hope that's kind of where it goes because I think that's like a very valuable thing that there's not like there's no influencer that I can think of that really focuses on that. And in my opinion, it's actually a very monetizable and a blue ocean. Because like I said, for every great entrepreneur, there is five to 10 other people that are in the C suite that need to know how to deal with that person at the top. Like, can you imagine, like dealing with Gary Vee? The guy's an absolute joke, right? Like he's, he's a loose cannon. And so there's probably 10 to 15 operators that operate his businesses because he's not operating them. He's at the top of the funnel driving awareness, which he should be doing. But he walks in a room and like just goes off the handle telling people what to do and saying stuff like, there's got to be someone that can share and they don't have to actually be at the top of that game, but they need to share their experiences along the way. So I think there's definitely something there for that. And I think even like this, this podcast, obviously being named C Suite Unfiltered has, has a, has an opportunity to get into that market eventually.

Yeah, yeah, I think that's the goal for it. Like, I think the goal is kind of two pronged for this podcast to look a little more internal now is, is number one. And this is what I've said to people when, when they, when they pour in the parades. And I appreciate it, but I, I try to be, you know, silent to the praise, silent to the criticism. Hey, stay in my lane. I'm doing what I think is valuable. But when they pour in the praise, I typically say, I'm just trying to show you in a slightly different light because I get to see this out of you. You and I have dumb Debates about random things or you and I talk about certain philosophies and business or practices or the stock market. But not everyone else gets to see that. So I think it's two pronged. It's one, showing you in a different light. And two, I think there's an opportunity for someone to see an operator myself work under an entrepreneur and what that relationship looks like not only professionally, but also that it's like a friendship. And we can talk about dumb things and we can talk about concepts and we can laugh at each other's bad stock picks. And people can feel bad for me on the Internet. Right. Like I think it's, it's two prong. Right. Hey, we're real people. This is a side of Mike I don't get to see. But also I think I can provide some value being essentially an understudy to you and operating in your businesses and leading your businesses to hopefully success and the people that you employ.

Right. I actually think in my opinion over the course of time, like if you look at the amount of time I talk in the pod versus you, it's probably like 65 me, 35 you. I think that will shift more towards 50, 50 or more down the road. Because the question that will come, like right now it's people from my eyes, entrepreneurs listening. And they're mostly listening. For me, what's going to end up happening is that will be like a large audience and then the people below all those listeners, okay, this might guys a little out of control all of a sudden. My owners listen to his stuff, going to his conferences. I need to figure out how to deal with all of this. And they're going to come with something, someone like you that they can connect with more as an operator level. That being said, I, I do feel like my part of my continuing education is like learning and the value of an operator. And so it's not like I have never not. It's not that I have ever not valued an operator.

Yeah.

But I definitely have grown more and more to appreciate it because it is necessary that as I build foundations and build up that the foundation doesn't get weaker and that there are people that are continually fortifying it and, and they even coming out here and like starting a business from scratch where I am 100 back into operations and like doing very minutiae type things. It gives me that value of appreciation for not only someone starting out, but someone who is an operator. And so I hope I never lose that because I see some people do that as they grow and they they focus so much on entrepreneurship that they forget that, like, operating a business is actually where the money's made. And strategy is pretty lousy when it comes to paying the bills. So, yeah, it gives me a better appreciation.

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I recently watched. I know we've brought them up a lot on the podcast and I think I've. I've told you this, that I am not drinking the tea as much, which is Alex and Layla Hormozi. Three weeks ago, I think Layla dropped her day in the Life video. Two weeks ago, Alex dropped his day in the Life video. They had their media team film the same days, um, but from different perspectives. One falling Layla, one falling Alex. And it's funny you mentioned that because I watched both of them and I was like, I don't know if.

Did we talk about this already or did I talk about this with Liz? We didn't talk about this.

No.

Oh, I must have talked with Zach. Okay.

Yeah, you might have talked about Zach, Liz, but I, I know my takeaway. I watched them both back to back. I watched.

We have not talked about this at all. You're saying you and I haven't not talked about.

You and I have not talked about this. I guarantee it.

Okay, so I want to hear your take because I talked to Zach and Liz about this. Perfect.

My take. They are phenomenal people. They are smarter than, than I will be. But I, I try to get there. I would love to get to their level of, of prowess and knowledge. I didn't necessarily relate to their day in the Life video. It was.

Dare I say, pomp. It was a facade. It almost felt like they weren't actually showing a real Day in the Life. It was like oh, we're like these awesome CEOs who do. Aw, look how chill we are. And it almost was like they were selling me how like chill they are, how relaxed they are, how easy it is to be multi million dollar CEOs. And I honestly didn't connect with it. And I think to your point, I was like, man, there were so many people that were talking to off screen that I want to, I want to meet them, I want to talk to them because that's what I feel like I am to you. Like I am the off screen guy. Obviously this is our podcast, but 99% of your audience doesn't know who I am. The 1% that does.

Cool.

Love you guys. You're great. But the 99, like, I'm the off screen guy. Right. And I'm like, man, I kind of, I feel like I'd relate to the off screen guy more than I would to Alex or Layla. So that's my honest take.

Yeah. Like, you know.

Looking at the direction we're going, like, I think that's where we will get to that size and scope. The thing is that I hope to do is that at that size and scope, I don't overshadow those roles and those characters in the story that others could learn from. Right. Because I do feel like they do have operators and they do have people. We don't know who they are. We don't know like they don't share them, they don't push them forward, they don't promote their story and it's to protect them. I understand. Like they don't talk about it, but I think that, I think that there's a different audience for people who are looking for someone a little more real and showing vulnerability and like not just showing your mistakes because they did actually pretty decent job of like, this is what I'm bad at is I'm good at that sort of thing. But like just showing that like.

More. Yeah, more like raw. Right. I personally, in the same way, and I think like, because of the way the culture we have, like we all are that way. There's also a subset of people that want things that are more buttoned down. They're going to be more investor types. They're appealing to companies that are doing usually 10 + million in revenue to invest and they're looking for investors. So it's a different type of audience. Right. I'm, I'm currently. And my, my, my passion is not for people making $10 million plus. It's for people getting started and doing about a Million and maybe up to 3 million. That's my passion. Right. Do I hope that I can help people build Great. Yes, fine. Like I'm not trying to appeal to the person has $10 million in revenue, they're going to think I'm probably too loud, et cetera. Someone like both of them, very button down, very professional, very executive like that's going to appeal much more to their target audience. And they need people to apply to acquisition.com and so.

Yeah, we all have very similar takes. Zach, myself and Liz and you. That's interesting.

That is interesting to hear. I think there's an element of authenticity that is hard to show through a camera. 100% very hard to show authenticity through a camera. But I think that the fact that we all caught the same vibe maybe says something. Maybe, maybe there's some validity to it. I could be 100 wrong, but maybe I'm right.

A few things though in their defense and just like just thinking about it out loud now because I talked about this with that quite a bit because we had eight hours to drive back from Louisville. So.

A couple things. One is part of it is they have a whole team of media that are very professional and they did it for Gary. And same thing with Gary. Gary has to his audience is the top 500 executives at the Fortune 500 companies and their CMOs, their chief marketing officers. They drive hundreds of millions of dollars revenue for VaynerMedia. He cannot do and say or be a certain way. For example, he just went through a divorce and is now dating a girl that's 20 years younger than his older. His other wife. That's not really talked about. He never showed his wife one time in his social media. Right. I'm not saying that that is like a bad thing or a good thing. I'm just saying it's a button down version of an executive that doesn't show that. He literally went through probably the hardest time of his life the past two years and we didn't hear a single thing about it.

Yep, yep.

And so I'm not to say that everyone needs to do that. Everyone's, you know, do what's comfortable. I just feel like I see that. I'm like, I know that's a huge story and that's something that I could learn from and a lot of other people could learn from. But we're not showing that and why aren't we? Right. And so, you know, there's got to be boundaries as a, as a content producer of what you do and do not share and I do actually respect that he's like, hey, I'm not showing family. But then there's also a level of, how am I supposed to learn from. To the highest extent, when family is a huge portion of business, because it plays a huge role. And he has, in passing, said in several different interviews that that was the lowest point of his. Of his life in 2020 and 2021, when he went through that divorce. And so things like that, that are interesting to me. So, like, first and foremost, back to the hormones. Like, Alex. There are. Sorry, Alex. Caleb, their main producer, by the way, from Bellingham.

He worked for Gary for years. And so that's kind of where that comes from. And then secondly, I would say.

In general, getting to know anyone more, you're going to start to see their flaws. And so this is what I'm always careful of, as I usually kind of follow someone for a year or two really, really, really deep, and then I kind of draw back. I'm careful to note that in just about any relationship, the more you get to know someone, you see all their flaws, and then you see the consistency of the flaws because they're humans, and then you're going to have negative emotions towards that. And so, like, that happened with Gary, that happened with, you know, Grant Cardone, et cetera. And so I think we need to be realizing the fact that even if you have a spouse or a best friend and. Or you spend too much, like Zach and I, you know, spending even a month together, like, you're gonna get to know all the idiosyncrasies and stupid things they do and the things that annoy you, and then you start to see it consistent, like, oh, that there's their. Their Achilles heel. Right. And so, you know, I've. I've been bad at jumping on those things in the past, and now I've realized, like, that's just part of a relationship, is as you get to know someone more, see them more, and the frequency of seeing them is increased, that you're going to, you know, distance yourself somewhat because you see the flaws.

And so, yeah, no, that makes sense. I think that's. That's an honest and fair take.

You.

You learn more. So, you know, you know how to filter better.

Essentially.

Essentially. It's actually funny. I was talking to Zach's partner. I. I work with her, and. And she said, yeah, it's funny. I watched the. I was like, how you doing? You know, Zach's gone. You know, have you guys been apart? She was like, we've never been apart. This long. And I was like, how you feeling? How's it going? You know, my wife and I, we were just long distance for two years before we got married. Like, you know, trying to relate, talk to her, and she's like, you know, what's weird is I watched the YouTube videos, and they both are now starting having more of each other's mannerisms.

Really? That's interesting. I'd be interested to see what she's picking up on.

You said that you have picked up on some of Zach's mannerisms as well as in her private conversations with Zach.

Oh, man. Towards that, but that's what I've heard.

You should not say that to him. What you should do is have her write those down or, like, document those. That'd be really interesting to go over.

Yeah, yeah, it's like a. It's like a psych test right then and there.

That's so funny. But hey, like. Yeah, it's what happens when you're in someone so long.

Yeah, I agree. You guys are basically locked up together. Like, you're forcing them to just follow you around and record everything you do. Like.

All right, man, well, let's wrap it up. I know it's late for you.

Let's wrap the non financial advice. I wrote my non financial advice down because that's what I'm starting to do. Oh, yeah, dude.

I didn't write mine down, but I have something great once again from TikTok.

Oh, dude. What? Kel. Oh, man. Okay. All right. So my night financial advice is to not go in a submarine. Okay?

That's my advice. You know, and to pay $250,000 to go and said submarine when I have a pretty good idea of what the Titanic looks like based upon Google Images. I'm just saying, like, is it really worth the risk?

You know, so experience in person, bro. My not financial advice. To give people actual legitimate advice and not, you know, play into the memes.

I just gave advice that could potentially save someone's life and save them $250,000.

Fair. Here's my financial advice. Put your political biases aside. Please, everyone, right now. Take your political code off. Whether it's red or blue or purple or pink, I don't care.

I think I know what you're going to talk about.

No, I don't think you do.

One second, one second. I'm gonna write it down, okay? Do you have any more. Do you have any more hints you're gonna drop before there's no shot?

I. I'll give you one hint. And let's put 100 bucks on it.

A hundred dollars? Yeah. Dude, we're striking out over here in south park, and you're gonna bet me a hundred dollars?

Let's do it for the people. It's good content.

Oh, okay. All right, Go ahead.

You want the hint?

Oh, give me. Yeah, give me the hint just in case.

Interview.

Yes.

Nope.

Wrong. What?

I don't know. Wait, which Joe Rogan interview are you thinking of?

So.

RFK or whatever his name is.

Okay, that's. That's. That's big stuff.

Oh, okay. Okay. Yeah. No, did you hear about that, though? Like, the whole, like, charity thing? That's nuts.

Yeah, that is.

Yeah. Just for everyone. Just to bring everyone to speed. Basically, he came on the pod, talked about COVID and basically vaccinations, like, the ineffectiveness of them. A scientist basically was like, this is crazy. This is be censored, blah, blah. Joe Rogan says, I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars to come and debate him on my podcast. There's no time limit. And then people started chipping in tons of money to a charity if he would come on. And he declined and announced millions of dollars that have been pledged if you were to come on and debate a scientist versus rfk. Sorry, go through your non financial advice.

This is not my now financial advice. This is just maybe. Maybe we could do a bit quote of the week. We could switch between non financial advice. Quote of the week. Quote of the week for me is they sky opt us into believing the common cold was deadly. Quote Andrew Tate.

Dude, that's all you have to put the preface of, like, political biases aside. Oh, man.

I don't know if you listen to that interview. Maybe we talk about an expod. Patrick bet David.

I heard that. He didn't interview with him.

I listened to about half of it. It's like three hours long. I was like, I am not gonna dedicate three hours of my life, my lungs to listen to this. But I'll listen to some of it in. Very interesting, but I. My favorite line was, they psyoped us into believing that the common cold was deadly.

I'm not gonna say I disagree with that. Say it so John Garretson, I know you agree with that quote. I'm just gonna. Just saying. All right, Mine out financial advice. Barack Obama did an interview.

Dude, you're. You're. You just went from Andrew Tate to Barack Obama. Dude, you're trying to make everyone hate you.

Yeah, well, here's the thing. I said, put your political biases aside.

I'M gonna crown him king of charisma. And here's.

Yeah, yeah, I'd say so. He.

He went on an interview with Nate Burleson, former NFL receiver, super bowl champion, maybe, I don't know. He wanted an interview. Here's the thing. I don't even know what the interview was about. All I know is that when Obama, there was. There was a behind the scenes. They were like, this is why Obama is the most relatable guy. This is why he's, like, coolest president ever. He comes in and he hits Nate Burleson with, like, this one, two, three, punch of compliments. And I am instilling that in every interaction I have with a person moving forward. He calls him sir first, which I've already kind of take adopted that into my language, calls him sir. It shows a certain level of respect, right? Oh, how you doing, sir? Right. It's former NFL receiver, former president of the United States. Like, obviously, we know where they stand. Like, sir, how you doing? And Nate Burleson, also an African American gentleman, is wearing, like, a. Just a cool tan suit. And Obama's like, oh, I can never get away with tan.

So he compliments the fact that he can wear the tan suit. Obama can't. Obama brings himself down to say, like, you're better than me. Like, you can get away with tan. I can't. And then he compliments him again. I can't remember what the third compliment is, but just like, 1, 2, 3, punch. King of charisma. I was like, that's good. So that's an off financial advice. If you're meeting someone for the first time or you just want to put on a good impression, just hit him with as many, like, compliments or position yourself in a way that, like, they are above you. And I was like, dang. That. That makes Obama very likable. You put your political biases aside. You watch that interaction. You're like, I. I wish I was meeting him. He just made that guy look so good. Like, he probably make me look good.

He could find something just so good.

Yeah, just. I loved it. I love that. Watch the Tik Tok. Watch the Instagram nab in Barack Obama. He just hits him with the charisma crunch.

It's great.

Oh, man. All right, well, that's the pod as.

Pod like, and subscribe.

This has been the Mike Andes podcast. Now you have some ideas on how to take your business to the next level. And if you liked what you heard, we have tons of lectures, interviews, and more over on the Mike Andes YouTube channel. That'll be right up your alley. That's all we have time for today. We'll see you next time.

Sam.