Episode 217: The #1 Trait Successful Entrepreneurs Share | Josh Ellis, PPAI

Welcome to Skucast, the podcast for entrepreneurs in the promotional products industry. Skucast shines a light on our industry's best work, features maverick personalities, and discusses what's really involved in running a modern promotional products business. Skucast is the official podcast of Common Skew.

One thing that I think that has to be mentioned is just that these people just don't fear failure in the same way that so many of us do. I mean, I've written about entrepreneurship for a decade and gotten close.

That's Josh Ellis. He joined PPAI, the Promotional Products Association International, on December 1st as the new publisher and editor-in-chief for PPB Magazine. And the association's various digital and print publications. Josh is the former editor-in-chief for Success Magazine. Before joining Success in 2012, he was an accomplished digital and print sportswriter working for the Dallas Cowboys. Today, I chat with Josh about a few things. One is, since he interviewed so many different entrepreneurs for Success Magazine, I wanted to know what similarities he found in their journey. We also talk about the essential elements for content success, what makes an impactful brand story, and we get a glimpse of his vision for PPAI and the industry moving forward. Hi friends, I'm Bobby LeHew, Commonsku's Chief Content Officer. On Wednesday, March 9th, we will be hosting Commonsku University. It's a conference for Commonsku customers that focuses on how to use the platform to grow your business and boost your sales and productivity. It's for distributor and supplier customers. We'll share everything from how to simplify your workflow to creating killer client experience. Now, one reason I love CSU is that it's in-depth. In-App Insight in an easy 2 hours of learning. And we all know we underutilize the tools that power our business because in our crazy hurried pace, we often don't set aside the time to learn. Well, here's your chance. Go register at commonskew.com/university and I'll see you there. Today's episode is brought to you by CommonSkew, the work from anywhere platform that powers your connected workflow, enabling you to process more orders and dramatically grow your sales. To learn more or to begin your free trial now, visit commonscue.com. Now here's my conversation with Josh. But Josh, you just wrapped your first Expo, and since Expo is a rite of passage for many of us in the business, what was your first impression, both as a first-time attendee and also as a new editor at PPAI?

I mean, the biggest thing is just the scale of it, right? For somebody who is new to the industry, And I started— my first day was December 1st, and so I had about a 6-week run-up to it, and I got to see some of the behind-the-scenes and frantic work at times to try and pull the thing off. But I couldn't have even imagined until I walked onto the trade show floor just how vast this room is, and the booths keep going and keep going. And I think people have probably heard by now that with some bad Omicron luck, turnout was less than than in prior years, but still, uh, really positive. And so I just can't imagine it in a normal year. I can't wait to see it. But, you know, it was huger than even my expectations. I've only been to, you know, a couple trade shows at all before, uh, including South by Southwest, and this was bigger than even that, right? So I, I was really impressed and just blown away by all of the work and planning that the team at PPAI puts into pulling off such a great show with very few hitches.

Yeah, and kudos to my friends at PPI for staying the course, for producing the show. I've heard nothing but high praise, and so it's been an amazing experience, I've heard. I'm curious about this because as an outsider coming in, I always love getting their impressions of how they viewed the business and the industry and what we sell from the outside, because a lot of folks may even bring negative baggage into the industry. And then how their impressions changed once they got on the inside. How did yours change?

I mean, I think that I had a really overly simplistic idea of what the work was. I mean, I probably came into this with the impression that it's just stamping logos on some generic goods that are often low quality and that this stuff is disposable. But being at Expo and even some of the work I did leading up to Expo and trying to get to know the people involved and the actual projects and campaigns that they're working on, more often than not, this stuff is pretty high quality and valuable. And it has to be that way so that it has the, you know, the stickiness of something that people want to keep and hold on to and keep making memories with and keep telling stories about. And so really just impressed by the quality of the goods that suppliers are offering and then the creativity of the work that distributors are doing along with their end buyer clients. It's really been pretty impressive. And so all those people that I met and talked to at Expo, I was just blown away by how talented and engaged they are.

We both get in trouble when we start naming names because we know so many people now, but, but were there brands or people that have made an impression on you that you really thoroughly stepped away and went, wow, this is, this is really cool?

Well, so many of the apparel suppliers that were at Expo. Yeah, I, I just looked at this stuff and I was like, I would, I would wear all of This is great. And, you know, I don't know, maybe, maybe I would have expected just, you know, a lot of plain t-shirts and plain polo shirts, but like there was some fashionable stuff there. And yeah, I also think about in some of the editing work I've done and writing that I've been doing over the last couple of months, you know, I did a story about our Pyramid winners for client programs and what's going to be the March issue of PPB. And, you know, I got to see the winners and really amazing links that they go to to pull off their clients. And sometimes a lot, you know, it comes down to the client's creativity and what they're asking for. But I'll tell you one that stood out to me. It was our winner for distributor-supplier collaboration, and the distributor is Jack Nadel International. They were working with Steel Threads as part of a campaign for Don Julio Tequila.

Yeah.

And they sourced and produced these custom bottles of tequila that had a bottle cap that was on a countdown clock timer, timed to go off at the pop of midnight on New Year's Eve.

Nice.

And so you think about all the work and planning and creative thought process, how many, how many, you know, concepts did they go— must have gone back and forth with, uh, with Don Julio to try and pull something like that off. Uh, and they, you know, shared it out to social media influencers and got a big reaction to the campaign and just what they were looking for. Yeah. And so that kind of stuff, that's just next level. I, I was not necessarily expecting and, and have just been blown away by.

Yeah, it's cool. What do you think is underrated or under-celebrated in our industry, and how do you hope to bring that out in your work with PPAI?

It's probably our— the thing that is most exciting to me is this initiative that PPAI has had, but it's a campaign that I think everybody in the industry really can latch onto, and that is Promotional Products Work. So we have the website promotionalproductswork.org. Right now it's going through a redesign, and we're going to be adding content to it to make it more robust. But, you know, it's just an advocacy effort to get that idea, that concept, and research that supports it in front of end buyers. So we're going to be distilling more of that research along those lines and really trying to put that visibility in front of, you know, your buyers, your marketing minds, to, to recognize the value of something physical that people can hold and keep. And as I said earlier, keep making memories with and keep telling stories about. I think about one that I still have. I mentioned South by Southwest. I was there, I mean, probably like 10 years ago. And I came away with this like little wooden spoon that has a Capital One Bank logo on it. And it just hit me at the right moment because I was a young bachelor at the time and like really just kind of starting to cook for myself. I didn't have a wooden spoon. And so all these Blue Apron recipes are calling for wooden spoon and I'm scraping up the charred bits of Teflon or whatever with a metal spoon. And I'm like, well, this is great. Anytime somebody's over while I'm cooking now, I get asked about it. And so like, these companies are— can make these brand impressions over and over and over again with something that lasts. Digital advertising is great. We all understand that it has a place that's not going away, and you can target specific people and things like that. But I've never felt emotion or told stories about digital ads. And so the promotional products work campaign, it's going to allow us to share those stories and share more campaigns that have worked and to put that idea in the minds of more of the end buyers. That's something that I'm really excited about. I think it's not a story that is being told enough in the industry. There's not enough of that content outreach to end buyers. And so we're going to try to do that and share some of the, you know, the ways that physical products can transfer meaning and emotion in a way that digital just can't.

Yeah, that's cool. As I mentioned in the intro, you have a background from Success Magazine and at the Dallas Cowboys. You conducted multiple interviews. Here I am interviewing you, you're the interviewer. You led a team of writers as well as hosted conferences that focused on the entrepreneur's success story or the athlete's success story. So since we're speaking to an audience of entrepreneurs, in your research and interviews, what traits did you discover that all successful entrepreneurs shared. I know that's a generic question, but I'm curious what Josh discovered that was maybe a surprise to you.

It's a great question, and I get asked it frequently enough that I'm always racking my brain for ways to tie it all together because so many of the stories are unique to the individual people. But the one thing that I think that has to be mentioned is just that these people just don't fear failure in the same way that so many of us do. I mean, I've written about entrepreneurship for a decade and gotten close to a lot of those people, but I just personally can't live like that. I'm scared to death to not have, right, health insurance, you know, like just driving my daughter to daycare would frighten me. And so I can do a little freelance writing on the side, you know, some of that solopreneur side hustle stuff, but The people who put their life savings into and their career outcomes into these entrepreneurial ventures are so impressive to me. And I don't know how much of it is nature or nurture. There was a story that we covered in Success a few years ago. It's gross, so forgive me, but it is kind of funny because have you ever heard of this? It's a parasite that's found in cat poop. It's called Toxoplasma gondii. Okay, I'm not making this up. Parasite found in cat poop. And the parasite, you know, cat owners will breathe it in and it makes them— studies have shown— less concerned about risk. And this is like a— this— I'm not making this up. This is like an evolutionary— okay, this is a way that this parasite evolved to host in cats because mice— in house cats, mice would breathe in this parasite and they would just like not be afraid of cats.

Interesting.

And so they're more likely to take risks. Mice will like walk right up to cats and of course, like, get eaten or played, played with like a ball or whatever.

Right.

It has the same effect on humans. I know people think that I'm just making this up, but you can Google it. You can Google it. It's called Toxoplasma gondii. And studies show— this is in 2018— that there is a link to this parasite in a higher percentage of entrepreneurs than you might expect.

That's awesome.

And so of that nature-nurture story and of that, you know, lack of fear of failure, I don't know where it comes from in people. Maybe it comes from how they were raised or their experience, or maybe just, you know, whatever parasites they've been exposed to. But it's definitely there in all the most successful entrepreneurs.

Yeah, I also think we tend to make the mistake of trying to simplify it down to a very simple recipe. It could be, you know, you can retro your story and come up with that, but it seems to be more complex. This is a great example of just the different factors that could affect someone in their success and they're willing to take risks. You know, you had some great experience at Success Magazine as an editor. How do you hope to parlay some of that experience into your work with PPAI now?

One thing that was a hallmark of what we did at Success, uh, and it has been for the magazine all the way back since it was founded in 1897, was that it wasn't just a business magazine like Entrepreneur Inc. or Fast Company that was about sharing news and strategies and things like that. We know that the readers as entrepreneurs, as solopreneurs, people who are going to take those risks and step outside their comfort zone. They need inspiration and encouragement and motivation, sometimes a carrot, to just keep evolving and, uh, and keep moving. And so it wasn't just news and ideas and strategies, but it was people who have gone before you on this journey and struggled and kept going and maybe had it harder than you in some ways because of a— some sort of physical or mental challenge that they had and just motivation and inspiration like that. I think that that's transferable to leaders at supplier companies who are challenged in all sorts of ways in business. And of course, distributors in this industry who are by and large independent salespeople who, you know, they have to make a lot of cold calls, or a lot of times they're just told no or not right now, or the budget's not what it used to be. And it can be really discouraging So they have to be encouraged to keep going and keep striving to find ways to be their best selves and deliver for their clients.

Yeah, I'd like to talk about content in general because I'm talking to a content professional, right? Someone who makes a living, has built a career, whose whole organization is focused on this. Since many distributors and suppliers are focusing more and more on the quality of content they produce, I thought I'd pick your brain for insight into how a content leader thinks. What do you think is the most essential part of a brand story? I know that's a very broad question, but you write stories for a living. So what do you think are some of the most essential parts?

I think that it's really incumbent upon brands to tell that founding story. And most of them, you know, have someone who's out in front who was there at the beginning or part of the initial, you know, effort to get the thing up and running. And, you know, usually our best customer in business, the person that we can help the most, is the person that we used to be. And so, you know, learning from how you personally have changed or evolved or improved, that's a great story to tell. And it's important to identify and have that self-assessment of who you used to be or what your challenges were to help you help your clients and help them understand what you've been through so that you can help them. You know, so many of the entrepreneurs that we covered at Success and people we had on the COVID of the magazine had those great challenges that we talked about. And I'm reminded of one, Suzy Batiz, who— I told a cat poop story earlier, so I'll tell one that borders on human poop now. But her company is, is Poo Pourri. It's based here here in North Texas where PPAI is headquartered. And you might have seen it. It's this stuff that you like spray into the toilet bowl and it traps the scent, right? Well, she was from an early age, like her early 20s, she was an entrepreneur and she was just hustling. She was doing anything that she could to try and make money. I mean, she was— she had a tanning salon, bridal store, and a clothing shop. Startup that did staffing, and she sold these like terrible bejeweled sweatshirts and bejeweled denim jeans and stuff like that. And I think at one point she was like taking this like lingerie catalog into strip clubs and just doing whatever that she could to try and come up with money and was never having much luck. And I think she kind of like self-describes this like this white trash existence of her 20s and 30s of just like scraping by. And then like when she wasn't looking for it, uh, when she wasn't looking for the money, this idea came to her for what is now a $400 million company, Poo-Pourri. And it was because the problem that she was trying to solve was not how do I make enough money to get by this month, but it was the size of a problem that has, you know, it's something that probably all of us would, would prefer to have dealt with. And so sometimes understanding yourself and understanding the scope of the problems that your company tries to solve is a great way to generate content.

Yeah, I think it's a great point to make because I found that the founder story is actually making a comeback in the sense that people want to connect with that first emotional connection that entrepreneur had when they went through that challenge. So it's funny I think we went through a period with storytelling where folks didn't want to hear the company story, you know, they want to hear what's in it for them. But I think it's come full circle to where folks really do want to be in touch with that for exactly what you said, you know, they want to know that your problems are their problems or their problems are your problems.

These days in sort of a social media era, social trust is, is more important than ever. People, people are buying based on recommendations they get from the people who influence them or their friends or whatever. And so we connect with individuals, even if we know that they're running a company that's trying to make some money off of us. We connect more than ever with those individuals and their stories.

It's a great point. All right, man. So how do you think we can improve content when it comes to— for our own companies and our own audiences?

You know, I think that most companies, unless you have huge scale and a huge staff and a great budget, probably better suited to just be focused. Focus on the one or two platforms that you like best, you can execute at best, where your companies are most likely to be. And sort of as I've said before, go through that personal assessment and be very clear about yourself and your expertise and your story and your personality and what sort of content and communication is most effective coming from you, how you can say it that is most you. We used to say at Success that there's such a thing as the you economy, where in this day and age, technology has made it easier than ever for people to be entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, independent contractors. You could start an Etsy in an afternoon and have your webpage up the next morning and be posting ads on Facebook and have a client base, pretty quickly. And ultimately, and it's even more so now since we've had the great resignation, right, where people are going for that. And the quickest way to success is really drilling down on what makes you, you, and understanding your value proposition and expressing that and just being yourself.

As an editor, where do you— what brands or people do you turn to for inspiration when it comes to creating good content. Who do you watch?

I would say probably my favorite magazine is The Atlantic because they cover big topics. I mean, that really impresses me, the way that they have not just a global view of news stories and topics that we're all sort of thinking about, but at times a global and decades-down-the-road type view of it. I mean, sometimes we in news, we kind of can't see the forest for the trees. And so you see these Constantly every day there are stories now about whether hybrid work schedules are here to stay or is remote work what we're going to deal with. And The Atlantic will just do a story like, what happens when none of us work at all? Some of my favorite stories are those just sort of imagination, imagine a future that is kind of a distant vision. And I think The Atlantic does that great. And I'm also a big fan of Axios, especially their smart brevity approach to newsletters that has been around for a while with newsletters like The Skimm and things like that, where there's sort of a too-long-didn't-read mindset that most of us have when we're consuming digital news, where we just got to keep it moving because we're busy and we've got 1,000 other newsletters that came in. The ones that we can get to and get through quickly. Axios is kind of bringing that to local journalism with newsletters for all the major markets in the country. I read the one here for Dallas every weekday and it takes 3 minutes, but I am more informed than if the Dallas Morning News was landing on my front door and I was throwing it away because that's probably what I would have to do because I just don't have time. To sit down like my dad or my grandpa did, right, with the morning paper. And so I think that's probably a direction that at PPAI will be taking our news content in the not too distant future with some upcoming redesigns and things like that, just to allow people to get the gist of a story and the really relevant details, and they can read more if they want to click through and that sort of thing. But, but just open it up and be informed and have a slight edge to the day ahead of you.

Yeah, that's cool. I'm curious more about Josh. Can you give us a glimpse into your day as an editor-in-chief? Like, either what's a Monday morning look like for you, or what's on your desk right now? Kind of what's your world look like?

Well, I mean, I would say that the work doesn't start on Monday morning because in this line of work you just have to be sort of aware of what's happening in the world at all times. And so it helps to be a, you know, sort of a newsy And I'm personally through the weekend and at night and, you know, anytime I have some downtime, I'm spending way too much time on Twitter for my sanity, but it's good for just keeping abreast of what's going on in the world. And so that's being able to follow world news, national news, anything affecting business and of course our industry, just to be aware of what's happening and how it might be impactful for our audience. So the Monday morning has been percolating in my brain since probably Friday night or Saturday morning, whenever I started to see some topics that would be interesting to me for, for the coming week. But then once the work starts, it's apart from that following of the news. It's not different from a lot of other jobs in that you're just juggling a lot of different projects with competing deadlines. And there's some things that you have to be turned in pretty quickly. And then there's some things that are have a kind of a longer time horizon. So I mentioned newsletter redesigns that we're working on. We've got always, you know, there's a deadline coming up sooner or later for PPB, our magazine. There's daily news that I might chip in or report on for the NewsLink newsletter. And, you know, like everybody else, just too many meetings all the time.

Yeah, right. Well, you've been working as a writer and editor since you were 16. Explain that.

Yeah, um, that's awesome. Well, it was better than, uh, flipping burgers at the time. It seemed like by the time I was that age, I was, I was your average just teenage boy who had all the average teenage boy interests of chasing girls and, you know, professional wrestling and football and things like that. Right. So, right, I haven't found a way to write about chasing girls yet. Maybe, you know, maybe that, maybe that'll come next in my career. Although I am happily married, but I chased my daughter around. That's enough. But I became a pretty good writer, at least the teachers told me, maybe like in middle school, because this is extremely nerdy, but I was doing— I was spending a lot of time in AOL chat rooms role-playing as a professional wrestler. It's true, which makes it much worse.

Yeah.

So I just like wrote a lot in my spare time as a kid. Sometimes it was, you know, in those chat rooms or like long-form essays that we would write to the other wrestlers.

You're probably like me, you look forward to essay tests. We're one of the few people in the world that actually look forward to essay tests.

Yeah, if I can, you know, something more than a fill-in-the-blank, I have a chance to BS my way through this. Exactly. But, you know, I kind of grew out of the wrestling thing, but I was a good writer and I was really into professional football and loved to follow and keep up with the news about the Dallas Cowboys and grew up in Texas. And so I was just reading constantly, like daily reports from training camp and all throughout the season and stuff like that. And so I started, I wanted to be a sportswriter and I started writing for my high school newspaper. And then not too long after that, maybe like the first semester I was doing it, we had, you know, a day where we went and shadowed the reporters at the local newspaper. And I just happened to ask you know, the sports editor there if, you know, they had any openings for, uh, for completely inexperienced 16-year-olds. And, and it turned out that there were a lot of high school volleyball and soccer games that they didn't want to cover, and so they could just as easily pay me $6 an hour and, and, yeah, and send me out there, as opposed to, uh, like I said, it was better than flipping burgers.

Yeah, that's really cool, man. So Where are your roots? How did you get from Longview, Texas to Ole Miss?

I had a cousin who is really more like a sister to me who is about 20 years older than me, but she went to Ole Miss. She's much smarter and got scholarships to go there and all that sort of thing. But as I was growing up, she would take me to football games, and it's a great campus, and there's a great journalism and magazine— print magazine journalism program there that seemed like a fit for me, you know, sort of like a literary tradition in Oxford, Mississippi, like William Faulkner lived there and John Grisham went to law school there. Yeah, Eudora Welty and a number of others. Yeah. So when I was younger, I always wanted to go to the University of Texas in Austin. But as you mentioned, Longview, it's a pretty small town. And so when I, when I took my trip to visit Austin, as like a high school senior and really check it out and figure out if it was for me. I found myself driving backwards down these one-way streets in downtown. I was overwhelmed by the size of the city. And so pretty quickly I realized that maybe I should just think smaller. And Oxford's an even smaller town than Longview. So it was a better fit for me.

So who inspires and informs your work as a writer, as a professional? Do you have mentors that have informed your work?

I mean, I've had some great mentors and teachers throughout my career. As much as anybody, my dad really informs my— the prism through which I view business journalism because he was an entrepreneur. But it wasn't some great founding story. He didn't, you know, he wasn't this classic entrepreneur with great vision like some Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos or whatever. He just had like a— he basically created a job that he hated for himself. He had a shop where he fixed up and sold used fishing boats, and, you know, it was hot and his hands were constantly beat up working on these old engines, and, and he just hated it. But it allowed him to pay the bills all right. He was a single dad, and it gave him some freedom to, to be there for my games or be there at the end of the day whenever I got home. And so there were some things he liked about it, but he never was able to get ahead in the way that entrepreneurs all basically want to. And so I observed that, and looking back on it, once I started getting into working at Success and writing content for entrepreneurs, how valuable some of these lessons that business journalists can share, these stories that they can share. Because my dad, like, never evolved with the times. He, he was still putting his ads for his boats and like the want ads in the newspaper and stuff like that. Never, you know, picked up on digital advertising or even Craigslist or anything like that. He just, he just, uh, and he didn't have the, the inspiration and the motivation type stuff coming into him. So he was just kind of down on the work all the time and unhappy with it. And so, uh, being able to provide something that helps a person like him because entrepreneurship is hard and lonely.

Yeah.

And it's competitive. And so I want to be able to help those people that, that informs my work. But as I said, a ton of great mentors, teachers going back to high school and college and, you know, kindergarten that helped me become the communicator that I am, or—

Yeah.

Gave me the confidence that, you know, what I had to say and my way of saying it was, was valuable to people. And I'm really grateful for all of them.

It's really a beautiful gift that he gave you in terms of being— the fact that you were able to reflect on that and see what he enjoyed and didn't enjoy about work. And that's what I hear you saying, is that really informs your further investigation and research into what makes an entrepreneur tick, what makes a business person happy, how, how they find fulfillment, all of those kinds of things. It really does inform your work.

Well, I, I think that, that most of them get into it because they, they just want to be able to choose their own adventure. They want, they want to live and work on terms. And some people are lucky or good, and they're able to do that. And for a lot of people, it just becomes, like I said, you create a job for yourself. And maybe that's better than working for somebody else, but it comes with a lot of extra pressure and a lot of risk. And so, you know, I think that those people deserve to have every chance to succeed so that their companies, which were all started, right, to help somebody or do some good in the world or their communities or whatever, those companies have the best chance to succeed and hire more people and employ more people. And just kind of make the world a better way in that way that entrepreneurship does.

What do you enjoy when you're not PPAing, writing, editing, leading? What does Josh enjoy?

Yeah, chasing the kid around. We've got an almost 2-year-old.

Okay.

And about the time that she turns 2, we've got another one due.

So, congratulations, man.

So once that one's born, what I'm going to be enjoying the most sleeping when I can, right? I— we are just past that stage where, uh, where I worry about the toddler's sleep, uh, and so just diving right back into it.

Um, really good for a writer, builds character, man.

Yeah, well, you know, the, uh, sometimes you just— you need to see the, the clock strike 4 AM to really understand the human condition or something like that, whatever. I don't know. Um, but apart from, you know, really loving my family, it's, you know, I, I waste plenty of time on, uh, you know, just looking at my phone or, uh, yeah, or, uh, you know, playing video games or—

yeah.

Um, if I've been really helpful lately, I can get out of the house and play golf with my wife's blessing.

There you go. I'm curious, as you look at this new role with PPAI, And you have these new initiatives, you have Dale coming in, and there's this new energy, new life coming into the organization. And of course, PPAI did an astounding job through the pandemic in terms of— because that for many associations, but this is just the one I know the best, went through a really crippling time when events and things like that were closing down. And so the whole organization did a masterful job working through this. Dale comes in, there's new energy, you come in, there's new energy, there's a new outlook. There's some new vision. What is it you're looking forward to the most as you look at this, what ostensibly could be this new fresh organization, at least in a different season or a new season going forward?

Yeah, I think that I was talking to Jonathan Isaacson from Gemline, and he shared some perspective about the association, and that is just that for a long time, you know, it has largely been an expo under the guise of an association, and that's shortchanging the operation a little bit. But there's— it's no secret that expo is the biggest and brightest project that the association has every year, and it's important to the industry, and it'll always be, uh, you know, a key part of what the association's offering is. But the last 2 years have, have probably taught the leaders at PPAI that Nothing is guaranteed. They would have never thought that they won't have an Expo every year, and yeah, in 2021 they couldn't. And, and so everybody's grateful that it came together this year, but you never know. So you just can't predict the future. And, and if, if we're not having that, then how are we serving our membership? And so that's, that's what the most exciting part of it right now is, is trying to think more broadly into investing in the ways that we can serve. And that's with content, you know, what I'm doing, but it's also in kind of leading some of the digital transformation in the industry. You know, there's a lot of companies that just operate really old school and a lot of wasted time with phone calls and things that could just be checkboxes and, you know, stuff like that. It's, it's, you know, being an advocate and a leader along the lines of corporate social responsibility because that's what matters to buyers, and it's something that, you know, that we got to get the industry thinking along those lines for the long-term health of it. And, um, and just the— all the continued advocacy in DC and with state governments and, and the professional development content that we produce, I think that the investment in all of those things is scaling up because we understand more than ever that you can't just count on, uh, the one big event to be great and, and, uh, satisfy everybody's needs.

Yeah, that's great, Josh. Thanks for taking the time to chat with me today, man. I really enjoyed getting to meet you, learning a little bit about you, and, you know, from one Texas boy to another, it's great to have, uh, have you on and, and hear about your backstory too.

Yeah, Bobby, looking forward to doing that coffee when you're in North Texas.

Yeah, let's do it, let's do it. All right.

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