Here's the big takeaways from ITNation Connect 2023!

All right, all right, all right, here we go. It took 2 times to make this thing work. We got it. LinkedIn's API is not so awesome. I'm joined with 2 people who are awesome though. The one, the only, Kyle Christiansen. How's it going, brother? What's up?

Yo, yo, still hungover.

And also we have Alex Farling rocking his 1990s plug-in. Nice.

My voice is hungover. I'm still struggling to get my voice back.

You know what I like is, Wes, you got a backwards empath going on. You got some mirrored video.

Is it mirroring? It might just be for you guys. Let me check on my phone and see if it's— I think it fixes it. No, it is backwards even on here. What's the deal?

I don't know. Dude, you're living in a mirror world.

Yeah, man. How do we know any of this is even real, right?

This is a simulation. I think we've already guaranteed that.

Oh, there we go. I fixed it. Settings, baby, settings. Now, now we're more better, man. So, uh, we're gonna be talking about— by the way, if you guys don't be shy, say hi to us in chat. I would love to hear, um, who's listening in today. It's always talking into a, a, a, like a vacuum. Um, so say hi to us, let us know who you are so we can say hi back to you. Um, but man, we're back from IT Nation. Super duper fun, really enjoyed every second of it. They're always— they go by too quick. I don't know about you guys, but I get so excited for any big event coming up, and then you hit it, you're like, yes! And before you know it, it's the last day. Do you guys have that happen?

Man, it felt like a blur this time, I'm not gonna lie.

I was just ready. That's really what it felt like. By the end, all I wanted to do was sleep, and, uh, and I decided to drive home that night.

So, so, uh, I don't blame you. I, I saw you dodge out, uh, with that last little bit. So let's— we're going to talk about today, uh, IT Nation. We're going to talk about some of the big takeaways, some of the things we noticed, some of the big momentous conversations. We're going to talk about all of that. So I guess, Alex, I'm going to get started with you. What did you think about IT Nation overall, high level?

I thought it was a super great event, a little low on attendance compared to what we've seen a few years in the past, but really good event. I really think that ConnectWise did right by the Solutions Pavilion this year, right, by dragging the startup vendors out in the hallway and doing it for exposure. But the, the pavilion just felt like you could walk through it this year, which was new and different.

Yeah, you know, they— I— the last time I saw this done was, um, at DattoCon in Dublin. They had a big back area with room back there for people want to sit down and have a conversation. They did that at IT Nation. I love that because I know it's a small change, but it gives some depth to the conference room. And there are times you just want to go grab a coffee and sit down with someone, have a deeper conversation. The booth is hard to do it. So I love that too.

I really did.

Kyle, what about you? I see you deep in thought.

Yeah, I don't know, like I'm still trying to like contextualize a lot of it, and I would like to talk to some MSPs because, right, the three of us, I think we were in our own little bubbles while we were there, just totally, you know, in meetings and all this back and forth. But it did feel like there was more space. Yeah, like, and I don't know if that's because they did better at organizing it. I don't know if that's because they had more sessions. But I, I heard quite a few people talk about that there was like a low energy feeling. It wasn't as chaotic as normal, and I don't know if that chaos has become something I expect and it excites me, uh, but there was a calm in the air.

Yeah, low energy. Do you think— I don't know, Alex, did you see that?

I think so, um, but I think it was more around, um not a lot of hype, right? They didn't have 4 new acquisitions to announce or anything crazy. It was just more of the same, like, hey, ASEO's coming, we're doing new stuff. Lots of promises, but, uh, but nothing exciting to announce. So I think that takes away from the energy, right? When you know there's a big acquisition, like when they announced Continuum, um, there's 1,000 partners going, oh crap, there's something here I got to pay attention to. There's none of that this year. I think that, you know, it's not that that's bad, but it's definitely different.

Yeah, you know, um, I don't know how much we can just publicly say, so we're just gonna do it and we'll see what happens, right? It seemed like to me in the Arnie days, there's always this push for like a big drop of like something momentous, something— what do we have to say that's going to cause people to say, I am coming to IT Nation because that conference is the one that drives the narrative. It's the one that shapes the future. It's the one that sets the direction. And I don't— I'm not saying anything negative. I'm just saying I didn't really notice that. I didn't go to the keynote, but I didn't notice people coming out being like, wow, you know, another sort of set this, this stage, set the future. I seem to think that might have been like— and you might be right, Alex, that maybe some acquisitions, you know, I think we expected some, or special in phishing security awareness training. There wasn't one. Um, you know, it just seemed to be lacking some of that.

Kyle?

Yeah, well, I think Apple actually has been experiencing something real similar over the last few years, which is when you get into these years of iterative improvements, not revolutionary announcements, a lot of us can take that for granted because we're— you become so addicted to that next big thing and you forget that there needs to be some catch-up time, right? We need to go make sure we stabilize a lot of those releases. We need to make sure we button up a lot of the changes we made, right? Last year there was a hurricane and it was the first year at a new event space. So they also probably had some logistical things to catch up with. And, you know, they added new vendors. I think the vendor hall was way more organized than the year before, rather than being that big circle that they kind of had the year before. Um, and then also, right, all the events got to be outside. We weren't just stuck in the walls of the conference like that. So I don't know, I think there's a lot of things and I think it's going to take us a couple more weeks to get around that. Yeah. But I do know I heard, and I don't really want to say names or anything, but I had some people give me feedback of it just felt small and less beneficial than normal. So I don't know if that's a reflection of the quality of the sessions.

I wonder the same thing. That was going to be my feedback. Is it possible that we just didn't have the same level of energy among the attendees? Maybe it's it's not the IT Nation folks themselves, it's the attendees, right? You know, were they distracted? I actually gave 3 sessions. Last year when I gave 3 sessions, we had packed out houses in all of them, standing room only. This time, all 3 of them, by no means, you know, there's plenty of room. And I went and asked them, like, did I just mess up here? Was it me that didn't advertise them well or didn't title them well? But it seemed like a lot of people said the same thing, yeah, not as well attended. So maybe it was the attendees. I'll point to you all. I want to know, those of you that are listening right now, Did you attend talks? Did you feel like, you know, you just didn't want to go to any? Maybe you were too tied down and busy, but that's something to it. Alex, what do you think?

So maybe it was—

is the attendees appointed to you all?

Here I've got the livestream playing back in the corner. Rookie mistakes over here. No, I think it's exactly the same thing. You know, in years past I've had 185 people in a room and this year, you know, I think 65 was pretty average. So we just didn't see the attendance in the sessions. I don't know if that's because attendance was down and they did more sessions, but something didn't seem to stir there. We got great feedback from the session, right? The one that the three of us did together. We walked outside and people hung out with us for an hour afterwards, giving us some amazing feedback and great conversations and even had an MSP come challenge me as to what we're building at Empath and tell me we can do better. So I love that, you know, a lot of really good, tough conversations, but also a lot of confirmation that we're building the thing that the industry wants today and we can do better.

You know, I love it when we have partners and, you know, MSP friends come up saying this is good, but it could be better. That's what we need to hear.

It's the only way you— I think you actually build something people want, right? You can build things in a bubble all day long, just like Steve Jobs said, right? You can start with engineering and build your way into product and think marketing is going to turn tricks. But if you truly want to build something revolutionary, you need to start with the problem and work your way backwards.

Yeah, yeah, exactly, exactly. So I want to cover down on a few different topics today, and you guys jump into if you want to. But you know, one of those was the big— I think the big momentous release, um, that ConnectWise themselves had was the RPA. Um, and this is something I covered in my newsletter. I've already heard this from a whole bunch of others. I think it was intentionally sort of like a not well-kept secret that I think they wanted the word to get out because a lot of partners had seen the product, seen what they were building. Actually applaud them for that, like I don't think it's about keeping something so secret like the iPhone. You release it, everyone's minds are blown. I think it is about talking to partners and letting them see it. But I think the— I think there's something more interesting than an RPA itself, right? You know, my understanding from what I heard from partners was a lot of what was shown is more just designs and stored thoughts. I think it's less that and more the ebb and flow of the industry. I find it interesting, and Kyle, I'm curious what you think about this. I find it interesting that You know, I don't want to say the age of the RMM is coming to a close, but I think it's a natural evolution to say the RMM has many limits, especially things that are not on-prem. As we've seen cloud adoption grow and that become ubiquitous across the board, you know, I think an RPA makes sense. I think the ability to do cloud automation and be able to have touch endpoints and devices wherever they may exist is big. The RMMs don't do that, right? So I thought— I wasn't shocked to see an RPA sort of be a big focus of attention. What are your thoughts on that, Kyle?

It's so— I think this is one of the first times where I finally have that old guy feeling where I'm like, I don't understand it. Why do we need this RPA thing? And I don't think I'm alone, um, in that because RMM for so long has been monumental. It has been the thing that has drawn a lot of MSPs to increase profitability. But right, we've always been saying for years, oh, what happens when everything goes SaaS? So it's like, oh, it's here, but I don't understand it. So I'm cut— honestly, I'm a little confused. And I also see it as a crowded marketplace, right? Especially when you go upstream with the Zapier and the Make.coms of the world. They have been around for ages. Now, you brought up something, Wes, that I think is going to be a massive problem to solve for, which I need a very expensive person to manage an RPA.

Yep.

Did we just increase our costs without even realizing it?

Well, you're back to my LabTech problem, right? This isn't a new problem. They promised us that they would sell us a product in 2008 that would replace a human, and it did. It replaced a tier 1 person with a tier 3 person because I had to have somebody way smarter to write scripts and power automation. You know, automation doesn't happen by itself, and out of the box, these tools are useless. Um, this isn't new. And the other point about this is RPAs are cool and all, they're not cheap, and MSPs are notoriously slow to make big changes like this. So anybody who thinks that the RMM is dead isn't paying attention, or is following ConnectWise, who's just called it the UMM now. And, uh, you know, we just changed some letters and move them around and maybe add an S and everything's different.

Is it Unified Management and Monitoring? Is that the US?

Because now we have cloud included, because apparently cloud isn't remote.

Yeah, so let's drill into this. I mean, we have someone that's probably got more of an operational mind than anyone else in the channel, at least that I know, and Kyle. Um, let's talk about this a minute, um, because it's something I don't think the RPAs are talking about enough, right? The pitch of the RPA is you need to automate your processes in a way that you've not done before. You haven't had the tools to do it, but you also don't necessarily have the knowledge to do it. We have an iteration of new technology capabilities via API endpoints that let us do to do more than we've ever done before. But I think you're right, one of the dirty— I don't want to say dirty secret, that's way too strong of a word— one of the things that you see RPAs not talk about is the burden to scale and the, the difficulty, if not impossibility, to do it. And so when you talk to market analysts, of which I've talked to many over the past 3, 4 months, one of the things they say, the big negative of RPA that no one wants to talk about and we're trying to get a grip around, is how does an MSP accomplish it? Because they don't have enough tier 3s. If all we're doing is shifting the burden to go more upward in the stack to 6-figure tier 3s so that we can remove more tier 1s, does it actually have an ROI? And when and where does it? And then the other thing, Kyle, I'll say before— I want to hear your thoughts on this— is we also have to just consider from an RPA perspective, look at what's happening in the market. Just like in the RMM, we saw that the initially the RMM was so difficult to use, have all these RMM consultants that have come out. We've seen now the same thing in, in RPA. We have a ton of consultants that are coming because MSPs are trying this. They're churning out because they don't— they don't— they see the value, they don't know how to get there. So it's, it's messy right now. I'm not hating on RPAs, I'm just saying it's not as easy to get there as, as some might want to, to, to have you believe.

I mean, as a guy that literally built an RMM consulting firm, uh, I, I, I completely get where this is going. And James Forbes, I mean, he mentioned, right, RMM vendors may be adding RPA because they need to add widgets to increase their revenue per client, per month, and there may be some validity to that as well. I think it's a lot of MSPs are going to be buying RPA without understanding what problem it solves for their customers, and they're going to be sitting there with— and I hate to say it, some of the cybersecurity tools are the exact same way— without understanding how does this reduce my cost for my all-you-can-eat agreement, or how does this increase my revenue by adding on an extra product to my customers. Which, by the way, requires some service component, not just the tool component. So the business, the actual business strategy that an MSP is going to have to figure out is how does an RPA play into your long-term objectives as an MSP? Is it going to increase top line from an MRR perspective? Is it going to add to some type of true consulting product like Alex and I have talked about with fractional CIO? Is it going to reduce costs? Right? And how is it going to reduce costs? If you can't answer one of those three questions, I can't figure out why the hell you would want this.

So I think you owe it to yourself then, Alex, as a previous MSP owner, to actually answer those questions, right? That we've talked about this forever. I don't care if it's what vendor it is or what type of tool it is. We have to— oh, we owe ourselves the answers to those questions, don't we? The path to profitability, what does this look like for us from a capability perspective? How quickly can we scale this up? All of those things that Kyle just mentioned, we owe it to ourselves before we just go buy a shiny thing.

Yeah. And, you know, as MSP owners, let's be honest, most of us got into this because we could play with shiny things. And that was, that was literally the impetus for this in 2004 before cybersecurity had the, the implications that it does today. So it's very easy for us to go, oh, here's the fancy new thing I've just got to have. It's way harder to deploy that thing. And to Kyle's point, actually get ROI out of it, right? Get that thing to turn a dollar so that we can actually make money with it. And Kyle, you'll probably know this better than me. Who is it that has the, the, um, the stat that says you have to deploy a product to at least 7 of your customers before it'll make you a dollar?

Um, Dippel was talking to me about that, like 2012, 2013. Yeah, there's always some unit cost of I need to sell this many of this product to have an ROI from my my product development time, my screw-up time, my proof of concept time. All of those things go into what is that total ROI. Now, for those of you to make this quite simple, right, I got to sell this shit in order to make a dollar because I have all of my maturity costs and RPAs have been around for a while. So it's also not as exciting as I ultimately— maybe other people are seeing it. Maybe they never knew what Zapier was back in the day. Or was it has been, right? They've overtaken the entire market.

Well, and I spent the weekend down the Power Automate, you know, rabbit hole in the Microsoft stack. And there's a basically baked-in automation tool in the Microsoft stack that nobody even uses. So, you know, we have this stuff, we just buy it because we went to a booth and a vendor convinced me that it was magic. And that's the thing. And it's funny to watch. And I know Roost is doing amazing things, right? Let's not take anything away from— Oh, totally. Some of the smartest people in the space. They're addressing it properly by building these, these books that allow people to not have to have that most brilliant guy in the room so they can deploy some prepackaged things. But to think that some other customer or some other vendor is going to come along behind them, they don't have— this industry doesn't have enough really smart people to go build those runbooks and design all that stuff for every vendor who wants to be an RPA. The staff, like, like Roost has done, deliver like Roost is delivering, and it's even hard for them. So if the guys who are—

that's so important, Alex. Like, part of, I think, who will be successful with RPA is who can provide a bunch of templates so I don't have to put this creative mindset into building what automation looks like, because automation's creativity, right? There you have to have some really savant-level person to come up with these workflows that truly have a really brilliant outcome. We're just trying to keep our heads above water. We're still worried about ticket volume.

Yeah, yeah, well said. So, you know, I— again, please don't— any of us here, I don't hear comments coming back like, oh, Empath guys hate RPA. We love RPA.

Um, I would have bought Roost like 2 years ago if I was still running.

Yeah, I'd have bought it. I'd have bought it at every show I've seen it at, right? Um, so guilty, right? I understand why you buy it. Um, just, just go into it eyes wide open, understanding the problems you're going to take home with a fancy new product.

Yeah, and that, that brings up, I think, the next question is like, what does it really mean for an MSP to get to profitability, right? What does it mean for them to get to where I think they want them to, to go? And I— we saw a lot of this. I'm actually going to share screen out here. I want to, I want to share this little piece here because I thought it was just fascinating from, um, somebody that I just got to know recently, Josh Kotler. Um, but I think, um, uh, Kyle, you know him well. So let me just read the comment and then Kyle, I want you to kind of give some thoughts on this. So he wrote in when we— I had this post on, you know, just sort of a— here, you know, here I am at the IT Nation. It's all quiet the day after everything's gone, the dust is settled. He said, normally takes a few days or weeks for the takeaways to really gel, but one thing that stood out for me, so many exhausted roughly 50-year-old guys. Next year's show should have an AARP booth, pickleball tournament, kiosk where you get your testosterone levels checked. All kidding aside, This is a tough business when you aren't growing, don't have scale, and aren't making at least 15% EBITDA margins. You can see that it's wearing a lot of MSP owners. Thoughts, comments on that, Kyle?

Oh my God, we don't have enough time today, man.

I, I—

spoiler alert— I have a 20-minute video response coming out on my YouTube channel this week on this exact thing. And I think there's so much impacted here, especially when it comes to education and content, because yes, We're seeing a lot of an older generation at IT Nation. That doesn't surprise me. But what is it that the younger entrepreneurs are going to have to grow and scale and succeed when all of the content that is important to the younger entrepreneur has become exhausted to the older entrepreneur? Those con— that education is going to disappear and they're going to need it because they've been dealing with it for the last 10, 15 years. And you see this obsession with EBITDA right now and not about scale. Well, the only reason you care about EBITDA is either one, put more money in your pocket, or two, you want to sell your business. And if you're not ready to sell your business, right? I was talking to Robert Chaffee until like 3:00 AM on Thursday about this. You need to invest in sales, marketing, and some of your operations stuff. So it, there's going to be so much that's going to be interesting over the next 3 to 5 years on this exact topic.

Quick. So is there—

have dinner with Josh. Oh, I was just gonna say, we got to have dinner with Josh, and he was absolutely as entertaining as any human I've ever met. But, um, you know, he makes a good point. Uh, but if you really take a, take a step back and look who's focused on EBITDA and margins at this point right now, the people talking about it are the people trying to find somebody worth buying, right? This takes me to the point where you say, hey, there's a lot of guys who look tired. I was one of them. I sold my MSP because I was tired, right? Um, and so he's identified basically me— 47 years old, um, really tired. I don't want to go to the ARP booth, but I'm not that far from it. And he's not wrong. I mean, this is an exhausting industry. These guys are worn out, and they're having trouble finding talent to backfill and help upskill and, and really take over their role. So these guys who have been doing this 10, 15 years are still taking the 9:30, 10 o'clock at night phone call the customer who's down. Um, you know, there is a real maturity problem in some of these businesses because we haven't been able to backfill the qualified staff to step up to the next level and take over for the owner.

So I feel like then that there's a bit of a zeitgeist that's happening here in the sense of like, um, you know, this push to, you know, a million EBITDA, the push towards, um, you know, what does this look like to be healthy for me to be able to acquire you even a zeitgeist among, you know, who is the one that dictates and says what a healthy MSP is. Follow my system and do my thing so that now I can put just another notch in the belt of why I need a whole slew of more MSPs coming in the door to follow me. There's just a bit of anti-altruism here, right?

Oh, and you know what? I heard it multiple times of right now it is a seller's market because there are not enough MSPs that want to sell. There's a lot of platforms and a lot of buyers, but something has happened. And I— maybe this is because there's too many immature MSPs right now where they're like, if I sell my stuff, I'm not going to make a dollar. And this might be why we're seeing a liquidity model through acquisitions of, hey, let me just— you need to stay on and get your MSP more mature, but let me buy you today so that you can go on that journey. And I just have dibs on you, right? A lot of let's acquire some immature MSPs. And I fear that this is going to eventually blow up on us when all these PEs do want to back out or collect their returns, and we're going to see a drop in the valuation of an MSP business.

Well, let's, let's take a step back and look at the statement that you made that there's not a lot of MSPs trying to sell. Um, I talked to several that were trying to sell. What I noticed is there's a lack of MSPs with a million dollars in EBITDA looking to sell, and that's who the PE wants to buy, right? They only want to buy somebody who's got a million dollars a year in profits. Well, if the average MSP is sub-$2 million, they just don't have— the average MSP doesn't have the kind of profit margins that, uh, that those folks want. But we also wind up in this place where, um, it's— there's a really hard— and you've probably dealt with this more than any of us, Kyle— there's a really hard growth kind of plateau there at a million and a half, $2 million, where everybody gets stuck and doesn't make it to 10. And the few that have made it to 10 have made it and gotten snapped up, right? The 10, 20s, 30s— those guys are getting snapped up ever faster. The ones who aren't getting snapped up or aren't going because they're growing fast, they're moving, they're shifting, um, they've got it right. So folks don't want to sell when they figure out how to get off that $2 million plateau, and nobody wants to buy them while they're sitting there.

Someone told me, I think it was— his name's Sean Stevenson, um, out of Atlanta, Georgia— he said You can put dollars into the bank, not percentages. And for some reason, when we have a lot of this nature to talk in percentages, we forget that there has to be a dollar number behind it, right? A perfect example is margin. Oh, I make 30% margin on this product. That's still $0.45, right? Like, why are you obsessed about the percentage when the raw dollar is literally laughable?

Yep.

And sometimes when you even see quotas built out for like CFOs of big MSPs, it's You need to generate $1 million in profit, right? Like you start to see the nomenclatures change of you need to generate this many dollars, not this many percentages. So well, that changes, changes how you think.

It does. And I think we'll— you'll see us at Empath expand on this more because we're not in the business of helping you sell your MSP. We're not in the business of, you know, telling you, you know, what it is to, you know, all the 3 steps that you've got to follow to, you know, to go and do these things, to find PE, to find you. We're not going to set up a market between buyers and sellers. We're not going to be advising MSPs one-on-one to do all this. We're just simply invested in helping you grow. So you're going to see us do more of this. As we close up, what I wanted to do is end on just a really cool high note from none other than Robert Chiaffi himself, who's become a very good friend of all three of ours. I want to just kind of COVID a couple of these things. So one, he says normal gets normal results and that won't cut it anymore. This business is highly commoditized, commoditized. So simply doing the normal is treading water. Eventually you're drowned. I encourage everyone to think about, am I just doing what everyone else is doing? Am I just treading water? A good way, a litmus test for this is go to your MSP, go, go, go find your folks and say, hey, what makes us different than the guy down the street, the gal down the street? And if it's words like, oh, our customer service is great, you know, oh, our tech stack is modern, you're missing it. And I think you're treading water. So I would encourage you to go home and think about that today.

I just started talking about this today with Joe Rojas, and if you don't know him, we're going to have him on the Elephant in the Room podcast here real soon, probably with Jonathan from Ninja, because the two of them just go down this track and just absolutely nail it. But for too long, right, the thing that we thought made us better or different was I swiped a credit card with the vendor and bought a fancier tool. I've hired somebody who was super nice from Starbucks and everybody will love them when they call and talk to them on the phone. And that day is changing. Robert's right.

Love it.

Second thing he said, personal and business brand matters. MSPs don't think about this way because we're nerds, right? Learn from the vendors and personalities that draw you into them. Aside from having a great solution, what do they do that made you want to do business with them or proudly wear their swag? Think about company personas and people that drive their success. If you want to see an example of this, go follow Robert on LinkedIn because he's doing this. Um, he was just bragging about my colleagues at Cyberfox. He's like, I don't do business with Cyberfox, but look how community-driven they are. Look how they support one another. Look how they're into just working alongside others. And then he also made a post on his own just sort of about how they're progressive computing can help other clients that might need their help. He actually did their own— his own post on that, right? Really kind of tying in the brand together and what he's doing and really love seeing that. And then last, Kyle, I'm going to have you kind of comment on this one is execution should be religion. Many of you— many of us come to these talks, head swimming ideas. It's worthless without action. In fact, a loss of precious time and energy if you don't execute. So pick just 3 things you want to do or change, list them in priority order, plan the work to get there, find someone, uh, like a peer to hold you accountable. I know that word accountability is maybe a little foreign to you, uh, Kyle. Uh, it's not like you have a bat with it etched. Give us some comments as we close out on accountability and execution.

There's a reason I love that man. Um, it's funny, we Robert and I had a long conversation. Like I said, we talked until 3 in the morning on— I think it was Thursday or Friday, I can't— they're all a blur to me— about how we all have these frameworks and we all have these plans and we all sit there knowing the benchmarks and where we need to go. And we have things like, you know, business operating systems, and we're still not growing or making money. Why? Do you have the stomach after you build the plan to transact the accountability? A lot of times we have people that are smart as hell. I don't know about you, Alex, but we've all had that engineer. He's a tier 3. He's the smartest guy in the room. He has all this tribal knowledge and everyone wants to quit because the guy is just a fucking asshole.

He said it.

You can't grow until at some point we hold people to their expectations.

But you're not wrong, right? I mean, I mentioned this when we were on stage doing our presentation. Um, we've all had that employee leave and everybody go— and we think we're going to be underwater because the smartest person in the room just left, right? And everybody sinks back and goes, thank God you fired that asshole. Like, I'm so glad they're gone. And the next thing you know, you've done 2, 3, 4 weeks worth of work and everything's caught up and nothing's behind and everything's okay and the culture is better and everybody's happier. Because that one jackass has left the room. So execution is a big thing. Execution over ego is a big thing. And, you know, we have— many of us have long been the smartest person in the room, at least in the basement that we spend our time learning IT in. And it doesn't translate into the real world. And I think that's an important thing to say, right? Execution should be religion. Like, Robert should quote that. He should put it on a t-shirt. He should get it tattooed on his arm. That is the second best takeaway from his, from his post there, minus the one that Wes wiped away and wasn't going to talk about.

We don't have to talk about that one. There's no evidence to prove it ever happened. It's all conspiracy.

As far as I think it's time we wrap up and I can wrap up by saying I am not Wes Spencer.

I am not Wes Spencer.

Well, I guess that leaves it to me. I am Wes Spencer. And right up here is a past RejectionCon. I want to see everyone there. Don't forget about it. RejectionCon.com. We're giving back to the community. 100% of your revenue, of all the revenue that we generate from RejectionCon, from passes, goes to the Rural Tech Fund. RejectionCon.com. I want to see you there. We've got all the talks in. They've been submitted. We're ready to go live. We're ready to start the voting. We're ready to start having folks join us. I want to see you guys there. RejectionCon.com. Don't forget about it. Alex, Kyle, any other final comments as we wrap this up?

Just a quick shout out to our, our producer and the man behind RejectionCon helping you make it all happen, Eric Bowles, who just showed up. So, Eric, good to see you. Thanks for popping in. Thanks for all the hard work you're putting into RejectionCon. Hopefully it's going to make something really awesome.

Love me some Mr. Bowles. What an awesome person he is and what an encouragement he's been to me personally in the channel. All right, my friends, thank you guys for joining. Feel free to to carry on this chat, you can use the chat after we're done with this livestream right below. You'll have it available in LinkedIn and in YouTube. We know we love you guys. We can't wait to see you soon. RejectionCon, go check that out and we'll talk to you all later, my friends. Thank you so very much.

Later.