Collin Hathaway – Big Ambition, Dogged Simplicity – EP.244

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(00:00:00) – Intro

(00:05:31) – Exits are personal

(00:14:49) – Bringing on a COO to become CEO

(00:18:11) – Aligning incentives

(00:24:02) – Keeping a sense of urgency

(00:27:31) – Pretty good vs. Perfect

(00:30:47) – Hiring styles

(00:38:59) – Maintaining culture and values

(00:44:43) – What would you change if you were starting the company today?

(00:49:26) – What are you working on today that gives you energy?

(00:52:33) – How have your views on a long-term hold changed?

(01:04:06) – Misplaced CEO advice

Alex Bridgeman: Collin, thanks for doing a third podcast. This is the third episode together. I hope it’s not the last. I hope there’s going to be many more. That’d be a lot of fun. I always enjoy chatting with you and a lot’s happened recently, too. 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, it’s awesome to be back. I’m not sure anybody will want to hear the fourth, but it’s awesome. And before we start, I just have to say, like, holy cow, you have done an amazing job. I mean, when we first met, you were relentless about getting me on, and I looked it up, you’ve done 242 podcasts as of today, and I looked up when you started, so 40 episodes a year for six years through COVID. It’s kind of amazing, and I’m very impressed. I don’t think you had any business interviewing anybody in 2019. No one should have talked to you, but because of your relentless nature and just stick-to-it-iveness, you did it. And it’s just pretty neat to see, because then you just grinded. And I’m really excited to hear what happens with you and your future in search and the podcast, but I just wanted to say how much I appreciate it and I’m just so impressed. And it’s been great for me because that first podcast has been a total boon. People ask for time to chat, and I just send them your podcast and say listen to the first 15, 20 minutes, there’s my background, and we can just skip that and get to it when we chat. So it’s been really helpful and I appreciate it. 

Alex Bridgeman: Well, thank you. That’s kind of you. I’m also glad it’s been really helpful to you as well. I love hearing some of the emails you’ve sent me and reading through like, oh, this helps explain our company to people who work for us or people who are interested in Flint. Like, that’s really cool to hear. It makes me feel very happy and fulfilled about the podcast. 

Collin Hathaway: Okay, a plug for listeners then, if you can get on the podcast, just beg, cajole, plead your way on. It’s been great for us. 

Alex Bridgeman: I remember back in 2019 chatting with you, that was pretty early on with Flint. And you even mentioned there was a job out in Kansas City that you were hiring for that, in hindsight, would have been a really fun place to, would have been fun to work with Trevor for a little bit. I got to have Trevor on the podcast too, and he’s awesome as well and now has a really big role at Flint after the sale, so good for him. But that would have been a lot of fun. But a ton has happened in the last two years for you and Flint and Trevor and the whole team. 

Collin Hathaway: It’s been a lot of change, a lot of great stuff. It’s been a neat period of time for us. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. We talked about kind of exits being very, very personal, and there’s a lot of factors that go into that. Beyond just the business case and kind of discussions you might have with your board and investors, there’s the personal career reflection to do. How did you think about that with Flint? And then is there some advice or takeaways for other CEOs maybe in similar positions as you were? 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, I think the whole premise or thought around exiting a company is really personal. It depends a lot on factors that sometimes are in your control, sometimes not, your personal situation, your family situation, where you are in your career. For me, I’m going to talk a little bit out of both sides of my mouth here. I’ve never invested in a company with the intention of selling it. So, for me, I always said we’re going to buy this company and run it like we’re going to own it forever and never sell it. And so, what that usually means is we spend more money on people and we get bigger and we get bigger facilities, and generally, it’s not very good for EBITDA or profit at the beginning. I joked with the, well, I didn’t joke, I told the investors in Flint, I said, I have 100% success rate at lowering EBITDA margins. And they said, oh, you mean raising it? I said, nope, not initially, but it always goes up over time. And we do all this stuff, and then it’s pretty hard, and then the revenue tends to go up quite a bit, and it pulls EBITDA, and then it’s more sustainable that way. And so that’s generally how we’ve operated or I’ve operated – I say we a lot, but whether it’s Flint or Guardian Roofing or other things or Wrench the first time. So that’s how I approach it. At the same time, I think it’s always important to know the worth of your business and what your exit options are. One, because I think it helps set some of the trajectory of the company. Two, I think it’s just important to know what your egress would be if you had to sell and you’re very aware of that. We just hired a new president at Guardian Roofing, and I always am talking to him about, hey, if we did this and we got to this size, we could probably sell for this amount of money. And I think it started to make him nervous, and I said, hey, we’re not selling. Like, I don’t ever want to sell this company. But it’s just important you know if we do X well, then Y could be the result, just so you have sort of a scoreboard of how you’re performing. And I think it works well, and so far it’s worked pretty well for Flint and Guardian. 

Alex Bridgeman: Were there any things you did in those years at Flint or maybe the year before exiting that were helpful in making that a smoother process? 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, I think, well, so it was a weird period for us. It changed pretty quickly. In 2022, so summer of ’22, I had told Trevor there was no way we were ever selling – not ever, it could be a long time. But I assumed, I’m 46 now, I thought I would do this until I was in my 50s. And I think a couple things changed for me. This doesn’t necessarily address the specifics of what we changed because I think we built it right for a long time, so we didn’t actually have to change anything to sell. I mean, you’ll see people selling and they’ll juice margins or they’ll cut people or they’ll cut marketing, and that may work for an exit because it creates more profit for a short minute. But we actually had a really good model that was growing really fast and producing really good margins, so we didn’t have to do much. But the things that changed for me in that year were, I had set out to get Flint to 150 million. That was in the fundraising document. I said, hey, I think we can get to 150 million and 20 million of EBITDA if we buy a certain number of companies, might be five, might be eight, and we grow organically and I think we’ll get to 150 million. And so, we did it; we hit the target. And then I was on the road like three to four weeks a month. There are probably better ways to run companies. I just don’t know of one that has worked for me. I had an 11 and 12 year old at the time. So, I hit the target. I was traveling a ton. I basically had abandoned Guardian Roofing, which had done really well, but I hadn’t been around. I mean, I would blow off Monday meetings that we always had with the owners because we were just so busy and growing so fast at Flint. And then I had to kind of look at what was next with Flint, and the options were raise more money. I had a $30 million fund I’d raised to start Flint, so someone said, oh, you’ve got to raise fund two. And I said, well, I didn’t set out to be a fundraising thing. 

Alex Bridgeman: So you spent all 30? 

Collin Hathaway: We invested 27 million of the 30 in building Flint, so 90% of the money. And we were using debt effectively to grow after that. But at some point, someone said, hey, you should raise more equity. And that just wasn’t that appealing to me to have a fund two or a fund three. That wasn’t really the MO of starting Flint. And then also, we were running super lean. So at the time, we had four corporate employees for 150 million in revenue. It was me, Trevor as the COO, we had a VP of finance, and a VP of people who basically oversaw our recruiting. And we were going to have to scale that up, and I just didn’t really want to be in charge of more and more people. Trevor was doing most of it, but I didn’t want to have to do that. And my attorney gave me some interesting feedback that I did not take well. We were talking, and he said, hey, you’re just not the right guy to get it to 500 million. And I responded with some expletives and told him that he was nuts and I was the best and I could do whatever I wanted. But as I thought about it more and what it would take to get to 500 million, I just realized it really wasn’t what would give me the most energy and that probably I really wasn’t the right person. I’d done a pretty good job of getting Wrench Group from 9 million to 150, Guardian from 9 to 30, or 10 to 30, Guardian Roofing, and then Flint from zero. We effectively bought six companies with 60 million of revenue and grew it to 150, and then we added a last company, so we got to 160. So I’d done a pretty good job with that, but it’s a whole different beast to get to 500 million, and it just wasn’t for- it wasn’t something that I necessarily wanted to do and we had a great setup with Trevor in charge and we’d promoted a gentleman from a GM role to a regional president and he was kind of set up to take the COO role, so we had a pretty good configuration that would work for the company going forward. So, I mean, when you ask about advice for owners, I mean, I think for me it’s just you’ve got to be brutally honest with yourself about your business and about your disposition. You’ve got to think about what you want. And sometimes, what you want is not necessarily what matters. I mean, I tried to buy a company from a gentleman who wanted a jet, and he wanted 30 million for his $3 million business. So that’s neat that that’s what he wanted. It doesn’t really matter. That’s not what he’s worth or the company was worth. He might be worth a jet, but the company wasn’t. Got to be honest about what the company’s worth. There’s a number of owners who would really like to sell, but it’s just not worth, I mean, it’s three times their annual salary, and they’d rather just keep their job. And then you have to also be really honest about what selling will look like for you, if you’re okay with the idea of selling your company, having someone else in charge, being out of the business. And for some people, that’s really attractive, and for other people, I think they think it’s really attractive and then they do it and they have some regrets. So, it’s a hard process. It’s super personal. 

Alex Bridgeman: That path to 500, were you able to outline like, okay, based on what peers of ours have done or what the structures and org charts of similar companies of larger scales have done, like here’s where Flint would have to go to get to 500? Were you able to outline exactly what that was going to look like and something you could point to and say, yes, I would love that, or no, that’s not interesting or this isn’t interesting? Was there enough of a path that you could, you had a lot of data on that decision? 

Collin Hathaway: Did I have a lot of data for making my decision or about getting to 500 million, could we do it?

Alex Bridgeman: Looking at 500 million, looking at the path to get there, what were the things you would have to do and change to make that happen and how did you react to each of those changes? 

Collin Hathaway: I think we had a pretty good idea of what we would have to do. I mean, the simplest thing is when we invest in a company, we generally, I just told you I lower EBITDA margins by spending a bunch of money on people and processes. We just hadn’t done that at Flint Corporate. Flint Corporate was still running lean and mean, and to get to the next phase, we were going to have to invest in people and additional roles and some new processes for how that would work with the companies. And we tend to believe that a decentralized model works way better. The closer the decision is made to the consumer or the team, the better. But you can’t get to 500 million with four people at corporate. So, we knew there was going to have to be an increase there. That was not that attractive to me. I love working with Trevor, I love working with our team, but about two years in, we started having Monday morning meetings as a team, as a group, and I don’t enjoy Monday morning meetings. In between Wrench and when I had a chance to start Flint, I had an opportunity to join a company or an investment group, and it was a really neat opportunity and I was super grateful they asked. And I was strongly considering it, and I said, hey, do y’all have Monday morning meetings? And he said, oh, every Monday at eight. I said, I’m out. And he’s like, what? I said, yeah, I’m not coming. I’m not interested. He’s like, just over the Monday morning meetings? I was like, yeah, I don’t want to sit in a Monday morning meeting. But we had Monday morning meetings because when you get to be a real company, you have to check in, and I just wasn’t super interested in doing that anymore. And I didn’t want to do it more with more people. 

13:22- 18

Alex Bridgeman: I remember you hired, I believe you hired Trevor pretty much immediately as you were starting Flint and that it was more of a happy accident. It wasn’t necessarily this elaborate succession planning you were doing to say, I want to bring on a COO who I could envision becoming the CEO within a four or five year period. We’re going to kind of make sure we’re aligned on the same page on values, they’re going to get a lot of experience, and then they can run the ship from there. It didn’t sound like there was this this kind of plan for that. But was there some kind of, over time, preparing Trevor for this kind of role? Was there anything like that? 

Collin Hathaway: No, I mean, I think there was a little bit of planning in the forefront with how Flint would operate with having a COO that was in place. And then there was a lot of serendipity. And Trevor and I met in Seattle. We knew of each other. We set up a dinner. We always talk about it as like the three hour sober dinner. I wasn’t drinking to lose weight. He thought it would be weird to drink if I wasn’t drinking. I told him if the roles were reversed, I would have probably had a bunch of beers. But we hit it off, and it was totally lucky. The things that really worked is that we thought we had similar values, we thought we had similar interests, and then when we structured the partnership, we were aligned financially. I mean, one of the things that I talk with folks a lot about and I’m happy to talk about is like aligning financial incentives is super important. And so anything that worked well for me worked well for him and vice versa. And then it was just spending a bunch of time together. I mean, one of the things that was really great about running lean is we both worked a lot, and we texted and called and emailed and chatted all hours of the day and night. I don’t really believe in the one plus one equals three, but in this case, I think it actually kind of worked because we both spent a ton of time working on it. And he was already an exceptional leader. He’d already run a company, he’d already started a business. So it wasn’t necessarily, I mean, we kind of learned together. I had had a little more experience at bigger scale than he had, and I had more experience buying companies. But he had a lot more experience operating the businesses. I mean, the playbook of Flint is like a little bit me, and then operationally, it’s a lot him. And he’s one of the best operators I’ve ever met. And so, I’d say through a lot of trial and error, but just a pretty good framework for how we want to do it, do the right things early, do the hard things early, do it the right way, and then just iterate, we created a really good flywheel or a growth engine or organic growth engine. And he continued to take on more and more responsibility as we grew. So by the time we went to exit, it wasn’t like there was this massive transition. I mean, my direct reports were basically Trevor and the VP of finance, but really he worked with Trevor because he was their old chief of staff. So, I mean, I was pretty easy to replace because most of the people reported to him anyways, or to Mike Soriano, who was our regional president. So I think it was a decent structure, but mainly a lot of luck and then just a ton of shared values and shared incentives. 

Alex Bridgeman: Can you talk about the incentive piece more, aligning incentives? I like that framing, like what works for me should work for you to get on the same page there. Can you talk more about how you’ve designed incentives like that? 

Collin Hathaway: When I approach working with people, it’s pretty simple. I have very high expectations. I’m very direct. And I’m going to get to the incentive piece. I love feedback. I love getting it. I really love giving it. It’s 100% selfish. If I give you good feedback, you feel good, which makes me feel good. If I give you tough feedback, I now assume that the problem is 50% yours, which I round up to 100%, and I feel better. So I love feedback. And then I think the most important thing is I assume everyone will act 100% in their own self-interest. And this is usually defined by money and compensation. It doesn’t mean they might not be good people or bad people, whatever, but if your financial incentives are not aligned, I think you get into trouble at some point. And so, I spend a lot of time aligning financial incentives to make sure mine are equal to or at least directionally the same as theirs and that they won’t conflict with mine. So, examples of that, like when we buy a company, if an owner’s going to roll equity and keep ownership, like their ownership will sit alongside ours. If anything good happens to us, it helps them. If anything bad happens to us, it hurts them. And when I first bought my first company in Dallas, the company that became Wrench Group, we had this funky structure that Alpine insisted on where there was participating preferred, and the owner rolled equity and he was sitting at the back and he had 13.7% and we went to go buy our second company, and he was asked to put in his pro-rata share, but he was kind of behind us, and it was very confusing, and he didn’t know if he should put it in. And so, I just did some math, and I said, all right, new plan. You own 10% of the company, not 13.7, but it sits at the same level, common equity as all of us, or preferred, whatever it was. And Alpine was like, why would you do that? And my lawyer’s like, no one ever does that. And I was like, hey, this is just easier. This way, like whatever happens to us, happens to him, and it’s good. And we just did that from now on. And at Flint, when people roll equity in, or at any of our companies now, their equity is treated the same as mine, so that it helps. And then for executives, if they’re getting equity, they usually get profit units, which is, I guess, different than mine because I have ownership. But I explain exactly how it works. And if it goes up, it’s great for you and it’s a tax favorable. If it goes down, you’re hosed, but so are we. And then we have this EBITDA bonus plan that I created in 2012, and I don’t want to get into it, but the specifics are basically like, if EBITDA goes up, you get a chunk of it. And then after a while, there’s a maintenance bonus, so like if EBITDA stays up, even if you don’t grow one year, you get a chunk of that. And what do we care about? We care about EBITDA going up. And it’s even better if you can layer some equity because there’s years where you’re investing and EBITDA doesn’t go up, and you’ll get that maintenance piece, which is good because you’re maintaining a bigger business, but then you’re also building equity value. And so, I just don’t use anything, I don’t do any sort of earn outs. I’ve never done these weird funky bonuses. And I mean, earn outs, to me, they don’t make any sense because as soon as you close the deal, your incentive as a seller is to get the earn out. And my incentive is for the company to do well, but hopefully you don’t get your full earn out. People will say they hope you do, but they kind of don’t. And there’s a bunch of work you can do to make sure you get your earn out that may not be good for the company long term. And if we want to hire a controller, but it lowers the chance of you getting your earn out, you don’t want to hire the controller. So it just creates a lot of friction. I just try and eliminate the friction wherever I can. 

Alex Bridgeman: I like the simplicity piece though, and focusing on something that’s easy to convey and understand feels less kind of hand wavy as well, making something really simple. Like an index card, if you can write on an index card and explain it quickly, that seems to make a ton of sense. That seem to be, if I think of your CEO style or the way you run things, simplicity is a core piece of that, at least from what I see. 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, I mean, I think when we talk to companies about buying their business, I just say, hey, we have two structures. Structure A is we’ll pay you $90- your company is worth 100 bucks, we will pay you 90 bucks in cash. And I’ll give you a $10 seller note that we owe you in 18 or 24 months and pay you some interest. And people say, well, why can’t I have it all now? And I say, well, we got to have some skin in the game so that if we need to know where our files are or how you bought your trucks or why Tina hates Hector, like you’ll answer the phone. Structure two is we’ll give you 60 to 90 bucks in cash. The other 10 to 40 comes in as rollover into our company, and then you’re treated the same as us. Financially, I think it’s potentially better, but the downside is you’re a small investor in our company and you’re stuck, there’s no mechanism to get it out. I don’t really care what you pick. A or B is fine. I don’t care if you stay or go. So, there’s two determinants. Do you want to stay or go? Do you want more cash, or do you want some upside equity? You pick. There’s your matrix, two by two. And it seems to resonate okay. 

Alex Bridgeman: That small team being only four at corporate, being able to move a little faster, it seems like you set a really fast pace across Flint, but maybe just externally, just in terms of, if I’m outside looking in, the pace of acquisition and growth has been really impressive and fun to watch and hear about through emails and texting, so that’s turned out fun. But do you see it the same way, and if so, how do you keep a fast internal pace or at least a sense of urgency? 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, I think we’ve always had that. I mean, I think it starts with goal setting. I mean, selling a vision. My first job was in sales. I think it’s translated pretty well to what I do day to day now. So, I do not like business books, except for Who by Geoff Smart. I’ve never read Good to Great. I hate acronyms and cheesy sayings and business speak, but I do know what a BHAG is, and I do think there’s some benefit to setting a big goal that’s appropriately unreasonable. Because even if you miss it, you still have an awesome outcome. And what’s been nuts is we’ve set some, I think, pretty nutty goals, and so far, I’ve hit most all of them. Like Guardian Roofing was $10 million when I bought it of revenue, and like in the first week, I went on the whiteboard and wrote 30, and they said, what’s that? I said, that’s where we’re going to be in five years. And they said, how? And I said, I have no idea. I said, but we’ll figure it out. And we missed it; we hit 29. But it’s pretty good. It’s almost 3X growth in five years. So I think you’ve got to set this goal, and then you’ve just got to remember the goal. I mean, Trevor often talks about the hardest thing with our business is just figuring out what works and then just doing it over and over and over because it gets a little monotonous at times. But that’s what it is, just you set a pretty audacious goal and then just set up what you have to do to get it and then just continue to grind it out. I mean a little bit like if someone said to you, do you think you could do 250 podcasts? You’re like, no, that seems like a lot. Okay, well what if you did like 50 a year? That seems like a lot too. Well what about like one a week? Maybe I could do one a week. Okay, well what if you did one a week for like six years? Well, turns out like you have 250 podcasts. So, it’s like, okay, you didn’t get- the 300 would be 50 a week, or 50 a year, but like… Yeah, but you got 250, right? So that’s pretty good. So that’s just how we approach it, is like how do we just set up the end goal and then just kind of keep remembering that’s the end goal. I mean, Guardian Roofing’s new goal is 65 million from 30. I have no idea if that’s the right number. I mean, I think it could be 100, and I’ve already thrown around 250 just to see how it worked for people. It did not work that great. 100 didn’t work super great, but no one totally pooped on it. But 65 is the goal. Okay, so if we miss 65 and we hit 50, I don’t know, we’re 30 now, 32, so 50 seems like a pretty good outcome in a few years. So that’s how we do it. And there’s a lot to it beneath that. I mean, a lot of it’s just operational kind of hammering, but a lot of it’s just doing the right things every day. Or we always say, if we can be pretty good most days, we’re going to do just fine. And if you just do that, it actually works. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, the pretty good versus perfect is another good segue. I’d enjoy your thoughts on it. 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, I mean, good enough, it’s kind of like what I live by. So, all right, so good enough, it’s kind of what I live by. I mean, it has worked for me so well to just follow this approach. In my experience, you can grow really fast doing it. I don’t think you can grow fast if your intent is perfection. And it allows you to iterate and think about constant improvement. And I have a bunch of different recent examples. But I’ve just become more confident that good enough generally works well. I talked about it in my first podcast, the sourcing model, I didn’t use Salesforce, I didn’t have Pipe Drive, I just used Excel, and I talked to a ton of companies. And I tried things, and this kind of offer, and how did this pitch work, and I got way better. And then I’ve seen the people do the matrices and do the research, and they don’t talk to any owners, and they don’t get any better but they have a really cool thought process around it. And I just think my way is better, which I think I said the first podcast. But just recently at Guardian, we did this, and I don’t know how it’ll work out. If we do a fourth podcast, I can let you know. But the background for Guardian was I bought it at 10 million and partnered up with the husband and wife, Lori and Matt Swanson, who started it. They said, we’re going to get to 30, we got to 29 million. And it got to the point where I was basically gone. Like I said, I was running Flint. They took us from 12 to 30. Now, we did a bunch of work at the front end with people and process and goals and got a new building. But they did it. And so I said, hey, I think we’re going to get to 65 million. And Lori, who’s the CEO, said, hey, I’m not sure, kind of like with me with Flint, she’s like, I don’t think I want to do that. Like, I’m not sure I’m the right person. I said, okay, well, I think we can still do it, so let’s figure out how. So I’m like, all right, we need to hire a VP of Ops, a recruiter, a president, we already have the new building, I think we can go north of Seattle, we probably should look at Portland. And all of them, they said, oh, those are all good ideas. I said, great. They’re like, what are we going to do first? I said, all of it. What? And I said, all of it. I mean, we’re going to hire like the- we started looking, so we got the VP of Ops, and we got the recruiter, then we got the president. And then we were going to go north, and I was like Portland’s bigger. Let’s just do Portland. If we’re going to swing, let’s just swing big. So rather than spend two years getting ready, we just set a date of September 1st. Was that the right date? I have no idea. I would argue probably not, it was probably too fast, but we just did it. And lo and behold, two weeks ago, we launched in Portland, and we’ll probably do 60 or 100 grand in revenue in the first month. It was not perfect; it was not fully baked. I’ve told the new president, I wish I had given him three more months. Well, we’re there and we’re operating and we’re in the game now. So, I guess we could have sat around and thought about it for a while. Instead, we just said, well, it looks like it’ll probably work. Let’s just go do it. So, we’ll see. 

Alex Bridgeman: You’ve talked about Who and top grading in hiring. How has your hiring style and areas of focus evolved over time?

Collin Hathaway: I mean, hiring I think is the most important thing you can do, particularly in service businesses but I think across the spectrum. And someone, a lot of people want to ask about firing, which maybe we’ll talk about. I mean, the best way to get good at firing is to get really good at hiring. And so, for hiring, it’s kind of simple. I mean, we use top grading, which is from this book, Who by Geoff Smart. For key hires, I think it’s important you take a minute and think, what do you want out of this person and why? What does the job look like? Create a job description, I mean, you can get them off the internet, people do, but you just need to take a minute and think, hey, don’t just boilerplate it, think what do I really want from this role and what do I want this person to look like? What’s really important in their job description? If you’re going to- like for Guardian, we hired a gentleman who ran a big branch of Otis Elevator. Different than what we do, but service, installation, lots of trucks, customer needs, that kind of stuff. And then you’re supposed to create a scorecard where when you do interviews, you grade how they’re doing. I just have never done that, so I screwed that part up. For executive recruiting, we use this guy, Tim Cook, at JM Search. He’s been phenomenal. For manager and staff recruiting, we use this guy, Sean Cahill, who’s local here, from Cahill Talent. And basically then, for lower level jobs, we hire a recruiter, and like in Guardian, we hired a bilingual recruiter. A lot of our staff is Hispanic. It was funny, I said we need a recruiter. And my partner said, oh, shoot, Collin, she starts next week. We just looked at our team, and I don’t think we need anyone. I said, I think we’re going to need 30 people this year. They said, well, we did the math at zero. I’m like, I bet it’s 30. And we have like 140 people at our company, but I was thinking about Portland and that. Well, as you restructure the company and start growing, we had a bunch of people who didn’t necessarily want to participate in the growth and some of the new rules and regulations we had around how we were going to grow. And I bet we’re going to be a lot closer to hiring 30 this year than zero. But the power of the recruiter is immense. They’re great at hiring for new roles, which is helpful. More importantly, they fill the funnel. So, I mean, if you have 10 people, there’s a good chance that one or two of them aren’t fantastic. But a lot of times, they’ll just stay, or you’ll keep them there because you’d rather have ten people than eight. But if you have a full funnel, you can usually replace the bottom two or four a lot faster. So this funnel replacement’s really important and it’s worked really well. And then as far as terminating people, I don’t know if you want to talk about that. 

Alex Bridgeman: Sure. 

Collin Hathaway: Okay. I mean, I think I’ve just gotten more confident as I’ve gotten older, but in business school, I took this one-hour symposium on firing people, and it was really good. It was be direct, make it two minutes or less, have an HR person there, have everything ready. 

Alex Bridgeman: Like that Moneyball scene where you’ve been traded, they’ll handle the details.  

Collin Hathaway: Yeah. That’s right, it’s exactly like that. Don’t talk, I’m not sorry. I mean, I’m kinda sorry, but I’m not going to say that. It already sucks for them more than you, so don’t make it about you. But I do remember, I don’t remember if it was the symposium, but I think one of my great professors said, the best time to fire someone is the first time you think about it. And I think the thing that I’ve gotten much better about, which sounds harsh, but I’ve found it to be more often true than not, and what I’ve just gotten better at is shortening the timeframe from first time I thought about it to doing it. And then if we’re letting somebody go and it’s not a massive performance issue or they didn’t do something egregious, you just offer severance and get a release signed, which is a little more tactical, but get a release signed so that they can’t come back and say there was some type of nefarious thing you did or- I mean, everyone is a protected class in America except for 40-year-old white males, under 40-year-old white males. So it’s just generally better to get a release so that you can’t get claimed age discrimination or any kind of other discrimination. I just found it to be more effective, saves you a bunch of time and money with lawyers later. 

Alex Bridgeman: When would you use- for what roles would you use an external recruiter for versus just your internal recruiting efforts? 

Collin Hathaway: We have used external people, I mean, for sure for a new role, generally, we have used external, but I mean, I can give you some specific examples. When we just basically revamped Guardian, we used external resources to hire the recruiter, that was the Sean Cahill. We used Tim Cook to do the VP of Ops and the President. And then the recruiter has hired the Safety Director, the Repair Manager, and so some of the, not lower, yeah, lower level, like less executives. But generally, and at Flint, anyone at Flint corporate generally comes with the help of an outside executive search firm. And then internally we have recruiters for basically staff positions. 

Alex Bridgeman: How helpful has like personal professional networks been for recruiting? 

Collin Hathaway: Not super helpful. 

Alex Bridgeman: Not super helpful? 

Collin Hathaway: No. I mean, we’ll post stuff on LinkedIn, but generally, we’re looking- I mean, this goes back to like thinking through the type of person you want and the role you want filled. I didn’t know any- my personal- well, my personal network is bigger now with people in service businesses, but oftentimes, we don’t do lateral moves, typically, we’re trying to find people who run bigger businesses or have done it before and then don’t necessarily have to be from our industry. It’s nice to find someone from our industry to come in because it’s faster, but we generally think we operate better than most of our competitors, so hiring from them is not necessarily the best approach. So I would say that it hasn’t been that helpful. 

Alex Bridgeman: What else on hiring do you think a lot about? 

Collin Hathaway: I think when we are hiring for key roles, I mean, one of my most important, I guess, strengths or roles in that process is setting the vision for them. Like, what are they walking into? I mean, they’re going to make a pretty big move and join our company, so why would they want to do that? So, a little bit of salesmanship, but more just, hey, this is where we’re headed. This is what it means for the business. This is what it could mean for you. By the way, if you decide not to stay here, that’s okay. Help us get here, and then if you do this, you will have XYZ opportunities elsewhere. I’ll help you or I’ll back you if you want to buy a company or whatever. I’ve already covered the financial incentives, I mean, making sure we’re very closely aligned on that. And then setting the expectations around both long-term and short-term, like, hey, this is what we think is going to happen. And then I think part of it’s, I mean, I have a pretty strict no asshole rule, so if I get any of that vibe, and usually the top grading process will weed out some of that. The reference checks will weed out a little bit of that too and how they interacted with their peers or bosses. But we’ve made some mishires and they’re not all turkeys, but we’ve had some misses, and if culturally they don’t align, they don’t make it very long. 

Alex Bridgeman: That’s a good word, turkey. 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, I’m trying to not swear. 

Alex Bridgeman: It kind of like gets into some culture aspects too, because you’re not running one single centralized business, it’s six different companies, each probably with very similar values, but there’s going to be different flavors when you walk into each business. Can you talk about some of how you keep values, or maybe there’s some aspects of culture you care about keeping consistent across companies, but just how do you manage cultures across six different organizations? 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, this has changed a little bit. The first time I did this at Wrench, the owners all stayed, and they were really the keeper of the culture. So, I didn’t have to worry too much about any sort of cultural norms getting broken or changed because they really set them. And in one case, we had the owner leave, and some of the cultural elements weren’t great, and we had to then kind of take the Houston culture and indoctrinate the people of Dallas into how we ran that company, and some didn’t stay, and in the end, it was a better situation. With Flint, when we sold, we had seven companies in five states, including three in Washington, three in Seattle. I think now we’re at 11 or 12. And the reality is, each one’s going to have a bit different culture. A lot of them have different pay plans. Some of them have, a bunch of them have different pricing, a bunch of them have different product mix. The Boston team talks to each other much differently than the Portland team. Not to mention they like Dunkin’ and they like Starbucks. So, I think we can honor that and respect that and foster that. And what we do is just overlay the framework of expectations, best practices, and then in some cases, try and make it work around their cultures. But I think in general, if you sort of set the framework up right, set the vision right, the cultural piece will sort of stabilize I’d say with like 80% commonality between them. And then you just got like the both socks people versus like Houston, versus Seattle. I mean, there’s just some differences between those states and people, but not a ton, 80, 90% the same. So, it hasn’t been too hard, again, because the framework’s very similar. It’s not like we have a company with 1099 employees, which are subcontractors, and it’s a huge marketing company versus one that’s family run forever. I mean, they’re all kind of the same with just some nuances to certain elements. But in the end, we’re just offering great service to homeowners. And we think we have a pretty good structure for how to do it and a pretty good playbook. And even if your culture is slightly different, we think we can support it and help them grow. So, it hasn’t been as hard as you’d think. I think if you were going to do something like a construction company versus a home service company versus a commercial company, I think that would be harder. I think some of the expectations and workforce and stuff would be harder to mesh. 

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, that makes sense. I’m also thinking about culture in terms of your acquiring other businesses and that they each come with their own culture. And so, if you have like a cohesive set of values, like they’re being added to from all these new organizations and new cultures and just some of the dynamics that that can create. It’s interesting to hear your perspective on that. 

Collin Hathaway: Well, I think Trevor’s done a really good job with the Flint team. I mean, we’re now actually not integrating the company so much, but we’re having them communicate a lot more. They’re training together more. They’re taking part in WhatsApp groups together more. So it’s creating a little bit of camaraderie. I mean, again, it’s still a little different. But for the first four years, it was kind of like, hey, you just be in Boston, you just be in Houston, you just be in Denver. But now they’re starting to train together, know each other, talk more. I think, I mean, they’re still part of that company in Denver or that company in Seattle. That’s where their core sort of cultural ethos is from, but it’s starting to change a little bit more where we don’t ever want them to think, hey, Flint, I work for Flint. They work for Southwest Plumbing or AAA Services or Craney, because they do. But it’s nice to know that there’s like a little bit of an overlay with peers that they can talk to who share some of that, I guess again, that 80, 90% shared value system. And I think it’s helping a little bit. 

Alex Bridgeman: We had Steve Swinney on the podcast, the CEO of Kodiak Building Partners. They’ve bought 45 plus companies. And he was talking about that and how his wife mentioned, you talk about all these companies, you mentioned they’re all great. Do they talk to each other though? He’s like, no, not really. Maybe every now and then, we’ll introduce them to each other, but there’s not really a forum for them to communicate. She’s like, well, I’m sure good things could happen if you got them all in a room together and they could share ideas for a few days. And he was like, yeah, that’d probably be great. Let’s make that happen. So, it’s interesting to hear you guys sort of think about how do you get those teams to get to know each other more and share ideas. 

Collin Hathaway: I mean, I’d say on that note, like good things can happen, but I wouldn’t over index on like everyone’s going to love- And also in our business, if you pulled a thousand employees into a Florida conference room and said get to know each other, we’d lose a boatload of money every day that they’re doing that. And I don’t know that they’d get that much pickup other than fight about which team’s going to win on Sunday football. So, it has to be sort of well thought out. And then I would say our expectations are modest for what they will garner from it other than just feeling like they’re part of a really good organization. 

Alex Bridgeman: If you were starting Flint over today, what would you do? What would you change if anything? 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, not much. I mean, I think we did a really good job. I mean, it’s pretty neat, since your listeners won’t see this, but you’re in my office. I mean, my first pitch deck was a picture of that whiteboard. And people sort of got behind the vision. And then it was a Word document. And then it was a PowerPoint that I paid someone to do because I can’t do PowerPoint. And it said, hey, we’re going to have these five to eight companies, we’re going to grow to this size, we’re going to do it the right way. And so structurally, and from an approach standpoint, I don’t think I would change much. I mean, I think for Trevor and I, it was really hard. I mean, we ran so lean. We bought five companies in two years, no, 18 months, five companies in 18 months, nine months of that was during COVID. We bought three of the companies during COVID. One of them I never saw, because of COVID, I couldn’t go. And so, I think, would it have been nice to have staffed up earlier? Yes, but I think part of what allowed us to iterate on the model and the playbook and how we wanted to approach it was that we didn’t have a huge staff. It was just the two of us. He always says, we’re just like back to back, like knife fighting, trying to figure out how to make it work. There’s a problem here, I’ll go, then I’ll go, and I go over here, you go that way. There wasn’t always problems, but there’s just stuff you’ve got to do. Hiring you’ve got to do. So I don’t think I would change, I mean, I wouldn’t change a lot. We had the right expectations around what a company was worth. We had a good organic- we were dedicated to organic growth the entire time. We never deviated from being in residential service and repair. I mean we bought a company from a convicted felon in Las Vegas, and that didn’t go very well, so I would change that. I wish I hadn’t done that. Now, we sold it, and the people who bought it made a bunch of money, and we got a 2X return on that investment, so it wasn’t all that bad. But no, I think, Flint is an amazing company and it was an amazing experience for me. I wanted to see if I could do it again, do it the right way and be in charge of my destiny versus having it sold too early like with Wrench Group, and I was really fortunate that it worked out. 

Alex Bridgeman: What would you be excited to work on again? Will it be working on Guardian for a few years, or is there something else that you’d be excited to do? 

Collin Hathaway: I mean, it’s interesting because I’ve been trying to think through that quite a bit. We sold in August. I’m the exec chair of Flint. I still talk to Trevor every Monday. We probably text 10 times a day. But it’s just I’m not in charge anymore. Guardian Roofing has some really exciting things happening, but we’ve got a great team and a great leader, and so that’s also not 40 or 60 or 80 hours a week like Flint was when we were going. And so, it’s kind of trying to figure out what would be exciting. I mean, I essentially shut down, I took like a half sabbatical this summer where I was working three, four hours a day and just drove my kids to lacrosse and soccer and baseball and was home and traveled a little bit and it was really nice. I mean, I hadn’t- people work their whole life without ever taking a break, so I don’t think you’re entitled to it, but it had been 17 years since I started Skylight and I was pretty fried. Well, and I wanted- I mean, I felt like I needed to do more, but I was just tired. And so a little bit is resetting expectations. I mean, I told my wife I felt like I wasn’t doing enough. She’s like, well, you’re on the board of your high school, I’m fighting income tax in Washington state, which has got sort of mixed views from different people, you own Guardian, you’re chair of Flint that’s growing like, I mean, Flint’s grown 80% this year. So, it seems like your plate’s pretty full. It’s just maybe not like overflowing in buckets like normal, and maybe that’s okay. So I’m thinking a little bit, someone approached me about teaching ETA related stuff at University of Washington. I’m interested in public policy and maybe politics a little bit. I just think I’m at an interesting spot where I actually felt like I got a good little break and I feel reinvigorated. But if you’d asked me this question like four months ago, I was just confused and beat up, tired. 

Alex Bridgeman: Is there any like consistent theme throughout those things you’re working on now that gives you energy? Like is it the getting a team together, working on some common goal? Like is that what gives you energy, or other things that you’ve kind of identified as like, oh, okay, I enjoyed this, I enjoyed building companies because of this reason, or this tax thing over here is really exciting for these reasons? Is there any consistency across that that helps you identify what else might be fun to do? 

Collin Hathaway: Well, I mean, I’m pretty competitive. So for a long time, it was just about winning and some of it is some bad mojo I carried for a long time about having a chip on my shoulder and having to prove that I can be a, quote, winner, whatever that means. 

Alex Bridgeman: That works for quite a while. 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, it does. It works until it doesn’t, or if you kind of win, which I feel like I kind of did. And so, then it’s tricky because was that really winning, and what does it look like, and what do you want to do next? And so financially, things have worked out really well, and so that big carrot. I mean, I still have huge equity stakes in two private companies that I’d really like them to perform really well and do really well, but it’s a lot different than I told that story of having 15 grand and a three month old in a rental house, so I don’t have that concern anymore. And so, I feel safe and I don’t worry if I have another heart attack that my family won’t be okay. So that’s pretty neat, but it doesn’t necessarily rev the engine of like, hey, I want to go kick somebody in the teeth and win. So, for now, it’s resetting what winning would be for the next phase. And I think, for me on the business side, I think Guardian could be the best roofing company in the country, and that would be pretty neat. Not so much that I want to prove to everyone we’re the best, but just because we have amazing people and I think doing it the right way and having it come out well is really satisfying. On the public policy stuff, it’s more just, I think maybe I just am getting old, but you kind of want to leave stuff a little bit better for everyone. I mean, Seattle has had a rough run since we moved home in 2010 and Washington State in general. So, I’d like to see a place that I really care about, I think, be in a better standing than it is now. And that seems worth time and energy, in what capacity I’m not sure yet. It’s a great place to be and I really love it. And a bunch of people ask why I just don’t move. And the reality is like, for tax reasons, I probably should have, but I just love this place and the people here, so why not just dig in and work a little harder to make it better. 

Alex Bridgeman: Your vision for Flint was never to sell it and be able to own it for a long time and run it into your 50s and maybe 60s as well. Obviously, a different path happened. And I’d be curious to hear, did your views on a long-term hold change, or was it just kind of right place, right time for where we are in the market cycle, or was something else happening? 

Collin Hathaway: I mean, I think it was all of those things, but just to hit on them, I guess, bit by bit. I mean, I mentioned this already, but my intent was always to build a long duration business. And I actually think you’re better off, or I’ll say I think it’s better off to think about the company as a long duration hold for how you build your company because you make better decisions that ensure that the growth’s sustainable, the people are right, the processes are good, the playbook’s good. So thinking long-term I think is really valuable. And we’re seeing some of the flame out of the short-term thinking. I mean, a bunch of people kind of hopped in and out of plumbing. They would pay a bunch of money, aggregate EBITDA, flip it. And at some point, I would say, some people, someone’s going to get left holding the bag. Well, you’re starting to see that. Flint’s doing really well this year. We’re up like 40% organically, but the sector’s not. The sector’s flatter down. And a lot of that’s because people don’t really want to be in home services, they just view it as a commodity or asset to get in and out of, and they’re the ones holding the bag right now. So, they weren’t super worried about building for a long duration, they were really worried about multiple expansion and using enough debt, buying enough stuff, and selling it. So I think for me, thinking long duration is really important. In terms of how long you hold it, it’s again a little bit personal, but not just for me, but for any person, but these aren’t commodities. They’re living, breathing entities, and they’re subject to a whole bunch of factors inside the company but also exogenous factors, interest rates and trade policies with China and AI and things that are hard to predict. And so, I’ve held companies for five years at Wrench, and I wish it had been 10, and we were forced to sell too early. And we sold for 200 million, and three years later, it sold for 750. So I think it proves we should have kept going. Maybe with me in charge, it wouldn’t have been 750, it would have been 500, but it would have been fine. We held for the first period of time with Flint for four years where I was the CEO, and now I’m still a huge shareholder, and we’re going to do another run. And then I’ve been a part of Guardian for almost eight years, Guardian Roofing. And I’ve made money two times at Wrench, and I’ve made money one time at Flint so far, and I still have money in Flint, and I have a bunch of money in Guardian. And in Guardian, even that, I bought out some minority shareholders last year for 21 times their money in six years. So I could have sold and done really well. But I’ve told you before, like I had 15 grand and a rental house. And if you had offered me the opportunity to have a long-term holding company at 31 and say for 20 years you can do this, and at the end, you’re going to make all this money, I would have probably said, well, how much can I make right now? So I can make rent and maybe buy a house. Okay, well, that’s cool. So that would have been great. Do long-term holding company, get paid a good salary, and then you can maybe afford a house. But then what I think is kind of interesting is like, as you grow these businesses, and your equity value starts to increase, there’s a little bit of a bifurcation in maybe what’s important to you or how you think about it as the operator or the equity shareholder versus how the investors might think about it. I mean, Flint’s equity value grew like 100 million bucks a year for like four years. So that’s pretty good if you’re an investor. I mean, it almost killed Trevor and I. So, at some point, like there’s different priorities. And what’s tricky is the equity value goes up for anyone who owns a business or operates a business. It’s cool until it becomes not cool. And when it becomes not cool is when your value on paper starts to get wonky vis-a-vis like what your value is in real life. So in 2023, I had done well, I had made money. I had bought the house I always wanted on Lake Washington. I was 95% illiquid on my balance sheet, 95%. Now, no one was crying for me. I could go to dinner and take a trip to Hawaii, whatever. But that is potentially a very scary place to be when suddenly COVID hits or China decides they want to take Taiwan, there’s a war, or Ukraine gets invaded, and your net worth can go down a ton and you have no liquidity. And so, I just think it seems hard for me to fathom at 31 or 29 or 35 saying I’m going to do a long duration hold fund and having any idea what you’re talking about beyond like five or ten years. Because you just don’t know. And I think there are vehicles, Pacific Lake has a great vehicle long-term hold fund to help people get liquid. There’s secondaries. I mean, if you get big enough, you go public. But I think you’ve got to separate the operating element versus the financial element. And I think right now they’re kind of getting jammed together, like I’m just going to be the operator of this company for 20 years. Oh, by the way, I haven’t identified the company, I know nothing about the space, but I’m going to buy something in this space and hold it for 20 years. I think you’re just kidding- I talk about like radical candor and being rigorously honest with yourself. I think you’re just snowing yourself that you have any idea what you’re talking about, which is maybe not that popular an opinion. 

Alex Bridgeman: It’s certainly a tougher place to be when your net worth is very small and have kids, don’t have a house. Makes it a lot harder. 

Collin Hathaway: Well, and I think what’s interesting, so I started Skylight, which is just a website. I mean, Skylight has bought no companies, and a one-room office that we’re currently sitting in, in a nondescript building behind a mall. And so, Skylight is basically a website and the thing, the market that I can buy companies. And every time, I buy a company, I set up an LLC or for a long time raise the money and bought it. I’ve done Skylight for 17 years. So Skylight is my long-term hold. But what’s inside of Skylight, what Skylight consists of has changed quite a bit during that time. And I think you have to have the flexibility, again, to think about how does your financial situation change, how does your operating interest change, how do the businesses you own change. I mean, if you bought a CD-ROM business, you may not even know what that is. 

Alex Bridgeman: Oh, I know what that is. I’ve been to a Blockbuster. 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah, you’ve been to a blockbuster, good, even to the last one. But like, I remember looking at Alpine in 2003 or something, a CD-ROM business, or even Yellow Pages. Like, it might have been a good business to buy at a certain price to just melt the money out, and then, it’s kind of like you just make the money and you get two or three extra money, and it’s fine. But if you’d said 10 years before, I’m going to own a CD-ROM business for 20 years, like that probably would have been a bad bet. Or you need to sell. 

Alex Bridgeman: Do you remember Redbox? 

Collin Hathaway: Yeah. 

Alex Bridgeman: So there’s a stock that I followed for a while called Outerwall that owned all the Redbox locations. And it was kind of an annuity that was slowly declining each year. But in the meantime, it was making good cash. I think it got sold like 10 years ago. But similar dynamic. 

Collin Hathaway: I think the firm that started Redbox and Coinstar might be a family out of here, GSB guy. But I mean, Coinstar again, great company, but nobody uses coins really. I mean, I’m sure I have some sitting here, and if I knew where a Coinstar was, I might take it there, but it’s fine. But stuff changes. I mean, 20 years, that’s a long time. So, again, I think you should think long duration and you should hope, but I just think it’s a little bit tricky for me to buy into the idea that a first-time searcher or someone who hasn’t operated a business could say I definitely want to do this. And maybe it’s not fair because I said that with Flint, but the reality is I’d already done it for 10 years and I’d already made some money. So, I could say- I mean, and even then, I didn’t do it. 

Alex Bridgeman: Well, the long-term hold piece is also helpful as a mindset because whoever you sell to is going to run it for another couple years. So, if you have a 10-year vision but you only hold it for five, because you have a 10-year vision, they have now a company that’s set up well to continue growing and it’s not run in a short-term way. To me, like that would just help with your exit, your enterprise value. 

Collin Hathaway: I think that’s what I’m saying with the long duration. I mean, I think, Wrench, I started- so Wrench didn’t start with me in 2011. The companies had been around for decades. They got bought by somebody else. They got bought by somebody else who went bankrupt. All the managers, a bunch of the Wrench companies were re-bought by the regional managers. They grew them. I bought them. So those companies have been around for decades. So that’s great. And then, Wrench is still, I think, the best company in plumbing and air conditioning. And it’s been 13 years, 14 years since I got involved. So that’s great. But it’s changed hands four or five times since 2007. So again, that’s where I’m separating the duration and the approach versus the idea that I will own an asset indefinitely. I think it could happen. I think saying that is my number one mantra, I’m going to be a long-term holder of this business, I think is potentially misguided. And if that is like how your incentive structure is or some other element, I think it could get you in trouble because you’re not being rigorously honest about how the market’s changing, how your interests are changing. I think it just sets some parameters artificially. I mean, if you own a company that you run for 30 years that grows 10% a year forever, it’s going to be awesome, assuming you want to do that, assuming it works for your family, assuming you get some liquidity along the way, maybe if you care. That’s a lot of ifs. If you say for sure that’s what I’m going to do, I just think you’re setting up some parameters that are unnecessary. Because by the way, if you have a seven year hold and you kill it and your business is doing great, there’s a good chance you can continue owning it for a long period of time, even if you have to sell or buy out some of your shareholders. 

Alex Bridgeman: Are there other pieces of advice that CEOs are given often that you disagree with or would redirect in some way? 

Collin Hathaway: I just think in general people like to make things really complicated, and I just try to keep it super simple. I mean, our financial reporting is really simple, the things we care about are really basic, revenue growth, gross margin, net income, EBITDA – net income is important, if it’s a negative, you’re probably losing money – cash flow. And I think, I mean, the number of times I’ve tried to structure companies to be really efficient tax-wise, I’ve probably done it five times, the number of times the tax savings has actually offset the cost of structuring the business with the tax advisors is maybe one out of four. And it was like I think we saved like 20 grand. So I’m just saying, so just working within the structure and keeping things pretty simple I think tends to be more effective. People love strategic planning. They love thinking really, really deep about stuff. And I’m kind of a mindset like, hey, just set the goal, I’ll agree on generally the course, and then let’s just go do it. And if we need to kind of course correct along the way, that’s fine. But I think people are prone to thinking a lot because it’s a lot easier than doing. And so doing is hard, and doing it right is really hard. And I think in general, a lot of people would just prefer to think and talk. And I just don’t have a lot of time or patience for that. Which makes me either a really effective advocate or a big pain in the rear. Depends on which side of it you’re on. 

Alex Bridgeman: Collin, that’s a good place to close. Thank you for coming on the podcast again. It’s always good to chat with you. This is also our first podcast in person, which is much more fun than over Zoom calls during COVID. So this has been a ton of fun. Glad to see your office too. 

Collin Hathaway: I’m very appreciative of everything you’ve built. I’m really proud of you. I’m really excited for you. I’m excited you start your own journey into buying and building businesses. And for the listeners, Alex is in a nondescript building that’s really janky where I have my Skylight World headquarters. So, thank you for making your way over here.