Lessons from a Decade of Growth and Acquisitions – Janelle Heuton – Co-Founder @ Heiton Partners – Ep.270

(00:00:00) – Intro
(00:01:43) – Janelle Huden’s career journey
(00:02:29) – Transition to GIS Workshop
(00:03:59) – Role evolution and responsibilities
(00:08:06) – Challenges and strategic decisions
(00:11:55) – Growth and acquisitions
(00:28:43) – Private equity and beyond
(00:36:30) – Advice for aspiring leaders
(00:39:18) – Conclusion and farewell

Alex Bridgeman: But Janelle, thank you for being on the podcast. And I’m excited to chat because Joe is really excited. I’ve known Joe for many years and he spoke very highly of you. And I’ve followed his time with gWorks, just meeting him while living in Omaha. And then of course, he’s an investor of mine today. But hearing your story of being at gWorks before he came and when it was GIS Workshop and then staying as the company grew tremendously and had a private equity transition and bought a lot of other companies, that’s really interesting and exciting. I’m looking forward to diving into it. What’s kind of your- how would you describe your time before GIS Workshop in your career?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah, thanks for having me so much, Alex. Before I joined GIS Workshop, which I really joined as sort of a happy accident, a friend of a friend was a CEO of the company and needed some part-time help. So I had joined just as a way to help out really on the sales and marketing side and very quickly became enamored with it. And I think the reason is that it was such a contrast to my time prior to that. So, before I joined GIS Workshop, I had been in a lot of sales and marketing roles, account management roles. I had lived in New York City for a number of years and was working there. I spent a couple of years working in beer sales. That was a lot of fun. But it wasn’t anything that I really found, that I really found my spot, found like I really belonged. So, when I started working at GIS Workshop, the company was really small. It was maybe a dozen employees at the time. That was exciting to me. The product piece, the GIS piece was really exciting to me. I didn’t really even know what GIS was prior to joining that company. And our clients and our mission, all of that, just how the company works, it quickly became clear that I thought, yeah, this is where I can be. I can really make a difference here. I can really stand out here. I really enjoy working here. So, again, contrasting that to before where I was always very successful and I enjoyed my work, it never felt like my permanent home, whereas GIS Workshop did. And I joined in late 2012. So I had a couple of years there before Joe Hayek acquired us at the beginning of 2015, where by that time, by the end of 2014, 2015, I was the COO at the time, but small company, I had my hands in a little bit of everything there, not just sales and marketing but the clients, spent a lot of time kind of face to face the clients, did a lot of scoping for our custom work. We did a lot of custom development at the time, so spending time with clients, understanding what it is they wanted, writing it out, which in hindsight was very much product oriented, and then working with the engineers to build it.

Alex Bridgeman: And you did beer sales before? Was that not very- it doesn’t sound like it was very interesting at least as it sounds to me, like it might be.

Janelle Heuton: It was actually extremely interesting. I worked for a craft beer distributor. So we were the craft beer arm of an AB company and we got to sell craft beer in New York City. And I was one of the first to hold the position of a beverage consultant. So, my job was to go into establishments and everything from Pete’s Tavern down the street to the Four Seasons. And they didn’t sell craft beer at the time. This was many, many years ago, Alex. So craft beer wasn’t what it is now. And train them on what craft beer was and help them design a menu to incorporate it, beer tastings. And it was- got to meet a lot of brewers and brewmasters. And it was a lot of fun. It was exhausting work, but it was actually a lot of fun.

Alex Bridgeman: So, you had to have like taste, like you had to match for your establishment based on the kind of vibe you’re going for and clientele, like these are the beers that I’d recommend, like you’ll want this one, that one and that one. Is that what…?

Janelle Heuton: Exactly, yep. And it can be where’s the beer from, a country of origin or where in the United States is it from, or what kind of vibe do they want to have at their establishment, or what might pair well with food? So, you can take a lot of directions with it, but it was fun.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. So, I heard sales and product. Is there one that you’ve found yourself enjoying more than the other? Or do they compliment each other in ways that you really like?

Janelle Heuton: Sales and product? I love product. Give me product all day. Before I landed at GIS Workshop, just sales and marketing jobs were the jobs that I found that I could do well at. So I did them, I enjoyed them, but they didn’t ever resonate with me the way product does. Building a product, truly understanding the requirements of what somebody really wants, not just what they think they want, but what they actually want, and then turning that vision into reality, there’s a lot of joy that comes from that for me personally.

Alex Bridgeman: So, when you got to GIS, what were the first product to-do items that you started working on or focusing on? Like what became apparent to you after about a week or two?

Janelle Heuton: Product wasn’t even, the word product or product department didn’t actually exist formally until much, much later when we were gWorks, maybe even six, seven years later. So, the idea of understanding product as a discipline didn’t really occur to me. But what we sold at the time were like web-based GIS products. So, an easy way for anyone without any sort of formalized training to go sit at their computer and look at things in a mapping context. So, it was just very easy to understand because it’s so visual, and people are visual, people understand things when they’re looking at a map. And so that was what was exciting to me, not something I had thought about before, but, oh, this makes sense. This is easy to understand why people want this and why it’s so important, why we have such an important role here for this county or the city to make this available to the general public.

Alex Bridgeman: And then what was it like when Joe bought the company? So, we talk to a lot of CEOs on the podcast who buy companies and we hear their perspective on what the first couple months were like in the business, but rarely from the other side and from the team’s perspective. So, within the team, what was the first couple of months, once Joe joined, what were they like?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah, well, as a super small company, again, less than maybe 15 people, it was a surprise. We all worked really closely with the former CEO and with each other. So, it came as quite a shock. Although I would say very early on, Joe and I clicked in that we had a shared sense of values and sort of ownership and drive. So, it made it easy to work with him from my perspective. And he really came in and I think brought a focus and a leadership to the company. It was really one of the most pivotal points. Like we’ve had several pivotal points of this company, and Joe’s acquisition in 2015 was the first one. And what he brought was a lot more formalized training, having just received his MBA, having his military background. So it kind of took everything up a notch in a much more formal way, but he also brought this sort of vision that was really exciting, something that we hadn’t- we had been going a certain path before and things were good, and you didn’t really realize I think what was missing until this person comes in with a vision that really shaped who we were as a company and our culture and what we could be. So, we became under Joe very laser focused on what we could achieve as a company, which again brought a new excitement and really reinvigorated me.

Alex Bridgeman: How would you describe your role the day that Joe joined? Because he describes you quickly becoming kind of a number two for all time after that, after a certain period of time. So how did that relationship start, and then how did it develop in the years after he joined?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah, that is, I did always see myself as the number two. And I think it was an easy transition, because as the COO of a company, granted a very small company at that time, I was already really in that position of kind of being the right-hand man, if you will, of the CEO and getting to have my hand in lots of different parts of the company. So it was a natural transition with Joe to do that. Again, when he came in with his vision and we learned together. He came in with an academic background. Putting it into practice is a little bit different when you’re actually learning in the trenches. There was a huge amount of growth that happened under Joe. But early on with that vision that just really got me excited, it was easy to go along with it. We like to- I think looking back, it always was an easy fit where Joe is a great visionary and I’m a great integrator. So, if you follow Traction or EOS, there’s the integrator and there’s the visionary. And without really knowing it at the time, that just seemed to click for us. And so, he had this vision, this excitement, and I got to come in and help put it into action. And that drove me. That made me excited, to have somebody that had this amazing thing that was worth fighting for, that was worth building, that was worth working towards. So I think that’s how it just made sense to be the number two. And really over that next decade, what was a 15 person company scaled to 140 people. And we got backed by a top tier PE company along the way. And as the number two, I got to touch every aspect of the business. I got to learn in the trenches and get exposed to the strategy and the business and learn from everybody at the company but learn from Joe’s experience and Joe’s education, but then actually do it firsthand, do the execution piece, understand the impact of the decisions that we made, and that really was probably the best education I could have possibly asked for. That scaling as the scope and span of my involvement and responsibilities continued to expand over that time, I really, I got to touch it all. I built teams from scratch. I built processes from scratch. My focus was always on client experience and then product in a more formalized sense later on, but I did sales, I did marketing, I worked closely with engineering. I really probably wore every hat and did every role in the company during that time, with the exception of engineering. I didn’t write code; nobody wants me to write code. But I did work closely with the engineering team. There wasn’t probably a year even toward the end where I didn’t have some sales on the board. Talking to clients, working with clients, that just sort of naturally happened. And then, of course, through nine acquisitions, I got to learn M&A. I got to be exposed to the sourcing and the due diligence and also the integration of the M&A, which was another amazing experience. Integration both of the people, integration of the product, which is where I think so many companies out there struggle with the integration side. I got to do it over and over again, learning and improving along the way. So, through the course of that time, as the number two, as our company grew, I continued to be pushed. Joe’s a fantastic leader in that he would give the support, but there’s also the pushing and the stretching where the bar is raised a little bit each year so that you have to do better, you have to elevate. And it was really amazing on the job learning. I was in an environment where I could fail forward. We failed. Everybody fails. That’s part of it. But while failing, we were always driving forward, we were always learning. The stakes were never so high that we couldn’t course correct or pivot or do what we needed to do. And that, again, was probably the best education I could have hoped for. So, over the course of that 10 years, at the end of 10 years, we had 20X revenue. Our client base grew by 2000%. And throughout it, we maintained a 98% gross retention rate. So, we were doing so many big things while growing and continuing to maintain our very high standards.

Alex Bridgeman: When I hear Joe bringing a lot of focus, first off, I can visually see that from just knowing Joe, but to me, that means like cutting out and removing things that aren’t important and prioritizing a couple things to focus on. How did you guys prioritize, especially in that first year or two where there’s a big vision, but you’re like farthest from that vision and that feels like there’s a lot to do? How do you prioritize, okay, what are the one foot in front of the other things that we can do now and are going to focus on?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah, early on, the vision, I wouldn’t say was crystal clear day one. It took a little bit of time, a year or two, to really, truly understand the potential of the company and where the growth would be and what we could be to local government. So the first couple of years was a lot of learning for Joe and myself in this new world. We made a very bold strategic move early on, which was to ramp down custom development. Custom development is, it’s almost like an addiction. You have to kind of chase it, and you go out there and you want to win the jobs and you fill out the RFPs and then you have to actually build it. And of course, nothing ever comes in under budget or on time in custom development world. But that was a good chunk of our revenue at the time. So it was a tough decision, but we had to ramp it down so we could become more focused on our SaaS offering. So we did that early on. That was tough, but it was a fantastic decision for the company and allowed us to focus on our two main SaaS offerings at the time. We had one that was really more county-based and we had one that was more city-based. So that’s what we did early on. And we stayed in the world of GIS and mapping. And that’s really, after that couple of years, after that year or two, the vision of what we could be for local government, which is not just a mapping platform or an asset management platform or a visualization platform, that we could actually be the one-stop shop for local government and provide all of their software solutions for all of their needs, so their payroll, their accounting, their utility billing, everything that they need. Another huge transition point for us was the acquisition of a company called Data Technologies in 2019 that had that platform. Now, it was a legacy on-prem platform, but they had the solution. They had a huge number of clients. So this was really a transformational acquisition for us where we could then again hone in our focus even more to say, okay, now we’ve got the clients, now we’ve got the product, we just have to modernize it. So, I would say the first few years from 2015 to 2019 were ramping down that custom development and replacing that revenue with our SaaS offering while we continued to lean into the county and city space on the government side.

Alex Bridgeman: I’d love to hear more about the ramping down of the custom development, because immediately like a bunch of discussions have to happen in that. Your sales team or whoever’s selling has to sell something different now with more of their time. You have to stop doing the RFPs and stop the work that goes into that and the quoting and whatnot. Then you also have to be okay with losing those big chunks of development revenue and that time, like being able to sell your man hours through custom development as… it kind of fills in the gaps. And so, it feels like that one discussion is really like maybe six different discussions that all have to happen. So, like what were those different pulleys that had to be adjusted and pulled to make that happen?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah, really the biggest loss was just the revenue and repositioning our teams. At the time, I was the primary driver, you could call it salesperson, although it was more kind of a solutions architect, working with clients in the area to either complete an RFP and submit it or to scope it out with them. So it significantly changed my time. We repurposed our sales team, and at the time we were usually one or two salespeople, again, very small companies, so we didn’t have to redirect an entire team. But we got to have them focus on the SaaS, which there was plenty of demand for them. So that wasn’t an issue. And then we took our engineering team, which was small, and really focused on the current products that we had. So, we did kind of a 2.0. We revamped and released our… revamped and re-released our revamped county product. We were building a similar product that had a lot of overlapping capabilities, but it was more designed for cities. So we got to take their time and put it into development into our SaaS product. So they still had plenty to do. And then looking at the actual code quality. We stepped up in terms of making sure that we were looking at- looking under the hood, was it architected correctly? Were we measuring code quality issues and improvements over time? So, we had a team that was dedicated to just making the small adjustments that make code more sustainable and maintainable and scalable over time. So that’s how we shifted them. The sales team shifted a bit, and a lot of it was just shifting my time and focus. We had to turn away business, which is probably not a terrible problem to have. But we had people say, hey, you are the company that builds these things, we want you to do this for us. And we had to say, I’m sorry, we just, we don’t do that anymore. This is where we’re focused, and obviously, if possible, give them referrals to other companies so they weren’t completely at a loss for what they needed.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, no kidding. So, going from 15 to 140-ish folks on the team, nine acquisitions, that’s a lot of change despite remaining as the COO through that whole period. So, like on paper, maybe the role looks similar, but that role has to be changing constantly, like the way you’re using your time and focus. Can you talk about maybe were there any distinct phases or time periods within your role? So, within those years and all that happened, were there kind of phases that you could identify looking back on how your role evolved?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah. Those first few years, it was really primarily client-facing. So what would now be considered client success or client experience, we kind of called it account management at the time. But it was first me actually going out and visiting clients and acting as somewhat of an account manager. When you’re a small company, you have to wear all the hats and you don’t necessarily have the resources to bring these people in. So I did a lot of that, time spent on the road, spending time with clients. That’s how sales just naturally became a part of that, really on the upsell cross-sell side of things. So, I would say that was my first real main focus and building up the client success. How are we taking care of our clients? How are we providing support? How are we tracking it? And after the acquisition of Data Tech in 2019, that became all the more important. Because we had doubled our head count and we had significantly more clients. So the focusing on taking care of our clients was more important than ever. So that year or two after that was really also focusing on clients, but instead of just having a couple of resources, we now had entire teams that we had to manage. We had to do a bit of restructuring at the time. Like a lot of small companies with small teams, everybody does everything. So, we had to bring in a bit of process and divide into lanes. Okay, this team’s going to handle inbound support. This team is going to handle the outbound or the implementation. Kind of really bifurcate that. We spent a lot of time on our resources. So having a multi-channel approach to resources because we had so many clients that needed support. Can we get articles and a knowledge base and a learning management system out there so we can really take advantage of that one to many communication. So probably 2019, 2020-ish was really putting process, putting formalized process into place, hiring people and making sure that we’re providing consistent support and consistent interactions so that regardless of who a client interacted with at our company, they had a fantastic experience. So, they weren’t- they were going from what I need to call this specific person to what I need to call gWorks. And I know I’m going to have a great experience with the company, regardless of who I speak to. So, implementing metrics, tracking things, things that the team really over time embraced because it gave them clarity on what they needed to do. Like any position, defining what does success look like? What do we expect of you? Gave them, okay, now I know what to do. When I come in to sit and do my job, I can do it really well. So that was the client success real focus, while continuing to talk to clients, what’s going well, what’s not going well. During that time, we were also doing a lot of client interaction, interviews, surveys, focus groups, spending time validating what we thought we wanted to do, which is revamp this legacy solution and build a modern cloud-based cloud native solution. So we wanted to validate that with clients. So we did a lot of that in those 2019, 2020 years as well. And as we did that, it gave us exactly what we needed to confirm, yes, this is the direction we need to go. We are going to rebuild this thing. So that was a transition really while I was still doing the client success and client experience side into a more formalized product role. So, as you can see, from 2015 to now, the depth and the breadth of what our product is is also becoming more complex, along with the complexities of the company and the team. So, learning how to do product, learning how to start from scratch, how do we even build this thing? And for a large part of time there, it was really just me doing the role, being a product manager and building requirements and working with a team of engineers. And then we were able to build out a product team over time as well. So, after that, that period of time where I’m shifting to product, that is really where I spent the last part of my career at gWorks as the chief product officer. So I was still overseeing the client experience team and working closely with them. But product became my focus because this was absolutely monumental for us to create a cloud native solution for local government that nobody in our space was really doing. There were companies doing it upstream of us, much, much larger clients than what we focused on, so that we could build this modern offering for our clients at our level of local government was really another huge inflection point for us as a company. And that’s what I spent the last few years of my time doing to completion and then rolling that out to our client base.

Alex Bridgeman: Was the move to the cloud also a way to integrate some of the other software systems that you’d acquired? I was kind of curious about that for software acquisitions, where the product they’re using is a giant program that may not work super well with a different program that’s written by other people and for different purposes. How did you think about integrating them? And maybe how did the cloud accelerate or help that in some way?

Janelle Heuton: Absolutely. So I would say it did help accelerate that, but it also informed the type of acquisitions that we wanted to do and that we did do. So, at the time, we were looking at competitors in the same space who, much like that acquisition of Data Tech, had a legacy platform. Now, integrating legacy platforms was not something that we were interested in doing. It’s very difficult and it’s very cumbersome. But acquiring a client base, a company that has a client base that has a similar product offering, we knew that by building the cloud-based version, we can build it, we have the opportunity to take the lessons learned from the last 30, 40 years of software. What do people like? What do people not like? What do people wish that it did that it doesn’t do? That was informed by our clients. So we knew that if we built this, what is really an ERP system for local government, that it will meet the needs of these government clients. So by acquiring companies like those that we did acquire during that time that had those legacy platforms, it was a perfect path to retiring that legacy platform, migrating the clients to the cloud, knowing that we’ve built this very robust, very modern system for them to operate the local government on. So, it worked great for the types of regional competitive companies that we were acquiring at the time.

Alex Bridgeman: And so then walk us through going through the private equity sale and then to Heiton Partners, which is, of course, the focus for you and Joe now and all that that’s entailed.

Janelle Heuton: So that acquisition by private equity, BV Investments, was another huge pivotal point for us in 2022. So, whereas we had been operating, I had thought, at a high level and at a very fast speed, maybe a sprint speed before with the drive and the excitement, we were still largely under the radar and really recognized regionally, but we were chugging along in our area. The investment by PE was a change in that. Now we’re in the big leagues. For all of us as a company, but as individuals, all of a sudden, the stakes are higher, the bar is higher. There’s just more on the line. So that causes more of a… If anything, I think I probably push myself harder than anyone to drive and to meet that bar. We had resources available to us that we didn’t before. We had always been very scrappy and I think it’s just that was in our DNA to be scrappy, to operate with kind of a startup mentality, although we had been around for quite some time. So now we have resources to build out the team. We have resources to build out our leadership team and get other folks to help manage what had become a fairly large team at that point, which was wonderful. And we had resources to increase our development speed. So rather than developing one thing at a time, we were able to parallelize the development, which meant, in ramping up outsourced development, it meant bringing in more folks internally. So overall that was, I would say it was an amazing education. It was a great experience. There was a lot more involvement in the board and even more strategic decision-making. We had lofty goals. I think we fought really hard to achieve as many of those goals as we could. I’m really proud of what we did in the time since that acquisition. And I’m excited to see what the company continues to do.

Alex Bridgeman: Let’s talk about Heiton too. So what’s the transition like now you guys went from 50 to 140 people to now just you and Joe and hopefully many companies to come?

Janelle Heuton: Yeah, in a way, it’s almost like back to where we started. When I left the company, gWorks, at the time it was the right move for me to step away and let the next team of leaders bring the company to the next level. There are- most leaders don’t go through the entire evolution of a company from startup to being an established company. There are different phases. And I think it’s very rare for a leader to cross even more than one or two of those phases. I feel really proud that I did go through several of those phases. And after some time having gone from being really just in the trenches to growing as quickly as we did, it became very clear that I was a bottleneck for a lot of folks at the company, having been there as long as I had been there, knowing the things that I knew. So, it was time to step away. And as I had reflected back on the last decade of my time, there was an opportunity available to me that 10 years ago, I didn’t even know existed. And that is the whole entrepreneurship through acquisition search world. That’s how Joe had acquired GIS Workshop at the time. And so I had the opportunity over the last decade to learn a lot about that world. And whereas most folks take a traditional path to that role, where they get their MBA, maybe the school they go to has some sort of ETA program, and they’re in the community, my path was growing through a scaling company, was operating a company and being on the front lines and learning every piece of the business and doing every role. So as I thought about what I wanted to do next, I was thinking of doing a self-funded search and putting that to practice. And after I had left and met with Joe, telling him what I was thinking about doing, he and I obviously worked together very closely for the last decade, sharing that I wanted to go into this world of being more of an entrepreneur and investor, we traded some ideas and it quickly became clear that we should just join forces and do a self-funded holding company, which is how Heiton Partners came to be. So, we get to take all of the lessons that we learned at gWorks through the building of the company, the acquisitions of these kind of small companies, founder-led companies, and preserving and growing on their legacy, we got to take all these lessons and we get to apply them now to our own portfolio of companies. And that is extremely exciting to me because that was probably looking back, one of the most fun things and most rewarding things that I got to be a part of. So now looking at building out our own portfolio of businesses, looking at the profitable enduring businesses and preserving the legacy and really focusing on the next generation of leaders and growing those leaders and building them out so that they can do what we got to do 10 years ago. And that’s really the goal of Heiton Partners. Now we’re early on, we’re not very far into this, but we’re really going to repeat some of the same things we did, which is focus on making businesses great over as long a period of time as it takes.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. You’re easily one of the top five most experienced searchers to have gone out and done something like this, which is exciting to me. And yeah, you’ve done lots of change management, the company’s grown, you’ve done tons of acquisitions, you’ve worked with boards and investors and all this other stuff. So, you seem quite well prepared for it. Is there anything you’re the most excited to learn in this phase of your career?

Janelle Heuton: That’s a great question. I think it will be different. What we do now is going to be different. Whereas before it was focusing on a single company and developing the strategy for that company and taking it as far as possible, pushing myself, pushing my team, pushing us as far as possible, but it was still very much execution focused. We were still in the seats doing the work. This next phase, I’m most excited about getting to help others do that same thing, so help mentor the leaders that I hope can learn from the lessons I learned, some of the mistakes that I made. So, getting to really have that influence, not just on one single company, but on multiple companies. So, the impact is that much greater on the leaders and their experience, the companies, the people who work at the companies and their families, and the clients. So, getting to, I think, go up a level where it’s less- it’s very minimally execution focused where it’s a lot more strategic, I am most excited about that piece.

Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I imagine as you meet a lot of other owners, they’re going to be excited to see similar stories as you. Like if I’m a CEO of a company that you bought and I’m asking about identifying, like how do I identify other Janelles in my company, how do I identify, encourage, and develop these young Janelles who are growing and developing into greater leaders in the company, what are some kind of initial pointers that you might give me to help find those people?

Janelle Heuton: In my experience, Alex, over my career, there are things that can be taught and there are things that cannot be taught. And looking for people that have probably traits and the right mindset over experience or book learning I think is key. Looking for somebody that really has that drive, has that sense of ownership. Certainly I know I did. Everything that I did over my career, I felt like I owned it. I think somebody that has the curiosity, there’s the grit, the persistence, not giving up, and the ability to be scrappy, those are things that I’ve looked for. And I think having those traits and having that mindset, those aren’t things that you can teach. If you can find the person that has those things, which if you’ve worked with somebody for any length of time, I think it’s probably pretty apparent whether they have the right traits or not, then you can teach them. As long as they’re coachable, that’s another really important trait. As long as they’re coachable, you can coach them. You give them room to learn. You give them room to make mistakes. Failing forward, just like I did. But my advice to anybody would be to get the person who has those innate things that you cannot teach and then build the foundation on there with whatever needs to be taught, making sure that you are setting expectations and being very clear on what it is that you want from them and what it is that success looks like in that role.

Alex Bridgeman: Is there any other advice you might give a first time CEO or young CEO based on your experience?

Janelle Heuton: I would say that as a CEO, it’s very important to make decisions. That sounds obvious, I think, but being decisive. You have to make decisions without very many data points in some cases, in most cases. You can’t wait for all of the information. You can’t wait for every single data point and have analysis paralysis. I think it’s really important that you collect what you can collect, you get the feedback, and you weigh the opinions of people that matter, but that you just act. You have to have a bias for action. And as long as it’s not maybe a one-way door where you can’t back out of that action, you can always pivot. You can always course correct. But you need to just be decisive and you need to act and you need to follow through, and then you can learn and then you can adjust and course correct as needed.

Alex Bridgeman: I love that. Janelle, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. This has been a ton of fun. I’m really excited to get to continue following you and Joe and chat more and hopefully come to Omaha at some point in the future. There’s plenty of reasons to go. So, I’m excited to see you guys soon.

Janelle Heuton: That would be great. Thank you so much for having me, Alex.