How He Built a 2.5M-Follower Media Machine with Chris Koerner (#420)

Summary

POWERS Podcast with Chris Powers

Episode #420 — How He Built a 2.5M-Follower Media Machine with Chris Koerner

Date: June 23, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Chris Powers sits down with Chris Koerner, the mastermind behind one of the largest business-focused media machines on the internet, boasting 2.5 million followers and billions of views across multiple platforms. Koerner shares how he built his media empire, his strategies for growth, innovations in business media, the mechanics behind his viral content, and the formative experiences—from humble beginnings to missionary work—that shaped his drive and outlook. The conversation is rich with tactical advice and candid reflections, making it both actionable and deeply human.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Origin Story: Scrappy Beginnings and First Wins

• Grit After Setback: Koerner recounts being "shut down" on Facebook Reels due to a false copyright strike, losing $30k/month in income overnight. He used this setback as fuel, immediately creating and selling a no-frills knowledge product that netted him $100k in a month, sourced solely through his newsletter.
  • Quote: “I ran home and I sat down on my computer...I sent an email and I had made 100 grand by the end of the month in net profit.” (00:04, 14:17)
• Business as a Lens: Even before his media business, Koerner saw every opportunity—fruit trees, side gigs, everything—as a potential business, which he describes as “a sickness. I look at everything that way.” (05:39)

Social Media Growth Strategy

• Platform-Specific Insights:
  • Started on Twitter, hitting 50k followers before launching his podcast.
  • Learned early: "You can't really bring people across platforms." (01:40)
• Content Experimentation: The original podcast concept—a business call-in show akin to Dave Ramsey—didn’t scale as hoped but pivoted to deep dives into business founders and “idea breakdowns.” This shift, and especially the move to short-form video, were key.
• Short-Form Video Unlock:
  • The real inflection point: short-form, “green screen” commentary videos on Instagram, YouTube Shorts, TikTok, and Facebook Reels.
  • System: Finds or is sent interesting clips, records “one take” commentary, bulk uploads to editors, leading to massive viral reach.
  • Quote: "In an hour I could film like 30 videos. And those 30 videos would get 30 million views in an hour of my time." (03:49)
• Tactical Repurposing: Exploited Facebook Reels' oversupply of audience and undersupply of creators to earn significantly more than on other platforms – until a platform policy blip ended the run.
• Automation & Team: Heavy focus on operational efficiency and a “two pizzas” team principle (max 10–15 people, never aiming to be a billionaire or scale linearly with headcount). (17:11)

Funnels, Metrics, & Platforms

• Top to Bottom Funnel:
  • Short-form for initial reach but explicitly to drive users to long-form platforms (YouTube, audio podcast, newsletter).
  • Quote: “My average short form video gets viewed for like 22 seconds and my average long form video gets viewed for nine minutes. That is like a directly attributable score to trust.” (08:02)
  • Trust and depth, not viral reach, is the ultimate goal. "I have 20x more trust with people that watch me for 10 minutes than people that watch for 30 seconds." (08:02)
• Audio Is King: Most loyal audience is audio podcast listeners—they develop habits around shows, are least distracted, and thus most valuable over time. All episodes built trunk-first as audio content. (09:42)
• Real-Time Feedback: Instagram is invaluable for live polling and product feedback, as well as recruiting. Also recounted how a family with a huge YouTube following built a $100MM haircare brand leveraging Instagram polls to crowdsource product features. (10:47)
• Revenue Streams:
  • No rush to launch dozens of products—Koerner only launches full businesses he's passionate about, and typically uses his audience to validate and launch quickly.

The Viral Dollar Lemonade & Banana Stand Moment

• Direct Inspiration to Business Creation: Koerner’s videos have spawned multiple businesses, e.g., a lemonade stand owner (adult!) profited $250k/year, then, inspired by Koerner’s banana stand video, added bananas and netted an extra $18k at a festival.
  • Quote: “He just seen my videos and he's like, yeah, I can sell frozen bananas. He'd never done it, which is exactly what I teach people to do. Like, just fake it till you make it.” (35:26)
• Realizes his impact, but laments the low “conversion rate”—out of 2B+ views, maybe a couple hundred people have directly told him they started a business due to his influence. (39:09)

Philosophy, Motivation & Human Behavior

• Pride, Action, & Rock Bottom: Koerner reflects that most people need their own “rock bottom” before taking action, and that ego/pride or inertia keeps people from pursuing even obvious, low-barrier-to-entry opportunities. (37:37)
• Mission Work and Lessons:
  • LDS Church mission in Hungary at age 19, cold-calling (door-to-door) “selling religion”—the “hardest sale in the world.”
    • Knocked on ~25,000 doors, resulting in 11 baptisms (above average for his area, where some missionaries got zero).
    • Describes the experience as ultimately being more about self-growth and building persistence than “efficiency” in soul-winning:
      • Quote: “It took me a while to kind of realize that…the inefficiency was the thing that really changed me, just the grind.” (65:37)
    • Recalls the anxiety and regular fear (“silently praying they wouldn’t answer the door”), and the immense value of repeatedly doing hard things. (00:27, 48:43)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

Viral Growth & Content

• On Short Form:

  “In an hour I could film like 30 videos. And those 30 videos would get 30 million views in an hour of my time.”
  — Chris Koerner (03:49)

• Analytics Mindset:

  “My average short form video gets viewed for like 22 seconds and my average long form video gets viewed for nine minutes…That’s…a directly attributable score to trust.”
  — Chris Koerner (08:02)

• On Motivation & Action:

  “Unless people's pride is smaller than the amount in their bank account, they're just not gonna do anything. It's like there's no excuses anymore. You don’t need money to start a business. All the ideas are out there. We have AI, they just don't do it. The secret is they just need to do it.”
  — Chris Koerner (37:37)

On Team, Ops, AI

• “Never a company bigger than two pizzas.” (17:17)
• Stresses hiring moldable, eager-to-learn (often younger) team members over senior “gray hairs”—team learns on the job and is incentivized via revenue share (especially the YouTube strategist at 10% of all YouTube rev). (26:02, 27:05)
• Details their factory-like content production pipeline: idea vetting, bulk recording, sequential editorial checks, and a strong data-driven packaging focus. (23:36)

Inspirational and Human Moments

• Mission Field Grit & Lessons
  • “You were rejected 24,989 times.” — Chris Powers (00:00)
  • “Just doing something you don't want to do over and over…will rewire who you are. It's so valuable.” — Chris Koerner (49:52)
  • “One person letting me in was more exhilarating than the thousand people rejecting me.” (68:01)
• On Influence:
  • “My mission is for people to start businesses that were inspired by something they saw from me.” (33:53)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [00:04, 14:17, 15:48] — Lemon into lemonade: losing Facebook income, pivoting to direct selling knowledge products, $100k in a month
• [01:40-03:38] — The social media shift: from Twitter to podcast to shorts, inflection point
• [03:49-05:33] — Step-by-step viral short-form workflow
• [06:27-07:40] — Why focus on media business as the main vehicle
• [08:02-09:12] — Why converting short-form to long-form is everything (trust metric, funnel)
• [09:42-10:15] — Audio podcast as the gold standard for loyalty
• [10:47-12:06] — Using Insta stories for product/feature feedback and even hiring
• [17:11-19:13] — Team design, “two pizzas” rule, leveraging AI
• [19:58-22:20] — Behind the scenes: viral DoorDash experiment, small tweaks = big outcomes
• [23:36-24:46] — Content idea vetting and workflow, quality control
• [27:59-30:24] — YouTube strategy: splitting shorts and longs for algorithm success
• [33:53-36:56] — True mission: inspiring real-world business action, banana stand story
• [37:37-39:09] — Action, pride, low conversion from viewers to doers
• [40:03-50:00] — LDS mission deep dive (self-reliance, rejection, “door-to-door” entrepreneurial baptism)

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Flow & Tone

The episode is candid, high-energy, and loaded with actionable insights—delivered in Koerner’s signature “just go do the thing” call-to-action style. He balances tactical wisdom with personal vulnerability, and the conversation frequently pivots from technical detail to foundational human motivation. Both Chris Powers and Koerner keep the dialog relatable and often funny, grounding grand achievements in daily hustle and humility.

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Summary for New Listeners

This is a masterclass on media entrepreneurship, content virality, and personal resilience—woven through the lens of one builder’s journey from scrappy, door-knocking missionary to influencer with millions of followers and real impact in the entrepreneurial world. If you want to understand what it takes to scale an audience, create viral content, build lean teams, and—most importantly—inspire people to act, this conversation is invaluable.

Transcript

[Chris Powers]

You were rejected 24,989 times.

[Chris]

I couldn't do anything about it. They shut me down. That income was cut off overnight. I thought, okay, how could I turn this lemon into lemonade? Like, how could I play like a David and Goliath story? And so I ran home and I sat down on my computer. Then I sent an email and I had made 100 grand by the end of the month in net profit. Just do a little more and you can influence how much money you make.

[Chris Powers]

You're going to a country you've never been and you are going to sell religion.

[Chris]

And I distinctly remember knocking and, like, silently praying that they wouldn't answer.

[Chris Powers]

Did anybody ever, like, get violent?

[Chris]

Couple times.

[Chris Powers]

Does anybody ever die? It's crazy because it's. I mean, again, I don't use TikTok or anything else, but it seems to be the biggest social network with the most. The highest concentration of the world's most, like, elite people on it whose attention is the most valuable. Yeah, like one of Bill Ackman's hours on Twitter or something is worth a gajillion hours of some random on TikTok.

[Chris]

Yeah, that's true. I don't know, man.

[Chris Powers]

It's an interesting time.

[Chris]

It is.

[Chris Powers]

Well, maybe we even just start there. I think we met because of social media. Yeah, but we met Twitter, and for a long time you were just kind of on it but not really taking it seriously. And then like, what, two years ago you took it. Started taking it really seriously. And now you have one of the largest business podcasts, but kind of business. Media. Business, media businesses. On the topic of business in the country, what was the shift? What happened, man?

[Chris]

I mean, I started tweeting four or five years ago about real estate because everyone, like, there was strip mall guy, you, self storage guy. And I'm like, I'm doing mobile home parks. There's no mobile home park, guys. So I started from zero there, and then I got to like 50,000 followers. And then like every other white male in America, I'm like, I should start a podcast, you know? But I knew going into it how hard they were to grow. There's no discoverability. And so I'm like, okay, Chris, like, set your expectations. Let's do a 10 episode test to see if A, you like this, B, it's growing because you can't really bring 50,000 Twitter followers anywhere else. You can't really bring people across platforms. It doesn't work like that. So I didn't really expect those 50,000 people to convert more than 1%, and they didn't. So I launched my podcast and the original thesis was to be like Dave Ramsey, but for business owners, call in show because I do well there, because I've had so much, like broad experience, I can answer stuff on the fly. So I did that. And it was fun, but it wasn't really the concept that people wanted because these questions and answers only applied to a small percentage of people. It wasn't broad enough. So I did 10 episodes. It was growing. But I pivoted the format to either A, cover a lot of broad business ideas in one episode, or B, go really deep on one business idea or one business with the founder in one episode. So I started that a little over two years ago. And the big inflection point was when I started posting short form videos, which I never wanted to do. I'm an introvert. I didn't want to ever do that. It just seemed cringe. But I'm like, let's just do this to see if it can grow the podcast. And it grew the podcast. Okay. But I started getting 10, 50, 100 million views a month on Instagram, YouTube shorts and TikTok and Facebook reels just from me featuring business ideas and giving my take on it.

[Chris Powers]

What did you figure out? What was the unlock in shorts? Cause they're ripping. Is it the content itself, which is great, or is there a format? Like, how did you crack that code?

[Chris]

Just treating it like any other business. You've got to have a good hook and you've got to have a good reason for people to watch to the end. And what my format was at the time is I would find people doing something interesting on Instagram might not have been a business, maybe just a craft or a hobby. And my brain sees everything as a business. So whether I was looking at someone else's video that was a business or not, I would green screen my face over it and say, here's why this is interesting. Here's how you can monetize this. Here's what they're like. Here's how I would make money out of this random thing I'm seeing on Instagram. Sometimes it's an overt business, sometimes not. And I think that was interesting at the time. That was kind of unique. And it worked because it's something that I could just. I could sit down and scroll Instagram, see a video, I still can, and not watch the whole thing, but immediately just, you know, open to my phone, take a video. One take, and in an hour I could film like 30 videos. And those 30 videos would get 30 million views in an hour of my time. I'd send them to my editor, they would take 5, 10 minutes to edit, and they would just go viral.

[Chris Powers]

So you would send the original Instagram video or reel, the video you took that you wanted on top of it, and they would combine it together, send it back, and you would put that out.

[Chris]

I had like an Instagram group chat with my team and I'd see one that's interesting. I'd send it to the group chat with no context, and then I would open up my camera app and just take a quick video and I'd do like 20 of those in one take. And then I'd upload all 20 of the raw videos to a Google Drive folder that's shared with the same team. And then they would just know chronologically, okay, let's match up these with these. And they're like, all right, he's talking about pressure washing. This is a pressure washing business. And they would edit everything and post it.

[Chris Powers]

For me, was the purpose originally to just build an online, a big online following, or did you think about it as a business from day one?

[Chris]

I think about everything as a business. Like, I'm planting fruit trees in my backyard and it's like, how can I. I sell these peaches $3 a pound, like it's a sickness. Right. I don't turn everything into a business, but I look at it that way.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

So I've always approached it like. Like a business.

[Chris Powers]

Okay. When we talked last week, a couple weeks ago, you said, I just said, of all the opportunities that you have, and you have this remarkable ability to see, like you said, everything is a business. Understand? It kind of. You can kind of strip it down to its bare pieces. I just said, well, what are you going to work on? And you said, I think this media business is the thing I want to work on. Okay, so you go from making a bunch of great content, growing a following, but why have you chosen to make this the thing to work on in everything that you could work on?

[Chris]

Because with AI being where it is, building a business has never been easier, more frictionless, more affordable, which means there's gonna be so many more businesses out there, so much more demand for attention, and yet at the same time, attention has never been harder. Marketing and distribution has never been harder. That's gonna be the moat. That's gonna be what companies struggle to find. Whereas before it was like, we wanna start a software business, let's hire a team, let's Go to Y Combinator, hopefully raise some money. That's all gone. Like it could be gone. It's not, but like theoretically it's heading in that direction. But eyeballs is the hard part now. I mean especially with AI generated content that's actually quite compelling and realistic. It has never been harder to get eyeballs and it will only get harder. And I have that, I have the luxury of having that and I enjoy it and I happen to like starting businesses and so the content could be the foundation that I launch anything off of. Even though I don't really have like a specific plan. Like this is my ten year plan. I'm going to launch this business with my content and billion dollar, like I don't even know. I'm just having fun.

[Chris Powers]

Do you know where you want to get the media business to or you just want to keep having fun with it and growing it? Like what do you want it to look like?

[Chris]

I just, I don't want to stay stagnant. Honestly. That is my only goal is just to keep growing and to keep tweaking and iterating and, and just growing my numbers. Like the number of people that watch my long form videos or listen to my long form episodes, that's like my KPI.

[Chris Powers]

Really?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

So you want to convert short form to long form, why?

[Chris]

Because my average short form video gets viewed for like 22 seconds and my average long form video gets viewed for nine minutes. That is like a directly attributable score to trust. Okay, so If I have 100 million views in a month, that sounds really impressive. But really that's like 10 million unique people maybe watching, you know, 10 of my videos and most of them see a video once for 22 seconds and they'll never see me again. But if I can somehow get someone to watch 10 of my videos, like binge it, then they're more likely to go to my YouTube channel and watch a 60 minute video. And on average they'll watch about 9 to 10 minutes of that. The difference between a 9 minute viewer and, and a 22 second viewer. I mean let's say it's a 10 minute viewer. That's like what, 600 seconds? So let's say 30 seconds. So it's like 20x, is that right? 20x. I have 20x more trust with people that watch me for 10 minutes than people that watch me for 30 seconds. So I don't get much from the shorts views at all. I just want to drive them to the long.

[Chris Powers]

So it's purely just a lead gen yeah, so what?

[Chris]

I don't even know.

[Chris Powers]

Hopefully they're long form podcast newsletter.

[Chris]

Yeah. Yep. Long form YouTube, long form podcast newsletter. That's like middle of funnel.

[Chris Powers]

Yep.

[Chris]

And then bottom of funnel is I have a couple communities and things here and there, but I don't, I don't

[Chris Powers]

even know yet what channels matter the most to you.

[Chris]

Is it YouTube audio? Yeah, audio.

[Chris Powers]

Why?

[Chris]

I think it's the most loyal subscriber, follower, the most engaged, the most loyal. Like we have habits around our audio podcast. Right. If I mow the lawn, I'm gonna turn on this one, this one, or this one. And if I have no new episodes on any of those three, I'm just gonna listen to my thoughts. Heaven forbid, right? If I'm on a road trip, Ali,

[Chris Powers]

I don't wanna have to do that.

[Chris]

I know, I know. It's just, it's YouTube. We're actually more likely to be distracted. Even though it's audio and video, we've got it in another tab. We're kind of finicky. There's a lot of distractions on the Internet.

[Chris Powers]

Right.

[Chris]

We're gonna click away. But audio, I'm doing the dishes. I'm a captive audience. And we just get really loyal to people that we listen to over and over. And so it just creates a higher quality subscriber. So we make episodes for audio first and then YouTube will follow. Like if we make it really good for audio, then it's gonna do well on video as well.

[Chris Powers]

Do you think about Instagram the same way as shorts? Like, is Instagram just another way to keep showing people something, or do you think about it generating a different type of user?

[Chris]

Instagram hopefully pushes people to long form audio and video, but it's also really good for posting polls to my Instagram stories. Like if I'm launching a website and I want to know what font to use, what font do you like? Ba ba ba ba boom. I go with that one. I have a friend that has a family with a bunch of YouTubers. They've got tens of millions of, of subscribers across like a dozen channels. He lives right down the road from me. And they launched a hair care brand in like Target Walmart. I think it's a nine figure business. And for years their daughter, his daughters would post stories of what color tone do you like? What is missing from your shampoo? What font do you. And just all these. And they didn't even know what they were answering, but they would answer honestly. And so when it came time to launch their product, they knew exactly what their customers wanted. And so when they hit shelves on Walmart and Target, they were like, hey, you guys built this product. Actually we listened to what you wanted, you built it. And Walmart had expectations for their sales. And Target, they had done stuff with influencers before and they just knocked it out of the park because they asked everyone what they wanted. So Instagram is amazing for getting real time feedback. Or if I'm hiring, I'll just post a story with a link to a Typeform. It's invaluable for doing stuff like that. Other than that, it's just top of funnel to the long form.

[Chris Powers]

Do you have any business ideas for what? Like have you launched a business because of the media company yet? Or you just. And is it something that you can't do 10 of these a year? It's something that you want to be a great thing. So how do you decide what you're going to launch?

[Chris]

Yeah, Facebook is actually kind of like a secret weapon. Facebook is paying creators now, whereas Meta is not paying creators. On Instagram they do for carousels and a couple like things here and there, but nobody, but virtually aside from like beta programs, nobody gets paid for reels on Instagram. But on Facebook you get paid a lot for reels. And that's because creators are all focused on Instagram. There's more creators than they need on Instagram. But Facebook's, they still have like over a billion daily active users, but creators have moved on from Facebook. So there's this supply and demand imbalance. And so Facebook is paying people 15 to 30 cents per thousand views, which is more than YouTube for reels short form videos because all they have is AI slop and they just have crap because there's not enough good content, right? So at one point I was making 25 to 35 grand a month from Facebook reels, really, just from recycling reels. I was posting everywhere, right? No effort. Okay? My cost basis on that 30 grand a month was like two grand, one grand, whatever, right? And so it was significant. But they shut me, they shut me down. One day I got a copyright strike that was false. There's no appeal process. And so I couldn't do anything about it. I couldn't reach a human or anything. They shut me down. That income was cut off overnight. And so I thought, okay, how could I turn this lemon into lemonade? How could I play a David and Goliath story? How could I exploit this in a good way to make money in a different way? And so I was out on a run One day, it was in January, it was freezing and my cheeks were cold and I was like, oh my gosh. I did consulting for a guy like two years ago and he wanted to grow an audience. And I never do consulting. I don't like one to one stuff. But I made an exception and I said, only if I can record it and if you pay me a lot of money. And he's like, okay, done.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah, done.

[Chris]

So I recorded everything and it was really tactical, like, exactly how to go viral, how to do this on this platform, how to make it for TikTok. And it was all just in a Google Drive that no one had ever seen but him. And so I was out on this run, I was like, what if I just sell a link to that Google Drive, how to go viral or whatever. And so I ran home and I sat down on my computer and then I was like, what if I record? What if I document the process of launching this? I don't just launch it, I document launching it. And so I hit, I sit down on my computer and this is on YouTube right now. It's, I've got gloves on, my cheeks are red, I have like a Patagonia coat on. And I'm like, I just had this idea, I'm going to launch this business, yada yada. And I hit record. And I just, I did some email campaigns and I sent an email and I had made a hundred grand by the end of the month in net profit. I just sent, I sold a link to a Google Drive. No website, just a stripe link, auto direct to a Google Drive. A hundred grand just to my newsletter. I didn't post about it on Twitter, Instagram, anywhere, only to my newsletter. So like that's the power of having the audience.

[Chris Powers]

And real quick, Facebook never reinstated you.

[Chris]

They did four days ago.

[Chris Powers]

So how long were you down?

[Chris]

I mean, this was four months.

[Chris Powers]

So you come back from that run, you go, you have a great setup at your desk, you press record, you make a video saying, this is the process of how I documented something about going viral. If you want to access to that virality information, pay right here. And you let it, you let it out.

[Chris]

So I did a couple things at once. The framework of my video was Facebook sucks. They shut me down without cause. I'm going to turn it into a business. Here's how to do this. And then I wanted to make it applicable to more people. So I was like, everyone has an unfair advantage, right? Everyone has access to something. Like even if you know how to put Legos together, In an interesting way, thanks to the Internet, everyone has a unique take on something. Maybe it's a Google Drive link, maybe it's something, maybe it's something in your head you just need to get out. Anyone can sell their knowledge to someone if you have distribution. So I'm going to sell a Google Drive link live. I'm going to show you exactly how I do it, how I ab test emails and everything. So I wasn't selling the Google Drive link in the long form video. I was selling it to my newsletter and then documenting that in the video. But then of course in the video I linked to it and I sold it from there as well. I'm like, by the way, you've already invested an hour in me. If you want to buy this, then here's the link. So I made a hundred grand from selling it to my newsletter. And then because that video is like still live and people view it every day, every hour I get a few thousand a month just residually for more people buying that Google Drive link.

[Chris Powers]

What does your team look like? Have you. What have you learned along the way? Really works.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

And what doesn't work? And, and then what's the end state of what does a team look like today for you?

[Chris]

Yeah. So Jeff Bezos has his two pizza principle. Have you heard of that? Yeah, yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Never a team bigger than two pizzas.

[Chris]

Yeah. My principle is never a company bigger than two pizzas.

[Chris Powers]

Okay.

[Chris]

I just, I don't, I'm not good at that. I don't want to become good at that. I'm not trying to become a billionaire. I want a small group of 10, call it five to 15 people. That is my core team. And now with AI, if I do want to keep growing, it's like, all right, we need to use AI to do this. I don't want to hire more people. So it's about 10 people. I've got a chief of staff that's my right hand man for everything. He knows how to vibe code and he knows a good bit about a lot of. And then I have a producer that helps with my in person filming. And then I have another guy named Kevin, he helps with my Twitter account and he helps hunt ideas down. So my producer and Kevin, they're on a two person team and they go find interesting people for me to feature. So Kamal, Kevin, Molly. And then I have two or three virtual assistants that edit short form videos. I have a YouTube strategist named Simon who packages my thumbnails and titles and helps with editing and he's Brilliant. And then I have a sponsorship manager who manages like sponsorships with, you know, high level companies like that beehive. And then I have a calendar manager. She manages like all right, on June 17th this video is going live and it has these three call to actions and this sponsored mid role. She manages my calendar and when everything should come out. And then I have Austin and he is my short form analyst and he goes and really digs into the numbers of my shorts and tries to make them better. So there's like eight or nine people.

[Chris Powers]

And do they all work directly for you or are they contractors?

[Chris]

They work directly for me.

[Chris Powers]

Really?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

How many are US based versus overseas?

[Chris]

It's like 2/3 US one.

[Chris Powers]

Really?

[Chris]

Overseas? Really? Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

So that's a pretty healthy team.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Who runs the ops of it all to make like the progression of content through the system. Is that you or is that your chief of staff?

[Chris]

Kind of both of us.

[Chris Powers]

Okay.

[Chris]

Yeah. I'm like, I stick my hands in sometimes, but he kind of owns it more.

[Chris Powers]

And it's pretty much infinitely scalable at this point. Meaning you don't have to add a lot more people to make this better and you don't really need to generate a lot more content to make this better. As your user base grows, you get more views, more views, attract more followers and you just have to make sure the content's good.

[Chris]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

How do you think about innovation on content then? To where you're constantly kind of tinkering one of the best ones you've ever done. And I've watched a lot of them. I thought the door dash thing the other day was unbelievable. Tell that story.

[Chris]

I haven't even published the edited version of that. But I grew up. I don't want to go too long, but I grew up with no food in my house. Pretty poor. And so every time I'm around food, I just like. I'm like a kid. Like I'm still poor. Right. If you put me around free food, like at a conference and it's included, I will overeat. It's a problem. It is. And so I worked at a Pizza hut as a 16 year old just delivering pizzas. And I loved. I was around food. I got to take home free pizza. It was just a vibe. I got to listen to emo music and drive around and I just have these nostalgic memories around it. And so when we were thinking of video ideas, as with my content team, like, what if I saw how much money I can make driving for doordash and I tried to get them to sponsor it because it's just a big ad for them, but they never responded to me. So it's not sponsored at all. But I just wanted to personally try it. And so we just hit record. And So I downloaded DoorDash. I don't even order DoorDash. As a consumer, I don't know anything about it. And within 10 minutes, I was, like, approved in my cybertruck taking orders. And I had my videographer with me. I had a camera here, and I was live streaming as well. And I just had the best time of my life. It was. I was just around food and I was sending, like, funny pictures. I wanted to see if I could influence my tips with messages I sent to the recipients.

[Chris Powers]

Did you?

[Chris]

I did. Cause on DoorDash, you add your tip when you place the order, but then they'll still send you a notification after you get it. And like, hey, did you like it? Rate your driver. And then if you want to add an extra tip, you can, but they don't really push that much because you've already tipped. So I wanted to see, can I get that second tip? How many people give me the second tip if I don't do anything? I don't communicate. And they're Getting notifications from DoorDash when I pick it up. You don't need to communicate. You're not supposed to unless something bad happens. But if I just do the bare minimum, what percentage of the time will I get a second tip versus, Hey, I just picked it up. Hey. Like, this smells really good. Hey, I love falafels. Hey. Just like, goofy things, like me driving, like, goofy smile, like, sending pictures. And it takes like a minute or two. But it went from like, 10%. 10% of the people would just give me a second tip. Cause they were a good person to, like, 50%. So it was the difference between making like 20 an hour and 35 an hour. And it's like, holy crap. Like, just do a little more and you can influence how much money you make.

[Chris Powers]

Was that an idea that you had for a while or did that just come up? You called your producer and you said, let's go do this.

[Chris]

It was very impulsive.

[Chris Powers]

Is that how a lot of these are?

[Chris]

Oh, yeah.

[Chris Powers]

What's the balance of their finding you an idea versus I have an idea.

[Chris]

I prioritize my own ideas.

[Chris Powers]

How many ideas do you need a week? I prioritize my own.

[Chris]

I do.

[Chris Powers]

Don't we all?

[Chris]

Not that I should.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah, right.

[Chris]

But I do. I mean, how Many, like, content ideas. Do I have a week?

[Chris Powers]

Yeah. Like, what does your cadence need to be? What are you currently at? One idea a week, Two ideas a week.

[Chris]

I mean, we publish three long form videos a week, and two of those make it to audio on average. So a lot of our videos aren't a good fit for audio. I'm screen sharing a lot. So we publish audio on Tuesday and Friday no matter what. But then we'll loosely publish three videos a week with two thirds overlap. But some of those, I cover a dozen different business ideas. But most of them, I'm going really deep on one.

[Chris Powers]

Did you figure out how to design this team or was this a blueprint that you had seen somebody else?

[Chris]

I'm just making it up.

[Chris Powers]

You're just figuring it out?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

How does content make its way through the system? Like, what does your factory look like from I just shot something to? It's gonna go out on these dates, at these cadences, et cetera, et cetera.

[Chris]

When it comes to shorts, either my team will send me ideas like, chris, we really think this is a good idea. Film something for it and I'll do it. Or I'll just be swiping Instagram and then I'll feel like it sounds kind of woo woo, right? But I'll just feel inspired. I'm like, oh, this is good. And then for whatever reason, I just get in this groove and every single reel I swipe, I make a video about. Right? 10 swipes, 10 videos. And then I'll just bulk upload all of them, like I explained earlier. So that's for shorts and then for long forms, that's a lot more structured. My team of idea hunters, I call them, they'll go find people, they'll have a pre call with them, they'll vet them. Like, because most of my packaging is like, this guy made 40,000 in his first month, 80,000 in his first six months, whatever. It's always an amount and a timeframe. And I get a lot of crap because people say it's clickbait, but it's only clickbait if the story doesn't match the headline. Right? But it does because we go out and find these people. Like we make. We spend a lot of money finding these people. We don't just say yes to anyone who emails me. In fact, if people email me saying they want to come on, it's a signal. I almost never let people on. If they email me.

[Chris Powers]

Yep.

[Chris]

Cause it's like you have an ulterior motive, you just want to grow Your business, et cetera. So we go out and find people, we have pre calls with them, we look at the receipts and then we'll package it and they'll set it up on my calendar. So I just built out a studio like this in my upstairs and so I'm slowly moving away from virtual to in person. So we'll fly people to my house and I had a producer that I was using that would be there on site, but I've just learned how to do everything myself. So now it's just me. They just show up and like my kids are running around and it's like, welcome to the Kerner house. You want a Celsius? And then we just go upstairs to a studio like this and I get the SD cards and put em in and hit record and make sure the lighting is good. And then we just start talking. And then when we're done, I upload it to our Google Drive and then I just text my team like hey, that one with that guy is uploaded. And then they just run with it and I'll, I'll give them like my opinion on how we should package it. Like, cut out this part. This was a dumb question. This was a dumb answer. Move this segment from here to there. Sometimes they listen to me, sometimes they don't. They don't really need me to say that. They just, they know.

[Chris Powers]

Do they know because they've worked with you long enough or did they know because they already came with that skill before you hired them?

[Chris]

Almost everyone has learned most of what they know about content while working for me. I'm just like, I'm cheap. I've always had. There's been a couple times in my career when I've said, all right, Chris, you need a gray haired CEO for this. We really need to spend up and I have and it's never worked out. And maybe I'm the common denominator and I just don't work well with them. I don't know. But I just do better with people that are young and moldable and I pay them fairly and then I proactively, like aggressively give them raises as they learn. But most of them just learn on the job.

[Chris Powers]

The person that goes and finds ideas and guests for you, they wake up every day and their role is just go find you an idea or find you a guest. Do you pay that person based on like how many ideas they actually bring and guests they bring? Like, how do you incentivize that?

[Chris]

My YouTube strategist makes 10% of everything I make on YouTube and that's just

[Chris Powers]

an easy number because you can just

[Chris]

see the check every day, plus a base. Yeah, but that works beautifully. He is very much incentivized by that. He's ab testing thumbnails and titles and like, that is just perfect. And when the channel's making a hundred, you know, 100 plus grand a month multiple, like he's gonna be. He lives in Serbia. He's making a lot of money, and he deserves every penny.

[Chris Powers]

Right. That's awesome.

[Chris]

Yeah. For my idea hunters. They're stateside, and if they find an idea through our channels, it's just like they make a base. Right. I probably should incentivize them for that. But if they go out and find stuff outside of official channels, then they make 10% of all the YouTube revenue on that video, which could be thousands of dollars, like monthly, like perpetually. Because YouTube is very evergreen. So if something goes viral, it'll probably still be going viral months or years from now.

[Chris Powers]

What's been the growth? It's like zero to. What are you at?

[Chris]

So I launched two years and three months ago. I hit 100,000 subscribers in 10 months. But most of those were subscribers from shorts and then. Which are not good subscribers.

[Chris Powers]

Wait, say that. Say again.

[Chris]

So I used to post originally, I posted my shorts and my longs on the same channel.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And my chief of staff is also a YouTuber. He has half a million subscribers on his own channel.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

He's like very YouTube native. And one day he said, chris, I really think we should start posting shorts on a brand new channel with zero subscribers because the algorithm is cannibalizing itself. Because your shorts aren't clips from your longs. They're standalone clips about business ideas, which is still the same niche, but they don't connect to your longs. And so I'm getting all these views, but YouTube's like, is this a long form guy or short form guy? We don't know. So I was getting all these subscribers, but they were mostly people only subscribing from my shorts. And because of my shorts and to see more shorts, which isn't what I want to lean into. So March of 25, we're like, all right, we will never post another short to this channel. We'll start a brand new channel with zero subscribers. We won't push it. We'll just start pushing everything there. That was like a huge inflection point.

[Chris Powers]

Why? Because everybody that was on the long form just knew. I'm watching long form.

[Chris]

It was more about the algorithm, not about the people. But the algorithm's like, after a month or two, it's like, oh, it's a long form channel. We need to find long form viewers. We need to find higher quality viewers for Chris and push them towards them.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, so go a little deeper on that. You're saying like, it's like you know what the algorithm wants.

[Chris]

No, I don't. But I've seen data points that make me feel confident in a few things.

[Chris Powers]

Okay. And the data was saying, the data

[Chris]

was saying like, my. My long form views were stagnant for a few months.

[Chris Powers]

Right.

[Chris]

And I really think it's because the algorithm was like, is this a long form guy or short form guy? Whereas if I were only posting shorts that were clips from my long form, it would do better. So I started a brand new channel. Now that channel has 150,000 subs. That's all short form, perfectly condensed to that. And my long form channel went from 100 to almost 600,000 subs. But those extra 500,000 are so much more valuable because they all came from long form videos. Whereas my first hundred thousand subscribers, most of them came from short form videos. So that was a big inflection point.

[Chris Powers]

When you're interviewing these people to come on your team, is it pretty much show me the. Especially editors or production people, Is it pretty much show me your work to date, or is there something you can tell even if they don't have a great back catalog of great production that you know they can become one? Or is it usually, here's my portfolio.

[Chris]

I'm pretty good for editors, specifically.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

It's really just looking at their portfolio.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah. And like, do they know a lot of it's about packaging? Do they know the business niche? Have they worked with business creators? Because it's different. Like, you, you have to lead with the numbers. You have to get. We don't talk about backstory in the first 10 minutes. We get right into the meat of it.

[Chris Powers]

But that's your niche.

[Chris]

Yeah, that's my niche. Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

It's kind of like what my first million did a little bit, which is break down businesses.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Is there anybody that. Are there any other business media companies out there that you draw inspiration from where you're like, they've done a great job.

[Chris]

Oh, my first million. I mean, that's been my favorite podcast since it was a podcast. I listened to almost every episode.

[Chris Powers]

Really?

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah. I listened on the way here and it was always like a dream. It's like a. Could I. I wonder if I could Ever be a guest. And I've been on there three times now.

[Chris Powers]

How'd you get on?

[Chris]

They just reached out. Yeah, yeah, we just started overlapping more and more and then it was like, man, I wonder if I could ever be as big as them. And I got bigger than them. Less than two years. So when I go on my first million now, it doesn't really grow my audience at all.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, so on that note right there though, do you collaborate with people on YouTube? Does that have a big impact?

[Chris]

Yeah, it does.

[Chris Powers]

And the common thread here though is there is no, like, hacking your way to a great following. You have to have good content.

[Chris]

Oh, yeah.

[Chris Powers]

It's not like you just like, learn the algorithm can have shitty content and still grow a great channel.

[Chris]

Absolutely not.

[Chris Powers]

So the thing you always stand behind is this is good stuff. Clearly.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah. You can't. If you buy, you can buy subscribers. It does nothing.

[Chris Powers]

It does nothing.

[Chris]

I see channels all the time that have 3 million subscribers and their videos have 300 views.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah. Or like five likes.

[Chris]

Yeah, it. It will actually. It doesn't do nothing. It will. It will shadow ban you from YouTube. You can start putting out good content to real subscribers and it will never go anywhere because they know that you bought fake subscribers.

[Chris Powers]

All right, y' all have heard me talk about better pitch for years on the podcast. I'm super proud of their founder, Nico, who is a great friend of mine. He's one of the best young entrepreneurs I've come across. And in just two years, he's built an incredible company that is now rebranding as collateral partners. And honestly, it makes perfect sense. From single family investment decks to complete brand overhauls, ongoing partnership support, to market research, they deliver institutional grade work that actually moves capital. Think of them as the difference between looking like a startup and operating like an institution. They're really your entire institutional marketing department. The team you wish you had in house but can't justify hiring. Ex Goldman directors who understand your business, ex PE associates who craft your narrative, and world class designers who make it all look effortless. Go check out collateral.com and mention the Powers podcast and they'll give you a complimentary one pager. Enjoy the episode. When you think about growing the business, do you think about it in terms of, like, what would be the North Star metric? Is it the amount of total hours listened to or the amount of followers following?

[Chris]

Like, my mission is for people to start businesses that were inspired by something they saw from me.

[Chris Powers]

Okay. Is that happening?

[Chris]

Oh, yeah. Every day I hear about it.

[Chris Powers]

Tell me the frozen banana story.

[Chris]

Which one?

[Chris Powers]

Well, you posted about a guy the other day, and it was like 10 cents to make these frozen bananas dipped in chocolate. And this guy had his own truck and.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

All right, tell me like a couple stories.

[Chris]

So I was in Balboa Island, California, which is the home of banana stands, right? And we were walking around and I see this banana stand and there's like six on this one street and there's a huge line and I'm like, this would make a good video. And so I get in line and we buy bananas. And I ask the girl, I'm like, how many bananas you sell every day? And I don't remember what she said. It was like a thousand or something. It's like a thousand plus. I'm like, all right, these are $7 each. You even though this is. What is it? San Diego, Newport beach, whatever. Even though your rent in this 500 square foot is probably like $5,000 something egregious. You make that in like three hours. I'm like, okay, why wouldn't people buy frozen chocolate covered bananas in Charleston and anywhere. You don't even need to be near the beach anywhere. So I asked her just like three questions and I, you know, give it to the next person in line. And then I pull out my phone, no professional mic. It was right behind me. And I'm like, look at this frickin banana stand right here. Like, she just told me they sell a thousand bananas a day. These things cost like 30 cents. They dip them in chocolate. Like, why isn't everyone doing this? And I just went like, here's where your unit economics would be. You don't need to be near a beach, but if you are, it's probably even better. Like, we've all been to 38 and all these beach towns. I don't see frozen bananas.

[Chris Powers]

No.

[Chris]

Why wouldn't people be buying them in Destin or Santa Rosa beach when they're buying them there?

[Jason]

Yeah.

[Chris]

So I posted about it and it got like 12 million views and I don't really hear anything. You know, most people that end up starting a business based on something, they don't ever reach back. I'll never know they exist, which is a shame. But flash forward a year and a half later. I'm doing this new series where I find interesting people on Facebook, Marketplace business owners. And I invite them to my house and I ask them about their business on my front porch. And so this Guy was selling $8 lemonade. He had a lemonade stand as a 45 year old dude with kids with a lemonade stand. And it seemed really interesting. So he came to my house and I didn't know that he knew me or anything. Right. And he gets here and he's like. He's like, I made a quarter million dollars profit my first year selling lemonade at farmer's markets. Like, farmer's markets that anyone could go to. There's no moat. There's no anyone. It was just like the Frisco farmer's market wasn't selling lemonade. So I showed up with fresh lemons and sugar and water. That's all my ingredients. And I sell them for eight bucks a pop. Like, I made a quarter million dollars profit. And then I got this one festival contract and they said, okay, lemonade's great. You have anything else you can sell us? And he had just seen my videos and he's like, yeah, I can sell frozen bananas. He'd never done it, which is exactly what I teach people to do. Like, just fake it till you make it. And they're like, that sounds amazing. Cool. And he made. I don't remember what my tweet said, but like $18,000 profit. Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

In like a weekend or something.

[Chris]

Selling frozen bananas. And it's like, oh, my gosh, that's amazing.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, you've clearly tapped into something. Expand on. Just like, what are people missing? Like, remember Gary Vee had the garage sale where he would go to garage sales, buy stuff, flip it, and basically what you're telling, like, your message to people is it's not that you can't make money. It's basically that you either have too much pride, too much ego, or you're too lazy because the opportunities are abundant. Like, what have the last couple of years taught you? Just about people in general and the message that you're trying to get to them.

[Chris]

Yeah. Everyone needs their own rock bottom moment. Okay. And that looks different for everyone. I used to weigh 260 pounds.

[Chris Powers]

Really?

[Chris]

Yeah. For a decade, for all my 20s, I was 260.

[Chris Powers]

You're eating all that free food at all?

[Chris]

I mean, seriously though, Seriously. And I go to my 10 year anniversary with my wife and we're in Hawaii, and she'd never said a word about my weight. And I just looked at the pictures and I was like, it was as if I had just went from 200 to 260 overnight. And I'm like, whoa, who's that? Like, I'd never seen a picture of myself, never looked in the mirror. I'm like, what? What is happening? What? This is not okay, that was my rock bottom moment. And so I lost all the weight and I kept it off. Right. So everyone needs their own rock bottom moment in the case of this niche for finances, for business, whatever. And generally speaking, they're not gonna do anything until they get to that moment. And it could look like, oh, my $300,000 a year job got cut to 250. That could be their rock bottom moment. Or it could be, I declare bankruptcy, I have nothing to my name. Right. So unless people's pride is smaller than the amount in their bank account, they're just not gonna do anything. It's like there's no excuses anymore. You don't need money to start a business. All the ideas are out there. We have AI, they just don't do it. The secret is they just need to do it. That's it.

[Chris Powers]

And your videos make them take action to go do it.

[Chris]

It encourages them.

[Chris Powers]

Encourages them.

[Chris]

Yeah. But it's actually like, it's kind of depressing how few people have reached out. I have a Google Doc, it's called Everyone that started a business because of me. And I've been keeping it almost since I've really started making content in earnest. And every time I see a comment offhand, an email, anything, I screenshot it, copy, paste and I just drop it in there. And that Google Doc is like 60 pages. But like some pages have one idea, one person because they're big screenshots. There's probably a hundred people on there. But my, my, I've gotten like over 2 billion views on my content. So from like 2 billion to 200 now I just hope and pray that there's hundreds or thousands of other people that I don't know about and never know about. But it's a very bad conversion rate.

[Chris Powers]

Okay. A story that I didn't want to, that I wanted to make sure I asked you about, which I think is, I've never really understood how these work, but I think is so baseline to who you are is the mission trip that you take at 18 for the LDS Church. When I think of it, it's one of the most nerve wracking things I think you could put someone to is like, hey, here's a buddy, you're going to a country you've never been and you are going to sell religion to people.

[Chris]

The hardest sell in the world.

[Chris Powers]

I mean it makes selling life insurance seem like a dream.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

So first question is how does it all what even is happening? So you know you're gonna take that trip your whole life so I'm assuming you're being prepared for it along the way. Like, when, as a man, do you start preparing for that?

[Chris]

Senior year of high school nowadays. And when I went, we went at 19 for the men and 21 for the women. But today it's 18 for both.

[Chris Powers]

What does prepping start to look like?

[Chris]

So you go to your bishop, your pastor, in your congregation, and say, I want to serve a mission.

[Chris Powers]

You have to.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Okay. You have to.

[Chris]

He has access to the portal to submit your application to Salt Lake to church headquarters. So he'll ask you some questions about worthiness and willingness and health and all that. And then you'll have to go get, like, a doctor's checkup, a dental checkup, and just make sure you're fit to serve. And then he will submit your information to Salt Lake. And then in our church, there's a first presidency. There's the prophet and his two counselors, three people. And then there's 12 apostles. So 15 and only they will look at these applications, and they're.

[Chris Powers]

And they're getting how many a year?

[Chris]

It's grown a lot. So nowadays they're getting like one to 2,000 a week.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, that's a lot.

[Chris]

And they're personally reviewed by only 15 people?

[Chris Powers]

No, Claude, No, I'm kidding.

[Chris]

I don't think so.

[Jason]

Maybe.

[Chris]

I mean, I wouldn't really blame them, but. So they. They have this screen and they see someone's name, where they live, and they pray about it, and they're like, cordoba, Argentina, next.

[Chris Powers]

Is that where you went?

[Chris]

No, I just picked one. That's my friend over there. Yeah, I was. Budapest, Hungary. Or sometimes it will be, you know, north Houston.

[Chris Powers]

Okay.

[Chris]

It's like, really four hours away.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

But you never know. Sometimes it'll be north Houston, Cambodian speaking. Right. Or Spanish, whatever. And then you'll get an email. In my day, it was. You get a letter, and it's like a big deal to get that. It's like a rite of passage. We'll live stream it on Facebook. We'll have a bunch of people over. We'll have people guess where you're going, and you'll open it. And then months later, three months later, you will go to the missionary training center, and there's like a dozen of them around the world. Big ones in Provo. You'll do it online for, like a week, and then you'll go to a physical one somewhere in the world, and you'll learn, like, how to preach the gospel, fundamentals of the gospel, how to speak the language and you'll spend like two to 10 weeks there and then they ship you off to the country and they give you, you'll meet your mission president and that's usually like a 40 to 70 year old man and his wife. They have a three year job in that area to be in charge of all the missionaries. Every mission has between like 70 and 300 missionaries. And so like a big metroplex like Dallas has like five missions, whereas like Omaha, Nebraska might have one, five missions

[Chris Powers]

being five sets of two guys going

[Chris]

around five areas that you might be called to. So like you could be called the Dallas East. They just created a Dallas North Dallas proper, Fort Worth, I think that's like the four in DFW. And each one of them have, call it 200 missionaries and a mission president and a wife that they have that calling for three years and then the missionaries are there for 18 to 24 months each. So then they ship you off, you get off the plane, the mission president and his wife are there to meet you. He has two missionaries that are like his assistants, called assistants to the president. That's like the highest tier of missionary. And they'll be there with him and they welcome him and then they'll bring you back to the mission home. And that's where the mission president and his wife live. And it's also where they host missionaries and train them and feed them from time to time. And then they will introduce you to your trainer and that's your first companion, usually someone more senior, someone who's reliable, trustworthy, and they'll hey, nice to meet you. Let's spend the next three months together knocking doors or six months or 12 months, whatever. You never know.

[Chris Powers]

In training. When you're in training in Provo, are they teaching you how to knock on doors or like any etiquette or anything like that?

[Chris]

They're more teaching you about the language. If you're learning a foreign language and the gospel, like we have a manual called Preach My Gospel.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah, foreign language.

[Chris]

Yeah. Well, most people do, some don't.

[Chris Powers]

So what'd you learn?

[Chris]

Hungarian.

[Chris Powers]

So you get to Hungary, you meet

[Chris]

your first companion who's your trainer from

[Chris Powers]

the second you met him, was it 24 hours later you were knocking on a door or do you spend four minutes, 20. Oh, so it's like here it is, you're out and you wear. You basically are wearing the same uniform every day.

[Chris]

Yep.

[Chris Powers]

Do you know exactly what the first house you're going to is or do you just start walking out, follow your

[Chris]

trainer, you don't know what is what. So you're just.

[Chris Powers]

He's the guide?

[Chris]

Yeah. He's like, all right, we're going to go meet these people. They just got baptized. Then we're going to go knock doors for two hours. Then we're going to go to this lunch appointment.

[Chris Powers]

Do you remember what that first day was like?

[Chris]

Oh, yeah. It's funny because I had forgotten a lot of it, but I just talked to the guy who was the assistant to the president when I joined the mission. His name's Jason, and we're still friends. And we were talking just a couple months ago. He's like, dude. He's like, you realize you were an animal when you got to the country. I'm like, really? He's like, yeah. We would always do this rite of passage that was unique to our mission, where there was this place called Moskvater, which means Moscow Square. And it was this big public square, five minute walk from the mission home. There was a subway stop and thousands of people coming and going. And they would always take the brand new missionaries, like, straight off the plane to Mosveter, who don't speak Hungarian. We think we do because we've learned it in this nice controlled environment. But you get there, you realize you don't know anything. And then they say, all right, go talk to people on the street and go try to get their phone number so we can meet with them and teach them a lesson. And they don't expect anyone to actually get leads. Right. We call them fines or phone numbers or whatever. They don't. It's not what this is for. It's just to, like, throw them into the deep end. Yeah, it's just fun. And I came back with like seven leads thinking, like, is that good?

[Chris Powers]

I'm not surprised.

[Chris]

And they were like, you're not? I'm like, yeah, she's good. And they were like, you actually got leads? I'm like, isn't that what we're doing? They're like, I mean, not really.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

And I forgot about that. And he's like, dude, I don't know if I'd ever seen anyone else do that. I was like, well, I was so excited. I just wanted to get out there.

[Chris Powers]

So that first day, that's what you were doing, you were thrown out into the square?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Why were you. What were you telling people? To get leads.

[Chris]

I was saying, I'm a missionary from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. We have a message that Christ Church was restored to the earth. We'd like to share with you. Or we have this book, it's called the Book of Mormon. It's complimentary to the Bible. We'd like to share it with you.

[Chris Powers]

Are people, People willing to take that meeting? Is some of it like, I'm just gonna be nice or is there genuinely people where you just catch in a moment in time where they're like, I need this.

[Chris]

It's like three groups of people. It's like, I don't like confrontation. I'm gonna just say something just to get you off my back. Then there's people like, I just wanna be nice. Like, they feel bad, whatever. I really don't care about his message, but whatever. And then there's people that ignore you. And then there's people that are just rude.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Is there a lot?

[Chris Powers]

Is there a lot?

[Chris]

And then there's people that are genuinely interested.

[Chris Powers]

They're just interested in, like, hearing about it.

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah. Maybe they just went through something rough and they're in a humble spot in their life and you catch them at a good time. But those are very few and far between.

[Chris Powers]

What is the mission?

[Chris]

Like, what is the goal?

[Chris Powers]

The goal is. Yeah. To bring people to the. Is there a.

[Chris]

Is there a quota or is it just. It's to bring people to Christ whether they join our church or not, and to serve people.

[Chris Powers]

Why do you think other religions don't do this?

[Chris]

It's hard.

[Chris Powers]

It's brute, dude. I'm telling you. I think about it, it's got to

[Chris]

be,

[Chris Powers]

were you fearful going into it or were you. Is it kind of like, oh, man,

[Chris]

like, I told you, I'm an introvert. Like, I really am.

[Chris Powers]

Which is the irony of that is hilarious.

[Chris]

Right. But I. I'm very, like, forward looking.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

I don't really, like, my wife's like, don't you miss living? So and so. I'm like, no, I don't care. Yeah, let's move on about that. Yeah. So, like, I was just so excited to get on my mission and to be on my mission and to actually do what I've been training for. But, like, I was terrified. And I distinctly remember, I can remember, like, what certain doors looked like in random areas where. And I knocked on like 25,000 doors. And I distinctly remember knocking and like, like silently praying that they wouldn't answer because then I wouldn't have to talk to anyone. Right. And I talked to my friend about this who served a mission in Mexico, and I'm like, is that unique? He's like, dude, I'll Take you a step further. He's like, we would get someone to agree to a baptism. We'd have a baptism plan on Saturday morning. I'd get there, and I would secretly pray that they didn't show up. Which is crazy because we put in so much work to get them. But it's like, if they show up, it's like, then we got to go through with it and we got to teach all these other new member lessons. And so it's like this weird dichotomy where you want to be there, you're worthy, you're prepared, you love being there. But also, like, you just don't want to have to talk to people. But it's no different than, like, going to the gym when you don't like going to the gym.

[Chris Powers]

For sure.

[Chris]

Just doing something you don't want to do over and over, tens of thousands of times will rewire who you are. It's so valuable.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, so of 25,000 door knocks, how many were. Would you consider, how many converted to a baptism?

[Chris]

11.

[Chris Powers]

Do you think if you now what you know today at the maturity you have, the experience in life you have, do you think you could. You think you would have a higher conversion rate today? Or is or was 11, like, already astronomically high?

[Chris]

In my mission, some people would never get one. That was kind of rare for my mission in, like, Switzerland is pretty common in Mexico because they're just. They're just so, like, they're wealthy, they're set in their ways. The culture is not open to it. Yeah, but if you go to Nicaragua, you could have 300 people join the church.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Yeah. So in Hungary, 11 was, like, above average, but not crazy. But I don't know. There's a strength of being ignorant and naive. You don't know what.

[Chris Powers]

You don't know how quickly into a meeting. Obviously, if they just shut the door. But I'm assuming somebody's taken a meeting. How quickly do you kind of have a vibe this isn't going to go nowhere?

[Chris]

I mean, like 30 seconds.

[Chris Powers]

But do you still stick it out, or you just keep telling your story?

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, so what are all the lessons? There's a persistence lesson there. Rejection, the fear of rejection. Which is it? I mean, I think that's the world we live in, and I think it's not like nude to the world, the fear of rejection. But people do not like being rejected, and so they'll just do nothing. Instead. You were rejected 24,989 times. Well, maybe not rejected that many times.

[Chris]

Yeah. Because like out of 25,000 doors, I don't know how many let us in. Maybe, let's see, I mean, we would have like call it ten lessons a week. So let's say a thousand lessons over two years. So maybe a thousand people let us in and then of that we want to go back a second time. So maybe 400 people invite us back a second time, but they don't all let us in. So those 400, maybe 300 let us in. And then a third time it's like 80 people let us in, you know, and then it's like we're inviting them to be baptized. And of the 80, it's like 25 say yes, and of the 25, like 11 end up actually going through with it. And then of the 11, maybe half if you're lucky, like stay faithful over the long haul.

[Chris Powers]

Do you have any connection to the 11 somewhat?

[Chris]

Yeah, just on Facebook every now and then. And it's a mixed bag of people that are still like engaged with the church.

[Chris Powers]

Do you have a story over those two years that you'll just never forget?

[Chris]

Oh, I have so many. I mean, there was a Finnish guy beating up a woman in a parking lot once. He had her up by the neck against a van. And so I had to break that up. And so that was like an overt confrontation that wasn't common for me or my mission. But then I have this one story where we had a 17 minute bus ride from our area to the meeting house. And it was an express bus, so it never stopped. And me and my companion would always get on and just kind of scout who we could sit by because we had to be within eyeshot of each other, but we didn't have. We could separate, you know, we could sit by different people. And so I saw this like teenager on the back of the bus with a seat next to him. And so I sat down next to him and I would always ask a grammar question. I learned this after like a year, but instead of breaking the ass by saying like, hey, I like Jesus, you know, I would be like, hey, clearly I'm not Hungarian. What's the difference between vemhes and ter hesh? And it's two Hungarian words that each mean pregnant. We don't have two words for pregnant in English. And I knew the answer, but he was like, you know, vemhes means pregnant for animals and tiresh is premier pregnant for women. I was like, oh, okay. And that would just break the ice. It's like, oh, what are you doing here? Okay, So I said that to this kid, his name was Lajos. And we hit it off and he was super chill. We were the same age. And he ended up joining the church and being like a strength to that area.

[Chris Powers]

What was your last day like?

[Chris]

It was a whirlwind. I love these questions. I don't think I've ever been asked that.

[Chris Powers]

But, I mean, I really think it's one of the coolest. No. No other religion does it.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

And it honestly, like, when I think of. I've. I've dealt with a lot of rejection, but to go out for two years and testify my faith door to door, it's. I'm just fascinated by it. Like, ultimate respect for doing it.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

And so, yeah, I just want to know what the experience is. Like, it's the last day, you know, it's your last day.

[Chris]

Oh, yeah.

[Chris Powers]

I'm assuming you're also like, I'm going to go. It's all out today. Yolo. No regrets.

[Chris]

We went knocking. We just went door knocking. And I have. I took a picture of me. I'll send it to you.

[Chris Powers]

I would love it.

[Chris]

Knocking. My last door ever. And I remember that doctor, did you

[Chris Powers]

know it was gonna be the last door?

[Chris]

Yeah, because it was my last, like, full working day. And then the next day we were like, driving back to the city and flying home. And it was the end of the day, you know, it's like we had to be back at the apartment at a certain time. So I knew it would be my last one. And I don't think anyone answered even. But it was just. I was excited, you know, I'm looking forward, but I also just felt like. I distinctly remember because there are senior missionaries in their, like, 50s to 80s that also serve, but it's like 2% of the mission. So, like a mission. We had 100 missionaries in ours and there were like six senior couples that would serve there. And they were like mentors to us. So on my last, last day, that knock was on really my second to last day. On my last day, they were driving me back, the senior mission to the mission home so I could go to the airport and go home. And I remember asking them. I'm like, I had heard a lot of missionaries at the end of their mission saying, I did my best, did my best. And I always took issue with that because it's like, did you. I can think of a lot of people I passed on the street that I could have talked to where, like, I wasn't late to an appointment. I felt like I should and I didn't. I can think of a lot of people like that. I can think of a lot of people at the doors where, like, they were kind of on the fence and I was like, okay, no problem. I could have pushed a little more. It's like, to me, the best is like an all out sprint. If we were to compare it to sports, like, if I go run the 40, I can genuinely say I did my best.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah.

[Chris]

Whereas if I run a 5k, it's like I probably could have sprinted a little more at the end. You know, maybe I'm just thinking of it too literally, but I asked them, I'm like, what is your best? Because I don't feel like I did my best. I'm proud of it. But I was kind of a piece of crap in this area because I had this companion and we were just kind of jokers for a while and I didn't do my best. And I don't remember what their answer was. I just remember feeling mixed emotions. Did I serve my time wisely here or could I have done even better?

[Chris Powers]

What do they do for you when you get home? Is there a celebration? Is there just welcome home and on about life, or is there a ritual once you get back?

[Chris]

It depends. So I'm a very unique case in that my family experienced a lot of turmoil while I was gone. My sister got divorced, which no one saw coming, and there's a lot of trauma going on there. My family kind of stopped going to church altogether, which I struggled with, because a lot of times you hear stories of like, you know, the Lord will bless your family while you're gone. And he does, but people have their agency, right?

[Chris Powers]

Yep.

[Chris]

And so when I got home, it was the most depressing day of my life. I mean, genuinely, really. Yeah. I got home and I was excited to be home. Like, a lot of missionaries, like, really struggle coming home because they feel like that's where they need to be. And I didn't feel like that. Like, I'm glad I did it. No regrets, but let's look forward. But I just remember seeing my family and just feeling like, what happened to you guys? You know, and it was so pronounced. And I didn't realize this at the time, but my now wife was there at the airport. So she witnessed everything as like an unbiased third party. And we went to Denny's right afterwards. Titusville, Florida. That's what you do. You go to Denny's.

[Chris Powers]

Denny's. The Grand Slam breakfast.

[Chris]

That's right. And it was like I don't know, it was 10pm or something and I had jet lag flown for 24 hours and at Denny's. So it was my best friend and his whole family that I was close with. It was my entire family. And then it was another close friend of mine. And then it was Jesse, my now wife. And so a big group of us. And I had just like served the Lord for two years. Didn't really have any money. You know, it's kind of like, I don't want to compare myself to a soldier, right. But it's like coming home from overseas, you just served other people. And no one offered to pay for my dinner. And I was in such a haze, such a. I didn't realize at the time, I didn't think anything of it. And then years later, I was married to Jesse and she's like, do you know no one paid for your dinner? Do you remember that? I'm like, what? No. She's like, no, I promise you. Because I wanted to, but I thought it would be awkward because we were just kind of talking at the time. And I'm like, really? And it was just like a representation of how I was like the black sheep of the family because I was still trying to like, obey these church principles. And of course I love my family to this day. They're amazing people. They're doing great things, they're not sinners. But they had just chosen to not follow those principles anymore while I was out, like, extra following them. And so it was just. I got home from that and I just remember, like, for some reason I just walked around my neighborhood barefoot, like in the middle of the night and just like, what am I doing? Like, who. Where am I? Who are these people? Like, what just happened? And it was like, it was literal depression for a good two or three days until I was able to like, look forward again.

[Chris Powers]

I can't think of something more unique. Like, as a Christian, the closest we've get, like, we've been on two mission trips this year, but those are four day. They're kind of. I don't want to say they're productions, but they're organized. There's no, like, we're just. We're just going like into random streets.

[Chris]

Yeah.

[Chris Powers]

And doing anything like that. And, you know, I lead a Bible study here in town for probably 60 guys. And like, to get that, like, there was a lot of fear before I started. Just because you don't know what people are going to think of you.

[Chris]

Yeah. Who am I? Like, do I know the Bible better than these guys, for sure.

[Chris Powers]

And it, like, any feeling of righteousness. And so I thought a lot about it. I mean, we didn't start there, but it was literally, like, the number one thing on my list is, like, I really want to get inside how these things work and the mind of what. And you're an entrepreneurial person. Like, I have to imagine for some people, like, it is just, like, just gripping with fear.

[Chris]

I don't know.

[Chris Powers]

How old are your sons?

[Chris]

16, 14, and 10.

[Chris Powers]

Okay, so your 16's going in two years.

[Chris]

He's planning on it. Yeah. And he's, like, very shy.

[Chris Powers]

Have y' all started talking about it at all?

[Chris]

Yeah, he's planning on it. Like, he's a gray young man, and he knows what it's like. Because in my church, a lot of times you hear the outlier stories from the pulpit. I went, we prayed, we found this family. They were waiting for us, and they joined the church, and they had six boys that all served missions, and. But, like, I can count stories like that on two hands.

[Chris Powers]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Chris]

It's a grind. And so I've been very intentional to tell him, like, hey, it's really hard because for, like.

[Chris Powers]

And dad's not gonna judge you one way or the other if you go.

[Chris]

No. There was a period of time in our church that I keep track of weird stats like this, but the church never really published it. Yeah. For obvious reasons. But from, like, 2014 to, like, 2022, the percentage of missionaries that came home early was, like, 30 to 40%. But when I served pre smartphone, it was, like, 1%, 2%. You didn't go home early. You just didn't. You weren't, like, expelled from the community. It's just not something you did. But my theory is, like, smartphone came out, and it's like, we're all connected, and then all of a sudden, you're not connected at all. Because for the entirety of the whole mission experience for over a hundred years, you called home twice per year. Mother's Day, Christmas. So I called home four times total, my entire mission. And every Monday, you write home or your email. That's it. And that's intentional. You're supposed to be in the zone. Right. But because of the smartphone, it was such a shock to their system that a lot of kids came home early from, like, 2 to 30%. Right. And so the church changed it to where you can call home every Monday now. And I think that really helped, because from, like, 2022 to today, it's probably down to, like, 5% now because it's more normalized and we're used to it, but it's like it's a grind and you're disconnected. And no more video games. Like, no, you're just working.

[Chris Powers]

Oh, you can't play.

[Chris]

Oh no.

[Chris Powers]

What can you do when you're not on the mission field?

[Chris]

Monday, Monday is P day. Preparation day.

[Chris Powers]

Okay.

[Chris]

Only until like 6pm so from 6am when you wake up to 6pm you can. You put on normal clothes. You still wear your name tag, but you wear normal clothes. You go buy groceries, you do your laundry, you go to an Internet cafe, write home, you write letters home. You do all your normal life stuff, but then at 6pm you put your white shirt and tie back on, you get back to work. So that's every week. Monday's P day and so now you call home on Monday.

[Chris Powers]

And then what about Tuesday through Thursday? What would those days look like?

[Chris]

You wake up at 6:30, you work out for 30 or 60 minutes. You study by yourself for an hour, you study with your companion for an hour. And then if you're.

[Chris Powers]

So that's two hours total.

[Chris]

And then if you're in a foreign language, you'll study the language for 30 or 60 minutes. So you wake up at 6 or 6:30, but you don't leave the apartment until like 9 or 10. Cause you're like preparing and you're calling people, you're setting up appointments and doing stuff like that.

[Chris Powers]

Leave at 10 and then you're out on top or you're walking or car.

[Chris]

Depends on.

[Chris Powers]

Oh, you could have a car.

[Chris]

My area didn't really have cars or bikes. We walked.

[Chris Powers]

We walked.

[Chris]

Yeah. Miles and miles and miles. And then you come home at 9:30 and you've got like an hour to wind down. Then you go to bed, bed at

[Chris Powers]

10:30, wake up, do it again. What about the weekends?

[Chris]

It's just like any other day. Sunday you go to church, you.

[Chris Powers]

But Saturday do you work? Yeah, you're probably like working extra on Saturday because people are home.

[Chris]

Oh yeah.

[Chris Powers]

Like during the week that's prime time. Yeah.

[Chris]

And evenings.

[Chris Powers]

So you'd be knocking at 10am on weekdays. Probably response rates a little less because people might be at work.

[Chris]

It is like on the surface, like if it were a business, it's the most inefficient thing ever. Right. Like the gold standard for emissions is a referral from a member. You come to me and say, hey, I've got this friend, he was asking me about Jesus. He kind of wants to meet with you guys, that is the gold standard. But it only takes up those referrals, take up 5% of your time. So what are you going to spend the other 95% doing? Inefficient things. So on the surface it's inefficient talking to people on the street, knocking doors during the day. 20% of people answer, no one answers. But then when you get home and you have some perspective, it's like, oh, like I served that mission for me. Yeah, like people getting baptized or whatever. That was a byproduct of me changing me. Like the inefficiency was the thing that really changed me, just the grind. So it took me a while to kind of realize that you have an

[Chris Powers]

allowance every day to eat.

[Chris]

The church gives you an allowance and it's.

[Chris Powers]

Do they pay for everything, the church? No, it's family funded.

[Chris]

If you don't have the money, they will.

[Chris Powers]

Okay.

[Chris]

But the families are asked to pay for it. But it's only like, I think it's 550, 600amonth. So like when my son goes, I'll just have to send the church like 600 bucks a month and that will cover his entire mission. Airfare, food, apartment, everything. But if you don't have it, the church will pay for it. And then they'll give, the missionaries call it 200amonth for food or something. I don't remember what it is, but you get like a little card and it's like barely enough for food. And then the members are asked to feed you as well. So like if you go to Utah and you go to like Chipotle, seven people will be like, I got them, I got them. I'll pay for you. Oh really? You go to any restaurant in Utah and you won't have to pay for

[Chris Powers]

anything as long as you're wearing a white short sleeve shirt and a tie. So the hack is if I go, I should just wear a tie.

[Chris]

You'll need to be with someone else wearing the same thing though.

[Chris Powers]

Go to a nice steakhouse.

[Chris]

Yes.

[Chris Powers]

Dress up.

[Chris]

But in addition to that, the members, you'll have like three dinner appointments every night if you wanted them. But in Hungary there were very few members and so we would have to just feed ourselves.

[Chris Powers]

Did anybody ever like get violent?

[Chris]

A couple times.

[Chris Powers]

And violent basically being like, if you don't get off my property, I'm going to. You know what?

[Chris]

Yeah, yeah. But my mission wasn't super violent. But like in south and Central America, they're missionaries that they see some stuff.

[Chris Powers]

Does anybody Ever die?

[Jason]

Mm.

[Chris Powers]

Like not die from like health causes, die from like violence.

[Chris]

Yes. But it's like statistically the safest place for an 18 to 20 year old to be even considering all that. Like the, the death rate is like 90% less than what it would be for that age person in any given place. But there are car accidents, there's shooting. Like in Birmingham, Alabama. This guy was playing basketball and I think he, there was like a foul and this guy just killed him, this missionary, just because they got fouled or whatever. But those, those are very rare.

[Chris Powers]

And you said there's a database. Is there like a way for you to log in and see who's on the mission field right now? As just like a member of the

[Chris]

church, I can see only like who's in my, in like Allen area who's serving a mission.

[Chris Powers]

Can you send them words of encouragement? Is it like a social media type of setting where you can send them a hey congrats or hey, keep trucking along or.

[Chris]

It's more just like in my congregation there's like 20 kids serving missions and I can see their name, where they're serving and what their email is. So I could email them if I wanted to, but I have dreams like maybe once a year that I'm back on the mission and I just, I love it. Like I wake up so mad because it's like, oh, that was just a dream because I genuinely loved it. Like one person letting me in was more exhilarating than the thousand people rejecting me. Right. So I just can't wait to see what my 16 year old turns into. Because he's shy, he's like, he doesn't want to date. And I, I just know he's gonna come back.

[Chris Powers]

Like, and then you have a 14 and a 12.

[Chris]

So I said that wrong. I have, I have four kids. 16 year old boy, 14 year old girl. Okay, 12 year old boy, 10 year old boy. They're all two years apart. Three boys and women. She wants to serve a mission too.

[Chris Powers]

Oh, the women can do it too.

[Chris]

The boys are like asked to. The women can, but they don't have to.

[Chris Powers]

Jason, as we sat back years ago and were envisioning where Fort was going to go, we realized we needed to bring in a global workforce, a remote workforce that could work with us. And a few of the reasons why were obviously cost, which I think is the first thing that comes to everybody's mind. But then when we talk about shifts, a 24 hour shift and maybe you can go a little further there and Some of the other benefits that we've realized as we've gone on and now we sit here today in 2022. At the time we first had this was maybe 10 employees. Now we're at 46. And as you think about the next chapter and how we're scaling, it's almost inconceivable that we would do it without Relay Human Cloud. So can you just talk a little bit more to how the shifts work at fort and the productivity and some of the other benefits that we've learned about working with a global workforce?

[Jason]

It's actually been pretty transformational from how we think about how we're going to not only get stuff done today, but how we're going to get stuff done in the future as we grow. And so when you start going down that path of thinking about you're going to start working with people on the other side of the world, right? There's a lot of questions that come up. How are we going to do it? How are we going to train them? How are we going to manage them? Who's managing them? All those things come up. What we found with Relay Human Cloud was that all those thoughts had already been taken care of and that we could focus on what type of talent is there that can join our team, does it fit our need? And once we saw that all that thought and energy had already been put into the operational part of managing and running a team and the thing that we focus on here locally, then it was just a matter of finding the talent. And what I think that Reload Human Cloud has done really well is find a lot of great talent. And these are people that are highly educated that can provide a ton of value to a company like ours that otherwise we can't find here. And obviously it's at a high or a extreme cost savings compared to what we could find here. So what we started looking for was how could we supplement what we currently do with the team overseas. And it started off for us from an accounting perspective. We have a lot of these things that are repetitive task driven that just never end. And we knew that our team was taking on a lot of work during the day, which was limiting our ability to take on new properties. And so we could either we have a choice, we can hire another accountant or another staff accountant or promote somebody and bring that person on. But we're really just trying to solve at first a repetitive task. So when we reached out to Relay Human Cloud, we discovered that not only could we solve that problem, we could get a very qualified Person that could not only do that, help support on a lot of other things. And so very quickly it turned into we're trying to solve some repetitive tasks to bringing on more and more team members that were actually helping us grow our accounting department without having to bring on a lot of people here. And so that just continued to grow. So since then we've brought on additional assistance. But it started with accounting. The benefit of having a team working globally is that you get the benefit of around the clock and it never ends. And so because we have a team here working on things, obviously the time runs out during the day, but there's things that are going to, they're going to come into work tomorrow and they're going to have to start doing that again. One of those things, and a good example is cash reconciliations of every bank account. At Ford capital we have 50 bank accounts and there's cash reconciliations that have to happen every day. Well, that was something that locally a team had to come into work and start working on every day. Well, that just means there's other things they can't start working on. What happened immediately with our team at Relay Human Cloud was that overnight they were processing all those, they were doing all that accounting work on the backend so that when our team showed up in the morning, they could start on more important tasks that were happening locally, directly related to the property. And that allowed us to create efficiencies. And so that's just one benefit. We can go through an entire list of things that we have discovered that overnight can be done to help increase the efficiency of the accounting team. That extends beyond the accounting team, it also extends to the property management team processing invoices. So for capital, we have millions of square feet of industrial space across the country. And with that, you have a lot of invoicing that's happening at all times. You could name a million things, whether it's paying bills, contractors, tenants, whatever it is, there's a million invoices being and that can all be processed in India overnight so that when our team comes in, they're not spending their day processing invoices, which allows us to get to more proactive accounting measures so that we're using our accounting team to actually push the company forward, not keep up with what's coming at us. Right. And so we found a ton of efficiencies by using or by having the 24 hour workday.

[Chris Powers]

So following that up, it was also important to us because that could have been done anywhere, but we wanted it happening under one roof with people that we knew, that we worked with daily, that were part of our team. And so as you think about these people that are halfway across the globe, it still doesn't seem like they're. It seems like they're in the next room over.

[Jason]

Right, and that's a good point. And I think what's important to understand there is that this group of individuals that are working in India are working directly for our team. They are a part of our team, they're in our systems, they communicate with our team every day. They are not just an extension of our team, but they are a part of our team. And so it is much, much different than if you go hire a third party service out there in the world that you're asking to process invoices, who you're having to send critical or important data to that is or might be sensitive. Right. Information. We actually have all that internal. And this team is a part of that internal team. And so it's a, it's a much different way to look at outsourcing than if you're just outsourcing it even here locally in America. There's a risk there that you're sending your data to somewhere else. This is all happening internally.