615: Stop Chasing Sexy Businesses - This Boring One Made Me $500M+ | David Royce

Summary

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The Foundr Podcast with Nathan Chan

Episode 615: Stop Chasing Sexy Businesses – This Boring One Made Me $500M+ | David Royce
Date: December 18, 2025
Guest: David Royce, Serial Entrepreneur (Moxie, EcoFirst, Altera, Aptiv)
Host: Nathan Chan

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep with David Royce, a serial entrepreneur who turned a door-to-door pest control job into four consecutive nine-figure exits, including his latest—Aptiv Environmental, which surpassed $500M in revenue. Royce shares how “unsexy” service businesses, if systematized and treated with Silicon Valley-style innovation, can yield lucrative, defensible opportunities. He discusses the myths of following your passion, building culture and systems, training and motivating teams, handling rapid growth (and near bankruptcy), and why progress—not passion or money—is his driving force.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. From College Salesman to Serial Exiter ([02:28]–[09:55])

• David's Origin Story:

  • Was studying finance and aiming for investment banking, but took a “crappy” summer job selling pest control door-to-door, which he excelled at after initial hardship ([02:58]).
  • “I was making $225,000 a year as a college student in a four-month summer—today’s money, probably double that.” ([03:26], David)
  • Mentor/boss encouraged him to start his own company instead of chasing Wall Street.

• First Exit and Early Growth:

  • Invested personal savings and got seed capital from his mentor.
  • Treated his first company as a lab to experiment and learn all facets—from sales to operations.
  • "I started my first company in Southern California, and it was really like a lab. It was a place where I could experiment with things." ([05:11], David)

• Blueprint for Entrepreneurship:

  • Extracted operational and sales best practices from both large and small companies.
  • Used feedback from mentors to create a "blueprint" of improvements: “He gave me sort of somewhat of a blueprint, you know, a bunch of ideas to go take and work on.” ([08:52], David)

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2. Sales Mastery: The R.A.C. Framework and Building Top Performers ([09:55]–[17:21])

• From Sales Failure to Top 1%:

  • Royce struggled for a week before studying sales gurus (Ziglar, Tracy, Hopkins) and reading 90 min/day.
  • “The key thing I wasn’t doing well was closing...I created a system called R.A.C.”—Resolve the doubt, Ace (present new info), Close. ([10:32], David)
  • “You always have to ask again for the service…and have different types of closes to close.” ([11:38], David)

• Systematized Sales Training:

  • Emphasis on body language (60%) and paralanguage (30%) over the words/scripts (10%); turned training into daily events with review and peer feedback.
  • “We’d pull out a phone, record someone’s approach...If something bad comes up, say pause: ‘You’re kind of frowning right there, can you smile more as you say this word?’” ([15:19], David)

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3. Systems and Scalability: Lessons from McDonald's and Silicon Valley ([17:21]–[24:18])

• Early Lessons in Systems:

  • Time at McDonald's highlighted the power of operations manuals and standardized procedures: “At McDonald’s...they had a best practice for everything.” ([17:36], David)
  • Host Nathan Chan shared similar formative experiences in fast food and wrestling with his lack of enthusiasm for systems.

• Scaling with Systems:

  • “If you want to scale a company, you have to have training manuals, job descriptions, a model—a recipe for success with best practices.” ([20:42], David)
  • Royce divided his time into A/B/C tasks, emphasizing the need to spend time on high-impact “A” activities (strategy, scaling, manuals).

• Delegation and Trust:

  • Over time, recognized the necessity to hire deeply skilled people for training, digital marketing, etc. “I needed to put more faith in people and hire those who specialized…as opposed to trying to figure it out myself.” ([23:11], David)

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4. Growth, Crisis, and the In-N-Out Approach ([24:18]–[28:21])

• Rapid Growth Nearly Bankrupted Him:

  • Expanded much faster than projections; commission structure paid out before cash received led to cash flow crunch.
  • “I learned the importance of literally following finances weekly and monthly as opposed to waiting, just hoping the model was going to go well.” ([24:36], David)
  • Solved temporarily by leveraging trust with sales management to defer payouts with interest.

• In-N-Out Burger Philosophy:

  • Royce focused on being the best at a narrow set of residential pest services to enable rapid scaling and nationwide reach.
  • “Let’s not go get into restaurants, hospitals…let the other companies have that. We wanted to scale.” ([27:10], David)

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5. Culture & Relentless Improvement: 'Only the Paranoid Survive' ([28:21]–[33:09])

• Continuous Improvement:

  • Inspired by Bill Gates’ “Only the Paranoid Survive”—if you’re not moving forward, you’re falling behind.
  • “A story—or a brand—is a story that never stops unfolding…there’s startup, scale-up, and screw-up stages.” ([28:32], David)

• Purpose Beyond Money:

  • Early motivation was challenge and growth; after multiple eight/nine-figure exits, purpose shifted to developing leaders.
  • “For me it was developing leaders...Gandhi said the sign of a great leader is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create.” ([31:03], David)

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6. Building a Modern Culture in a 'Boring' Industry ([36:01]–[39:38])

• Culture as Secret Sauce:
  • Borrowed from Silicon Valley giants: “We built a killer headquarters...NCAA basketball court, golf simulator, movie room…Had NBA players and bands play, crazy company retreats.”
  • “It was not just a pest control company, it was an experience and a really fun culture to be a part of.” ([38:20], David)

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7. Passion vs. Market: Why ‘Unsexy’ Can Be Lucrative ([39:38]–[42:15])

• Obsession Over Passion:
  • “People love what they’re good at…Follow the opportunity, become obsessive—passion fades.” ([40:08], David)
  • Referenced the "Stealthy Wealthy"—the top 0.1% often in boring, defensible industries.

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8. Selling to the Same Buyer—Four Times ([42:15]–[47:45])

• Strategic Exits:
  • Sold three businesses consecutively to Terminex, structuring non-competes around geographies/roles that let him build new teams quickly.
  • “We took the key people, changed the name, and were better capitalized to expand…All four companies are really the same organization.” ([46:37], David)
  • Early exits provided capital for growing faster, without dilution or chasing investors.

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9. Innovation in Execution: Software, Data, and Gamification ([47:45]–[50:04])

• Built Custom Software:
  • Developed in-house software for sales training, gamification (“March Madness”–style leaderboards), and operations management.
  • “We found that we could drive sales 20 to 30% higher on tournament days by doing this.” ([49:17], David)

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10. Advice for Founders: Seek Boring, Defensible Profits ([50:04]–[53:40])

• Find Unsexy, Profitable Niches:

  • “Use AI right now to go ask: what are the most profitable blue collar businesses?...See if private equity is entering the space—the sign it’s lucrative and has recurring revenue.” ([50:38], David)
  • Get deep experience before launching; franchises flip the risk profile because of proven models.

• Find Industry Pain Points on the Ground:

  • “I talked to 60,000 homeowners, you learn what they’re asking for…and then you can implement that.” ([53:21], David)

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11. Critical Book Recommendations ([54:04]–[56:58])

• Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh:

  • “If you’re going to build a business and you’re thinking long term, read Tony Hsieh’s Delivering Happiness…It saved me a lot of money because I was thinking about going to an executive MBA just to figure out that question: how do we develop a culture at scale?” ([54:04], David)

• On Sharing Knowledge:

  • Royce recounts Zappos founder Tony Hsieh explaining why he shared his “secret sauce”:
    • “I just think the world would be a better place if everybody operated this way.” ([56:23], David)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Choosing Boring Over Sexy:

  “If you follow passion…you really gotta be in the top 1% of 1% to do well at them. The top 0.1% of wealthy people: 43% are in these unsexy industries.” ([40:08]–[41:32], David)

• On Systematizing for Scale:

  “If you want to scale a company, you have to have training manuals, job descriptions…a recipe for success.” ([20:42], David) “At McDonald’s...they can literally almost take anybody and plug them in, and within a couple weeks, they’re trained and they can work.” ([17:36], David)

• On Overcoming Initial Failure:

  “I was awful when I started...for the first five days it’s a commission-only job, I walked around all day long talking to people, not being able to close anything—it was horrible.” ([10:32], David) “I went to a bookstore, bought a half dozen sales books...Next week, sold four the first day.” ([10:32], David)

• On Creating a Modern, Fun Company in Pest Control:

  “We built a killer headquarters…we had NBA players, DJs, retreats in Hawaii, Egypt, Thailand…It was an experience, and a really fun culture to be a part of.” ([38:01], David)

• On Progress as Motivation:

  “As long as it’s fun, interesting, and I’m growing, I’ll keep doing it…Gandhi said the sign of a great leader is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create.” ([31:03], David)

• On Advice for Aspiring Founders:

  “Experiment, look at what different jobs are out there. See if private equity might be getting into that space…Get experience, become the best, and only then start your business—that’s how you mitigate risk.” ([50:38]–[52:55], David)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 02:58 – David describes his pivot from investment banking to pest control sales
• 05:11 – Founding his first company as a learning lab
• 10:32 – R.A.C. sales framework and sales turnaround
• 15:19 – Training sales teams through video and peer review
• 17:36 – Lessons from McDonald’s systems and host’s own job experience
• 24:36 – Nearly going bankrupt, importance of weekly financial checks
• 27:10 – Adopting “In-N-Out Burger” simplicity for scalable service
• 31:03 – Why developing leaders became the enduring motivator
• 38:01 – Culture-building and borrowing from Silicon Valley
• 42:57 – Selling three businesses to Terminex, structuring non-competes
• 47:57 – Building custom software for efficiency and sales
• 50:38 – Using AI and research to target lucrative, defensible, “boring” markets
• 54:04 – Book recommendations: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh
• 56:23 – Philosophy on giving back and open sharing

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Summary Takeaways

• Boring businesses can yield exceptional returns if systematized, focused, and approached with premium standards.
• Sales skills can be learned and systematized—Royce’s R.A.C. model and obsession with training transformed culture and results.
• Unsexy markets can provide wide moats and less competition compared to the constant gold rush of “sexy” ideas.
• Innovate with “white collar” systems in blue collar industries, invest in culture, talent, and technology—stand out by delighting employees and customers.
• Progress and leadership development—not money or passion—are the most durable motivators for continued entrepreneurial growth.
• Always begin with the end in mind (sale, scale, or legacy), and mitigate risk by gaining deep industry experience first.
• Recommend: Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh for understanding the power of culture at scale.

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A masterclass in turning overlooked industries into nine-figure empires—by blending blue collar grit, white collar innovation, and a relentless focus on systems and people.

Transcript

[A]

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[B]

Hear the stories, learn the proven methods and accelerate your growth and future through entrepreneurship. Welcome to the Founder Podcast with Nathan Chan.

[A]

David, thank you so much for joining us. You are renowned for building four different environmental service based businesses. You know your latest business that you are part of. Active environmental hit 500 million, half a billion in revenue. You know what was the pivotal moment since early college days that convinced you to really ditch investment banking and pursue entrepreneurship?

[B]

Yeah, so I was going to school thinking I was going to go, you know, I'm studying finance thinking I'm going to go into investment banking. And at the same time I was paying my way through school and I took this, you know, kind of crappy summer job as a broke college student selling pest control services door to door. And I was, I was really good at it. Ultimately I was horrible at first, got better at it and became the top rookie, became a top sales manager the next year, ended up writing a sales manual, doing training videos for this company. And then I got into recruiting about 100 people that were underneath me. And I was making $225,000 a year as a college student in a four month summer, which in today's money is probably double that, right? It's been 25, almost 25 years. And the I went to my boss, that's what it was. And I asked him for a letter of recommendation and I said, I really need you to make this pest control thing look sexy to these investment bankers. I put off doing internships with investment banks specifically because I was making so much money and gaining a real great skill set. I thought that my background in sales plus my finance degree would team me up nicely for investment banking. And he looks at me and he just goes, what are you doing? Like, why on earth would you go work 800 hour weeks for somebody else? You should go start your own pest control company. And I never thought about it before. It didn't appeal to me. It's blue collar. You probably don't need a college degree to get into pest control services. And that's kind of where I started. I realized that I'd been there with him. It was a startup. The first company I worked for was like a hundred billion dollar company. His company was a startup. I joined the second year he was in business. And then he also told me, he says, hey, you know what, I'm actually selling this business. And I'm kind of like, wait, what? Like you've only been in business for four years? And he says, yeah, I'm selling it for like 10 million bucks. You should go do the same thing. So I'm like, okay, well that sounds like a great way to initially, you know, have maybe put my foot in the water for entrepreneurship. And if I don't like that, maybe I can sell it down the road, go on to MBA school and maybe go get investment banking then if I want to.

[A]

So what happened next?

[B]

So I had saved about $300,000. I was very brutal in college. It didn't change my lifestyle really in any way. And so I had some of the best money to invest. I was Originally saving up for MBA school. And actually I married my college sweetheart, so I was saving for her law school. And my partner said, hey, if you go start your own company, I'll invest into you. He's like, I don't want anything to do with it. I'm going to be a silo partner. But if you go do it, yeah, I'll match what you're putting into it and maybe give me 20, 30% of the business, that kind of thing. And then if you need me, just call me if you want to ask a question or whatever. So that's how I originally got into it. I started my first company in Southern California, and it was really like a lab. It was a place where I could experiment with things. I could learn the business model from an operations perspective. I understood the sales side really, really well. And yeah, it was a lot of fun. We did very, very well, grew very, very fast, very quickly. And within four years, Forbes estimates I have NDAs. So I'm not allowed to say how much I sold them for, but Forbes estimate I sold that first one for $13 million and then took all that capital and rolled it up into the next one.

[A]

Yep. Okay, so your partner was that person you used to work for in pest control. Is it somebody else?

[B]

That's right. Yep. Yeah, he wanted to invest in me. Yep. In fact, I. Even when he sold his business, he. His company didn't have any brand recognition. And so Terminex, who bought it, they only wanted his customer base with his corresponding technicians, some of his customer service staff. And they said, you know the name, you can keep the name. We don't need that. And I said, hey, do you mind if I use the name like I've already been working for you, you know, maybe I can pull some of these individuals I've already been working with to go work, work for me. And he's like, yeah, go for it. I don't care. That's great. He'd originally encouraged me just to go do my own thing, but it's funny, he actually, over time, he actually used that model and had other people go start pest control companies under his company name and kind of use me as the example.

[A]

Yeah, there you go. So was this conversation just random by chance that you met this guy, made a truck ton of money one college that convinced you to really go and pursue this particular business model?

[B]

Yeah, it was. I worked for him for three summers. So each year while I was in college, I did this, you know, door to door job. And he was the one that approached Me, after my, my first year with him, which was my second year in sales, he said, hey, would you be open to writing? Like, I offered initially to write him a training manual, because when I got there, he didn't have one. And then he said, you know what if I put you in charge of the entire sales program and then you can get a commission off everybody that comes and works for it. So if you go recruit college students and then you train them and then manage them over a summer, I will pay you a cut off what I would normally pay them. And I said, oh, it's great. It's a great way to make money. So I really ran with it and ended up with about 100 people underneath me by my fourth summer. So after three summers, he had seen how well I had done and he really was encouraging I'd make him a lot of money, obviously, and he was willing to invest in me to go start my own. Yeah, so that's. YouTube's definitely, like, encouraged me. It's just like, you're, you're really, really good at this. I. To give you an idea, I was in the top 1% of 1% in sales and the entire industry the last year I sold. So I really had the sales model down, had the respect of, you know, a lot of people, and it wasn't too hard to go start my own thing. It's definitely a new experience, but, you know, I was confident in myself by that point. I had worked for $100 million pest control company the first year, so I knew what a large company looked like a regional business. I worked for a startup, which is nice because you're kind of a jack of all trades, right? Like, you really get to get your hands dirty and see different things. And then when I was leaving, I actually, I asked my old boss, I said, okay, tell me everything that you wish you had time to work on. Like, he had a family that was young, you know, we had expanded into a bunch of locations, and he was just, you know, overwhelmed. And he said, you know, if I had the time, here's about 30 things I would change or work on to improve the business. And so he gave me sort of somewhat of a blueprint, you know, a bunch of ideas to go take and work on. And then I had my finance degree, so I understood the finances fairly well. And you just had a lot of. I could use the ideas from the big company, you know, from his startup, from what he wished he could do if he had time to figure out solutions to those problems. And RAM with it.

[A]

Yeah, that's. It's interesting that you were managing 100 salespeople by your third college summer, but your sales journey began disastrously. Like you had zero sales in the first week. How did you structure your self education marathon and what advice would you give? Can you give like three actionable, specific things for anyone that they can implement immediately that doubled your results and you know, went from, you know, rookie to, to like top 1%. 1%, definitely.

[B]

So I was awful when I started, you know, I, I really didn't know what I was getting into. I had a friend that said, hey, I made 25 grand last summer and you know, four month summer selling pest control services. I had no idea what that was. I just said, that's really good money for a college student. I'm with you, we'll go do that. And we, I guess we can go surf on weekends or whatever out in Santa Cruz. So I packed up, moved myself to Sacramento, California and you know, I had an apartment and I just had never done sales before. It didn't come naturally to me. And, and there wasn't a great training program. And yeah, for the first five days it's a commission only job. I walked around all day long talking to people, not being able to close anything. It was just horrible. And so that weekend I'm, you know, I'm thinking, gosh, like what do I do? Like, I've already got an apartment out here. Is this kind of do or die? I gotta make it work. Should I just bail and go home? I'm like, no, I'm gonna go to a bookstore, I'm gonna buy sales books. I bought a half dozen sales books. I got, you know, a lot of the, the best sales gurus like Zig Ziglar and Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy, all those books. And I just started reading. I said I'm going to read 90 minutes a day all summer long until I get this thing figured out. And that next week I actually, I had four sales the very first day. And I don't know if it's how much. It just gave me confidence. The key thing I wasn't doing well was closing. I would go and just kind of give the sales presentation and then I just, you know, be like, all right, so what do you think? You know, And I didn't realize that, hey, maybe you should do some sort of close, like an option close. So you know what, we're going to be here tomorrow at 3 o' clock and 5 o'. Clock. Which time would work best for you? You notice the option close Both closes are actually in your favor. You're giving a three or five, but they're suggesting to go ahead and take service. And so that was a key skill for me that really worked. The second thing I did was I started to write out a rebuttal to every objection and every objection that I could think of. And then I would actually write out multiple rebuttals to the same rejection. Because sometimes customers would hear maybe a rebuttal and they would go, I still think that's worth it, or whatever. And then the second I created a system. It was called rac rac. So one is resolve the doubt. A was an ace. You know, I'd usually have four of them. You know, I'd like cards. I was going to lay down, lay down something new to get their mind off of the doubt and help them think, oh, there's more to what they're offering. And then I would close again. You always have to ask again for the service. And I would have different types of closes to close. So there's a lot of psychology in how I'm selling. So get through the objection, you know, resolve it in some way, take their mind off of it by offering something new and then close in a different way. So it doesn't like, trigger maybe what the first close did where they're like, it makes me think of this objection or no, I don't want to do it. And then the third thing I did was body language. This is like, if all that other stuff is business 101 or sales 101, this is a 102 or 201 for a sales class. You start studying body language and you learn how to read the customer based on their body language. And you also learn how to control your body language so that you can deliver your approach in the most persuasive way possible to gain trust, to help them to say yes in different ways. And it's a lot of fun. The more and more you get into it. It's nice because a commission job, it incentivizes you to learn how to sell better and to put more effort into it. And that's what I love. Working a minimum wage job prior at a snowboard shop. It's almost like you're incentivized not to work hard because you're still getting paid the same thing per hour.

[A]

Yeah, you mentioned body language. So you said before that sales is 60% body language, 30% paralanguage. Like how do you measure and train those non script elements to when you had, you know, 100 college sales team, 100 college students. And make sure it's replicable.

[B]

Yeah, so it's, you make it really fun. So one, you know, body language, you know, for those who are listening, it's like just close your ears and it's what you see. So it can be, you know, your eye contact, it can be your smile, it can be your head nods, it can be your gestures, it can be your posture. All of those things help you come across more confident and to persuade more easily. And then the para verbal communication, it's, you know, if you close your eyes, it's what you hear. So it can be the volume of your voice, it can be the speed at which you're speaking, it can be the intonations or the pitch of your voice. It can be pausing to add more of a dramatic effect. So those types of things are really powerful. And the way we initially did it is I created a training manual and I started to take photos of myself doing it correctly and doing it wrong. And so that really works on just on the body, the body language side from a para verbal side. Like we would write all about it and try to explain it. But we actually started creating videos of all the top, if you were in the top, like 1 to 5% of sales in our companies, it was an honor to be able to get on the videos, the training videos, so everybody could see you. And it was awesome because even the best salespeople, although I wrote out a script in the training manual, like kind of a quick two minute script. Because when you're on the doors, you got about 10 seconds to get their attention. Two minutes is about as long as people want to initially talk to know whether they're interested or not. I had a script, so the focus was, is like, look, you've had this. Memorize it and then start focusing on your body language because that's what really sells the customer. So we created the videos and then we had sales. You know, every day we had a sales training meeting for about a half hour. And in those meetings we would pull out a phone, record someone's approach, and we put it up. We had a big giant screen TV in every office and we put it up on the tv, you know, through Apple tv. And you could, you were watching someone's two minute approach and the sales manager would just say, okay, if anybody sees something really good or something they need to work on, just say pause. And then we'd say pause. Like we flip it on, press play. If something bad comes up, say hey, pause. Like you're Kind of frowning right there, like, can you smile more as you say this word? And then. Okay, play. And then pause. You're fidgeting. Notice your hands down here, they're fidgeting as you're saying that. So we literally walk them through. And it's kind of nerve wracking when you first start doing it. But the sales reps really appreciate it because everybody's helping everybody else to get better.

[A]

Yeah, you really. It sounds like you've got it really down to a system, but it. What's most fascinating to me is you had these character traits even with your, you know, early career. Where did this. Where does this come from?

[B]

It's a dang question. I think so much of, I think was just the sales model was really interesting as far as systems go. I would even go all the way back to working at McDonald's when I was 15 years old. At 14 years old, I worked at a pizza parlor to make some extra money to help save money for a car when I turned 16. And then I got let go from there. Down on my luck. Go work at McDonald's next, because they'll basically take anybody. And that was the beauty of their model is they can literally almost take anybody and plug them in, and within a couple weeks, they're trained and they can work. There's a. And I was very young, I wasn't a great employee, but I was amazed at how much more systematized their business was than the pizza parlor. It was just a mom and pop shop. They had a best practice for everything. So in many cases, I would ask myself, what would McDonald's do? Food's not great, but their systems, I mean, it's a multi, multibillion dollar company. They know what they're doing in that aspect.

[A]

Yeah, it's funny you say that. I. I worked at McDonald's when I was 15, 16, and I learned a lot from that. Like, I almost lost my job at McDonald's. It's actually really funny thinking back, because, yeah, it was my first casual job as a kid. And yeah, like, I never forget this one moment where this guy was, like, trying to train me because it was taking me too long to pick it up. And said to me, you know, he's like, man, I don't mean to be hard on you, but, like, you've just, like, got to pick this up, otherwise you're gonna. You're probably gonna lose your job. So. So other managers had probably said. And then that really snapped me, and I just kind of worked it out and, you know, I was slow and I was lazy. Like at McDonald's, like they had this rule that you can't be standing there doing nothing. So even if you are doing nothing, you've got to be cleaning, right? So you pretend you're cleaning or like you're always doing something, right. So you know exactly what I'm talking about. Yeah, that was, that was what I took away. Like if I am at work or I'm always doing something, right. Like I'm always working something, I've always, always on the go. And ever since that job, I've always been working. I've always been making money building business, what, whatever. But I never took away the systems piece, dude. Like that is not something that came. It comes naturally to me that I naturally lean into that. I, it excites me. I find the systems and the process side soul crushing, if I'm going to be honest, because I'm more kind of your typical, I guess, visionary type, you know, ideas creator type, entrepreneur. So you would say that you would be more of a systems type and mechanical kind of engineer. Methodical, repeat. Yeah, only.

[B]

Only by necessity. It's not my favorite thing to do. And if you think about most mom and pop businesses, they get so focused on the working in the business as opposed to working on the business, right? Like if you want to scale a company, you have to have training manuals, you have to have job descriptions, you have to have, you know, a model, a recipe for success with best practices that in order to go open up additional locations. And it's, I think it's the little things that hold most entrepreneurs back, meaning they want to work in, they're focused on working in the business and they feel good because they're doing something. But it's not necessarily the most important thing they should be working on. I try to divide up my time into A's, B's and C's. So an A is something that's, it's super important, but it's not urgent. A B is somewhat important, somewhat urgent. And a C is, it's urgent, but it's not important. So that might be like paying bills, right? You got to pay your bills, you're going to get in trouble. But I, as an entrepreneur, I don't have to do that. I can set that up on autopay. I can have somebody else controller take care of that. Maybe hiring people, it's somewhat important. You got to make sure you have the right people. Can you train somebody else to do it? Yeah, you can. In the beginning, I didn't but over time I learned how to do that. Now the A's, what's most important. It's like strategy, right? It's like, it's like how do I find a way to add an additional service line or additional product line? How do I increase price or increase profitability? You know, and thinking about those, those are the types of things you should really be thinking about. How do I scale? How do I get bigger, how do I create better training manuals in order to have more efficiency?

[A]

Yeah, I agree. It's a, it's a part depending on the founder, it's an Achilles heel on or a superpower. And you've tend to be, you've tend to for your business as a solo founder. Right. So you've wore both those hats. The, the creator side, the entrepreneurial visionary side, but then also the mechanical scale up, you know, the hacker and the hustler. You've, you', you've been able to maintain both. Have you found over the years as you've been a founder for the past 20 plus years, that there is a, a conflict?

[B]

You know, what I found is I needed to put more faith in people and I needed to hire people who specialized in those things as opposed to trying to figure it out. You know, at some point our organization gets so big, you know, it might be a hundred million or whatever, you know, the founder just can't do everything or it's going to impede your ability to scale. And so you've got to find people. You know, ultimately we hired in people who are even better at creating training rentals than I was. Right. They'd done it for very large companies and they were able to make them more entertaining or more funny or, you know, get them into software so it was easier to distribute to people. And there's so many other different jobs that are similar. It's like I just can't like digital marketing. As we started to expand into digital, I'm not gonna, it takes years and years to get good at that. I'm not gonna spend my time trying to figure that out. I'm gonna go hire that expertise and bring it in house. So I think founders, you know, you have to learn to be able to trust other people and manage them. But you know, depends on how closely you have to manage them. Hopefully you're hiring people that really know what they're doing and can give them that autonomy.

[A]

Yeah, I agree 100%. So your first business moxie, you nearly went bankrupt in your first year. Despite rapid growth. What happened? What was the Lesson and what steps did you take to stabilize things?

[B]

Yeah, so I felt pretty confident having, you know, graduated in finance, supposedly, you know, to go out and start business. And I planned that we'd probably do 4,000 to 5,000 new customers in that first year. And I knew I had enough money for that. We ultimately ended up doing about 7,500 new customers. And nobody had ever done that many new customers in a single branch. And so it was something I just didn't even conceive was possible. We blew it out of the water. We did amazing. And the way that we pay our commissions is the revenue. We're paying out commissions oftentimes before the majority of revenue come in, comes in. You know, we might have a year long of revenue and we're going to pay a percentage commission on that revenue, but the percentage commission might be bigger than where we're at in the year just because most people don't want to wait all the way an entire year to get paid. So that was, that was the trick. And so I should have been paying more attention on a monthly basis. And I waited until a few months in to go, hey, wait, if we're actually going to do 7,500 accounts instead of 5,000, what does that do to the financial model? And so I learned the importance of literally following finances weekly and monthly as opposed to waiting a while, just hoping the model was going to go well. The way I saw that is I just went to the very top salespeople and the top sales managers and I said we did way better than we were going to. Can I get another month or two months before I pay out this back end bonus payment to you and I'll pay you 10% interest on it? And they were more than happy to do it because I had worked with all of them. I trained all their salespeople with them. They had a lot of trust in me and Faith and they were all planning to come back the next year and work with me. So I think trust is really important. And just having good people building the right culture so that they're okay, it's not something I'd ever recommend to people you don't want to ever do if you don't have to. But yeah, Almost bankrupt and dear one.

[A]

Yep, great story. And you know, you talk about kind of building, you've been touted that you want to create or your, your goal with your, you know, when designing a service model, you aimed to be the in and out burger of pest control. So what specific customer pain point did you solve Regarding the duration of thoroughness or service that allowed you to provide premium yet efficient experience.

[B]

Yeah, so that was all about how do you scale quickly? And the secret to that, as I read in multiple books, is keep it simple. So what we did is we said let's be the best at residential services. You know, well, let's focus on families that have kids, that have pets, and let's be great at that. You know, we don't need to in the beginning go chase, you know, commercial services. Commercial, you know, if a customer has a commercial service, you know, something that's barely basic and they want us to do it, we'll go out and treat it. But let's not go get into restaurants, you know, and hospitals, like more technical, you know, commercial services, wildlife or termites, you know, things that are way more intense, way more, you know, let's let the other companies have that. Because what I wanted to do was scale across the entire country and it was so much easier by just being the very best at what we did as opposed to trying to be the biggest or, you know, service every which way you possibly could. So it's very much more this in and out burger philosophy. And then we really nailed it when it came to customer service and you know, providing even more services with, in the residential service.

[A]

And you've also said that only the paranoid survive, so you're constantly seeking improvements. And that's a, that's a, that, that comes from a book, right?

[B]

Yeah, I first heard it through Bill Gates, he used to say it a lot. But it's, it's that notion that, you know, if you're not growing, you're dying. Right. Like, I believe in business, everybody's like moving up into the right. They're all working and to get better. And so if you stop, you're actually going backwards because everybody else is moving forwards. And I usually give the example of the Fortune 500. I think it was invented in 1955 and today only 10% of the companies that were on it in 1955 are still there. And so what does that tell us? It tells us we got to work really freaking hard to keep up with everybody else or otherwise you're going to become a dinosaur and go the way of the dodo. A story, or I'm sorry, a brand is. It's a story that never stops unfolding. And there's like, in my mind, there's three different stages to business. There's a startup, there's a scale up as a screw up. And the screw up phase is when you get to the point where you say, you know what? It's. We're already the best in industry. We don't need to be better. Like, we've always done it this way. Like, those are some of the most dangerous phrases in business. Because everybody else is like, working hard, they're trying to catch up and someone else will. Will beat you and ultimately you'll, you know, go downhill.

[A]

So how have you maintained that paranoia and hunger at the same time? Like, even, like most people, like, if I spoke to a friend and said, you know, hey, I'm going to sell my business for 10 million, they'd be like, you know, this is a friend that, not entrepreneurial, kind of, you know, works in corporate whatnot. You say, yeah, well, why wouldn't you? That'd be stupid. Then you have to work again. You set up, you know, most. A lot of people would be comfortable, right? A lot of people are comfortable. So you've sold four businesses now and multiple, you know, eight figure eight. We can't talk about the latest exit, but, you know, let's just say nine figures plus, you know, most people would settle. What have you done to maintain that hunger? Because even when you are winning, it's easy to. It's easy because you've been working so hard, because it's, it's a grind, because it's an absolute dogfight. And building a business at the levels that you've built is not easy. It's nice to just kick back and relax a little. Like, what has kept you paranoid? What has fueled your hunger?

[B]

It's a great question. I went through that phase where I saw my first company and I had a money manager say, oh, this is awesome. You never have to work again. And it was a huge turn up. I didn't end up going with. It's like, why on earth would you stop? I'm 31 years old. Makes zero sense. I'm ready for the next level. I was able to do kind of a small regional business summit in Southern California. I want to go into multiple states and see if I can tackle that challenge. It was fun, you know, and I told people ask me, like, how long will you do this for? And my answer was always, well, as long as it's fun and it's interesting and I'm growing, I'm learning, but that's what was exciting to me. And then as I started to question where I, you know, sell the second one. Forbes said it was for 30 million. Sell the next one. Forbes says it's for 135 million. Then the question starts to become, well, what, so what is it? What does it for you if it's not the money so much anymore and you're in a really great spot financially? And for me it was developing leaders. You know, we, I had so many people come work for me, you know, start out maybe as a technician or a sales rep and work their way up into sales management, regional management, even onto the executive team. And that was really inspiring to me. I loved developing leaders. You know, Gandhi said the sign of a great leader is not how many followers you have, but how many leaders you create. And I love developing people. It's the same reason, like pest control is never that excited about pest control. It's not that hard to do. What I really found joy in was treating college students and providing that same, you know, trying to provide the best, most financially rewarding experience, you know, that college student can have. You know, to be able to make six figures in a four month summer in college is, it's nuts. So I really enjoyed working with the salespeople. And that's where I initially gained joy was from that and then it was in, you know, developing leaders. And then it was, all right, let's see how big we can scale this thing. And it's really cool, like you're providing thousands of jobs to people and feels really good.

[A]

Yeah, look, I really resonate with what you're saying because I've been listening to a lot of Tony Robbins again. It's, it's, it's funny, I, I go through phases. Do you like Tony Robbins?

[B]

Love him. The year that I sold the, the Most, I sold 903 accounts. The average sales rep sells about 100. On my way, my drive out, I had to drive 20 hours from Utah down to Houston, Texas. I listened to Tony Robbins for 20 hours. It was the first time I'd ever listened to him and it was amazing. I listened to it over the summer as I was, you know, just driving out to my areas to go sell, um, great stuff.

[A]

Yeah, there you go. So it was, yeah, it's. Look, I've interviewed him twice and was really weird. I listened to an interview that I did with him seven years ago and it was more. So much, it was more so that interview around kind of. His latest book at the time was called Money Master the Game and he interviewed people like Ray Dalio and stuff. And it's crazy, seven years ago, the stuff that he was talking about to me around the markets, how you have to think mentally and emotionally about managing your money and building Personal wealth. It was so spot on. But coming back to it, I've been listening to a lot of Tony Robbins and he, you know, one of his, one of his, his big, big things that he preaches is the secret to happiness is, is really progress. Progress equals happiness. And what I' you know, it's not about the money anymore, right? It's about the progress and it's about evolving and growing. And yeah, I have a leadership or had a leadership coach and that was, you talk about developing leaders and that was the thing that he and I really kind of used to have a lot of conversations and he really pushed me and challenged me because that's, that's how you scale businesses, right? It's developing more leaders, leaders that, that create leaders and then like that, that is the key, that is the key to it and looking and finding and identifying potential leaders and then lifting them up and taking people to places that they never thought they would go. So I'm curious, when you were growing active, you know, it was on the Inc. 5000 list, I think it was four consecutive years in a row. If you were to nail like one thing that was really kind of a key, secret ingredient to just consecutively being on the list, then eventually exiting for, you know, nine figures and above, would it be like your, your, your biggest thing is just creating more leaders? And, and just an insane focus of, of on developing leaders? That's, that's where it's at to scale a company.

[B]

You know, it's never, it's never one thing. You know, one thing can probably be a big portion of it. But yes, developing leaders, you know, having, developing a secret sauce or secret recipe that you can scale and deliver to everybody else. Making it fun, getting people to buy into the vision, you know, especially for pest control. It's not a very sexy industry. And so getting great talent to come be a part of that is really critical. And we found lots of ways. I studied Silicon Valley and my industry wasn't as exciting to me. It was probably the thing that held me back from wanting to go into it. But when I sold Eco first, I really started looking at Altera and saying, okay, we've got some extra money here. What can we do? And I knew that recruiting the right talent was going to be critical. So I looked down at Silicon Valley for ideas. I said, yeah, I looked at, you know, what's meta now? But you know, Facebook, Instagram, looked at Google's headquarters, went towards Zappos, toward the Nike headquarters as well, Tesla. And I just was getting ideas for really amazing cultures and headquarters facilities, ideas of how they treated those employees. And so we built a killer headquarters. We had a NCAA basketball court, a golf simulator, movie room, you know, foosball, ping pong, pool tables, air hockey, all that sort of thing. And then now we could have like really great all hands meetings. You know, we could have like top author, business authors come in and talk to us. We could do charity events, you know, and have like a NBA shootout or whatever, having NBA player come and everybody like would say, okay, well how many three pointers can you do, you know, with within one minute, you know, to raise money? Or we'd have rock concerts. Like Dan Littles from Magic Dragons came out and played for us. And the guy from the neon trees came and played for us. We had some DJs just for different events. So it was really fun. We just started thinking like, pest control companies don't do this, but we're going to be our own thing. We want to be a really great company and get back to our people. We got a 36 person suite at the jazz arena. So all of our employees, anybody at headquarters could sign up to go to the jazz game, you know, and there's almost one or multiple games every week or whatever. Other things too, like the retreats. We really got into company retreats and traveling all over the world. You know, whether we started in Hawaii and the Caribbean, then we're like, all right, well what about Egypt or Africa or Thailand? And at these retreats, you know, it was, let's get the top 5%, top 10% of salespeople there, sales managers, or let's get operations managers together and let's brain share. Let's create our goals for the next year. But let's get them together to share information as opposed to like hoarding it just to themselves and get them to know each other and build that camaraderie. And then the second half of the day is we go do crazy stuff like we do skydiving or we go swim with sharks, or, you know, we go hike a volcano, you know, and look at lava, like up close. We go drive Ferraris out on a racetrack or do dune buggies in the desert. And so we just kind of came up with all these really fun ideas to make it not just a pest control company, but it was an experience and it was a really fun culture to be a part of.

[A]

Yeah, I can see. Okay, so I can see when you talk through kind of your approach, it's a very different approach to building a traditional pest control business.

[B]

White Collar approach. Right. To a blue collar industry.

[A]

Yep. Okay. You talk about before. Not. You argue against following your passion. And, you know, you say that founders should focus on solving problems and developing their strengths. Can you talk us through that a little more around, like, the ratio of focus versus passion versus market opportunity? And what, what do you think aspiring founders should adopt?

[B]

So one, I think that people love what they're good at. And to. If you follow passion, you know, there's a lot of passion industries out there, and they be super fun. Like, I was a band in college. Like, I had a lot of fun with music, but it wasn't a lot of money in that. We weren't that good. Same thing. Like, a lot of people run into film or tv, you know, or the restaurant business because they're passionate about it, but they've never done it before. And those monies, those industries, they don't typically make a lot. You really gotta be in the top 1% of 1% to do well at them. And so, as you know, was horrible at sales in the beginning, but I found passion in it. I was able to become more so obsessive about it. I think obsessive is the right word as opposed to passion, because passion's kind of like when you first get into a relationship, the chemicals are flawed and you're so excited about the relationship with a partner, but after a year or two, those chemicals kind of wear off, and then you're like, all right, well, we got to figure out how to be committed. Especially, like, we're going to raise a family. It's more than just passion, because passion can run out. So there's a lot of industries where people aren't very passionate. In fact, there was an article in the Wall Street Journal this last May that came out. It was called the Stealthy Wealthy. And there's a professor at Princeton who's labeled us businesses that are kind of in these unsexy industries, the stealthy wealthy. And the top 0.1%, not just the top 1%, but the top 0.1%, meaning you make $2.3 million or more. 43% of the top 0.1% is in these unsexy industries. And so I think there's a lot of people who are missing the ability to go build and scale something that could be really incredible that larger strategics or private equity groups want to buy simply because it's just not on the radar. The AI tech, those are more sexy businesses. They're disruptive. And so they're going to get the majority of the headlines. Pest control, not so much.

[A]

Yeah. And when it comes to that, you have an interesting story around your past. Yeah, it's your past three businesses. Right, so you've sold your past three businesses to the same buyer.

[B]

Yeah, the first three businesses. Yeah, I sold all of them. Determine X.

[A]

So talk us through that. Like you achieved 75 million in revenue with Alterra before selling it in fall of 2015 and you know, reported consolidation pushed valuations as high as 2.5 times revenue. So like how did you like talk me through? Like you just kept starting business or non compete? Like, like that's, that's very rare and unique.

[B]

It is, it's very unique. And there's, there's multiple industries where you could do this, you know, maybe alarm system. There's a lot of blue collar businesses where if you have public companies, you know, they got to grow every quarter and maybe half, half of their growth or more might be M and A. And so in order to grow they've got to buy customers. But they're really just looking for, you know, the customer base and the corresponding technician. That's all they want. They don't care about the executive team in most cases, they don't care about, you know, a sales force or whatever because they have all that. They're just trying to buy streams of income so their numbers look better and their stock price ultimately goes up. So for me at first, the first deal I structured, it was there was an oncompete. I couldn't go back to the same location, but I could go start a new company and we're really good at training technicians. So within two to three weeks we could train a whole new technician force and we got to keep the golden goose, got to keep our salesforce, got to keep our executives. And then the second one, I just said, look, if you're interested in buying us, we're not going to move locations. We won't knock on the doors of our previous customers. So for Eco first, we'll sell that to you. But when we start Altera, we still have to go back to the same locations. And they agreed to it. They said that's fine, we trust you where the homes are and that sort of thing. And if there's a problem, you just call us and we'll figure out if a sales rep is knock somebody they shouldn't have when they knew that they were the term next customer, a former Eco first customer. And then with Altera, same kind of thing, we just did an asset deal and they bought the customer base. The technicians and did the exact same thing for this that we could start Apto. Yeah.

[A]

And what would you say to the statement that businesses aren't bought, they are sold? Did you run a process or you just kind of always knew that you could build up, keep building up the same type of business multiple times over and keep rinse and repeat. Like, talk me through that. Like, was there a strategy there that you were going to build it up to north of of nine figures in top line and then go, okay, I'm going to sell to the same guys or I'm going to. And then I'm going to run a process. Or they were tapping you on the shoulder like, yeah, talk me through that.

[B]

I never knew who we would sell it to. I just knew that term. Rex was a buyer. I knew Orkam was a buyer. There's several other companies, depending upon the size of your business, that could be buyers. And because my, my old boss had sold to a company, I understood the basics of how to sell. And I love negotiation. I'm pretty good, pretty good at it. So I was very confident in going in and selling my businesses directly to those basically running my own prospects and selling it. As I started to get bigger with Altera, I hired someone to come in and help with that. And with Aptiv, we definitely ran a process. We hired big investment bank JP Morgan to help us run through that process. Because then you're no longer just going to strategics. For us, it was like, hey, we want to target all the private equity groups. We're such a big company, you know, if a company might have to drop 10 figures, potentially we're going to have to go wide, you know, to see who wants to buy us.

[A]

And what advice would you give to founders? Because you've got a history of building companies and selling them and getting great growth and exit over a short period of time. What advice would you give around, like structuring your company to be sold, to sell quickly versus building one like Aptiv to operate long term with the brand and leadership intact?

[B]

Yeah, I'd say always begin with the end of mind because it can't hurt to be thinking, okay, how would I structure this in the best way if a buyer was interested in buying the business and the first three companies, all four companies are really the same organization because all we did, we took the key people, we changed the name, we were just better capitalized and now we could expand to lots and lots more locations. And I learned from that first business where we're almost bankrupted, where I said you know what? We might need more capital than I have right now if we want to keep up this growth rate. And so that was the real reason we sold it. There was no reason to just sell the businesses other than let's get capital, because then I can still control all the equity and keep it. Why. Why would I go get investors, waste time trying to find investors, and just, you know, just for the sake of keeping the same name. So that's why we sold, you know, and continue to grow. And then on the last business Aptif, we just said, look, we. We have so much money, we don't need to sell anymore. Let's just keep building a legacy brand. And, you know, someday we'll, you know, we'll ultimately sell it, but, you know, we want this brand to live on forever.

[A]

And one thing you did was invest in software development to improve efficiency and also profitability. Can you talk us through that as well? Because I think that was really smart.

[B]

Yeah, that was one of the things, you know, looking at Silicon Valley and just going, okay, how can we differentiate, you know, from our competition? And I don't think any pest control companies were looking at building their own software back then. It was pretty early. The software that was out there, like the CRMs, you know, the software that was available to pest control companies, it just wasn't very sophisticated. And so we started looking at how can we create more efficiencies, you know, operational efficiencies. How can we obtain more sales if we had a sales program or, you know, some sort of software? And so, like, a few things on the sales side, you know, obviously we're trying to increase revenue and increase profitability on the OpSite. On the sales side, it was nice because every. As opposed to, like a training manual, some sort of paper training manual, salesperson can have everything right there. Right? We'd create, like, a software for it. They could see it. We could create, like, modules or for them to go through and know if they've got all their training done. They could see all the training videos at any moment on their phone now. They didn't have to come into the office to watch them. And then one of the really cool things that we did was we created a competition. So over the course of the summer, people start to get. They start to slow up, you know, in August because they're about to go home, and the sales start to slow down, and you're like, all right, well, how can we fix that? How can we motivate them? Can we turn this into, like, a sport? And so we, it's kind of the concept from March Madness. We said let's, because we're so big now, sales reps in one location competing against other sales reps. It's not enough. Let's take every sales rep and have our computer like our software, figure out who is about just as good as the next sales rep anywhere in the country. And then we'll do tournaments like from mid July on throughout the rest of the year and have these sales reps compete with each other. And so then it's a real competition, you know, so whoever's going to, you know, win the incentives for that week or whatever else they're fighting. And we found that we could drive sales 20 to 30% higher on sales days, on tournament days by doing this. So really great, really great, really great wing for us.

[A]

Yeah, really clever. So you really have taken, yeah, basically a non sexy traditional business model and applied all of the kind of, yeah, white collar, like you said, kind of strategies and building that business and just come in and really capitalize and blowing up that market. What advice would you give to founders that are thinking of, you know, the next AI software idea, the next, you know, physical product, shopify, you know, kind of brand, what would you say?

[B]

So I would use AI right now to go ask it, what are the most profitable blue collar businesses? Right. And that's the most amazing thing about it. It'll spit out what it almost whatever you want to know about an industry. Like you could go ask it, what's the average profit margin in this company? What does it take to build this sort of company? It's what an amazing time we live in, right? Where you can hear podcasts, you can go on the Internet, you can use AI to get access to all this information. It used to be you went to college to you to go to business school to learn how to be a business owner or work in business. And today it's, it's mostly out there. So I think going and searching for it first experiment, like look, look at what different jobs are out there or different markets are out there. See if private equity, for example, might be getting into that space. That usually means it's a pretty lucrative model and it's probably a recurring revenue model. And then I would say go get experience in that industry, go try it out because you don't know if you like it, but if you go try it out and then you're actually good at it and you can create a competitive advantage. I mean that's basically what I did. So I'm Preaching the same thing, then you can go start your own business, hopefully, and people are more willing to invest into you. And I like that model much better. I think a lot of people think, oh, entrepreneurs like these crazy adrenaline junkies, they're going to jump out of a plane without a parachute. And I'm not like that at all. Like, I try to mitigate risk in every way I possibly can. So going and starting a business after I had already gained experience and was one of the very best at what I did. It allowed me to mitigate the majority of my risk. It's the same reason why franchises, they flip, right? So the average business in the United States goes out of business in five years, or, I'm sorry, 80% of businesses are out of business in five years. But franchises, if you start a franchise, meaning you already have a proven business model as the KPIs to look at, it has the finance, the types of financials you should be thinking out in terms of how to scale, you have a 80% chance of success. The odds actually flip. And so that's why I push experience. I think it's really great to have that.

[A]

Yeah, I agree. I agree. I think one of my mentors once said to me, you know, before you start a business, go spend time with a person or spend time in that industry or market, and then you'll truly know if that's the kind of business you want to start or if that's even something you want to do. And absolutely. It's, it's, it's, it's the, it's the, the best way to stack the deck in your favor, to know it's something you want to pursue.

[B]

And you find all the pain points, right? You're going to find all the pain points while you're in it. Like, as a. When I was selling door to door, I talked to 60,000 homeowners, like, knocking doors, and you learn, like, what they're asking for. And they're like, the industry doesn't really have this. It doesn't have this. And then you can go, okay, well, I can actually implement that, Adam, you know, have a competitive advantage now.

[A]

David, this has been an incredible interview. We've been going for an hour now. My last question for you was, were there any books, any recommendations that you could share on recommended books that people need to read that have influenced your career? I also just want to say that, you know, what you've built is so impressive. Was there any impactful books that people must read?

[B]

Yeah, so the one book that I would say is just critical if you're going to build a business and you're thinking long term. Read Tony Hsieh's Delivering Happiness. I read it when I was at Eco first. As we started to expand, I was struggling with the idea of how do we keep that same family feel and how do we develop a culture if we're spread thin all over the country, and I can't be in every location to dictate what that culture should be. And Tony had built his first business. I think he sold it for $250 million or something. And the first 10 employees he had, everything was great. But as they started to rapidly grow in scale, they just started hiring anybody that had the resume, but they weren't really hiring for the specific person. And he said he got to a point where he'd go to work and he just didn't want to be there anymore. He just didn't relate with the people the culture didn't have. You always have a company culture. Right. But it wasn't intentional. And so he sold that business. And when he got into Zappos, he was very adamant about, let's have core values, let's have a mission, and let's have a really refined hiring process so that we're only bringing people that we're excited to work with and who are going to add to the company culture. And he saved me a lot of money because I was thinking about going to an executive MBA program just to try to figure out that question. That was my big struggle. So, yeah, anybody? It's going to start. I think that's one of the best books. We create all of our core values. We asked all of our people how to do that. A lot of me thinking more about core values and the headquarters and the amenities, studying Silicon Valley, a lot of that came from that book originally. And I got to go talk to Tony at his place. He, you can walk, you can go through Zappos anytime. They have tours that you can do. And then they actually have a cultural conference. If you want to go there for three days, they'll teach you a lot of their secret sauce and how they do it. And I got to talk to Tony and I asked on a few different occasions, and I asked him, I said, okay, I love that you're doing this, but I gotta ask you why? Because you're giving away your competitive advantages to anybody. And he said, well, I just think the world would be a better place if everybody operated this way. And I realized for me how selfish I was being by hoarding all the information to myself for my own business. And as I've gotten older, I've really learned to share information with other competitors and build relationships, you know, and it's the best. It's the best way to live. I love giving back. It's one of the reasons why I do podcasts. I think it's. It's great to share and help inspire others. So I hope most entrepreneurs, they. They learn that principle over time and want to get that.

[A]

Yeah, it's a full circle. So look, dude, thank you so much for taking the time. Congratulations on all your success thus far. Excited to see what your next move is. You're always welcome back on the show and thank you again for your time.

[B]

Awesome. Thanks, Nathan. Great to be here.

[A]

Hey, founder fam. Thank you so much for tuning in today, and if you enjoyed this episode, please take the time to leave us a review and let us know what you think. This podcast is a hundred percent free. We work so hard to go out and find the most successful founders and entrepreneurs all around the globe. So your feedback helps us grow, improve, and even bring on more incredible, valuable guests and insights. So if you have a second, please take a moment and leave us a review. It really means a lot to me and the founder team. It makes so much of a difference. Thank you again for listening and I'll catch you on the next episode.