Is Your Business Worth Anything Without You? | Dr. Mitch Catterall

[00:00] Cold open

Mitch: Your business isn't worth anything because the business is all in your head. Why don't we just sell it for the price of the assets? Your ute's worth 30 grand.

Kane: At one point we would just hire anyone that pretty much had a licence to get the numbers up there, because we thought it was about the numbers. But it's not about the numbers with regards to the amount of people or revenue.

[00:20] Intro and welcome Dr. Mitch Catterall

Kane: Hey, I'm Kane Tyler Smith, the founder and CEO of Smartfix and Hypotential. This is Unlocking Business, where we have real conversations around business, leadership, mindset and personal growth. If you've been getting value from these conversations, please take a second to like, subscribe and follow our channels. It helps us reach more people, bring on more guests and share more stories. Now, let's get into this episode.

Today, I'm joined by Dr. Mitch Catterall from Unveil Development Partners. Mitch helps owner operated businesses build companies that can grow without relying on the owner. His work focuses on finding the gaps that keep businesses dependent on the founder, then building the systems, structure and people needed so the value sits within the business, not inside the owner's head. Sounds like something I might need. Thanks for coming on the podcast.

Mitch: Thanks for having me, Kane.

[01:02] Growing vs just getting busier

Kane: Short notice. We briefly spoke this morning, worked it out, managed to get it done the same day. How good is that for efficiency?

Mitch: Entrepreneurial spirit in action, isn't it?

Kane: It is. Why do you think so many business owners believe they're growing when in reality they're just getting busier?

Mitch: They usually don't have their eyes on the data that they need to work out if they're growing or not. They might have their eyes on some things, but it's very hard when a business starts to grow. Keeping your eyes on everything is really hard, because the method that got you to three or four people is not the method that's going to get you to 10. And that's not the method that's going to get you to 20.

You can't brute force or gut instinct your way through the entire growth phase without having significant pain. You can scale your business, grow your business, but if you don't fix the gaps in between, you scale the pain and you scale the gaps. All of a sudden you've got this big wide business, big team, cash coming in the door, holes everywhere in the bottom of the bucket that you can't see, because you never put the structures in place so that you could see them. So, grow the business, don't have your eyes on everything, and it just hurts.

[02:04] Using data to back up your gut

Kane: So, when you say data, is that data from like a CRM point of view?

Mitch: Data for everything. I've become more and more of a data nerd over the years, because if you're not using data to help you make your decisions, you're doing some kind of gut instinct and you're not backing it up. So you're making a subjective call, which sometimes can be right. One of our values is trust your gut and be deliberate. So using your gut is really important. Using your gut with data is way more useful, way more tangible.

So CRM data, people data, cultural data, leadership data, commercial data. If you can't start gathering that data, you will just keep making decisions based on gut and instinct and go, "I think I need to do this because it feels right." I've got nothing to back it up. And sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. Sometimes nothing seems to happen and you're back at square one.

[03:08] Where people struggle most with data

Mitch: As soon as you can start gathering data, I think the people side is where people struggle the most. First they say, "Ah, I'm not a numbers guy, so I don't like looking at the finances." And once you unpick that and you go, "Oh my god, I was making all of these decisions without really looking at the whole thing. I haven't got my eyes on it, so I can't forecast. I don't know how to make decisions based on the numbers." Once you unpick that, because it's just numbers in the end, the next challenge that people have is numbers around people, because a lot of people don't know how to do the people work very well and put data around it.

So that becomes a huge focus of what I do: financial side of things, capital side of things, people side of things, with leadership being a big part of that. In all of those areas you can get really good intelligence and really good data, and if you do that you start to make better decisions.

[04:12] Getting data on your people

Kane: So give me an example of how you get data around a person.

Mitch: It depends on the person, it depends on the level. But the short version is using a bit of technology coupled with the right conversations with the right questions, and listening to what they have to say, so that you can get data on what hurts them, what helps them, what the gaps are that they experience. Because once a business gets to a certain size, which is usually only about four or five people, the business owner can't see everything. So they rely on their people. If they can't have really clear channels of communication and they don't know what's going on with their people, blind spots appear everywhere.

So you need to bring the people in, have the right conversations and capture the data in the right way. We use custom systems for it. If you can't do that, you end up gut instincting your culture and your people. You make the wrong hiring decisions. One bad apple comes in and you wear the pain for months or years. Your best people leave because you've brought in the wrong person, because you haven't got the data right. Even something as simple as running DISC profiles, which have been around for ages and they're cheap, helps people understand how they work at work, how their behaviours frame up and how they match in with other people. We've been running them for years.

[05:14] What DISC profiling reveals

Mitch: Anytime we do them, it's the cheapest psychology you'll ever get, and it has one of the biggest net returns for any business of any size. If you know more about yourself and how you interact with others, then you can make a decision about it. Again, it's data informing decisions.

Kane: So, what's DISC? Is that an acronym for something?

Mitch: Yeah, it stands for... I can't remember what the... [laughter] It's like a coloured wheel. They get rolled out in corporate businesses all the time and it's a bit of a standardised thing. We bring them into trades businesses and into professional services that usually aren't at the corporate level, simply because people haven't been very well equipped to do people work. They haven't been equipped to do development work. People will talk about a type A personality or a type B personality, or "Oh, I think I'm an extrovert or I'm an introvert." Depends on the situation.

DISC profiling has been around for 40 years, based on some psychology from the 60s or something. I think it's essentially a method of unpicking how you actually behave under pressure at work. How do you work with others? Are you compatible? You know how sometimes you'll meet someone who you just vibe with and you don't know why. And then you'll meet someone who you don't vibe with and you go, "They just do things differently to me and I can't put my finger on it, but I don't like it." Or we get into a high pressure scenario and I handle it like this and they handle it like that. It's completely different. Why?

[06:16] Behind that is the psychology of how the human brain works and how we interact with each other, and that feels like such a heavy thing to get into. But once you start unpicking it, we run a DISC profile in an hour and a half and by the end of it people go, "Oh my god, I'm going to have to show my wife, because this feels like me on a piece of paper."

Kane: This is proof as to why I'm like this.

Mitch: This is proof. I did that the first time I went through a DISC myself and I showed it to my wife and she said, "How did they come up with this data?" I said, "It was just a survey. It was just really specific questions framed in a really specific way." I went, "Yeah, that feels right." And it spat out essentially a picture of me in psychology.

[07:18] Kane's first performance reviews

Kane: Yeah. Okay. So it's funny how you talk about people not knowing how to measure people, and it makes so much sense to me. I'm a trady by trade. We're nine years into business and we've only just started doing performance reviews, like literally two weeks ago. We've never done it ever, which is mental. So it's interesting just asking those questions. Obviously we're probably still not doing it great, but we're asking questions and trying to ask open questions to get their feedback, trying to probe them, because they're tradies as well. They don't like talking. They don't like giving you the honest feedback. I can't think of an example, but we just ask open questions and it's amazing how much they will give you back. I wish I knew this years ago, because that would help us make the decisions.

Hiring a bad apple just happened within the last couple of weeks. I hired someone really good, interviewed fantastically, offered him a job on the spot, which we never do. He comes in and, yeah, not great. It causes issues, and the other guys are like, "Why are you hiring people like this?" He interviewed literally fantastically, da da da. Obviously got rid of him.

Mitch: Yeah, people are hard. It's hard to manage people.

[08:20] Testing candidates before you hire

Mitch: We use some of those tools that, like, we came to them late as well, and mostly because we have multiple businesses that we're part of. Everyone scrambles when it comes to people. Nobody really knows what to do. We essentially borrowed tools and techniques from corporate environments, from bigger businesses that have done this stuff well and not so well, but they've done it at mass scale. So how can you take the success stories of that and bring it into industries that typically don't have that work and see the same impact?

So, DISC profiling for example. And we run another tool that's actually a homegrown Perth tool. It's a platform for succession and leadership and creating value within a business, which is the stuff that we do. The platform is called Lumia. We're a partner of that, and the company here in Perth is called Adapt. They've been around for six or seven years and we've been partnered with them for a long time.

We run a DISC profile and what we call a career valuation, both of those, as part of the recruitment phase. We used to run it afterwards and then you'd catch it too late. It's the wrong personality, doesn't fit with the other people, doesn't work under high pressure environments.

Kane: Is it empathy testing? Is that the right word, or no?

Mitch: No. It's testing what is hurting and what is helping a person. So, for example, how do people respond to recognition? Some people need recognition. They need a pat on the back. "Kane, you've done a great job with this project. Killer. Keep up the good work." And it bumps them up. Other people, you do that to them and they go, "Leave me alone. I'm busy. I'm doing my thing. Of course I did a good job. That's what you pay me for. What are you doing?" So even questions around how important is recognition to you, because then it's going to change how we operate with that person. And also, some people are heavily motivated by their paycheck. For some people it is their last priority. And of course nobody's working for free. Of course you need to get paid. But for some people it just does not motivate them.

[10:26] Law firms and sparkies, same problems

Mitch: They would prefer to have great culture and work that they love doing, and a distant last is their paycheck, or somewhere towards the last. It's usually not all the way last, but it's maybe second or third last, that kind of thing. So we measure on seven different areas what people care about, in what order, and then how satisfied they are with each of those areas.

I did this about six months ago with a law firm that we're working with. We split between specialised trades, tradies, and then we do some professional services work: lawyers, accountants, insurance firms. So we kind of split between the two, and we've had quite a bit of experience in both. First of all, you'd be amazed how much the problems are almost functionally identical. The same thing that will hurt a law firm will hurt a five person sparky business.

Kane: And that's with regards to people in general, or systems in general?

Mitch: Everything, if you take the specialisation out of it. Law firm here, sparky company here, you take their specialised craft out of it and the underlying structure is functionally identical.

[11:29] Mitch: So the problems that they experience become functionally identical. Yeah, there's nuance to them. It's why we do a custom thing for every single business that we work with. So it's got nuance, but the basic structure is the same every time. Which means a solution that worked over here, yeah, we might change our language. I'm over here in Perth at the moment working with a giant construction company. The way I talk about stuff over there, it's not quite going to be the same as at a law firm. I've had the benefit in my career of having my roots in blue collar, so I speak blue, and then I went through a white collar experience, so I can speak white collar, and then I can speak both. So the way we might talk about those things is different. But the underlying architecture doesn't change. It doesn't change at all. I can't remember if I answered your question or not, or if I just rambled.

Kane: No, you did.

[12:31] It all comes back to people

Mitch: Bit of both.

Kane: It's all about the people.

Mitch: Bit of our tagline. Everything is going to come down to the people eventually. The underlying structure, the thing that props every single part of it up, is people. So eventually you've got to go, "Okay, I've got my head around how we do quoting. My profits are up. It's visible. I'm getting my financial acumen up. I've changed accountant. We're doing a forecasting model now. We're starting to market. Oh, the work's starting to come in. What am I forgetting?" Every single one of those pieces is driven by people. And if I don't bring that into primary focus, at some stage it's going to hurt and it's going to cost.

Those two things combine, and all of a sudden the business is making bulk dollars on the surface, and underlying it you've got a massive churn rate. People that are desperately unhappy, and it all comes back to bottlenecking around the owner. They go, "Oh my god, I can never leave this thing. I've cooked myself. How do I get out?" And the answer is almost always people.

[13:33] How Unveil works with owners

Kane: So your business, Unveil Development Partners, you guys come in as like a fractional situation where you help build those systems?

Mitch: In bits and pieces, depending on the engagement. This is how we set up the business: we base our engagement on what the business needs. We don't have a generic coaching program that everyone goes through. It is deliberately a not very scalable method, because we'd engaged in those services in the past and felt like a number, and we didn't like that. So our approach to how we engage with business owners is customised by default.

First thing we do is we have to get on with the business owner, because we have a close relationship with them. If we don't get on with them, we don't do the work. Because if we can't trust each other, there's like, "Hey, I think you need to look at this and we've got the data from your business to back it up. Let's get after the work." If we don't have enough trust in the relationship for them to believe what I say and believe the data I've put in front of them, we might as well have never engaged in the first place.

[14:36] Mitch: So we've got to have the connection. If I can't have a beer with a business owner, I'm probably not going to work with them, right? So that's the beer test. Then we're going to measure a business to see where they're at and see where their gaps are. Not just generic gaps, where are their gaps and their blind spots, because that's different for every business. You might have a business owner that's great with people and scared of the finances. So they run away from it and they try and let their accountant handle it all. They get advice from their accountant, which is not always the best when it comes to growing and scaling the value of your business. So they might get advice that works or doesn't. Or they might be scared of the numbers and great with the people. And then you might meet the next business owner and it is the complete opposite. Great with the numbers, horrible with the people.

Putting someone through a cookie cutter model like that has never worked for us in the past, so we don't do it that way. We step in and go, "Where are the gaps? How much work do you need? How quickly do you want to solve it?" And now we base the engagement around that. Sometimes that means we're heavy-handed.

[15:40] Owner dependency and the 3X model

Mitch: A lot of the time we end up touching base with owners every two weeks and we work on things on essentially a fortnightly basis. Any sooner and it takes too much time, too much homework kills people's brains. They say, "I'm busy. I'm not reading this book or listening to this audiobook or filling in these documents. Can we just get together and work on stuff that actually moves the dial on valuation?" Because if it doesn't, why are we doing this? For feel good? Is that why?

Kane: So would there sometimes be occasions where you would say you need to hire this kind of person to fill this role or fill this void or gap in their business?

Mitch: Yeah. A big one with owner dependency is everything is trapped in the owner's head and they're paying themselves nothing. Then eventually they want to move on from the business or bring a partner in, and they look at the valuation of the business and it is bubkus, because they've paid themselves jack all. To replace themselves in a business with an MD or a GM, whatever it happens to be, it's going to cost them 250 grand, and they've paid themselves 90 grand in dividends for the last couple of years, whenever they just reach a certain profit line. They've pulled something out.

[16:43] Mitch: So then when they go to move on from their business or bring a partner in, their valuation plummets, because they've got all this key person risk that's built up around them. A savvy buyer is going to come along and go, "Hey, this business is turning over good dollars. It's got good profit. It's got some good systems in it, but without the owner, it's worth nothing."

Kane: Replacing it might be 250k salary.

Mitch: Yeah. I usually work on a 3X model, which is, depending on how big the company, it's probably going to take two to three people to do what the owner does at their level. So you probably need a really strong GM or MD and then probably some support people around them. Now, to get to that level takes years. You're not going to go from a three or four person business and go, "I'm going to hire three people to lead the business." You won't have the cash for it. But it's something that you can work towards and build into your plan and go, "Hey, in five years, I want to be able to step back a bit from operations, because it's going to help me and my family and my energy, and my brain might be able to go on a holiday. Happy days."

[17:47] The family fencing business collapse

Mitch: But ironically, the more you step an owner away from the business being dependent on them, the more their business is worth. So the thing that they've spent years building up, the more they stick in it, the less it's worth and the less likely they are to be able to get out of it. I know that for a fact, because my family business went through that exact struggle. It's why I'm on this journey in the first place.

The business that I had with my dad, my mum and my brother, since I was 17, eventually collapsed because we didn't have the knowledge of what to do. My dad's health was bad. His knees blew out. He needed a double knee reconstruction. We did commercial fencing and security fencing, so it was pretty hard labour. I'm clearly not built for hard labour, but I stuck in there for many years. At this stage, I'd moved away and I was at uni studying. Dad didn't know what to do. Mum didn't know what to do. They went to the accountant to get some advice, and

[18:48] Mitch: the accountant said, "Your business isn't worth anything, because the business is all in your head. So why don't we just sell it for the price of the assets? Your ute's worth 30 grand. There's some boys that want to sell it." And he had 250 grand in the pipeline of work that was bolted on, contracted work that was ready to go. Dad didn't know what to do.

For me, I call it my founding wound, because if I had the info then that I have now, we would have been able to structure a proper exit for Dad so that he would have been able to exit with dignity, with value, and it would have set up all of our family legacy. We didn't get the right advice at the right time. We didn't have the knowledge, because we were at different stages in our lives. It got folded for the price of a ute.

Kane: Which sucks.

Mitch: And there'd be so many businesses like that.

Kane: So many. Probably most small businesses would be like that.

Mitch: Staggering amount of small businesses

[19:50] Why most small businesses don't sell

Mitch: close every single year. Vast majority of them don't sell. I think the actual stat is four-fifths of businesses that go to market don't sell in Australia. I can't remember the exact stat. Someone will correct me in the comments, I'm sure.

Kane: It's interesting. I don't have much experience in buying or selling businesses. I've never really looked too much into it, but when I have briefly looked, there'll be an electrical business for sale that's a single operator or a guy with two staff and he's trying to sell the business. I'm like, what are you actually selling? Because if you're selling the business, it means you're not working in it, and I'm buying it for two staff that could leave any second. It doesn't make any sense to me. I don't know who would buy it.

Mitch: Nobody does. The only time it happens that they buy is that they buy out the assets, because they need another van. They need another fleet of tools. A savvy buyer is going to look at that and go, "There's no way." We'll buy it if it's an advantage, because they've got market share in this area and we can use their van with their branding and it might give us a runway for six or 12 months, or they've got bolted on contract work that is secured

[20:55] Everybody exits eventually

Mitch: for the next 12 months. Cool. That's worth something. But again, if everything is held in the owner, you buy the business, the owner walks, everything walks with them. If it's trapped in your head, you can't buy someone's head.

Kane: It doesn't work. Is it common for businesses to build a structure like what you're saying, properly, even though they're not considering selling? Or should everyone build a bit, or should everyone have in their mind they're going to sell at some point, whether it's in five years or 20 years?

Mitch: Everybody exits from their business eventually. Whether it be time, whether it be market conditions, whether it be health. Nobody survives life. That's why it's hard, right? Nobody will stay in their business forever. Those that can set up the structure of their business so that over time it is ready to sell at any given point, it means that if the owner's knees blow out and they can't work, they've got bolted on work that is ready to go and they've got team and they've got assets and they've got equipment. If they've set it

[21:58] Mitch: up right, they should be able to elevate people into the leadership positions, ideally they already have, and then they can step back. And yes, it will hurt, especially it hurts the ego of someone who's built up a business and all of a sudden they feel redundant in their own business. That's a genuine identity crisis that lots of people have. But if you build it as soon as you can, whether it's from the jump, happy days. It's extremely rare that that happens. But eventually you'll go, "Oh my god, how do I structure this so that I can step back?"

And I've heard this thing about, if you step back from your business, it's good, but I don't necessarily want to get out of the tools and get off all the clients. I still want to be involved. So you have to get the balance right. But if you ignore it, eventually you will exit from your business. And if it happens like it did with my family trade business, you get forced into an exit and it is the end of the wealth that you were trying to create. It stops, because a 30 grand exit is not generational wealth. It's not a legacy that you could hand on to your kids.

[23:00] Mitch: That business no longer exists, so my two kids can't work in it. I don't have a family business. That family business was going since I was nine. I had my granddad involved before he got sick from asbestosis and passed, because he was a fitter. And my dad set it up with him when I was nine. It continued all the way through my schooling years. I remember when I was 11 he finally had enough cash in the business to get branded merch. This is back in the late 90s, early 2000s. Branded merch with an embroidered hat. And I was so proud as a kid to wear my dad's fencing services hat at school. I'm like, "This is sick." Because it was a huge moment for our family that, hey, we can actually start branding and advertising and wearing shirts and doing our thing. And then for that business to functionally collapse within a space of months because my dad's health failed. How often is that going to happen with businesses out there? It happens all the time. And I think that sucks.

[24:03] White collar advice, blue collar reality

Mitch: The other thing that sucks about it is we didn't have the right advice at the right time, because it wasn't accessible and it wasn't in our language. During that time I was embarking on a white collar career. So I was learning about the academic side and the studies and the research and all of this stuff. I started getting educated in it from that side. And it annoyed me that those two worlds don't seem to gel very well: the white collar advisory space and consulting space and coaching space, and then the blue collar boots on the ground reality. Getting up at five o'clock and going to your suppliers in the freezing cold morning, and then the supplier is late so you've got to wait for the truck to come out to site, then the rig's not working, then you've got to wait for the batteries, and all of those ins and outs of how a trade business works. It's so at odds with the advisory and consulting space that it felt impossible to get that information, and the right information, from people that had gone through it before. So in many ways I almost feel like it's

[25:09] Mitch: a pursuit of justice, that that info was not available and digestible for us. It didn't even matter that we couldn't afford it, because it'd be usually older dudes in blazers coming through and going, "Ah, for your business." And it's like, dude, I don't even understand what you're talking about.

Kane: And you probably haven't done it before.

Mitch: Haven't done it before, or maybe they've done one business and had some success, whatever it happened to be. So not being able to access that information hurts people. I almost feel like a responsibility in some ways. It's like, I've learned this stuff and I can speak blue collar and I can speak white collar and I can digest a heap of information and understand how I can take it back here. Let's go and help people, because I didn't have that help in my first business and it collapsed, which sucks. It still hurts, and it's been 11 or 12 years, something like that. It still hurts.

[26:11] Systems don't have to be complicated

Kane: What do you think is the biggest misconception then with processes and procedures within a business?

Mitch: That it has to be complicated. People think systems and they think software. "I've downloaded a system before, therefore it must be that." A system is a process of getting from point A to point B. That's all a system is. Yes, you might have a software solution for it that makes that journey between A and B better or richer, whatever it happens to be. Most of the time we just have to look at the things that are repeating and are being manually done, trapped in someone's head, and go, "Can we get that out?" Because you're already doing a system. It's just insanely inefficient. Can we make it more efficient? And an efficient system might be as simple as writing it down, so that when you hire someone, they go, "Oh, that's how we do it. Cool." And then you start to create consistency, because your system is written down and it's not in your head. "Oh yeah, we do it like this and this and this. Ah, I forgot something. Dang, I forgot something." And then you've sent your guys out on the

[27:12] Mitch: job and they go, "Yeah, I think Mitch talked about doing this." Oh, but something's come up and I don't know how to solve it, because it hasn't been systemised. It hasn't been written down.

So the misconception is that it has to be complicated or it has to be tied to software or technology, and it doesn't. We're getting from A to B all the time. Can we map that out in a really clear way? Procedures and SOPs are one version of that. If we don't get that in place, it becomes impossible to scale beyond the owner, because as soon as they get their eyes off everything, the business gets too big. If it's not systemised, then things get really inconsistent. "Oh, we've got Mitch over at that side doing that, that and that." But he's done it differently to us. The client's calling and they're complaining, they're annoyed because he hasn't done it the way I did it on the last job. So my service looks really janky. Now I've got to go out there and do the rework, and there go my profits. It's gone. It's not even cost plus anymore. I'm screwed.

[28:17] Craft alone won't grow a business

Mitch: So the biggest misconception, I think, is the complication of it. The other part of that is, and again I talked about that idea of if you take the specialisation out, you've got the same underlying structure when it comes to any specialised craft, whether that's trades or professional services. If you think being the best at your craft is the thing that will help you systemise and proceduralise, you're already wrong, because it is not the excellence in craft that grows and scales a business and creates value. It's almost got nothing to do with craft. Yes, you've got to do a good job, but most trades are already doing a good job because they care about it. That's why they got into whatever field. And yeah, they did it out of utility as well. It was like, "School sucks, so I'm dropping out and I'm going to go be a sparky or a plumber or a chippy," or whatever it happened to be, or my mates that are boilermakers or sparkies or brickies. They got into it, they became good at their craft.

[29:22] Mitch: Quadrupling down on your craft doesn't grow your business. It's all of the underlying structure under it to support more people to do the craft, not just you to do the craft. It's insanely better. One person or five people doing a craft exceptionally well could be masters of their field, and someone that has better infrastructure under them will crush them, destroy them, and that five person business will sell for the price of their assets, for the price of you, because it won't be valuable.

Kane: Which is a weird misconception. Yeah. Something we talk about a lot, because you don't learn anything like that during your apprenticeship as a trainee. You don't learn anything about that whatsoever when you do your contractor's course, which is obviously what you need to do as an electrician. You then need to do a contractor's course to have your own business, as a legal requirement. You don't learn anything like that whatsoever, which is why there's probably 100,000 one man bands floating around and not many medium to big businesses.

Mitch: Let me ask you a question. When you went through your training, got all your qualifications, who were your main instructors and teachers and people giving you the qualifications?

[30:25] Why trade training skips the business side

Kane: The TAFE lecturers.

Mitch: Yeah.

Kane: Potentially ex sparkies.

Mitch: Echo chamber.

Kane: They don't have their own business.

Mitch: Here's what you need to do to be a sparky. Here's what you need to do from a compliance perspective to get a licence to be a sparky and sell your services. Good luck. And you go, "Okay, now I'm out here. I've got my sparky's licence. I can go out and I can actually do the work. Cool. Work's getting busy. How do I make money? Okay, I've got to get more contracts. I've got to get more guys in vans. I've got to go out and do more work." I'm already at the extent of my knowledge.

You can only know what you know, right? As I said before, there's this huge discrepancy between the white collar info and the blue collar digestion of the info. If all of the info surrounding how you grow and scale and create value in a business is written in white collar language, it never makes it to blue

[31:28] Mitch: collar. So then you end up in strife because you haven't had your eyes on the books, and all of a sudden you owe the ATO up to your eyeballs because you didn't know how it worked, because no one taught you. And then the accountant goes, "Yeah, weren't you accumulating it over time and accruing it in your bookkeeping?" You're like, "What? I don't even know what that means." You can only know what you know, and it will take education to close some of those gaps so you can go, "Oh my god, yeah, I do need to fix that."

But again, if the white collar info doesn't translate to blue collar boots on the ground, because it's written in a different language and it's using too many bespoke terms and weird acronyms and phrases that are capitalised and have a TM after them, you're like, "Why is this trademarked though? This is weird. Isn't this meant to be a method? Can't you just speak to me in a language that I understand so I can do something about it?" You know what I mean?

Kane: So, do white collar people learn business practices throughout uni, or...

Mitch: No, this is the ironic thing, is they don't either. And that's why we do a lot

[32:30] Lawyers have the same gaps

Mitch: of work with law firms and lawyers. It's funny how similar lawyers are to specialised tradies, because they are focused in on a craft and they've got into it for whatever reason. It's funny with lawyers. They seem to get into it for two reasons. One is, "Mitch, I just want to help people." And the other is, "I really like suits and it looked cool, so I thought I'd be a lawyer."

Kane: The series.

Mitch: Cool. Yeah, the series.

Kane: Good series.

Mitch: Good series. So many people are like, "Oh, Mitch, I actually watched Suits and I thought it was cool, so I'll become a lawyer." But all through the legal training, they don't get taught how to run a business. There's bits and pieces of what they call practice management. Someone who owns and runs a law firm, so a principal of a law firm, or anyone who's a registered or admitted solicitor, they have to maintain CPD. They have to make sure they're doing x amount of training per year. And one of the segments that they have to maintain is practice management, so it's essentially how to run the business. The problem is it becomes a tokenistic thing because it's like, "Oh

[33:33] Mitch: my god, I've got to get my 10 hours of CPD and I've got to jump on a webinar or something like that," and it doesn't do the job. So lawyers that I work with often have the exact same troubles that a tradie does, because they haven't been taught effectively how to run a business. They're not gathering the right data. So they're making decisions based on gut or what they've seen in the past. "I worked at a big firm and I saw them do it that way and it kind of worked. It kind of didn't. So I'll do my own version of that." And then they end up in strife.

Kane: Would you say that they would be better at it in general than tradies because they're white collar, or no? Is it just as bad?

Mitch: No, it's just as bad, for the same reason. If they just focus on their craft and they want to be the best lawyers in the country, someone that has better structure will eat them up. It's the exact same. That's what I mean, they're so similar. Even though it will take a very different person, the same problem applies. They quadruple down on their craft and then all of the structure underneath it falls

[34:36] Law firm with a 25 year age gap

Mitch: apart. I'll give you an example. There's a law firm I've done some work with that had a really strong, really experienced leadership team, a bunch of partners that had all banded together and joined their names together, and they were running heaps and heaps of legal work. But when I came and started working with them, they had a 25 year gap between their ages and the next cohort of people. So there was this huge gap. They had lots of 22 year olds. As in staff, 22 year olds, 23 year olds, 24 year olds. And then the partners were all encroaching on their 50s and nobody through the middle.

People would stay for a year or two and then go, and they said, "We don't know what's going on. We can't keep people. We're doing great work, but it's heaps of pressure on us." They had horrific people practices, horrific culture, and they essentially treated people like they were treated when they were young lawyers and young solicitors. They just chewed through people back in the day. And it's not back in the day anymore.

Kane: It's different.

[35:38] Mitch: Lawyers that are coming through the field now are not the same as 20 years ago. They are not going to put up with what they put up with 20 years ago, going through the trial by fire to become a partner, just like going into the trades. People are just going to end up biting you. It's not going to work. That's why I say the same thing that troubles any specialised business, you can transfer the same problem everywhere, because it's the underlying structure that is the core issue, not the craft. Does that make sense?

Kane: That does. I can see your brain going. It's just such a common thing. I obviously have just started the other business, which is business coaching for tradies with a bit of a private network around it. We get people like that who leave here to start their own business, which I like and I want to help them, but a lot of people have just no idea about the business side of things. I've always loved the

[36:40] Kane: business side of things. I did like being an electrician, but it wasn't going to be me forever. So I loved the business part of it, but I had no training. I didn't think it was a thing. I've only come across it in the last couple of years where I've started talking to other people and networking for my own benefit, and I'm like, "Wow, there's nothing like that." That's why we're doing Hypotential, because there isn't anything in WA. There's nothing in here for trades specifically.

Obviously with our story with Smartfix, we built a big business. We've had obviously big issues. We've learned a lot along the way. Now we're trying to help because it's fun. And I do like speaking to people about business, especially the pros and cons, things like marketing, advertising. Obviously, like I said to you before, with people management, that's something that we've probably... I feel like our two top things have always been customer service and staff retention. We've had great staff retention, but we still haven't done the performance reviews and stuff like that until recently. So I feel like our culture has been good enough to keep people, but if we can now level up and actually do reviews, get the feedback, I think those people will probably then perform

[37:44] Performance reviews feel obvious in hindsight

Kane: better, and then we need fewer people, because we don't need extra people to cover for people who aren't performing.

Mitch: Yeah.

Kane: So it's been a huge thing for us.

Mitch: Some of it, once you get to that level of adding things like performance reviews, when you're at the size that warrants it, it feels like Captain Obvious: why did I not do this before? Because it was so important. But again, you only know what you know. And if you've not experienced it yourself and you can't access the info well, or it's not in your language, as I've said before, it's really, really hard to make the call to implement it, especially if no one in your network has done it. It's like, "God, I saw this on an Alex Hormozi video, or on a podcast somewhere, or in something I found online, or I dropped into somebody's marketing funnel and they said this and it made me think about stuff, and then I thought maybe I should do that. And I did a bit of research on ChatGPT or Claude and went, well, that might be a good idea, but I just don't know."

Kane: Because you don't know what you don't know.

Mitch: You go down a rabbit hole and you're like, "Nah, this is too hard." Yeah, don't worry about it. And you won't do it. You keep doing what you're doing. And then you keep losing people and you go, "Ah, maybe I should have started that months ago." But again, you're relying on gut instinct and doing it all yourself, because there's not the support, there's not the language, and there's not the intelligence around you to help you make a better informed decision.

[38:45] Hire slow, fire fast

Mitch: So like your business, for example, you mentioned before that you've learned a lot through the blood, sweat and tears, the mistakes. What's one of the biggest lessons that you learned, regardless of area? What was the biggest lesson that you can think of?

Kane: Probably hiring too fast. Hire slower would be the lesson.

Mitch: Yep. What was the result of hiring too fast?

Kane: Hiring the wrong people. Costing you a lot of money. Obviously recruiting is expensive. Getting them on board, training them is expensive. When they mess up jobs, that's expensive. When they provide bad customer service, that's expensive. And keeping them too long, because we've grown so fast. We've let that go. We got to keep hiring.

[39:48] Why revenue isn't the goal

Kane: So at one point we would just hire anyone that pretty much had a licence to get the numbers up there, because we thought it was about the numbers. But it's not about the numbers with regards to the amount of people or revenue. I think you mentioned something earlier about the revenue being high not mattering, because if the profit's not there and you're losing money, who cares how many vans you've got on the road? Who cares how much revenue you're doing if the profit's not there? It's not going to last. A few businesses pop up, they blow up, then they disappear because they don't make money.

Advertising is expensive. Getting customers is very expensive. So you need to retain those customers by providing that level of customer service. And to do that, you need great staff, which means you need great culture. So everything ties in together. [laughter]

Mitch: It's funny. It's really common, the problem of hire fast and fire slow. And it has to be the other way around.

Kane: It's hire slow and fire fast, which is hard.

Mitch: It's such a hard thing to do. It's really hard, but it's so important. And also Australian culture and how we grew up and how we're told to behave around each other is just give them another chance. Give them a shot. Give everyone the benefit of the doubt.

[40:51] Skills can be taught, attitude can't

Kane: Benefits.

Mitch: And then it ends up being, "Oh, I hired this person because we had a skill gap," but I didn't close off the people gap. Skills can be taught, right? Attitude and personality can't. Which is why, as part of our recruitment phase, we deploy these tools so that we get that knowledge before we offer a contract. Because if you offer the contract to the wrong person, it's exactly what you said, right? Customers get burned. One bad apple in there can just ruin a good culture in a matter of days and weeks. It's not a month thing. One person in for one week and it can destroy a team. It can destroy it overnight.

So if we are hiring fast because we have a skill gap, that usually means we've got a planning gap. That planning gap we can probably tease back to the finances in some way, shape or form: we're not predicting things well in advance, we don't have the data to back up our decisions. Then we go, "Oh my god, we've got a job that we can't

[41:54] Mitch: perform. So we've got skills that we need to deploy." Hire for skills, hire for skills, hire for skills. And then you get the wrong people in the business that destroy everything you've built. You go, "Oh no." And then it's like, "But I've got to get them on these jobs." And you go that little bit too long. I should have fired them in week one, but I let them go because I was hoping it would work out. Maybe it was just a little blip in the radar. And it's almost never a blip in the radar. That's actually where gut instinct works really well, where it's like, I know this person is the wrong person. I've got to move. And that's the hire slow, fire fast.

Part of hiring slow is going, "Hey, they've got through the interview. They've got some of the qualifications they need. They've got most of the skills we need. We can fill the gaps with them." Let's do the proper people work to make sure they fit. Is it as simple as, "Hey, would I take them to the house and meet the kids and have a barbecue on the weekend?" Is it as simple as that? Because it can be as simple as that, and you can use your gut for that. Ideally though, you want to back up your gut with some data. That's why we run things like DISC

[42:56] Mitch: and we use the Lumia platform, a whole bunch of stuff depending on where the business is at, because then it backs it up with data. We usually take part in some of the recruitment phase if the business wants us to. So I will run a DISC report on a prospect who's maybe being recruited, so I can go back to the business owner and go, "Hey, I'm looking at this from a third party, non-biased view. I'm looking at their data, not gut. I'm having a conversation with them so that I can lend my recruitment experience and years in the field. I can lend my gut to it, but it's backed by data. Now we can talk about it."

And then they go, "Mitch, what do you think of that person?" And I'm like, "They're actually a really good fit for you, because I know you and now I've got a good understanding of that person, and it's backed by data." That's the best case scenario.

Kane: Agree.

Mitch: I could talk about this all day, as you can tell.

[43:59] Why founder content matters

Kane: I want to talk to you a bit about founder content, because I know you talk about that a bit. Why do you think that's becoming so important?

Mitch: Because the world is getting inundated with faceless rubbish.

Kane: AI.

Mitch: AI.

Kane: I do want to talk about AI, but it always comes up.

Mitch: It always comes up, right? We're getting inundated with garbage. And in the end, people don't buy from landing pages and funnels and tricky arrangements with contact forms and beautiful glossy images. They buy from people. Especially when it comes to trades, they are going to buy from someone who solves their problem and relieves them of whatever pain they're experiencing. Burst pipe in the middle of the night. It's like, "Oh no, I've got this problem that's impacting my home and impacting my family, or impacting my commercial space and impacting my business. I need someone who's going to fix it, and I need to feel like I can trust them before they walk onto my property, because if I don't trust them, I'm going to be scared and it's going to make my pain worse and they might not fix the job."

So why I think the founder content side of things is really important is that eventually you're going to go and shake hands with that person. You're going to be in front of them. So you're going to win the work via the people work, or they're going to call you up on the phone and

[45:01] Mitch: they're going to have a conversation with you and they're going to determine by the way your voice sounds or how you talk. They're going to go, "This person sounds competent. I believe I can trust them to solve the pain that I've got right now." Or they meet in person, you do a quote in person, and they go, "Hey, I just liked that person's attitude," or the way they walked, or the quality of the equipment that they parked in the driveway, or just the way they trod with care over my flowers instead of stepping through the garden. All of these different things about how people interact.

Where founder led content comes into it is you're able to multiply you and what you project and who you are to more people. So that by the time you're doing an old school doorknocking campaign, which by the way still works very well with trades, works well with lots of businesses. "Hey, I'm a sparky in the area. Here's my fridge magnet. Nice to meet you. I'm Mitch." And they go, "Hey, have I seen you on TikTok?" And you go, "Yeah, a bit embarrassing, but yeah, I put some stuff on TikTok." "Oh yeah, I saw that post that you put up

[46:03] Multiplying the handshake

Mitch: the other day. It was really cool. I really like the way you treat your team." It's like, cool, trust. Or you rock up to a networking event and people go, "Oh, Kane, I think I know you, because I've seen you talk about stuff. I like the same things that you like." So it's multiplying the handshake. It's multiplying the barbecue on the weekend by getting out on these platforms that everybody is on.

Who is the buyer for a plumbing service? Probably a family home, mum and dad or whatever the arrangement is, who might have a young family and they need some plumbing services because their kids put some wipes down the toilet and it clogged it. And where have they been scrolling for the last hour? Instagram. That's where they are. They're not scrolling people's websites and going, "Huh, I wonder what people's websites look like these days." They're scrolling Instagram. And if they see somebody's face rather than somebody's banner or a generic stock image, immediately their brain is going to

[47:06] Mitch: trust the face more than they trust the stock image. In fact, you look at stock images and B-roll and stuff like that and people go, "Is that even a human?"

Kane: Yeah. So it's like on a website, if I don't see somebody's face within a really tiny scroll, there is no way I'm buying from them. It's not happening, because I want to buy from a person, not from a block of digital. That's why I suppose the video point of view is even tenfold on top of that. It's even a photo of someone, but then a video of them telling you who they are and what they're about.

Mitch: 100%.

Kane: By the time you do speak to them, they feel like they somewhat already know you. Like I watch a lot of podcasts and, like, you watch Diary of a CEO and you feel like you know them. If you bump into them, you've already got things to talk about because you know what they talk about.

Mitch: You know what they care about. And one of the big, like, we were talking about that connection between people and recruiting people and getting the right people and all of that, right?

[48:09] Finding common ground

Mitch: If you know ahead of time what that person cares about, you're already going into the conversation going, "Oh, we care about the same things here and we disagree here." That allows us to connect more effectively. You know what I mean? It's why sport is such a huge part of Australian culture. If you see someone wearing a Crows scarf and you're a Crows supporter, which I'm not going to tell where my allegiance lies, but you see somebody else with a Crows scarf on, you go, "Ah, that's one of my people."

Kane: Yeah.

Mitch: Because you've got something to connect with. It's an icebreaker. There's something that they care about that's one of the things that I care about. Therefore, I'm more likely to trust them than a random stranger who doesn't have a scarf on. Right? It's like, we go to site and we wear steel cap boots because it's trades, and I grew up in the trades and blue collar. So when you're on site, you wear steel cap boots. People look at your shoes and go, "Ah, they know what it's like to be on site. I trust them more than a consultant that's rocked up with shiny boots." Now I'm wearing a pair of shiny boots at the moment. That's different. I'm not on site, right? So all of those bits that allow us socially to connect with each other,

[49:11] Committing to founder content

Mitch: if we can do that in content, as weird and awkward and uncomfortable and annoying and time consuming as it is, the more we rock up to networking events and this happens to me now. I've only been doing it for a year, right? A year ago, I was like, I'm going to commit to this because I've seen it work with everyone and nobody in my circle is doing it, and I'm just going to try it. I know it's going to suck and I know

Kane: Your friends are going to give you...

Mitch: I know my friends are going to give me grief, and they did. But then I started rocking up to networking events and multiple people would come up and go, "Are you Dr. Mitch? I saw you on TikTok." And then someone's like, "I can't open LinkedIn without seeing your face," or "I can't go on Instagram without seeing your reels bash me in the face." Because I made a commitment that I have a genuine purpose to help other businesses, and I can only do that if I'm in front of more people. So that became an obvious multiplier for me. As much as it was painful to go through, and it's still annoying, picking up my phone and going,

[50:13] Mitch: "Oops, I forgot to put something out today." I usually try and post once a day. In fact, this week is terrible. I've posted once this week and it kills me on a Friday. But it's just been a rammed week and I couldn't quite make it natural. I'm giving myself an excuse. I could have, but I chose other things and I'm going to feel the pain of that later, because then your sequencing is off and you're not in the rhythm. I'll have to start from scratch again next week. But, you know, we can't all be perfect either. So that's my perspective on founder led content. Is that what you think as well?

Kane: Yeah, I think so. I watch a lot of podcasts and it is personal brand, same thing as founder led content. That's something that I have been trying to do, again being in front of camera.

Mitch: Yeah, so hard at the start.

Kane: It's weird. That's why I like podcasting. You're not staring at the camera. It is different and it is very conversational, so I do find it a lot easier.

Mitch: One thing that I think is really good now about where founder led content is at, and content in general, and it always goes in peaks and valleys and trends and all of that

[51:15] Unpolished content works

Mitch: but I love how there is significantly less focus on hyper edited and hyper overproduced, especially short form talking head content. And the popularity of just going, "Hey, my phone's already mounted in my car while I'm driving to a job. I'm just going to hit record so I don't have to look at the camera, because I hate looking at the camera. It's weird. I'm driving to a job and I found this." And you are going to find that other people actually resonate with that. You might get 40 views, but one of those views might be your next recruit, or they might be your next client, or they might just be someone in the circle that wants to help you and go, "Oh, I saw you were cruising in my area and you mentioned something about this job. We've got a big job that we need to sub out some of. Did you want to collaborate on it?" It's like, "Oh wow, what? Where did you find me?" "I saw you on Facebook." "Oh, did you? But I don't have any followers on Facebook." It's not the way the algorithm works anymore. It will throw it based on keywords and stuff.

Kane: Yeah, that is true. It's not about the followers.

Mitch: I started TikTok. I had, I think, nine followers and one of my videos got 178,000 views overnight, because it just happened to hit this thing that was happening in the legal world at the time. I made a seven second video as I was walking to an Uber to go to a wedding. I went to a wedding, got back to the hotel, a little bit dusty, and I went... [laughter]

Kane: What, viral?

Mitch: It was like my fourth post and I had functionally no followers. People just clicked on it and started watching it, which then means more people start watching it. And it had the right stuff I was talking about. It was a hot topic at the time and it was right within my sweet spot of what I talked about. It just worked.

You get to a point where it is pretty easy to just go, "This is the thought that I'm having. Is it relevant to share it with people? Would people maybe agree with this or at least have a conversation?" Bing. "Here's what I think today. Da da da da da." I just go...

Kane: Easy as that. Should be as easy as that.

Mitch: It is as easy as that. [laughter] We make it harder. We go, "Oh, I didn't say it perfectly, or the lighting was bad, or

[53:20] Owners carry the pressure, be proud of trades

Mitch: I stumbled on my words, or oh no, I feel a bit ooey about that." It's like, you're going to meet someone and have a chat and say things that you don't like as well.

Kane: In real life.

Mitch: In real life. Make it as real as you can. Like I just said, "ooey". I don't even know what that means. [laughter] It sounds stupid, but it doesn't matter. It's how human...

Kane: Not going to edit it out. [laughter] Riley, don't edit that.

Mitch: Leave it in.

Kane: Keep it in. We've covered so much. Before we wrap up, is there anything we haven't spoken about that you want to talk about?

Mitch: Look, I think it's important, because this doesn't get talked about enough, that running a business is really hard and it is an insane amount of pressure, especially on the business owner. They carry an enormous amount of risk that, unless you have done it, people don't understand. And people think

[54:23] Mitch: the owners are cleaning up all the time. It's like, no, they're carrying all of the burden of the business, usually on their shoulders, and they usually wait too long to ask for help, and it becomes a detriment to them and it causes them pain. So first of all, if you're a business owner, talk to other business owners who you can talk about the pain and the annoying stuff and the cost of carrying it all on your shoulders, and what it's done to your health and what it's done to your family. You've got to surround yourself as much as you can with people that have like-minded experience. Otherwise, it's really isolating and really lonely. So it's really hard work.

On top of that, especially in the trades, and I've got lots of mates that still feel this way, even at our age, and felt it early on. I felt it early on in my career as well. It's like, "I went down the trades because I'm dumb and this is all I could do."

Kane: Hated school.

Mitch: Hated school. Didn't get on well. I wasn't smart. I didn't like reading

[55:26] Mitch: textbooks. I've got dyslexia, so I can't read well. So I can't understand it. It's annoying. I'm dumb. I've always been told I was dumb, because that's what I got told in the schooling system. So I guess I'll go do a dumb trade.

This entire country is built on trades. This is something that we should be standing behind proudly. I'm proud of the fact that in my area, that I've moved back to after 20 years away, I can drive past public schools that have the security fence that my dad and I put up 20 years ago, and it's still there, still protecting kids. I'm proud of that. I never was before, because I didn't feel that sense of pride. I was like, "This is just the job I've got because I'm dumb. I'm an idiot and all I can do is swing a hammer and dig a hole and fill it with a post on concrete. That's all I can manage." This country is literally built off the trades. It's something that we need to be proud of. And we need to celebrate with each other. I don't think it happens anywhere near enough. Nowhere near enough. We should celebrate ourselves and we should celebrate our mates and not worry too much about

[56:29] Treat competitors as allies

Mitch: the competitive rivalries. They all come up and it's a bit of fun, but we should be acting like elite sports people who will crash tackle each other during the World Cup and then get up and laugh and give each other a hug. It's because we're all in this game together.

Kane: As in between businesses?

Mitch: Yeah. There doesn't need to always be competitive rivalry. The more we can reach out to our competitors and go, "Hey, competitor, whoever you happen to be, we're in the same spot. How are you finding it these days? You want to grab a beer? You want to grab a coffee?" Yeah, we kind of cross over, but we don't have to be enemies. And yeah, some people you'll meet and they'll be difficult and you go, "I guess I'm not going to collaborate with those people," but often that's where the best partnerships are found. We're a four person sparky team. They're a six person sparky team. "Hey, you want to grab a coffee sometime and just shoot the breeze about what the business is like and what the field's like at the moment?" All of a sudden, it's like, "We got on really well. Should we go after some of the bigger jobs that we can't do alone? We'll share it and we'll work it out. How do we work it out? Honestly, I don't know. Let's work it out." And all of a sudden you get these partnerships, you

[57:31] Mitch: get mergers, or you just do some work together and you split. You call each other and go, "Hey, I've got a big job. Can I borrow one of your guys for this job and, you know, we'll make sure we cut you in?" And it's like, "Yeah, sure. We're a bit quiet at the moment. Go over there, Kane. Do this work over here with this crew." And all of a sudden, you've built allies around you that you can share the burden with. And you can stand behind and be proud about it. I don't think that gets talked about enough.

Kane: I don't think it does at all, to be honest. We are bad as people at asking for help. I'm bad at it still. I preach it all the time. I teach it. And I'm still bad at asking for help. And whenever I ask for help, guess what happens?

Mitch: You get help.

Kane: I get help. Just like whenever you don't have an answer to something from someone, you could guess what it is, but the best thing to do is ask.

Mitch: It's like with people, right? Something's troubling my people. You know what I'll do? Nothing. Why don't you go ask your people what's troubling you? What sucks right now? What can I do as your leader to make your experience better so

[58:34] Ask your team what's hurting, wrap-up

Mitch: that you can do better work? It might be as simple as, and I know I'm rattling on here, I worked with a law firm and they were worried about not connecting with their people and they said, "I'm going to drop some cash on doing some social events and some team building, blah blah blah." And I went, "Let me go talk to your team first and I'll run some of these tools and I'll just find out what's hurting them." And you know what it came back with? The annual leave policy wasn't clear enough, so they were scared to ask for time off. And parking in the city where they were based was too expensive and some of the younger lawyers couldn't afford it. So they had to park heaps far out and walk in. And it's like, okay, they were about to drop five figures on social events. No, clean up your policies and give them a parking allowance. You've got the cash to do it. Sometimes it's just asking the

[59:37] Mitch: question and listening to the response and going, "Okay, can I do it?" And then if you've got your eyes on your finances and you've got help doing that, then you can go, "Not only have I asked the question, but I know that we can afford it, because I've done the work. I've got the data. The stuff that I was scared of collecting before, now I've got it. So I can say yes to this, maybe to that later for that one."

Kane: Mhm. So true. Communication is everything.

Mitch: Who would have thought?

Kane: Where can people find you on social media?

Mitch: Dr. Mitch Unveil is my handle pretty much everywhere, and they can find us at unveildp.com, which is our website. So you can find it there, but you'll see my face. You'll see my face everywhere. You'll see it now.

Kane: Thanks for coming on.

Mitch: Thanks for having me, dude.

Kane: Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Unlocking Business. If you've enjoyed this conversation, please take a second to like, subscribe and follow our channels. It really helps us to bring on more guests and have great conversations. If you'd like to connect with today's guest, the details are in the description below. I'm Kane Tyler Smith. I'll see you on the next one.