57. Startup Lifecycles and Surviving No Man’s Land – Ruth King Interview

Profitability Master Ruth King is the award-winning author of 5 books including “the Courage to be Profitable” and “Profit or Wealth?”  In this interview, we talked about the lifecycle of startups and particularly the challenges of a phase encountered by most companies that she calls “No Man’s Land.”

Some of the specific topics we covered were:

·      When to listen to friends encouraging you to start a company

·      Talking to potential customers

·      Characterizing your users

·      Setting the right price

·      Managing through No Man’s Land

·      Transitioning from working in to working on your business

·      Building an emergency fund to survive the inevitable crises

Links

Feel the Boot “Boot Prints” signup: https://ftb.bz/join

Founder’s Alliance: https://ftb.bz/alliance

Video of interview: https://ftb.bz/57V

Recommended books:

The Miracle Manager https://amzn.to/3ATK0Gy

The Courage to be Profitable https://amzn.to/3ecnxdX

Profit or Wealth? https://amzn.to/3kb0N1K

About our guest, Ruth King

Profitability Master Ruth King has a passion for helping businesses get and stay profitable utilizing the latest systems/processes/technology.  

After twelve years on the road, doing 200 flights per year, she knew there had to be a better way to reach business people who wanted to build their businesses and train their employees. She began training on the Internet in 1998 and began the first television like broadcasting in 2002. Her channels include www.hvacchannel.tv,  www.profitabilityrevolution.com and others.

Ruth holds an MBA in Finance from Georgia State University and Bachelor's and Master's Degrees in Chemical Engineering from Tufts University and the University of Pennsylvania, respectively. 

Her latest book, Profit or Wealth? reached #1 in October, 2020.  This book is preceded by The Ugly Truth about Cash and the #1 best-selling book, The Courage to be Profitable.  These two books were named two of 37 books start ups should read, along with the books of Napoleon Hill, Stephen Covey, Dale Carnegie and other esteemed authors.  She is also the author of two other award winning books, The Ugly Truth about Small Business and The Ugly Truth about Managing People. 

Transcript

Hey! Greetings, founders! Welcome to Feel the Boot, the science of startups.

I'm your host, Lance Cottrell and I'm here to help you navigate the nearly vertical

learning curve you're going to encounter as you start your business.

I've seen it all before. I've been there, I started my own company and I've advised countless other founders through

their processes. I want to help you avoid the mistakes and learn what you need to know to be successful.

In this episode, I talked to profitability master Ruth King, she's an award winning author of five books, including “the courage to be profitable” and “profit or wealth?”

We're gonna be talking about a variety of topics very practically around starting a

company. Particularly a phase that she sees most companies go through that she calls No Man's land, how to recognize it and how to climb out of that particular quagmire.

Ruth King, Welcome to Feel the Boot.

Thanks Lance for having me.

I'm happy to be here.

I'm really excited to have you on because I think you've got a somewhat unusual way

of thinking about the lifecycle of a startup.

And so I thought maybe we just start off by kind of having you talk about what that is and how you see that progressing.

Okay.

So I look at the start up is you know, somebody's got this really, really great idea for business and they talk to their friends and they go, oh you should do that business. And they get talking to their friends and more of their friends say you should do that business and they don't talk to people who know about business.

There's totally difference between talking to friends and talking to people who actually know something about business and the question that I always tell people to say the thing that I always tell people when somebody says, oh you should do this and said, fine, would you be willing to invest?

And then then we really see what they think of the idea.

Well, now that's right. It makes you get serious. When someone is asking you to put put cash down, I really resemble your description of

someone who's starting a business without any real knowledge of business or talking to people about business.

Uh, uh, it makes things challenging.

So where do you go from there?

All right.

So you've got this great idea, then go out and get a customer And the customer should not be your mother should not be your sister should not be your best friend. It should be somebody who can be a real customer, somebody who you can satisfy a need for and do

things that they would be happy to pay money for.

And at that point, once you have a customer, somebody's raised their hand and they basically said, hey, I'm willing to pay money for this and this is why I'm willing to pay money for this. And so you have some ideas at that point that you can use in marketing?

Well why didn't you buy our product?

Why did you use our service?

What did you like about it?

What didn't you like about it?

And most people are more than happy to give you their thoughts and suggestions after they've used it and had experience with your company. But unfortunately a lot of people just don't ask, ask the question.

Most of them are happy to give you that information and guess what you then can use it. It becomes a testimonial for your company. And obviously you get their permission to use it as a testimonial.

And then you're in a situation where you have marketing pieces to go to other people who are like them. So If you find that all here and everybody who's loved your product is 50 year old women are older, I guess where you should target your marketing.

50 year old women or older. Don't go after your daughter's friends. Just, yeah, doesn't work that way. That's right.

You're not going to find that audience on Tiktok. Go, go, go find the one, you know, Not if it's

50 years old or older women.

So I mean, and you might find that it's guys, you might find, um, young men between the ages of 20 and 29 is your target audience or young men who are doing a specific type of exercise or reading a specific type of book or, you know, any number of things where you can really find

out who is using your products and services and what makes them alike.

It might be age, it might be demographics, it might be that they have the same hobby. Um, you know, I always talk about one of my clients who is now since retired and He and I were both in our 30s at the time.

And there was a radio station on Hilton Head Island, which is a small island off of Savannah Georgia and it had a lot of plantations were really, really, really wealthy people lived.

And there was one radio station on that island called WLOW.

And it was called the fifty to dead station. Now I'm in my thirties so I can call it a fifty to dead station because they played big band era music and music that really was appropriate for the people on that island who had money and who listened to it.

So we ended up sponsoring the 9:20 stock market report every Thursday morning for this particular company. And the owner who looked at me and he says I'm not doing that.

I said why not?

He said because I don't listen to the station.

I said it doesn't matter whether you listen to it matters whether your customer base listens to it.

And so you know, he went like this And you know 9:22 the phone started ringing every Thursday morning and he did it because he was paying me to do that type of thing and to help him grow his business.

But it turned out he renewed the contract the following year and he just looked at me and he said shut up, I do not want to hear it, okay.

So you know, a lot of times with what we do is first of all, you know, making sure your marketing is right and then we also have to make sure that your pricing is right.

And unfortunately I work with most companies who get in trouble because in the beginning they don't know what they don't know. And it's a lot of times it's way too early in the process because they don't understand a profit loss statement and balance sheet.

There's tons of books there um including you know, mine "The courage to be profitable" and "profit or wealth?", but there are lots of courses you can take. One of my very first client was a florist and she had a bookkeeping company who was doing her books and she'd get the financial statement, profit loss statement and balance sheet at the end of every month.

And then she'd look and "oh good I made a profit" and threw it in a draw. Didn't look at any other number. All right.

So she started having cash flow problems and she's "wait a minute I'm this profitable company." So she called me, smart enough to do that, and I went through everything and I said what is this what is this what is this? And she gave me this blank you know deer in the headlights there.

And so I said go ask them.

Well it turned out whenever they didn't know what something was. Instead of asking her they put it in miscellaneous sales.

So she always had a profit.

She fired him obviously and I made her take a bookkeeping course on you know in the old days you went to you went to a classroom, it wasn't done online. And she said it was the three most miserable months of her life.

But she learned enough to question and that's all I ask any business owner to do.

I don't expect you to be a CPA or a bookkeeper and you know get into the minutia of debits and credits and stuff like that. You have to take what your bookkeeper or your CPA

produces, look at it and make sure it makes sense.

And if it doesn't start asking questions where the numbers came from and then at that point you really see that they're right or they're wrong. But you know, enough to question.

I give similar advice for non technical founders that are doing technical startups.

You don't need to be a programmer but you need to know enough to be able to ask pointed questions and recognize when someone is blowing smoke at you.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

And you know that's the that's the profit loss and balance sheet and then you have to understand a little bit about pricing. I find that many small business owners are afraid to price what a product is worth.

You know, they think they can do it for X because their competitors doing it for X plus 10 and you know, stop thinking price, start thinking value, you know, just because they can do it for X plus 10 doesn't mean that you can.

Do you think it's a lack of confidence that causes people to to underprice their their products?

They think that people will buy strictly on price and it's proven, and I don't remember who did the study and I think it was 17% of the population will always buy on price, no matter what I mean, there's 83% who won't, Those 17% are probably not your customers, they're probably going to go to the cheapest store, the cheapest place, the cheapest grocery store and whatever else it is.

Um but the remaining 83% buy in varying proportions on value. And if people don't understand the difference between two companies, it will always go down to price.

If they understand that you're providing them X, Y and Z. And then your competitors only providing X. Well, yeah, since you're providing Y and Z. And I need Y and Z. I'm willing to pay more for that.

And the companies who are totally focused on price can't understand why a company might be, you know, customer would pay more, then they were pricing for it.

They should be thinking I left X number of dollars on the table is what they should be saying.

Exactly.

I mean there's some customers that you just don't want to happen in many cases, you'd be far better off letting your competitor deal with those while you harvest the more profitable ones who really appreciate what you're doing.

Yeah. I call them firing with ruthless compassion. And since my name is Ruth, I can get away with.

So, so where does that trajectory go? And what do the big Inflection points that the founders need to be thinking about?

I, you know, starting up is is great. Everybody's excited and everything else like that. And then you get to the point where you can't do it by yourself or with a couple of employees and then you have to start adding overhead.

You have to start adding an infrastructure for additional people for rent, utility bills. Um, yeah, marketing and advertising, finding, you know, CPAs. And travel and entertainment and all that sort of fun stuff.

You'll hit a point which I called No Man's Land, which means that you have to add overhead to be able to go to the next level. You'll know when you're there.

I mean you'll be totally frustrated because you're working harder and you're not making as much money or as much profitability and you're just like, And you have to add overhead and people and things to be able to take you to the next level.

That is the first, you know, that's a level of no man's land. i.e. we have to add the overhead, you're gonna make less money, but once you add the layer of overhead, you might be able to grow 10 times.

You know, different industries have different levels and different times of no man's land.But every industry has where you hit the wall at somelevel of revenue and you have to add overhead, which affects yourprofits.

But look at the, you know, the long term that level of overhead will actually allow you to grow that much more. And there's some industries where you actually hit two levels of it, um, you might hit a lower level of it when you're adding people for the first time and everything

seems to be going great again and then you're gonna hit another level, but where you put in a formal management team and that management team then takes it to a third level, even higher.

So, you know, depending upon what industry you're, and you'll probably hit no man's land at some point in time.

Yeah.

How do you think, uh, different, different industries, do you think this is a harder thing to overcome for some than others? And how do you suggest people wrap their heads around taking kind of that bitter pill that they're going to have to take that reduction for a short time to get the longer term win.

The first thing is to recognize you're going through it and you're going, uh, this is no man's land. I know I have to get through this.

Okay.

There are different ways to grow through it depending upon your industry. Um, one of the best ways to grow through it is with what I call recurring revenue and we all participate in recurring revenue.

If we have a netflix account, if we have a, um, a cellphone account or a mobile mobile phone account, if we have a gym membership and you know, we are all part of recurring revenue for somebody.

So figure out what in your company you can do with respect to recurring revenue and offer that to your customers and they pay you every month, every quarter, or whatever else it is.

Or you can do it as they do it in the restaurant industry where you have the birthday club or the anniversary club where you have their birthday or an anniversary date or both and you send them a coupon said, you know, celebrate your anniversary with us. You is the birthday person meal is free, as long as you have one or two people with you and they pay for their meals and so you go because your meals free.

So that's a way of doing recurring revenue to get people in restaurants without them paying for it.

They're basically allowing you to market to them is by them giving you anniversary dates and birth dates and things along those lines.

Um, the old famous one is Book of the Month Club. I mean if you remember that and then they had the audio, what was it? Um, Columbia Records, I think did one where you stuck a penny in And you've got 12 records over a 12-month period of time that you could choose from. And they sent you records every single month.

You know, that's recurring revenue. They built a phenomenal business on that.

Book of the Month Club has been copied, stolen. You know, whatever you want to do it, um, call it.

But you know, people have a cake of the Month club there, a baker or the Tea of the Month

club. Or, you know, if your maintenance, if you're, uh, in the home

services business, you might have a plumbing maintenance plan or heating and air maintenance plan or a, um, test control maintenance plan.

You know, so, I mean, there's lots of different ways to do it depending upon what your industry is in. But the best way I know of to get out of no man's land is to figure whatever that is out,

get everybody to sign up for it because it gives you enough revenue to overcome, um, overhead issues.

And the goal is for the recurring revenue to take care of all the overhead of your

company.

Yeah, look, subscription models are so powerful, partly for me, it's the flywheel effect that, you know, you're not needing to reset someone every time, once you get them on, they then just become part of that momentum.

And each new person you add in just kind of increases the speed of that wheel. Uh, and you've got some visibility of what you're revenues are going to be right. It's not that you need to sell everyone every month and you're starting from scratch. You're really starting with most of your revenue already booked and now it's, how much more can you bring on to that?

Yeah.

And, and they do the referrals, There's trust and loyalty. I mean, there's lots of reasons for doing that.

And, you know, if you came out with a new product, guess who you're gonna go to first, your subscription, people are your recurring revenue, people, you know, they're both, they both mean exactly the same thing and that's where you're gonna go to first and guess what, They can be your guinea pigs and tell you the good, the bad and the ugly, they will.

That's right.

But you already have a relationship, they trust you to some extent. You know, them, they're often willing to work with you when it comes back to right where you started with talking to your customers and getting that feedback, getting that interaction, just, that's something that never should stop.

So, absolutely.

When someone is coming along, you know, they're just running the business, what are the best indicators to help you be aware of that, What should people be looking for so that they catch

the coming into this sort of situation, this "no man's land" as quickly as possible.

Essentially what you're going to do is you're gonna graph your P&L. Every month and you're gonna graph your balance sheet ratios every single month and they will tell you right then and there, you're gonna see, you know basically profits going down on a long term basis and you'll see it.

And from a graphical perspective, you know, revenues will hit a plateau, profits will decrease, overhead will increase and direct costs depending upon how you price, your products may follow revenue and they may not, it just it kind of depends on on your industry and how you price, but you'll see it on a trailing P&L Data.

You will absolutely see it.

And you'll see it on your balance sheet there's a ratio called the current ratio which is current assets that things that are cash are turned into cash within a year. i.e. cash accounts receivable inventory, prepaid expenses basically and divided by current liabilities or things that have to be paid within here.

And as a general rule, increasing current ratio means increasing profitability, decreasing current ratio means decreasing profitability.

And you're going to have a decreasing current ratio when you start hitting the no man's land the signs are absolutely there and then you're gonna go, oh whatever terminology you want to use after the, oh I mean I know where I am.

Okay.

Here's how I have to get out of it. Most of us have to grow out of it profitably, grow, grow, grow

your revenues with proper.

Do you have any advice?

So we talked about going for recurring revenues.

Do you have any advice for how people can focus on growing past the no

man's land?

Yeah.

That is generally the recurring revenue is one way to do it. The second thing is to go reactivate all of your inactive customers.

Every one of us, including me, has customers that we've worked with years past or months passed or you know, five years past or whatever.

Go talk to them, see whether you can entice them back with a, you know, a special offer, a coupon, whatever. Most of them were saying, I thought you went out of business because you didn't talk to me, never heard from you.

So that's a very quick way to grow out of no man's land is to reactivate your inactives.

Of course.

I guess part of, part of the challenge with the overhead is that to handle this surge of customers to get the kind of growth you need you need to be hiring more people which is adding to your expense flying.

I overheard.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

But then the overhead will settle because let's assume you're no man's land is around $1 million dollars because I can do that number in my head. And to grow out of no man's land, we have to gorow to at least a million two for example That million dollars of overhead probably depending upon your industry, can allow you to grow two, maybe $3 million dollars if that's where you want to go without adding any more overhead.

So I mean once you add that level, you're probably going to be able to exponentially grow your company With at same level and then you might hit another level of no man's land, let's say $3 million. You got to add more overhead, but that might take you to 10.

So you really truly don't know. It it's dependent upon what industry that you're every business has told me where the numbers actually are.

What challenges do you see founders have when they're trying to bring on that additional

staffing? Is that something that they're able to do pretty easily? Or are there challenges with handing off those responsibilities?

They should have a job description. They have should have what I call key performance indicators. i.e. Here's your minimum that's expected.

They should have communications with that employee. I here's your KPI or key performance indicators. Um you met them, you didn't meet them, you exceeded them.

What bonuses do you get for exceeding them? Um If you're not needing them, what do we need to do to help you to get to the minimum copies?

So everybody who's, you know, who's employed by you should know how they fit into the company, what's expected from them from keep performance indicator basis and communicated with as to whether they're making amazing how often people don't have really clearly articulated sort of definitions of what is this job about and what does success look like?

How do you know if you're actually achieving what you're supposed to?

Yeah.

Right.

That's what I call a key performance indicator.

How what what should the founder do if they're if they're in this situation there trying to climb out, but it doesn't seem like they're getting there at the numbers aren't necessarily going great. They're they're kind of feeling like their backsliding.

Uh Do you recommend that they sort of fall back to where they were and retrench, get stable and then move forward again? Or do you double down? What's what's your suggestion?

Yeah.

All right.

When you hit no man's land, you have two options. You can grow out of it or you can shrink.

Some people can't handle, you know, more and more people, that's just not their style and that's fine.

You shrink to where you can handle it. Other people are like, yeah, let's go, let's go, let's go.

And, you know, they build these, you know, phenomenally large companies, but there are a lot of people who just they like the company at the size it was and I said, let me try growing and they find they don't like growth and they shrink back to where they were and that's ok.

That is absolutely okay.

You have two options at that point, grow out of it or shrink. And there's not a right answer to it. It's how you feel about having a whole lot of people around you and and actually doing all the KPI S and doing the communications and doing the reviews and doing the things that have to happen when you have all the way, that kind of human resources management thing where you're moving from doing the work yourself to now organizing other people to do the work and your abstracted.

Yeah.

And usually owners who were doing and then they are overseeing long for the day when they were doing it. You know, when the days go really, really, really wrong. It's like, I wish it was back when I was a half a million dollars in size and I was running the whole company myself.

You know, you get that, but in the aggregate, in the overall, a lot of

just say that when they get frustrated, but reality was they're achieving more and more goals that they want to achieve because they've grown the company. Um So it's just a situation where they can look at it and go, okay, yeah, it was a bad day.

Yeah, I would have preferred, you know, for that one day being back the way it was.

But you know, let's look at the big picture here and and remember why you're some of my early hires, the frustration when you're bringing someone in to take a responsibility off your shoulders, but they don't do it as well as you did. And and you've got you still got to do it right, you can't do it all, you don't scale well.

Yeah.

Mhm.

Yeah.

What's really, really, really hard is your first employee does really, really well up to a certain level of growth and can't handle growth past that.

And you know, people, it's often been said that people rise to the level of incompetence, which is the peter principle, and firing that very first employee who got you where you are today

hurts like crazy, but it has to be done for the good of the business because they're holding the business back and I promise you that hurts.

That hurts worse than firing a person who wasn't doing their job. You're firing the person who helps you get where you are today, but it's not capable of getting you past no man's land or the next level. And I see that happen a lot.

I experience this in with the company's advised they'll bring someone in and also, often with a really high title, their senior VP. Of engineering, but really they're a coder and you get to a point where that person needs to be an amazing manager and administrator and now you've got to demote them or fire them and bring someone in and it's always painful.

Well, that's hard.

That's at the same time, I remember the best day ever in my company was when my personal pager, it was back then, was no longer part of the technical response loop anymore.

Right.

It just never went off.

So good.

I never want to go back to having anything. You start to really appreciate having that buffer of, of other people and at the end of the day they are better at doing what I did than I do. You know, the people I hired as programmers were way better after a couple of months. You know, it's that, it's part of that valley I think is the people you bring in learning.

Yeah, exactly.

They have to learn that.

Yeah.

And as long as you give them clear expectations and, and they, you agree on clear goals, clear performance indicators and the feedback loop that they prefer. I mean, there's some people who just want you to come sit at their desk and go, “ya didn't make it.”

And then there's other people who say, look, well, how do you think you did this week?

You know, it is a conversation.

So you have to learn the personality styles of the people that you're managing.And the reality is is that different people communicate different ways and you can deliver the same message, six different ways to six different people with six different personality styles.

And they all get it because you deliver the message so that they heard it. Not like you were a, you know, for some people, like if you come in like this, you know, carrying this really big stick and going, oh my gosh, you just screwed up this week.

Some people will just freak out and just go blank and will not hear another word that you said, others will say.

Yeah, I think this is one of those skills that is really challenging for a lot of founders because they were experts at doing whatever the business was, but this is a totally different skill set that they need to master.

Do you actually have advice for founders for how they can try to acquire those kind of soft skills?

Wonderful.

One of the best books I've ever read on management was written by Kevin Armstrong called the Miracle Manager and I give that to all of my clients who are into the management piece, you know, some of its mid level managers, some of its owners, um, in smaller companies. But go read that book, it will help you a lot.

And you know, when I teach my leadership skills classes, I used that book as a textbook because it's that good.

Link in the show notes.

Mhm.

Yeah.

So do you have any appreciate it, founders be more self aware about whether they want that sort of growth model, you know, get big, get lots of employees versus that, that they should kind of rethink their expectations and build a company that's really more appropriate for what they actually want.

Yeah.

They have to decide what they want.

I mean, if you want a lifestyle business where you don't have many employees and you just worry about making sure cash flow comes in to support your lifestyle.

That's terrific.

Just recognize that's what you want and close your ears and everybody says grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, Yeah.

There's other businesses that get started or get bought where they have, okay, this business is going to be a tool for me to be able to do X and in order for me to be able to do X, I have to grow this business to this level of revenue and I have to go to the business for this level of profitability and I have to build my cash to why and sell it at some point.

You know, generally people with lifestyle businesses don't sell their businesses, they just kind of retire with them, but they're happy. I mean, it's not to say one type of business is better than another.

It's just a big, doesn't always mean for the founders depending on what the journey was like and the investment rounds were sort of an interesting waterfall moment though, when you do start taking that outside investment and that you are kind of at that point committing to go the growth to exit around.

Yeah, I think, yeah, it's not an option at that point, it absolutely is not an option.

Um, and some people don't do well with it.

I mean, I'm sure you've, you've heard the stories and written about the stories, but you know, really, really, really bright entrepreneurs start a business, take it to a certain level of growth,

Excuse me, Get outside investment and then can't handle the management, so the outside investors, fire them and they go and start something else, build it to a level managers take over and they're gone.

I mean, and that's, and that's okay.

You know, I think that's what they want when I hear the stories, it's usually from someone who's pretty resentful about the process. But yeah, I mean it can, it can work, it can work great. I remember about five years into my startup, the board of directors approached me and said, you need to bring someone in who really has some background in business.

Uh, you know, you're doing, that's right.

You're doing pretty well as a, as a astronomy drop out.

Yeah.

And leadership. You need, you need something else.

Um, fortunately I was able to find someone, I was able to find someone and recruit them and have a fantastic relationship and we worked together for many years.

But yeah, and you're comfortable with that person, it's a lot easier for you to find that person and have the board be happy with that person than they find a person that you exactly, because that never works well.

You're usually gone, you resent it, right, That's going to be on a short fuse.

Uh, whereas if, if you can embrace it, realize and I guess know, your own weaknesses and appreciate how that synergy is going to work, then that can be a win win. I'm still really good friends with this guy many, many years later.

Yeah, absolutely.

So any other, any other advice, key thoughts you have?

I think we're sort of beginning to come to an end here.

My, one of the things that I always suggest owners, I mean, you can have a profitable company and still go bankrupt. Um, the covid just did this, I mean, look at how many restaurants went bankrupt.

I mean they were very profitable restaurants, but you know, when everything closes down and people don't go to restaurants, do you have a problem?

Or I had one of my clients who had 80% of his customers were in restaurants. So I mean it was, he would've been toast.

So you have to be able to pivot.

My rule is no more than 20% of your revenues come from any one industry or anyone

um, customer. Because if something happens then it won't kill you.

And then I always suggest that you save 1% of every dollar that comes in the door as your rainy day fund as your ability to sleep better at night. However you want to call it.

You know, if you get a check in the door for for $1000 and that's 10 bucks gives you, it gives you that crisis, but it does add up and it will have a

And and do it. It's not hard to do. Um, just make it, make it all automatic. You can tell your book keeper to do it?

Of course it's, it's it's when things go wrong that suddenly that line of credit that you suddenly gets pulled because no one wants to give you money if you need money.

Exactly.

I like that one.

Yeah.

That's why you have your own line of credit.

I had I had I've had two banks over the years. Change management philosophies And two people, two business owners with lines of credit who were, you know, within compliance, they were thirty days, no, not needed the loan, whatever else it is.

Had their lines called for no reason.

And because the management changed, and didn't like those loans anymore. And it was in a point of time where they had actually borrowed against the line And they have 30 days to pay it back and sometimes you can't do it if it's in the middle of it. be your own line of credit.

Alright, well, fantastic. That's really good concrete advice.

I think people can prepare for that sort of thing. It's glib to say expect the unexpected, but there's just always surprises and hard times.

Yeah.

Have enough money that you can sleep well at night. That's the key and just keep it there. Don't get tempted to touch it when it gets large.

It's your rainy day account, you never ever know. And if you buy, you go to the big boys toy store, the big girls toy store, that's right because there's a bump and suddenly for that.

Yeah, you can't you can't turn that Ferrari back into useful capital, yep.

I have just All right, well, fantastic. I really appreciate you coming on.

I think there's great information for the founders and thanks for joining us on feel the boot.

My pleasure.

Thanks for watching this episode.

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Until next time, Ciao!