Bill Black on Scaling National Fleet Management

Bill Black: I was born and raised in Buffalo, NY. After high school, I joined the Marine Corps. That’s what led me to North Carolina. My last duty station was here in North Carolina from getting out of the Marine Corps. Went back to Buffalo for a short period of time and then moved back here. Worked as a technician and had a really good experience at a small dealership group where we opened a new location. It was a new AOR. Let’s see that know what an AOR is. It’s a area of responsibility. So it’d been open for 10 years. So what does that tell you? It tells you we had no customers. We had no trained team. We were basically started from scratch, not knowing what I was getting myself into. I was starting a business from scratch is what we did. And within 18 months we were running 15 technicians, 2 shifts Monday through Friday, one shift on Saturday. We were very successful. But when you’d walk through our shop, we were a Volvo dealer. There wasn’t a Volvo truck in the shop because there wasn’t any mobile customers there for 10 years. So we’re like, well, why are we so successful? We’re scratching our heads and we, we looked and we’re like, man, we’re an independent repair shop with a Volvo sign on the building. So that’s where the vision for National Fleet at that time, it was a vision for the company I was working for. And as we started to grow and and help, I started to help in the other locations. We actually opened a independent repair shop. You know, there’s a dealer group and we open an independent repair shop because we’re so successful. I’ve seen that as a great opportunity and wanted to continue to grow. And the dealer principle at that time was like, you know, well, slow down, cowboy. You know, things are going pretty good and, you know, take it easy. Yeah, we’re good. You know, you’re doing well. We’re doing well. Let’s let’s just, let’s just ride this for a while. And I didn’t, you know, I wanted to grow a scene like, hey, this is something that’s missing in our industry. There’s there’s it’s very fragmented. The the level of professionalism compared to like the automotive side just wasn’t there. Yeah, on the automotive side, you can go get your car repaired at an independent repair shop. It’s very professional. You know, they look professional, they act professional. It’s just like going into a dealership service department and it’s just like a dealership. However, you just can’t buy a car there. So my vision, that’s where the vision for National Fleet it, it’s sprouted, so to speak. I thought I was going to do with that company, but after working there for about 10 years, I really had a fire in my belly to do something. I decided to step out on my own and start national Fleet Management. Yeah, so the day we started, it was me and one other technician and and my mom was helping in the office and my wife was helping in the office and we had 1500 square foot of flex space. It was national fleet management. So the vision 15 1/2 years ago was always to take it across the country.

Chandler Kohn: That’s awesome. And how many employees in Bays do you have now?

Bill Black: So right now we have about 60,000 square foot of shop space team members, we’re close to 120, you know, continually hiring every week.

Chandler Kohn: That’s awesome. Excellent. We appreciate that. You know, tell us a little bit about the business products and services and the geographic footprint.

Bill Black: Sure. So we have 4 brick and mortar shops. They’re all in North Carolina, currently in Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, Greensboro, and Statesville. The Statesville location also sells used trucks. And then we have a parts business in Wilson, NC mobile trucks. We have about 34 mobile trucks currently and they’re in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana and Georgia.

Chandler Kohn: Great, excellent. And before we jump into some questions, talk about two kind of inflection points in the business from 1500 square feet to what it is now. Sure. What are two major growth points?

Bill Black: So I would say it’s to the two major ones. I’d say there’s really only one major one until now. We’re anticipating. The second one is what we’ve built in infrastructure for the past year and a half and we are primed to go to last year we did 25.3 million, we’re probably go to 400 million by the OR not 400 and 100 million by 2028. So we’ve really built the company to scale right now. But the first inflection point was when we decided to separate mobile from the shops we had. We had been operating the mobile department underneath the shop so to speak. And what we were doing, we kept running into, we get about 3:00 to 5:00 trucks in an area. We hit a ceiling. We just couldn’t go past that ceiling. And we’re struggling to figure out, well, why is that, you know, what’s holding us back? So I did some research. I started studying some other companies, you know, like Dickinson or Cox, whatever you want to call them now, TA, you know, how did they go about, you know, growing their businesses so, so rapidly? And what we found out was that they separated the shop from from mobile, set up an infrastructure under each one. You put someone in charge of mobile, someone in charge of the shops, you know, kind of one throat to choke there. One focus on, you know, if you were doing mobile and I was doing the shop, you were focused on growing mobile. I’m focused on the shop. And when we did that, we grew. In 2024, we grew over 40.

Chandler Kohn: Percent. Well, was that hard to implement? I’ll paper it doesn’t seem that difficult. I’m sure it was, but to really separate the two businesses and have them operate in kind of separate lines.

Bill Black: I don’t think separating them was difficult. It was pretty, it’s just pretty simple process. You know, when you map it out, it’s just people and process. Where we struggled was on the, the culture side, you know, taking you a handful of mobile guys off of a shop P&L. You know, now the shop’s standing on its own and it doesn’t look as pretty as it did before. And then, you know, I would say that we got, you know, we got sloppy on the shop side because we had the mobile as a crutch. You know, like I said, you have four or five mobile guys contributing to AP and L that you’re really not managing. It’s, it makes you look better than you really are. So that’s been our focus this year is getting our shops back on solid ground.

Chandler Kohn: Good, good. Well, that’s helpful. You know, obviously you’re doing well now, right? And you know, I want to understand and help our audience understand why Bill is interested in growing to a billion dollars. You know, why not be content now? Why do you want to keep growing? Understand why growth is important to you.

Bill Black: Well, I would tell you so my faith is a big part of who I am. So I believe that we’re all created to do something. You know, we all have God-given gifts and talents and those were given to us to serve other people. So I believe too that I don’t know what my capacity is. I don’t know what I can do, what I’m capable of. So I believe that I should continue to grow and, and become a different person every day. Like re re renew myself every day. You know, the, the bill here, here’s the here. I mean, here’s an obvious fact. Last year we did $25.3 billion or $1,000,000, so we’ll get to 25.3. So you know how many of those businesses I’ve ran before? I was the CEO of 0, right? This year the goal is 40 and I believe we’ll do that. Do you know how many of those I ran before?

So, you know, the game of growth and building to me is fun and it also allows me to attract high caliber team members that want to build because my dream has to be bigger than yours. If I want you to work for me. If your dream is bigger than mine, you’re not going to come to work for me. So if I have a big dream, I can attract really high caliber, aggressive people that want to grow and create a really cool team of people that are doing cool stuff. So we like to say that we’re not, you know, I’m not for everybody when it comes to hiring people. And we’ll probably talk about team and how do you attract and retain talent. But I don’t hide that, you know, I don’t. If you’re here, if you’re looking for a place for 9:00 to 5:00 and you want to coast and you don’t want to improve yourself, we’re probably not the best place for it. There’s plenty of places that you could go and and work, but this this wouldn’t be a good fit.

Chandler Kohn: For you, that makes sense. And it’s a good segue into my next question, which was actually how are you finding talent? It’s a struggle in the industry, particularly people, you know, you know, younger generations, right? They kind of want it here and now. Yeah. Not really want to grow in into their roles, for example. Yeah. How do you think through that?

Bill Black: So there’s a couple questions there. You talked about the younger generation, then you talk about talent. So I’ll start with how do we attract talent? And that has been a struggle for us, but the struggle has been us trying to be something that we’re not. Yeah, trying to be be what everybody wants. And I think it, it was about 3 or 4 years ago where I fully embraced and understand what the word alignment meant. Yeah. So right now when I’m hiring people, especially if it’s a manager, you’ll talk to people that I’ve interviewed with us. It’s like you haven’t asked me anything about my job history, my skill set or all that other stuff. You’re just like general conversation. I want to see who you are. I want to see if we’re in alignment with our values, our growth. What do we want? Because you could have really good smart people on your team, but if they’re not in alignment with where you’re going, it’s not going to work. And I’ve, I’ve, I’ve made that mistake for years where I’d hire good smart people, but they weren’t in alignment with our goals and our vision. And I was looking at myself like, what am I doing wrong? Why is this person not being successful? And I, when I realized how important alignment was, you know, first thing you have to do to, to attract and get and retain talent is be authentic to what you expect this person to do and what you want. And if they don’t fit that, don’t pretend that you can change that person because most of the time you can’t. And then the younger generation, what what we’re finding is, you know, they’re the younger generation, they’re either studs or duds. There’s like nothing between, you know, they’re, they, they’re either, they either come in and they got, they got, they’re squared away. They know what they want. They want a career path. And if you show it to them and show them what they need to do, they will execute. And then there’s other ones that are, you know, they want to talk about Taco Tuesday and flexible schedules and things of that nature. And that’s really not who we are. You know, where’s the foosball table? You know, do we have kegerators here? And that’s really not not who we are.

Chandler Kohn: So that’s kind of almost the labor side of things, right? Yeah. And then, you know, here I’m, I’m at Bill’s corporate office today. It’s, it’s off site from, you know, where the service is being done. Bill had time to do the podcast. You obviously have to have some good general management. Yes, middle management in place. And I I know that that can be a challenge too.

Bill Black: I don’t know that we have that figured out, Chandler. You know, that is something that we’ve struggled with because of my background as a technician and working my way up. My tendency is always to pull somebody up, lift somebody up, and sometimes the person doesn’t want to do that. Sure. And that’s where I’ve struggled is wanting something more than maybe that individual does, you know, wanting to put that effort because that’s how I came up. So I think we’re, we’re doing a much better job. We, we have an HR director that does a fantastic job of understanding what people’s goals and what drives them and making sure that they’re a good fit for our company. So I, I don’t know that we’ve got that figured out, but we are constantly, you know, anytime we, because that middle manager, that general manager at the site level is the most critical position in our company. Yeah, they’re managing, if you think about it, they’re managing expectations from three different directions. Most, most managers are managing from one or two directions. So they’re managing the expectations of the customer. All our team like our technicians and that are all performance based pay. So they’re managing their expectations. So they don’t have work and they’re not being efficient because we’re not organized that that affects them. Then of course they’re managing the company’s expectations of profitability. So we like to say every transaction there’s a bull’s eye in the middle where everybody wins a little bit.

Chandler Kohn: And so you’re motivating them with performance based compensation.

Bill Black: Yeah, performance based compensation. And since the locations aren’t at full capacity right now, you know, we’re we’re struggling because you really need a builder and a maintainer. Once the location gets to capacity, then you’re going to need a maintainer. So it’s almost like if you’re a builder and I’m a maintainer, we bring you in till you get to about 75% and then you hire the maintainer. It’s like, all right, Chandler start to hand this off the bill because he’s going to maintain it while you go start another one and get it to capacity. So we’re still trying to figure all that out. I wouldn’t say that we, we haven’t figured out. So I’d love to get, I wish I had a good answer for you because I’d say I haven’t figured out. But we’re, we’re continually improving in those areas and evaluating, you know, hey, if this person didn’t work, why didn’t, why did, what did we miss? You know, was it a, was it a selection process? Was it training? Was it on boarding? Or, you know, did the person just not do what they said they were going to do?

Chandler Kohn
Yeah, that that’s helpful for us to understand. And you know, obviously there’s you know many other operators in the industry that deal with talent and the organizational strategy and and motivating employees. So really help you. Thanks for sharing that. In terms of multi location strategy, breaking out to a second location is obviously very risky for a lot of people. They’re not comfortable with taking that on, particularly later in life. What is it done for you to spread out geographically? Obviously, there’s only so much work you can do in one town or city. So I want to understand that and then kind of brand synergies and brand recognition.

Bill Black: Yeah. So, so our strategy for for brick and mortar locations is the Charlotte market. We believe we put four locations. Raleigh, Durham, we think we put four locations. This Greensboro, Winston Salem, High Point area, they called the Triad. We think we put 2 locations, you know, one in Hickory, one in Wilmington and maybe one in Asheville, you know, and why do you say 4 in Charlotte? So when we were first, our first strategy was we’ll put a really big location in each city and it’s like, OK, so where in the city you put it? You can’t put it in Uptown Charlotte. Of course, when you, you wouldn’t want to to, they wouldn’t let you. So OK, we’ll put it on the north side because that’s where we’re at now. We’re up there by all the the, the truck dealers, but there’s a lot of trucks on the South side and during rush hour traffic, it’s going to take you an hour one way to get, get to the north side. Customers are not going to do that. They’re they’ll settle for poor service, pay more for it, but it’s close to their location. Proximity is, is, is critical in our industry. The other thing that we found is there’s a lot of good technicians that live on the South side of Charlotte, right? Are they going to drive an hour one way to work? No, they’re going to take a job that’s 5 minutes from the house that has, we have I, I, I’d say we have some of the best benefits in the whole industry that has maybe worse benefits or no benefits and less paid. But it’s 5 minutes from the house. So that’s where our strategy changed probably 5-6 years ago where we said, OK, well, if we put a smaller shop in the four corners and then just absorb because we don’t focus on transit business, we focus on local business and you focus on that 5-10 mile radius around the shop, you can be very successful. You can run A5 $6 million a year, shop at about 2025% EBITDA and and it’s easier to manage. I can find a manager to run that facility a lot easier than I can find a manager to run a 20 Bay shop where you have 5060 people working there. It’s total different skill set. So that’s how our strategy is changing. That’s how we think about growth. Right now, our focus is on we have big, we have 3 levers this year that we’re pulling. One of them is the shops is maximizing our current facilities capacity and getting our systems and processes nailed down with with excellence because we have to do that. If we’re going to duplicate this process, these these locations we have to have, we have an operations manual, but we don’t follow it the way that we should. So once we’re, that’s our focus. It’s not adding locations right now. Once we nail that down with the four locations that we have, then we can go wherever we want, whenever we want to. We just pick where, where do we go next? Yeah.

Chandler Kohn: When we think about EBITDA and for those that don’t know, it’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, amortization, it’s a very close metric to cash flow. A lot of what we see for smaller shops is kind of a 15% EBITDA margin, 12 to 15%. You mentioned 25 ish. Yeah. Has that number increased as you expanded or have you done something kind of special to essentially minimize your cost of goods sold and expenses to?

Bill Black: Increase that margin. So it has not expanded yet because we built the infrastructure. So right now we are very SG and a heavy because we’re built for scale. You know, when you’re growing a company, it’s like a stair step. You know, you push, you push, you push, you get to about a hundred 120% capacity. Everybody’s about to blow a head gasket. Then you level off, add some support staff, get them geared up and say, all right, ready, here we go again. And you keep doing that. And what I found as I’ve grown and I’ve learned about business is every stair that you go, those steps get more expensive. Yeah, when you’re adding a layer of leadership of managers, that’s one price tag. But when you’re at a layer of manager of leaders that have V’s and C’s in front of their names and they don’t have an immediate impact on the business, you know now they want to hire managers and stuff. So this last round where we’ve added a layer of leadership that were senior leaders, what I would call senior leaders, it was very expensive, very, you know, costly to to the EBITDA numbers and things of that nature. But now we’re prepared to go to 100 million without adding any significant more.

Chandler Kohn: Overhead. Are you growing through your own cash flow? Are you taking on debt? How are you thinking about?

Bill Black: That, yeah, currently we’re not taking on any more debt. The last two years we took on more debt than we’ve ever taken on before. 1 is one reason was we bought some, we bought three of our facilities in three years. So 2122 and 23 we bought facilities. One of them was also an acquisition. So during that process, anybody who’s bought real estate that was that’s a big cash suck out of the business. You know, I had never planned to be a landlord. I’d always wanted to reinvest in my business and what was happening. We have first right to refuse on all our facilities. And one of the concerns that we have in our industry is we can’t just go rent some flex space or some office space and we need 14 foot doors. We prefer free standing ceiling. I like to have at least 5 acres of property. And those aren’t just everywhere.

Chandler Kohn: Of course.

Bill Black: So after COVID in 2020, a lot of investors got out of the office building market and started focusing on our industry. So they’re coming after ours. And I had relationships with all our landlords. They’re really good relationships. And when I found out that these investors that were buy the properties were from Chicago, New York, and I didn’t know that I’m trying to do some research like, OK, what is this relationship going to look like? And you know, wasn’t as comfortable, I would say to, to do that. So we decided to buy the buildings. And then the last acquisition we did, we, we, we pay cash for some inventory, the used truck lots. So there’s a lot of inventory and we’ve sucked a lot of cash out of the business over those three years. And that’s put us in a position to get into some debt last year. But currently, you know, we’re growing without debt.

Chandler Kohn: Good, good, good to hear how, how, how, how should a smaller business owner, I don’t know, 10 million in revenue, 15,000,000 in revenue think about taking on debt. A lot of the younger folks maybe my age, you know, they’re open to that risk, but folks 50 and over tend to really not want to take that on even though it can really benefit them. How should, how should somebody be thinking about taking on debt? What is your perspective?

Bill Black: Well, I think, I think it all depends on how savvy the person is with finance. I mean, obviously if you’re, if you’re earning 12% on cash and you can borrow money at 6%, it makes sense. You know, if you can manage that, most people can’t manage that. You know, Dave Ramsey’s become a multi millionaire. He runs about a four $500,000 or $400 million business based off people to teach them fundamentals of not getting in debt because they can’t handle not that so much of debt is bad, but people people can’t handle it. They can’t manage it. And I, I think as long as the person that’s doing it understands what they’re doing, maybe has a good CPA or has somebody helping them through that, it, it, it makes sense. It makes sense to do it.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah. I, I, I think for US, one of the, I don’t know, there’s kind of a demarcation between IC owners doing less than 20 million in revenue and over the ones that doing over, they really have good Cpas, cash flow, they have good insight into their own cash flow. They understand it. They understand the forecasts, it kind of know how to manage that. And the ones under it, they’re really they’re, they’re just not finance people. They’re really operators. And I can see it’s a challenge.

Bill Black: Understand, yeah. And some people don’t have, I wouldn’t say the appetite, but that’s not their goal. You know, they didn’t get in business to do that. They got into, they got into to be a lifestyle business and that’s what they’re doing. And if if I was running this as a lifestyle business, I would not be that. Yeah, yeah.

Chandler Kohn: You can run the business from your vacation home. Life’s good. You have time to spend with your family. Biggest return on invested capital for you Sure, you know what does, what does that look like for national fleet management?

Bill Black: It’s people you know, investing in. Do we do like leadership training? I would say over the last five years, I’ve spent over $1,000,000 on leadership training, whether it’s seminars, coaching, consulting. I’ve spent personally on myself, $500,000 in the last five years. I spent almost 100 grand a year. Yeah. So like I said, I was, I, I was the CEO of a $25.3 million company last year. And it wasn’t because of just me, you know, I, so I’ve constantly have coaches that are, you know, teaching me, holding me accountable. So I think that’s, that’s the biggest, that’s the biggest return on investment. And I’ve watched you hate to see somebody leave the company after you’ve invested in them. But when you see them go and be so successful, what they’re doing and get jobs that they would not have gotten had they not worked here, you know, that that’s really, that’s really why I do this is to have a positive impact on other people’s lives. I, I prefer that they stay here and use their skills, Hey, while they’re here. But if they don’t, you know, I don’t know if you call it pain forward or, or what, but that’s, you know, that’s what I like to do. And and that’s what attracts people here. They know if they’re going to come here, whether they stay here for a year or they stay here for 10 years, when they leave, they’re going to learn an awful lot. And what they do with that is up to them.

Chandler Kohn: And your investment, it’s more about leadership, right? Investing in people, understanding how to motivate people. Is there any other disciplines that they’re teaching through your training?

Bill Black: That you’re. Yeah, yeah. Most of it’s personal accountability, OK. You know, somebody can’t lead. Like I can’t lead A-Team if I can’t lead myself, you know, if I can’t, if I don’t, if I don’t have discipline in my personal life and in my job and what I do, then I can’t, I can’t hold you accountable to have discipline. So really a lot of what we do when it comes to leadership training is it’s servant leadership. And it’s also, it’s, it’s also personal accountability. And when I say servant leadership, I want to make this perfectly clear because I get so frustrated sometimes when people talk about the purpose of leadership is to build more leaders. It’s not. The purpose of leadership is to execute a mission. Yeah. And I get very frustrated on LinkedIn and where it’s like it’s all about the team and all about it’s like the you don’t have a team, you don’t have a mission, you don’t have a company, you don’t have a you don’t have a team. And I get really frustrated because you really need to take care of the company, the profitability and the mission that you’re trying to accomplish. Now, if you build leaders behind you, that’s great, but that isn’t why I’m a leader. That isn’t what I if, if, if I was reporting to a board of directories, they could, they could care less about how many leaders I’m building unless it’s helping the mission. So that needs to be yeah, it needs to be if I’m building leaders, I need to be building them for to benefit the mission and the company, not to benefit the individual. And I think that’s where I see leadership get really, really confused by, you know, the way that you you grade a leader is by how many leaders that they created. I’m like, OK, how many leaders did George Patton? He was a pretty good leader. I don’t know of anybody that you look at his lineage, I’m sure they’re there. But, you know, in that case, I wanted him to win a war. I didn’t want him to build leaders.

Chandler Kohn: Which was the mission?

Bill Black: Exactly. So our audience knows who, who are you going through who, who’s a service provider that offers that?

Chandler Kohn: What’s that? The leadership.

Bill Black: So we do multiple ones. One of them, I’d say the fundamental 1 is Jocko Willink. If you’re familiar with Jocko, it’s a company that Jocko’s a retired Navy SEAL. He has a book called Extreme Ownership and the Dichotomies of Leadership. And it’s all about personal accountability. You know, those are the fundamental ones where you have, we’ll send, we’ll send a technician, anybody that’s showing potential to be a leader, a future leader, because it’s all about the fundamentals. When you think about business and you think about leadership, it’s, it’s very simple. You know, there’s fundamentals that you can’t shortcut. You can’t, you know, there’s no easy button. There’s fundamentals that you just have to execute. And Jocko teaches those at a very, very high level. But we’ve we’ve sent office people there, we’ve sent technicians, we’ve had them come out and speak on a Saturday. It’s really expensive to have one of their speakers come in. It’s 2030 grand and that that’s not, it can be, it could be expensive to somebody. To me, it’s a great investment. And since I’m paying it, we will invite customers. If you’re, if you’re a team member, you can bring your wife, you can bring your kids. Like if you have teenage kids that are kind of a little trying to figure themselves out because I’m paying for it. So why not invite it’s?

Chandler Kohn: At a cost, right?

Bill Black: Yeah, the only additional cost is the food and that’s that’s minimal. So I even had my pastor come one time. My pastor came one time to it. That’s awesome.

Chandler Kohn: Yeah, that’s great. I haven’t heard that before.

Bill Black: In yourself well couple things if you think about it too, if you if everybody if you’re teaching the same leadership philosophies yeah, you know remember I told you how alignment was so critical for me. But if you’re coming from a John Maxwell type atmosphere, and then this guy’s coming from a Jocko atmosphere and then somebody’s coming from AI, don’t know, name another one. Simon Sinek. You know, not only do you have different terminology, like you’re using servant leadership and this guy’s using a different version of it. And I’m not, we’re not even speaking the same language. So you know, that alignment thing where people are, we’re all speaking the same language. You know, communication is, is critical for us that we’re communicating and cascading down at at at the same speed and at the same speaking the same language.

Chandler Kohn: Good, good part. You know, obviously you’re growing inorganically, right. I know you mentioned you made an acquisition or two, but acquisition strategy can play a large role into growth And you know, I think everybody knows that is this old buy verse build. How do you think about buying verse build? If you’re if you’re buying, it’s immediate cash flow, right? If you’re building, it takes time to get there.

Bill Black: So we’re, we’re growing with both. You know, I call it an opportunistic way of doing it. I’m not out like hunting deals. The deals that we’ve made, most of them came to us. I get calls from other shop owners that, you know, want me to buy their business all the time. And right now we’re focusing on, like I said, those 3 levers because it’s easy to get distracted with, you know, something like that.

Chandler Kohn: And repeat the three levers again.

Bill Black: So one of them is getting our shops to capacity, Yep. And executing our systems and processes with excellence. The mobile department, the goal this year was 35 trucks. And we’re already, we’re already just about there. We’ve got 2 trucks come in this, this week. They should be here tomorrow. That’ll put us at that number. So we may have to bump that one up a little bit. And then the other one is our parts business, getting it fully integrated into the national fleet stores, which we’ve not done a good job with that. So those are the only three levers. I’m not buying anything. I’m not doing any acquisitions. I’m not opening no locations until we nail those 3 levers. And the goal is to get those done this year. I believe we’ll do that. And that’s going to set us up for the next inflection point that you were talking about. You asked me about two, I think, and I’ve only had the one. The one was separating. Now the second one we’re on the precipice of because once we nail down the shop operations, the systems and processes, the next and then it’s just, you know we’re printing cash to invest wherever we want and be very focused.

Chandler Kohn: Awesome. And then let’s kind of wrap it up. You know, I think, I think, you know, our, you know, I want our audience to walk away. You know, if they only remember one thing from this conversation is, you know, how do they think? How should they, how do you think about growing past the 10, fifteen, $20 million mark? How do you think bigger? How should they think bigger?

Bill Black: I think the key is you had, I would say go, go to go away for the weekend, just you all by yourself to a place where it’s quiet and just dream, you know, what do you want? If you knew that you could be successful at anything or you couldn’t fail, what would you do? And then think about that and think about what that feels like. And then you can read, you know, you can reverse engineer that. Well, how did they find somebody that’s done it? If you want to be a 25,000,000 to come talk to me, I’ll show you how we did it and I’ll show you how to not make the mistakes, all these mistakes that I made. You can do it a lot quicker. And then I, I heard Tim Grover say this one time, if he’s talking about the price for success, the price for winning, you have to, you sacrifice, you have to be disciplined. You have to do all these things to be successful. And he says, if you think the price for success is too much, wait till you get the bill for regret. And what you don’t want to do is wake up one day when you’re about to retire and say, man, I wish I would have. I wish I would have. You hear a lot of people say on their deathbed, you know, I wish I didn’t work as much. I wish I didn’t do this. I wish I would have spent more time with my family. I wish I would have done that, but they never tell you about the guys that were on their deathbed or gals guys because women that were laying on their deathbed and said, you know, I wish I would have started my own business. I wish I would have went for a second location. Yeah, I wish I would have done these things. They don’t tell you about those guys. They’re always trying to put pressure on the guys that are growing their business and being aggressive, which I believe is what we’re supposed to do. So it’s American Dream.