Todd

Today I'm talking with Eric Brunton. It's super excited about this. This is probably one of the first people that I know that has actually had over three exits, successful exits, and is working on his fourth. So Eric has got an interesting story about how he went from working after college, into consulting from consulting into his first startup, as first startup being sold to real page and then just continuing from there the success. And so I'm super excited to bring you the story and his experiences to sit back, relax, and enjoy this conversation with Eric Broughton.

Eric Broughton

Okay, well, today I'm going to talk with Eric Broughton. So welcome, Eric, super happy to have you here and talk a little bit about your entrepreneurial journey. You're the first person I think we've interviewed with three successful exits under your belt. So welcome. Great. Thank you very much, Todd. Thanks for having me. Yeah. So kind of digging into this. You know, you've done a bunch of startups and you've had a bunch of success. But like, I'm curious about going from like college to like some of the jobs you did kind of post that. And then tell me about how like you transition to like doing your first startup and why. Yeah, absolutely. So South Dakota School of Mines technology right up there. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah, we have that graduated from from tech. And it was it was, I think, right out of the gate, it was worried by decisions were lying. Where do I choose which path to go. And I had opportunities, you know, like a lot of lot of Tech grads from, from Boeing to Northrop Grumman, Microsoft, other other like bigger, you went the Microsoft route as well and let these bigger opportunities. So I did not have an opportunity to Microsoft. just clarify there. But a lot of bigger opportunities in different companies. But the one that struck me was this with Cargill steel, that Northstar steel, Arizona, and why it was exciting is because it was a brand new steel mill built in 1995. And, and the fact that all the technology was was was was still in transition, and really becoming a new steel mill. So that was a concept to me that that drew me there. And and so my wife and I moved to Kingman, Arizona to start our starter career journey. And that was probably the first thing is just making that decision to go to that where the technology had just gone.

Todd

Okay. And so then as you were there for a while, like what made you want to go do a startup? Like how did you kind of just get into the corporate gig and you said, hey, I can I can do this and can or I've got an idea for a startup. And you know, you did your entire kind of startup career has really been in kind of real estate. And so how did those two pieces go from like, you know, an interesting opportunity, rather than college to, hey, I should do something in real estate in the startup world.

Eric Broughton

Yeah, took a lot longer before I went into the entrepreneurial world. So should I take a step back, I'm at the steel mill, I'm electrical engineer, by education. And I go into the steel mill as a plant engineer, I'm working on the floor, I quickly move up. And I have a department thatand, and we had four shifts. So here I am, 22 years old, from South Coast school mines, and the managing managing people that were everything from 25 year olds to like 65 year olds in this in this desert environment. And then let's just say there wasn't exactly the same work ethic as South Dakota. There's some Arizona mindset a little bit different at this time. So that was kind of a culture shock for me. But one thing I was able to do is get some of the technology extended internships as well leading up to that, and I was able to use some of the technology to reduce our changeover times. So it was about a 15 minute changeover to go from maybe three rebar size three rebar to four or five or six size, rebar. So making those changes. And by having the program and working with the technology team to move our setups into a database, and then moving them back for certain perfect environment setups. It before they were printing them out and putting them on the screens. And then I was able to get that built up until the point where they said, Hey, do you want to be our IT manager? I said, Well, let me think about that a little bit. And well, I can be covered and still does every day and shower before I go to bed. Or I can be that guy that sits up in the office and says you know what, let's make the bits and bytes go here and there. And that was a lot more I would say enjoyable from that perspective. But and that was still able to actually see things happen. So I'd make technology changes and because we integrated directly with our programmable logic controllers in the plant floor, I can see them go from a database on down and I could use kind of both sides whether or not the plant so that's where I really started in the technology side. And, and it was mostly Oracle and I had four books on my shelf that were Oracle books, and two and then I got this call from this recruiting company and two of the books on the shelf were written by this company called Tusk, the ultimate software consultant I thought oh my goodness, this is, you know, to me at the time that was, that was like, you know, McKinsey and Company of Oracle consulting, like these guys are reaching out. So I just leapt at the opportunity and moved to Chicago. So it still hadn't had my entrepreneurial roots, I had intrapreneurial. And that was kind of exciting project I did even at even at Northstar steel or Cargill steel, is that we had an electric arc furnace, and then electric arc furnace, your arcing electricity across to melt down the steel. And that was probably its equivalent, about 25,000 homes about 50 megawatts going into this, this that melted down the steel. And by collaborating and networking, I was able to learn that we had an Energy Division at Cargill, that bought and sold energy. And this is during kind of Enron energy crisis, when they were just taking advantage of the West Coast. And this is an Arizona property, we were able to figure out how to whenever there was downtime in the mill, they would pop up on the mill operators or the electric arc furnace operators a monitor and say, Yeah, let's let's drop this down, we're going to be down for three hours or four hours, we would send a message to cargo corporate and sell that electricity in the open market. And we made more money selling electricity in the summer of 99. Then we made some steel. So that was just kind of like that. Oh, okay. Yeah, there's more to this. And that was going to help. So I would call that like my intrapreneurial journey. And it had some had some more than that. And then went on to Chicago had some great projects, Northern Trust, I was a Data Architect for their wealth management platform. That was fascinating seemed like the Bush family or the Gretzky family. And biggest thing was, I was learning how much money people make while they sleep by the sweep accounts. Like, oh, my goodness, how does this happen? You know, that's got a kid, I'm like, watching them make more money than I make in a month, you know, by just like, I'm just gonna take this money from this account, put it in this one and earn interest a couple of days, until I want to do something with it. Yeah, exactly. Or trying to date architect like, you know, their artwork or horses or, you know, their cars and, and put that into their net worth, it was pretty fascinating. But my favorite project was archipelago, it was Arca exela group of entrepreneurs bought the Pacific Stock Exchange, see pricing that movie with Will Will Smith, it's a pursuit of happiness, where he's sitting in the steps. And while this group bought that, and brought it all online, in Chicago, and that became the foundation actually even still today for the New York Stock Exchange, I was able to work with Steve Rubin owl, who is the CIO of arc x at that time, and he became the CIO of New York Stock Exchange, and it was able to do some really cool projects there. So it was just fascinating. And, and through that through the course of that experience. Then, another little transition is I was hired away. But one of the executives at Tusk who left and said, Hey, Eric, you've been doing great with projects and technology. But you're also seem to be the guy in projects that get like the next contract, and always seem to add on more consultants, what do you think about going and starting this division for me, and like a general manager, almost like a global consulting, global fractional use of, of database administrators and consultants. And I said, that sounds pretty exciting. So that's what I left toss to join IT Convergence. And I was the Global Solutions Manager, and built those products. I even came back to South Dakota and worked with Gateway a little bit and had had some had some clients in the in the area. But but that was where I where I really cut my teeth on sales. So I was very fortunate, even before my entrepreneurial journey, building up this muscle of, of innovation, and then understand the sales side of it, understanding the value of EBITA revenue and AP and AR and all these, you know, accounting terms and managing groups, even before and I think that laid a good foundation for me, which led me come to the entrepreneurial journey as I also became president of Chicago's Oracle user group. Okay, and, and, and there, and that's where that's that's what really by raising my hand and said, Yeah, I'll take part in that and volunteer and running that group. I was able to land a meeting in the Sears Tower. It's so cool. And I was able to get, you know, Sears Tower, basically, I had four sponsors paying for this thing for the room as a Chicago Oracle user group. And I had some great speakers and then there's a company Amelie residential am Li was just bought by Morgan Stanley real estate for about two and a half billion dollars. And they're a big Oracle, Oracle shop and they had all this real estate assets. And their CIO just happened to attend my meeting, saw how I manage it saw what I was doing, that I knew the business side that technology and, you know, sales, I guess a little bit and he said, Hey, we were just acquired by Morgan Stanley. Morgan Stanley has asked us to create this consulting entity within Morgan Stanley real estate $100 billion assets under management. He said I understand real estate. I've had to use consultants for this oracle stuff. Would you be interested in partnering with me, and building out a consulting arm, like an entrepreneurial consulting arm within Morgan Stanley real estate, I thought this is the coolest thing I've ever heard. And this is prior on 2006, and jumped on board, start doing some cool projects. But then, you know, safeguards self storage and retrofitted all their, all the different environments. And, and I get fascinated by this stuff like start geeking out because we're talking about, we started to figure out how you have your elevator bank. And we said, Hey, we should do revenue management and just charge like a buck more as you as you get as you close the elevator, because the further you get from the elevator, the more the more pain of painful it is, you should charge more for closer elevator, you know, just things like that little revenue management things, start building those out. But then the financial crisis hit. And that's where it's like 2008. And we can kind of sense it in advance, we're supposed to go to China, and we're supposed to work with 25 different other companies that start to take our take our real estate technology that got delayed three months, then it was delayed another three months, and then just things just went crazy in 2008. So they really feel that that we're Morgan Stanley wasn't even sure they're gonna be a business pretty soon changed our charter, and really had to wear that entrepreneurial happen. And a couple of things happened. One, I went back to my Oracle roots, and I landed a large project with a port of Oakland. And this kind of goes back to two people that are hopefully watching. It is really about the grind and the hustle, you know, when it comes down to it, you know, you just have to just figure it out and persist and persevere and get it done. And this is one of those situations, you know, could have went, you know, life sucks, I'm gonna go, you know, put in my resume and at the time monster and go work for some corporation. Or I said, You know what, let's, let's figure this out, landed a nice project port of Oakland. But then also said, You know what, let's create a product. And that's what we did is we created our first platform was called the yield vision. And it was, it was a data warehouse. And also, so happened about six months earlier, Marc Benioff was in Chicago. And this is when Salesforce was still kind of, kind of pretty, pretty nascent, you know, and they had had this luncheon. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna say I like me and Marc Benioff and three other dudes. It was like 60, you know, 40? Yeah, exactly. We hang out, we serve together. It was, it was about 4050 people in attendance. But it was still impactful, because you hear this guy talking about this software as a service concept of just, it sounds so simple now, yeah, do a subscription. It's so and at that time, you know, and I just come from that IT Convergence where I was providing a database administrator for 40 hours a month, or developer for 40 hours a month in it. And I thought, Okay, why couldn't you do this from a software perspective, and this is way before the cloud, you know, this is kind of maybe we have an outsourced data center. And that really struck so the first thing we tried to do as a data warehouse with that kind of software as a service concept, and it was a great idea, excellent platform, the problem was our market, you know, product fit, not the market fit, because real estate, people do not want to pay $250,000, for you to map out your datasets, they want it to work out of the box, and they want to play fractional, and they can pass it on to their asset owners. And that was not the case here. So that was we sold about three projects wasn't enough, we just kind of let that sit for a little bit. But then what we did is because we're building this data warehouse, we're able to see where the where the first real estate entities to return was going to be multifamily apartment buildings. But we're also able to see that a big gap was marketing dollars. We saw these huge swings of marketing, some properties, paying 10s of $1,000 a month, some $1,000 a month, and we said look at the revenue, look at the revenue per unit. What's the difference here? We started asking questions, and no one really knew. So we said, okay, let's figure this out. And it's, it's again, it's commonplace now. But we were the one of the first ones to actually take every ad. And we put in, we put in, you know, our little one one pixel trackers. So every time it was drawn kick back to us. We'd have unique phone numbers for every unique email addresses for each one. It sounds so silly, but apartments.com rent.com, Craigslist, all the different names that were going wild at that time. They didn't know which one works. So they'd be like, Oh, the apartments.com guy brought him bagels. Were gonna go that 1500 bucks a month per property here and how do you know and it was crazy. So we started to give them those datasets. And in a lot of times, it was Craigslist actually that was winning for these guys. And they didn't even know it. So all this like real estate data and that's that was like a true entrepreneurial, figure things out, create it and then really that that flywheel you know, you read the Good to Great Book, and that flywheel is true. You're just like pushing so hard to get it just moving but then once it starts rolling, boom, that gets pretty fun. And you just, you can just feel it momentum kicking up. And that was a more of a true entrepreneurial journey for the for that platform.

Todd

So that's kind of interesting. I mean, I guess the the takeaway to this is you really leveraged some consulting engagements to find kind of the problem, and then basically said, Is this problem something that lots of people have? And can we turn it into a product? And I think that's kind of unique, because I think there's a mentality of billing hours versus building product. Right. And I think that, you know, there's very few, I think we've all kind of seen consulting companies that they don't build product very well, because they're always in the mindset of billing more and more hours. And so that's kind of interesting, that you kind of pivot from, I see an opportunity with a large client that I can turn into something that's a repeatable product, and then generate reoccurring revenue at a time where that was kind of unique in general. And so we'll talk a little bit about the six years of doing that, you know, your exit was to real page. And so, you know, I'm sure that was a lot of work. But tell me a little bit about just kind of the growth in that from having a product and understanding the market to an exit with, you know, a pretty large organization.

Eric Broughton

Yeah, it was, it was such a exciting growth period, even personally, professionally, on so many levels, you know, building up a team, we're about 55 employees at one point. And even having your own office, it was really, it was really an exciting time. And it was really collaborative. And we definitely didn't have work from home, you know, maybe ever, it may be a couple of Fridays, but uh, you know, we did things like, like, you know, get everybody together, maybe a beer cart Thursday, when the guy walks around the Captain America mask, and you have, you know, you get everybody together and have good times. Yeah, exactly. White Elephant, Christmas and different things. And I would love my favorite arm, it was lunchtime, actually, you know, we would just and we built such a trusting environment, we that we'd have, you know, some people explaining concepts of their religion or where they grew up. And never forget, we had two employees from China, and one grew up in the country and one group in the city. And they had such different perspectives. You know, one was part of the Communist Party and one was not, and just having that, and then just every, I really miss those conversations that was being having that and building up that crew right in downtown Chicago. And the other thing we're able to do that we're able to get a great space. So another thing about just being on the hustle and talking to a bunch of people found out there was this gaming company that that lost their contract for Tony Hawk. It was when they had those skateboards, you could jump on and sense that they lost their contract, we're able to scoop up their office space, just pennies on the dollar. So we got a beautiful space is a 32nd floor. You know, again, some South Dakota kid, I'm in the corner office, I'm looking at, you know, Daley Plaza, there's I'm like, Oh, this is pretty sweet. Exactly, exactly. That's all we do. It was good time. So it's definitely something to write on tomorrow about, you know, take some pictures.

Todd

And point what you're kind of describing as building a culture, I think, and, and so and I think as an entrepreneur, the first one, it was always kind of a little bit strange, because I think you don't know what culture is, you know, what you what you value. And you know what you're trying to espouse. And I think as you add people, you baby kind of organically add people that are kind of like your culture. And I think it takes you some period of time to realize, okay, well, I'm getting to the point where I'm interviewing people that maybe don't have the same cultural fit, or I'm moving to the next startup, and I have a more clear idea of what I want to do. So tell me what the role was kind of culture played in that.

Eric Broughton

Yeah, it's fascinating, very insightful, and that build up the culture and definitely when you hit a plateau, when you're at five people, different mindset, and then you're at 10, different mindset. And you're kind of you're still than that, about 20 to 25, is when you can't really talk to everybody every day, and you start to get different. And then it's so important, from five to 50. And above. That's where it's like, it's your majors, people that you hire, are really creating a culture that you don't daily basis, so you kind of have to, but they're also taking cues from you. So you're spot on, and that and that, what you do what you say, and really what you measure, and how you reward people that flows up and down. And you can't please everybody, there's it's never gonna work that way. So you have to figure out what that path is. And then also, relatively still young, you know, early 30s. That time Yes, still still learning a lot about how to work with people. But I think the thing that's never goes out of style is, you know, integrity, doing doing the right things, treating people with respect, you know, honoring all these will go through HR laws and things but that's just common decency. So as long as you do those, what should be basic foundational things, then on top of that you build your business culture, which is we do valuable things for our clients, our sales team don't stretch the truth. And it's amazing how when you set the bar or set the standard for those type of conversations, how that just flows down and permeates across the board. So I think it's pretty darn important.

Todd

It is, and I think you got to be good stewards, I think as you become a leader in a larger organization, being a good steward of that, right, basically, encouraging people that are doing the right things, and then basically stamping it out when you see where it's not going. And I think I would say my journey at concur, that's probably one of the key elements of, of our success, and adding more and more people that like, you had to be a steward, everybody had to be a steward of it. And if it didn't happen, you know, you had to wash people out pretty quick.

Eric Broughton

Right? That was probably something I learned is I was not quick enough to wash people out in the beginning. Definitely something to learn is you kind of thought, oh, maybe this is, maybe it's just me, and you question it. And then as time goes on, you recognize Oh, my goodness, yeah, this is not. And on the flip side, it's not good for that person, either. If they're not unfit for their, and then you see them flourish somewhere else. It's not because you were bad, or they're bad, it's just wasn't the right fit. And that's, that's usually where it ends.

Todd

What kind of fiddling, you know, it's like, I always think of entrepreneurs, when they come to us, we they're either kind of fitting into kind of one of three categories, they're either kind of strong, or have a natural inclination and sales product or technical. And so you know, your background is kind of interesting, where you maybe had more of a technical engineering bent. But like, you basically quickly went through like finance and you went through operations, and then you went through sales. And so at this point in time, like, what would you say, in your, like, core skill set looks like? I mean, do you think that really sales was kind of the one that you lead with? Or it was more kind of operational? And how systems worked?

Eric Broughton

Yeah, yeah, I still can't fit into one of those. I have to do three. Yeah, it works. Because I'm sure I've missed out on some opportunities, because I've been too analytical. And, but it allows me, at least at this stage of my life, you know, I'm going to be 50, pretty soon here. It allows me to take a step back and say, Okay, where's this product going? What are my margins? And what is the look going to look like? Can I have enough sales conversations to clarify and confirm there's, there's likely going to be a product market fit, and I can iterate through those conversations in my head, a lot of times before I get too far down a path. And that's allowed me to invest, invest in better, I still need to do better job there, to mentor, you know, improve my mentorship and work with different groups. And then and then with a okay to charge my, like company today, you know, look at that. And even now, you know, looking at different business models, growing it, that's the thing about an entrepreneur, if you think you have a great idea, wait until you start building your company. Right? I mean, you've been there so many times, you have to pivot, you have to change. And you have to do it intelligently and in pragmatically and take what the world gives you. And, you know, there's only there's very few people that can bend the world to their will. And I think even those people probably didn't really bend at practice evolved into their will. But yeah, that's why we hear about them.

Todd

You know, honestly, Eric, I would actually pull this back to the maybe your education in school nines and engineering in general, I think that there's a pragmaticset of skills that like I think School of Mines gave to us about like just problem solving, right. And so I think you had to have a reasonable document, you had to be somewhat intelligent, you had to work hard. But I think this kind of methodical approach of like breaking down large problems into small problems. And if some of that happens to be in finance, so if somebody happens to be an operations, if it's something that product or if it's in a sales process, what are you doing, you're taking a system, and you're breaking it down, and you're solving it. And so I think, I think that's probably as a foundation that probably enabled you to continue to collect skills on top of that, but I do think that's a foundational element that I think, sir, probably both of us well,

Eric Broughton

You're absolutely right, that that we already came to school minds, because, you know, we knew we were were smart in our school and our in our smaller ponds. And then you go to school minds and this bigger pond and you're surrounded by all these super smart people, and then you kind of find your way and even even at mines I didn't, I didn't thrive until I learned to do to study with a group. It sounds kind of silly, but I was kind of like doing it on my own. And I was at Delta Sigma Phi and the fraternity electrical engineer, I think it was probably one of the only ones. So it's kind of like I was on my own, trying to figure these things out. Until then I became a study group and then Well, lo and behold, Dean's List, you know, it's like, but But it took collaboration It took that continued curiosity and then back to your point, that foundational element of just bringing it out. That's something else about school mines is there's not much coddling involved. It's, you know, it's kind of a Oh, you don't get that, huh? Well better figured out. Like, Hey, Dr. Simonson where I can't figure this out, could you? Could you help me? He's not there to coddle you, you know, here's what the problem is, let me help you figure it out, and then move on.

Todd

The second piece to it, which I don't think came from your education that I think is important in these companies, especially for something he went through a scale is how do you apply that kind of analytic nature? And then basically do with people, right, I think you see people, lots of smart people who answer, but I think, the ability to kind of mold and figure out what type of talent you need, and then the ability to get the most out of them, I think is a skill set that like all CEOs are all founders need to kind of invest in what's what's your experience on that side of it, because it's one thing to know what the path is. But it's like, you know, you're not doing all the work, you got to hire people to get work done.

Eric Broughton

Exactly. It kind of going back to school minds as well as I played football there. And some people don't know, but when I busted up my knee, I haven't played in the band for the year, you know, so I didn't really did yeah, you're not see that one coming? Yeah, is that I did Student Government participate in there and just really active. And it was, I was always a leader in high school, in different activities. And then I kind of took a couple years off of that mindset and college mindset, and then I became reengaged. And the passion plus those leadership skills have really transcended well into the entrepreneurial world. So I was very happy about that about how, you know, just kept engaged. But you're right, you have to lead you have to inspire, and you have to feel the read the room as well about what is the what does it feel like What's especially when you're speaking different groups, and, you know, whether I, one of the companies I managed was in San Antonio, Texas, down there, every other week, I had a team in an office. And we had to go from 22 employees, and I had to cut it down to about 12 employees. Yeah, so trying to manage that environment and rally the troops and, and share the right mindset so that you can that you can grow. So 100%

Todd

Yeah. So let's talk a little bit like you saw that last business to real page, and you were there for about a year and a half. And so maybe talk to me a little bit about the difference from you know, running your own shop, and you know, I don't have any employees, 15 odd number of employees and then going to this larger organization, skill sets are different, right, you know, control is different. And, you know, a year and a half is not chump change in that and type environment. So tell me what worked, what didn't was a difficult?

Eric Broughton

Yeah, definitely difficult, very difficult, different challenge, you go from the startup world, where it's kind of an us versus the world type mentality. And if we, if it's not working this way, let's let's figure it out. Whereas once you've sold your company to a different group, you know, like a real page, large public company at the time, and in, I was fortunate enough to initially exhale, kind of talk to that journey, even selling the company, my initial job was the leader lead the vision that we sold, it would continue doing my day job. And it was, hey, can we keep 60 67% of our clients engaged in next three months, and I was able to hit about 72%. So I was able to do that. And then I was able to get another opportunity to manage about four other divisions. And that's when I became president of the divisions that was after, right about nine months. So within about nine months, I was able to earn the trust of the CEO by sitting down and having very frank conversations. That was nice out of the gate, because I was able to continue to be who I was, you know, you get in these meetings where they do these product, product control meetings, and you sit, and I always sit next to the CEO. So if he wanted to ask a tough question, I was there ready to answer it? I thought that was the right thing to do. And, and continued on to the to the very end, which is why I think he bought my second company too, because because we, we always, he always knew I was bringing the real deal. But the difference was that what this is, the tough part about large corporations is you know, I'll use the word politics because it's the best thing I can think of is that it's not as much youever the world, it's, it's you versus other divisions, other groups because you're fighting for funding. Some people are worried about the newcomer coming in, and there's politics, a little bit of Game of Thrones action, who's next to the line who's got this opportunity. So you have to be more weary, weary, that became weary. You have to be wary of these different of all these different groups that you're that you're, I guess battling for lack of a better term on a daily basis. And it really does take up resources and brain, brain time.

Todd

Unfortunately, I think I the way I describe it from my time at Concur was, I got away from the work that I enjoyed doing right? It was like you're protecting your teams, you're doing a lot of budget, you're doing a lot of HR, there's a lot of politics, and you got away from just building and shipping product. Right. And so I think it goes from pretty black and white in the startup world to kind of a lot of gray. Yes, it's a different set of skills are successful. And that definitely reached my peak at one point in time, too.

Eric Broughton

Yeah, you're absolutely right. It's it's not good or bad. It's different. Because obviously, at a company of that size, when you're when you're pushing hundreds of millions of revenue, you can't run that same way. Yeah, and you want to, and I was able to, I guess I felt more about that mindset and muscle at an habit where I was previously, where you're looking at, hey, we can't build all the cool things that we need to do. We only have so many resources and allocate additional funds. And we have other investors and real pages case, public investors that need to have that return on investment, you got to figure that out. And that's to your point about the budgetary process, while you will get really savvy, your financials pretty darn quick, about where to where to manage and where to move. Move resources.

Todd

Yeah. So after that you joined e supply systems as this was like an existing company that needed some turnaround help. So you know, that's, again, kind of a different skill set than building something. And I'm curious about a that how that opportunity came about. And then being just like, what that was like, I mean, I'm assuming there's a lot of costs and operational efficiencies, some things you've done in the past. And then but you know, and again, this was another one that you sold the real page. So that's pretty cool.

Eric Broughton

Yeah, yeah, it was a good, good exit for the investors. Main reason is a while I was exposed to the opportunity through a couple of common friends that I've met in the apartment industry, mutual appreciation, respect. But then they introduced me to one of the investors was more of this red McCombs funded group called the Fraser McCombs. And I, of course, love McCombs come from the Midwest, being a previous owner of the Vikings and the Denver Nuggets and, and just just remember seeing him thinking, how cool would that be. And then you go down to Texas, and you talk to these guys, and they're doing everything from water rights to, you know, land in Montana, where they make money off of the wells, and the mineral rights and air rights, and everything else is just unbelievable what these what these intelligent people can figure out. So I want to be a piece of that part of that action. And it was really, really fun to get to. So I had that small piece of that business, go in there, and it really wasn't supposed to be a turnaround. They thought it was this rocket ship that just needed the right guy, you know, maybe it was a sales pitch. Yeah, just the the fuel, you know, with your Rolodex, Eric, it's gonna be so easy, you know, and I get in there. And because I think I'm that product guy, and sales and Mark and everything. I go in, and I look at I talked to a few clients. And I'd say, Okay, what do you love about this product? And they'd say, I kind of bought it because this previous sales guy liked him. So like, kind of bought some of it is not good at all, no. But I would find out that they wouldn't roll out the whole, they would buy it for maybe five or six for their properties, maybe in, you know, most business sense, maybe about 5% 5% 6% their portfolio, just to be nice, guys. And once I saw the, you know, I hope that guy doesn't listen to this podcast, but maybe he does. But I saw his expense reports, and I saw why they bought from him. The barbells this guy put up and golf and everything else, I mean, my goodness, it would have been better just to buy the licenses himself. But he was no longer with us, you know, after that. But, but but it was it made it pretty apparent to me that the product was not what it needed to be. So sat down, took a step back, and also brought in a little bit more money from investors, but looked at the time horizon. And this is the time value of money and how much time I can have these resources. And I had to make some tough decisions, which I thought I would left that behind it the corporate world, but had to do that here as well. Same Oh, my goodness, this is not what I thought it was gonna be. But you know what I'm signed up. I like these guys. They trusted me, I have to do the job. And I reduced the staff count, change the business model a little bit to more be more inexpensive, but more scalable, and able to get up to product profitability where we're losing 100k a month to get to profitable, just barely break barely over breakeven, and then flip that to real page again, and that got the investors their money back and then a nice little return, which made them quite happy. And some of them invested in in the last couple of companies as well. So and then TierPoint sold the Steve Wynn by talking to him and him saying, you know, this is great. This will be a nice addition. And last time I checked in it's over $100 million business for them right now. Wow. So the team did really well. And I felt really great. My favorite thing was about some of the team members, even though I just did the transition. But knowing that up front, being honest, in the sales process, some of those team members took on some very high leadership roles. One of the gals, Dana did an amazing job, she was leading that division up until recently, I pulled her over to inhabit, and now she's the GM over there. But it kind of goes back to this culture, you get people that you work with that you trust, you know, or quality. And then you bring them along for the ride, you know, ethically and within all the legal bounds, which I of course, waited until those times have expired. But so I think you're seeing that a couple of things is it's being upfront about the sales process saying what your expectations are, there's no surprises, and then and then everyone can win if it's a true value add on all sides.

Todd

Sure. So what you didn't really mention in there was product, you were saying that they were kind of, you know, doing it as a nice guy, do you think there was just not enough? There wasn't a product market fit? Do you think there wasn't a lot of customer discovery to really nail the solution. And, you know, basically, that was part of what they ended up doing. And then aligning it, you know, both from a cost perspective was there a lot of functional stuff that they had to do to make that work?

Eric Broughton

Great, great, great insight there. Again, the the product, it was something the market needed, so picture like an amazon.com. But you restrict all the products down to a limited set at a property for like refrigerator, or paint, or like Sherwin Williams is a big partner, or, or your carpeting. And we could restrict that down. So maintenance tech, you know, would just go and click and drop down and choose the ones that he or she wanted for that property, they'd have to think about it, that was nice. So the great solution very much needed. The problem was is you didn't have many property managers that wanted to pay a buck two bucks a unit for that, for that right to have restricted information, they didn't see the value enough. So so that was an issue. Also, the setup was very time intensive, you know, going down to what type of batteries do you want? Or what it's just so many skews? Yeah, so it was really, it was it was not a scalable platform. So I think it goes back to Great products, great idea. Not scalable, the price was not a market fit. So yeah, but the product was a fit it just, if you're gonna give it away, great, you know, works for Silicon Valley, guys, but not for, you know, sorry, works. You know, it works in that in that vein. But it doesn't work in a mindset where you need to be profitable and have have a great revenue stream, so that that didn't really fly. And that's where what I did is I is I spoke to enough of these vendors, and I saw that they were paying, they're paying us money, just to have our restricted list. So I can say, Okay, this property is a Sherwin Williams property. And then I would keep out all the other paint shops. And then we'd have this is where one or two members would go through and say, Oh, my goodness, you use this paint from Home Depot. And this and this is if you would just consolidate, you're gonna save yourself $10,000 A year, oh, my gosh, no brainer. And showing them it's more. So give us a cut of the action. So we've flipped it around said wouldn't give this to you for free. And we focus on the big four, you know, carpeting paint. And that's, that's when it changed. Yeah, that's pretty cool. That's a that's a pretty cool insight, right? Because basically, the business model was wrong, is basically what it wasn't that the product was right, the business model was wrong. And so, you know, that happens a lot. Right? I think you come up with the idea, the value prop and should be there, but it's the right person isn't the one paying? So? That's right. That's right, you can sell yourself on any idea. That's exactly. So that after that you did apartment yet? And and, you know, that's you and I spent a little time on this one. I think that the concept was kind of interesting. So maybe talk a little bit about this. And the timing, because I think you you did this and you built this before COVID. And you've sold it before COVID. In a lot of ways, man, like that stroke of luck was super good. Because if you had continued that and done that through COVID, you know, the story of may have been very, very different. Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah, there's a couple of unicorns, you know, billion dollar plus companies that are no longer around or went under during COVID for exactly that reason, they kept on going. And so I was running e supply systems, I was starting to go through the process of of selling the company, and was that at one of our conferences and heard these executives on a panel, and it was about what to do about Airbnb. And the brilliant guy up there from Airbnb Harvard MBA is trying to say the right things with saying all the wrong things, you know, like, hey, wouldn't it isn't awesome that your residents can list at Airbnb isn't that great? Like, and how does that Providence is like, No, we're making zero money and we're getting more and more wear and tear and everybody hates it and he's like, but think about your residence like are you this believe now? And he totally missed the mark. So I kept on seeing that and I'll never forget the day I put the real page poster. You know, the, in my in the booth we were we sold the naa in San Francisco. So the marketing team from real page walked over put up, we'd literally signed the docs that morning with Steven pulls up the banner posts and now a real page company. And that that afternoon I was in the court furniture office or in their booth saying, Okay, tell me about how it works to move furniture around. Because my initial thought was, oh, we whenever there's a vacant unit, we just put furniture in there, rent it out until it was rented. And then, and they said, Are you kidding me? Eric? Have you ever heard of bedbugs? I'm like, I kinda like, yeah, every time we have to move furniture out, we have to take it to a warehouse with to process it with chemicals that kill the bugs, and then send it back. That's not going to work like Okay, so all these little things. That's where it's at product market sales, everything mindset going into it, then I did start doing the numbers, but eventually partner with TransUnion for background checks. And that's true talking these exact same, what do you need to feel comfortable with that? And that's where it really built up momentum built up that platform kept it really small and light raised a little bit of money, network ventures, you know, and others as appreciate that. It's up to you if you want to share that or not. Exactly. That one. Yeah. There you go. Yeah, todos. Pardon. I was very happy with that. So hopefully those two Yeah, so appreciate the validation. And brought in, brought in just one round of investors found them first in Chicago, and got them on board as a lead network ventures, which estimators and team and kept it really small. I mean, we were even out of a we work initially. And in Chicago as a group called 1871, as well built it up, start to get some larger clients and started to get our revenue cranking. And then we started to have conversations as far as their integrations with Airbnb and VRBO. And not quite booking.com yet. But it was fascinating because it's actually a guy out of Minnesota, that comes down to our offices in Chicago. And he's with verbo. And it just just friendly, chatting around. It was really the biz dev guy, you know, and we didn't we didn't know at the time we thought was more of a partnerships. But what they were seeing was that our average daily rent on our multifamily units, were getting probably two to two and a half x of what they were receiving on their, on their vacation bookings. Because these are in Chicago, Nashville, Austin, great downtown city places. Yeah, great location is getting a ton a ton of money, and a ton of occupancy, too. I mean, we're talking 70 80% just unheard of numbers for these guys. And they start seeing this going, Man, this is going to be huge. And what we didn't know is they had already begun conversations with a quote unquote, competitor of us called pillow that was helping the residents lift their units. They were not getting them the financial transactions as much, but so. So in pillows model of that of that resident, that was our phase two. And we're architecting that and we're because we're pretty excited engineers and entrepreneurs, we're sharing it with this guy, this is our vision. And in his mind, he's going back to Seattle corporate and going, if we don't buy these guys, they're going to replace what we just bought in like six months. And even worse, if Airbnb buys them after we make this move, it's really going to get ugly. So we're very fortunate. They came in and made a nice time. I thought for some reason they didn't know they did. Okay, they didn't say they were looking at them. Yeah, sorry if I misspoke. But yeah, they're looking at them. And then the and then they bought us at exactly the same time. You were right. Yeah. Within days. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, the president or the CEO of pillow and I were on a panel, it was women and asset management for greystar. It was like this big, big event. And he and I are on stage. And we both have these, you know, grins on her face, because we're just, you know, we know every big checks come in. Little did we know that it was us together. You know, our both picture our names in the billboard near Times Square, which we had to share. That's like really? I have to share this moment with this guy. Yeah, he felt the same. Exactly. Right. Yeah. Crying crying on the bank. So not too bad. I don't know. No one should have John should feel bad for me. Yeah.

Todd

It just it was just a cool story. And the timing was really good. And so it was great. And then you know, your time at Expedia was interesting, too. Because, you know, I think, you know, that just the market wasn't really there for both of your products. And so you had to find to add value while you were there. And then, you know, and so, maybe talk a little bit about your time at Expedia, again, a larger organization going from a startup to a large organization, different skills run differently, a lot of competing, you know, agendas, a lot of thin margin businesses and that one, which is difficult to I mean, I knew well traveled perspective and so yeah, I'm just kind of interested from your standpoint on on what that experience was like.

Eric Broughton

It was a night and day experience from from real page where whereas we're at real page, it was definitely a CEO led Steve, when you know, everyone, everything had to go through Steve, if you want to get something done, whereas an Expedia is such a large group, this is before. Yeah, exactly, very decentralized. But also, unless your numbers were so massive, I was in a meeting one time, and I just can't even make this up. One of the executives leaned over and said, and it was about our business and Pil. And they just said, I don't even know why I'm in this meeting. This is like point 5% of my business. What is the point? Like, I'm sitting right here. But that was his perspective. You know, like, why am I even in this meeting, you know, once he saw the numbers, and it was just so disheartening, and that was tough, the tough to experience, you're going, okay, maybe I'm not so special now. You know, and that was tough to stay motivated in that environment, even though we're building something pretty cool. And they still need to compete with real page, I'm sorry, with Airbnb, and as, you know, now shut down. And during COVID, and even then, you know, I'm a I'm a, you know, persist, persist, persist type guy. So even during COVID, we completely retrofitted our platform, so that we could support nurses and first responders. And the idea was that you would use our platform to book first responders and such because New York City was the first place I was getting really hit hard by COVID. And we were we said, okay, you can use our platform, whether multi not multifamily, but you use it for, for hotels, because no one was staying in hotels for business. And we built that we could do our background checks and do all this validation stuff. And it was just one of those things, someone just said, it doesn't matter. And just we couldn't get our brains around the point that we're so small the matter, and that we're like, everything matters. But you know, then on the flip side, when you're that big, yeah, when your billions of dollars and you know, the Clintons on your, on your, on your, you know, advisory board and the board of directors, you know that you don't worry about 10s of millions of dollars, you're worried about hundreds of millions and billions of transactions.

Todd

Yeah, a couple of things there. I think I agree with you, like I think even at concur, you know, it's like when we were coming up with new product ideas, if it didn't generate $100 billion, or 100 million dollars in five years, you're kind of like, okay, is this worth investing in? And so that is a definitely a different way to think about it. I mean, you have a massive distribution channels. So you know, product matters. And so there's, it's different. The second piece I was thinking about was like, I mean, do you think that the product actually has a home? Like do you feel like even today, like, you know, I don't know what they're doing with it. But do you think it ever gets resurrected? And does this problem need to get solved or it's just not big enough for them to go do something about

Eric Broughton

A lot of those things. It's it's not resurrected at that at a at Expedia right now, and I don't see it becoming resurrected. It's because you'd have to take the codebase and put all the resources behind it as well. I don't see that happening. Is there a need for it the marketplace? Absolutely. You're slowly starting to see more and more short term rentals in the multifamily space, you're seeing Airbnb had 18% of their bookings in the last quarter are greater than 30 days. So you're seeing actually the short term rentals come into longer term rentals. And there's some my friends Zumper in San Francisco, they now the short term rentals and their multifamily sites, and now you're seeing multifamily go on there. And there's different concepts. My daughter just graduated from Berkeley. So my wife and I are gonna go stay at a property in downtown San Francisco's but got 16 units. And it's basically Hotelling type concept, not one front agent or anything. It's fascinating. Yeah, so that's definitely happening. So there's definitely opportunities there. And as more and more platforms are being automated, you know, automatic keys, locks, door locks, everything else thermostats, and you just need a cleaning crew. It's going to become more and more commonplace. So I think it's definitely there. And I always consider resurrecting it. I just don't like doing old ideas. I like new things. Still Still gonna happen. Maybe I'll advise somebody that does it.

Todd

Let's keep going. So that's the finish that when you went to inhabit and were they they were kind of like a private equity group. Is that what they were?

Eric Broughton

Yeah, massive private equity. I was I began talking to them while I was at Expedia, even before the pandemic hit, and just because it's such an exciting opportunity, and it's a taken these all these multifamily assets they rolled together under one umbrella things vacation history assets under one umbrella we're talking about 30 plus companies that have been brought under the first was Providence putting some equity in some some some cash and then you had an insight partners and then just before it kind of I think it was probably like a precedence of me joining was Goldman Sachs put in money as well was one last investor so I, Goldman Sachs hit and then I started and actually they're, they're checked in hit me clarify that until after after I'd started. Maybe just throwing it out there, kind of a big deal. But it was cool, though it was good to see. I mean, they were, some of it was part of me joining because they had to get a leader with the space because a lot of the leaders that they had did not have multifamily or experience. And I had the vacation, I had the multifamily experience, from real page at the vacation from Expedia. There's frankly, not too many people in the world that have a background, so it's fit. And it was very exciting to go in. My intention was to come in as his chief strategy officer and then become CEO and take public company public. But it wasn't quite the case after I got in the door. And some things were, you know, not not the way I expected them to be. But it was still very exciting to work with these different groups and organizations, I start with a vacation team, getting them aligned, getting some structures put in place, some sales momentum, things such as you know, entrepreneurs forget about is you actually can do price increases. And it was pretty wild. You know, on the flip side, now, how painful that is, but but we're able to rate create significant revenue from these groups that hadn't done a price increase for probably 5678 years. We're not talking egregious. I'm talking like 5%. And then also just doing right sizes with contracts and saying, hey, you know, sure, that was your uncle's cousin that had a property and he wanted a free one or whatever, no, we're gonna pay at least $10, you know, or something minimal. But that was really impactful that created kind of like a 30%, revenue uplift. And that was pure EBITA, as well, which is the most fun thing without having to add any headcount. Just execution. Yeah, so then I grabbed the residential piece, and, and continue to see growth within a habit, and, and just kept on building up those teams. So it's pretty enjoyable and brought some really good people in as well, that are still there.

Todd

Yeah, that price elasticity thing is kind of interesting, because I think a lot of startups go through this, right, they basically beg borrow and steal to get you to get on to start with, right. And so they discount their price just to get them on. And then you're getting larger corporations, you'll discount. But then once you get to a point where it's like, okay, you've renewed for three, five years, or whatever, we've got some elasticity in that model, or you're getting value out of it. And so get back to what market value and look at what your new deals are doing. And basically close that gap. And so we've gone through just even in my consulting stuff, a handful of customers exactly the same thing. Yeah, once you start getting some market brand, then you have a lot more probably leverage than you think you do. Right spot on, and you just nailed that the word is market value, right? You do comp to comp, and you say, Hey, if you were to leave today, you're gonna pay probably double or triple. So how about we just come up? Like, half of I'll meet you in the middle of double? How about that, you know, and which is a big uptick? Yeah, like, the change management cost is pretty high. Right? Like, I gotta read something else out, and I gotta go back in so like, you know, maybe not like it. I think it's a good point. Yeah. And sometimes entrepreneurs overlook that. So yeah, absolutely. Let's talk a little bit about your, your current stop. Okay, to charge. So, you know, I think you're taking an Eevee kind of trend that's happening with multifamily. And so that's exciting, where, you know, it's something that you know, well, and then a space that's, you know, growing in the right direction, with a long tail on it. And so tell me a little bit about that opportunity. And what drew you to that?

Eric Broughton

Yeah, so I'm Adam habit, I'm walking the conference floor, because I'm always looking for acquisitions. And I meet these guys that are doing access control. And almost in the corner of their booth, they have this this charger, this Evie charger, and I'm electrical engineer, I have drive a Tesla, like, Okay, tell me more about this. And come to find out, Oh, we do access control. And with our client in Hilton Head, high net worth individual puts in an Eevee charger, and then starts to realize that when he's gone, his electrical bill just keeps on going up higher and higher. The local Uber driver driving his Tesla chargers vehicle and he's gone. Like what happens? Like, Hey, could you guys help me out? And like restrict this thing? It's like, it kind of makes sense, right? You're like, what the heck because, you know, they put their charger outdoors, they don't have garages on stilts, or whatever the heck these things are. They they build access control and start putting in some some finance and I met them like, this is going to be huge. You know, no one's thought of it this way. Like multifamily. I'm saying you can restrict access and multifamily because right now they have these RFID cards they hand out or you pay by credit card or it's just free. A lot of these places. So we're already like a step ahead of everyone else. So left, left and habit and joined okay to charge a partner with these gentlemen building this platform up. They had kind of the technology. I brought the business model on top of annual subscription and then a revenue share company All right, have it really make minimal margin in the hardware because we don't make the hardware we're using. And now we're hardware agnostic work with Siemens, ABB Analects, robot, all these different players, and really just building up a network of charging stations that are restricted to vacation owners to multifamily. We have two of the NMHC, top 25 as clients right now. And so exciting just starting to build up that muscle, we have a couple of hotel chains that have just started Best Western added a few properties with us. And then all the way back to my Oracle days Oracle hospitality worked with them landed a deal with Margaritaville in Panama City Beach, where they want to restrict Yeah, it's pretty fun. And it's just uh, it's like I was sharing, you know, before the call started is that it's not taking off as much as I had hoped. But I think what I mean, we're lagging factor to evey sales, and Hertz and enterprise, they already said by the end of next year, 25% of all their cars are going to be Evie or be electric. So people go to, you know, even the Black Hills, someone gets a car at the hertz or enterprise, where are they going to charge their car, they want to drive up to the Black Hills, you know, park their car at their vacation property? And then what do they do they start getting down to 25%, they start thinking, well, that's almost too late sometimes. Yeah. So that's where we're starting to get into that it's a follow on. And then the second thing that caught me off guard is how much the costs are, especially these commercial properties. Anybody that's listening that doesn't know what they're gonna do for college, go to be an electrician, because there's gonna be so much need for that these installation pulling conduit putting in and there's gonna be so much money, I'm working with Xcel Energy, you probably know well out of out of the area. And they're they're actually funding a lot of these projects, just because they need to get get that throughput going. So it's very exciting time.

Todd

Yeah, it is. It's interesting. I mean, it's, it's a trendline, that's gonna go for a long time you think about transmission lines, you think about like, there's all sorts of kind of ramifications to the whole kind of supply chain that needs to happen over time. If this continues? Yeah, pretty cool. Yeah, well, you know, I was kind of wrapping up some of your career stuff, like if you, you've done a bunch of investment type of work to and so, you know, it's kind of interesting, as an investor, if you've been an entrepreneur, because I think you kind of you have a tendency to look for certain things. And so I'm kind of curious, from your perspective, are there three things that you look for in entrepreneurs, whether you're working with them, you know, investing in them, you know, partnering with them? Is there anything there that you've kind of seen that you think are repeatable patterns that you look for? Yeah, it's mainly lessons learned, mistakes I made in you always learn the best when you did something wrong, or made a mistake. So that's the probably the most important thing is not at all euphemism bet on a bet on the jockey, not the horse, you know, bet the bet on the person who's leading the enterprise, not the product, don't fall in love with the concept of the product, it's more fall in love with the person, if at all, because they're the ones that are going to work with, they're going to be pivoting, changing, working those concepts. And then it's, that's the second part, and then are the first one. The second one is kind of separate your passion projects, from your investments. And make sure you know the difference. If you're if you try to mix those, you get yourself in trouble too. Because if it's truly a passion project, you don't need to return you're doing it because you enjoy it and you enjoy the people and the concepts. That's all good. And if you push them too hard, that's going to mess up the conversation for investment. It's okay to say, Where's your quarterly report? What's going on? What's your plan? Where are you going next? And I think you're phenomenal. This Todd, I actually envy your ability to dissect companies like this, I think you're outstanding at it. So it's a muscle I need to get better at. And then I think I think the third thing is is, is be a participant and be a support. Don't try to don't try to drive these things. And that, and that because you don't live it day to day. Well, unless you are part of it day to day, that's gonna be the third part is that it's so hard. You're probably like me, he'll have to dive in and like, get him. And then it's like, but at the same time, you're going, Okay, I'm gonna disappear for another month, and they're gonna be doing this day to day. It's hard. It's so hard. I'm still figuring that one out. So once you figure that out, let me know how that how to do that. Yeah, I think it's tough. I think you're right, I think I think the first one really resonates with me, because I think even the stuff we're doing with wildfire labs, I think we just bet on the individual. Right? The idea that, you know, if it's decent and interesting, that's great. But I think a lot of it is that's an entrepreneur, I want my ecosystem that's an entrepreneur I want to work with. And so the product will pivot business models will pivot, but the core individual doesn't. And so I think that one's really, really just resonates with me. So it's good. It's and I think your last one too, is kind of interesting, where it's like figuring out where to participate, where to add value, and then making it so that you can have the flexibility to drop in drop back out. I think that's not always easy, right? Especially for people like yourself, where it's like you're an operator, you understand what needs to go on and it's like, and there's a fair amount of context to like add value In most cases, right, you need to learn things to actually add value. Otherwise you just kind of given these glib, high level answers where they're like, Okay, I don't know that was cool. Let's have coffee with Eric. But no, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. It's one of the things or Oh, have you thought about? I have thought about that? Because

Eric Broughton

yeah, exactly. Yeah. Evie charging. Have you thought about solar? It's kind of big shout out there. Thanks. Yeah, thanks. Yeah, exactly. It's love it. I love what you're doing with wildfire. I'm excited to continue to see it grow and what you're doing for Rapid City? It's great. Yeah, it's a it's a big, audacious goal, you know, but I think, you know, we're early shoots are looking pretty good. It'll be interesting to see how it continues to evolve. I think we've got a lot to learn. We've learned a lot in the last year. But it's hasn't been boring, Eric. So that's good. All right. Great. Great. Last question I'd ask you is, and I close with this with everyone is what's the kindest thing anybody's done for you? I think, you know, we talked about bits and bytes. And we talked about all these things. And it's kind of, I don't know, it's a business, right. And I think at the end of the day, this is about people. And it always kind of brings me back. So I don't know if you have a story that you want to share that maybe resonates with this. Yeah, I do. It was, um, you know, I mentioned his name, but it was Larry Simonson a bit earlier, he would come to Chicago quite a bit. And, and I wasn't really involved in Sopko school mines in the beginning. And, and he'd bring out come out and bring us jelly and things like that. But it was, it was early lunch. And because I was doing the consulting project, and, and I had a chance seating arrangement, I sat down next to Randy Baker, who was president of Case IH at the time, another school minds grad. And it was fascinating to me to listen to his experiences, about how he, how he, you know, wasn't engineer was in sales was in product, and all these things led to his role where he's at. And then I asked him if I could follow up. And I just went up there and sat with him for about half a day. And he shared his mindset. And, and for me, that was really transformative in how I what I thought was possible. And that that helped me to think about the engineering background. And you touched on earlier about being solving problems, about applying it to all these concepts. And I think that's half the battle. You know, coming from South Dakota, you can see where Harvard and Yale and everyone around them are senators and all these great, great opportunities and great rose pain until you kind of see it and kind of shake someone's hand and know who they are and know that, hey, I could do that, too. It's difficult to see that vision until two you've seen up front. And I think that's that was a really big level of kindness to share that time and insight and it was motivating for me.

Todd

Eric, I just want to thank you for taking the time today. This has been a great conversation. We certainly learned a lot and appreciate kind of you sharing all of your experiences. And really, I think there's a ton of things to take away from this. So thanks for taking the time.