5G Talent Talk with Carrie Charles (00:01)
Hello and thanks for joining me today on 5G Talent Talk. I am so happy that you are here. I am also thrilled to have with me today Seth Buechley. He is, gosh, there's a lot to say about him. So just sit back with a cup of coffee here. He is the owner of Cathedral Consulting Group. He is the founder of Cathedral Finance. He is the founder and board member of Safer Buildings Coalition. He's also the author of a book,

called "Leading with Gratitude," which is a really good book you should read. He is also the host of a podcast called Business Done Right. Seth, thanks for joining me today. I've known you for years. I'm glad you're here. Carrie it's been a long time coming and I'm super excited to be with you and your audience. I love the work that you're doing and it's an honor to be with you. Thank you. Thank you. Well, let's start with, you know, how...

How did you get into telecom, talk a little bit about your journey? Because you've done a lot. I you've done a lot in our industry and outside of it as well with just writing books and speaking and podcast. Yeah. Well, I was fortunate to have a dad that was a very intentional mentor and somewhere along the line, he got an invitation to start building cell sites. And this is like the late 80s. So people didn't even know what cellular was in the late 80s. And he,

you know, started this company to be a construction company and then quickly went right into building cellular. And he presented me a choice. He said, would you like to go to college? And I was kind of, you know, a little bit of a rebel, always moving at a faster pace than I felt like the school would allow me to move. and I decided to join him. in the late eighties, we started building cellular sites on mountain tops all across the West.

And, we had a great run for a decade building a business and then we had a chance to actually exit that business. And so I kind of went from being in telecom to, you know, getting a chance to build a business and sell it. And so that was my, that was my entree into telecom. And, you know, since then I have been fortunate to be involved in, owning spectrum or being part of companies that build towers. And then really in the last decade, most of my focus has actually been personally in the in -building sector.

kind of that last frontier, so to speak. Well, let's talk about that a bit. Introduce, you know, what is the Safer Buildings Coalition? Sure. And also, I believe that you have authored a textbook in this area. And really, it was a movement, right? Starting a movement. Yeah, it really was a movement. And, you let's start with that. You know, a movement is...

And I've learned this from a, from a coach that I, that I follow. says, you know, you have to identify what is the egregious wrong that needs to be rectified. Like, what is the thing that you're like, that's just not right. That shouldn't be that way. Right. And I like to say nothing happens until somebody that's ambitious gets a little bit motivated and is usually because you're ticked off. Right. And so you identify what is this egregious wrong that should be corrected. And in our case, it was, we were seeing at that time, the carriers were enhancing cellular coverage inside buildings.

And we knew that eventually there was going to be a requirement for public safety coverage. And it just didn't make sense to us that people were enhancing for cellular, but they were ignoring public safety. And so we articulated that in front of the FCC and everybody said, Hey, we will follow you to the end of the earth. And of course, I didn't actually have a plan or know where we were going. And so we kind of had to do that. And this was when I was leading a company called Solid and Solid had a platform that could do both cellular and public safety very elegantly.

And that made sense at the time. There's some things that have changed in the technology that make that a little bit more challenging. But nevertheless, we identified that egregious wrong. And then we cast a vision for where we could go. And the vision was simply that people should be able to dial 911 in an emergency from inside a building. That during the emergency, they should be able to receive communication about what they should be doing and reach out and talk to loved ones. And then when the first responders show up, their systems should work. Their devices should work.

And everybody's like, well, yeah, of course. And we're like, yeah, but that doesn't, that's not how it works unless somebody does something proactively. And so we were able to articulate that vision. And I call that kind of like phase one of the coalition. And then phase two was we coalesced the industry, the ecosystem of, you know, amplifier manufacturers, system integrators, authorities having jurisdiction, cities, you know, government officials, everybody who said, yeah, this is an issue. How do we work together? And so now it's been.

12 years that we've had the coalition and we've kind of ascended to this leadership position mostly because, you know, I did have a vision, but I had a lot of support. And then ultimately we had some leaders, John Foley, the executive director of the coalition, chief Alan Perdue, who actually chief Purdue is the executive director. John is the managing director and chief Purdue is the subject matter expert on codes. And John is the leader of kind of where the industry is going. And those two.

together with a gentleman named Mike Brownson, literally wrote the textbook for the rest of the industry on this is what it means to be certified in an area, know, heretofore where there had been no certification. And so we're kind of in the early innings. And so as we articulate the coalition, was, you first we had to frame the problem and call people to action. Then we had to do the work to get the support. And really what we did is we changed the building codes that

are adopted all over the U S. And so the reason that the market is growing, we think it's about a half a billion dollar a year market right now. Part of the reason that's growing is because the codes got changed because chief Purdue had been a respected code official for all these years and he was able to move them towards what our vision of what we thought the future should be. And now we're at a stage where it's very interesting, Carrie, because you can make an argument that First Net is public safety and that LMR is

static at best or in decline and people are wrestling with what is it, what is public safety? it, is it this LMR two -way radio stuff from Motorola? Is it, is it AT &T First Net or is it some combination? And really, unfortunately, one of the main themes that's happening in America right now is school safety. It's not unfortunate that

School safety is on the top of people's mind. It's unfortunate that it's a result of these incidents, these school shootings and other things. most of the time, including recently the assassination attempt on former president Trump, if you look at the after action report, 10 out of 10 times, there is some sort of communication breakdown. The systems were in place, but they didn't talk to each other because everybody's using their own systems. There's no interoperability. And so this is...

becoming a bigger and bigger issue as we think about next gen 911, as we think about where, you know, how people want to be safe inside buildings. So it's been an honor. It's been a journey. It's interesting because in one hand, you could argue it's a trade association. On the other hand, it's an advocacy group that's kind of lobbying. And so it's been a lot of fun, a lot of work, a lot of learning, but it does give us a visibility into the whole ecosystem of all the people trying to solve for that, you know, that last piece. They say that 80 % of all phone calls are generated inside a building.

And I like to say, you know, this is still a big problem. If I stand outside of a building and I try to dial 911 and it doesn't work, a carrier could get a fine for that. Really? Yeah. It's happened when their 911 goes down. But if you go inside of a building and try to dial 911 and it doesn't work, it's kind of nobody's problem. And that's, that's one of those things you're like, okay, that's another one of those, this should not be problems, but until, until we figure it out.

Wow, more work to do. Always more work to do. Yes. Well, let's switch gears a bit. And I want to hear the story of Cathedral. Sure. You know, I'll start with a story about a startup. So we're in a startup. We were a system integrator. We were looking around the room at each other. And we're like, you know, we're kind of a glorified technical contractor. Let's at least tell ourselves the truth there, right? You know, we're selling other people's stuff. We're integrating.

You know, it's better than being a general contractor, but it's still kind of in the same vein and we're trying to build value. And so we just kind of had a heart to heart with ourselves. And we knew at that point that we were, you know, say that we were an $8 million a year company and we needed to do something different. We ended up forming a partnership and we negotiated the exclusive rights to bring a product to the market called solid at that point. And.

We knew that amongst us, we'd never grown a business say beyond say 12 million or 15 million. And at some point we just said, we're going to have to find some help. And we ran into this company called Cathedral. And Cathedral was led by somebody I really got to know well. And he was a former lawyer, a CPA. When he could have went into retirement, he went to seminary. He was a global partner in Coopers and Librarian. And so he worked with all these big public companies.

But in his latter stages of life, what he really wanted to do is he wanted to mentor smaller businesses with the best practices that he picked up from being in the trenches all over the world, growing businesses. And he was funny. He could show up into a meeting with no notes and he could just carry the room and bring this wisdom. You're like, wow. And so we were very fortunate to hire Cathedral. You know, we were a client of theirs. And so they helped us grow. And we literally grew from a million.

to just under 60 million in about six or seven years that we were working together. And so one of the reasons we hired them as an advisor is we just had this sense, like we've got a tiger by the tail here, and none of us have actually been to the level that we're gonna go, and we're gonna have to change our thinking and our approach. And so I had the privilege of having a mentor in the form of the co -founder of Cathedral. The story takes a little bit of a twist because as we were negotiating to sell solid

USA to our Korean manufacturer partners who have maintained it by the way and continue to grow it and done great. My advisor during that process that was a co -founder of Cathedral, he actually crashed his airplane and he died in the plane crash. And of course it was, you know, it was devastating personally because I was assuming I was going to get another 15 years with this mentor because I had a lot of energy. had just sold the business and I was looking forward to the next chapter and I got the phone call that, you he passed.

And so, you know, I had, after a fair amount of a thought prayer, other people suggested that perhaps I could lead cathedral. I ended up buying the business from his widow and his motto was in God's world, business done right is a blessing. And so he had this philosophy that, business is tough, but you don't have to always do hard business. You can do good business. And if you use good principles and he was a man of faith, so good, you know, biblical principles, he's like,

That's good business. so his quote was in God's world, business done right is a blessing. so he was very much a mentor and a teacher and had this ethos of, business is a lot of best practices, but there's also the cultural piece. And so it was my privilege to buy the business from his widow. But then I also kind of had to do this thing I call take emotional ownership. You know, when you buy somebody else's business, it takes you a while before you can decide that it's actually your business.

And so over the years, I've repositioned it into the areas that I have gifts and I have passion around, know, telecom, wireless infrastructure, strategy, mergers and acquisitions. Those are the things that kind of give me energy. And then if we need to do other stuff, I tend to pull in experts for that. So that's the story of Cathedral. It's been a journey. I actually, you learn a lot by coaching. That's for darn sure. What are some common

mistakes that entrepreneurs make when they have an exit in mind? Yeah. know, really the things that are your strengths will quickly become your weaknesses. You can build the business around your strengths to a certain spot, and then you run out of hours, you run out of energy, the wheels start to fall off at home, and you you can

inadvertently build the business around your own strengths. What we like to say is you've got to work the process in reverse. When a buyer is coming to look at your business, we teach two things. said, number one, you need to focus on making sure they can identify the value of your business. Okay. That's the first thing. Everything has to be organized. They need to understand exactly how you do what you do and how you make money. So that's identifiable value.

but the next one is the one that catches people. That value has to be transferable. So back to your question about mistakes. If you've done things, if you've done it differently every time, if you've lived on duct tape and Red Bull and you've just made it happen behind the scenes, and you may have revenue and you may even have profit, but if you don't have a repeatable system that's not built around your unique skills and personality, then the buyer is not convinced that when they write you a check,

that they're actually going to be able to take the business further. know, back to our, you know, this is, there was a lot of talent at Solid when we sold Solid USA to Solid, our Korean counterparts. One of the things I am proud of is that that business stayed intact and it grew. And a lot of that was because as we approached the time for me to leave, more and more leaders were stepping into other leadership, right? So back to my point, what is it, what can an entrepreneur do differently?

is you have to attract talent, which is your domain, and you have to lead that talent. And at some point you have to hand the reins to that talent, even if it hurts your ego. remember, I mean, I love trade shows. I love being on stage. And I remember towards the end of our exit at Solid, not going to that many trade shows and seeing my peers and, you know, the guys that worked with me on stage. And I had to get over my ego around that and realize that's a good thing. You know, that's, that's what you want. It's important to them. And ultimately it was something.

that matter for the valuation because anybody that buys your business has to have confidence when they write you that check that they're going to get all that money back plus more because you've given them something that can grow without you. And you know, that takes prep. It doesn't happen overnight. One thing we see that's very common is people defer it. And we all do this. We procrastinate the things that are stressful. And we think, I'll get to that. I'll get to that. I'll get to that. And at some point we wake up and you're saying, now I need to do it now. Well,

Now, you're not ready. You may feel like the time is now, but you should have been working on preparing for that exit two or three years in advance so that when that buyer shows up, everything's dialed in and ready to go. You can't just microwave these things. What are some common pain points that you see with the owners that you work with?

You know, I think sometimes who gets you to one level, they may do a good job. They may fulfill all their duties. You may love them. They may be family. They may be friends. That's particularly common with entrepreneurs because they tend to be very charismatic. They can recruit people. know, I call this sometimes the law of proximity. And so you hire leadership based on who's available around you. Right. And then, and then you just figure out how to make it work. And it, and it maybe makes you.

several million dollars in terms of revenue and maybe a little profitable. And you're like, okay, now I want to go to the next level. And you're like, all of these hard, some of these hardworking people that are around me, despite their best effort, despite they're doing everything I've asked them to do are still not the people that are going to be able to take us to the next level. And that's a very emotional experience for a founder when you have to make a tough decision to let a friend go or as my friend.

euphemistically said, release them to industry. You have to release somebody to industry so that you can go to the next level. And that's extremely hard. Many people will flinch at that because the emotional turmoil for the leader to basically crown the company to say, this is important for the company.

I'm doing this to protect others. I'm not just doing it so I can make more money because that's what happens to a founder. think, well, I don't want to make that tough decision. That would be selfish of me to make that decision. That is one way to look at it. The other way to look at it is organizationally as a leader, you have to make the tough decisions. I will tell you this. I was at a board meeting last night and a motion was made to terminate the brother of a founder of a business. Wow. Right.

That's hard. That's tough stuff, right? But we've known about it for a year and a half, two years. And so the board had to be very gracious with the poor CEO who's been wrestling with this because we know that when you introduce family and these emotions to it, it's very difficult. But nevertheless, it is the right thing for the business. It's the right thing for everybody involved. so those are things that as you grow in leadership, you realize that you end up dealing with predominantly tough

hard stuff because if it wasn't tough and hard, your team would have already handled it. And that is something that, you know, so if we're into, if you're into pain avoidance, like some personality types are being a leader of a entrepreneurial business, will, will stretch you. Yeah. You're nodding your head. Like maybe you've experienced a few of these things. I really feel what you're saying. I mean, I've been there so many times and I love it. I mean, everything you're saying, I'm so excited about.

What about the buyer in today's world? What is the buyer thinking? What's important? You know, I don't think buyers change that that much. I'm going to answer this in two ways. Number one is I still think people invest in people. It's going to be personal. They want to look you in the eye. They want to trust. They want to know that you're telling them the truth. They want to know that you're going to win or die trying. And so I think it is still personal.

despite what anybody will say. Now, then we peel that back. need to look at, me just go a little bit on the personal point. What I'm saying is they're gonna bet on the operator. They're not gonna necessarily bet on the market conditions. They may bet on the market first. In other words, they say, hey, I wanna tell Com Investment. Great. Which sector, maybe they narrow it down a bit. And then they're gonna be looking at the leadership team. Okay. After the leadership team, in my view, you start to look at

Okay, how is this business performing? What is the market like today? What kind of revenue are they creating? So they're going to bet on the operator. And then I think the next thing they're going to look at is what type of revenue are you generating? This is often missed for entrepreneurs. Cause we'll start chasing the revenue, but not all revenue is the same when it comes to an exit. I've stated better, not all profit is the same.

when it comes to an exit. There's a reason that towers trade at a multiple of free cash flow that is off the charts. There's a reason that software trades at a multiple of earnings that's revenue actually off the charts. And then as you start moving towards things like construction that don't tend to have long contracts, know, that revenue is gonna trade roughly, we would tell people it's gonna be three to five times your earnings.

is what you can expect to make for a typical tower construction business, for instance. But if you can get some long -term contracts and some maintenance and some recurring revenue, now you're going to be five to seven times earnings, right? Or if you have soft, unique software, you start moving up that value ladder. And so a buyer is going to be looking for revenue income that is very sticky, revenue and earnings that is very sticky, that's long -term, that's recurring.

And so to the extent that you can either negotiate contracts or have these proprietary relationships where it's less likely that your customer base is going to churn out, that's one thing that a buyer is going to look for. I think the other thing.

that we just have to be aware of is a buyer needs to understand the cycles, especially in the wireless world. In between the Gs, there's some troughs and we just have to realize that that is what it is. Speaking of the last thing, I remember my thought is customer concentration. That's actually a huge, huge challenge. If you have more than 15 % of your revenue from one client, you're gonna get flagged. They like to see

your revenue spread out and that not one client represents more than 10 % of your overall revenue. And that's pretty difficult to achieve in today's world. Yes, yes it is. And it does take a long time to move that ship once you have it. what are you, you mentioned earlier that owners should do certain things, let's say, did you say two to three years before they exit? What are a couple of suggestions? Yeah, we tend to look at it,

through what we call pillars of value. You have to have these things to build a valuable business, and I'm just going to rattle them off real quick. And then once you know what those pillars of value are and you nod your head like, yes, I agree, then you frankly need to develop a strategy to show how you're making progress against those objectives. My view is that buyers, particularly financial buyers, they don't want another project.

You know, they want to, they want to invest in a leadership team. They don't want to be the leadership team. Now, as you look at the universe of buyers, if you're looking at a strategic buyer, chances are they're going to say, well, listen, I'm to buy your company. I'm going to leave it alone or I'm going to buy your company and I'm going to assimilate it. That's a little bit different mix, but for the most part, what a business owner should be doing is, developing their own clarity and strategy so that the buyer.

believes that you know where you're going. They don't want to have to come in and tell you where you're going. And I'll give you an example of how the bad story might sound. I've struggled for all these years, but when you buy it, you're going to be able to do these things and we're going to win together. That is not an attractive message to a buyer because the buyer is like, well, listen, if I'm the one bringing the value to this party, then I'm not going to pay you for it upfront. And number two, I'm already busy.

So if I'm going to buy your business, I need to know that you know where you're going and that you're executing and tracking your plan. So these are the four pillars of value. The first is actually finance and accounting. You have to have finance and accounting dialed in because that is truth. That is reality. The second pillar we say is sales and marketing, right? Why? That's, that's your fuel. You know, that's your lifeblood of the organization. You have to have repeatable processes around sales and marketing.

rather than just relationships, individual relationships, you've got to have a team. The third thing we say is you have to have systems and workflow, which is really the scaffolding by which you're building this business. And those systems and workflow cannot be built around your unique personality or any one or two people. And then the last pillar of value is your people and your culture, because that's really the heart of your organization. And so you've got finance and accounting, sales and marketing, systems and workflow.

people and culture. And it's always good to just ask yourself, tell yourself the truth. Right? And so when we do strategic planning, we start with getting really clear with your whole team on where you're at. You look at that a couple different, 20 different ways to say, now we're all aligned on current reality. And then you look at the market and you do those same exercises. And then you start to say, all right, now how do we communicate what it is we're aiming for? What is it?

What does a win look like? If we're talking about an exit, we like to use the phrase an ideal exit. What does an ideal exit look like? And so you get a little bit aspirational, right? But now that you've defined reality, now that you've looked at the market, now that you've kind of connected with what you're trying to do as a business owner, that's called a strategy, really. Now, you have to still do the work, right? You've got to really document who's going to do what, when, and that's really a project management function. And frankly, a lot of entrepreneurs tap out right about there.

You you want to go on this two day retreat and everybody has this great time and you you've got great clarity and then you come back Monday morning and you do it the way you've always done it. Right? Change is hard, but back to your original question. I think a buyer wants to see that you've done the work. You understand your gaps in your reality. You understand the market and you've got an action plan and you're making progress. You don't have to be done, but you have to be able to articulate that. And by the way, I will say this.

If you're also a growing organization, having that level of clarity on your strategy is an amazing recruiting tool. Because when you're competing for talent, you can say, well, let me tell you what's important to us. Let me tell you about our differentiators. Let me tell you about the kind of behaviors we don't tolerate in our company. Let me tell you what we want to be held accountable for. Let me tell you where we're going. That's really enticing, I think, for people that are thinking about joining a company. You mentioned ideal exit.

How often do owners achieve this? And is it directly tied to how early they start planning for that ideal exit?

I don't think it's directly tied to it because sometimes things just come out of the blue. I they just, you know, you, I don't think there's any downside to planning for it. I think one of the things that I would try to avoid is people, sometimes business owners can pretend that they're never going to sell the business. We'll go say those words. I actually think that's, that's kind of silly. I think it's better if you let people know we'll always listen. Right. And.

And I won't do something if it's not, and this is where the ideal exit phrase kind of came from is, I remember as we were looking to sell one of our businesses, being very clear with the buyer, I want you to focus on two things. It's I'm a really simple guy. The business has value and we're going to require that that value is market value. And I want my people to be set up for success. I'm like those, that's what I mean by an ideal exit is I want to get the value of the business.

And then I also want my team to be set up for success. And so when we think about the value of a business, it kind of goes back to how did we build the business? Was there good recurring revenue? Were there long -term contracts? Were there things that were differentiated? You know, that's really on me, right? As the business owner, you can control the value of your business, right? But you do that in advance of having those conversations with a buyer.

The, do I set my team up for success? I actually do think that that's part of the negotiations when you go to sell the business, where you can make sure that you protect your people or you can, in our case, what we did is we ended up sharing, I would call it a meaningful chunk of our proceeds with our key leaders in the business. Now we did that for two reasons. We did that because we thought it was the right thing to do.

But we also did it because the buyer was saying, hey, you guys as the sellers, you're going to leave. We know that. In fact, they wanted us to leave, if I'm honest. And we said, yes, we are going to leave. And they said, well, we're having a really hard time writing a big check and seeing all that money leave the company and the people that are going to be left to do the work. And so part of what we agreed to is, well, let's leave a meaningful percentage of it back for the people that are here. And then if they stay with you for the next couple of years,

then they earn that money. And so it's a way to kind of keep them in place. Sometimes they call that, I think, a stay put bonus, right? And so as a seller, as the person that gets to make the choice on whether you sell your business or not, if you can kind of keep those two goals front and center, it helps you rationalize a lot of the drama that happens in the process of selling a business. You're like, listen, the value is the value and I need to secure the value and I need to take care of my people.

And it's very helpful to do that. And that's for me what we call an ideal exit. I've had a couple of those. That's what we like to talk about and teach about. I know that you still have your finger on the pulse of the wireless industry and so many clients in that world. So what are you seeing in wireless right now? And would you say that it's a good time to sell? There are deals happening. So I will say that.

Yes, it can be a good time to sell. I really do think it's a question of what kind of business have you built? I happened to see a deck on a business the other day that was very impressive. I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but it was 10, 15 % bottom line, steady, consistent growth through the ups and downs, including last year. And I looked at that and I'm like, that's a rarity.

right in today's world right now, especially on the tower construction and services side. it's, it's a soft market. I think the thing that would be the biggest concern would be customer consolidation or customer concentration at this point. If you've got a diversified client base, I don't have any specific inside knowledge of this, but I'll give you an example of how my brain would think. We know that companies like Jacobs and mass tech are,

these large turf vendors are taking this huge chunk of the AT &T migration from Nokia to Ericsson, right? Well, there are, that's a known project with a deadline. There's certainly not enough people geared up to do that work, like ready to go today. And so the people that are winning those contracts are going to be in a scramble to identify resources.

Right? that, you know, if I'm in the space, those are some of the places that I'm looking. It's definitely a soft market. The question is how long will it be soft or is this just a cycle? And to be honest, I don't think anybody's answered that question to my satisfaction yet. So, I'll just leave it there. I would tend to agree. It feels like a little bit of a mystery right now. So, Seth, this is, I could talk to you for days about this. just, I'm really enjoying this.

What is the process of working with you? What like the steps and also how can we contact you? Sure. Discovery call always works great. You can get us just Seth at cathedralconsulting .com. That is my kind of marketing oriented email. It hits our team and our team responds. But what we'd like to do is a discovery call. Just reach out, get a discovery call set up with us and we just listen, right? Life is too short.

for to do work that you don't enjoy. And so I, we tend to like, strategy and and a advisory, but we tend to prefer to walk alongside of a company as they're going through the various evolution. You know, what we found in one of the key hallmarks of cathedral is most small companies don't have a board. There's a couple of reasons for that. Number one, they don't want somebody looking over their shoulder, criticizing them. Fair enough. Right. But the other is it's just.

They just have never thought about it. They've never thought about the purpose of the board or how you use a board. And so one of the things that we enjoy with our clients is you facilitate this kind of monthly board meeting where you're looking at last month's financials. You're talking about how you're doing against your goals, assuming you actually have some goals, right? And you're talking about whatever's the topic of the month, because there's going to be a topic, you know, something happening. And so you kind of walk alongside that owner as they go through the evolutions and, know, you can, you can chart that long -term course of.

hey, I would like to exit someday. But before you get to that exit, first you gotta tell yourself the truth, that's what those monthly board meetings do. Then you gotta have a strategy. And then eventually, if you build it the right way, you should be able to engage in a process. And what we find is strategy is kind of a project. It takes about 90 days to get that dialed in, and we've got a fantastic strategy project. M &A, I typically tell people you should think six to nine months.

Because the first thing you have to do is rationalize a value of your business. And then you have to, you know, get agreement on that because if you don't, if your business really isn't worth what you need to exit, then you've got work to do. Don't, don't, don't get all spooled up. It's a very distracting process. You don't want to start it if you're not really ready. Right. But if you're in that exit stage, then that's also a project where you, we, we coalesce a team and you start to build out this financial model and you build out a story.

that supports the financial model and then you go after those target, you know, acquirers or targets of acquisition. And so really the process starts, frankly, wherever that owner is in that cycle, usually with just a discovery call. And, know, we tend to take a very open -handed approach, particularly on M&A because we're a boutique M&A advisor. You know, one of the things that people get weirded out about is you have to spend a bunch of money, get all spooled up, and then maybe the market tells you, you're just not that interesting right now.

You don't want somebody that's trying to push you towards a sale no matter what, in order to earn commissions or things like that. Our attitude is if we go to market, we're listening. If the market tells us now is not the right time, you should be able to turn that process off, turn those costs off, and then you can revisit it later or you can make a pivot. So you can reach out to us, cathedralconsulting .com. We're glad to just have a discovery call and we make it easy.

All right, Seth, this was fantastic. I appreciate you coming on the show. I learned a lot and it's, I just have so much respect for you and everything you've done. Likewise. Thanks for pioneering and thanks for always being so diligent to hit all the shows. would just a little note. I've been at trade shows and I've seen who's that lady out there working out at five 30 in the morning. That's Carrie. So you keep it real wherever you go. So good job. Thank you. You take care. We'll talk soon. All right. Bye bye Carrie.