EntreLeadership - Relationships Aren't Efficient

Episode Date: April 5, 2020

Tune in to hear Daniel Tardy and Patrick Lencioni respond to some business owners' fears around Coronavirus.   Get access to the EntreLeadership Weekly Report Tool, FREE, for you and your team for 3 months: Text TEAMHEALTH to 33444 or visit entreleadership.com/weekly-report   Follow us on social media to stay plugged in to everything we’re doing to help the small business owner win: LinkedIn Instagram Facebook Twitter YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, this is Alex. I think we all know that times are a little bit wild and crazy right now. And I think one of the things that makes it so crazy is that everything is changing so fast. But here's the deal. The last thing you want to do as a leader is keep your eyes glued to CNN and Fox News. I just don't think that's good for your sanity. So we wanted to make sure that we were providing you with the most up-to-date information with regard to how we are handling this whole situation at AMCY Solutions, but also how we see small business owners around the country winning and leading in this time. So every day, we're committed to bring you action-oriented, practical, positive content that can help you move your business forward. So here's today's bonus episode with Daniel Tarty and best-selling author and thought leader, Pat Lynchione. Well, hey everybody, Daniel Tarty and the Entree leadership team, and I am so honored today that a longtime friend of mine and a friend of Ramsey Solutions, Pat Lanchone, is joining us. One of the foremost thought leaders on team health and business consulting and all-sized businesses. Of course, he's written the

book The Advantage, the Ideal Team Player, Silo's Politics and Turf Wars, Death by Meeting. It goes on and on, and this guy personally has mentored me and our leadership team and Entree leadership and really meaningful ways. He's one of our go-to guys when we get stuck on something. He just has such a gift of helping leaders and helping teams come together in a way that empowers them to launch forward and to achieve whole new levels. And so Pat, thanks for joining us today. It's great to have you, brother. Good to see you again. It's my pleasure and it's a blessing to see you guys. It's actually nice to reconnect. Yes, indeed. So we're in the midst of this crazy disruption in the marketplace right now as a

result of the coronavirus. I'm curious to hear from you. What was the moment you thought, oh, this is like a thing? You know, because I think we all initially thought, oh, yeah, it's another, you know, there's a virus. It's going to be a little problem. But it was just making headlines, you know, December, January, and it felt like just one more headline. And then there was a moment that it hit, and it really caught us by surprise. Like, oh, this is actually causing us to change how we're all working. You know, we, three and a half weeks ago, I was in Dallas at my own company's conference, annual conference called the Unconference. And we had 850 people there,

mostly from the United States, or from all over the world. And I remember beforehand calling up my staff and saying, do you think we should cancel this? And they're like, no, we've checked with everybody. And we had a guy, a doctor who came who had been in the White House that morning. And he said, no, this is fine. This is fine to do this right now. We think this is okay. Literally three days later, we were like, oh, we would never have done that. I mean, so it was, it was just so fast. So fast. And granted, it was trying to get information from from the source in China and find out what was really going on. And so by the time we all figured it out, it was like, you know, and I'm in California. So over in a matter of days, the whole place just shut down. And so it happened fast. I can't believe I'm in

week. I'm getting toward the end of week three of a shutdown now. And we were a little earlier. And I swear, I can't even relate to what life was like a month ago. Well, I know you're still talking to a lot of leaders around the country. And you talk to everybody from small business owners to Silicon Valley executives and CEOs. What's the theme? What are leaders saying right now as you're having these conversations about how they're experiencing this? You know, I think at first it was, It was just, you know, getting your sea legs. And the question was they were all like, how long is this going to last? And I think just this week, everybody was like, oh, okay, this is now the new normal for the foreseeable future.

And I think that nobody thinks this isn't going to last for another four to eight weeks. And it could go longer. I hope not. I pray not. But so I think what's happening now is people are shifting from survival and just waiting it out to what I'm encouraging people to do is say, how are you going to thrive during this time? And I grant it, some businesses are just getting hit so hard because they can't do anything virtually. And God bless them. And we are trying to reach out and support them.

But some businesses are actually busier, maybe not making as much revenue, but they're busier. Our company, we are so busy right now. And it's not making money so much as we are serving our clients and we're still staying afloat, but there's a greater need. So what I find interesting is some people are idle. some people are actually more stressed and busier and some are kind of in between and the CEOs I'm talking to are all saying how do I give my people what they need right now

in what looks like an unprecedented situation what do people need right now I mean they need a paycheck right but from a team health standpoint what do people that we're leading what are they looking for from their leaders right now you know I think that first of all people need their leaders to be exceedingly human

they need to know that their leaders are experiencing the same things they are. This is a time where leaders need to be appropriately vulnerable and say, yeah, I get it. I have kids at home too and I've got a family to deal with or I've got these other worries I have. A leader trying to be too professional and too cool and common collected actually doesn't serve their employees. It makes them feel alone. So empathizing with them and being human with them is critical. The other thing is leaders need to be persistent and they need to reach out. They need to bother their people a lot.

You know, it's easy. I say bother because people think, well, people are at home now and working. I don't want to bother them. People need community. They need to know that their manager knows what's going on, both in the business and in their lives. And so I say, be persistent. Be really persistent. Six months from now, nobody's going to say, man, my manager, she really bugged me because

she called me all the time to see how I was doing. They're going to say, why didn't she call me more? That is so true. Be creative. find new ways to develop a relationship, to get work done, to serve your customers. This is a time to try new things. And again, we need to shift from surviving to thriving, figure out a way to make this new. And because this is the new normal for a while.

And our employees need us as leaders to inspire them. The last thing I would say, Daniel, I'm sorry to make this so long, but the last thing I would say is this, your people need clarity. and though we don't know how long this is going to last, we don't know what the world is going to look like on the other end and all that kind of stuff, come up with enough clarity temporarily. We call it a rallying cry. So my company in the first week, we were just kind of hit by this. At the end of the first week, we said,

let's come up with a rallying cry for the next eight weeks. And so in ours, it was like we are going to become more cohesive, innovative, and personally growth oriented. And eight weeks from now, that's what we want to say is we are more cohesive than we've ever been. We came up with new ideas and we personally grew more. And that shifted us from feeling like this was being inflicted upon us to how we were going to respond and make something good of it. And every business can say, here's our two-month rallying cry and this is what we're going to do. That gives people a sense of purpose.

Even if you don't know the exact right answer, give them clarity of some kind. Yes, absolutely. I want to break down the rally cry in just a second. But first, I want to go back to something you said earlier. Being appropriately vulnerable. As leaders, we don't want to make our team panic. And so I think we're tempted to go to that calm, cool, collected. We want to almost put on this mask so that the team feels like we've got our stuff together, even though we really don't.

What do you mean when we say appropriately vulnerable? Because we also don't want to run around and the sky's falling and every fear I have. I vocalize and kind of a panic state. What does that look like practically in what we communicate and don't communicate to our team right now? Yeah, I think that it's when in doubt, err on the side of letting people know how you're feeling and who you are and what's going on. You know, when I talk to one of my colleagues and they say, my son is really struggling, he's kind of panicking about some things. And I say, hey, one of mine is doing that too. Both of us go, okay, so we're not alone in this.

Or when somebody says, I'm really afraid that we're not going to get some of our clients back. say, yeah, I get that. I have some of those same concerns. So what are we going to do about that or how are we going to cope with that? So I think it's empathizing and saying, that's human. You're okay for feeling that way. So it's about being honest, but you don't have to be hyper emotional. But actually, you know, you don't have to like, I think it's just being emotionally intelligent and being human.

Now, if you are a leader and you're panicking and you're freaking out, I think it might be a good time to find someone on your team that can kind of take over for a bit because you might not be serving your people well if that's where you're at. Yeah, that stuff, it has to have an outlet and then we got to get after it and come out to the team and say, hey, we're going to go somewhere even if we don't have all the perfect answers, right? Exactly. And Daniel, I think community is so important. I think when we all get on the 12 of us in the headquarters of my company, we talk every day. And it's hard to panic when you're talking, when you're looking at 11 other people and we're all talking about our stuff, you know,

if you share some of the burden, everybody seems to come out with more peace. This is not a good time to isolate. We should be having more meetings, more Zoom calls. And not just when there's a specific topic, we should be hanging out together. What I like to say is,

this is not a time to be efficient. If we're going to cut these calls down, we're not going to have very many of them. No, get on the call and spend. We had a CEO say, he of one of the largest companies in America. I was very proud of him. And I love small to medium size business. That's that's the economy. Those are my favorite people. But this guy is the CEO of one of

the 10 largest companies in America. And he spent three hours with his executive team just talking about what was going on with their family. That is not inappropriate at all. Yeah. In the midst of all this, right? In the midst of all this. He said, let's get on. They spent three hours because if you take care of at their core and their family and who they are personally, that might not seem efficient, but it's ridiculously effective. And they're going to emerge from that so much more productive and confident. So this is a time to not count the minutes, but to waste time, quote unquote, really building on and reinforcing those relationships because people will come out of that more productive and more innovative than ever.

That is so good. And, you know, Pat, you know this, but we tell people all the time, relationships are not efficient. If you're going for efficiency, give up on relationship, right? There's no way to turn a relationship into a closer to transactional experience and maintain a healthy relationship. That's not how they work. And, you know, a friend of mine and an author named Matthew Kelly writes about how to build a friendship and a relationship, you have to have what's called carefree timelessness. Well, we do that at work. I mean, we hang out. It's what happens in between. we need to replicate that in this world. And so we talk about the need for,

and you know what's going on right now out there, Daniel? There's really tactical meetings. Like, let's have a Zoom call for 20 minutes and knock this issue out. And then we have happy hour. But what we need is to do some hanging out together around our work. It's neither completely social, nor is it super tactical.

It's like, let's just get on for an hour and talk about what we're working on, talk about our clients, and maybe even just do some independent work on the line when there's somebody else on the other end of that and I can see them working and I'm working. We can talk. It's that incidental carefree timelessness that we have to spend together, which we would do if we were in the same office. We have to double down on that now because otherwise isolation, silos, and fear fills the gap. That's a bad combination. Really good thoughts on that.

Let's talk about this idea of a rally cry. Pat, I remember the first time you taught me how to do this. Our team was in your office, actually, and you did, on the whiteboard, we did this exercise, and you talked about this story with, I believe it was Firestone tires and how they had this crisis, and they had to say, okay, what's important right now? And then they got a rally cry and broke it into these objectives. And you'll be glad to know two Mondays ago, I jumped into our boardroom with Dave and our operating board, and we did that exact exercise. We put together for Ramsey Solutions, a 90-day thematic goal.

We said, what's important over the next 90 days? for business continuity. We broke up, I think it's about five objectives, some quick revenue, how we love on our tribe, managing expenses. We put an owner on each of those things. And every since we've met a couple times a week and we just check in on that. And we do kind of the, each one has a status. It's red, yellow, or green. And that informs the discussion. But for those who haven't done that exercise. I'm so excited that you're doing that. That's great. Yeah, it's working. You know, I feel like it works better even in crisis than, I mean, it's a great strategic tool. It's great for strategic planning. We do that as well. But when you're in crisis,

this, man, what a great way to align people and help diffuse some of the chaos and some of the chasing our tails in a conversation that's just emotionally driven. I found it gives our board a sense of feeling anchored. We feel connected and anchored to something that we can move forward together towards that. But for those who have not done that exercise, where do you start? When you say a rally cry, it feels a bit nebulous. practically what are we talking about well the question is this and it's it's about a given period of time and right now you know like two months or three months is a good one and you say at the end of this period whatever it is but you have to stipulate that what is it that we needs to be true that's not true today like what's going to be different what's going to be our focus and and we as a team all share so together we're all in this and it might be it could be anything from like in

ours, we said, we're going to be more cohesive and innovative. That's not enough just to have that, put it on a t-shirt or a hat. You need to come up with the four or five key levers you have to pull to make that happen. And in our organization, the levers are we have to establish a completely new communication and meeting rhythm. And so we've done that. We're having Zoom calls and more Zoom calls and different kinds of those. And we really are sticking to that. Then we had to get more messaging out to our followers. We used to do it maybe once a week or every couple weeks. We realize people are hungrier now. We're putting out new information all the time. We needed to launch a couple new programs. And as a result of this period, we launched a program that we were going to do and we were

going to make it all perfect six months from now. We said, screw it. We're going to launch this this week. People need it right now. So we launched a network for coaches and practitioners. And we had 5,500 people sign up in two days. And we have now got this movement. of consultants that are supporting one another, we would have never done that without that rallying cry and without having the four or five key objectives. My company is now more focused and actually more productive than we've ever been, but it all started by having a rallying cry

and defining what that was going to look like. Isn't that funny how, I mean, I've seen that on our side too where there's things we've wanted to get to and then now all of a sudden because of the urgency and because everybody feels like there's no BS. The meetings and the approvals and the red tape. all that just goes out the window, and it's very clear what we need to do right now. You know something that we did?

So one of our defining objectives that goes with is rallying cry was let's leverage some of the assets that have been idle that might be more appropriate. So we have a book called The Three Big Questions for a Frantic Family. So all these people are working at a home right now. And they're looking at their business and then they're looking at their family in the next, in the next, I just filled some water. You're modeling frantic in real time. That's what Frantic looks like.

Exactly. So people are actually, like, how do I apply this to my home? We actually went to our publisher and we, that book is now free downloadable. The three big questions for a frantic family because we want people to make their families more productive during this time. And so we would have never done that. Our publisher probably wouldn't have allowed us to do that. We always looked at that family book as kind of a stepchild that we never talked to. Now we said, this might be the most important thing we can do. So cool. I love it. Talk about these objectives. So you've got a rally cry. You've got the levers, as you call them, that you can actually put your hands on. When you're getting into a check-in with the team about how these areas are going, we mentioned the red, yellow, green. How do you know if something's green? How do you know if it's red? What do you do if it's red? Is it like a everybody scores it and grades it? Is it kind of just from your gut? Why does it matter what status it is? Alan Mulally used this same system when he turned the Ford Motor Company around. And he did it. So if they can do it with a company that full of data and moving parts. You can do it in your medium to small business. And it's not about being precise. It's about having a general collective understanding about how

things are going. So what it is, we just say, like in ours, we might say, message is going out. Is that green, yellow, red? And somebody who's most involved in that might say, I don't know, it feels kind of yellow to me. And somebody else might say, no, no, I think it's green. I mean, we're getting more stuff back. Oh, that's great to hear. And we'll go, well, I don't know, we'll say, let's call it lime. Okay. It's not, it doesn't really matter. What the purpose is is at the end of that, you look at all of your colors and you say, let's talk about the reds and the oranges. So the purpose isn't to get an exact score. The purpose is to look at things and find out relatively what needs our attention the most. I think I remember you telling me one time,

I brought you a big complicated strategy looking document and you said, no, no, no, this isn't going to work. And I was so proud of it. And you said, look, it's wonderful work, but it's just not going to work. I said, what do you mean? You said, teams don't latch on to something. something that's got that much sophistication, you need just enough structure so that the team has a healthy conversation, not so that they understand every single detail of the business. Exactly. And if people are pretty close, call it good enough and keep moving on and then step back and look at the whole thing. And by the way, so I'm glad that Alan Mullalley said he felt the same way at Ford because like I said, if it can work at Ford, it can work in a smaller business.

Well, we've talked about how we can show up more for our teams. Pat, what do, what? What do our customers need from us right now? I mean, it's challenging because we want to keep revenue coming in so we can keep our business afloat and keep our jobs. But it's also a weird time to be asking our customers to pay for something. How do we show up and love on the customers, the tribe that we've built and do that in a way that's not tacky, but also keeps the business going. Okay, so I have a few very specific things. First of all, anticipate their objections or your concerns and just say, listen, as we approach you right now, we don't want you to think we're trying to be opportunistic here

or we're trying to take advantage of the situation. So just know that we really care about you. And that's why we're reaching out. This is not about us. It's about you. So just say that and let them go, okay, good, good, thanks. Secondly, instead of just saying we're still here for you and we're open for business, give them choices. Give them specific options. Say to them, here's four things that we could do for you or we could provide for you right now. And if any of these sound good, when people are in crisis, they don't want you to say, tell us whatever we can do for you. Because it's too hard to even think about that. That's another decision process. And exactly. But if you say, hey, here's four things, which of these would be good for you? Most times people go, yeah, I'll take two of these. And this was

driven home to me by a friend, one of our consultants, who talked to a woman who last year lost her husband. And when she lost her husband, all of her friends reached out and said, hey, we're here for you. Let us know if we can do anything. And she said, I couldn't even, I didn't even know what might be possible. But if you went to her and said, I can help you with your personal finances, or I'll take your dogs for two weeks so you don't have to worry about that. Or, hey, I can bring you food. Now they've got things to choose from. And sometimes in a misplaced guide, in a misplaced attempt not to be overwhelming to our clients, we just say, we don't want to bother you, but just know we're here. No, no, give them options. And they will appreciate that. But again, if you feel

bad for doing it, just say, please know that I'm not trying to be pushy. I just know a lot of people need this and we're glad to provide it. So here's some things, here's a menu of things that we could do for you. Really good. Well, Pat, we've talked about how we can take care of our team and what our team needs right now. We talked a little bit about how we can take care of our customers. Before you and I got on the call, we talked about taking care of ourselves, taking care of, you know, go out for a run, get time away. have to think we're still human. We don't have Superman capes on. It's a difficult time, if I'm honest, to give myself permission to prioritize self-care because our customers need us, our team needs us, and I can imagine many leaders feel that way right now. Yet on principle,

I know, I know I got to work out at some point. I got to eat food at some point. I got to sleep. How in the midst of a crisis do we, one, give ourselves permission and practically how do we do that to the point that it's not at the detriment of all this other stuff going on. Well, and I will throw another thing out there, Daniel, and that is that I get up from this call and I walk three feet away, open the door and go out into the room, and there's my kids and my wife who are more important to me than my customers. And so I go from meaning customer needs to my employee's needs as a leader to my family's needs.

It is so easy not to work out or not to eat well or not to sleep or frankly, not even to go spend silent time thinking. I think that's the biggest challenge for me is finding time to ponder and to be creative and to pray because there's always something right in front of me that I can do. And I love Zoom and we're finding a way to use this, but there is always something on this computer of mine that can occupy my attention. And so I think it's, this is a time to put in place a new sense of discipline and that is find regular times to do things. I worked out this small. I usually don't work out in the mornings. If I don't work out in the mornings, man, eight o'clock hits and I'm like, yeah, I think I'm

going to skip this day. And that just starts to trail off. So I think it's about putting in place just enough discipline to keep you healthy while you're trying to serve the needs of customers, employees, and family members. Well, unpack that a bit more because I hear you. And I'm thinking about business owners I've talked to in the last couple weeks who are literally losing customers every day. They're literally having to lay people off.

Every hour feels like it's precious. Every hour. And they're sleeping four hours a night, jumping out of bed, getting into the email. I mean, really, how can I justify taking an hour just to go think or just to go exercise? It feels contradictory in this season. It's not unlike when you're on an airplane, and they say in the event of the cabin losing pressure, put your own oxygen mask on first. Because after about four days, certainly a week of not. not taking care of yourself, you're actually not going to take care of the other people around

you better. So it's really about having the wisdom to do that. By the way, as far as when people losing their jobs, we started this, we put out this message recently and we're going to stay on it. And we did a podcast about it too. And that is when there's people in your organization, you're having to let go, we're asking people, and many leaders, it just hasn't occurred to them. And we're reminding them and they're actually doing it. Go to your other employees and ask them if they would like to volunteer to take a pay cut in order to keep another person on board or to keep their brothers and sisters employed. Let me tell you, I'm shocked at how we don't think about doing that. And the benefits are twofold. One, we give a person the dignity of

keeping their job, which is huge. We also allow people that aren't losing their jobs to participate in the sacrifice and some of the suffering for someone else, the morale in an organization that actually allows people to opt in for a pay cut for their, for their peers goes through the roof. And now at the table group, we are fortunate. We've always stayed very small. And for the time being,

we're going to be fine. We're not going to be laying anybody off. But we feel really bad for our partners and our vendors. So we did this. We're doing a voluntary pay cut and we're going to use that money. to go to our partners that are experiencing really bad times, and we're going to say, can you keep that person on for three more months? Wow.

And this is something that I think most people would be like, I didn't even know I could do that. Yeah, talk about making it feel like a family. I mean, that's a unifying experience, no doubt. Right. And our vendors, we really love, we have some wonderful partners, and they're in the travel business, travel-related services, right? And so they've just hit a wall.

And we're like, hey, we love them. We don't want them to lose their job. We want to show them that we care about them beyond the business. By the way, Daniel, one of the things I would also say, I read this yesterday and we believe this, for people that are losing clients right now, treat your prospects like clients. And don't lose a client that can't pay because this is going to pass. And if you can survive by cutting back salary and keep serving your clients, and I realize some businesses just can't do that.

I don't want to be Pollyanna-ish or naive. But if you can just keep serving your clients, they will reward you. Boy, as we come out of this, if we do the right things, we are going to have more loyalty with our customers, greater sense of commitment to one another than we could have ever imagined without this. So if there's any way to keep serving your clients, even though they can't. pay you. They will more than reward you when this is over. So good. Pat, you've been around the business world a long time. The market cycles. There's disruption. There's times of plenty.

There's times of struggle and famine. We're hitting in a kind of a famine season. When we go out five years and we're in 2025 on the other side of this, based on how you've experienced these types of things before. What do you think we're going to say about 2020 or what do you hope we'll say as the business community emerges through this? What do we want to be proud of as we look back in five years from this? I think we want to be proud of the way we treated our employees. I think we want to be proud of the way we handled this. I really believe that in the end, individuals, families, businesses are either going to emerge from this better for having gone through it or worse for having not managed it well, not handled it well. And I think that right when this started,

we said, put yourself into July. And it might be October. When I say October, it just mean like that kind of normalcy kind of returns. Beyond this storm. What do you want to look back and say about how you handled this? And I think it's so key that people get out of this moment and look back. You know, Daniel, when I was a kid, I was in college and I took a job on a beer truck, right? And I was, and I reached back. It was the middle of the summer. I'm from Bakersfield, California. We were actually literally in the desert outside of Bakersfield.

It was like 110. And I reached back, but I looked through the mirror and I didn't realize what I was doing. And I touched the little guardrail around the exhaust pipe. And I just burnt the hell out of my fingers. I mean, they were like puffed up white. We were in the middle of the desert. There was no ice. There was no water.

Nothing. I just sat there and watched my fingers blister. I mean, that had to be like a second degree burn. And it was so painful. And I remember in that moment saying, someday I'm going to tell this story many times. And I won't be in pain when I tell that story. And I just put myself into the future, into this very moment.

And by looking into the future, you can kind of go, okay, I will not always be in this pain. I don't think I'd be that great, that classy in that moment. You had a lot of fortitude to be able to stop and actually project out in the future in the midst of the pain. I would have been saying some not so, Well, I probably rolled down the window right after that and was like, but we have to say, what will I say one day about this moment? And I think that's really important for people in all facets of life to do that. This will pass. It will pass. Pat, you've been so encouraging. You've talked

about how we can love on our teams right now. You've talked about how we show up for our customers. You've talked about how we take care of ourselves as leaders and how we continue to value and prioritize our family. We've also talked about this idea of a long-term perspective and getting through the storm. Before we jump off, any final words of encouragement? Leaders out there taking it on the chin right now, struggling, scared, lonely, lots of fear. What would you say to that person listening right now? I'm so glad you asked that. And normally at the other day, you're like, I don't know, I think I just said everything, but something just occurred to me. And my next book is going to be about this. But, you know, whatever we watch movies or TV shows about heroes or people love superhero movies.

And we always think about, man, I would want to be a hero. But you can't be a hero if there's not a crisis or a need, right? This is the time to be a hero. And if that means you're a leader and you say, I'm going to cut my salary by 60% to save these three people's job, you will be that person's hero, their spouse is hero, their kid's hero. and it's only during this time that you can do that. And yet some people live their whole lives watching these movies and reading these books and saying, I want to be that person.

And then the stuff hits the fan. And they don't realize the window of opportunity for heroism just opened. And so I think that if we can just say, how can I be heroic in the way I deal with that? And heroic means really sacrificial. stop and ask yourself, am I fully embracing the hero that I want to be? Because when we start a business, we don't think, well, I'm not a superhero. Well, we actually are to the people that need us. And right now is when the Joker is taking over Gotham City.

You know what I mean? Right now is when the invasion hits and we have to do the right thing. And this is a war. And it's not being fought just in laboratories and hospitals. as it's being fought in the hearts and minds of people who running small businesses and how they deal with their employees and their customers. And so I would say this, be a hero. It matters.

Really good. Pat, I'm encouraged. I know our listeners are going to be encouraged by all of this. And guys, it's time to lead. You already are leading. It's time to be who you are. You know, it's a good reminder. This isn't when we become leaders. It's when we just show up for who we've been this whole time.

And we turn up the volume. And what a challenging time, but also I just want our listeners to hear you're not alone. We're in it with you guys. We're going to continue to pour in and show up and do anything we can to blow wind into your sales, to encourage you guys. And Pat, it's great to be friends and it's great to cheer for each other. And it's a reminder to me as I'm sitting here looking at your face and doing this call. If you're a business leader out there, reach out to your friends, talk to your friends more, encourage each other, bond together. bond together. This community of business owners and leaders and entrepreneurs is one of the most

magical and full of some of the most intelligent and bright, incredible human beings that I've ever been around. And this is the time when we really need to lock arms and lean on each other to get through all this. You know, I think about going to Entree leadership, going to the conferences and stuff, and how I would always say, this is the best audience. They're so hungry. They're so passionate. All that hunger and passion, it demonstrates right now. And so you're exactly. right. Reach out to one another. This is a time where we're going to look back and realize there were blessings hidden in this as hard as it is. Yes, absolutely. It's great to see you. Pat, great to see you, brother. And for all of you guys listening out there, keep fighting,

keep pushing, and together, we will get through to the other side of the storm.