Noob School - Episode 96: The Wild Ride with Dan Sterling

Episode Date: November 6, 2023

On today's episode of Noob School, we're joined by none other than John's own brother: Dan Sterling, an excellent businessman with an esteemed career in the telecom industry. They discuss Dan's career, from how he got started to where he is now, giving excellent sales advice and insight along the way. Be sure to listen through, as you wouldn't want to miss a piece of information - whether you're a sales noob or an industry pro. Check out what the Noob School website has to offer: SchoolForNoobs.com I'm going to be sharing my secrets on all my social channels, but if you want them all at your fingertips, start with my book, Sales for Noobs: https://amzn.to/3tiaxsL Subscribe to our newsletter today: https://bit.ly/3Ned5kL #noobschool #salestraining #sales #training #entrepreneur #salestips #salesadvice

New School. All right, welcome back to Noob School. Today I've got, I think I could probably say my favorite podcast guest. Brother Dan. I think you said that to the last guy, too, to Peter. No, I did not. Brother Dan Sterling is back for his second visit to the Noob School. So welcome back, Dan.

Thank you. Exciting time to be here. Yep. Dan has been, we're going to talk a little bit about Dan's wild ride in the telecom world since he got out of college. And, of course, we're going to end up where he is now. But Dan, Dan's at Gamecock. Yes, I am. In South Carolina.

Yep. And you graduated in 91? Yep. We always win the tailgate. We're really good at tailgate. Tailgate. That's good. That's good.

And when you got out, it hadn't been that long since AT&T had been forced to break up kind of their monopoly, right? Correct. 1984 is when AT&T was forced to break up. Okay. And it created a huge opportunity. I was already in the United States. the software business in Greenville and you entered

the telecom business which I think those two businesses, our business data stream and then what you got into CTG, corporate telemanagement group, were the two kind of hot spaces for young salespeople. Absolutely. Yeah. And Layton Cubbage,

Charlie Hauser, has started CTG and they had a lot of our friend Ted Hassel and David Hudson and Eddie Terrell. A lot of our friends were there already. Yep. And you knew wanted to work there absolutely and Layton said we don't have a spot for you he did say that he did and I and I listened to him for a little while and then I decided that one going to work for me you just said I'm gonna be there on

Monday and you pay me when you're ready I called him on a Sunday night and I said I wasn't calling him Cubs I didn't know they had him that well yet but I said Mr. Cove this is Dan Sterling I understood there's a job for me but I'm starting tomorrow and he started laughing and that led to about three more calls where I just said I'm starting tomorrow I'll clean the bathroom to take the trash whatever you want yeah but this is the place I want to be okay and pay me whenever you want yeah it's amazing how often that approach works you know where you're just you just won't give up you won't say well okay I'll look somewhere else you like I found my spot I'm coming

I had a guy one time you know John Fredella yep who for whatever reason he actually he didn't pass a certain test we gave him so we were very strict about these psychological tests he didn't He had a different profile. And I tell him, sorry, but, you know, I like you, but, you know, we're not going to take you. He said, well, I'm going to call you every day until you hire me. I'm like, well, call if you want to, you know. So he called, I'm no kidding, every day for 50 days. And every day I was polite, and I said, you know, sorry, I told you.

I'm not going to work out. Day 51, we've had like three people quit. We had open wrecks. We had nobody on the bench. I was like, okay, we'll give you a try. There you go. Yeah. Yeah.

And so anyway, I think he was probably like me. I found the spot with a bunch of motivated people. Yeah. That seemed to be going in a common direction. And it seemed to all trust and like each other and have fun. Yeah. And I said, I got to be there. Because all other places I was talking to didn't have that atmosphere of not only fun, but work hard.

Yeah. So you knew it was a good place, good industry. And you knew a lot of the people that were already there. So it was kind of an easy pick for you to go there. But that effectively puts you in the telehealth. telecom space, which you've been in since 91, so that's like 30 years, right? Yep. Telecom and cloud.

And interesting enough, it wasn't, I mean, it was, for the most part, your career has been managing telecom through a channel, right? Correct. Through other distributors? Well, through agents, through agents. And my definition of an agent is somebody who's worked for a telecom or cloud company, one day in most cases their bosses made them mad and they walked out of the door because they knew they had some customers they could put on somebody else and start making residual income so they might

have been working for AT&T or charter yeah or windstream or green cloud or any any company like that and they had good relationships because they became an agent so they're now selling for someone like you but not as a direct employee as a distributor or an agent absolutely they're very much john like an independent insurance agent, somebody like our friend Bubba Watts, who represents a lot of different insurance companies, and then he gets paid money based on who he points the customer to, the end-user customer. And so that's what these guys do. Okay. And so CTCG eventually gets bought by a company called LCI. Correct. What's that stand for? I can't remember. LCI. It's been a long time ago. It was a big payday. Yeah, it was a great payday. And you stayed on with LCI and just kept doing

what you were doing, right? Yeah, I stayed on for probably three or four years. And did your territory change? They kept trying to make my territory change because I had the northeast part of the United States. And when LCI bought us, they were like, that's stupid. We don't want you flying up there. We'll let one of our people up here handle it, and I said, that's fine, but I don't think my customer's going to like that very much. And so the customers pretty much told them we want to work with him. And it worked

out. It worked out great for the first four years. And then Russell Powell who was one of the guys was meeting at CTG and I were sitting there one day and they were making some decisions we didn't like and not taking care of we worked with these agents

but not only were our agents they were our friends and when they started making decisions that were bad for them we were like we can't be a part of it and so we called Layton Cubbage and told Leighton what was going on

because Leighton had pretty much left behind and Leighton literally was over at my house within 30 minutes under this tree I'll never forget it And he got so mad when we tell him what was going on that he called his stockbroker and sold a big chunk of stock right then. And it made the LCI people so bad because normally when you sell that much stock, you bring in a pretty planet.

But we left that day. Now, LCI eventually got bought by Quest, right? Yep. And then Quest eventually got bought by Century Lake. Correct. So so far in your career, as a Gamecock, working in telecom, every single place you've worked, has gotten bought by somebody. Correct.

So it's kind of interesting. I mean, we broke up AT&T, they were from the monopoly, and then immediately all these little companies start buying each other. Absolutely. To make another big company. But you ended up starting

NuVox. Is that right? Russell Powell and I first went to a company called BTI, Best There Is. Okay. In Raleigh, North Carolina. And we got brought there because they said they wanted to build a channel

and after about three months we quickly realized they really didn't understand what that meant. Okay. And one Friday night, Russell and I were, they'd given us these company cars and we were racing each other back from Raleigh, North Carolina to Greenville, and we were talking on the phone

about how miserable we were. This wasn't what we thought it was going to be. And Shay Houser talked to Russell and I the next day, and he and his brother, Charles, had made the decision they were starting NuVox. And so Russell and I jumped in and it kind of went from there. Okay.

So you all started NuVox. And how long was NuVox a private company? It was probably, I'll probably get this wrong, John, but I think it was six or seven years. Okay. And if you remember at the time, some of those guys you mentioned earlier, Ted Hassel, not Ted Ludd, David Hudson and Eddie Terrell had spun off and started a company called New South. And kind of the younger guys at CTG, Russell Powell and Matt Smith and I and Shane. and Charles did Newvox. Yeah.

And Ted ended up joining us too. Yeah. And what was your role at Newbox? Well, it changed a lot. At first I was doing direct sales, indirect sales, marketing, and I was finding all the real estate. So it was a crazy, crazy time because we were basically opening one office a month. And it was wide open, but God, it was fun.

I wouldn't change those days for anything in the world. And one of the things you were talking about last week was, you know, when you find great people, They tend to bring a lot of people with them. And we learned that experience that I couldn't do all that stuff I was doing. So the channel was where my real passion was. And so we found a guy named Jim Dunn, who had a bunch of industry experience. And Jim was totally focused on direct sales.

We bought him in. And he bought like 35 people in less than a month. What? They were all just direct sales studs. And so it really helped springboard us. Where did he come from? He was at a company, I think he was at Earthlink at the time. And he bought 30.

something people in him? Wow. And he bought a lot of people that you've known over the years. I mean, you know, Tim Cope is one of them and several others. Stephen Rick. And so you built Newbox for six or seven years, and then y'all sold that one to Windstreet? We first merged with a couple of great companies, New South, a company that has the CTG people. A company called Florida Digital Network was where I got to meet Mike Gallagher, who's a great guy, a great friend. And that company stayed together for three or four years and then we sold to Windstream communications. Okay. And I remember this part, but when you were at Windstream, you were running all, you were in charge of all the distribution, all the distributors, all the agents, right?

Yes. And so your number, I was always impressed by this, your number you were responsible for every year was over a billion dollars all going through the channel. Yep. We eventually got, we were doing about three billion dollars. Three billion. And we were adding on. on, it's about $100,000 a month and net new business, which is in our business, if it's $100,000 a month, they normally sign a three to five year contract. So it kind of grows from there.

Okay, okay. And that was a really, that was a fun experience for the first, you know, it's going to sound redundant, but the first five years or so, because they totally left us alone. Yeah. And we'd never have money,

we never had money to spend on marketing stuff or shows. So we had to get real creative, and I could spend a couple hours talking about that because it was so much fun to have we creatively spent money. But Windstream came in and wanted to build a brand, and they were a sleepy ILEC company that just had the rural telephone areas where there's no competition.

So they wanted to grow by acquiring C-Lex, which we were. And we bought four or five with them. And so you, running that big number, that big distribution number, what was different about that than all the scrappy, little growth companies you'd been with before. I think it just made it easier because we had money to entertain people.

We were used to like going to the shows and being at the bar when all our competitors were, you know, they'd come to the bar and take all our big customers out to fancy dinners on cruises and stuff, you know, around, you know, the New York Harbor, whatever it was. And we'd stay at the bar. That was your, that was your, and we'd go have pizza, you know. That was your trade show booth, was the bar? And then we'd come back when we knew they were coming back from these dinners, we'd be there, you know, have the bartender paid off pretty much. Yeah.

Well, we could take care of the customers. Yeah. Interesting. And so, but when you got it at Windstream, with that big number, you were able to spend the money and do the stuff. Yeah. But there were challenges as well because the Windstream core group didn't understand the channel. Yeah. And so they'd look at the numbers and see how much each channel manager was producing the month.

Right. And let's just say I had two channel managers in Atlanta. They would decide we need to put five or six. And I'd be like, no, no, no, no, no, there's not an agent tree where we can just go pick them. It doesn't work like that. We're very productive, but you can't throw too many bodies at it. Right. Because they'll go somewhere else, right?

Well, you can throw bodies at it, but we'd say we want more engineers. Because at the end of the day, that's what the salespeople need help with, is the engineer piece. Well, then Windstream, did it get bought before you left or was it just? No, Windstream's still there now. There's a change in CEO or something. Something happened. It's a long story, John, but they hired a consulting group because of a mistake that was made. And, you know, consulting group is an interesting buzzword.

Yeah. You know, I know the guy you talked to a while ago, Peter Barth, is an awesome guy. Was it Harvard? Yeah. Well, most consultants I've talked to over the years went somewhere like Harvard, and they've got their MBA, and they've got their, you know, law degree from Harvard. but they've never been out in the real world. And so they wanted us to do things that I didn't think were right.

So after a good six years or so, you left for yet another startup with some of the same characters, some of the same Hauser family, Charles and Shea. And Charlie. And Charlie. And Keith Koker. Yeah, and Keith Koker. And you started Green Cloud Technologies.

Well, they had started it. They were about three months in when I jumped on board. And they brought you in as president. Correct. And that was the first time, if I'm not mistaken, you've been a president versus like a head of sales. Absolutely. How was that? It was mind-boggling, I think I'd say.

It was challenging. Yeah. It made me realize that salespeople couldn't go out and just sell stuff that people had to actually install it. Because I'd never really thought through all that. All of a sudden, you're in charge the installers. Yeah. Yeah. It's funny because one of the guys there was like, Dan, you know that we can't just sell it anymore.

You've got to think about this other stuff. And so it was good. And we were in the cloud space probably a little bit early. And eventually they ended up being very successful in doing very well. But we had to do a lot of pivoting because our traditional agents that we'd worked with for 20-something years at the time, they just weren't ready for it. Yeah. Who was the good agent for this? A managed service provider.

An MSP? Yeah, an MSP. Okay, so somebody who's already managing the technology for an office. Yeah, they're servers for an office. The computer servers you see in a closet somewhere. And you would say, well, we'll add this cloud security service to what the MSP's offering. Correct. And they really liked it because we could private label bill it for them.

and we were a Cisco certified cloud provider. And so they could sell it as whatever MSP, right, and use their own brand and put the cloud piece on their own bill. Yeah. And just put it as another line at them. Yeah. And it wasn't a risk as much for the end user because it was Cisco certified. I mean, nobody gets fired for buying Cisco.

Yeah. I mean, that's the gold standard. So you all got ahead of that wave. very very popular now of course and y'all eventually green cloud eventually got sold for it was a good good deal for everyone yeah i was gone by them but they did and they did a phenomenal job yeah um of making that happen well it is amazing i mean you're you're part of the story but you know with the hauser's they've just they've started up and sold or merged or whatever four or five different telecom companies since it started uh so it's been pretty amazing um to watch

that and I'm glad you've been a part of it. So you have a big shift happen after Green Cloud because I remember you got a call out of the blue from our friend Mike Bauer at ScanSource who said I want to get into the I'll call it the telecom world the cloud this this world and start selling this kind of telecom stuff through our our Vars so the people that are already selling people the hardware. It makes perfect sense. It's like the Reese's Cup right. I mean, the peanut butter and the chocolate. And he asked a few people who he should talk to about it.

They all said Dan Sterling. The main one, though, was Randy McDougal. I don't know if you all know Randy McDougal at Carolina Triathlon, but Randy used to work with us at Nuvox and before that at CTG. And Mike and his wife were in there buying a bike. And he starts asking Randy about some of these. They called them master agents at the time. I mean, now they're called TSDs.

But, you know, do you know anybody who knows these guys? And Randy goes, the guy you need to talk to. is Dan Sterling and Mike goes, God, I should have thought about that. And so that's when I got to call him here. Yeah. And he shows you a list of his list of the top 10 of these type of providers that he'd liked to discuss. He said, do you know any of them? And you said, I know all of them. Yeah. They were my biggest customers. Yeah. And then you also knew the right one to pick and who their owner was. And what, within a couple of weeks, y'all were meeting with him up in New York? Well, me being the type A that I am, I said, I think you've got to talk to this one right here, and I'll call them right now.

And he goes, no, no, no, I'm a public trading company. I can't do that. I can't do that. And I laughed with Mike because I said, Mike, you realize I've been trying to get you to sell this stuff for a long time. And John, you probably don't remember this, but the last time he told me no was up at our parents' Mountain House and Flat Rock, North Carolina. Really? And I asked him, I said, Mike, why won't you sell this? Because Dan, don't ever bring that up again.

we're a hardware distribution company. That's a distraction. But it's worked out great. Yeah, you know, long sales cycle. Yeah. Long cell cycle. But it did work out, and you helped them meet the guy and get the deal done. So they bought the biggest distributor of this type,

your supplier of this type of telephone, internet, cloud, all that stuff. And the idea was get, you know, ScanSource does billions of dollars a year in hardware sales. things like Scanners Yep Things like that You know Security cameras

Yeah Hardware Physically hardware phones Right And let's get them Instead of just selling the hardware And making a margin And going on to next month

Let's sell the scanner And connect it to some kind of Internet service, make it live And not only get the Commission here But create this annuity on this stuff here, right? Okay.

So once they got that deal done, it makes all the sense in the world. It's not easy to get all these thousands of scansource vars to do that immediately. And so they said, we want you to stay and help us figure that out. You have a small team of people, you're working with the biggest Vars

and teaching them how to do this. And the common refrain is our call from a Scansource var was we don't want to mess with it. We're too busy. We don't want to mess up one of our deals with this, right? It's kind of like that. Most of them would say we agree we ought to do this.

But then they wouldn't necessarily do it. And it was mainly because their sales team didn't understand it necessarily, and they were very concerned that if they did do this, it could mess up their core deal, which is where they're used to making their money. Right. And I get that. But sometimes you're just too busy doing your, thing and making your if you got to make your number every quarter and you've got a way to do it

you don't want to distract yourself with something else but it is nice when you say every time i sell a deal or every one time out of three i can add this annuity to it it is and and one of the challenges that we had to overcome there is getting the scan source customers to understand how they pay their sales reps yeah because they're used to paying them one time yeah and so if you tell you're going to pay them one time on something that bills $10,000 a month, then it's X percentage. That doesn't look like very much. So you've got to get them to agree to pay them either a big lump sum and realize the customer is locked in for three to five years, or you've got to get them to pay a little bit of the monthly residual they get over time. It's a snowball

effect. And kind of the way I try to explain it to them is let's train your sales guys on if they've got a $500 a month car payment. How do we make it where they can eliminate that car payment by this residual income and then we go onto their house payment and then we keep growing it from there well in the SaaS world the software world you know we struggle with that too damn we're switching from licensed sales to an annuity subscription kind of sale the way it normally runs now is whatever length of time you get your customer to commit to two year three year whatever where they can't get out of it a contract they'll pay the rep and they'll say say we're going to pay you, you know, your commission right now for this length of time.

And then that's your customer. And your job now is to start working on what happens in two years. Yep, absolutely. We make it a three-year deal. Can we make it twice as big? Can we, you know, and so the rest, the rest stays very involved, but we just, we just pay them and move on. But anyway, so you started working some, some of the low-hanging fruit scan source cross. And you've done that for the last five or six years, right? I know one of them was something we can't say who the customer was

But it was a big shipping company and this was putting thousands of scanners in their facilities, right? Absolutely, so let's just run through the deal if If let's say let's say I'm the var for scan source and I'm the one who's going to sell these scanners to this company company, let's just say there's a thousand scanners, and the scanners all cost $1,000 a piece. How much is that? Is that a million? A thousand times a thousand? I think that's a million. Sounds right. I don't know how much it is. Well, the beauty of the deal you're talking about was this particular scan source customer had never sold any services before. Okay. They were in a large deal that the margins on the hardware had gotten so compressed. They

weren't sure how to get how they were going to make it work yeah but it was a big name brand and they didn't want to lose the customer and one of the scan source one of the greatest people I ever met Bob Kroski at ScanSource he's walking in the hall one day and says I know you sell these services but is there any way the services can go with what I sell and I said what do you sell then he pulled out this zebra device which I'd never seen this zebra device in my life and I said what does that zebra device do and he says well when they scan a package when they're delivering it they scan it and it goes back to let the customer get the email and know they got it.

I said, okay. I said, how does that connectivity work? He goes, I've got no idea. And so he called a customer and said, how does that connectivity work? And he said, well, we called T-Mobile, Verizon, Sprint, with the customer, and they pick one. And they put it in there. And I said, Bob, ask him how the experience is. And he said, they said, the experience is awful.

And I said, why? And it took me right back to the telecom days. because the hardware provider, Zebra, would blame Save Verizon and vice versa. Yeah. And so we came up with a great solution for that. That particular Scantial's customer is making about $56,000 a month on this one deal right now, and it's growing.

So this customer is making $56,000 a month just on the subscription part of this. Correct. They already made the margin on the hardware. Correct. And that will probably grow every month as we get more scanners. Yes. and most of the VARs are leaving that on the table. Correct.

So your job has been to educate them and get them going. And you've done a lot of that over the last five years. But, you know, you've done so much of it that I think that they're comfortable that the Vars kind of get the deal now. It's growing. It's growing every month. And it's not just the scanners. It's when Avaya sells a phone system or, you know, do we get them to Avaias? a cloud or there's all kind of different stuff like that or a camera system yeah camera

we're doing cloud backup yeah exactly so you've learned a lot about how to not just work with these telecom cloud distributors but also how to cross-sell to the bars which leads us to what you're doing now so you have left scan source correct and you're now doing the same thing you've been doing but you're just doing independently right so any any var out there that wants wants your help in creating these annuities, you kind of know both sides of the equation and you can help them do it. Is that right?

That's correct. I'm talking to some of the people I've worked with in the past about do you want me to continue helping you or not. And then I'm also talking to people about going back into the supplier world as a channel chief or sales leader. So I mean, if somebody wanted to hire you as what you traditionally done, this VP channel chief, distributor thing. I know you'd look at that. But in the meantime, you know, you've got these

customers that, I mean, the way it works, as I understand it, is they either pay you some kind of retainer, you help train their salespeople, or maybe a retainer plus your company and their company splits the commissions. Correct. So they have very little risk. Correct. Okay. I know my son, Jack, or your nephew, did that with a firm in Arizona when he started his agency business. He had a veteran show them, you know, these are the good deals. This is how it's structured. And Jack still calls me today and says, this is the deal I'm in. And if it's a deal that I know is above Jack right now, because he's, what, four years into this now, you know, I'll say, Jack, this might be one that you talk to your friends in Phoenix about. Yeah. Because, you know,

Jack tends to focus on the security piece. And if it's a real complex data solution, he usually need some help on that one. So walk me through again, ideally how it would work if you had a VAR that sold hardware. And they said, hey, I want to get figure out of the subscription thing. Dan, how would you help me? What is what does the financial part of that look like? Well, I've talked to a bunch of people about different ways like you said earlier. I mean, some of them want to pay me a retainer and make it six months or a year. Yeah. Because I'm telling every one of them that I talked to, it's going to take you. unless you get lucky with some big customer like we've talked about,

it's going to take you at least three years to build it up where there's scale, where you can make some money. And that's an investment. And so I'm real upfront with them about that. And I talk to them openly and honestly about what it's going to take. And if they don't want to commit to it, I'd rather just walk away as friends. Yeah. And I think if I own the VAR, my starting point might be, Dan, I'm okay splitting the commission with you.

let's just share, let's look at my customers, let's see if we can cherry pick and get a couple done. Yeah, big ones. Yeah, and then we can go to phase two. That's what I usually tell them is, let's talk to your friendliest customers that trust you the most. Yeah. And say this is completely new to us of what you normally have bought from us.

Yeah. But this is something else we do. Okay. And if somebody wanted to talk about that with you, just give me a call. These are people that already know you or they find you on LinkedIn or something. And it's interesting, I'm having a, I'm having a lot of good, good conversations with agent friends of mine, because most of the, you know, agents that I've worked with whatever the past are used to selling services. And they're calling me because they know I've got the experience in hardware now.

Yeah. And they're saying, what kind of hardware can we sell? And, you know, Scansource has tons of resources that can help these people as well. Yeah. But I could be another value ad. Yeah. Scansource is such a cool company because you know for a couple years you've worked for

Scansource but before that you were working with Scansource and now you're working with Scansource Absolutely. It's a... Scansource is great and they were great to me. It's a great company it's a great Greenville story Switching gears favorite sales teachers over the years

I think Zig Zigler has got to be one of the greatest Yeah. And not just because you remember brother, but I think I was very lucky to have a brother who was, you know, six years ahead of me in sales that could tell me all the stuff not to do. Yeah. And I remember some of the early years when I'd tell John what I was doing and he'd be like, wrong answer. Wrong answer. Well, it is, listen, that's a good lesson for the noob. Just find somebody, your brother or someone you trust that's just a little, a little ahead of you on the path. Yeah. Five years, seven years, ten years. Not someone who's like 40 years ahead of you. That's too far, you know?

Yeah. They need to be in a current path kind of where you close. I think other than you and, you know, Zig and, you know, my buddy Layton Coverage has been a mentor of mine when it comes to sales. I mean, he probably helped me the most when it came to just keep it simple. Yeah. And just going next door. I mean, don't let it affect you.

If somebody doesn't want what you've got, you know, don't waste time. And Mr. Ben Key, our dad's good friend, you know, taught me that a lot as well. Don't sell the same thing over and over again that you never really sold. Okay. And then what's your favorite book? A book called Rhinoceros Success that you know well by Scott Alexander. It's a book that's, as you know, has really big letters and lots of pictures. and so that's good for somebody like me.

It keeps it real, real simple. And it basically boils down to, you're going to get some thorns and you're rear in every once in a while. And so just, you know, pluck them out and keep on going and wake up, you know, go to bed at night and wake up and just start all over. And sales, that's what it's all about.

I mean, it's hard effort, hard work and effort and enthusiasm. But I was talking to my friend Daniel before he came in here today and he was talking about sales. And I was like, well, It's really about listening. Sales is more about listening than talking.

Because you've got to find out where their pain points are and then make sure they've got a budget. And then if you've got the right solution, it's going to sell itself. Yeah. Yeah. And if you're talking as a salesperson, there's no way you can hear them say anything of value.

Because you're talking. But if they're talking, they might tell you where their budget is or what their problem is. or so yeah I mean the other thing I think the news would like to hear about selling stuff is a lot of times salespeople they get excited yeah when the person says yes yeah that's when you definitely don't talk anymore once you get the yes it's like the sales the sales done it's over here you're gonna out you're gonna sell him out of it if you keep talking yeah I definitely agree

with that okay favorite favorite band well don't tell edwin if you are listening I'm sorry but it's got to be right now Jimmy Buffett. Oh, that's good. What a classic. Classic. Favorite word? Well, I'm going to pretend and use my accent to make this one word, but it's super fantastic. Okay.

And I choose that word because I think in life you have a choice. You know, our parents always taught us mainly our mom. We turned lemons into lemonade. And I think that word super fantastic sums that up because, you know, you never know what somebody's going through in their life because everybody's going through it. Yeah. But if you just have a great positive attitude, you're going to end up getting where you want to go. That's a good word.

Tad Hassel would agree with you on that. Well, I'm glad for your new venture. I think it's interesting because it's pretty much the same thing you've been doing, just without any supervision. You could just do whatever you want. You can help these VARs do a better job service than their customer. and they can make more money for themselves and their salespeople. But I still want to keep coming back because I am having lots of conversations

with some of these supplier friends of mine that are trying to build a channel. Yeah, either one. And a lot of those need a lot of help. Maybe some of both. Yeah, you never know. I don't know. Well, thanks for coming back. Absolutely.

Look forward to having you back on podcast number three when it's time. But we enjoy watching your wild path through telecom. keeps getting more interesting. So thanks for being here. Thanks a lot. Appreciate it. All right.