Noob School - Max Stewart: Leading Greenville’s Economic Growth with GADC

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

In this episode of Noob School, we sit down with Max Stewart, the newly appointed CEO of the Greenville Area Development Corporation (GADC), to explore his journey from central Florida to the thriving business landscape of Greenville, South Carolina. Max discusses his transition to leading GADC, a key organization in promoting economic development and attracting businesses to the area. He dives into the importance of understanding and integrating with the local culture and why Greenville is a prime location for major corporations like Michelin and BMW. Tune in for insights on economic growth, leadership, and what makes the Upstate region a magnet for global industry. Get your sales in rhythm with The Sterling Method: https://SterlingSales.co 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 #SalesTraining #B2BSales #SalesExcellence #SalesStrategy #BusinessGrowth #SalesLeadership #SalesSuccess #SalesCoaching #SalesSkills #SalesInnovation #SalesTips #SalesPerformance #SalesTransformation #SalesTeamDevelopment #SalesMotivation #SalesEnablement #SalesGoals #SalesExpertise #SalesInsights #SalesTrends

New School Welcome back to Noob Schools episode 134. Can you believe it? I've got a new friend today named Max Stewart. Max, welcome Max? Max is the new CEO, relatively new CEO of GADC, which is Greenville Area Development Corporation. And what that means, so I understand it, is you help recruit

and expand good companies in Greenville County. That's right, yes. Wonderful, wonderful. So Max came from Bradenton, Florida. And how long were you there? I was in Bradenton seven and a half years. Okay. Working for what is called Manatee County's Economic Development Office.

It's called the Bradenton Area, B.D.C. And the same kind of situation? Yep. Okay. So now if someone's thinking about here or Bradenton, you'll say, Well, it's so hot down there in the summer. I don't think I would go down here. Yeah.

Yeah, of course, of course. Well, we're really glad to have you here. Thank you. Yeah. And we certainly think you've been smart to take that job because this is a pretty good place for people to move to. I think Braden is pretty good, too, though. It was a toss-up. It was a hard choice between, but it's actually, it was a career move.

It was a vertical career move. It was the next step up in my career path. Good, good. But it also was my wife's decision. I've been asked to be recruited to other areas around the country. And she said, I like Greenville. And so we took the trip up here and we both said, yeah, I think this is the next move for us. And so we're here.

Well, I live downtown. And so I meet people all the time. And I can't tell you how many people I've met. And I'm like, why don't you move here? And they'll say, well, we were driving to Charlotte and stopped here for, I mean, Literally people stop and they'll go and they'll stay here. So it's pretty amazing. There's some wonderful quality of life assets we have here in rural county.

And we saw the Reedy River Falls area. We saw the hiking opportunities in TR, you know, great housing and sports opportunities for kids. Yeah, it's just a great community to be in. Good. We're glad you're here. Well, we always talk about people's kind of where they're from and kind of follow their career up to today. and anything that you've seen along the way we're selling, you've seen good selling, bad selling,

how it affected business in general. So all I know is you went to Central Florida. What about before that? Where would you grow up? So I've been all over Florida. I grew up pretty much everywhere you can possibly imagine in Florida. I've been in Sarasota twice in the life. So before I-75 was a two-lane road back when we moved to Sarasota area.

But I grew up in pretty much, everywhere in Florida. Seabring was the last place I kind of went to high school. Okay. And then went to college at Auburn for two years and came back to Florida because out-of-state tuition got so expensive. And so it came back and graduated from UCF with a political science degree. Yeah. I started off as a computer engineer and went to political science. It was a little bit more my style, I guess. Easy, easier. Yeah. Yeah, I mean too. So when you switch to political science, Why don't you pick political science? Well, actually, it was really, I took an elective class while I was a computer engineer

and just on basic diplomacy. Yeah. Basic diplomacy class. And I started asking questions, talking to the professor and my professor at the time said, you know, you probably need to switch career tracks. You're pretty good at this, talking to people. You know, political science is all about building relationships. Yeah.

And so working through that, I said, yeah, I think I should switch. And then I got involved with what is known as the International Visitor Leadership Program from the Department of State and the World Affairs Council in Central Florida. And we started building the program and they asked me to come on an intern in the office. And then the next year they asked me to be the program manager. And then three years later, I'm about to graduate college. And I am the executive director of the organization because the previous executive director retired.

So here I'm 22 years old running a nonprofit in Central Florida and bringing foreign dignitaries to the market. Wow. And so that was a great 10-year experience learning how to interact with people, really build relationships. And that's, you know, the heart of selling is just building a relationship with somebody and being comfortable with them and then being comfortable with you. Well, so interesting, computer science makes all the sense in the world if you like computer science, right? I'm in the computer business, but I don't really like the science part of it. I don't code or anything. At what point did you figure out that wasn't the path you wanted to go down? Probably when I got to like the quadratic equations, like some of the math computation

algorithm, this is not for me. I'm not that kind of person. And I thought I was. I'll build up to this and work on it. But, you know, Fortran and some of those computer languages, I was like, I don't know if I want to do this every day. But then getting into political science classes and starting debates and discussions and theory and, you know, getting on the debate, the debate team. and kind of figuring that process out, starts the process of how do you negotiate? Right. And how do you negotiate your position, you know, in Congress?

How do you do that? So that kind of got me into that building relationships, and I loved it. And so then I decided to kind of, I was like, you know what? I really want to be more of a, like, in that relationship building space, not behind a computer all day,

trying to type code. Well, I think it's a good lesson, though, for the salespeople and the new viewers, is, you try it. If it's not working, you can pivot. It's easier to pivot when you're young than when you're older, but you can nonetheless pivot. And you found something that was much more amenable to what you're doing so well now, which is meeting people, building relationships, trying to negotiate, get people to move here, right?

That's pretty cool. That's pretty cool. I'm telling you, I promise you, not that it makes any difference, but when I had to pick a major to go to college, I picked political science. I did not know what it was. I just I figured well I didn't want to do this one I don't want to do this one I don't want to do this one I'll just do whatever that is and a lot of electives little too hard but I ended up liking it I mean I like the fact that you you read something and then you have to give your opinion on it you know I mean I kind of like that

versus the the hard math of engineering so you know when you watch you know you watch some of the debates and the rhetoric and but you really see all those comments congressmen and representatives, when you really get down to it, they're having to negotiate on bills and really work together. And behind the scenes, it's a completely different story. Right. And so that's where we learned those skills of how you kind of debate and negotiate. Right. Because we're essentially working with established businesses and businesses that want to expand here. Negotiating their, how they fit into this community.

Right. And so we're making a, you know, a kind of bet from our side from the county's perspective. and the company is also making a negotiated bit on their side and see how we can meet together and where it comes in. So that's how we build that relationship, and that's worked pretty well since then. So just to dump it down a little bit, the area you're in as you're recruiting businesses

to move to the area that you work for. So when you, you had a great experience in college, it sounds like when you switched to political science, you got really into it. Yeah. What did you morph into first, business-wise? So we got into actually, I spent about 10 years working in that kind of political science, more diplomacy phase. And then the state of Florida has an office, Department of Commerce.

And they had a position open on their international trade team and foreign direct investment. And I worked in that space on the west coast of Florida for about four and a half years, kind of working with companies expanding overseas, selling their products abroad. but also foreign companies that wanted to invest in the U.S., mostly from the Americas. That was my area to cover. And so we had to help companies learn to sell overseas. And that's a whole different avenue ballgame of selling. You know, learning the foreign language, customs cultures, what are your landed fees, essentially, for your product in a foreign market? So we worked with a lot of companies on that structure, how to get that really going.

So you're helping companies in your area, which was West Coast Florida, to export. Export their products around the globe. Wow. What a fun job. And it takes a unique proposition because you're an American company going into a foreign market. What makes you, and it's the same thing. What makes the American product better than the foreign market? What makes their product better than yours?

So you have to really build a relationship. And it's not a one-time deal. It's a you're going back and forth. You're visiting them. They're visiting you. They're getting to know you. And so that's really key in the process. It's learning to be open.

Because that's the easiest thing. Once you get to that, you meet their family, you meet their friends, and you're selling overseas that that. That you need to know them as a person in a relationship to really get that sale. Can you give us a story, like one of your big wins doing that? So when we were, yeah. So we actually went to. to Chile and Santiago and we took a company in the Tampa Bay area with us and it was a lady who had a small manufacturing business but she had a lot of interest in the metal

markets she was a steel her company did oxidization of steel steel products along those lines and she went to the market and she was meeting with all these different companies around the area Chile is known for their steel industry there's a lot of steel that comes out of that market and she was having some trouble kind of connecting with one of the people that she was meeting with because it was just very difficult for her. She was, you know, language barrier translation. And so then I just happened to notice on the wall there was a local, like the symbol for their soccer team. Okay. I'm like, oh, what's that? And I just changed the subject completely. And oh, this is the soccer. And then she

started going, oh, my kids play soccer in America. And they, play for this and they started talking about family. And it changed the whole dynamic of the room. It changed the whole dynamic of the conversation. And so then we brought it back around to the product and said, okay, let's finish it. We got to go. Let's talk about the product. He's like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I just need this, this and this. And she's, well, those are things we can input into the product. I'm happy to do that. And so they've had a selling relationship. Hopefully ever since I haven't talked to her in about a year and a half or two. But just changing the topic because negotiations weren't going good. They had already known about each other's product. They were comfortable with it, but really getting to know somebody.

So that was the important transitional part. Common ground. Yep. What makes the relationship unique in similar? That's pretty cool. Chile, do they speak Spanish? Really? Yeah.

Okay. Okay. So you were doing that. That was helping the companies there export. And then how long did you do that for? It's been about four and a half years there on the Tampa Bay side. And then Manatee County, so it's in the Bradenton area, the president of their local economic development office, who we, as the state office, we work with them all the time.

She called me and said, hey, we have this position open for a director of business recruitment for projects. Would you be interested in that? And I said, yeah, let's do it. We had a very young family at the time. We came down to the market and kind of lived in the Manatee County, Braynton area. And I spent seven and a half years there working in local economic development at the county level, getting to really work with companies that were looking at the market.

And figuring out what our unique value proposition is, you know, where there's hundreds of counties around the country. And there's 5,000 economic development offices around the country all selling a proposition of this is the community to be in. How do we create a unique value proposition for Manatee County and what does that look like? And for us, that happened to be aviation, the aviation sector. We had a small commercial airport called Serseota Bradenton International Airport. Yeah, and it's just a boutique airport. It's kind of like the same thing as GSP here. And they had a lot of land at their airport.

And we said, let's start a plan to figure out how to get more companies here because you're not to build any more runways. Let's find a way to create some manufacturing operations, some repair service operations. I have a background in aviation as a pilot, but also from my dad was in the Air Force. I was in the Air Force. We kind of had that relationship. And I said, let's figure something out. And it took us five years of infrastructure work at the airport. They had to do a lot of work in the infrastructure phase. But then we could go start selling the airport as an aviation ecosystem for companies. And so that was a unique experience to, basically create something from the ground up.

So what else happened at the airport once you did that? Did people like manufacture there or store planes or what they did? Yeah, so they were, it was just a commercial airport and it was 2018, so there were 30 direct flights there, 29 direct flights. And not a, we had about 140 acres of open space on the airport and they were looking for an MRO facility, a maintenance repair and overall facility. You know, take a, take a corporate jet. And refurbish it.

There are a lot of corporate jets that fly in it out of Sarasota. Right. And so they were looking to do that. And we got all the infrastructure work done, and we started going to the Farmboro Air Show, the Paris Air Show, MRO, all the big air shows and just meeting people and building relationships. And the last project that I did just before I took this job was we landed a company called Pilatus Aircraft, which makes a single-engine big cabin airplane.

They're going to open a MRO facility and then a final assembly facility. at Sarasota Airport. So the culmination of seven years of working, selling the abilities of this aviation ecosystem, we landed a big OEM. That's like one of the safest planes, isn't it? The Pilates? One of the safest planes to fly,

and one of the easiest planes of its size to fly to. We really need one pilot. Right, right. It was a great win for the community, but it was a partnership. It was a lot of people collaborating. Was Donaldson fall within your county? Yep.

Donaldson, GMU and GSP all are in. Greenville County it to some extent. Yeah. I mean Donaldson has a lot of that doesn't it? A lot of... I was able to tour the F-16 facility, Lockheed, and this is the only place the F-16 is made in the United States and refurbished on its level.

And it is a, Donaldson is a beautiful facility. And the Lockheed facility there is bar none, one of the best manufacturing facilities for Jets. Cool. So it's a really unique proposition for us. You got a lot to work with. So you were there, successfully there and then you came here that's the next thing okay and that just

happened July just July of this year okay okay okay and who made the call who called you I got a call from a recruiter okay knowing a couple recruiters actually got a call and that's where my my wife kind of came in the story we were we were loved the West Coast of Florida it was it's a great experience we had we were kind of raising our kids there and I got a call up this the background to the story goes I got a project that we were working on. And the project was looking between our area,

Manatee County and the upstate here in South Carolina. I hate to lose. And I hate to lose really bad. And so last year we had this project come through, and I think the project ended up in Anderson County. But we lost the project. They said, we're going to South Carolina. They offered us this.

And I was really mad because I don't like to lose projects. And so I learned everything. I could about the upstate area, about the business incentives, the business climate here, who's here, Michelin, BMW, Lockheed, all these big companies, Pashton, all these big companies have offices here. This is a community that swings way above its weight in terms of landing large projects. And so I learned everything I could and spent the next six months benchmarking what we did against this community and some other communities. And so lo and behold, in April this year, I got a call from recruiter says,

hey, we have this opportunity in Greenville, South Carolina. Are you interested? And I said, yeah. And so went through the whole interview process, working with the board of directors. And here we are today. We got offered that we came up here in June, visited the city, just got a chance to walk around, see the community. And we loved it.

Good. Good. We're glad you're here. It's a good sales lesson, I think, is that you know, you did lose a deal to this area, and instead of sulking about it, you learned everything about it. And that probably helped you get this job. I knew what I was walking into before I got here. I was pretty informed about the process.

You know, culture is always, that's a different story. We're learning about the culture and the people. But as a CEO coming into the market, the welcome that we've had here, has been phenomenal. Everybody's reached out, said hello, I want to help, I want to be involved. You know, if you're coming into a market as a new CEO, and then what does that say about if we're going to recruit another company to the market?

So making sure that our community is welcoming. And it is welcoming. It's one of the most welcoming communities I've been to. It's almost a little too welcoming sometimes. But it's been great because the people have been, and I'm going to recruit another CEO here, I want them to have the same experience I have. And so we want to make sure that that always happens

because they at least feel like they're a part of the community and are engaged. And not having to push their way in or try to find a way. We just open our arms up to them. So let's talk about how this works because I was a little confused until we talked beforehand. Just so people need to understand you're in charge of recruiting companies. This would be like, you know, in my basic memory, BMW was kind of a big deal. Long time ago, though. Long time.

How long ago? 30 years ago? It's been right around 30 years. Michelin has been here 50 years in Greenville County and 35 for corporate headquarters. And BMW is right around the same time about 30, 35 years. Okay. You know, we recruited, I guess, our governor and somebody from Greenville County area, maybe a delegation of them recruited BMW here.

And BMW now makes more cars at that facility. than anywhere in the whole world. That's unbelievable, more than Germany. Because they're in Spartanburg, so the groups got together. So the mayors of both Spartanburg and Greenville got together, the government leaders all got together, and they really recruited BMW to come here back in the late 80s, early 90s, that time period.

And they haven't looked back since. The number of companies that have come over as a result of BMW and Michelin being here, There are so many feeder companies here that work with those two companies. And so those are legacy projects. Those aren't just generational. Those are legacy. We're thinking many, many years out with those. Those are big wins.

Another thing it does, as you well know, but it legitimizes you. So, well, BMW has moved here, North American. Michigan, Michigan headquarters. Like, oh, okay, we'll take a look. Yep. Right? That always helps when you have Fortune 500, Fortune 100 companies in your area that are big corporate headquarters. In this region, if you look from Atlanta to Charlotte, there's a number of those.

And so we capitalize on that because we're right in the middle of that Charlanta region. Charlanta, yeah. And your primary method of recruiting these companies, tell us about how you go about finding them, screening them, contacting, and then what we can offer to get that. than become here? Yeah, we have a really unique sales funnel. Actually, we've been putting together a really cool sales funnel of what it looks like. And so we are in charge of recruiting really targeted sector companies. So we're very specific with what we go after.

Advanced manufacturing, mobility, which is aviation, aerospace, automotive, life science, and then professional technical service, and those all encompassed corporate headquarters. The process begins with one of four places. is a company might call us directly. A site consultant who does national site searches for companies might call us. Department of Commerce might call us or the Upstate Alliance might call us. Or somebody might have a friend that's, hey, I've got this company friend of ours that wants to move here. Or is looking at the market.

What can we do? And we put together essentially a community welcoming to her for them. We make sure we have the assets they need. We're not going to go out and tell somebody, this is a great market for you. you, but we don't have, you know, we don't, we have a, oh yeah, we can build you a million square foot building. Well, we don't have the assets for that. You go to Spartanburg for something like that.

So we, we really are very specific for what we recruit. High wage, high skill jobs. But we also make sure that we have the labor force because we don't want to have to recruit hundreds of people to move to this county as well. That's a huge undertaking. Right. So if we have the population here that's skilled, we can, we can handle their output of employees. Okay.

So we're always introducing them first to Greenville Technical College, to the CMI Center, Center for Manufacturing Innovation over at CUI Cars facility or Greenville, the public school system, the CTE at the Innovation Center at Roper, just showing them the assets that they can build their company from this market. Because it's going to take them a couple of years to build the building, build the land, then we can equip their workforce while they're doing that process. So we meet with them, show them the area, show them the area, show them the, assets we have here and then say this is a great market what do you think yeah and they usually

go back home and then go okay we're going to narrow it down to three markets and do a follow-up tour and that's where we introduce them to the mayors and some of the other people so the first one is kind of that under the radar yeah tour yeah and the second one is more we we make more of a a concerted effort with our you know elected officials government agencies how am i going to get water sewer power to a building. These are my needs. Can we get this done? And then they get a more comfort level

at the market. And then we go into the negotiation phase. And they say we are going to bring X, Y, and Z to the market. Or we're going to take over a building. This is what we're going to do. And so we have the ability, because the GADC is authorized by the county to negotiate

incentives on behalf of a company, we have the ability to work with the company on those, that process. Okay, if you do this, we'll do this. If you do this, we'll do this. Everything is performance-based. So there's nothing that we're doing is we're not giving a company money to come here. It's you do this and we'll give you this.

And so that's something that we talk about with the community is they think, oh, we hand money out. No, we don't hand anything out to anybody. It's all performance-based. You have to meet these performance goals. So you break around, this happens. You hire 500 people, this happens. Yep.

And it will help you with the hiring process. We'll get the community involved. the community involved. So it's really, it's really an interesting thing because I think like you're saying before, we don't actually own any of the things we're selling. We don't, we don't, the money is, we're not giving them money. We're giving them a discount on their property taxes. And we're also helping them with the workforce that we're not training ourselves. So we're helping somebody else to do that. So it's a very unique sales proposition. But it comes down to really three things that we talk with a company about. It's availability of land, infrastructure, availability of workforce.

And will my employees like living there? And I think we've covered the, well, we both like living here. This is a great place to live. Can we train their workforce? That's usually a, that's a big sticking point for a lot of these companies. Can you train the workforce in the time? And do we have the availability of the site? Oh.

So that's where we get into this. That's where we really get into the negotiation part of the sales process is going through those steps. And then we bring the state in to help with some of the final negotiation points. some maybe tax things or some higher level tax things that we can do. But most of that is very basic to the qualities that we're looking for in the company. We're looking for a company that's going to provide a great benefit to the community because we have an ROI to meet. We have a threshold to meet.

But also is going, is this a company that is going to stay here for a long time? Are they, is it just a in and out in five years have gone? Or are they making a legacy investment in the community? Just like Michelin, just like Bechon. Yeah, yeah, it's wonderful, wonderful. Well, it's great what you do, and I hope I can think of someone to recommend at some point, some company that might want to move here. It'd be wonderful.

Love to be helpful. We love to hear from anybody. If there's any unique ideas, you know, our big focus now, and we talked about, like, kind of the professional and technical workforce, you know, Greenville County is transitioning from a manufacturing, purely manufacturing distribution to an advanced manufacturing professional engineering technical workforce. We're seeing that slow shift.

Just like in the 70s when textiles was going down and then Michelin and BMW came in the market to kind of do manufacturing, we're starting to see that shift. It's not a small little community anymore. This is a growing area. And we're going to have to start working on our white collar professional workforce.

And those are the type of jobs that we really want to attain, those high-skill, high-wage jobs. So would like tech companies be in your sweet spot, computer software companies? Yeah, we just had startup Greenville last week, the NextGen Summit, meeting with small entrepreneurs. That's the next big niche is really growing it from the home base right here. So working with them and the next-gen community did a huge event, match. making day, which we worked with them on that. But it's getting those companies together with founders and funders in the same room. And really talking about how can we grow each other.

And so that's the next phase of iteration for us between us and the city is that founders and funders starting up startup tech companies here in the area. Well, you know Scott Millwood and Che Hauser, so that's a good start because they're helping do that too. and, you know, one little successful tech company can get really big. Hopefully you can find some more of those. Love to have one of those in this community. Are you using the AI tools at all for searching for companies?

We have a very unique niche of companies. So we're using, we use a couple other tools that are on the market. There's a couple international tools that are out there with company databases. But we look for a very specific size company. We know we're not going after the thousand person job prospect. We're looking in that 50 to 250 range job company that's got so many. So we're using a couple tools like that. The majority of what we use AI for right now is when we're doing that targeted marketing

in those markets where those companies are, is putting together the value proposition, the ads, the pitch deck, those types of things for those companies. Put together the first draft. Yeah, let it, let AI cycle that through. Here's what the companies look for. And so we're doing a lot of that right now. I mean, I used to, I used to before, for AI, I would get somebody to do the first draft for me.

I would just tell them what I wanted and that they would do it, and then I would take it from there. Now I don't need them. It's just amazing. Two seconds later, there it is. And so we're doing that for the first step. But really, when it gets into the data, you know, the data decision, our research team handles all that together.

But, yeah, getting the first deck out there, that's the easy part of NAR. Yeah, get it going. And then social media-wise, what are you doing on social media to attract companies? So we have been, I would say, less active on social media before I joined the organization. And I actually gave our team, hey, we need to be more engaged out there and start sharing unique and new content. It's a process. It takes time to get everybody to do.

together, but we shared a post about the inland port in Greer and how long this port is and just driving through it. We did a quick, it was a 15 second video, but we said this is a unique asset we have here in the upstate area. And we shared that on social media, got a lot of views and a lot of, I think it got a couple thousand impressions, which is more than we've had in a while. But we took that same post and targeted it to different markets that we're looking at. And so that's how we're going to start using social.

media. A lot of targeted digital efforts, looking at other markets around the country where we have unique value propositions. Yeah. Well, certainly seems to be working all the content, you know, moving around stuff. That's pretty much all I do with my businesses is, you know, create content and put it out there and hopefully attract people that are interested in the content. Yes. You know. Yeah. Well, let me ask you a couple of quick questions. These are very important. Favorite all-time book. I read the trillion-dollar coach. Yes.

Bill Campbell's book. Bill Campbell's book. Eric Schmidt did the If Forward. I read that book last year, and it's become one of my favorite books. Okay. I also read the first 90 days by, I forget his name. But when you're becoming a CEO or leading a C-suite effort, the first 90 days. is a great book to read.

I'm in day 83, so I'm almost to the end of the steps. But I really like the trillion-dollar coach. That book was really, that book kind of influenced me in the last year and a half to two years. So, I mean, Bill Campbell was a football coach. My understanding he was a football coach, mostly, mainly, and he went to Silicon Valley. Maybe he worked for somebody, HP or somebody. But anyway, he ended up being so loved because he was so different than everyone else. He was just a football.

He wasn't fancy. He was a football coach. ended up being the coach for Steve Jobs, right, and Ellison and Smith. Schmidt, yeah. And he didn't charge any money. Nope. He was just like the guru, like Yoda. He has some great relationship building.

Everything really is about relationships for him. And I saw that throughout the book. And I said, that's something I want to emulate in my job. But yeah, the trillion-dollar coach is now up on the top of my list. Well, I'm going to go back and reread it because I can't remember all the great things that he told these guys to do. I was just, I took kind of the big picture away that he was must be an amazing guy. I took those football principles to Silicon Valley. It's pretty cool. Favorite word? Lately it's been intrinsic. Okay. Intrinsic. So I think that what means

coming from within? Yeah, intrinsic value. What is the value of the that? So yeah. Like we would have Greenville would have intrinsic value. Yeah. From value we had, we as a community, you know, it's intrinsically in the area. We already know it's here. It's already the values with it. An extrinsent value would be come here and someone's going to pay you a bunch of money. Would that be like? Yeah, that's kind of the, but I've been using intrinsic.

I don't know a lot, I guess, in the office lately. I think I've seen it somewhere online. So, but. Well, that's okay. And then most importantly, favorite band. Oh. Well, we are in Greenville, so I could say Edwin-McCain. There you go. There you go. You've seen him twice.

Yeah, I've seen him twice. I do like food fighters and a couple of the other bands in that market. But yeah, that gets my bed. Edwin was roommates with my brother for a little while, the brief time he was in college in South Carolina. And he would go in front of this pizza store and five points and play his guitar for tips. And the pizza guy says to him, and he says, if you come inside tonight, play inside, I'll give you $75. plus beer. And Evan says to my brother, he goes, I'm quitting school. Because I do not need school.

I am a professional now. And so that was beginning of his professional career. That's amazing. Yeah. So is there anything like promoting GADC or any way to contact you if they have questions? What do you recommend? So the GADC is, you know, we are a public-private partnership of the county. And if anybody wants to learn.

more about what the GADC does, go www.g.w.g.c.g.c. Golf Alpha delta charlie.com. And they can kind of view what we do and see the upcoming, you know, what we have. You know, we are always looking for great talent on our team. So we are looking for, you know, existing industry, people that have experience and want to network with companies. Research is a big part of what I want to do with the organization, data analytics.

So those types of things we're always looking for great talent. But that's really just sharing the story. We are all part of this together. And if we're all working together to recruit great companies here, but also to retain great companies. These startups that grow, that's important to us. Well, we are glad you're here. You're a good example of somebody who found what they loved in college

and had been sticking with it ever since. You keep moving up the ladder. And we're glad you found your final spot here in Greenville. I hope. Thank you, Max. Thank you. Okay. Thanks a lot.

All right.