The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast 240 Rob Braiman of Cogent Analytics

Episode Date: November 20, 2018

Rob Braiman of Cogent Analytics

and see if I'm actually in the frame. Hi, folks. Chris Voss here from thechrissvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show dot com. Hey, we're coming here with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. As always, be sure to refer the show to your friends, neighbors, relatives, dogs, cats, everyone else you know. Tell them to go to iTunes, Google Play, Spotify.

Holy crap, you can listen to us on Spotify right now. You can mix us up with Lawrence Wilk Show, Metallica, Megadeth, maybe some of that, I don't know, that country music or something, and you can listen to Chris Voss Show on Spotify. Wow, how about that? We have a most excellent guest today, Rob Braman from Cogent Analytics today, and he's going to tell us about some of the things he does. He is a longstanding entrepreneur. He's personally responsible for the development and growth of

three directly owned and successful startups. He brings a passion for the small to mid-market segment of business. Mr. Brayman has spent 15 years working directly with business owners to improve strategic planning, operations growth, and business development. Welcome to the show, Rob. How are you? Good, Chris. Thanks for having me on today. Thanks for coming on today.

And so tell us about yourself, who you are, and all that good stuff. So I used to tell everybody I was the American gypsy. When I was a kid, I was the baby of four. And my father always had the philosophy that if you're willing to move, you're willing to move up. And by gosh, we moved a lot. So go ahead. He was in the military? He wasn't.

I was a corporate brat. So Indiana, Kentucky, Indiana, Kentucky, Wisconsin, Texas, Brazil, South America for five and a half years. Back to New Jersey. And then I graduated high school. So went to college for a little bit, decided I was going to join the military, and then the fun really started. I got a chance to be in Africa, the Middle East, Central America. So I am, well, if I was to say that I'm well-traveled, I've been in the state of North Carolina for the last 15 years.

So I've raised my kids. I've planted some roots. I love North Carolina. And, you know, at the end of the day, I have found that the, you know, the journey called life has taught me a lot of lessons along the way. But my passion really is for the American entrepreneur. There you go. Being an entrepreneur, starting businesses, all that sort of good stuff.

You started three different companies. What's the number four coaching analytics so people can take a look at it. So you can go to www.cogentanalytics.com, cogentanalytics.com. And, you know, sign up for our newsletter, look at their client testimonials, watch some of the videos.

I think you'll get a really good sense of the American Business Center we represent every day. And it's a pretty wide swath of American business. We have a division in our company is for startups to about that $2 million range, 10 employees, $2 million. And then we have a whole another segment of our firm that really represents from about 2 million to 200 million. So the dynamics in each one of those organizations might be different. But I really started that incubator group because I think that the greatest challenge for the American entrepreneurs when they first

open the door, you know, your highest fail rate for entrepreneurs is in the first three years, first five years of business. You know, it's a ridiculous fail rate. You know, people go in, they're undercapitalized. They don't have enough money to pay the bills. And most people that start a business have a passion for what they do, but they're undercapitalized, right? They don't, they didn't know what it was going to take them to build their business and having to have receivables and becoming the bank of Rob Braman. You know, those are some of the lessons I learned back in my early 20s. Those are the kind of people I try to help today. I've been on that journey now for.

Oh, good Lord. I'm almost afraid to give this number 20, 25, 26 years. Suffice to say, I'm well-worn and well-traveled, Chris. There you go. There you go. It sounds like my sex life. Oh! I don't know what that means. So you've started three different companies.

You started Cogent Analytics. It looks like you guys are an Inc. 500 listed company. Yeah, twice, actually. We just got it for the second year in a row. And based on our numbers, I think we'll hit it next year, although I'll have to wait until that jury comes in. They usually announce in August, but we've made it two years in a row. And they look at a history of growth. The thing about Inc. is that it's a growth-only metric. We're in 22 different states. By the end of 2022, we'll be in all 50 states in America. We have a number of clients that are wanting us to cross borders.

I've always said that you got to stay home first and allow your company to mature. It's like a fine bottle of wine, Chris, right? You serve it too early and it just isn't good for anybody. I like to be patient. I like to be patient. I like to be strategic. I like to make sure I'm representing my clients the very, very best. People have asked me over the years, Rob, how big do you want to get? Or they'll ask me how fast you want to get there. And to be honest with you, I don't care about either of those things.

Cogent Analytics will get as big as it's supposed to be to be a great consultancy. And it will get there only as fast as a great consultancy can get there. Because in my line of work, I represent American families. I represent people. And if I'm chasing the dollar instead of chasing after how to make it right by the client, then my morals and my values are screwed up. So I like to believe that we're going to do it strategically. We're going to do it because we have a passion for representing the American small business or the entrepreneurs out there

and the people that fight the fight every day. There's a lot of hardship that goes in with owning a business. And I feel like we're a resource. We want to be that third leg of the stool. You got your account, you got your attorney, and you got your business advisor. And I think that we're a resource. We want to be that third leg of the stool. You get your account, you get your attorney, and you get your business advisor. And I think that's where we shine, most importantly, because we care.

That's where, if you ask me later in our discussion, hey, Rob, what sets you apart? It's because my values are really simple. It's honor, courage, wisdom, faith, perseverance, and loyalty. And that goes back to my days in the military and it's carried me into business. I'm a believer.

I always say I'm Don Quixote, Chris. You're chasing windmills. Sometimes, man. Sometimes. That's sometimes how it feels when you're an entrepreneur. You guys are a consultant based business. You guys consult with businesses to help them achieve their goals and success. You guys do strategic businesses to help them achieve their goals and success.

You guys do strategic planning, according to your website, profit engineering, sales performance improvement, exit and succession planning, business leadership, organizational engineering, procedural systems, and reporting systems as well. Yep. You can add valuations to that. You can IT-managed services. We've got a great strategic partner that we work with, you know, something as simple as restructuring financial statements all the way through complex strategic planning, market position, margin management, you know, product distribution

and distribution channels. So, you know, from its most simplistic, hey, we got to get you off the ground problem to the very complex. You know, the thing I'm proudest about in four and a half years, we've grown from six people to almost 130. We're too shy of 130. So I'll say 128. And in that group, we've got, you know, a team filled with experience, masters in business, PhDs, accountants, attorneys, people that have embraced what it is that I'm trying to do and work really, really hard in that vein. That's hard to do for any small business owner out there is number one, grow, but more importantly, putting the right people in the right chairs. And in that case, I think I've been, you know, sometimes it's better to be lucky than good, but I'd say we were both because we've worked really, really hard at making sure that if we're going to represent a

client that I've got the highest level of talent to be able to make sure we're doing it the right way. That definitely is something you need in business. You need a little bit of luck. You need a little bit of hard work. And hopefully everything comes out the other end just fine. Well, I'm an energizer, Bunny. My wife marvels occasionally. We've been together for 24, going on 25 years. And I got two beautiful kids. We've raised them both during college when my young

my young son is going to go to virginia is at virginia military institute he's going to serve in the military after my daughter's going in engineering um you know in that case i've been blessed that uh i work my heart out every single day i think in service of others and you know that if you don't worry about the dollar, but you worry about the purity of what you're trying to accomplish, sometimes when you're tired, it allows you to fight one extra inch, you know, one extra, one extra yard, one extra mile. And, you know, I'll go back to what I said to you before, when you're representing other people, if you're not willing to go all in,

you've got to check yourself in the mirror before you wreck yourself. You know what I mean? Before you wreck? Yeah, that's right. That's also my Tinder profile. You're going to have to explain this. You've got to explain the Tinder profile, Chris. Seems like a good reference. I don't know. People are like, we need to see the Tinder profile, Chris. Seems like a good reference.

I don't know. People are like, we need to see his Tinder profile. So how long have you guys been doing co-gen analytics? April 22nd will officially be five years. Wow. I have put a lot of heart and soul into building the structure the right way. I marvel sometimes that we're not quite five years old, you know, made the Inc. 5,000 a couple of times, made the Inc.

500 two years ago, but it's a growth metric. So unless you're just growing at a light year's pace, I'm happy with 5 000 because that means i'm managing my growth it's a nice ego pin on the wall if that's important anybody out there to say hey i can i was in the inc 500 top 500 fastest growing company in the country yeah you know all of that stuff doesn't really matter at the end of day and i tell my team it's a cool thing that hangs on the wall that everybody takes some joy out of but But, you know, all that says to me is that we did, we went through a lot of blood, sweat, and tears and a lot of, you know, a lot of hard work to get to the point where, where we're focused on the people that we represent. And that's the passion. You stay home, you stay what you're true to, and things tend to work out.

Yeah, it's great to be recognized in that way, in any way, really, at being successful. You know, there's so many people that work really hard and they don't achieve success or they work really hard and they fail. I mean, that's definitely an aspect of the business of taking and starting your own business. I mean, the penchant for being able to fail where you have, you know, 99% of businesses fail in the first two years is huge. I mean, the- Eight out of 10. And here's a crazier statistic that most people don't add on to the back end of that. Eight out of 10 businesses,

small business owners fail in the first five years of business, right? The funny part about it is by 10 years of the remaining two, the ratio is just as bad, right? So if you've got 20% left and five years later, your fail rate is equally as high as it was in the first five years. That should tell you that you've got a really small percentage of people that do two things. One, ever make it past a million bucks in annualized gross revenue. And two, that make it past 10 years and build a healthy growing company. Now, my position to those people is small business ownership is never about ego. It's about passion.

It's about your skills. It's about what you're capable of doing. It's because you woke up one morning and said, I've got the skills to do something and I want to do it my way, which to me is the coolest thing in the world, right? Somebody who puts it out there on the line and says, I want to open my own company. The one cautionary tale is don't fly solo. You got to seek out people that you can trust, that you can ask the tough questions, that you can get guidance because running a business, the actual science of running a business is something just as important as what you do for a living, right? People get stuck because they hit those levels. I always say the first level is somewhere around a million bucks

and then they scale their business to two, $3 million and they start to feel all the pain of not having the right people, not having the right structure, not having the right systems. They're not managing profitability. Their liquidity or cashflow, they're having a tough time making payroll on Friday. They're trying to offer benefits to their people, but they can't because they can't afford it. Now you're getting into the science of business, right? That gets into how you're selling, the people you've building on your team, the operations and how efficient you are at bringing your product to market, and then the control structures you have in place. All four of those things are critical to managing profitability when you're a small

business owner. And it's not a solo game. A lot of people go into business today and they fly solo, not looking for somebody that they can get and use as a resource. And they cap themselves off. They don't perform to the ability that they can perform. And what I believe is we push them through. Right? Sometimes it's painful, but that's okay. Change is always painful. The idea is to make you healthy, to make you better, to make you profitable because your business is, you know, for any entrepreneur that's ever done it, a business is a wealth

creation vehicle. That doesn't mean you're greedy. It doesn't mean, you know, you're going to whore out the process. You know, it's all about me, me, I, me. It really is about protecting your investment. It's the number one investment you'll have in your life. God bless. It'll fund your retirement. It'll pay for your kids' education. It will take care of succession

if you want your kids to come in the business. So you've got to honor the structure called your business every day. And that's a pretty tough journey. So that's where I think we come in. Definitely. It's a hell of a thing when it comes to making businesses and growing them and of course when they become successful you know i i think the biggest problem that everyone thinks about when they're going to be successful in business is that once their business starts making you know multi-millions of dollars and you know they're making plenty of money in the bank and stuff, that everything becomes easier. Oh, no.

Quite the contrary. Quite the contrary. It becomes a lot harder. You get more employees, and those employees have problems. You want to hear a crazy story, Craig? An apologist and this thing where you're just spinning more and more plates trying to keep the whole thing going. So you want to hear a crazy story.

You just said something interesting there. You said, you know, when you grow the business and all of a sudden you're doing millions of dollars and you're making. First off, it's a fallacy. Most small business owners that we represent are between $3 and $30 million. We get the low and we get the high. I've really built this incubator group to manage and help people get off the ground. But I have countless numbers of stories

that we could sit here and talk all day about a $5 million business. He's had it for 10 years. He's paying himself 125, maybe 150. He's never taken a distribution from his company other than to pay his or her taxes. So really what he's got there is he bought himself a job. And now you get into the discussion about if you got to pay back your debt and you got to pay the government in the form of tax, if you're not optimizing every single aspect of

your business, there's never going to be anything left over for you until you sell it, right? Got a $5 million business. Now you're going to get five times multiple to sell your business. Well, if you're not as profitable as you can be, that affects your retirement program. If you're not as profitable as you can be, you don't get to take distributions other than paying Uncle Sam or paying back, you know, paying back the government. That's the really hard story that I see every single day for the last 16 years of my life is I look at small business owners fighting the fight every day and not maximizing their opportunity.

And it has a profound impact on the way they take care of their family, pay for care for their parents when they get older. There's a lot of burdens. Sometimes it's easier to have a J-O-B than it is to own a company. And if I were to caution anybody about starting a business, go into it with eyes wide open, right? Understand you got to manage the controls and the financials of the business. Understand that what you do can turn into a very profitable journey. But you got to respect the science of business. You know, I always tell the laughable story. I didn't go out. I didn't go out in the garage one day and chip away at the granite wheel, walk inside and say, look, mom, the wheel. You know, I've tried to perfect the system called business and work with other people to

help them get that same place. Sorry, I didn't mean to ramble. No, that was awesome. You're correct. There is a science to it. It's very detailed. It's very broad. It's very lengthy. It's not as simple as, like you said, just making a widget and selling it. There's definitely a lot more to it than that. And I imagine that's a lot of what your consulting firm does in helping people understand some of the different aspects they're missing or some of the different things that they need to fill in the blanks to be able to be successful. I'm a diehard believer that profit is something that you engineer, right? Profit happens because you make it happen. It's not a residual. It's not like you go to work every day and you work 90 hours a week or 60 hours a week and that you get to open your financial statement once a month. And it's like, holy cow,

we made some money. A financial statement is there to help you make better decisions, help you manage your cash flow, make a determination of where you're going to invest in capital expenditures, whether that's equipment or being able to invest back in the structure. Maybe you might want to buy a new building. The adventure of small business owners has got to be strategic. I watch a lot of people. I've saved a lot of people over the years. Great idea. A lot of heart.

Definitely vested in what they do. And they get off the ground and they didn't take into consideration, okay, well, how are we really going to go to market? How are we going to turn it into something profitable? And I've got a client this week that he's had that business for 20 years. In the last five years, he's never made more than 1% profit. And I want you to think about that. A $5 million gift business making 1% profit for all of his hard work and effort, he made 50 grand. Jesus. Right. 20 years? That's crazy. 20 years. Pays himself about a hundred and a quarter because that's what he can't afford to give himself a pay raise.

I know you have listeners right now listening to this show that are saying to themselves, holy cow, that's me. I'm feeling that pain every day, but they're not going to punch a jack. And you don't want to go 20 years with that. Holy shit. Well, but business is the journey, right? Sales are up. Sales are down.

Margin is up, margin's down. I lost an employee, key guy, missed my sales. I've got people creating headaches for me. Can't get product. I got too much product. I got too much inventory. I got not enough inventory. I can't get my product to market.

Oh my God, I lost my distributor. That is what your audience, your business owners that are out there listening today, that's the fight called small business. And there isn't a person that goes into business that ever wants to close the door. I've never met that person. Never met the person that said, I went into business so I could figure out how to fail. My message is fail fast, learn quickly, and figure out that there's an opportunity to be successful, but you got to

create it. You know, the one thing I've always seen in business, you tell me what you think in your experience, because I'd love to compare notes. But the one thing I always, the main thing I always see in failures as business is they always go into business with this model that they set up when they start. and they run that fucker right into the ground like they just they just keep on going and they don't ever think about getting out of that model until they're pretty much bankrupt and by then they're like well maybe we should change this that's that's very true that's that's usually what i see in a lot of business failures they i want to catch them before they fall is when the game's over and they're out of cash.

Worst part about it is, and because I live it every day, the worst part about it is when they're robbing Peter to pay Paul. So it's not just that they're out of cash right now. They've spent through because they don't manage cash flow correctly. They've already put their house on the line. They've signed personally and severally to the bank. So they put their house on the line. They've signed personally and severally to the bank. So they don't just lose the business. They lose the business and end up filing bankruptcy personally and corporately, right? Because for years they've been violating

the arm's length transaction rule. And all of a sudden they don't quit. Nobody stops them to say, man, you've got problems right now. We need need to change course i can't tell you how many clients we'll talk to on the phone and i'll get the i got it speech and then they'll call me back six months later and say man i really need your help and by the time they really ask for help it's like okay so six months ago when i said we really need to start this process now yeah you know, we bled a turnip six months later. Be proactive. Be aggressive. If you have a question, don't feel like you got to figure it out on your own, right?

There are people that care. There's people that are willing to do the right thing. You know, consulting world, right, my world, consultants have a tough brand. Before I started Kojin, and I'll just tell you why I started the firm, I worked for another firm that just my personal beliefs didn't align. Now, I did it for a lot of years with this other firm. I tried to change that company from within that company. And, you know, that was to no avail. So when I finally decided that I was going to do this, I said, you know, if I'm going to, if I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it based on my belief.

And I will tell you that, that, you know, the firm I used to work for literally changed their name probably six to somewhere between six and 11 times, depending on how you count, because at the end of the day, they had built a reputation that made them run away from their own brand. My simple context is if you're going to represent people, you better be proud as hell of the brand that you're building and you better honor the clients you represent because they're the ones that make that brand better. And, you know, I know that there's a reputation in the consulting industry and I don't care. I feel like if I do the right, if I fight the right way every single day that I'm going to build a brand and it doesn't matter what everybody, yeah, there may be some selling pressure out there. There may be some pressure from clients who are a little reticent to bring in somebody else because they say, oh, I've seen that story or my buddy saw that story.

I'm here to tell you that's not the case. There are good people in this world that care. There's good people that you can reach out and look for assistance. I don't like to use the word help, right? I mean, I spent the beginning of my life in a special forces group, so I'm not much of a help me, help me guy. I'm more like a hand up than a hand out. People need assistance, but you can't help the unwilling. I've told clients over the years, consulting is not a function of coming in and having somebody do something to you.

Consulting is a function of finding the right partner somebody do something to you. Consulting is a function of finding the right partner that's willing to work with you to teach, educate, motivate, be the impetus to change, give you the tools that you need to make better, get you to the point where you embrace it and make yourself better. But at the end of the day, you built this business. It's your company. You're responsible for it. If you want to make it better, I'm willing to assist, but not until, right? So we have a rule internally. We believe that every dollar that a client, when we work with a client, you know, whether it's a little project or a big project, I'm not going to use numbers on today's show,

but every single time we have two metrics that we adhere to. One, Cogent Analytics has to pay for itself. We do a discovery with a client and we want that discovery to be a deliverable where a client can literally turn over every rock. I used to call it peeling the onion. You want a client to be able to go through that discovery process and identify the challenges first. And we do that somewhere between $1 24 hundred bucks, depending on the size of your company. That to me is the most valuable thing we do is the discovery, because if I take on a client

and actually represent them, we only take on about half, right? Because if I don't see a clear return on investment for my clients, I'm just going to give them advice, shake a hand and say, you know what, as we continue to get better, reach out, we'll go through another discovery. This is the value. The second piece is, and we have a minimum of two to one. Most often we see four to one, five to one, six to one return. But here's the caveat. The number one thing that I hold my team responsible for is that the client has to be responsible for the problems first. It can't be us pushing them up a hill. It's got to be them charging up the hill and kind of us guiding them along the way. So that's why we're very careful about the clients that we represent because they got to take ownership of it. And that's the best part of the story. Entrepreneurs do that the day they open the door. It definitely is something that needs to go down that way. Years ago, we had our little bunch of companies. We used to loan out

money and usually we were cherry picking. We were looking for different things that we could take over. Usually people were cash poor, but I said rich. I kind of learned how to do it from some of my business brokers. And so we would offer loan out money to people and businesses look for businesses we could white knight or take over. Or if we could fold them into our companies, we do that. And invariably, I'd find businesses that we were either willing to loan money to or take over, but the entrepreneur just wouldn't give up. The entrepreneur would somehow see our interest as like, well, there's a way to make this work. And I'd be like, look, you're bankrupt now. It's just you just haven't figured it out yet. really interested in, we'd give them a first rider. We'd give them a contract with the first rider refusal to where we'd have them

call us when they were ready to either sell or give up their business or turn over to us, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah, really smart. I like it. It was kind of smart, but what's interesting about it was, and there were some people I'd go in and just be honest, cold, and sometimes they'd be so thick in the head and so locked into being an entrepreneur. And I have to be like, look, you're not cut out for this. Number one, you don't, I don't think you have what it takes for

this. And number two, you don't have the money, you've kicked the model and you've run into the ground. I think you have some assets that we can utilize or fold into our businesses but you know you've we're gonna give you walking money and we're gonna pay safe we're gonna take over your shit and because there just was no point these people had no business being in our businesses even as a front-level employee sometimes. It's like you can answer phones for us. But what was funny was we give these first-writer refusal contracts, and we pay them like a dollar or something, you know, 10 bucks, whatever.

And they would go by about four to six months on average with these first-run refusals and they would call me up one day and they had ignored everything I told them and they had run that thing deeper into the ground. Even farther in the ground. That's right. And I would tell them too when we'd sign the agreement, I'd say look, don't call me one day

before you're ready to file bankruptcy. I can't save you then. I might be able to save it now. I might be able to save it now. I might be able to save your creditors. You know, businesses that we did took over, we could get on the phone with their creditors that they were behind with and say, hey, we know the lease is behind. We know their payments are behind.

We're taking over the company. It'll be caught up soon. Give us a week or two to get, you know, all the stuff off. And they'd be, you know, usually the, you know, whoever the landlord was or whoever they owed money to it'd be like oh thank god thank god right yeah some money um but uh and

then a lot of times we can go on and do deals we could we could you know say to a landlord hey this is great the rent's awesome but you know we have another building if you want to make a deal with us, we know they're behind the scenes. You know, we work it out. And so it ended up being good for when we did make deals. But, man, a majority of these six-month first-ride refusals we do, they would call us the day before bankruptcy. And we'd just be like, no, we can can't save you now man you you've run that sucker into the ground you just helped a long time ago you know my world works although i've learned over 16 years that you you ever see the movie the guardian right kevin cost He's the, he's the, uh, this rescue swimmer.

No, isn't that where he's the, he takes care of, uh, the one singer. Coast guard. Right. He's the, well, no, that I know what you're talking about. The guardian was about, yeah, he was a rescue swimmer for the coast guard. There was one line in that movie where he says, you know, there was a whole big about how many saves and it was based on a true story, by the way. But he said, you know, I swim as hard and as fast as I can, and I save them one at a time, and the sea takes the rest. You know, I listened to your story there, and I'm going through all the stories I've got in my head of clients that I've tried to help

along the way. And I've learned to flush them over the years because I know that there is a never ending supply of really, really good people that really, really need the help and are willing. I mean, I had a client last week, man, they're not at bankruptcy and they were proactive. They said, you know what? We've done it our way for about the last eight years. We grew really fast. We over got over the tip of our skis, but it was a husband, wife, a son, and a disassociated partner, but they were all like family. And they were fully vested. I mean, they had everything in this business. And the best part of the story, when you get to the end of a really honest discussion with folks like that, and they don't guess, they don't wonder. It's not about ego. It's about, holy cow, this is my life and I'll

be damned if I'm going to let that thing go sideways. So I've reached the point where I need to talk to somebody that can help me through this landmine called business ownership. And if I could say one thing to your audience, again, it's not a solo flight. You just got to be careful, do your due diligence, vet the people that you're going to ask their opinion, make sure that they know what they're talking about, make sure they're not trying to fill their pockets out of your last dollar. Yeah. Because I see a lot of that, right? Make sure they're not trying to fill their pockets out of your last dollar. Yeah. Because I see a lot of that, right? Make sure they're not trying to fill their pockets on your last dollar, right? Find a group. And I obviously, I'm prejudiced, right? I think that we're the one group out there that does that every day.

But I know there's a lot of really good advisors all over America and you got to make sure that the right person shares your values. They care about what they're doing. It really is about your success before their own, because, you know, the purity of what we do, and I tell my people this all the time, you know, it should never matter when you get the next one, because you're always going to get the next one. What should matter is that you represented that client for the time, whether that was three days or three months, you do your level best every single day and the rest of it takes care of itself because then you can look yourself in the mirror in the morning and know you gave it your all, right? I

got a saying around this place that says, you know, we're going to strive for perfection every single day knowing it is an unachievable goal in the hopes that we achieve excellence. And I know that may sound corny to you, but that's our life. You know, that's what we do every day. Well, I think it's an important acumen to point out too, because some people say we're going to be perfect. And there is no such thing as perfect. No such thing. You'll get a lot closer trying than you will by not.

Amen, brother. Definitely. So we could talk forever about Entrepreneur. It's been great having you on the show. Give us your plugs one more time so we can have people take a look at your guys' website and ask for help before you need it. I think that's the lesson we've learned today in our discussion. Yeah. So we did something really cool. The last podcast I did is we put out to the audience that we've set aside, you give us a ring and we'll do a full two to three day discovery, peel the onion, figure out what's going right,

what's going wrong in your business. I hope that we find more right than wrong, but we're always going to turn the stones over, but we'll do a full two to three day discovery with any client that calls in, sends us an email, www.cojananalytics.com. We'll do that for $1,200. Right? My professionals, go do your due diligence on us. Look at my people. Look at my team.

Listen to other clients. Tell their story. Read the testimonies. I got hundreds of testimonies. We got 70, 75 videos out there. You know, listen to the story. If that's you, when you hear that story, send me a note, send it to me personally, and I will make sure I personally call you

and we set up a discovery with your company because you've got some small business owners listening today that are going through some challenges. I'm Rob Braman. I'm the CEO, Senior Partner of Cogent Analytics. I'm Rob Braman. I'm the CEO, senior partner of Cogent Analytics. I'm passionate about the American Small Business Center. If you heard something today that speaks to your gut, I would love to have that conversation. I don't want to get into it on your show today, but let's have an honest conversation about what challenges you're faced. And I think that if I earn the right,

then we'll figure out how we open that dialogue a little farther. Sounds awesome. I love the way you think, Robert. And that's a great deal for our audience too as well. So be sure to go to cogentanalytics.com and yeah, get to know Rob some more. Definitely some great advice there in how to do your business well.

Anyway, thanks for tuning in to our audience. Thanks to Rob for being on. We appreciate you being on today. Be sure to give us a like. Subscribe to us on YouTube.com forward slash Chris Vaughn. Hit that bell notification button so you get all the notifications of the shows, everything we're doing. Plus, there's all the reviews of all the great products from AT&T on down to Harman Kardon, JBL. What we'll be doing for christmas you can figure out

what you want to have on your list for christmas or what you want to give to somebody for christmas and also you can see the great husky videos there as well uh be sure to go to uh itunes and google play tell your friends to go there and subscribe and spotify as well thanks rob for being on the show chris awesome experience i love the i love the nature of this conversation. It's one of the best, just flat out one of the best podcasts I've had since I've started this little adventure. I enjoy the tempo and I enjoy the dialogue, brother. I greatly appreciate

you having me on. Sounds good. We'll have you on again, too, because we could talk forever, so we'll do this in our segments. Great. I love it. Thanks, Rob. Take care. Thanks to my audience, and we'll see you guys next time.