The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Mary Grothe, Founder & CEO of the House of Revenue

Episode Date: October 7, 2022

Mary Grothe, Founder & CEO of the House of Revenue Houseofrevenue.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. The CEOs, authors, thought leaders, visionaries, and motivators. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms, and legs inside the vehicle at all times, because you're about to go on a monster education rollercoaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, I'm Mr. Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com, thechrisvossshow.com. Hey, welcome to another episode of the Chris Voss Show. My gosh, I've never told you how much we appreciate you guys coming by.

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give the show five stars there on the itunes she is the author of two upcoming books from Forbes. This is going to be pretty interesting. It's going to be coming out. Mary Grothy is on the show with us today. She is the founder and CEO of House Revenue and fractional CRO of Spots. She is a faith-based leader, entrepreneur, global keynote speaker, and host of two podcasts, Revenue Radio and Destination Remarkable. She began her sales career at a Fortune 1000 company where she quickly advanced from an admin role to being the number one sales representative. By following her natural instincts to always put customers first and listen to their needs, she was able to drive success for her clients and herself and brought in millions of dollars in revenue.

Now she has her own company, and she's here with us today. Welcome to the show, Mary. How are you? Hey, happy top of the week to you. I am a little concerned hearing the intro of this show, though, about brain bleeds. I really hope the content today isn't that serious. Well, you know, we tried to push it. There was a few things we had to cut out of the intro that we originally wrote.

But I think some of it made you, it was like, if you get so smart, you'll be sexier. You'll just glow of sexiness. We thought that was pushing it a little too much. So we went brain bleed. And, you know, I mean, between the coffee and everything else we're doing in the morning, there's a bit of brain bleeding that goes on one way or another. But welcome to the show, Mary. Give us your plugs, your.com, so people can find you on the interwebs, please.

Yeah, find me at marygrothy.com, G-R-O-T-H-E, houseofrevenue.com. And LinkedIn is my biggest audience by far, so send the connect request or hit the follow button. That LinkedIn is getting pretty awesome, isn't it? Yeah, I was an early adopter, love the platform, and I'm excited to continue to grow my network there. There you go. And I've got, I think, 30,000 connections and another 30,000 that follow me. There's 130,000 LinkedIn group over there we built from zero.

There's, of course, all the different platforms that we have that are over there. I just got access to that audio, LinkedIn audio. Have you gotten access to that yet? If I have, I have no idea what it is. What is it? It's basically Clubhouse was kind of like a really hot thing. I got like 10,000 followers over there in Clubhouse. It was really hot during the lockdown.

It was kind of a lockdown thing. But we just got access to that. And we probably should mention that the Chris Voss shows over there daily on the weekdays doing little audio rooms. So you can check that as well. You should get Ask for Askers to it. I think there's a link or something for it, but it should come on the room, say hello and check all that good stuff out. So you have two books coming out in 2023 by Forbes Books, Destination Remarkable, Revenue Scaling Playbook. We're going to be talking about that, but give us a little bit of more color to your bio. Tell us a little bit more about your background, what got you here and got you doing what you're doing now.

I would love to. The first book with Forbes is Capturing My Entire Life Story. Somewhere along the way, somebody said this is story worthy and it should be published and I believed them. So we will see how it lands with the audience. But I do get to drip a lot of the stories and content on LinkedIn and also on the Destination Remarkable podcast. So you can fill in a lot of the holes to the short story I'm about to tell you and hear the backstory on a lot of these items. Ultimately, my upbringing was cool from one respect because I grew up in the performing arts and I was on the stage as a triple threat, actor, singer, dancer. My dad was an opera singer and actor. My mom was a pianist and choral director and they owned a performing arts school.

It was a cool upbringing and that was the fun part of me growing up. But unfortunately, the sad part is my mom was an alcoholic and my dad was an abuser. And it was a really, really difficult childhood. They ended up losing everything and had to flee from the community from which we had the small business. And we had just a couple of days to pack up a moving truck after a big auction of all of our belongings, the big red and white tent in my backyard when I was 14 years old. We packed it up. We drove across the country. They had to file bankruptcy. They owed people just hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was not a good exit from the small town where I grew up in Northwest Indiana. I also said goodbye to a lot of family and it was a rude awakening. I was 14 years old and they told me as well as my 15-year-old brother that we were going to have to fully support ourselves. So we ended up getting jobs at the local grocery store and we ended up bagging groceries and

supporting ourselves through high school. I was able to continue dancing. I danced with the Boulder Ballet. Also took a hip hop and breakdancing class with the studio next door to the ballet company. And once that happened, I quit ballet. I fell in love with hip hop and breakdancing actually later in my life, became a professional breakdancer. But what ended up happening at that point is I was focused on survivorship and I was fully supporting myself, fully independent. And I had a beautiful plan for my life. I got accepted to CU Boulder with a scholarship and the plan was, hey, I'm going to become this professional dancer and fall back on a medical degree.

Unfortunately, God had different plans, or fortunately. But when I was 18, I got into an awful car accident. And my dreams of becoming a professional dancer were taken away. And so I entered into a really dark period of my life. It was actually the darkest four years of my life. I only through the good grace of God am alive and not in jail. It is a story that unfolds in the book in a little bit more detail. But I interviewed when I was 22 after being just fed up four years of in the dark. I married an abusive man. It was just not good. But I found a job out in a

newspaper for a sales admin position. And I interviewed and I got the job against their better judgment. They gave me an opportunity. And I worked as an admin for two years and mastered the role. And then they allowed me a spot on the mid-market sales team. Within the first 30 days, I became the number one rep. My quota that year was $150,000.. I sold 758,000 in revenue, which was more than number two and three combined. The second year they cut my territory in half, doubled my quota, asked me to train reps across the country, and I sold 850,000. I started my third year, but I eventually, I didn't finish it. I left and I went to go work

for one of my clients and had an amazing seven-month journey as a VP of sales marketing. And I got to work with their leadership team to quadruple the size of the company. At that point, I said, I love scaling revenue. I was young, I was 28, but I wanted to do it on my own. So I started my first company at 28 years old, the CEO of Butterfly Creative. It was three years of really good intention, but a lot of rookie mistakes, not knowing how to price rice services, didn't know how to delegate. I had a terrible ego. I just hadn't taken the time to heal from the wounds from my upbringing. So I was masking all of that pain and emptiness with fame, money, recognition, and success, and also drinking. I loved to go out and party. That was probably my favorite thing to do. And also during that time in the story, actually, that's in my mid-20s is

when I became a professional breakdancer. I was doing that on top of my work as a VP of sales and marketing. But anywho, the company I built lasted three years. And it was like for every 8,000 that came in, 10,000 went out the door. So I just couldn't figure it out. So after three years, I went back to the payroll company, did three more years in sales, a few top 10 finishes, made a lot of money, met my now husband. And well, first I found Jesus after I drove my car into my neighbor's front porch.

Thank you, Jesus, for saving my life. And I was able then to meet my now husband. We got married, bought a house, had a baby. And then after that, I started this company. So that takes us to about five years ago. It has been an unbelievable ride. Thank you for letting me share the five-minute version. There you go. There you go. Well, we go through a lot of stuff. I mean, life is a zigs and zags and we learn a lot from life. It sounds like you went through some trauma

in your childhood and sometimes it takes us longer to figure all that stuff out you know i i woke up at 50 and said maybe i should start dealing with some psychiatry stuff and probably most of my listeners probably know this i should probably be in deep psychology now probably should be in a funny room one of those white rooms but it's what it's actually a wonder i'm not but we go through this and it's amazing the journeys that we go on but we learn so much stuff on the way not only only about ourselves, but about life. And then we kind of reached that point that like you mentioned five years ago, you, you reached that, that, that great point where you're able to put all that knowledge into something and make it work. So tell us about your business and what you do now, House of Revenue. What do you guys do for your clients?

Who are your prospective clients? Cause there will be people listening to this on LinkedIn, I'm sure, and other places. And who are they and how can they get to know you better? We scale companies as fractional CROs and CMOs we partner up. So every CRO has a CMO counterpart. The two of them go on contract for a year and roll up their sleeves, do the work and scale companies. Now it's quite a bit of fun. I started it five years ago as a former salesperson. I thought, let me be a fractional VP of sales, build sales departments. We did that for about 18 months and then realized our clients that had a great brand and marketing engine were far outperforming

the others. And so that's when we tripled in size and rolled out this model in 2020. Let's pair our CRO with the CMO. We go on contract for a year. Our client is B2B. They are between $5 and $20 million in revenue, typically around in that range between $4 and $7 million in revenue. Companies plateau. What got them to that point is no longer working. So our ideal client has plateaued. Our ideal client is B2B manufacturing, distribution, professional services, technology, SaaS. We typically stay away from VC-backed companies. We love partnering with PE firms and we love bootstrapped companies. So what we're able to do in a 12-month time is do the audit and research needed to understand

how we need to refresh the go-to-market strategy. We bring in a new, fresh approach. We refresh the brand, build a new website, marketing engine, build the sales team, the CS team, and make sure that the technology layer is also there. And we go to work. We build it, we test it, and then optimize and set for scale. We serve about 12 companies a year. Wow. And so you come on for just a year to be a part of their thing. Now, does that require an equity position or how does that work? Good question. In the future, it will. We're baby stepping toward that.

Historically, we've only ever charged flat retainer. But Chris, we finally got the data back from the companies we scaled in 2020. I mean, millions, millions, millions of dollars scaled and we took no upside. And so as a business owner, I look back and say, that was a huge miss on my part. And so we now, for the first six months, we work on retainer. And then the second six months, we cut the retainer in half and then we play for commission and upside, not the form of equity. It's all commission based on net new revenue gain. But then once we do that, probably for a year or two and start building up the available cash in our company, then we can do more of an equity play, which is going to be delayed on us earning

because our ideal client would have a significant event to where they would potentially have an exit or a merger or an IPO or something within two to five years of us working with them. But the reason that we have to build this slowly is I can't wait five years to get paid. My people are very expensive, rightfully so. They are brilliant revenue leaders, but my overhead is high. So we have to baby step to that. But we get to play an upside now and the team is thrilled. That's awesome. But I mean, that's probably makes it a little bit easier for people to bring you on board because, you know, and then you come on, you prove your worth, you increase the revenue. You know, a lot of companies do that.

I used to buy out companies that were stagnant, and they would reach a point where that or they were headed towards bankruptcy and it was amazing how many times entrepreneurs would still be holding on that same original model whatever their business was they built and and it would become outdated either by the market or you know pricing or different costs things and they couldn't they the model wouldn't work anymore or sometimes they just had gotten a lot of funding and they were just burning through cash and they thought their model would eventually work and it just eventually worked and and it's really interesting how companies can can have like you mentioned startups and stuff that they they can stagnate and sometimes they don't realize it's just not working you know it's it's you know they're like, it'll eventually work. It'll work someday. And eventually they run out of cash. They do. And a lot of it is because they hold on to sacred cows.

It's not just the model, but it's a lot of people. So you think about people that got you from zero to 1 million or 1 million to 5 million, and you're like, great, let's go on this journey from 5 to 20 million. Well, come to find out, usually the people who got you to that threshold where you've plateaued are not the same people to get you through the next growth stage. It's not bad, right? We all have our different specialties. That's why I'm not sitting here telling you I want a $100 million company. Our team has no business with a $100 million company. We did it one time and it was great and we had a phenomenal outcome, but I'm not going to do it again. It was hard. And so we know where we play.

And if you look at the revenue leaders in startups or smaller companies, or if it's family members, or sometimes we run into old legacy reps, it's like you got to be willing to part with people who aren't serving you anymore. And it's one of the hardest things to do in business is to refresh your team. But that is the definition of insanity, is expecting different results, but not changing anything. And so I'm with you, Chris. That's really cool that you have that in your experience, that you've taken some of those distressed companies. We partner beautifully with PE firms, but I also love the CEOs that are just vulnerable and honest. We can't make it with what we have right now. Like we need to do something different. Do you find it's hard to get

CEOs to be honest with themselves, especially startup entrepreneurs? I used to have a really hard time getting through to them sometimes. Like sometimes we'd be, you know, I was good at pulling things out of bankruptcy or close to bankruptcy and then, and then either folding them while we were doing, I pulled companies that were, companies that were going to default on their payroll and put out bankruptcy end of the week. And sometimes getting through their heads that, hey, you need to ask for help. You need to bring someone in who knows what they're doing. And sometimes that means you're not the boss anymore. Do you find sometimes it's hard to get through to people to get them to have that aha moment where they wake up and go, yeah, we need some outside help here?

Yes. So typically the CEOs that come into our funnel and they want to work with us, they are problem aware. So they know, obviously, hey, we've plateaued. Like we're not scaling revenue. Are you problem aware? Sorry to interrupt you, Mary, but that's a good wrap. I like it.

I'm going to be my new radio advertiser. That's my new shirt. Be problem aware. Exactly. Yeah, problem aware versus solution aware. So problem aware, that's great when they come into the funnel. But one thing that we do before we enter into a 12-month agreement is we actually do a 40-day, $40,000 engagement because we have to ensure that they understand what it is going to take to scale their

company. So we do this 40 days of audit and research and present the go-to-market toolkit and the very granular revenue scaling plan. It comes with a revenue economics forecast, 12, 24, 36 months revenue org chart. And it has the entire refresh on the brand strategy, go to market strategy. It has a baseline on all of the individual sales contributors and CS teams so they can truly see if you are serious about scaling, you have to say yes to this 12-month plan. They'll know how much it's going to cost them, who most likely isn't going to be staying in the seat, who they need to hire.

And so it's our way of having a beautiful discussion together, CEO to our team to say, are we fully committed and aligned? Because Chris, we've had a couple of failed launches where the CEO was very promising of, yeah, I'm down to do whatever it takes. And then we started working together and it was a mess and they weren't ready. And they, one, maybe overstated their product market fit or access to capital. Two, they said they were willing to let go of the sacred cows and they weren't. Next, they have this hidden revenue plan inside of their head that's very ego-driven and they're excited about, and they just want us to run with their plan. It's like, wait a second, we already presented a plan to you. And so this is our way to have a decision point to say, are we going to work together or not?

So that's one of those pieces that really helps identify. They're problem aware, are they solution aware, and are they fully aligned with exactly what needs to happen in order to scale? I love how you diagram and laid that out for issues CEOs can have in their head. One of the things we used to do was we ran an ad that would say we have money to loan for businesses that are in trouble. And I read about this in my book. And it's really interesting how what we do is I would go visit with a guy. And usually they would be on their way to bankruptcy they're in that same place where they they've they've held on to that model like like a raccoon holds on to a piece of tin and where the red

fur grows and and they're stuck in the hole but they won't let go you know they can't get their hand out of the hole because you know a hunter has drilled the holes and put the tin in there. And so they'll hold on to that tin and they won't let go of the tin in spite of the hunter approaching to club them. And it's kind of one of those things that I find with a lot of CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs in the mid to low market size. And one thing that was funny was I would give them, once I couldn't get through them, because we'd say, you know, we'd say, look, we'll take you over, but you know, you have to go and your family's got to go too. And, or that, or, you know, we're just going to put you down the

thing, but you're not the CEO anymore. And they would be so stuck with their program. And so what I do is I go, look, we're going to give you a first rider refusal thing, and I'll give you a 10 bucks or a hundred bucks or whatever it was. And I'd say, look, we're going to be a first right of refusal. We want you to call us first when you're ready to sell, but don't call me the day before bankruptcy. Don't call me a week before bankruptcy. You want to call me the next week or two, because you got about three to six months on your runway right now before you hit the wall and I can see it, but you can't see it. And a lot of times what they would do is they'd take this attitude that like, well, if Chris sees value in my company, there must be something here. And it's like, yeah, because it's in Chris's head and it's not in your head.

And so I think what you outlaid is really important for self-employed people to recognize their own fallacies. Because, you know, I got to tell you how many of those I signed, they would always call me, you know, when they call me week before week and a day before bankruptcy, Hey, do you want to buy this thing now? Not now. Not now. I pulled one, I pulled one company back from the brink of bankruptcy where they were going to default on payroll in a week and, and, and it was all over. And I pulled that out within 48 hours. But, you know, I had to do a lot of rescuing. And the amount of money that they were wasting was just incredulous.

But, yeah, I like how you analogize that for analogize. You gave the analogy of what entrepreneurs go through in their head because there's a time where you really need outside blood. You need outside mind. You need people that are successful to come to your project. Just because you got that model to drag for two to three years and somehow you got here doesn't make you freaking, I don't know, who can we use as a Mark Cuban or whatever. So there you go. So what's the best ways for clients to reach out to you to get involved in working with you or explore working with you?

What's the best way for them to reach out and do that? I recently added a lot of copy to our website to try to help people understand who we are, who we're not, what we do, what we don't do. It is helpful for CEOs to self-qualify, but we've laid it all out on the website. And so I would encourage people who are considering entering into a stage of scale, we call it second stage scale, so it's after startup scale, that they would just go to the houserevenue.com and read. Look at the fractional CRO page specifically has the majority of the detail in addition to the homepage, but that should be an opportunity for you to read through and understand, is this for

me or is this not for me? You can also see some of our results and case studies. Ultimately, we have a very strong track record and we are able in many cases, not all, but many cases to double the monthly recurring revenue of companies within the first year that we work with them. And that is significant when you're looking at a company that's already between 5 and 10 million. That's a lot of revenue to be bringing in. But you have to take our work seriously.

You have to follow the process. It's also going to cost about a half million dollars. About $300,000 of that is retainer. And then there's going to be upside and also fees for websites, recruiting, etc. And all of that is detailed on the website. But if it looks like something that you're interested in, you know, hey, I want to get an additional $5 million. I'm willing to pay half a million to get that $5 million and then set on the trajectory

for a scale moving forward. Because I do want to lay that fact down. As we said, in 2020, the companies that we scaled, they've all continued to grow. Nobody flatlined. I mean, one of our clients who was $14 million when they started, they lost $2 million because of COVID, lost contracts. We added $5 million that year. They ended at $17 million. Within about 10 months, we took them after that, we took them to $24.5 million. They're now at a $35 million run rate and their budget for next year is going to be $50 million and they're going for an exit. And so when you look at that happening within a three-year timeframe, that's substantial.

And we have several stories very similar to that. That's probably our most exciting story. You always got to lead with the one that's super flashy, right? But we have several other stories that are also in line with that. But I just ask that people review that. If they like it, there's a chat bot right on the site. You can also email info at houseofrevenue.com and I'd be more than happy to get booked with each other. There you go. And I'm looking at your complimentary tools. I just downloaded a couple of them here. People should check them out. You've got a SAS revenue economics template, a RevOps audit checklist template, our methodology ebook. It's Monday. Our 12-month project plan.

So you have four tools here people can check out, they can download, they can kind of see a better way to work with you and integrate. Yeah, that's exactly right. Start with the resources. You can get an example of some of the work that we do. We're going to be refreshing those. We refresh them about every three to six months. And so anybody who downloads now, we refresh it. We'll send you the new one when it comes out. And I see you're in Denver, Colorado. Do you work with companies just in the U.S.? You do international? We're all U.S.-based at this time. I've had a couple of team members that have international experience that are asking when we're going to expand. And I'm definitely not opposed to it.

So we actually have a client right now that is going to want to expand internationally. So I'm like, what better than to do it with an existing client? And they've got a great CRO to lead the charge who has done it before. And so I think case-by-case basis, if it's a U's a US-based company looking expansion, I'm happy to take it on, but I'm not comfortable taking it outside the US company out of the gate. But yeah, we serve companies coast to coast. There you go. I love Lodo. I think part of my kidney or liver is still at Lodo bars. Mine too. In lower downtown, For those of you who are not aware of that in Denver, Denver is a beautiful place. And I think we had a third place there and our third office there for years. It's just a beautiful place, but I partied a little too hard at those Lotto bars,

but I remember them nicely. They're a wonderful time. Let's talk about your books. Let's get those in here because we want to plug those as well. They're coming out in 2023. September 2023 is the date on them. You've got two books coming out by Forbes Books. One's called Destination Remarkable. One's called Revenue Scaling Playbook. Let's talk about each of those if we could. Sure. So the first one for sure is publishing in September of 2023. The Revenue Scaling Playbook could be in 2024. So stay tuned on that date. It is not set in stone, but for sure on Destination Remarkable. So Destination Remarkable, which we'll publish in September of 2023, is my life story. I will detail. You heard a high level recounting of

that when we opened the show. There's a lot more where that came from. So we're going to be sharing that story in detail, but then I will be documenting everything that I had done through my sales career to be a number one rep and then going into starting my first company, going back to sales, and then starting my second company being House of Revenue. I'll be documenting the highs, the lows, and turbulence of being a wife and a mom and a CEO, which I think adds an entire layer of complexity that only wives, moms, and CEOs understand. And so my hope is that I can lay it out, the good, bad, and the ugly, also just centering on being a faith-based leader. That's something that's really important to me. It's actually the number one thing that's important to me.

And I would like to debunk a lot of the myths around Christianity. I have a major beef with American Christianity. I think that it's broken. I think that a lot of people are running away from it who don't understand, but I don't blame them. There's a lot of people that don't model it very well. So understood, understood. But for me, I'm really filleting and sharing my heart with everyone and documenting the journey. It will go up to present day, which is us just about to celebrate our five-year anniversary as a company. We've had some crazy highs and lows in the last two years. People who have been avid listeners on the Revenue Radio podcast have had it live detailed

for them every week. So that's a nice way to catch up if anyone's interested in what the heck has happened over here. The second book is going to be centered around revenue scaling playbook and methodology. I'm not going to get cracking on that until next year. I need to focus on getting the first one written and then I'll have more for you, Chris. So maybe we'll come around a second time and we can talk about the revenue scaling playbook. But my hunch says it's going to be following the process and methodology that we've been following for years, tried and true method of audit, research, build, test, optimize, and scale. Heavy emphasis on go-to-market refresh and being rooted in customer need.

There you go. There you go. That is awesome. And you've had an incredible journey. What was it like getting Forbes to publish the books? I mean, that's pretty awesome. I think we need to have more Forbes authors on. What was it like? Surreal. Yeah. Surreal. I got an email and I thought it was spam.

Like, what is this? I took the call and I had a screener that was asking some questions. And then they put me in front of the head of publishing, and then she submitted me to the council, which is four people. And unanimously, they said, yes, we would like to publish her. And so it's an honor. I mean, this thing is going to have international distribution. It'll be in airports. And I'm pumped. I'm pumped. I saw the book cover design. I feel like I'm playing in the big girls club. I could not believe how good it looked.

But I'm just really honored to be working with their team. I have a writing team, a design team, and they are super high class. So the experience has been absolutely wonderful. But can you expect anything other than that with the Forbes brand? That would be awesome. Great brand. I mean, I grew up reading Forbes. Back when it used to be like about this thick with ads,

I think the father or grandfather ran it. Yeah, I remember it was in the 2000s, 90s, 90s and 2000s. It was like about this thick, the Forbes magazine. But we'll have a copy of it right here between us in the final edit so people get a chance to check that out. So this is pretty awesome and pretty exciting. Launching books is fun. The editing part is, is not quite as fun in my opinion, but that's for me, but you know, it's funny in editing because someone else takes your editing and then they just, they just, they go, yeah, this is all bad. Just go back and start over. At least

they did that with mine. They didn't really do that, but the rereading of it 50,000 times is, is really fun. Let me tell you, gotta love it. So editing, but you know, writing a book is, is so important. It's so wonderful to become an author, to add that to your, you know, your, your titles of titles. And it's funny how people look at you a different way when you're an author. Like, you know, I've always kind of, you know, done some things I think that people would say are successful. I don't want to sound too egotistical, even though I am. We all know that. But, you know, it's adding that author thing. Like people look at you weird, like it's different. But when you go through the gauntlet of how hard it is to write a book and put all that down and the editing and prepping and getting the whole thing

just out there in the world and shipped, basically. People should look at you differently because it's hard. I know a lot of people that try and write and they don't ever get it done. Yeah. A lot of people do start the project, but don't take it into fruition. It is really difficult. Like I said, a man, I am grateful for the team I have because they are doing a huge part of the heavy lift. And I'm with you on the rereads. We just got done with the second third of the book and they're like, we'll have this few in a week to reread. I'm like, I don't want to read this again. I've already lived this. I recorded it and I was helping with editing and I've already read it and now I got to read it again. So I'm with you. I'm with you on that part of it. I'm like, I'm not that into myself. I don't need this again, but then to know I will have the privilege of rereading several more times. But you know what? If it's part of the process to ensure that we have a great product coming out to people, then that is really important to me. And it is different with having that author in your title. It is cool to have that authority.

But for me, my biggest mission is to get back on the stage. I loved being a keynote speaker in 2018 and 2019. It was such a privilege. I was speaking nearly every month. I had some really cool big girl gigs and I loved it. And then COVID just wiped my calendar clean. I've done some virtual events and I just got off the stage recently with HubSpot's big inbound conference. And it was

such a rush to be back on the stage with hundreds of people. And so ultimately, Chris, yes, I believe I have a story to tell, but I'm using this as an opportunity to spread the good news of the gospel, to talk about being a great faith-based and loving leader, to talk about overcoming the challenges and turning the trials into testimony. There's a lot of goodness there, but ultimately I'm excited for the credibility piece because I am ready to be back on the stage and to be on tour and to be delighting people with the good words that come out of my mouth. That'll be exciting. I think people are excited to hear you, see you.

And yeah, COVID kind of threw a whole lot of curveballs, but it did make for a lot of good books. We've had so many brilliant authors like yourself on the show. What else do people have time to do? They got time to write a book. I wrote my book over COVID. I was like, well, I guess I'll finally get this. I've been trying to rewrite it for like 10 years and I'm like, well, I'm trapped in my home. It was kind of like, what was that movie by Stephen King where the guy's a book writer and he gets trapped by that chick who breaks his legs and stuff?

Kathy Bates? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Misery. Misery. There you go. It was kind of like Misery. It was a version of Misery. It's like, you're stuck here.

Write a book. I'm like, okay, whatever. Well, hopefully your feet didn't get smashed with a sludge hammer. No, just my brain, what was left of it pretty much. So there you go. That's where the brain bleed came in. Yeah, the rereading. That's why I put the brain bleed in there.

Yeah, people just get smarter from the show, I can just say. So Mary, anything else you want to touch on before we go or plug? I think we've covered quite a bit today. I do appreciate the follow. I think anybody who understands how an author gets launched knows the more followers, the more awareness, the more book sales, the more future books. And so your follow or subscribe on my YouTube just goes a long way. I'm happy to return serve. I'm super grateful for the community latching onto this and thinking this story is inspiring and has some

legs. So a little follow goes a long way. So I'm grateful for all of you and I'm happy to return the follow. There you go. Give us all your.com so people can find you on the inroads, please. MaryGrothe.com, HouseOfRevenue.com are the two big ones. You can find me on LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. All my handles are Mary Grothe, except Twitter is Mary L. Grothe. Because Mary Grothe was taken. I'm like, really? There's another Mary Grothy, except Twitter is Mary L. Grothy. Because Mary Grothy was taken. I'm like, really? There's another Mary Grothy out there? But okay. Mary L. Grothy on Twitter. But I look forward to connecting with you. There you go. There you go. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it. Thank you for having me. Thank you. And thanks to my audience for tuning

in. As always, be sure to go to all the groups on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok, all the crazy places those kids are playing. Go to YouTube.com, 4S Chris Foss, Goodreads.com, 4S Chris Foss for all of our great authors. Well, thanks for tuning in. Be good to each other. Stay safe. See us over the audio LinkedIn thing. And we'll see you guys next time on The Chris Foss Show.