The Home Service Expert Podcast - Unlocking the Secrets of Private Equity with Johnny Conklin

Episode Date: December 29, 2025

In this conversation, Tommy Mello interviews Johnny Conklin, founder and managing partner of 16 South Capital Partners. They discuss the importance of partnerships in business, the evolving landscape of private equity, and the role of founders in driving success. Johnny shares insights from his journey in private equity, emphasizing the need for authenticity, transparency, and a focus on non-economic goals. He explains the unique approach of 16 South Capital, which prioritizes legacy preservation and team culture over traditional leverage strategies. The conversation also touches on the misconceptions surrounding private equity and the importance of preparing for life after a sale. 00:00 The Importance of Partnerships 06:11 Navigating the Changing Landscape of B2B and B2C 09:03 The Role of Founders in Business Success 11:54 Understanding the Value of Non-Economic Goals 14:45 The Unique Approach of 16 South Capital 20:54 The Importance of Team and Culture 26:47 The Misconceptions of Private Equity 29:45 Preparing for Life After a Sale 32:50 Advice for Aspiring Business Owners 35:51 The Future of Private Equity and Business Growth

Anytime you partner with somebody, that should be a top five life moment. You know, getting married, having kids, I would think kind of building a business and bringing on a partner would be right up there. So take the care to do it right. Welcome to the home service expert, where each week, Tommy chats with world-class entrepreneurs and experts in various fields like marketing, sales, hiring, and leadership, to find out what's really behind their success in business. Now, your host, the Home Service Millionaire, Tommy Mello. Before we get started, I wanted to share two important things with you. First, I want you to implement what you learned today. To do that, you'll have to take a lot of notes, but I also want you to fully concentrate on the interview. So I ask the team to take notes for you. Just text

notes, N-O-T-E-S, to 888-526-1299. That's 888-526-1-2-99, and you'll receive a link to download the notes from today's episode. Also, if you haven't got your copy of my newest book, Elevate, please go check it out. I'll share with you how I attracted and developed a winning team that helped me build a $200 million company in 22 states. Just go to elevate and win.com forward slash podcast to get your copy. Now let's go back into the interview. Welcome back to Home Service Expert. Today, I got a guest visiting us from Charlotte, North Carolina virtually. It's Johnny Conklin. Johnny is the founder and managing partner of 16,000 capital partners. He has built a reputation of dependability, integrity, and excellence over his 20 years of expertise in the lower middle market. Raised in the

South, raised in the South with a family of values and hard work, Johnny loves for sports evolved into business career defined by teamwork, preparation, and hustle. Before launching 16,000 South, Johnny sat on both sides of private investment sector, principal investment. and strategic MNA advisory. He was previously a partner at Atlantic Street Capital, where he was integral in all investment aspects from CTHIS development, business development, value creation initiatives, add-on M&A, and exit planning.

He was also a managing director and member of the executive committee of Black Arch Partners, where he built and led businesses and consumer service practice, advising on over $10 billion in lower middle market, self side M&A transactions. Known for his personal touch and empathy for the challenges business owners face, Johnny is a trusted partner for founders, helping them achieve their goals while enjoying the journey.

Johnny, just to let you know, I just had surgery. I am on a lot of pain meds, so if something doesn't come out right, I'm blaming it on that. Understood. We're in the Thanksgiving week, and a lot of folks are going to be around some family and probably looking for some of those other painkillers. if you will, as they're hanging in an old family and having some discussions.

But this is one I've been looking forward to chatting with you and your audience to be a fun day today. Yeah, I'm really excited. Do you want to just get started, Johnny, with just a little bit? Tell us your own story. What got you excited about private equity? What are you excited about in the future? What are some of the stigmas just maybe a few minutes just on you and what you're excited about? Yeah, look, I think, look, we're all product of our environment.

As you mentioned, I grew up in the south. I've got a New York Italian mother. She's an amatooly and an uncle Vinny. She moved south and met my dad. She was a teacher. My dad was an accountant. And one of his businesses actually got acquired by private equity when I was in high school. So I'm in my late 40s.

So it was almost 30 years ago. And if you can imagine sitting around a kitchen table in your teen years and your college years hearing EBITDA and these weird terms, I kind of grew up with that. but a very normal kind of household that I grew up in. You know, my first job was at 15. I was cutting grass. I was working golf course maintenance. I like to get finger, you know, dirt under my fingernails and just a good day's work.

That was fun. But as I got into college and realized the white collar jobs that were out there, obviously that was fun. I thought I was going to be an engineer. When you get a zero in physics, that doesn't work, which I did. And so I moved over to business and realized that. you know, there's a bunch of these things out there like spreadsheets and systems and automation and all that stuff's really good. But I always had a knack for just being around people and

understanding them. And that really led me into the financial world and more importantly working with a small founder and her companies, both as an advisor and as an investor. So I think we're all proud of our environment. And I've really kind of grown up in this world of, you know, blue-collar businesses, but looking at it from a white-collar mindset on how to drive value and make money for both the people in the field and those running the companies. So tell us about some of the exciting deals you've done in the past and what made you excited, what made you attracted to the business, the founder, the CEO, and the leadership. Yeah, there's a, I mean, there's a lot of fun deals that we've worked on.

I think a couple that ring true for me. The one that's probably most relevant is a business that we sold in 2020. You can imagine all the things that were going on at that time. I always grew up in the world where B2B businesses were worth more than B2C because in recessionary environments, B2B businesses would tend to perform a little bit better because they were built that way. COVID happens and the world changes, right? B2B becomes a secondary investment.

Offices are closed. People don't know what to do. Everybody's investing in their home. And I was working with a private equity group who owned an HVAC asset. And the gentleman who was running that business, I'll just call him KB by his initials. KB, if you're out there, hey, brother. Great guy had worked in landscaping before and brought some of his ideas into HVAC. And it was an early adopter of service titan.

And I remember having conversations in May and June of 2020 with potential investors about this HVAC business. And they're like, Johnny, why are you calling me? I'm at home. I don't know what's going on with this pandemic. And we could just see their numbers. We're going up and to the right. We knew something was going on. And we figured folks are sitting at home.

People got to put money to work. They're going to want to hear a good story. And KB had really, I think, systematized HVAC in a way that had not been done before. He had good scorecards. He was teaching founders that were coming into his business and kind of protecting their brands and giving them tools to be successful. And in convincing that private equity owner that we should talk with other buyers, which ended up itself was a leap of faith that they took.

We ended up developing 20, 30 really good relationships with folks that said, man, this home services thing is real. And this might be here for a while. And so that business ended up trading for a really high multiple, you know, probably two, almost three X more in terms of dollars that the private equity inter thought they could get for the business. But what made it great in what people really last on to was this repeatable playbook that was really 80% of it.

And the other 20% was that it was being dialed in for local markets and the people that were there. So yeah, you have this playbook, but it's kind of like the old adage in sports, right? a great coach takes the talent they have and builds the game plan to them, not the other way around. And so they worked with companies and their strength to double down on them and in the areas that they needed a little bit of help. They would use that as a way to, hey, we're going to get this better over a couple years or some time period. But instead of whacking people for what didn't work, it was more let's double down on what's great. And so his business became an amalgamation of a lot of local brands bringing their great attributes together and then share.

those across the business. And so he did great with that, great with metrics. And then that sort of cascaded over the last, call it five years into what, you know, we hear a lot on your podcast into many other industries. And so that was kind of the catalyst for us. That business, I guess I should probably share it with you, was called Turnpoint. Great company. It's now, you know, 40 plus brands at least. In KB, if you can do some connective dots there, you'll figure out who I'm talking about. Yeah, that's great. Great company. I, you know, I just, I just was talking to Ken Haynes the other day. And as you know, it was a mild winner. And this is where the greatest start to stand out. And it's actually kind of fun for me

because I get to really see the people that are really good at what they do. You know, Ken Haynes with French Group. I don't know if I do. I do. If I rewind all the way back, that was, if you had asked me to give a second story, it would be there. I remember. working with InvestCorp before they purchased Ken's business. And they were asking, hey, what's the playbook in this industry? And it really didn't exist. If you go all the way back, service experts kind of broke the industry in a bad way 20 years ago. Sorry, service experts folks for you out there. But if the simplest part of that story is when the business was bought, they changed the phone number within the first 30 days. And at that point, you didn't have the

internet. You had stickers. And so everybody went and made the phone call and the phone number was gone, they killed the company. So you can have a lot of really smart people make a really basic decision that really can cause some challenges. And InvestCorp didn't want that. So we sort helped them build a little bit of a manual. It probably Playbook is too strong of a word, but that was back in 2016. We sort of continue to develop that as an advisor by looking at other companies. And that really, I've got it sitting over on my shelf behind me. I look at that all the time and it's really formed from all the interactions we've had. on things to do, many things not to do, so that we don't make the same mistake twice.

And we've deployed it in our strategy now at 16 South as sort of our handbook, if you will. But yeah, Ken's going to get my hands on that. We'll see, man. We'll see in time. Yeah, absolutely. We've got to do some golf first once this ankle hills up. I had an opportunity to speak at Cortex annual event. and they brought in a group of really high-end PE guys.

And they really emphasized how the PE market is starting to get more sophisticated and how important it is to keep the founder. And keep the founder engaged doesn't mean they're going to stay the CEO, but kind of the founder has been the glue and they've been through all the mistakes. They've got all those, I won't say, there's a lot of success, but they remember the failures. And what is your take on what it means to be a great founder when you do it, deal and how do you keep them motivated when you you know there's founders i'm 42 there's other founders that are 65 keep them motivated when they just got you know a lot of money i don't think for me money's

the motivation uh but some people they're like we're at an age now that we want to live a little bit so what's your thesis on that yeah look it's it's interesting um i'm gonna give you a little bit of history because the way i'd answer that now is not what i would have said a few years ago um so So if I think about that 2020 time period, we just talked about it a little while ago, I was an advisor. So I was looking at working with management teams. They would talk to a bunch of private equity groups. But ultimately, it was going to come down to who paid the last dollar because you had a private equity owner selling to likely another private equity group. Yes, they care about the management teams.

But at the end of the day, they have a fiduciary responsibility to make an economic decision. I get it. Then I get recruited away and I go to a private equity group who is now buying those businesses, not necessarily advice. them from a M&A advisory standpoint. So now I'm looking at it from the complete other. I literally take my baseball hat and turn it around the other direction. And you're trying to assess how do we keep the management team in place? How do we incent them, the exact things you were just talking about?

But it becomes this is what we need them to do instead of the question of what do they want to do. And do we fit with that? And so I always felt like that direction just felt a little bit off. And that's no indictment of my prior firm. I think it's just an observation of just private equity at large. And so what we try to do is a little bit different. We are trying to assess chemistry and goals and objectives, economic, of course, but more importantly, non-economic objectives. What is that business owner trying to accomplish? So we talked to, say, 10 business owners over the course of a couple of weeks. We'll probably get two or three that say, look, I know I need help with A, B, and C. I know that these two things, my business are really good because I've got a peer group and I'm talking to them. But what I really want to do is I want to spend three days on the boat fishing. I want to help, but I need a number two. So we start to pretty quickly come up with, you know, the basis for working together pretty quickly. And if that chemistry is there and they trust you, we should be solving that business owner's

problems and we should be bringing something to the table. And by the way, if we do that, we're probably going to build great technicians in the field. They are going to deliver phenomenal service to a customer. And by the way, if we do that, they're going to come back, which means that we solve all those pieces and we're giving that business owner what they need. We're going to end up building a great business and the spreadsheets and the money will take care of themselves. And I always felt like the order of operations was different when I saw it from an advisory standpoint and within traditional private equity. And don't get me wrong, those are great businesses, advisory and regular way of private equity.

We're trying to take a little bit of a different tact to it because we do think those business owners need to be around because that is a loss skill. They're going to forget more about their business than I will ever know about it. Yeah. It's just a fact. And so having them around, I just think it's that continuity. It's the continuity of the brands. It's continuity of what's worth. worked at the same time, they've got to have an open mind that the world is changing two or three times as fast as it did 20 years ago.

And you've got to be willing to make little experiments to see what works so you can stay ahead of the game. So, you know, two or three of our interactions are going to be great because they're going to understand that. There's going to be six or seven that they don't want to do that. They want the last check. They don't know what they want. They don't know what they need to work on. They just want to hand it over to somebody to fix. That may not be the right fit for us as a place to start anyway.

it might be something to fit into something. But that's our general approach. When we think about kind of how we come at the market, Tommy, I think importantly, like when we think about that founder business owner, it's about what are your non-economic goals and objectives? And let's try to solve for that. And the rest usually takes care of itself. I love that.

You know, it's interesting because there's two types of companies. There's the ones that have an amazing track record that AB tests that are willing to be curious. And the other ones kind of have this mindset of why fix it if it's not broken, but you're right, the world's changing so fast. You've got to have an open mind. And some PE companies, and I don't, you know, maybe, maybe this is true. I just know some investors, they try to find broken companies that are at a million or two million of EBITA and say, how do we get that to 10? My buddy, Darius Livers, said, you got to get rid of the founder if they're under five million of EBTA because they end up being a bottleneck.

What is your take on that? There's some truth to that, for sure. Generally, we're trying to assess, like, what is the skill capability that that individual brings? Do they have a team or not? That often is part of the biggest part. And then what parts of the team don't exist today, but they know they're going to need help with? We typically talk with every founder that is part of a transaction about creating an ambassador program. And what we mean by an ambassador program is, even if that person is fully taken

out of the day-to-day operations of the business, they still have their DNA in it in some way. And in many ways, their personal identity is that business. And to rip that away from a human being seems, I don't know that I could deal with that. I mean, look, I'm 16 South and I found of this firm. I've got two great colleagues that I work with. I should comment on here a minute. But gosh, like if 16 South went down, I would feel personal responsibility to that. And I'm certain that our business owners we partner with have that same identity connectivity to the business. So when we think about an ambassador program, maybe not doing the day to day, but there's no reason they can't on our behalf be an advocate for their technicians and or what we're trying to build in talking with other business owners.

And that still gives them purpose. We think training is another great thing to have them involved in day one to say, look, I set this expectation, 20 years ago. Here are our core values. Here's what we're trying to build. Maybe they talk with, you know, once a quarter can come in and tell an old story. I mean, to me, these are all things that make these small businesses great and make them feel like the local brands that they are. And we don't want to lose that. No, at the same time, we have to advance and get better. And so that kind of comes to your point. If they're out of the business, I think every case is bespoke and should be treated as such, I still think they need to have some connectivity to the business and the people

otherwise you'd be taken out the root of how it got started in the first place. Great answer. I'm learning a lot. I can't stop writing. So whatever I'm writing like this, it's a great podcast. 16th South Capital. I mean, you've kind of wanted to build it a little bit different than the normal PE company. Tell us a little bit about why you started this company and what makes you guys different. And what are some of the aspects that people get excited? about when they work with you? Yeah, the, you know, why do we start it? Look, I think private equity, particularly at a size, and I'll call it somewhere in that

eight to 12 of EBITDA range, which was where I was at my prior firm and where a lot of transaction velocity takes place. If you've gotten a business to that size, you've done something pretty well. The challenge that I saw was that even though size of company does not. constitute maturity of the business model. You can get big and still be very immature in what you do, and you can also be really small and be super nimble and be an absolute leader in what you do as well. So I think this moniker of size gets away from business health and business strength and business potential, but that's not how private equity in the sector is built. It's built on folks that

invest small, invests medium, invest large, but again, that doesn't necessarily match to the best company. And so what I felt like we were doing is looking at companies that were large, but not mature, but we were having to pay as if they were fully mature and take on a ton of risk. And by the way, to give the return to our investors that they demand, put a lot of leverage on a business that had honestly never had leverage on it before. So that was the traditional private equity mode. And I totally get the math behind it. And there's nothing wrong with that. what really set me on the path for 16 South is I was talking to a business owner. It's about $2 million of EBITDA.

And it was going to be an add-on for one of our businesses that we owned at my predecessor. And we ultimately, he ultimately decided he didn't want to do the deal. And the answer of, you know, kind of as the reason why it was, look, Johnny, I have two options. I can sell to you. The brand is going to go away. You're going to, you know, do all the things you need to do. it, but my life's work's going to get gobbled up into something I'm never going to see again. But my alternatives, I have to run it on my own. I don't understand why there's not a middle

option in there where someone like you guys could help us get to the next level and I could do this with you. Now, that business owner would fall into the two or three out of 10 that had the right chemistry, the right outlook, knew he needed help. And I started thinking of myself, I came home that night and spoke to my wife. I'm like, we need to help people like this. this. And there's just not an avenue for them to do that. And like my wife usually does, she's way smarter than I am, looks to me and says, you should do that and stop talking about it. And so she was right. And that became the predicate for 16 South. And so we decided, well, what works and what doesn't? What works is a force multiplier of assistance with people that actually

get their hands dirty and can help in businesses, not pontificate in a boardroom, but can actually do stuff. And I'll come back to that because I've got two folks that are great at that on my team. The second, and this might even be the first one on the list is, look, business owners are petrified of debt. They typically don't use it in their business unless they absolutely have to. And so when they hear two, three, four, five turns of leverage, they freak out. And so our business model, when we start an investment, we use zero leverage. None.

And folks say, well, Johnny, you can't make any money doing that. It's like, no, you can. our view is we want to create a snowball effect where we first come in let's understand what we have let's make sure we change one thing in the business but it's easy and you've talked about some of these things in your podcast before it might like might be the little win we need more swag the toilet that doesn't flush right fix it um you know the three things that uh we never could get our hands around we're pricing on x customer service y and getting our website dot like do the easy stuff and get some little wins to build the momentum. And then eventually what you're

going to find is that the culture starts to take root on, oh, like there's a little bit of change here, but it's good. And as that starts to build, now we can start to do some things with the business owner to really double down and grow the business. And as we grow, we can fund it, but not having to do so under the pressure of covenants and debt. And now eventually we will use it. And every business owner knows that we're very transparent in that approach. But once you start to build some cash and the owner starts to understand that the model works, you can take a little bit more risk, but it's calculated because now you're just repeating something you've already done before. So our business owners like that part. And then the third part is a little bit of help. So I'm a deal

guy. Like I like ops and I can get my hands dirty in it. But that's not my, that's not my primary best use. So I partner with a gentleman named Mike Gillen. Mike is 20 years, my elder, but a super good friend. I've known him for over 15 years. And when I was an M&A advisor, I sold his business not once but twice. And what's really cool about what he has done, so he's been a CEO for a field service business before. I'll tell you about that in a second. He was also an operating partner in private equity, but also came from corporate America in various capacities. And what he did, he came in as CEO of a business called National. car wash solutions. It was a call it $50, $60 million revenue business. I was basically an equipment manufacturer. And when he took over, he got really upset that nobody could fix his stuff. They would customers would call and say, no one can fix this. I've called your distributor. They don't want to come out here. Well, yeah, it makes sense. Distributors want to sell $100,000 pieces of equipment and make $20,000 of growth profit. They don't want to do a thousand dollar job.

Well, Mike got tired of his brand and his OEM stuff getting tarnished by not being able to fix it. He said, I'm going to hire technicians and I'm going to acquire my distributors. And he did that. So he brought service close to the business and close to the brand and built a 300 plus person national technical service team to service his equipment and competitor's equipment and grew that business from 60 million of revenue or so to over a billion and eight years. Wow. And he did it by taking an OEM model into a service technician driven model and just absolutely killed it. So where he is in his career today, he's not looking at. looking to run companies, but he has been through this journey era the last 20 years,

big private equity, small private equity, building field service. So while I've majored in deals and minored in ops, he's majored in ops and minored in deals. And we've worked together in the bunker. So, you know, when we go talk to an owner, they don't want to hear from me. They want to hear from Mike. Rightfully so. And then we've got a junior guy that we've worked with, who's worked in many field service businesses as well. And so he's younger than we are. So we kind of think we hit three of the different generational elements. We all think and work really hard and we work in the businesses together. And, you know, we've seen some of those challenges. So that's kind of while we're a little bit different. You know, I think we're smaller, we're more nimble,

the lower leverage and bring bringing an operating capacity to the table and put those three things together. And that's that option that never existed for an owner before. It's really smart. I know a lot of people that are afraid to get gobbled up because you're right, their identity is so tied to that business. And they're like, why are you buying me if you want to change everything? And that's one of the problems that we face is because if we're really going to integrate it, truly integrate it. There's one price book.

There's one CFO. There's one call center. There's one dispatch center. There's one training center. There's one team of recruiters. And I know there's another way to do it, but I don't like the other way of like having all these different run companies, not the same suppliers. You don't get economies of scale.

and personally, I don't think it's wrong because there's a lot of companies that have pulled it off. I just truly find it like, how do you leverage, like my CSRs could take 50 calls a day. If you're running them out of one location and it's a slower location,

they're taking 15. So you really don't pick up all that economy of scale, which allows you to have much higher margins and pay people a lot more at the same time. So you could pay the top of the market, but one person could do the work of three and get paid to when the company's doing well as well. You know what I mean? Completely. And look, if you think about the size company we're working with, they're at the

beginning edge of this journey that they're going to go on. And so our view also is we get the flywheel going. We'll be with the company for a typical private investment firm might be three years on the short end, five or six in the longer end, depending on what's going on. Our view is because we're not traditional private equity. Like 16 South is writing our own personal. capital into deals. So we're not going to do that unless we have the same at-risk dollars that our partner might have with us. Yes, we do bring some third-party capital to the table, but we're 100% invested in the line with the number one. Number two, our goal is we know we will ultimately sell the company again, but our view is we need to take a 10-year view and everything

that we do. Because if we go from, say, a million or two of EBITDA, and we get it to eight, and would therefore be a nice opportunity for a new private equity group to come in, we want to provide the continuity of what we've done to that point on behalf of our business owners. It's kind of like the old top gun, you know, don't ever leave your wingman. That's kind of what we're doing with our owners. If I'm going to come in and partner with them and Mike and sit on our team to do that, and we said we're going to sell the business in four years and we're gone, we're really not doing what we said we would do. So our view is, we don't need to have a big auction. We know who the groups are that align well with our mindset and our

chemistry. And we can partner with them to get them from 8 to 25, but we can stay in the board. We can maintain our promises to the owners that we've had and be an advocate for them in the boardroom to make sure the stuff that they care about doesn't change. And again, I'm still relatively young. You and I are kind of in the same relative vintage. I'm going to round down and call myself in my 40s. Technically I am, but I got you by a couple. I'm going to be doing this for the next decade plus. And so the companies that we're going to invest and get on that right flywheel, I don't want to leave them. They might want to leave us, and that's okay if the time comes.

But we make a commitment. We want to stand by it. You know, one of the biggest problems I see is win the founder. And hopefully they did an equity incentive program or some type of phantom equity. No one really trains what happens when the money comes. And you watch people just like when they win the lottery, all of a sudden they get these vultures around them. And that's one of the things that I really try to help people with is like, look, be very patient

the first year you get the money. It's tax strategy. Make a list of what you want to do for your family. You're going to have a lot of people calling you that haven't called you in a long time. And after the money comes, it could ruin people. Keeping money is a whole different skilled in making money. I was on a podcast with Gino Wickman and he said when he sold EOS, his whole identity, he had literally a pot of gold, very, very, very wealthy.

It just felt empty. And so there's a lot of things that people need to prepare for when this happens. Luckily, that didn't happen to me. You know, I still, I'm half the owner still. I rolled half of it. And I still feel like this is my identity. Like I would do anything for the people that work here. And luckily I got with Goldman Sachs.

I got the right tax advisor, the right lawyer. and I got to watch a lot of other people become millionaires. And that to me was like the joy of it. And now I'm like, let's do this again. And at some point the money becomes a relative. It's still a score scorecard. It's like still like I want to have meaning. And I definitely like I'm a capitalist.

But that's really tough when people go through that transition of like, okay, do I get a chef? Do I buy a new house? How much debt should I be considered? Where do I put the money? Do I put it in the S&P 500? Because everybody's got a business plan. And now all of your buddies go, hey, man, listen, I got this great idea for this restaurant.

I mean, unfortunately, I've invested in a couple of bars and restaurants. I'm going to stay. Like, I've learned the hard lessons, but luckily it was a small amount of money. But do you know what I'm saying? Have you seen that happen where people are like, now what? I got all this money, but I've kind of lost some of my passion. And they don't know what to do with the money. 100%.

I think there's two things that jump out to me when you describe that Tommy. One is for the owner who's standing to make life-changing money, in addition to Mike Sid and I, we have what we call an executive council. And these are, it's about 15 other field service executives. KB is one of them. And there's a handful of others that are all CEOs, CFOs, ops, HR, all the key functional areas that you would want and or need in a field service business. But they have all been through a transaction before. again, I know what I'm good at, and that's not a lot. And so I've surrounded myself with folks who are pretty good and have been through these other things before. Mike obviously has been through it multiple times of private equity. To be honest, that's probably one of the key questions. He gets asked the most is a business understand, hey, Mike, can we talk about kind of what you did after you sold in a similar way? Mike doesn't want to come back and run a business, but he wants to be connected and share his experiences. That's where our ambassador program comes in. And it's where our executive council can

really help coach people. I don't think you can simply go, you know, turn the light switch off. You just can't. You got to have some connectivity back into it. I don't have a silver bullet for it, though. That is tough. I think the other part, though, is what you were just saying, Tommy, which is you have to, it's almost like the point guard mentality. I'm a huge sports guy if you can't tell with some of the analogies I've used. But a great point guard does not care about. It's about delivering the ball at the right times for somebody else to score. And usually the guy dunk in the basketball or is on the highlight reel. It's not always the guy making the pass. We view our job and our executive's job should be great point guards. And so if you've got a field technician that's

living in an apartment, maybe the goal is so that he can live in a home and raise his two kids. And for the guy that's in one home to be able to send all of his kids to college, like that should be a better metric of success if we're doing what we say we're doing. And to be honest, you're talking about field services. These are human capital-based businesses fundamentally at the end of the day. That's what we should be building. And that's where, you know, when I'm dead and gone and hopefully when somebody says I have two cents worth of legacy, I would hope that it's not the dollars that we made, but it's the life-changing opportunities that came out of some of the effort that we're trying to put in. And most of the, you know, again, those two to three

out of 10 business owners we're talking with, we want them to share that same chemistry and mindset with us. And if they do, man, that's really powerful because you're talking about a lot times making investments in companies. Maybe EBIT got dog goes down for a year because you're going to put some expenses in beforehand. And if they care about what their people are and what they're going to be and knowing that that's the mindset of how we're going to be great, that's salt a lot of things you just talked about. It maintains the connectivity and it's kind of being part of something more than just yourself. I want to pivot a little bit and go a little bit back to leverage.

You know, I've kind of got the school of hard knocks and really learned how all this stuff works like to the T. Like, I understand when you take leverage, the company's paying on that. And as you probably heard about Renovo recently. Yep. You know, you're starting to see some of these companies that have this leverage. It's really hard when you're six or seven times leverage. to grow a business and have to make,

but it's a great return if you can pull it off. It actually makes a return way better for the founder and everybody that rolled equity as well. And that was a Black Rock company, and I've kind of got the inner workings of what happened. But, you know, I agree with you to not take on leverage that pivotal year when you've got to make, how do you go buy companies and how do you roll out companies in Greenfield

when you've got these covenants to pay all this debt? you know, it's a great, great fundamental question. Now, if you're, you know, if you're bringing in 50 plus million of EBITA, it's still levered a lot, though. I mean, what is your thoughts on that as far as, like, obviously you're not a big fan of leverage in the beginning, but it does really help. Like, if I want to get over-equitized and not have these massive bills,

it's crazy because I see a lot of companies that one bad year could really be a death spiral. Well, so there are a couple of things at play here is I just think about what I've seen and touched over the fears. And it's not to say I have it right. It's just my personal experience. Look, when you are investing out of a fund, you are focused on the portfolio. You're not necessarily, you're going to focus on each individual part of the portfolio, but sometimes things in the portfolio don't go well. Sometimes things do really great. But it can lead to some perverse incentives where you let your,

winners, you double down on them and the ones that aren't doing it as well, you kind of let it go. So you're willing to take excessive risk on leverage to maximize the outcomes from a financial standpoint. Totally get the math. It's an LBO and L in the front is leverage and that's why it's the first letter. I get it. At the same time, the way we do things at 16 South, we do not use a fund. We invest in each deal individually. And therefore, if that deal goes bad, that entire investment group is wiped. So my incentive to take maximum leverage is not there. The incentive is that that company needs to be a going concern forever. And I made a commitment to the legacy of that business owner that it will last in some form forever. So the incentive structure is such,

we will use leverage because we all want to make money and we all want it to be worth more than we initially started with. But we should not be taking excessive risk to put the company at risk and or to prevent growth opportunity. So we tend to, ultimately, we think of it as legacy preservation and building and prudent use of leverage at the prudent time. So it's more of a philosophy, and it's not always an Excel calculation, but that's how we have normalized for it. So again, for me, it's just business model.

Our approach is individual companies need to stand on their own, legacy preservation, and the piece we just talked about around building the right path for our employees, you can't do that if your seven turns levered. You just can't. And you don't know when the rainy day is going to come. And gosh, all we have to do is look back over the last five years and there's been more rainyer days and we thought were possible. But if you were ready for it, you could also take massive advantage of that stuff by having liquidity available to you. By having not gone too deep on debt up front.

So again, I'm not saying we have it right. It's just the way we think about the world. And we have found that more business owners tend to think that. that way but haven't had that option before. And so that's been, you know, a good thing for us from a legion perspective. One of the best things I always advise people when I talk to them is I say, go out there and get a delay, draw, term loan in place. Because the right opportunity when it's available doesn't mean you need to use the money. It's sitting there when it's, you're already got it locked in. And the right company calls you up and says, dude, I've had the coldest day of my life.

My wife's going to divorce me if I stay in Minnesota. I'm ready to sell the business. I'm Reddit, give it away at 3X. And you want that money there. And it's a process to get that loan available if you haven't gone to an investor yet. So that's a great thing. I mean, I love Dave Ramsey, and I think it's great for 99% of Americans. But when you understand how to use leverage to your advantage, you should take it. That approach, I think, Tommy, with the way you just described it is our exact approach. And I think having it there for a rainy day, again, it's, It's just not taking it to the max. It's taking it.

And I think most folks typically aren't doing that. They're taking it to maybe 80 or 90%. We're taking it more to like 40 or 50%. And I think as companies scale and we get our processes and procedures down, we could certainly increase that if we chose to. But that's now done as a partnership discussion, not something that we just established out of the gates before we built the trust with people. But I agree with you. It's a powerful thing. You should harness it.

Be prudent, be thoughtful, safe for the rainy day. You know, a lot of people, especially on social media, they bastardize private equity. And I got in a little debate, service titan, literally on stage. It was set up like a debate. And it was fun. It was me and Chris Hoffman. And I said, listen, my parents are in their 70s, man. Like, I got to really change their life forever and got, I get to experience them.

You know, money's not everything, but it gives freedom. And, you know, I got a great group. I love Cortec, and they've been really great for the company. And I got to help out a lot of people. And I think it's kind of selfish to not have a plan to sell. I really do, because the owner's taking all these draws every year. What about the leadership team? How do they change their life?

Yeah, they get bonuses at ordinary income. But there are a lot of misconceptions about private equity. I'm just curious from your take, what are some of the misconceptions. And we all know there's great ones. There's some ones that that aren't so great. But what do you have to say about that? Look, the private equity has lost the marketing war. I think there's the horror shows get way more attention than the really good situations.

I think net net private equity is a good thing. I think there's different flavors of it, of course. We've talked about that here with what we do versus others. But generally speaking, if you think about what the capitalistic world is about, it's about putting resources behind the best ideas and getting the most out of those. And unfortunately, not every idea is a good one. And not every business should exist forever. And that's part of the cleansing process of bankruptcy, for example. And there will be winners and losers.

And so part of what I think private equity and private investing tries to do, is establish an owner mentality outside of just the executive or the business owner, CEO, impress that ownership mentality and physical ownership of shares in some form to drive alignment and to create that, again, that leveling up from a financial standpoint. But it's not just the financial, and we've heard this on your podcast in a couple of different ways over the years, that it's incentive alignment and it creates people to think a little bit differently about what's going on and it's not just what is my little job, it's how does my job impact the whole and how do we work together to drive better outcomes? That to me, driving better outcomes for more people seems very

noble. And if we're putting money behind it to help drive that for all of us to win, and again, if it gets pressed down, that seems like a really, really good thing. It just gets monikered sometimes as private equity is bad. But look at some of the, I think the folks out on the West Coast, I believe it was Leonard Green and a few others had pushed some of these, you know, ownership down to the lowest level in some of these firms through like ESAP programs and the like. I'm not going to get into the specifics of those. But I think the more you can get people to think like an owner, the more you will win, the more folks that benefit from being an owner. And by the way, not everybody's ready for equity ownership, but I do think that's a big part of what folks ultimately

want can drive some really interesting things. That's one good thing about private equity. I think the other, you kind of hinted at this before, is just speed. For folks that are ready to go fast, there's usually resources and capital to do that. Our view is that's great, but our moniker is measure twice, cut once. We do not want to spend and go so fast that the wheels are coming off the vehicle. It's kind of like you floor the golf cart, you might swerve into the lake. go a little bit slow, go slow to go fast, and kind of that snowball will start to get going faster and faster and faster, and nothing will break. Again, we're legacy preservation too. So that's a little bit of a wandering answer because there's a couple of things in there about private equity.

I think net net it's good. The PR battle is one that is real. And that's why it's up to a podcast like this to explain to folks kind of where some of those nuances are and for them to ask the right questions and figure out what the right fit for them is. I think a big misconception is P.E. is going to spend money even if they have to lose. Like, I'll Greenfield into a market and plan on losing money to take market share. But this idea of a great operator, P.E. backed or not, there are great operators out there that know how to win the game. And those who could pay more per lead are always going to win. And everybody thinks P.E. is evil. They're just going to spend their way to the top.

But that's not the case. I mean, they've got debt. They've got to make money for the LPs. They've got reporting that they've got to do to. They've got people's pensions, teachers. and firemen and police officers. And it's not an easy job. And I just think they get a bad rap. And I think everyone says they're evil. They're so greedy. And I'm like, well, do you want to win?

Because I think everybody wants to win. And we want to win for our investors. We want to win for the people that we work with. And this idea that P.E.'s got it all figured out. I talk to P.E. companies all the time. And I'm like, these guys are really, really good at understanding debt and arbitrage. And they understand how to read a balance. sheet and they understand how to build a budget, but they have no idea the operational side that

goes in, and you can't cut your way to profit. And I think that's the biggest mistake that PE started to understand is don't end the vacations and the great trips you go on. Like, you've got to make people, like, you've got to look at the internal net promoter score. And I'm not saying every PE company does this, and I think they're getting smartest, don't cut stuff. And you could top grade people, and you could fit the missing people in the org chart. But this idea, and not every people, there's so many great companies out there that have been through this and they bring the knowledge and they bring the, like you've got obviously Mike. And that's a big advantage to have somebody like that on the team that's been through it. Did you have a comment on that? No, for sure. Couldn't agree with you more. I'm just thinking again, it's Thanksgiving week. And we just bought a business a couple of weeks ago. Business owner was 76 and he is moving on to his next chapter. But he's got three great direct reports. And the number one thing we've been focused on at the end of the year here is, what are the little things that we don't know that you do around holidays for folks and so forth?

And so our CEO right now is handing out gift cards to the team as they come back from the field today for Thanksgiving and a couple of the things. And I think it's that you just hit on Tommy like that's not in a spreadsheet somewhere, right? That's the we got to take the efficiency and the capital investments and the speed and we've got to balance it with these are real people. They live, breathe, just like everybody else. And we've got to do right by them. And almost every time you do the little things like that, it comes back in spades. And it's really, really simple stuff. I've got a 19-year-old son in college.

And he's smarter than his mom and dad. But he sees what we're doing. And he's like, dad, I want to go run a branch one day. And it's like, all right, what do you think you need to do that? And so this summer, instead of going and working in an office, he's probably going to be in the field somewhere turning a wrench. Because he knows if he's going to lead somewhere and he hasn't done that, no one's going to believe in that.

So I actually have a lot of faith that the private equity stuff you hit on, the connectivity with the people I think is going to be there. And you didn't ask this, but I'm actually getting pretty enthused about this younger generation and some of the folks coming out actually getting it because they care a little less about the money and more about the experience and think a little bit more worldly. and that's a great thing if we can harness that in our companies. I want to make this very valuable for the listeners. And I think one of the biggest mistakes,

I try to be the most curious guy in the room. I consider myself pretty humble. There's a difference between confident and cocky. And when I go in, I'm there to learn. I'm there to listen. And I think there's a lot of people listening that are probably thinking, I know a lot of them that I've talked to in the last week, thinking about having their first meeting.

what are some of the points of advice that you would give of what really attracts you? Obviously, I think some of the things, I'll just spit a couple out, is admitting there might be weaknesses in the business that doesn't make you look bad. Obviously, a PE company saying, what are the holes that we can help fix? If you say there's nothing wrong with the business, just leave me alone and you're very closed off and you're cocky and you talk about the cars you're going to buy, I think I could ruin a deal very quickly. but what are some of the best advice that you would give to somebody that that's going to be talking to several people? What attracts you to a founder and the business? Yeah, there's two things immediately, Tommy, that I think about authenticity and transparency. And by the way, that works both ways.

And some of the things you hit on there, I think, are exactly right. like there is no perfect business. But it takes, you know, it takes a little bit of confidence and or, you know, put yourself out there a little bit. But I feel like in conversations where those two things are taking place, you know pretty quickly. And it's hard for me to know if somebody's being perfectly transparent. But if you ask a question and say, hey, what are the, what's one great thing about your

business that does really well? And what's, you know, what's the one thing that you feel like you could be better at? And if they don't have, if they haven't thought about some of these things, they're probably not ready for a deal. And that's okay. Most of the time, we'll even give some folks some homework assignments to say, hey, maybe you haven't thought about this, but here's a couple things that, you know, let's talk again in a month and here's a couple things that would be great for you to give some thoughts to. A lot of it actually comes down to metrics where they think they have a good vibe on the business. And then we asked them, okay, for a month, once you took a tally mark

on a little sticky pad, every time you actually think that that happens. And we, we're when you come back a month later, they realize, oh, well, that didn't happen as much, but you know what did this. So a little bit of a mindset of, and I think we're all guilty of it, right? It's very easy to feel like we think we know what's going on, but until you really uncover it and start looking at the data and getting a little bit closer to it and getting into the vibe of in the feel of the game, that's kind of what we're shooting for. So if I'm, if I were advising a business owner what to do. Definitely, like, be authentic. If you really like certain things and, you know, tell people that. If you're scared about certain pieces,

tell them that. If, you know, ask questions. Ask them how they would handle certain things. You should be able to get a lot of quote unquote free advice out of this and you should obviously talk to more than one person. And I always feel like reference the reference. it's very easy for me to give people, you know, 100 references that we've worked with in the past. You should call, like, as far as I'm concerned, you should call everybody and anybody you can think of if you want to do a deal with 16 South. My reference list is anyone I've ever interacted with in my life. And there's going to be plenty of bad ones. I think there's more good than bad.

And don't be afraid to do those reference because I think a lot of people put those off to the side and just think that's a check the box. Man, you've got to do it. And talk to different types of people, you know, the business owner. that they've done work with, you know, ask about the deal that didn't go great and why, they should be able to tell you those things. So that authenticity and transparency should work both ways. I think it's kind of like, what would you do if you're, you know, going to go to, go to college, or you've got a new job and you're meeting new colleagues or you join a new team?

You just want to get to know people. Be curious. Ask the questions. Get to know the people as best you can because at the end of the day, these are people businesses and you'll find out pretty quick kind of what bucket you should be in. All right. You want to do a speed round? Give me with a.

Yeah, let's do it. Five questions, five or six. So as far as tech goes, what's some low-hanging fruit that you think could transform a home service company that you look for? Oh, man. The first thing I think of is just call center. A lot of people don't know how often stuff the phone's ringing. Like, he got to know top of the funnel. So we think of, you know, phone system as being number one.

The second one is really around field software. And I think the two pieces we think about there is being able to execute a transaction or a quote kind of very quickly in the field to get sign off and payment. And the other is really around, you know, driving efficiency in where our folks are going and why. So if we can solve those three things with tech, which I think, you know, you can do without kind of upsetting the the apple cart. Those are the three that we kind of quickly look to look to as good levers to pull. What is the fastest way to kill growth? Fastest way to kill growth. Well, I think there's two kinds of growth. If the business is already growing and we're talking to them, it's changing what they're doing. Now, that's hard for guys and gals that sit in our seat because we want to tinker.

but if it's working, take a step back and try to really understand all the things that are going into why it's growing. And I think that's where, so we try to take a more observe and learn approach when we see that already in a business because what they think might be driving it may not be. And if we're trying to repeat that, let's learn. If a business is not growing, that's different. That becomes a question of what does that owner need to do that? And do we have the capability as a partner to achieve that or not? So it requires some discipline on our part where if we can't really effectuate that growth, maybe we should say no. But we kind of take the money part off the table because we don't use a lot of levers.

We can usually effectuate growth with some investment. So don't be afraid to invest. If it's already growing, really understand the reasons why it's growing before effectuating any change so that you can double down the stuff that works and don't double down on something that really doesn't impact the growth scene and then really understand sometimes business. struggle for reasons that aren't on paper, and it's the people. And so you got to understand those roadblocks as well. So those are the three things that kind of quickly come to mind. I just got a person, well, this is kind of a greedy question. But what if you saw a company out there growing 30% a year and they had 30% of the bottom line? What would be, would you consider, maybe they're not paying their people enough, maybe they're charging too much, or would you

feel good about it? What would be your first inclinations? My first inclination is if you're growing, if you have 30 points to the bottom line, you're probably using technology in a way that's different. You probably have the best people in the market. And it wouldn't surprise me that you'd be growing at 30%. Because if you think about the industries we're working in, they're super fragmented. And while the industries may only be growing at 3 to 5%, because there's so much market share to get, if you've got a real real. good mousetrap, you can absolutely, you know, grow four or five, six times the market. So I've seen it. So for me, I'm probably, that wouldn't freak me out. I think to a typical

investor, people would say, man, there's maybe more downside than upside in that situation. I would tend to look at a business like that and say, wow, they probably are doing a bunch of things great, but I bet there's some things that we can learn with them and, you know, again, playbook, systematize what they've done and maybe apply to some other companies to help level them up. And that's where the value creation would come as we have the foundation. Now we just need to apply the 80-20 rule that can be brought to other businesses. So if you got those, Tommy, send them my way. We'd love to talk to them.

They're out there. When you see an operator who scales from an operator who struggles, what separates the two? Typically, the one that struggles is the bottleneck. They've not invested and or sort of parsed out parts of the business by making a key hire and they're trying to keep it all altogether. The reality is none of us are capable of doing that. We've got to have teams to help us do that. I know it's hard to make the investment to do so.

I would just encourage anybody who's struggling with something like that and you're not sure if you should make the hire, you should probably make two hires yesterday. And you'll find that you're going to start to break things loose in a good way. For those that are doing well, I think it's more, look, the world is never as bad or as good as you think it is. So when you have the tough day, it's probably a little better than you think. And when you have the great day, it maybe isn't so great. It's probably more average, like trying to get hung up on the highs and lows and look at it more over a longer period of time. So those that I think who are who are doing it well tend to take that more measured approach. So I think measured and then again probably creating a little bit

more help for yourself than you think you need. And I'm as guilty of this as anybody. If you can get that kind of in your in your process of how you do things, you'll end up, I would suspect growing. And at the worst case, you'll be way more happy because you have more smart people around the table to help solve some of the challenges that you've got. That's right. I agree with you wholeheartedly. What is a belief that you had early in your career that you completely changed your mind about? You know, I thought for a long time that money solved everything and it just doesn't. You know, we hit on this a little earlier in our discussion.

It just doesn't check all the boxes, at least not for me. I have seen it solved some problems like initially, but eventually it doesn't. care happiness and or purpose. And I think people need both of those. You know, happiness is something that we probably only get for minutes out of our whole lifetime, if we're really being honest about it. So I think, you know, life is a little bit more about the journey than the destination. And I think falling in love with that is really important.

And if you get that part, it means like achieving that one paycheck and, you know, or achieving the big outcome on exit. Like, that can be really fun and that, but that can also be fleeting. So I think the purpose and the journey is really kind of probably what keeps you coming back to the podcast and talking with, you know, guys like me that are trying to figure it out. And it's what gets me up in the morning to go talk to business owners is to kind of figure this stuff out and it's ever evolving and changing. And I think when you really fundamentally think about the world that way, it's just changed my outset and outlook on things and kind of help navigate some stuff that I thought could have been solved with money before. But the reality is that was probably not. not what was the lead cause. So a lot of what we try to do is come back to just core principles, you know, servant leadership is something we believe hard in, something we believe in our family.

Like we have a, I'll come back to sports again. If you're a Notre Dame fan and you're running out of the locker room, you have, you know, slap up on the board that you're a champion today. In our house, we have a little board that says grit and grace. And you've got to have both of those every day. And if you're not slapping that sign by achieving both of those things, you're probably not going to have a good day. So go do those two things, and usually the day works out pretty good.

You know, you remind me of Jim Carrey once said, I wish everybody had an experience to be very rich and very famous, then they'd understand that it's not the answer. Amen. Because literally, more money, more problems. That's true for most people. After 20 years in the middle market, what's one piece of advice you wish more business owners understood

before going through a sailor capital? raise. The, I think that, you know, timing really does matter and understanding sort of where you are in that, you know, we talk about, for example, when is the time going to be right? And I can't control market dynamics. I can control decisions that, you know, we make in 16 South and we can influence decisions that are happening in our portfolio companies. So I think understanding that you're never going to be able to time it right, but you are going to know when you're ready for help. And so focusing more on partner than last dollar is probably the most important thing. And if somebody really is about last dollar, that's great.

Like that can work. But like we just talked about with the money piece, you're probably going to miss some stuff. And you may not be creating the right environment for your whole team and the legacy of your business. And so I think making sure that you're going into for the right reasons or at least knowing what those reasons are so that you have a true north that you can come back to as you're going through a process. I mean, if I think about a typical exit that might take anywhere from three or four months on the really fast side to it might take 12 to 15 months. And usually something is something in between there. But, you know, that's a long, it's a long time period. you're running a business in addition to kind of going through the process itself of either selling

or bringing on a partner. It's stressful. So making sure you know and remember why you're doing it and kind of coming back to that consistently, I think will really help make sure you make a good long-term decision and not one that's fleeting. And you look back a year or two saying, I mean, why'd I do that? Because this should be, you know, anytime you partner with somebody, that should be a top five life moment. You know, getting married, having kids, you know, you kind of go down the list of the things. you look back on when it's, you know, it's all gone. I would think kind of building a business

and bringing on a partner would be right up there. So take the care to do it right and know that it, you know, make a longer term decision on it because you have to live with it and it's going to be one of those kind of top five decisions you're going to make in your life. I was just thinking about that yesterday. I have a bunch of family in town and we got like eight Christmas trees and we were just sitting around the fire and I was like, I really enjoy being able to spend that time. And it was a pivotal moment when we decided to join Cortec and I'm one of the lucky ones because they've been nothing but amazing to us. If you had a chance to sit down with 22-year-old Johnny, what would you tell him?

Oh, man. Don't date Margaret. No, I'm kidding. No, funny, I was going to say the opposite. I should have asked my current wife to get married sooner than we did. That would be one. The second one is have an extra kid, not one. less. And I think the biggest one is just from kind of going back to if it's all about the money,

you will ultimately probably not be satisfied in the end. And just so kind of keeping core to that. I mean, look, I, you know, from 22 to 48, I had some goals. And if I think about what they were, the vast majority of them up until I was 40 were 100% financial goals. And, you know, I had to spend a lot of time away from the family that you don't get back. And, yeah, that stinks. And it stinks to feel like, man, maybe I made some, you know, decisions there that maybe worked out financially. But I can't get those moments back with family and kids. And I feel fortunate that I'm close to everybody and we enjoy the same things.

We do plenty of family stuff now. I think that's the one thing. Build for legacy. Build for what's great around you. Be authentic. Have goals for sure. But the journey is okay too. And the journey is probably more important because when you reach the goal,

you're just going to set another one. So enjoy the journey. It's fun. It's okay to fail. You should because if you don't fail, you're probably not going to learn. So that's kind of the philosophy we have in our house. And also 22-year-old Johnny,

would say, don't spend so much on haircuts because it's not going to matter in the long term. Yeah. I love it. Is there any books that are not like Napoleon Hill or Del Carnegie, The Bible, you know, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, E-Mith, like just more unconventional books that really impacted your life or business strategy? I don't know necessarily business strategy. I'm actually in the middle of reading one right now. If I had it right next to me, it's called Inner Excellence.

and by Jim Murphy. I recommended it from a buddy who was a private equity CEO and is now retired. And it's really neat. You may remember it. It was in the news, actually, not too long ago. I think it was AJ Brown and the Philadelphia Eagles was reading this book on the sidelines.

And it's a really interesting read. I haven't gotten all the way through it, but it's a little bit about freeing up how you think about performance and moments. And so it's like, you know, when you're eight years old shooting the free throw in the driveway with no time left, like you're not stressed. But all of a sudden, the 22 year old is in the NCAA tournament and is a 90% shooter and misses two in a row. Like, how does that happen? And it's because your brain gets in the way of how you think about the process and the journey and putting more pressure or less pressure on certain situations. And it's a way to free you up a little bit.

And so I think about what we've talked about here for the last hour or so, you know, we're probably. our own worst enemies. Me, you, the business centers we work with, we get in our own heads. And it's a way to maybe just take a step back and think about the world just a little bit differently and not let ego get in the way. So again, I'm really curious how this book ends.

And I'm a bad reader, Tommy. I get usually halfway through books and they get put down. I suspect I'll finish this one. But that's one. But most of the other stuff I'm read. I'll read kind of one of these a quarter. And I'm listening to podcasts. And if I'm reading other stuff, it's more for fun to get my mind off business.

How do people reach out to you if they want to get in touch to you? What's the best way? Best way. I mean, I'd be happy to share my information here with you guys. I mean, I do give out my cell phone number. I don't know if it's on our website or not. The 16 South website, I don't think has our info. LinkedIn's great.

But my view is I always answer the third. phone unless it legitimately says telemarketer on my caller ID. It's hard for me to tell all our companies that they should pick up the phone every time it rings if I don't do it myself. So, yeah, call, text, email is all great. LinkedIn, super easy. If you can't find me and somebody who's connected to us on our network, ask them. They should kind of know how to find us too.

But yeah, 16 South. And I'll circle back with you and you can figure out if you want to share anything on me or us. I don't know where this podcast goes, so I won't give my cell phone out here. But if somebody gets it, call any time. What's your LinkedIn? LinkedIn. It's just my name, Johnny Conklin, 16 South. We'll find it.

It's J-O-H-N-N-Y. And I am Johnny. I'm John the 4th. So you can imagine our holidays are a mess with all the John's running around. Yeah. So I'm Johnny Conklin. All right. Last thing, we talked about a lot of stuff.

And by the way, I think this is really educational. I love hearing from your perspective. of how you think because it's a life decision that people got to make. So I really appreciate you sharing everything you did. Maybe we didn't talk about something. Maybe there's something still on your mind. I'm going to give you a chance to just close us out for the audience, anything you want. Yeah, I mean, look, this is maybe more philosophical than anything.

You know, work is hard. Life is hard. I feel like with all the distractions we get on TV and social media and all those things. I come back to something I said before. it's never as bad as you think. You're not alone. There's people out there that want to help you. You know, and go chase your dreams. Like it's so easy for folks to get down and don't think they've got a shot. You do. And there's people out there that want to help you. Find the people in your life that make you feel good and will support you. And if there's folks that aren't doing that and they're bringing you down, get them out of your life like yesterday. I firmly believe that the more that you can sort of feed the soul and get the tough stuff out, the more you can focus on actually solving problems.

I'm not going to tell you you're going to be happy or that it's going to be easy. But I'm a big believer that business is personal. If it's not, you're probably not going to win against those of us that feel that way. And so if it is personal, then you've got to get right on the personal. personal side and be willing to make some investments in yourself and then ultimately your family and then from there you'll do better. So that's the approach that I try to take. I'm sure I fail there a lot. I've got a family that supports me. I've got a business team that supports me. And I try to wake up every day to feel like how I can do the same thing back for them.

And that just to me creates a much better environment to be in. So if you're out there and you're not sure what to do, it's going to be better. Invest in yourself. Take the time to do it and eliminate some of the stuff that in particular people that that aren't reinforcing good things for you. And I think you'll find better days ahead. Love it. Invest in the people you have a common future instead of a common past. Johnny, this was amazing. I really appreciate you taking the time today.

Thanks, Tommy. Good to be with you and your listeners. And I'll look forward to continue to listening to all the good things you have to share with the industry. And it's a great place to be. Good speaking with you. Thanks, brother. Appreciate it. Hey there.

Thanks for tuning into the podcast today. Before I let you go, I want to let everybody know that Elevate is out and ready to buy. I can share with you how I attracted a winning team of over 700 employees in over 20 states. The insights in this book are powerful and can be applied to any business or organization. It's a real game changer for anyone looking to build and develop a high-performing team like over here at A1 Garage Door Service. So if you want to learn the secrets to help me transfer my team from stealing the toilet paper to a group of 700-plus employees rowing in the same direction, head over to Elevate and Win.com. slash podcast and grab a copy of the book. Thanks again for listening and we'll catch up with you next time on the podcast.