Host: The Entrepreneurship through acquisition club at MIT hosted a virtual summit on March 11, and I moderated one of the panels. It was about when and how to make changes at the business you acquire. Always a challenge for acquisition entrepreneurs. Today's episode is a rebroadcast of that panel, which was a lot of fun for me, largely because of how good the panelists were. Just what you want as a moderator, transparent, historical, engaged, lots of stories. Those panelists were Trish Higgins, a familiar name to many of you. Kush Das and Marcus Scott. They introduced themselves at the top of the panel, so I'll skip that here. But one more quick note about the summit. It was the sixth annual ETA at MIT Summit. 469 tickets sold, up from 162 two years ago. So that is a tripling of attendance in two years. A testament, I'm sure, to the leadership of the club, but also to the growth of acquisition entrepreneurship at the most prestigious business schools in the country. So pretty cool to see so much interest in eta. And with that, here's the panel. Welcome to Acquiring Minds, a podcast about buying businesses. My name is Will Smith. Acquiring an existing business is an awesome opportunity for many entrepreneurs, and on this podcast I talk to the people who do it. As you can imagine, podcasters love to connect with and hear from the audience. I am no different, and one quick and easy way to do that is LinkedIn. Many of you have already reached out to me via LinkedIn. Thank you for that, but I figured I would mention it here on the pod and encourage everyone else to do the same. Connect with me. Let me know what you'd like to hear more of, or if you're searching how that's going. It's really cool to hear from you. Just search Will Smith acquiring minds on LinkedIn or on Google. That should also turn up my LinkedIn profile toward the top of the results. Just make sure to search for Will Smith Acquiring Minds. If you search just Will Smith, there's this other guy that'll appear first. See you on LinkedIn. Welcome to the panel on making Transformational Changes. We all know that one of the big opportunities in ETA is bringing our fresh set of eyes, our new energy to the businesses that we acquire. And in many ways that's really kind of the point of search. But at the same time, we also know that many searchers have been burned by trying to change too much too soon, changing the wrong thing at a business they've acquired. So this eagerness to improve the businesses that we acquire, that is so characteristic of searchers it can also be hazardous. So getting buy in from the team that might be resistant to change, you don't yet have trust. The time it takes to build that trust, your own ignorance, you might see opportunities that you think are great to improve, only to find out later you've done more harm than good. So figuring out when and what and how to change the business that you've acquired requires nuance. My name is Will Smith and I host a podcast called Acquiring Minds that's devoted to acquisition entrepreneurship. I've interviewed dozens of searchers and acquisition entrepreneurs and the topic of today's panel comes up again and again. So without further ado, let's introduce the panelists and we will get into it. Panelists, if each of you would give your name the business that you acquired, when and how many employees there were at the time that you acquired it. Trish Higgins, would you start us off?

[3:50] Guest: Sure. Thanks for having me here today. Happy to be part of the conference. So I sort of wear two hats. One is I founded a firm called Chenmark in 2015 with my husband and brother in law and we've acquired with the goal of acquiring small businesses from retiring owners. And under that platform we've acquired basically nine platform businesses. And so I can certainly bring that perspective to the panel. But right now I'm actually running one of our businesses myself as CEO. We acquired that business in early 2020. It's in the tourism space, so probably the worst time ever to buy a tourism business. But thankfully we've made it through all right. And at the time it actually only had to employees because it's a seasonal business and it was an off season and then we ramp up to about 30 in season. So that's me.

Host: Kush, you want to go ahead?

Guest: Sure.

Host: Kush Das, the CEO of Noble Care. We have about 225 employees, about five states. It's a healthcare clinical provider delivery business. So we do primary palliative and hospice care. And I acquired it in September of 2021, so a fresh five months ago and started my search actually right as Covid was starting. So I've only known Covid searching and Covid operating so far, but it looks like we're coming out of the tunnel, which is great. Great. You're in it. Marcus, please. Yes, no, likewise, excited to be here today. Appreciate you guys having me. But Marcus Scott, I am the CEO or chief dog as Kush pointed out of IQ Monitoring, which is a remote video monitoring company based in Atlanta, Georgia, bought the business in 2015 after searching for almost two years, one year, 11 months and 12 days. Not that I was counting, but bought the business 2015 when it had 15 people and had been the CEO since, fortunately grown well. But one other question, well, that you mentioned was scale of 1 to 10, how smooth was it? And I would say a zero on a scale of 1 to 10 for me personally, but have survived, albeit with a little bit less hair over the last six and a half years. Well, let's get that number from Kush and from Trish as well on the transition, the smoothness of each of your transitions. Trish, choose maybe the tourism business. Whichever you want. Grade it in your own mind. Scale of 1 to 10, 1 being Marcus level, terrible, 10 being smooth as butter.

[6:38] Guest: Sure. So I'd say within the Chenmark network we have had a range of experiences and some of those experience meant that my expectations are quite low. So I was pleasantly surprised. With the tourism business, I would have given it maybe an 8 because mostly because we'd had such terrible experiences before that this one was actually very, very smooth. I was very, very fortunate for that.

Host: Yeah, in my case, I'm going to split the score. So I'm going to say on the people side went well, solid seven or eight and probably like a one on the process side, which I will just try to avoid buying complex regulatory businesses in multiple states and that won't happen. But once you're there, I don't think, you know, we didn't know. We didn't know until we didn't know it. And so I went through quite a bit of fun to get all that set up.

Guest: I would sort of say that I think my experience went well because everybody felt so bad for me because I bought a tourism business the last week of February of 2020 that like everybody was just like, whatever you need, like, we're happy to help you out.

Host: Well, let's kick it off talking about day one. So day one is the tail end of what is likely a multi month, or in Marcus's case, I don't remember what it was, but one year, nine month and three days search. Maybe a tense acquisition negotiation, but you've gotten your deal across the finish line and now as they say, the real work begins. And day one is your big day to go in and meet everybody. Probably sometimes you may have already met folks, but you come in and you make a big announcement. So I'd love to hear from each of you what that was like, what you first communicated to your teams. And specifically with respect to change, that's often one of the Things that the inherited team wants to hear about, how much change is there going to be change, et cetera. And then follow up question. Also, just internally, talk to us about what you said externally, but internally, what was going on with your emotions. It's always nice to hear about how people are feeling in these big moments. Marcus, you want to go first? Yeah, happy to. For me and my background, I came out of middle market private equity. I had seen a fair number of very good transitions and also some very bad ones. And kind of my general strategy was that I didn't want there to be a day one announcement, so to speak. I really wanted in kind of those last weeks of the deal for people to start to get to know me and then to pull everybody together to talk about the vision. And so that's how I handled it. As I really spent the last month of the deal, I got the seller convinced on all of this stuff. Obviously that's part of that dynamic. But I spent the last month of the deal really working out of their offices and getting to know people. And then day one made the announcement like, hey, obviously we're done with the transaction, excited to be working alongside of you all. And I didn't announce on that day any big vision changes. It was just that, hey, I really want to get to know you guys and what your vision is for the business where I can put resources to help all of us get to where we want to go and growing this business and being a great opportunity for our families. So that's kind of how I pitched it. Now, internally, my emotions were completely different, so. So I was excited, nervous as hell, scared about all of the potential outcomes that could happen. We actually had on the day before the deal actually closed, a fairly major HR issue that I got sucked into as the money was getting wired around the country to different people. So I was incredibly scared in my first operational dynamic on whether or not we were going to be successful, but glad at least that I handled it that way where at least the intention of day one was to not make big changes and just to build relationships. Anybody else? Yeah, I think mine was pretty recent. Sometimes it still feels like day one, not an extended way. I think when we started on our true post Close Day 1, my goal was not actually to talk to every employee that day, but rather to focus on the existing. So again, a little bit different, right, because we had different market leaders in the different states. And so what we couldn't do was be everywhere at one time. So my first goal in the first week actually was I met first in the Zoom call on the first day with the 11 executives, which are both kind of functional leaders and the market leaders. And then I said, look, I'm going to grab lunch and dinner with each of you over the course of the next week. So that first week, that's all I did was I had a lot of lunches, a lot of dinners, and then spent the evenings doing other stuff. That was some of the other work that had to be done. And then we scheduled a couple all hands town halls by Zoom the following week. And so by that time, the executives were a bit bought in. I'll talk about how they were brought in, but they were excited about it. They were already socializing with their employees. So by the time the, you know, the kind of ground level personnel and the middle managers got to hear about it, it was already not new news. And the town halls were basically them asking me a ton of questions. Me being super open about it and just answering all the questions after my short five minutes feel, and then talking about the open door policy, letting people actually email me directly. I had hospice aides from Georgia sending me text messages about random questions they had about mileage reimbursement. It's funny because you don't expect to get a question about mileage reimbursement right on the first day. I actually at that point couldn't even tell you what the mileage reimbursement was for that employee in Georgia. Um, but it was interesting, right? Cause like the door was opened, the conversation started and that that's how we kicked off

[12:49] Guest: the.

Host: You know, the biggest thing I'd recommend from the whole, like how to do it okay and not pull your hair out is like just the prospective planning with the sellers makes a huge difference. And then to know that you obviously can't plan for everything, and then I think from an emotional standpoint, knowing that you can't plan for everything, you just gotta be ready to go with the flow a little bit and be okay with some of the curve balls that are thr your way. But there's no way to get around the fear factor. I mean, I was nervous as hell. I think I was. You know, I didn't know what that first day was going to be. Didn't know what each dinner was going to be, didn't know what different personalities were going to be. I'd met a couple of the folks beforehand, but it was very like kind of arm's length and transactional versus like when you sit down and talk about what you're going to work on together for the next two, three, four, five years. It's very, very different. And so the, that was the beginning. And then, you know, I think since then, the people part, which I gave a high rating to during the scoring. Right. Was great. And then obviously a lot of the process stuff was stuff that we had to work on too. And kush, your business, you said 220 employees. Yes. And it's not a remote business if you're going to dinner or lunch with folks.

Guest: No.

Host: And so, I mean it's, you know, it's a healthcare delivery business. Right. So these are clinicians. I have a bit of a clinical background myself, which helped. And so the. We do have offices. So we have, you know, five brick and mortar offices. And I went to each of the offices during the course of those lunches, dinners, and have since made a lot of those office visits as well. And it's remote to the extent that a lot of my executives are remote and they go in and out of the office a lot. But all the care delivery is very. Not remote. Yeah, sure. Great. Trish, on your day one, everyone was huddled around the cable news watching Covid unfold on tv.

Guest: Yeah. I will say that I'm a pretty introverted person. And so day one, I sort of hate because there's so much sort of anxiety and on sort of the seller's part, buyers part, the employees part. And you know, for me personally, sort of standing up in front of a group of people is pretty much like, with the spotlight on me is like the last thing I ever want to do. So I always try to remind myself that, like, it really isn't just about the first day. It's about like every day after that and showing up and doing a good job. But the first day is very symbolic. And I think for me, I kind of followed what we've sort of learned internally about kind of what has worked for us, which is, you know, not to come in and make some huge presentation about all the things that we're going to do, but, you know, rather just come in, introduce ourselves in a more casual way and then just set up a lot of one on ones with people and just kind of go with an open mind to hear about what's going on. What, what do you think is working well? What do they think is not working well? Those sorts of things. So ask people all, you know, have a framework for questions and say, you know, I'm not coming here with an agenda. I'm just coming here to continue on the great, you know, legacy that has been built. We bought this because it was a good company and we want to continue operating it like that. One thing that has worked well for us is we have found that at the beginning, a lot of times we've gotten caught off guard with people want to talk about wage increases sort of off the bat first thing. And those have always sort of caught us off guard. We don't necessarily know if that's the right or wrong thing to do. So tried to preempt that by just saying, listen, you know, I am not going to be making any wage decisions until 90 days in. And so just be very transparent with that and communicate it and say like, I don't. I'm just getting my bearings here. I need to learn. I don't even know how to make that decision right now. But I promise you that if that's something you want to talk about, then, you know, three months from now we'll come back and we'll talk about that. And made sure that I followed up and was good on that promise. But that was something that I found has been very helpful to set that framework up front. So it's not like, hey, nice to meet you, I need a $2 an hour wage. And you're like, increase. And you're like, I don't even know your name. So that's one thing that's been helpful. But the first day at the tourism business was we were in off season, so it was quite slow. And to be honest, the owner didn't really set me up well because he didn't tell his employee, his sort of the top guy, didn't tell him that the transition was happening. As somebody who'd been in the business 20 plus years was the only job he had. And the owner who was in Florida when the transaction happened, just called him up and said, by the way, I sold the business, some energetic young lady named Trish is going to call you at some point. And that's all I told him. So that got off to a little bit of a rocky start because you can imagine people in the some aspects of the tourism business are not super familiar with corporate transactions. So that was a little rocky start, but we made our way through it

[18:02] Host: well on that point. And I feel like there's been a theme to your all of your answers that a gradual transit gradually dripping out the awareness of the transition is better than showing up day one and saying, hey guys, I'm the new owner. Although I understand that that still can happen. It does happen. But in none of your cases did it sound like it really happened that way. Except for you, I guess, Trish. And that that was not the appropriate way to do that. So on this point of how not to do things and how to do things, let's have some more examples. I'd like to hear a win and a loss from each of you on specifically, not just the transition, but specifically implementing changes, something that you did well in implementing changes that you wanted to see, and then something you'd recommend people not do that you did in fact do. Kush, you want to go?

Guest: Sure.

Host: On the good side. So I think you mentioned the listening is really important and understanding what people are feeling and what problems they have uncovered over the many, many that have been part of the business is also really important. And there's a bit of intuition to it too. So for in our case, for example, just to get super tactical, we have a care coordination team that supports a bunch of our providers who are in the field. Right. Being a provider in the field is very lonely because you're by yourself with your laptop and your patient and you feel sometimes isolated and don't get the support. And previously they had done this thing where the providers are basically supported by an anonymous teams chat of care coordinators that goes through our EMR platform that we own. What I realized right away was that providers want to know who's actually helping them. The people who are helping them actually want to get to know the providers. And so one of the changes we did make relatively quickly, about 45 days after close, was like a pretty intuitive change, which is to just map it out one for one, right? So like one can. Because it's the staffing ratios, by the way, worked out. It was already one for one we just made. Instead of it being anonymous care coordinator to anonymous provider, anonymous group to anonymous provider, we made it. Dr. Lee now knows Ms. Jones really well. And that's it. We put them together. We had a really simple get to know each other conversation. And then people got pretty happy with how it worked in terms of feeling personally connected to each other, like a team in a virtual way providing services to a collective patient population. The only reason that went well was because I think it was something people just wanted but didn't understand that they wanted it and didn't understand how to get to it quickly. And so it was almost like unlocking a roadblock rather than turning the ship. I think that's why, frankly, it was an easier change and transition to make. And we're seeing the fruits of it from a revenue standpoint without Diving into the details of revenue cycle Management Board, we're actually seeing actual growth that results from that, which is cool. On the bad side, so many things I think the easiest thing to talk about is like things like pto, right? Things like PTO matter a lot. And sometimes in small businesses they're set up in a very kind of nonsensical way. Right. In our case we had eight different PTO policies that none of which made sense. Lump sum, not accrual, anniversary date, recycling. And like this is super tactical, I know I'm getting into details here. But like the, none of it really made any sense. Right. And obviously the feeling when something doesn't make sense is fix it. Now that is not necessarily the right feeling, especially for something that's as important as pto. And so we started first of all to get like ad hoc. The sellers just answer ad hoc questions by themselves. Every time a PTO question came on, they'd make a pseudo policy based and pseudo judgment based decision on the PTO policy. As that started happening to us, I wasn't really ready to do that. And so I wanted to make a PTO change and just clarify the policies. And I was like, why wouldn't we do that quicker? And then we kind of opened a Pandora's box because again, there were a lot of if then statements that I had no idea, like some of the permutation combination of those ad hoc PTO issues that could come up until we like started to flush them out. Right. And so the lesson I learned out of that and which by the way, we're still working on clarifying the PTO policies three months later and are in the process of like maybe finally getting to a solution that everyone is comfortable with that has like a graduality, gradualness to it rather is that every time I think it's going to take one conversation takes 10, and every time I think it's going to take one day, it's probably going to take five. And I do need to socialize and syndicate and hear from enough people when it's like a PTO bossy type issue that we have solved the problems and thought through the implications before we make any of those changes. I think that's one where you got to figure out the things that matter, figure out things that don't, and then really spend a lot of time on the things that do. Trish, what about you?

[23:16] Guest: Sure. So I think one mistake that we have certainly made is going in and saying that we're not going to make any changes. And I think that the tendency on that is to say, oh, well, we're coming in and we want things to continue on for the long term and things are going to be the way they were under the old owner. And you shouldn't do that because it's a lie. We didn't realize it was, but it is because we have our own views on how pretty much everything should be done. And we're going to change those things to an extent where you may not even realize how much you're going to change going into the business. Even something like a PTO policy that might entirely change, you might not even be on your radar screen. It's something that people really care about it. We have certainly gotten ourselves into a lot of trouble in the early days by coming in and communicating, oh, don't worry, yeah, it's an acquisition, but everything's fine, nothing's going to change. And then we really shoot ourselves in the foot because then a week later we're like, oh, we actually need to change this policy, or we need to have a new system here or there. And then not only are we introducing change, broadly speaking, we're also liars because we said nothing was going to change. We have to dig ourselves out of that hole as well. We made the problem even worse by trying to sort of quell any fears people had with new owners. So I think that the best thing that we've done is to come in and just be on front and say, yeah, like there is going to be change here. But I promise that we'll talk to people, we will take people's opinions into consideration. And even if you don't agree with the policy or a change is happening, you will understand why it is being made. And when we've done that, we've been able to at least make people feel sort of respected and heard in the process. And that can be everything from, you know, we typically move people to being paid every two weeks of every one week. That is a big transition. We generally change benefits policies. We have a new health care program because everyone has to be under the Chen Mark umbrella, which healthcare, being different, even if it's better, is stressful for everyone. We may be bringing in new pricing policies, new systems, even something like changing from Microsoft to G Suite will cause just so much stress amongst people. For me, it's really about not necessarily having one change that went well, but communicating there will be changes and this is how decisions are going to be made.

[26:11] Host: I'm happy to answer as well, but I agree with Trish, I think on that One point around making sure that you don't under promise the reality of what's about to happen both in terms of this acquisition and tuck insense certainly have seen that play out. But on what we did wrong, although I can give you a long list here, I will combine two things. One, don't buy a business with a seller that lacks integrity unless you're ready to roll up your sleeves and get punched in the gut a whole lot. And then more importantly with that, don't expect that your motives are going to be trusted. Most people in terms of a transition are going to naturally distrust a new leader. And it's kind of on you to be able to be vulnerable and build relationships and build up that trust. But it's very difficult to do in a culture that is established by somebody who lacks integrity. But I didn't really appreciate how big of a task that would be for us just to catch you guys up a little bit. Seller during due diligence, we found some things that suggested they might be a little bit of a snake in the grass. I naively thought we could just paper around those issues and I thought, starting to get to know the culture that people would really latch on to a new leader coming in and fixing all the things that they were complaining about and naturally just trust my intentions that we were going to steer the business in the right direction. That did not end up being the case. So most of my first year was dealing with massive HR issues, needing to switch out team members that just lacked integrity. Longer case study over drinks of all the things that happened. But it ended up being a massive distraction for the first 12 months because I was just fixing issues with people that made it very difficult to focus on things that actually drove future value. Right. The end of this story is I ended up in litigation with the seller two months into the transaction. He was trying to compete against the business through his wife. He thought he could get around the non compete, non solicit that way. We got an injunction. I put my head down into litigation, became an expert of all things litigation, which does not drive value for those of you who don't know that. And I did everything besides focus on growing the business. But what came out of that is I did something really right, which is it forced me to really learn the business. And I can't stress enough for people. That is the first thing I think people should do when they buy a company. Learn the business. You're going to spend a lot of time and due diligence developing a plan that always goes up and to the right of all the great things that are going to happen when you take over. But the best things I've heard from people who have done really well and built great companies is they usually just latched on to people inside the organization for whatever was really important about the future of the business and walked alongside those people to learn the business. And for me, with 15 people to start, I lost our bookkeeper two weeks in after she decided to announce to the entire customer list that the transaction had happened without talking to us. So I became a bookkeeper overnight. I was the only salesperson after getting rid of the seller. We had a virus hit our servers in week two that shut down our ability to communicate with customers. So I had to learn it. I found out a bunch of customers who had told us in due diligence they were super happy, weren't. And so I was on a roadshow in front of customers, building relationships and understanding what those issues were. But all of those things that came out of that is that by the time I got to six months, I knew the business incredibly well and it helped paint the vision for where we eventually took the company, which has been a great story since. So the best thing I think that came out of that is that it forced me to. Into a place where I had to get to know the business really well. You're talking a lot about trust, Markus, and what a trust deficit there was at your business. But regardless of whether or not there's a trust deficit at the business that you. That you acquire, you, you're all going to need to. To earn the trust of the team that you inherited. Inherited. And that's going to be certainly for large changes, really a prerequisite before you can start making those large, particularly those large changes. And we all know that intuitively and we all say that it takes time to earn trust. But I'd like to hear each of you talk about that just in a little bit more depth. What was the character of you earning trust at your organizations? And did you do anything to proactively earn trust? Can somebody do anything proactively to earn trust? Or is it just being the new leader and being there and listening to people and just exercising EQ and time? And Trish, why don't you go first, since you with your story of the gentleman who'd been working in the business for 20 years and then he's got here, he hears he's got a new boss by the name of Trish. How did you earn his trust? Or have you earned his trust?

[31:06] Guest: I Hope so. I hope so. Some of it is like you just can't rush. It does take time and there's no substitute for that, I think there. But what do you do during that time? In my opinion, you show up, you listen, you try to work hard, lead by example in terms of your work ethic. And in my case, you take on. I don't sit in an office all day just telling people do things. I am out in the business interacting with customers, interacting with employees, doing, you know, I see a piece of garbage, I'm picking it up or sweeping the floor or whatever needs to be done. So I'm making sure that it's clear that I am trying to lead from the front. I do think that establishing personal rapport can go a long ways. So sharing information about my personal life, about what's going on with my kids or things like that especially, and engaging with people on a personal level, talking about what's going on in their family and their life, that can really help bridge a gap because if you keep it totally professional, you're not going to get past that whether they view you as a real person. And so for me, it's working hard in your actual work, but then taking the time to get to know people on a personal level and making sure that they feel that, you know, you care about the whole them and you care about what's going on in their lives. I think that can help accelerate the process. Great. Kush.

[33:02] Host: Yeah, I, yeah, I think I'm still in the process of it, of building trust. I don't know if the process ever ends, honestly. I think it's consistency mostly, just being as consistent as humanly possible with doing what you say, saying what you do, all the cheesy stuff you see on fortune cookies, but actually it is that. And I think on top of that, a lot of people are actually looking for information, right? Like information builds trust and like transparency around information builds trust. And so, you know, I mentioned those dinners and lunches I did in the first week. Right. I think the reason why that was so valuable for like an initial kickoff was because I got to share information with people, right. And I got to share information with executives and not have like a black box attitude towards it at all. And I think the second thing, frankly, just like super tactically, right. Is that I was very quick to put together after my first two and a half months, I had a pretty good idea of which of the 10 executives that I thought are the long term drivers of this business. And I was probably wrong about two of them, but out of the other eight, so far, so good. Obviously very early still. So jury's still out. But I was very quick to say, okay, look to the board. Look, we need to get P units, the right structure of it, but just to get super tactical with the cliff and the four year vest and how we think about approaching these people with them to make them feel like co owners of the business builds a lot of trust too. Right. And I didn't want to mess with that. And the reason I went quickly with that was frankly because a lot of those executives do have great customer relationships and community relationships. I don't want to lose them.

Guest: Right.

Host: And I want them to feel like they are, in fact, you know, in that way, owners of the business and have that ownership mindset with us. Marcus, I'm eager to hear. Marcus especially. Yeah, what's that? Go ahead. Well, I'm just eager to hear your answer given that you had to do so much to earn trust on a team that was just so distrustful. Had been trained to be distrustful. So let's hear it. Yeah. Well, one, I had to learn to not take it personally for people that I couldn't get there with, despite everything that I said to them. But nothing to add. I think Trish and Kush hit it. The biggest lesson I've learned is, and this is a little bit controversial, I don't think everybody runs their business this way, but I've learned to be vulnerable. I don't know that there's a. A different way to really build trust other than, again, yeah. Being consistent and being vulnerable. Right. And I think there's times where I've felt much more guarded. Right. Because I want to build the business up and make it bigger. But it's worked for me over time that I just. That's the kind of person that I am. I get more energy from that, frankly. But I've seen trust strengthened through that where people understand transparency and those kind of things are acceptable when they see me actually doing it. So I wouldn't be afraid of that. As a new entrepreneur, to really build close relationships with people, you still have to run the business. You still have to drive off of KPIs. But I think the more that you can just be a normal human being, it will speed the process of you really winning the team over. Mark, is that word vulnerable? We hear that word a lot. I'm interested particularly in somebody saying it whose job title is chief guard dog. So can you just give us a concrete example of just small example of vulnerability Just. Yeah. What does that mean with more color? Well, multiple situations over the last six and a half years. I've been doing it for a while now, but no more vulnerable time than 2020. You think about the amount of emotion that went through that time period, especially for our business. You think about our business. We are emergency responders. We never closed down. We were trying to figure out how to keep people in the office. People had health issues. They had to coordinate with childcare. We ran into a situation where we weren't sure what the future looked like. And so we had to furlough people for the first time. We've grown from 15 to now over 100 employees, but we had to furlough 25 people. And it was an incredibly difficult time. Obviously not as difficult for the people that you're making decisions for. But I broke down in my office as I'm sitting there with our CFO talking about who we're going to furlough the next day. And then when I went and did that in front of the entire team and held a town hall and talk about this dynamic, some people in the office, some people virtually. I can't tell you how much more reassuring it was for people in terms of feedback afterwards. They actually saw the emotion of it. For me, it was not an easy decision. And then every day we had twice a week phone calls with all of those people to tell them where we were, to be very transparent about the numbers and financial metrics, to give them a plan of how we were going to bring people back and feel very blessed that we got to bring back most of those people once we got through that time period and had triple P and everything else. But it was incredibly important in those moments, especially for an organization that had been scaling for people to actually get full information and see kind of the emotion behind it versus it just being very, kind of cold and calculated. Here's what's happening. So, yeah, there's been multiple occasions where just meeting with people one on one, sharing stories about my family, bringing my kids to the office, them seeing normal human being things, but especially in those moments of real challenge and tragedy, I think it's important that people see you leading, but they see your emotion behind that as well. Let's pivot a little bit to figuring out what to change. So the experience of many searchers once they get in the seat is to see opportunities for improvement and change everywhere. And it becomes a question of really their allocation of their attention and their resources, not to mention the fact that some things just aren't worth the time to change. You really got to choose carefully and figure out what will move the needle. So how have each of you or how do you decide what to improve when you probably just see opportunities for improvement everywhere, especially in the early days. Trish, do you want to go first?

[39:43] Guest: Sure. That's a hard question because there's so much nuance to it. So we're actually going through this right now where we're looking to do a tuck in acquisition and we're going through our, you know, with, with the team about. Okay, well, here's all the stuff about how they operate and how it is. Is different from us and that the framework we're using is in the. For us, it's actually quite nice because we have seasons that have a distinct start and end and then we have a whole off season to do other projects, which is a wonderful blessing because it just, it really allows you to kind of put in place changes, see how they go and then reevaluate them in very discrete periods of time, which is wonderful. And so what we're going in, we're saying, hey, we're going to have this other entity that is under our umbrella for the next season. It has a different name brand, different sort of offering than we have, but it's going to be run sort of centrally, different employee base, all that stuff. So we are just going through, you know, starting, instead of diving into the details, going and saying, okay, you know, let's go back to first principles. What are we trying to do with this acquisition? What are like the three things that the end of the season, if we said, hey, we got those things done this season, it would be a successful season for us. So for that it's, you know, we agreed that's increasing prices, that's improving or introducing some new like trip insurance policies, that is introducing a new ticketing system and using this as a platform to train up one of our sort of managers in training. So, like, if we do all of those things this season, then at the end of the season we'll consider a success. So those four things are our priorities. And this season we're not really going to worry about any of the other things that might come up that should be changed. Because just introducing those four things is going to be enough change for the team there that we don't want to overwhelm them. And so if it's not one of those four things, we basically just bite our tongue. And unless it's like an emergency, we're just going to, we'll Deal with it another year. And so that's how we've kind of. We're always going back to like, what are the big picture goals for what we want to do in this time period? And let's just focus on those things and not worry about the other stuff. Because if we try to do all of it up front, there's two downsides. One is we actually don't know the business yet as well as we should, so we're kind of making it up. But the priorities will be there, you know, we'll know better once we've owned it for a little while. And two, the poor people in the business, if you come at them with a million changes, you know they're going to be exhausted and probably not like their jobs that much. So if you can make sure you're focusing on the things that really drive change, but let the other things go, I think is very important. Otherwise people get, you know, they just get tired with all the stuff that you're trying to do.

[42:58] Host: Kush. Yeah, I don't think I do this very well right now. So I'm having trouble giving, like, the answer of what the right answer looks like. I think the short version in our case, right. Is that we. There's. There were so many things and there are so many things that could produce incremental impact. Right. At any point, there's always like 100 things you could be doing to make it Things move the needle, like slightly at a time, but it's almost taking a step back and say, what are the fundamentals of the business? Right. Like, what really makes the business move? In our case, it's serving patients really well and then keeping people, the providers that are serving those patients, satisfied with how that's going. So they keep wanting to do it again. And so if you just think about those two buckets of work, right? If they fall into one of those two buckets of work, that's great. If they fall out of one of those two buckets of work, that's less great. But that's me grossly oversimplified. Right. I'll give you an example that's like super specific, which is that before I, like before we closed, sellers were exploring switching EMRs for the hospice branch. It was the right decision. It still is the right decision to switch EMRs from the old worse EMR to the new, better EMR. It's in fact even like net net going to help us on compliance and costs and all of those things. Right. So we, the momentum was going a lot of the executives were already ready for it. And I said, once we started, we said, okay, now let's. Let's do it for like a march start. You know, that was four months out from when we closed. Thought it was going to be all okay, but it's a huge change.

Guest: Right.

Host: And if you ask me in retrospect, am I going to burn people out by trying to switch EMRs in the context of the other 10 things that I had to switch that weren't. That couldn't be pushed off by a year, then I would have told you, yeah, yes, in retrospect, whoops. And so that's where I'm at with things like that, where, yes, it's going to create impact. Yes, it's going to help us down the line. Should we have done it right now in the sea of the other things we could not avoid doing right now? That was the hard part. It's always one of three things. It's the things that you can't miss, and then it's the things that you really, really want to do that produce impact. Then there's everything else. And like, that would have been the everything else bucket that we ended up doing. It was almost like the momentum was going. I didn't pull it back fast enough or think it through hard enough to start that change, which resulted in probably an allocation of time and energy and people's. To Trisha's point, like the feeling of frustration around the change being amplified unnecessarily. It feels like you just need to feel what this threshold of tolerance for change is within your organization. And always get up to that threshold as close as you can to optimize things, but never cross it because then you're just going to have. You're going to have problems, pushback and unhappy employees. Marcus, what are your thoughts? No, I think you summarized it well. I mean, we've been fortunate over the last six years, we've grown revenue 10 times in that time frame, but not without a whole lot of mistakes of trying to go too fast. So I think the overall lesson for me is that you've got to manage your business like you would. Kind of a project manager kind of mindset. Right. Of all of the growth opportunities we have, what needs to come first, of the options we have of what needs to come first. I think it pays to do a lot of AB testing. You've got to decide what resources you need to have in place before for whatever you decide is most valuable happens. And then you also have to get into a good discipline of Taking a breath in the organization to really absorb those changes. Where we've failed over the years, it's because we've missed on something there, or it's because I'm over. I'm doing too much myself as well. And I think you also have to be careful about that. Not just your organization, but what can you do? In 2017, we started to have some success from sales, and I thought it was going to be a great idea that I could, you know, with two small kids at home, go build sales offices in four other states while I left the operations to my operations manager. That was a bad idea. None of those sales offices exist today, you know, and I burned a whole lot of time thinking that I could replace all of the energy needed for the organization to make that happen. So you just have to be patient. You have to have a really disciplined mindset about it and then learn just to, you know, take a breath every now and again to absorb the growth that you're actually achieving so that you don't break the engine. Great. Yeah, I like that. Taking a breath after a big change. We were coming up on time. I have one more question that gets into a tactical tactic, so if we could try to keep our answers short, and if we're lucky, we'll have a little bit. A couple minutes left over for a question or two from the audience. Interviewing employees. So Steve Devitkos is the moderator on one of the other panels, and he's actually been on Acquiring Minds and. And he talks about how in the first two weeks of his acquisition, he did nothing but interview every single employee. So a long, hard two weeks, but incredibly valuable. So it strikes me that one of the best ways to identify where you should be making improvements is simply to ask the people, and they're likely to be more than happy to tell you that what needs to change around here. So have you all used straight up interviewing your employees, asking them for their ideas as a way of deciding where you should orient your energy when it comes to change? Marcus, why don't you go first? Sure. Happy to. Yes, you absolutely should talk to your people at the early stage. I would also be aware that you don't have all of the background information, and it's good not to be reactive necessarily, but to process the information, and then I would say it pays to continue to do that. So our leadership, our executive team today, every week when we have our management meeting, somebody in the room is responsible for giving feedback from an employee. Right. So we've kept that kind of culture where everybody is Constantly thinking about how can we do better for our team? And it's paid massive dividends to do that. Not just because people get their requests heard right, but it shows kind of the value to the organization of people should absolutely do it. Trish, you're nodding.

[49:38] Guest: I mean, I totally agree, but especially with the not being reactive point, I think especially as a new CEO, there can be sort of a tendency to come in and please people a little bit, or like, you want to be liked and you want it all to go well. And I think that that can actually end up. If you're certainly. You want to interview with the employees, clearly kind of has to be done. But I would be hesitant to sort of immediately be like, oh, well, this person said this, so we should do that. Because I think you get yourself into a whole lot of trouble doing that. So I think it's more. You're interviewing the employees. You're taking time to understand the broad range of perspectives. You're giving yourself time to digest it, giving yourself time to understand the operations and then see where people are coming from. Because you will also get, you know, two people will come and tell you, you know, completely different things. And then you also understand that, hey, this person has this backstory with the business, and this person has that backstory. And there, you know, maybe some person is just saying this because they don't like this other person or because they want to advance themselves or whatever it might be. And so I'm hesitant of being like, okay, we'll go in, interview the employees, and that's your playbook, because that might be the right playbook, but it might not be, because you might just be listening to the person who has the loudest voice, who seems like they know what's going on, but they're actually like a manipulative person that two months from now, you're going to sight into fire. So I think I just. I would do it, but I would just understand what you're getting yourself into and give yourself room to digest the information that you're getting.

[51:20] Host: Yeah. Nothing else to add except, yes, like a hard yes on that. I'm peeling back the onion. And it's very important to take your time on that stuff. And I'm, you know, I think, like, I'm not even done interviewing or I'll ever be done interviewing, but I also don't think that, you know, it's. There's no one perspective that holds, not even my perspective, but there's no one perspective that holds.

Guest: I'd also add, and this is something that quickly that, that my, my partner and brother in law, Palmer has, has always said that, you know, it's the CEO's job to make the hard right decision, not the easy wrong decision. And so when you're the CEO, sometimes you're going to have to do something that your employees might not like because it's the right decision for the business and you're going to have to lead the company through that. And so, so sometimes your value add is in saying, we're headed in this direction that is new. And you guys are all going to have to come on board with this new vision. And there might be people who don't like that, but that is also your job. So just being the. Taking everybody's opinions into account and then going with those opinions may mean that you're doing the easy wrong decision. And so you kind of have to understand what your role is as the CEO.

Host: Yeah, that's very well put. Your role as CEO is as the benevolent dictator, not as the vote tallier in a democracy and just letting whatever is voted for when you got to make the decision, even if it's unpopular. We're at 56, so I want to give the audience time to take a breath before their next panel. So I think we're going to skip doing questions and 57 now. So I'll just thank Marcus, Kush and Trish for a great panel. This was super interesting and thank you all for being so transparent and vulnerable about your own experiences. And I really enjoyed it myself. So that, that does it for this panel. Thank you very much, Will. Thank you, everybody.

Guest: Thank you. Bye bye. Sa.