Host: 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. Today's interview is a little different. JD Klein bought a print shop, a type of business you see a lot on Biz, Buy, Sell. And while he didn't go out of business, keeping this print shop alive was financially punishing for jd. You'll hear it in his voice. In the first year as new owner, he finds himself digging change out of his ashtray to fill his gas tank. And this after being a corporate guy earning over 200 grand a year just a couple years earlier. Two specific things I want you to listen for. First, what made the business so difficult was that it was too small. Even after growing it impressively over a few years, JD squeezed out margins way higher than the industry average. It still wasn't throwing off much cash. So don't buy too small. It's more risk, not less. Second, though, JD's is not a story of financial victory. It is a personal victory, which counts more in the long run. I think you might share my respect for what JD went through and how he kept it all together. Here he is, J.D. klein. J.D. klein, thank you for joining me today on Acquiring Minds.

Guest: Thanks for having me, Will. I'm excited to be here. I love the podcast I've listened to so far. You've had a great guest. I hope I can live up to that standard.

Host: I'm sure you will, and I appreciate that. So, jd, you acquired a Minuteman franchise. It's a printing business, back in late 2013. You then sold it this year, the top of this year, January 2021. So about seven years, front to back. And this is not going to be a happy, happy, money, money story. Like many of my guests, this is a story of small business survival. And you bought what turned out to be a very challenging business. You had some very challenging times, but you did pull it out. So there's a lot of personal victory and personal success to this story. You live to tell the tale. You're stronger for it. So I'm really looking forward to having you share all this with the audience. I've heard the story once, and I think people are really going to appreciate it. Let us begin before your acquisition of the business in 2013. So give us whatever background on you that's relevant and take us right up to that decision to want to go out and buy a business.

Guest: Yeah, I'm happy to. I've always had an Entrepreneurial bent, if you will. I remember getting to my last year of college. I wanted to be an attorney. And instead, like I don't want to go out and go to another three years of law school, maybe I'll go buy a business. So that thought was always there. And my career kind of reflects pursuing opportunities that were very entrepreneurial, a lot of them turnaround operations, even in the corporate world. So after college I ended up working for a bunch of franchise owners who owned Subway stores and ran their operations of their eight stores for about two years. And that taught me a ton about management and making the numbers work in a really tight competitive business and decided I was sick of that and I wanted to get into sales. So applied for a job at AT&T Wireless and go corporate sales and learn how to sell and learn how to make numbers and achieve very well. And then over the next couple of years I went to a couple of startups, got early cloud technology, early wireless system integrator, and that was the dot com era. And then I ended up going back to Microsoft. I said, you know what, I want to go back to the stability thing. I spent nine years at Microsoft really in a variety of roles, mostly sales, mostly enterprise sales, software and services, back into a couple mobility roles at Microsoft as part of a couple of elite teams there doing mobile solutions. But again, each one of those had, as I look back on it, some very entrepreneurial things where we're going out into this area where there's a lot of ambiguity and we need people to just roll up their sleeves and go figure this thing out for two years. That's the kind of role and opportunities I was attracted to. I left Microsoft in 2012, went to another corporation for about a year doing high performance sales, did very well and I was miserable and took. Took the next year 2013 off for the most part was really just a great two things. Some nonprofit work with a little league and then also figuring out what I wanted to do. And met a business broker and he turned me onto this idea of Minuteman Press as a franchise, introduced me to a couple multimillion dollar operators. And I saw a blueprint for what you could do with building this multimillion dollar business. Buying real estate, really creating a path to wealth for our family through printing services, which is not a glorious glamorous thing, but I saw a platform there to do a lot more. And so that's how I ended up in a printing franchise right out of corporate technology.

[5:14] Host: And why had you taken that year off to consider a new path Just because at the high performance sales job you knew you didn't want to continue there and so you wanted to take a beat to decide what was next sort of thing.

Guest: Yeah, it was really a let's stop and rest and listen. Because we were financially doing very well, we could afford to take a little time and have not a sabbatical, but take a number of months off and figure out what the next phase is going to be. And I continued interviewing in 2013 with big companies, Amazon, Verizon, AT&T a few other system integrators and really just kind of kept getting a sense that it was time to go out on my own and actually go and test what I think I know about being an entrepreneur and a business owner. Extending all the way back 20 years earlier to running a bunch of Subway stores for some investors. Right. And I'm like, okay, well I see a path to wealth. I've seen blueprint and I actually made an attempt to buy a large Minuteman press shop doing seven figures, got in the letter of intent on that one and then walked away at what was supposed to be the signing meeting. Because the guy I was going to buy it from, which is coming across as a very, very difficult person. And I just said like I am not going to be in business with this guy, in debt to him, with seller financing with him as a consultant for me. So I walked away from that one. And the exact same day a smaller one came open in my hometown, very close to our house and we jumped into that one.

[6:48] Host: And this is all the Seattle area in Redmond specifically is where the second franchise location was, correct?

Guest: Yep.

Host: Why buy an existing franchise location versus starting one from scratch?

Guest: You know, there's looking back on it, I call like sub million dollar for any small business the death zone, especially in a services business. And if you can buy into something that is at or above a million dollars, look, most of these businesses will net 15%, maybe 20 if you're really operating at a high level. Right. And so just do the math on especially what it costs to live in the Seattle area. If you're starting something that's going to do 1000-002000-00300,000 hopefully, which is a pretty good growth rate for a startup window cleaning franchise or something, or landscaping. Are you going to be pulling home 15, 20% of $300,000? The math doesn't work. It doesn't work unless you've got a spouse full time in the business and you really, really, really scraping it. But at the time, you know, we can talk about the mistake here of not having a financial planner, but we ran the model on this small business we were buying and thought that we could make it work. With me making 30, 40, 50,000 for a year or two. My wife's real estate would come in and cover the rest of it. Our savings. Like we thought we had margin, but there was a lot of things that just didn't play out. So I would say buying a business, and I'm going through this process now, do I want to go stitch together sub million dollar businesses to make something bigger or do I want to buy in at a bigger level?

Host: Right.

Guest: And that's the financial planning piece that people really have to think about when they're going to go out on their own in a small business.

Host: So you look at the second location, you decide to do it. Do you remember exactly what the revenues were?

Guest: Yeah, they were doing. This was at the end of 2013 and we took over Thanksgiving week and they finished the year at about 175,000. In revenue. Yep.

Host: 175,000 in revenue.

Guest: In revenue, right.

[9:00] Host: Oh, okay. And so what were the margins going to be that? The 10 or 15% that you said?

Guest: Yeah, you can think between 10 and 20%. Right.

Host: Okay. All right. Okay. So you acquire the business and take us from day one.

Guest: Yeah. So acquired the business and brought in a new designer, kind of revamped the store with what resources we had and really started marketing ourselves in the community. And then the first year 2014, we got double revenue, went up to 350. Right. But the problem is we're still looking at take home pay being not enough to pay our bills on. And 2014 was a weird year in real estate. My wife's a incredible agent and she had multiple buyers, but really nothing to sell them. It's very similar to now. There was like an inventory shortage and so all she had to do was pop a couple of deals and just nothing to sell these buyers. And so we're kind of going through 2014. The business is going great. We're getting great feedback there. But we're watching our personal P and L just spiraling down. And then made a decision at the end of 2014 to sell our house. One of the things we didn't do going into the business was go and tap credit lines. Right. To be able to bankroll some of this. Because what they don't tell you when you buy a business, a lot of people discovering it now I see on Twitter, is that you're not credit worthy to borrow Anything once you're self employed. Right. Not for a number of years. With a W2, the bar is very high to borrow. So we were house rich and cash poor at that point. And I remember brainstorming with friends, advisors like, what can we do? What can we do? And unfortunately we ended up selling our house at the end of 2014 and you know, moving out of a very beautiful property that our kids had grown up in basically and going into a rental a couple miles away. And it was a really, really, really difficult time for the entire family. Yeah, you know, yeah, just a lot of tears, a lot of just, you know, what are we doing? What's happened here? Like, how did this happen? Kind of thing.

Host: Wow, man. And J.D. so you. So this is basically after a year in the business because you bought it toward the end of 2013 and so here you are at the end of 2014.

Guest: Right, right.

Host: But you did. It sounds like you almost doubled revenue or thereabouts.

Guest: We did doubled and then 2015 we went up to about five and a quarter in revenue. Right. So that's a pretty big bump again.

Host: So what wasn't working was the fact that you needed to do that and your wife's real estate business needed to perform at a certain level. And because of the real estate market, that's what was not the piece of the puzzle that was missing. Because it sounds like you're growing the business like crazy. So far, the Minuteman decision seems like a good one.

Guest: Yeah. We're growing at a rate that dramatically exceeded what a retail printing business would do. Right. To go from 175 to 350 to five and a quarter. That's a lot of print. At $200 per order, an average print order is about 200 bucks. And that's, that's $5,000 postcard mailers and $40 box of business cards. You think about that average order size, stay consistent, really from the time I bought it. That's what I was told going in. It was true until we switched to wide format late, late, late in the business cycle. But yeah, 2015, now we're up to doing over 500,000 a year. Right. And so the take home pay gets a little bit better, but there's just this bounciness to the revenue depending on a few things. We ran into a construction project from the city in 2016 that was just a giant crisis that needed managed around

[13:01] Host: that was that they basically started doing construction right in front of your front door or on your city block. And it lasted for many months longer. Than the city told you it would. Of course.

Guest: Yeah. So part of the proposition with his business is that it's literally at the busiest corner in town. It's an old historic building. It's a bunch of other historic buildings. So you're getting the highest daily traffic count in all of Redmond. And I wanted to buy the business. I mean, the building. I still would, but the city needed to do this infrastructure project where they tore up about 2,000ft of the main road through town, and we're converting it from a one way to a two way. And that project was going to last 18 months. And so it cut traffic to downtown by like 70%. And the businesses around the area were just dying because people were staying away from downtown Redmond. They were. They were going to others. You know, you can go to Bellevue. You can go to other parts of Redmond. There's just other neighborhoods to go and get services.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: And the construction crews are filling up the parking lots. You know, there's backhoes outside of our door every day for weeks, just, you know, jackhammering the building. I was a. Like, we had a lot of ptsd from construction for a long time. And one of the coolest things I did, one of the things I'm most proud of is I started a shop local campaign called high Redmond. And that came out of just a desire to we got to do something and created a brand, created a logo, created a concept where we're going to invite the citizens of Redmond to come back downtown and meet business owners and get to know us and reconnect with us while this construction is going on.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: And so we launched this campaign with no help from the chamber of commerce. The city jumped in and helped us, thankfully. And we ran this campaign for about two years, and it really gave a shot in the arm to, you know, the business community downtown.

Host: Oh, that's great. So what did 2016 and 17 look like? What did this construction do to revenue while it was. Well, for those 18 months, you know,

[15:04] Guest: 2016, we fell back to. I've got it, my thread here. About 505,000 in revenue. So from 525 down to 505, which I thought was pretty good given that people were staying away from downtown.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: And the thing is, from a marketing perspective, we could market that. Look, we can print anywhere. We don't care. We can print all over the country. Right. And I'll ship it to you. I'll bring it to you. Don't let traffic get in the way of this. But part of the, part, part of the way we found customers, the way they found us was by just driving to and from work to and from Microsoft. People would drive by for years, see this print shop, and they go to Microsoft or Amazon or Boeing or whatever, and all of a sudden they'd stop by on their way home from work and they'd be like, yeah, I need to order a bunch of stuff for a business project. Like, wow, how'd you find us? Oh, I've been driving by for years. Oh, it wasn't like Yelp or Google or Facebook or anything like, oh yeah, we see you online too. So there's a joke in there about marketing attribution. But at the end of the day, our business visibility was cut down from people driving by. It's like you're out of sight, out of mind.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: And in the printing world, it's brutally competitive. And once, once you're not front of mind for people, they'll see an ad on TV for Vistaprint or they'll drive by FedEx and they'll just go there and. And you can be just disintermediated just very quickly.

Host: Right? Yeah.

Guest: So 2016, we were down to 505 and then had to kind of street

Host: fight our way back up and take me through the revenue for the next few years.

Guest: Yep. 2017, we bumped back up to 620, so pretty good growth. I just missed out on an acquisition that would have put us up over a million. This was another heartbreak I don't think I went into on Twitter, but we were going to buy a local printer. I had a good relationship with her. She was in Redmond, she was retiring, but it just bought her book of business and folded it in. Would also have the option to move into her location and get out of downtown if I wanted much bigger warehouse type production. And I thought we had a deal and I was paying like 4x, you know, multiple on it. And I got outbid at the last minute and I was like, well, like, what do you mean? Like I'm paying you a crazy amount of money. And the broker's like, well, I found a better buyer. Like, sorry. So I called the owner. I'm like, what happened here? She says, well, you know, Minuteman and Issaquah bought it. I'm like, what?

Host: So this is another franchisee in your

Guest: same franchise in the same franchise network? Yes. And you're not allowed to open up another franchise in another market right under their franchise language. I won't get into it here, but it's they went to a lot of effort to conceal the purchase of this and then to try to put their brand on it and just open up a, you know, a branch of their business in my patch. And so, you know, I lawyered up and, and at the end of the day, like, they had to close it and move out and, you know, we ended up, I always joke that I didn't have to pay for those customers after all because they just came over to us from the service differential. We gradually got, we gradually got most of the customers over the next year or two anyway.

[18:32] Host: But in lawyering up then, you won. You did force them to shut down.

Guest: Yeah, they had to shut it down. And Minuteman stood behind me on this one too. They were very good about it. They were like, no, we're not, not doing this. So. Yeah. And it was a testimony over the next few years, as we got more customers of their attrition, that people were drawn to our customer service. Right. And just the way we did things, right, that if you just do a great job with the customers over time, it's going to take longer, but they'll come to you.

Host: J.D. you'd referred at the top to this blueprint that you'd seen of getting to success with the Minuteman franchise, I assume because the broker pointed out these other franchisees who are doing really well with their Minuteman locations, right?

Guest: Yeah, there are Minuteman locations. There are some that are doing eight figures worth of business out of one building. And so it's not like a Subway where like a strategy with a lot of Subway owners is you're going to buy multiple locations and you'll own a geographic area which from a national brand recognition, people either buy Subway or they don't. And they see signs locally. And there's this concept of brand density leads to more utilization and more revenue anyway, but with, with Miniman, with printing, you don't need to do that. The wealth path is consistent sales and growth and then buying essentially bigger and bigger buildings. And there's owners in different parts around the country that, like I said, they're doing eight figures in sales and just, they just keep buying bigger buildings, right? Yeah, keep buying competitors, keep swallowing them up. And then once you get to a couple million in revenue, like you're, and you're running a good operation, you're just swallowing up printers. Because industry wide, most print shops net less than 3% in revenue. Right? Net. It's more common that a printing company nets like 1 to 2% rather than 15 to 20. And that we were able to net 15 to 20 to 22% sometimes in terms of profit. Ran a very, very good operation and a high really at the far end of the bell curve as far as profitability.

Host: Yeah. Your revenue, despite this setback of the city construction, your revenue is growing. What did your growth plan look like? Even more growth? Were you trying to hit, I don't know, whatever, 1 million, 2 million, 3 million sooner than you were on track to do at the current growth rate?

[21:06] Guest: No, I mean, it's just organically in that space. In 2017, we did 620, 2018, we did seven and a quarter. 2019, we bumped over eight into almost nine. And again, that kind of growth is phenomenal in the printing industry and in retail. But there was always this grand trade off of, do I keep the retail location? That again, brings us visibility to 10,000 cars a day. But it's very tight and packed and I could try to buy the building or do I try to move to a warehouse type district within Redmond? Because I had to stay in Redmond. And real estate in Redmond is very, very tight. I mean, like, nothing on the market and no chance of buying another building, like, wasn't going to happen. So that was a choice that I made, was to stay in the building and keep renewing the lease and keep trying to grow. So I looked at a couple of growth strategies, acquisitions. There really weren't any other targets around that time. I looked at doing a digital services brand kind of underneath client communications based on a couple of projects that we did that got good feedback. And I'm like, most businesses are unhappy with whoever's doing their website and their social media. Here I am with 500 small business customers. If we just penetrated 20% of those, there's an entire big business here. But I could never get out of the chaos of construction and losing employees and this and that. And to ever get the headspace and the financial certainty to go focus on that, I was going to spin it up and then the construction happened and spun it down.

Host: And even though you're seeing this growth, it's just not enough growth. Because let's say, let's just call it roughly, you're taking home 10%. So even though you grow from 500 to 600 to 700 to 800, all that really means for you is you're taking home 50 to 60 to 70 to $80,000 a year with three kids and living in the Seattle metropolitan area, which is a really expensive place to live. So it's just clearly it's not enough. Meanwhile, your wife's real estate business is kind of erratic.

Guest: Yeah. It's going to fluctuate, right?

Host: Yeah. Right.

Guest: I mean, real estate is that. It is, it's feast or famine. And yeah. I mean, we're taking home 15 to 18% most years. I mean, but still. Yeah. I mean, what's 18% of 600,000, of 700,000? Like you can barely feed a family of five in Seattle for that. Especially where we're paying our own healthcare benefits. Right. And every year in healthcare we're paying 20,000 bucks. It didn't matter. Right. We did go on State Health for a couple years, which I want to encourage anybody out there listening, like if they're in financial pain or going to be in financial pain, like go on to your state healthcare plan. Do not let your ego get in the way of going to State Health to get on it. Because we paid full premiums for a year or two out of, I guess, ignorance and maybe ego and whatever else. And then finally at one point we're like, this is crazy. We called the state and they're like, yeah, we'll put the kids on what's called Apple Health. And it basically cost them nothing in Washington. We paid a little bit for us, but our income, our take home income fit the model. Right. So it's out there and it's just one of those things that again, if a small business owner's out there suffering, you need to use the options available to you.

[24:45] Host: So how are you feeling at this point, JD 2016, 2017? You're growing revenues, but you're just not taking home nearly enough to support the family. Where's your head at?

Guest: I was still into it in 2017. 2018 had a really great team, just a really phenomenal team. I was just so happy with the people that I kept finding to come into this business. Just creative, hardworking, service minded hearted people that just kept coming into the business. So I was still pretty optimistic, even though I was kind of getting tired of just the chaos. And the 2018 had another decision. Do we, you know, renew the lease? Do we move? We, we stayed in the, I renewed the lease for another three years and I had the idea of, look, we've got to, we've got to get into wide format. And wide format simply means, you know, wall graphics, car graphics, you know, the. Once you bring those big printers in house to do like window wraps and car wraps, you can also print stickers, you can print heat press transfer for apparel. So once you bring that equipment in House, you've got a platform for now. Signs, you got a platform for apparel, you got a platform to do stickers, all kinds of things. So I got with my team and we figured out how to bring in really kind of cannibalize a bunch of square footage that we never thought we had and brought in 30, $40,000 worth of equipment to be able to do signs and stickers and banners and apparel in house. And that was a big shot of energy into the business as well. Like I said, that's what pumped us up into the eight hundreds over the last couple of years.

Host: When was it that you. I'm just quoting from one of your Twitter threads that you dug 94 cents out of the ashtray to go buy gas?

Guest: That was at the end of 2014. Yeah, that was at 2014. I was driving home.

Host: So that was the low point that first year month, 12, 13, 14 in the business.

Guest: That was a low point, man. I hadn't dug change out of my ashtray to buy gas since I was in college, probably. Yeah, I'd gone from making 2,300,000 a year in corporate technology to now I'm digging change out of my ashtray to pay for gas. And what was happening was in a couple of days, our house was going to close for sale, and we would get that money back in our account. But, yeah, um, that's just one of the days I drove home just sobbing, just like, you know, this is like, what is going on here? Right? Just feel so humbled and so, like, embarrassed about, you know, this entire set of situation.

[27:25] Host: Right, yeah, yeah. And was your family supportive? I mean, obviously it was hard to have to move. But tell me, kind of how were your kids? Like, we get it, you know, this was a risk. And sometimes risks don't work out. Or were they mad or can. Can you talk to that at all?

Guest: All of the above. All the above. I mean, they're very supportive. Like, we. We always prioritize and we said, like, to this day, like, we're not going to lose our family over a business or over a job or over something like that. Like, it's. You're a family or a unit, we're a pack. Like, we are in it together. And for the kids, it was very hard because when I bought the business, I mean, they were in late end of grade school, junior high, which is a really, really cool time of life, but it's also fraught with risk. And all of a sudden, everything they knew about money and stability and success was just blown up. Next thing you know, I mean we're shopping at Value Village. Like we're on consumer cellular, prepaid, we're on State health. Like how do we go from working at Microsoft to this within a couple years? Right. And you know, the social part of it, you know, your friend network dries up when you're not, you're not able to go to Hawaii over Christmas and also over midwinter break like your friends, you're not able to go to the cool parties and things like that. Right. So we had, you know, good friendships with a handful of families that knew we were going through and they stuck with us. And that was super valuable and it still is. But a lot of friends, I don't think, I don't think a lot of people really understood what we went through. Like they knew that we sold and they maybe knew we were having trouble being small business owners. Yeah, but people are worried about their own deal. They're not worried about your deal, right? Yeah, they don't think about you, they think about their own thing. So. And we didn't run around complaining about it. Like we're sitting in church crying in the pew and the kids are, we've moved and we've got this humble circumstance around us now. And so it was a hard time for everybody but the family stayed very supportive. Just continue to love each other through the entire thing and help each other out and adapt. And the kids to this day, I mean they got jobs when they were 16 and they're all very hardworking, entrepreneurial minded people.

Host: Corporate jobs due to this experience, you can trace it back to this experience, you think, oh, 100%, 100%.

Guest: I mean if I was still at Microsoft and doing financially well, they still would have went out and got jobs when they were 16 because that's just in our DNA. Learn how to work ethic and learn how to serve customers and follow processes, et cetera. But there would have been no way to credibly present to them that it's a need to be able to be self sufficient financially and self reliant. I mean it's very obvious to them living through this, that and even right now as we're trying to figure out how to pay for college, it's like, hey, we're on your own. We're trying to figure this out. There is no hidden pocket of $100,000 that's going to show up. Right? So this is real life and we can be mad, we can be sad, all those things and we really have to honor those feelings. But at the end of the day, then we have to focus on what we have to do, and that is earning our way through life. Right. There's nobody coming to save you. You got to earn your way through life. Right. And so I think they really got that. And it's a lesson that they will always remember and always probably appreciate later on more than they would recognize now, I think.

[30:59] Host: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really powerful stuff. And at any point, 2014, 2015. JD, did you consider with your wife, like, let's pull the plug on this project? Yeah. And we'll just take it in the chin. We will have lost a lot of money, but I could go back to Microsoft or wherever and go Back to that 2, $300,000 a year salary and, and dig ourselves out of this. In a couple of years, we'll be back to normal, just a few years behind. Did you consider that or did.

Guest: Yeah, I don't remember considering that.

Host: You burned the boats. You were all in.

Guest: We burned the boats. We're all in. I mean, it's. Yeah. And at that time, again, like, once we had sold the house. Right. And committed to this austere lifestyle, you know, it's, you're, you're in here. And heck, we grew it to 500,000 in two years, triple what it was when we bought it. Like, and I remember doing the math, I'm like, if we just do this for another year or two, like at this rate, we're going to get there. Right. I mean, if you just need real estate to keep, you know, stable somewhat. But then it was bouncy. Right. So, yeah, we, it's.

Host: Yeah.

Guest: Obviously I could have hired a manager, just gone absentee and just let it sit there like the previous owner had done or sold it. Right. And just wrote it off. But now we were, we were all in. Like, that's just kind of, you know, row hard and figure it out, you know.

Host: Okay, so, so now we're in about 2018, 2019. You go for the what, what was the word? The, the wide printing we brought in.

Guest: Wide format. Yep. Yeah. And, and we could order those products, those printed products from vendors, you know, wait a week to get them delivered and guess at the quality. Or we could control it in house. So once we brought in, you know, a 60 inch wide printer and a cutter and a laminator and heat press equipment and all the bindery materials, you know. Now we could take an order for a banner and have it for you tomorrow. Right. We could take a order for 50 shirts and have them ready for you on Friday. Right. So the promise of like, high quality, very fast, great customer service. We were able to now do that with wide format, with apparel, with stickers, you know, building wraps, et cetera, and do it very quickly. Right. And so that paid off. So again, that bumped us up into, you know, the eight hundreds in sales. Bumped our average sale from, like I said, around 200 up to like 380, almost 400, your average ticket price. And it really made us. We weren't in a commodity anymore. Like, you're not going to order that from FedEx or from Vistaprint Office Depot. They would do those things, but they're not going to do them at the speed and at the quality and the customer service that we would. Yeah, right.

[33:55] Host: Okay. So that investment sounds like it's paying off.

Guest: Yeah, yeah, very much so. It was a great investment and it was cool to see us do the whole, you know, Rubik's Cube of how to put the store together in a way to. Without gaining any square footage to be able to bring in, you know, basically about 900 square feet required to do this. We just got rid of machinery. We added shelves to go vertically as high as we could go. We bought smaller garbage cans. You do all these little.

Host: Every, every square inch you were operating.

Guest: Every square inch counts. Totally. Yeah.

Host: Okay, so you crossed the $800,000 revenue threshold and you're eyeing a million. So now take us up to 20. 20, 2021. I assume Covid will have something to do with this.

Guest: Yeah, it will. So 2019 came around and I was again just kind of tired of the drama and.

Host: Sorry, J.D. and what's the most dramatic or two or three most dramatic things about this business for people who out there who might be considering buying a printing business? Is it the turnover? Is it just. The nature of the work is it's just all order based and you're scrambling to fulfill orders all the time. What is it?

Guest: Well, there was two things is I never enjoyed the process of selling print. I got to understand and experiment with the marketing driven sales. Right. How to actually use advertising and marketing to drive to make the phone ring and make people come in the front door, which I had never done as a corporate salesperson. Right. Marketing people are in that other building. It's the arts and crafts department. Well, now you're a small business owner and your job is to go create marketing and make the phone ring. So it's really, really hard to do and you waste half your money and you don't know which half is wasted. But I never enjoyed the process of selling print and the like. The emotional part for me with running the business was losing employees. Like, I really love my employees, my team, and just finding someone and developing them and watching them grow and giving them the empowerment to go and just be their creative best self, whatever it is they're doing. Like, I get a lot of fulfillment as a business leader from that. Right. And that got reflected in our customer service. And just the efficiency of way to do things is that people were. I was able to put them in their. In their sweet spot very often. But when you lose people that you've developed over a year or two, which is kind of what my requirement was when hiring people, I would tell them, look, I need at least a year out of you because if you leave, I got a family at home. That. Right. I can't work your schedule. Like, you're killing me. Right? So don't sign up for this job. If you're going to leave in three months or six months, you're not happy after a month, fine, my fault. But sign up for a year or two and I will help you and I will develop you, and I will write references for you, and I will accommodate you when it's time to interview. And. But you got to work with me and give me some notice on this. And that worked, actually. But it just broke my heart to have people leave. And that's just the nature of the business. And so 2019 came around, and I'm thinking, you know what? I want to sell. And I was having just a really tough time emotionally and mentally with this whole thing. And I lucked into a coach therapist, a guy that spends time with professional athletes and CEOs and high performers, and I was able to get some time with him. And it's funny, when you sign up for therapy and coaching, you'll actually fight it for a while. You'll actually fight as to why everything they're doing doesn't apply to you. And then you'll have a couple of epiphanies and you'll be like, wow. And so that changed my life. And in terms of giving me emotional intelligence and putting me in touch with my feelings and how I do things. And it made me. I think it took my management to another level with my team from 2019 forward. But what he told me in 2019 was, he said, you got to make a decision. Either sell or don't. It doesn't matter. It literally doesn't matter. Just sell or don't make a decision because you've been thinking about this for a year or two to make a decision. So I made a decision. 2019, I was going to sell, got an offer in December 2019, 2020 comes around, and January, February 2020, I tore my rotator cuff skiing and can't get it operated on because of COVID So now I got to walk around with a marionette arm for three months, basically. And the buyer pulls out in March. Like, hey, the bank wants us to back off. So here I am with one bad arm. And our sales, January, February, March,

[38:44] Host: we

Guest: were doing 80, 90,000. Like, we were on track to almost organically hit a million, like, in 2020. I mean, it was like we were on fire even in March. But Covid hits in February and March, and I can see it going like this. And they're pulling out and I'm like, hey, I don't blame you. And like, okay, fine, we'll just check in later in the year. And I just figured at that point, I'm going to own it forever. And so I said, let's go. We're going to figure this out. And so I made an offer to a designer. Didn't have my loans yet, but I'm like, we're just going to go on this. I got to hire ahead of the issue, ahead of the money. We're going to pivot in April. So right in April, we started doing return to work graphics before anybody was returning to work. Like, we publish this stuff out there, a brand guide, a bunch of materials. Started sending samples all over town, just. So basically, you're going to have to go back to work and, like, we're already ready for you. Put signs on the wall and everything. Right?

[39:43] Host: This is April 2020.

Guest: Yeah, it was April 2020 after the fire pulled out.

Host: A month after Covid starts, essentially.

Guest: Yeah, you can go look it up. I wrote a blog on LinkedIn and about how we're going to reopen and again started publishing this material and dropping off samples around town and got my designer. Then I think in May, we got our PPP loan or Eidl, and just kind of kept going. And we, we lived on grad signs and reopening banners and laminated menus and all the floor dots. Right. So all the stuff.

Host: Yeah, yeah, sure.

Guest: Through the summer. And we were only down like 15%, I think, year over year. And then the, you know, we're doing okay, but, like, I was exhausted. Like, everybody was exhausted. And, you know, you're with all these business owners that, you know, you know, you're on a first name basis with and you know, their families and stuff. And you see people go out of business and like, it was such a sad like, like it's just a crazy year for everybody, right?

Host: Yeah, yeah.

Guest: And we get out.

Host: I mean, you're in a retail business sort of. I mean, you're, you have a retail location. So all your neighbors up and down the block are, are traditional retail and they're the ones getting hit the hardest.

Guest: Yeah, like I could walk around to the bakery and the bar and the restaurant and like, say, look here, I'm going to print banners for 50% off. Just. Do you need an opening banner? Do you need something? Floor dots. Can you. Let's get floor dots. And like put your logo. Put a picture of a burger on there. Right. Picture of a beer. Like, can you, you know, you're almost there, you know? And they'd be just like a thousand yard stare. They'd be like, can I just have a dot? People were so PTSD that. And you couldn't blame them, but they couldn't get their head around marketing at that time. It was just like survival. So we get around to August and then the buyers come back and they're like, hey, the SBA is done doing ppp. They want to accelerate acquisition loans. We want to buy. Like, we've been watching. You're doing awesome. I'm like, what? So, yeah, we put the deal back together and had to like charge toward the end of the year and keep sales up and keep operating and keep my team intact. And. Oh yeah, my lead designer manager left in right after they said they wanted to come back. I think it was like a week or two later. My lead guy who was the assistant manager of the store just left on no notice. He just said, basically, we're moving to Arizona. Like, come on, man. Really? So he had his personal reasons and I respected those. It's just the timing was terrible.

[42:27] Host: Yeah.

Guest: So I replaced him and then we just kind of kept going because that's what you got to do. Like, you know, do you tell the buyers? I'm like, yeah, I just told them like, we lost somebody, but I replaced them like, full speed ahead. They were like, okay, cool.

Host: Were these going to be kind of absentee buyers or somebody who's going to

Guest: work in the business hands on, Hands on, you know, nice husband, wife, couple. She came from the promotional products industry, so she understood that piece of it very well. And he's a corporate graphic designer, so he understood the creative parts of the business.

Host: And by the way, jd, when you acquired, did you know anything about printing or did you learn everything in the business?

Guest: I learned everything in the business. Minuteman recruits what they want, corporate people who are coming in, who are good business operators, general manager types who can sell, they don't care if you come from printing and they don't recruit from

Host: printing necessarily because I think printing is pretty technical, but in fact it's pretty learnable.

Guest: It's crazy. Technical people don't understand it and they don't get it because you've got this desktop printer in your office right there, I'm sure, right. And you've got your 27 inch monitor. And so it's as easy as hey, it looks good on my screen and I can print it right here. How come I can't get 5,000 postcards for $5? You know, like Vistaprint.

Host: Right.

Guest: So they don't understand that like what you created on your desktop can be a complete Frankenstein document that's unprintable in the real world. And if you actually want access to something that's you know, eight bit color and you know, 300 dpi and it's got beautiful, you know, bleed and everything on it and it's trimmed perfectly, like you have to pay for that. Well, it takes all these little pieces from the graphics to the whole manufacturing and binder, repeat the printing and binder piece to hand you a box of something that's just beautiful, right?

Host: Yeah.

Guest: But the vistaprints of the world have made it seem like, hey, a box of business cards is only $10, but they don't look good. Right. Everybody knows you bought them from vistaprint. Right. So you've got this constant price, commodity pressure and devaluing of what we do. Really what we do is very complex. And that's part of what I liked about printing business is because as a marketing salesperson, creative, you can walk in and I can say, hey Will, you're starting this business. I can help you out with branding because I've got a designer and here's her portfolio and she's awesome. Right. I can help you out with marketing and communications because that's. And sales, right. And infusing your literature with like making sure your value proposition and your messaging is great. I can help you with strategies for direct marketing, for mail, for car wraps, for handouts. Right. Pop up street fair marketing, right. I can help you with all these customer touch points and give you a one stop shop. So that's a lot of where my creativity and entrepreneurialism gets to be monetized and bringing in customers. The hard part about printing to your question, like actual printing is very complicated. We went from offset to digital. We did this whole digital transformation. It let us do a lot more, better, faster, cheaper, et cetera. But the machines, I mean, These are not SpaceX rockets. These are $70,000 printers that are, that can go bad because there's a little bit of dust on a sensor. Right. And so you can be in there one day and you've got like, again like $20,000 worth of postcards to do in the next two days and all of a sudden your machine gets an error code because again, like a sensor is covered in dust.

[46:13] Host: Yeah.

Guest: And you don't know which one it is. And you're only as good as your technician. And you're on the phone with them and on their management. Like, I need, you know, him out here in the next hour or we're gonna die. Yeah. And so my equipment purchase strategy was a hundred percent around the technician that was going to work on it. Right. I mean when I did a competitive shopping, I brought in everybody, but at the end of the day I'm interviewing their technicians more than I'm interviewing the equipment. I'm like, equipment is equipment. Right. It really comes down to like who's going to show up at my shop within an hour or two of machine outage because I'm losing money every second this thing is not running.

Host: So, J.D. you'll see printing businesses for sale on Biz Buy Sell in places. I feel like it's a type of business that transacts. Who's the ideal buyer for that or would you recommend people not get into the printing business? Give me a 30,000 foot overview of the acquisition opportunity for somebody who might be considering it for printing.

Guest: For the ones that you see on Biz Buy Sell. And I actually saw one today or two today. They're sub $500,000 businesses. You're not going to go do that unless you can tolerate low earnings for a few years. So you've got to have a financial position that does that, first of all. Secondly, you've got to be able to sell. You've got to be okay going to networking meetings and Rotary meetings and Kiwanis meetings and chamber of Commerce meetings, walking around the neighborhood, meeting everybody in your town. Right. The advantage we had in Redmond was I had ran a large little league around here and had worked at Microsoft and my wife has got a big real estate network as well. So I mean we knew 2,000 people who could potentially be customers of printing, Right?

Host: Yeah, yeah.

Guest: So if you're just Going to go buy one of these. It helps to have some neighborhood city knowledge as well.

[48:05] Host: Right.

Guest: Because you're going to have to. It would be hard for me to move to like Oklahoma and buy a printing business. Right. I'm going to, I'm going to spend two years running around town meeting everybody, donating a non profit, signing up to sponsor the golf tournament, all of these, you know, community marketing activities. So you want somebody who's got a financial position, you want somebody who's comfortable doing sales and marketing, you want somebody who also is a will hire the experts to do the job. Right. The worst business operator in printing and really anything else is the owner that can't keep their hands out of it. Right. So we had a running joke at Minuteman where if I was actually had indesign open or if I was actually running the Konica, something was very, very wrong, you know.

Host: Yeah. Because you might think, you know, kind of an artistically inclined, creatively inclined, design inclined person would be, you know, the, a great owner for the print shop because they love the topic, they love the subject matter. But in fact you're saying no, they should work in the business, they shouldn't be the owner of that business.

Guest: Yeah, that's right. If you're a designer, you maybe should not buy a printing company, Right. Because your job is sales. It's sales, sales, sales, sales, sales. It is not design. You need to hire a designer. You might be able to sell design projects, but you need to hire a designer and then you need to get out of their way, Give them everything they need to succeed. That's the model for growth. You know, if you're, if you're a printer, like you're a press operator or you've run a print production shop and you want to buy it, the key is can you get out of the back room and can you get out in the front end of the business? Because they'll have guys that'll come in and they'll just spend all their time hanging out with the pressman in the back room. Right. And the pressman knows that your job as the owner is not to be back there with them. Your job is to be out, you know, hunting big game and bringing it in. Right. Your entire team knows that because you signed up to be responsible for their paychecks and then paying their rent and their bills. Your job is to be out selling. It's not to be running the equipment and designing.

Host: So we just have a couple more minutes. J.D. would you say that just one more question on the Printing business itself. And then I want to just get to kind of lessons learned from your, from your experience. What about just the general trends in the industry of retail printing? Is Vistaprint going to eat up everybody's business or Vistaprint or FedEx or is there going to continue to be room for higher end niche, more personalized service for another? As far as the eye can see, is there still a future in that? What are the big industry trends?

Guest: You know, I, I don't know. The printing industry overall only grows at like 1 to 2% per year. There's, there are subsegments of it that are growing 15 to 20. One of those is wide format, for example. If you've got, if I were to go back into it, I would go into wide format. And that is again back to like vehicle wraps, window displays at retail. Once you bring in that equipment, you're doing signs, you're doing stickers, you're doing banners. It's hard to get commoditized in that because you've got creative and you've got installation services on it. So if you bring your fleet of cars out to me, yeah. You can download the templates for a bunch of Kia Souls anywhere. But the fact of my designer, you can bring a car in and my designer can sit down with you in 30 minutes and sketch out a plan. Right. That.

[51:34] Host: Right.

Guest: We can print up some samples and drop them on your car and peel them off. We don't like the way they look. Right. As a mock up and then charge you for installation when it's ready to go. That those are pretty good moats around wide format.

Host: Okay.

Guest: Yeah. Standard like business cards, brochures, postcards. Those are commodities that I would not build a printing business on today. Right. It's very, very hard to maintain differentiation with those other than speed, frankly.

Host: So, jd, to your lessons learned on your Twitter profile, you have a sticky thread which kind of tells the story that I've just heard in brief. And at the end of the thread you have your lessons learned. And I thought the audience would be really interested in hearing those. So can you walk us through those? The first one is you bought the wrong business. What do you mean by that?

Guest: Bought the wrong business meaning the financial size of it. And it goes back to what we talked about earlier. Not that printing was the wrong business per se, because for me, being a very creative, entrepreneurial person, it gave me a platform to go do a number of interesting things and keep me motivated and curious the whole time. We did not have a financial planner going into it and we now also have a financial planner looking at the next thing that we're going to do. We're not making the same mistake twice, but bought the wrong business, meaning the size. I look back at our projections and they relied on a more optimistic family P and L than what actually happened. We said we could buy a small business if these other things are true. These other things were not true. They didn't happen. I also didn't have the net coming out of the business that I thought it would for the first couple of years. So you need emergency funds, you need credit lines, you need financial position, you need to use debt wisely. I paid 100,000 for the business and a third of that was cash out of pocket. And two thirds of that was a seller note that was amortized over two years at 100. I don't think I could have got an SBA loan. Um, but I didn't even try. I just wrote the check and signed the seller note. I'm like, this is nothing. We're going to make this work. Right. So did not financial planner. My mistake. Don't do what I did. The other piece. Like, I think you wanted to also talk about acquisition, you know, and exit financially while we're on this topic. Like I said, I paid 100,000 for it. Ended up selling for over 400. And that included a couple of vehicles that came with it that we use now. And that was actually a little better than. Without naming any numbers, it was a little better than what the price was pre Covid. I was very surprised at how the deal came together. It felt good. It was time to move. It was a win win for both people. They've got a great business that they're well prepared to take on. We were able to walk away with, you know, a fair amount of cash. But again, mind you, I had to pay off some credit things. I had to pay off notes on the vehicles. I had to pay off taxes. Yeah. Pay taxes when you sell the business. Yeah, a lot of taxes. So when you hear that number, that's not a net, that's a gross sales number, right?

[55:00] Host: Yeah, sure.

Guest: Yeah. So that's the financials of it. And the last two things, like, you know, again, making sure your family can support it. Don't lose your family over a business. Even now, my wife and I kind of have an inventory of what we're good at and the things that we're not good at and we don't want to do. And our mindset, like right or wrong, is not that I have to be the face of the business. I kind of don't want to have to be the face of the business, but I look at businesses right now or business ownership as something that, like, I have to have some creative stimulation from it. Right. I think about buying a business that is maybe like, surfaces, like painting, you know, decks, countertops, cabinets, like, and then bringing in design around that, bringing in installation, et cetera. And so we get, you know, but it's all around aesthetics and around where you can create design. Right. You can bring people's ideas to life. Yeah, that type of thing is. And we have experience again in real estate. We remodel houses, et cetera. So, like, that's a basket of businesses that I could get comfortable around. And I can see myself in. I can see the creativity coming into the business if I were to go by.

Host: So, jd, despite. Despite how difficult the Minuteman experience was, sounds like you are getting ready to buy another business.

Guest: Well, I'm. I'm standing in three canoes right now, so.

Host: Okay. And one is buying a business. One is going back to corporate or staying in corporate. You have a job now. And what's your.

Guest: One is working at a security startup.

Host: That is.

Guest: It's. It's going well, but it's tough sledding and you never know how long the startup is going to be there. Right. I mean, we're not doing the unicorn funding thing. We're building a business. It's a great product and. But growth is slow. And so that's the third canoe. But.

Host: Yeah, but you're not completely turned off from buying a business. The lessons learned from your Minuteman experience you can apply to just buying a better business this time around is how you feel.

[57:03] Guest: Yep. Have financial planning going in. Buy a bigger business. Buy something as well that at least me and my wife can see ourselves creating some value in. I don't see myself right now as a disinterested financial owner of a business. We see ourselves as like, we have to be able to add, like a dump truck company. What do I do with a dump truck company? Might spit out a couple hundred grand a year in cash. But, like, you know, am I. It's not something I want to do right now.

Host: Yeah, well, you know, your thing about buying. They're too small a business. It's just so. It's so. You just hear it over and over again. But it's still really counterintuitive for people because they think that the smaller the business you buy, you spend $100,000 on this business. That's a relatively low, I mean it's a very low priced business. And so in your mind it's probably like this is low risk, you know, it's just $100,000 to buy a whole business. And in fact what you learn is that the lower, the more affordable businesses, the cheaper businesses are, the lower quality businesses and there's less meat on the bone. So there's less room for error. There's more that you, the owner have to be in the business and more of it's leaning on you. So it's counterintuitive. But the bigger the business you buy, in fact, the less risk there is. And I feel like your story is a perfect cautionary tale of that.

Guest: Yeah, it really is. I mean, so you'll see the question put out, do I just start a pressure washing company or do I go buy one? And it's like you'd be better off just starting one. Like if you're going to go spend $100,000 on a services business, right, just go start one. Just go buy the equipment off of Craigslist and go start it, don't buy it. And like franchise, franchise. A lot of franchises want 6% royalties or 8% royalties and then 2% for franchise marketing. And you're required to buy products through them. Like don't you know that's 8 to 10% in your Opex that you're paying, right? And so at 500,000 a year in revenue, at 8%, you know it's 40 grand, right? 700,000, right to 10%, you're trading money to a franchisor for, for probably one to one and a half full time employee people or your spouse. So if you're going to go buy a franchise and you read this thing that says minimum investment 250,000, it's a cleaning franchise, whatever. Awesome. Reality is until you clear like 800,000, get close to a million, you're not bringing home enough to feed your family, right? And you're paying a fixed operating expense every month back to the franchisor that could be an employee to help you grow. Now franchises have their place. They have systems, they have marketing, they have support, they have their place. But people being really careful about what those projections are in a franchise and if it's worth paying the royalties and the marketing funds and everything else, right?

[1:00:07] Host: But that cleaning business for $100,000 and you'd say we'll just start it. But if I could find a cleaning business that was mature and that was doing two or three million dollars a year and that was very healthily profitable. And day one, as the president of this and new owner of this business, I could support my family that you would advocate.

Guest: Sure, yeah. I mean, again, if the income is there or the take home income is there. Right, of course. And you go in with your down payment, go get your SBA funds and business pay for itself, and 10 or 15 years later, hopefully you've built something big. And again, a lot of people don't have to see their creative ideas and their entrepreneurship come out in the business. Maybe you just want to be an investor and hire a manager for that $2 million cleaning. That's totally fine. That's just not how I see myself right now. And maybe in five years I'll be like, I'm out. I just want to be an investor. I don't really know. I would say, you know, the last thing here, and we're short on time, is to touch on the faith part of it. I said, you know, talk about that a little bit. Yeah, you know, there's this, the whole faith thing got us through. And I mean, you've got, you know, people in your audience that are, you know, of faith and people that are not whatever else. And it's. I remember having a meeting with my pastor about halfway through about like, where is God? And all of this. And he said, you know, don't get your heavenly scorecard mixed up with your business scorecard.

Host: Right.

Guest: And it was his way of saying that, you know, faith is a really simple proposition. Faith in Christ. You know, there's a God, there's a heaven. He created a path for you to get there by just a simple act of faith. Just believe in Jesus Christ. That's it. Right? That is the essence of the gospel. Nothing more complicated. Nothing that you see in the news and politics, all this stuff. It's a very simple proposition. It does not mean that you are going to get rewarded on a daily basis. Like, God is not a cosmic vending machine. Right. And so one of the things I had to learn through this whole walk was there were times when, like, I know that God showed up and provided this thing, and there are times when I prayed and prayed and prayed, wanted God to provide this thing, and it did not happen. But the faith lesson of this was that, you know, God was with us and got us through. Like my, my heavenly scorecard was intact the entire way. Right. You've seen that poem about footsteps in the sand, right? I looked at the beach and there were two set of footsteps and then all of a sudden there was One set of footsteps. And it was, you know, I said to God, like, where are you? I'm walking by myself. And God said, no, I was carrying you. So it's a famous. It's a famous little poem. But that was the essence of the faith journey, was that I got through this thing with my family and discovered that my faith was much stronger than I ever thought it could be. In spite of not having a business scorecard that I could tie to prayer activity or, you know, church activity or doing the right things or this or that. Like, it doesn't work that way. I feel like that was a revelation that for me, like, just really got us through and put me in a place later today. And even now, it lets me. It lets me deal with and package up, you know, the shame and the mistakes and the hurt and the pain of all the past and everything we went through. And so that is all earthly scorecard things. That has nothing to do with where I am as far as my faith and my relationship with God. And that's the thing that I have to make sure that I have on a daily basis, regardless of what this other scorecard looks like.

[1:03:40] Host: So now I feel like I'm asking a very earthly question. But do you look back at all of this with a sense of regret? I mean, I just wish I would have stayed in that job. Or am I thinking too small?

Guest: Small.

Host: And this is just the path that you're on.

Guest: It's more the latter. It's the path I'm on. This is the path that I chose. Like, even in the hardest times, Will, I chose that life. I chose that path. I'm not a victim. That is what I chose, Right? That is what I chose. My family. That is what. Was it the right choice financially? No. Like, it never will be. Like, we will never make up the millions that we've lost in this business between not being real estate owners, selling what we had, stock from income. We'll catch up eventually and get ourselves in a better place for retirement. But, yeah, the financial piece, I don't look back and say entrepreneurship and buying a business was a mistake. Right? Again, I can point to things I did that were mistakes along the way, but that experience has been a game changer for me as I go out and either interview with a corporation or look at buying another business. Like, I am able to have a different conversation with anybody. Whether I'm selling corporate technology again or whether I'll buy another business, I'm able to come from a completely different space. I've actually been on the implementation side of putting technology into a business and changing jobs and training people to do things with software that they didn't used to do. And, like, I've had to implement this stuff. Right. So. And the mistakes I made as a few, you know, good friends have pointed out, like, I'm not going to make a lot of the same mistakes again. I'm going to be better for it and be able to do things quicker. Right. Having learned all these very tough lessons.

Host: So, yeah, that's great, jd. Well, let's leave it there. This is a great and much needed episode, I think, for acquiring minds. So, no, I really appreciate it. Really appreciate your honesty and transparency about what was obviously a hard experience. But I think I agree that, you know, looking back, it's not an experience to regret. It's an experience that made you, you know, built your character, made you a stronger man for all of that learning and some suffering.

[1:06:03] Guest: Yeah, Yeah. I mean, you certainly wouldn't choose to go through what we did. Nobody would. But having gone through it and having survived, I mean, you know, I'm still trying to figure out what my. My public voice is around this, and I think it's a voice of hope and of healing and of the economy turns around. It's definitely going to be like, how can I help people, like, figure this out? Right. But. But for now, I think it's like, really, how do you survive and how do you get back to a place of, you know, function and thriving and figuring out how to move forward through all of these obstacles that life throws at you?

Host: Right.

Guest: Um, and so, yeah, I. I'm super happy that, you know, to join you today, and I'm very thankful that you've had me on and give me a chance to tell the story and look forward to seeing you online and interacting with people on Twitter as well.

Host: How can. What's your. What's your handle, jd? And is. And is. Is that the best place for them to reach you on Twitter?

Guest: Yeah. Yeah. DMs are open. It's at JDKlein33 at JDKline33. JDecline33, I guess, or 32 other JD Kleins when I signed up.

Host: Very good, JD. Thanks a lot for your time. Really appreciate it.

Guest: Yeah, thanks.

Host: Will.