Billy Keels  0:00  Today's episode is sponsored by Billy Keels advisory services. If you want to learn more about how to make your 99 optional, just go to make it optional.com. Once again, that's make it optional.com.Speaker 1  0:14  Helping you build freedom without losing your edge. This is the going long podcast with Billy Keels,Billy Keels  0:27  it's not every day that I get a chance to speak to someone who I have known for years, call a brother from another mother and is also a world traveler, an amazing father, and someone who really, really, really enjoys making a positive impact and contributing to others. And also this is the gentleman who, about a year ago, was sitting where I'm sitting today on episode 435, and he is the one that helped to bring Billy Keels back to the microphone on this side of the microphone. And I'm super excited to welcome today the gentleman who is not only a two time best selling author books like exit to excellence, you're next, he's also got an amazing podcast himself. He's the host of your next podcast. He's got all kinds of frameworks, all kind of different things that he's going to talk to us about. But the most important thing is His name is Mr. Jerome Myers, and I want to welcome him back as the only other person who has now been here three times he is coming from my guys. Want to welcome to today's episode of The go along podcast. Mr. Jerome Myers. JeromeSpeaker 2  2:00  show me all day, and I don't know what to do. I'm so happy to be here when you guys reached out. And it's like, Hey, we're thinking about guests. I was like, Well, I gotta make sure I'm the first one. Yes, I like first mover advantage. And so, so grateful to have the invite. I know how rare they are to get an invite to come on this podcast, the top one and a half percent in the world. I mean, come on. Man, who does it better than you guys? Man, it's so good to be with you.Billy Keels  2:28  We are just one step at a time. Man, one step at a time. And so, yeah, this is 123, is this four times?Unknown Speaker  2:40  If I get credit for interviewing you, yes,Billy Keels  2:44  you absolutely do. And by the way, just being here and sharing Mike time with you is amazing. I also get face to face time with you, which is also a blessing in itself. But I want everybody else to get a chance to know you. I know they can go back and check out episode 435, where you did a masterful job in helping me to get back here to be on this side of the microphone, which I think you eternally for, for you helping me with that. And I know that nowadays you are really focused on helping individuals that you will call founders, because everybody talks to them a lot about they're talking to them about all of the money they're using really amazing formulas and their ROIs and their EBIT does, and their CAC and all this other kind of stuff. But you realize that nobody really wants to help them understand what is their identity. And I think that that is absolutely powerful. And you yourself, who has been in a highly influential multiple eight figure corporate business role, to also being able to work with and help others that are eight, nine figure things, I really want you to help us understand is, who is Jerome Myers,Speaker 2  4:07  yeah, you know, I asked chat GPT this a while back. I was struggling. I was like, Who am I without the money? Because, you know, I think it's a core concept. When you take away the things, the accouterments, you take away the watches as you pick with me all the time about in the cars, the houses, the cash and what's left. And you know not that AI is the end all be all. But it said, Well, you're an amazing partner and a father and a son, your friend, one who actually cares about how people are doing and not what they can do for you. And it went on to really dig into values. And so if I had to sum it up, I would just use an affirmation, and you kind of alluded to it. An intro, and it is, you know, I want everyone I come in contact with to be better because of our encounter. If I'm remembered that way, if that's the essence of the experience, then I think I will have done well.Billy Keels  5:20  You're on that path, for sure. I can attest to that. And so today, as you as you're on the path, and you're making impact and contributing, I would whenever I think of you, I think of contribution, right? Because that's one of the biggest things that I have personally been able to grow as a result of and so, but there, there are some individuals who also too. I mean, I alluded to a little bit, but I know there was a certain point in your life we're going to come back to what you're doing today, but there was a moment in your life when you know a lot of what you were doing was the identity that you kind of gave yourself was related to roles and related to just things that you were doing in the day to day, and at a certain point you had a choice to make, like, Hey, I think everybody that's here and is watching is listening, they know that, you know, for the large part, I came from a very working class family, us working class family, and watch my parents work two different jobs, and so I always wanted to stay in the corporate role in the race and all that kind of stuff. And I did it really, really well for a long time. Then I got to a certain point that it was a I had a choice, and I could either live the corporate lifestyle or not, and I really enjoyed mine. Just chose to make some different had to make a different path or choose a different path. Can you talk to someone who may not have seen or heard from you? Kind of that path as that corporate warrior, that high achiever, and then you got to a point and said, Hey, maybe I want to do something else.Speaker 2  6:52  Yeah, I'll never forget January 13, 2015 where I started a new division for a fortune 550 company. We had $0 in revenue. It was me and one other person in the shop. We have our first meeting with the client. They hand over the file, and we're off to the races. I look up at the end of September, we got 175 people on the team get to the end of the year 30% profit margins on $20 million in rev December 24 I get a phone call and it goes something like this, Hey, Jerome, we're going to lay half the team off. Like, yeah, that's not the right answer. We'll need them next year. We're going to continue to grow. Like, yeah, this isn't a discussion. I'm informing you of a decision. And it was at that point I realized I wasn't actually an entrepreneur, even though I only talked to people every other week and saw them once a quarter, so I spent the week between Christmas and New Year's figuring out who was going to stay, who was going to go, and I promised myself I'd never do it again. But I also, in the same breath, said they're making me do it. I gave away my agency Billy, and that for me was a challenge. And so it was at that point where I was like, Well, how do I make it so that the buck stops with me? And I just kept asking myself that question over and over and over again. And I'll never forget it was like, late January, early February, we're having the all hands meeting with the team that was still going to continue the journey, and I apologize to them and say, hey, you know, I should have been a better leader. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry for the folks that are gone. You're still here because of your performance. We're really appreciative of you. And they just kind of looked at me dazed and confused, because I don't think they'd ever seen somebody take responsibility in that way, and maybe they felt like I shouldn't be the one taking responsibility, whatever the case was. And so that kind of struck me as well. And so we get to November of the next years, the week before Black Friday, and I've pulled the team together say, Hey guys, I don't know what's going to happen between now and end of the year, but don't spend all your money on Black Friday, huge holiday here in the US, for those of you across the pond. And a lot of times people spend or overspend because they want to make good on those deals. And so I just felt all my leadership credibility was out on the floor in that conversation, and I had a three hour drive home from that meeting, and it just kept rolling it around in my head. What am I doing? Why doesn't the buck stop with me? Why am I telling people who are postponing and changing their life plans to help work on this initiative that I don't know what's going to happen, and I know deep down in my soul not to find her decision maker. And so I decided to exit corporate man, and we went on this run. We started fixing the flip of houses, then we bought apartment buildings, and we had a few exits along the way. And I learned very quickly that. But nobody actually cares about the real estate, and it was a pretty lonely existence, because the only time I heard from people is if they wanted to complain about their unit, or they wanted to know when they were going to get their dividend check. And none of those things were where I wanted to be remembered. They that those things weren't part of my legacy, although I have set this ambitious goal to be one of the largest housing providers in the market that I live in. And so again, there was a pivot. And when I was in that pivot, it was, well, what do I actually miss? Like, what actually matters. And the only thing that I could come up with was people coming into my office and saying, Hey, I couldn't have done that without you. And then I just started chasing that. And what it looks like today is eliminating suffering for founders, business owners. It's we're watched. 75% of people exit their companies and regret it. And for the life of me, I can't understand how that is the promise for somebody who dedicates 15 to 50 years of their life building an enterprise only to regret that they parted ways with it.Billy Keels  11:26  So helping to stop pain, eliminate pain, and you've just taken us through this kind of where you started, yeah, to where you are today, right? Um, and, and and I know that there's a lot of you know you mentioned that you felt like your your agency was taken away because you were in a role you you saw a an entire division like literally explode in positive results. Then you had to detract it sure it was more continue to maintain profitability. That's one of the things that that has to happen with to happen with the machine, right? Um, and then at the same time, you chose that like, this is not the life for me, because the agency, one of the aspects you talked about. But I'm just curious if you, if you had, because there's some patterns that I start to recognize, but if you had this notion or this voice that maybe was calling you over time leading up to that saying, hey, look, you have these amazing skills. There's something that you can also be doing, not just within the constructs of what you're doing. And you're nine to nine, as I like to call it. But did you have that kind of voice that was calling you for a little while? Hey, Jerome, there's something else you can also be doing. Or was it just the pain of what you were going through at that moment that said you don't want to be involvedSpeaker 2  12:47  in this. So what was really interesting is, in college, my sophomore year, me, my buddy Doron, were sitting on a stoop, and we were doing math. I was paying 395 I had two roommates paying the same thing. He lived downstairs. Exact same thing happened in his apartment. And when we multiply, multiplied it across the complex, the guy was making $750,000 a year, but we never saw him or talked to him, and so it was like, well, you can decouple your time for money. This is interesting, but grew up the son of a soldier and a stay at home mom, so I didn't have any idea on how you buy multi million dollar real estate, and so I spent my career in engineering and project management trying to figure out how to get back to the real estate and so I'm calling. I just didn't know how to do it, and I still hadn't met the people to do it. And even upon my exit, I still didn't know the people that could help me do it, but I'd been doing some private money lending. So that took me into the fix and flip world, and then from the fix and flip world, I got kind of pulled up to the majors from there, but there was that calling from college, and the voice was always running. And then once I got there, it seemed like that was an illusion, right? Like this whole concept of, you know, make money, don't have any time obligations, you know, this passive income thing that everybody touts and offers. It ended up showing me how meaningless life can be when you aren't in service. And you know, somebody may say, Well, you're in service of the people who rent from you. Yeah, okay. But like we were managing a manager, like the time commitment, the obligation related to the real estate was really, really small. And then with your in acquisition mode or disposition mode, it might be some intensity there, but for all intents and purposes, like you're just kind of floating aimlessly. And that, to me, is a bit of a purgatory, because we, I believe, that we've been placed here to serve. And. So a lot of people have the talk about purpose, but what we boiled it down is purpose is two piece, the people you serve and the problem you solve. And I wasn't doing either one of those in the real estate. I guess I could say, oh, it's helping my partners make money that's unfulfilling and then providing housing for folks. Okay, great, but I was so far removed from the end client that, you know, I didn't actually get to see the impact that we were making. So then the voice was, well, does your life actually matter? And how can your life matter? How can you get it such that when people are carrying your casket, there's other people standing there, like I should be doing that, or I like to say, you know, are people going to fight over the opportunity to carry your casket? And I wanted to create or deliver that level of impact in the world.Billy Keels  16:02  And you're definitely on that you are doing it, and you are on that path to continue to do it at even higher levels. And so it, you know when you hear that voice, even before you knew that the voice was going to impact you later, it's it. This is a common theme that I that I begin to recognize, because that voice, when you begin to hear it. It doesn't ever go away. It's just a matter of, are you willing to take a moment to listen and interpret it at that point in your life, like you did, and now you're continuing that journey, right? And one of the things that you were talking about before, because maybe someone's listening for the first time, when we talk about a founder and you helping to eliminate their pain. Can you help us understand who is a founder? For someone who may not know, and you talked about money, but then also potentially, that founder that we talked about looking for life beyond just the money, if you can describe that a bitSpeaker 2  16:58  for us, please. Yeah, so a founder is someone who starts an enterprise. Some people say, Oh, I'm the CEO, or I'm the president, or pick another title that sounds really fancy on LinkedIn. But the fact of the matter is, you had an idea and then you started to start an organization in order to execute that idea. So what we find outside of like the tech folk, it takes 15 to 50 years to build that to a place where it is independent. You can sell that cash flow that's created by the business of somebody else, and you can get a multiple on it. This is one of the largest opportunities for wealth creation that anybody can ever have. Many times I liken it to hitting the lottery. So you go from having a zero or two in your bank account to having a multiple of zeros, and now you've got more money than you've ever had, you have more time than you've ever had, and you don't have anything to use your talent against because you've been using it against that enterprise. The pain comes in on six levels, and we call them the six centers of doubt. So it starts with self image. Then it goes up to relationships, from relationships to work or the void that work was. Then there's health, prosperity and significance. Most of the time, when we're on these shows, we only talk about self image and relationship, just because they're the easiest to illustrate. So with self image, most people who are founders talk about the company as if it's a part of them, and for all intents and purposes, if it's been around for 15 to 50 years, it is. You've had to be the chief evangelist, you had to tell everybody about it. You may have mortgaged your home to keep capital in the bank so that you could keep the thing going when you had a cash crunch, or if it didn't work the way you thought it's going to work in the beginning. And you know, your DNA goes into the culture, the people you hire, and so on and so forth, and so if you don't do the work to decouple your identity from the business, when you sell it, it's like experiencing a loss. Some people would say, I'm losing a limb. Other people would say, I just sold my baby. But there is this disconnection with the piece of you when that transaction happens. And then if we move out to relationships, just to get us, you know, get us a third of the way through the six centers when we do this exercise called a 2c matrix and workshops, and we did three of them for visage last week, what we find. Is of the five people you spend the most time with, three of them are typically connected to the business, and so imagine having 60% of your friends vanish in a single day. Very quickly, the loneliness sets in. Very quickly, you start to question if you matter, or if anybody cares about you, and you find out that you didn't really have five real friends. You had three deal friends and two potentially real friends, although those two are usually the spouse and the children.Billy Keels  20:39  Yeah, so you know, as as I'm hearing you talk about the the six centers of doubt that 60% in that example that you gave that are related to or connected to the business that has become a part of this, this founders identity. And I'm also thinking, you know, we have so many people that are watching and listening that the founders and we're helping to help them to understand that the question would be, well, you know what, Jerome, I don't actually, I'm not a founder yet. Maybe that voice is calling me. But today, I'm running a $200 million line of business across, you know, four or five, six region or geographies, maybe two, three different regions. Call it North America, Europe and Northern Africa. How does, how could this actually what you're talking about? How it can that relate to me? Because I'm not in that founder space yet, but I'm. I'm pretty much running a really big business, and probably bigger than many of the small, small type of founders. But I'm feeling like this could potentially be meSpeaker 2  21:43  tomorrow. Yeah. So the great part about this is it, it's the same for anybody that's making a major transition. The first time I went through the founders exit paradox was when I left the division, right? So, you know, we go to 20 million, we've got a team of over 100 I walked out the door, I still lost three people associated with the business that were in my five I still didn't know what my identity was. You know, I traded a company truck in for my own truck. But what did that actually mean? The people who wanted to talk to me so aggressively when I had the title, didn't want to talk to me anymore. The people that I used to call every day weren't answering the phone or responding to the text messages as quickly. And so it's the exact same thing. It's we focus on founders because we think it's more intense with them, but the symptoms are the exact same thing, regardless of what transition you're making. And you know, my favorite example of this is my dad. You know, my dad was a public has been a public servant for close to 50 years now. And you know when he started with military service and then went in a postal service, and now he's a public official. And you know, his struggle in between each one of those transitions was very apparent for anybody that was paying attention. So, you know, these experiences, while branded for founders, are universal for anybody that's going through a major transition as it relates to the way that they earn moneyBilly Keels  23:20  and that now the penny drops, right? It's very, very helpful. Um, and also reminds me, I mean, you're giving an example that I remember as I was I had stopped running. I mean, I ran about $100 million business across Europe, Middle East and Africa. And you and I've talked about that before, but I just remember when I exited stage left of corporate right because my dad got sick, my phone stopped ringing. I was like, Wait, hang on a second. Hang on, man. Every every call is supposed to come through me, everything's supposed to happen. And all of a sudden, for that little period of time, I just, I didn't really necessarily know what to do. It was, it was a very different feeling. So I appreciate you also bringing that home to help us understand like what you're doing, the way that you're contributing, the way that you're serving, is also helpful for anyone who is going through any type of of a transition. So you talked about earlier, or I talked about it your exit to excellence, right? We've talked about exits, we've talked about the transition, but when you talk about exit to excellence as a founder yourself, whatSpeaker 2  24:31  does that mean? Yeah, so we talked about the 75% of founders that regret their exit. Well, let's really dig into the math. I'm a recovering engineer, right? And so sometimes I pull out the math. I think you and I were doing math on a boat in St Lucia at one point. But yes, that's for a different story, right? So one in 10 businesses survives 10 years, right? Of those businesses, two. Two that get listed for sale, out of 10 actually transact. Right? Of those two that transact, 70% 75% of the founders regret it.Billy Keels  25:13  So when you say Jerome, just so we don't, just in case, we, I know we got a lot of corporate folks, but just in case, when you say transact when you bring us the numbers just to we don't lose anybody. Yeah, soSpeaker 2  25:27  people who own their companies go through this process of trying to sell it. There's only a 20% success rate in selling the business and getting paid for the company that you bought. And I think it's probably good to bring up the fact that there's only three ways out of a company. Once you start it, you sell it, you give it away, or you close it. And so the one that provides the most financial upside is selling it. And again, only two out of the 10 that go through this process of trying to sell or transact are successful, then of those folks, 75% regret it. And so that leaves you, if we did the math right, about 4% of companies actually get to the place where they exit and they are happy about the decision to sell their company, and that's what I consider excellence.Billy Keels  26:27  You all did hear Jerome just say and do the math. You walked us through it. Very, very diligently. Kindly, 4% you said, right, Jerome, 4% and you call that happiness? Yeah, well, ISpeaker 2  26:44  think that's excellent, right? Excellent. If you're in the top 4% top 5% of the world, yep, right. And we're discounting the fact that only 10% make it to the place where they could even be considered for this, right? We're skipping over that, and we're just saying, for the ones actually go through the transactions, like ones that actually are successfully sold, that they are limited to 4% of getting to a place of enjoying it one year after, to me, with all of the folks who label themselves As exit planners running around, you know that's a failure in a lot of ways, right? There's only a 4% success rate. I don't think many people are taking that bat. And so what we're seeing is people, specifically baby boomers, who are holding on to their companies, right? Indefinitely, I'll die in a meeting. They'll pry my dead fingers off of a keyboard, like we hear that a lot with attorneys and financial advisors. Or I've worked so hard when I was younger and didn't make any money. Now I get paid so well for the work that I do. Why would I ever leave something else that comes up for us? So, you know, I don't believe that that's what we're built for. I don't believe that's our destiny. I don't think that's the legacy that we truly desire to have. So when you put all those things together, you know, we sit in a space, in this place of, well, what does it actually mean. And I think there's a couple of things that go into that. So there's a percentage, right? There's the rarity of the fact that you can actually enjoy it. I was having dinner with Daymond John maybe two years ago. We were in Miami, and I was like, man, what does it mean to like, exit to excellence. You, you know, you sell food boo for whatever, multiple times and like, what does it actually mean? He's like, Well, you exit on your terms. Okay, that's difficult. You get your price. You're prepared for a void, because you know that you're going from something to potentially nothing, and that you know what you're going to do next. Those were four things. And I was like, okay, that's that's pretty cool. And as I've done a lot of work with founders and more research, what I found is the thing that's most important for somebody that's leaving, whether it's their corporate job or selling their company, is knowing what you're going to do next, right? It is exiting to something instead of exiting from and so many people are so focused on what they're exiting from that they say, Oh, I'll figure out what I'm going to exit to. And they'll say, Oh, well, I'm going to do nothing for a year, or I'm going to do nothing for six months. And in that time, they go into a valley, and it's often filled with quicksand, and many times they need somebody to help them out, because the more that they struggle in the quicksand, the deeper they get. Mm.Billy Keels  30:00  So this is so this as you, as we talk about contribution, and we talk about you being able to have this insight, and not just because of the fact that you have studied, you have, well, one that you've studied, and you have you've understood the Exit Planning, exit and Exit Planning as it exists, correct? You've done it yourself at a corporate level, outside of corporate and you are helping others today. Now, I also happen to know that you talk about this on a global platform. This is something that you've gone to talk about in other countries. I'm also curious, is this something that is just a US phenomenon in terms of the the those that are arriving to that excellence level of exit, or is this something that you're also seeing globally?Speaker 2  30:58  So the very interesting thing about the global marketplace is the majority of the businesses are family owned and family held, and they're moving them in between generations in the US, we're finding that the next generation don't want to be in the family business, and so that founder is faced with the challenge, do I sell it and spread the money across folks? Do I close it, or do I still try to give it to the children that have said they don't want anything to do with the business, mainly because they saw how it has treated their parents, and they're like, there's no way that I'm going to subject myself to that on a global scale. There's more it seems to be more duty with the next generation, and they just kind of gladly step in to the family business. And the issue that they experience is a dilution issue, because each generation typically has multiple kids, and then it's like all these people are eating off of the business. And if the business isn't growing, or the children aren't finding ways to contribute in a meaningful way, they get trapped in a business that can't sustain all of the shareholders. And IBilly Keels  32:19  can imagine that that's usually not a, you know, let's say it's just to also bring that to what Jerome is talking about. There's, you know, you have a family business. There's a, let's just say it's a one box in that one box with one person, maybe, or two people in the beginning, that's one thing, but that same box that doesn't potentially grow to a much larger box, but then has three children for each person, that's six, and then those children have other people. And so as you find it's more and more people with the same size of the box. Hence the dilution that that Jerome is talking about, and that you know that that does bring it back home to what you were talking about in the very beginning, as a founder, you really have those three different options. You either sell it, you close it, or you give it away. And so there's a number of, you know, there aren't an infinite number of possibilities to be able to, to be able to go through. So I appreciate you. You painting that picture, and I want to keep talking to you forever and ever and ever and ever, of course. And I get to actually, once we turn the mic off, but not not today, at a different time, but Jerome, before I wrap up, I guess I'm just, I'm curious, in terms of, like, what you are seeing or the people that you are helping to eliminate the pain, what is something that we should know about founders or anyone who's making that transition? Let's not just keep it to founders. I know your specialization is there, but also you are able to and do help those eliminate pain that are in corporate scenarios as well. If you can just share something, maybe, I don't want to call it prediction, but just something that you're noticing as well that you're noticing as well, that we haven't highlighted here today, that would be useful for our audience to know.Speaker 2  34:07  Yeah, we talked about it already, but I think it's worth repeating. Exiting two is the most important thing you can do, and I watch so many people say I got enough money, I'll figure it out. And they kind of drift in the sea of freedom. And for some people, it's an ocean of freedom, and they don't know how to sell their ship, and so they're just getting blown around. And what looked like freedom becomes a prison because they feel trapped in a space, in a place where they don't know how they're going to answer the question of what's next. The money is not the solution, and this is probably actually. A good addition to this conversation. So if you think about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, there's five different levels to it. Money only solves the first two levels. And once you solve your money problem, all the problems that you're going to be trying to solve are in levels three, four and five. And if you really get fancy level six, which isn't actually on a pyramid, it floats above, is called transcendence. And so what I believe is happening, more often than not, is people are trying to solve problems that can't be solved with money, with money, and this requires a totally different frame of thinking. It requires a different level of vulnerability in order for you to get the support that you need, to get to the outcome that you truly desire. And I don't think most people are even beginning to think about things in that way,Billy Keels  35:57  which is why we're very fortunate and all of our viewers, all of our listeners, everyone that's part of the going along family that is watching. That is watching and listening today are now aware, also aware of you bringing this to our minds. Thinking about what you are getting ready to are going to exit to is a great mindset, a great way to to prepare yourself, right? And then, of course, you're part of our family. You're in in and now they know that they can reach out to you. And so Jerome, I guess, in in wrapping things up, even though I don't want to, man, I want to ask you a question. Today. I'm not going to ask you about traveling to Europe.Unknown Speaker  36:39  I'm going to come to Barnes.Billy Keels  36:42  Okay, Hey, you. Everybody heard it? Everybody heard it? It's pretty high. We'll make it happen. We'll make it happen. So it's been a couple times here now and then. One of the things that I'm also recognizing is that if we have a chance to tell ourselves our future selves things, you know, what is it that we would say now I plan on being here for quite a while, the podcast being here for quite a while, and I would, I would really love for you to be able to think about today's conversation, be able to reflect upon it and leave a message for your future self, because you've been through a number of different life events that have helped to get you here, and each time, you become much more aware, much more conscious, of what's happening. And so if you could think about what you would like to leave the message for your future self, but Jerome, just, just three years out, not not a year, not five years, three years out, what's the message that you want to leave for yourself, that you know that the the going long family can also benefit from and it gives us something to come back to three years fromSpeaker 2  37:51  now. You know, I'm I'm really grateful Billy to have this opportunity, and I look just over her head, and I see a dragon egg right above your head, and it's a gift that I gave you in St Lucia a few years ago. In the theme of that event was tame your dragons. And I believe that taming your dragons is the key to allowing you to live the life of your wildest dreams. And so whatever the thing is that you're carrying guilt about you need to be forgiven for you're scared other people of knowing about, like being able to tame those dragons is the thing that's going to give you the freedom that you need in order to make the impact that you want to make on the planet. And I watch so many people hide because they're scared somebody's going to find out. Somebody might know that this happened to or for me, depending on your perspective, and even I fit in that boat when I when I think about my divorce and think about being the dad and not being in the house with my kids, it's one of those things that You know, it's tough. It's tough.Billy Keels  39:21  So as you help us reflect and also talk to yourself, with yourself, for yourself, being able to think about now, you make me think back to well. I can't even believe it's only been well, I guess that was three years back now St Lucia, so to be able to recognize and tame those dragons, which, as I think about that can believe this is this conversation has already gone by so fast, helping founders, individuals, let's say, helping growth minded leaders to. Be able to eliminate pain, right? It's something that you continue to do well. You continue to do well in the area of helping others to exit to excellence, which is fantastic. You've given us some very concrete examples as to how you are helping the global vision that you have of your space, the the 4% four percenters that you also can help move to the next level, and being able to do it in a way that is helping not only people solve their problems, but do it in a way that is as hyper focused on on the individual, and so it makes me think about what you talked about in the very beginning, right as we, as we think about you as a as a friend, as a father, as a partner, as a son, and the things that we will continue to understand and know you for as someone who continues to contribute, who continues to make impact and eliminate pain. I would like to say I really appreciate you joining the podcast today, and I also want to give you an opportunity to help our going long family understand. You know what Jerome is sharing some goodness. I really want to find out more about what he's doing. We didn't, I didn't. I didn't. I mentioned the podcast at the beginning, but you got your own podcast, your next podcast, talk to us about how we can get in touch with you. Man,Speaker 2  41:29  yeah, I think the best place for the folks to go is LinkedIn. Man, we're there every day, multiple times a day, engaging with folks and you know, you'll be able to see all the different things going on from there. That's our hub. And you know, we're on the other social medias, but that's by far our biggest following, and we're our most active and so Jerome Myers on LinkedIn in Greensboro, and think we're the only ones, because we're the only ones talking about exits,Billy Keels  41:59  all right, man, well, I appreciate it also to everyone when you win, not if, when you reach out to Jerome, and you reach out to him, as he just mentioned on LinkedIn, please let him know that you have already invested time learning more about Jerome, how he can potentially help you, help you to diagnose, and I know he can Not potentially, he can help you, but also getting an opportunity to know you, but let him know that you've already invested time getting to know him. All right, it's great for you, it's great for him, and that way you can continue the conversation in a much more efficient and effective manner. So Mr. Myers, I would like to say from the very bottom of my heart that I really appreciate you deciding once again to invest your time with me and the entire going along family. Thank you very, very much. Appreciate a pleasure. All right, my friend