Owned and Operated #50 - SMBesties 4: Talking Economic Struggles and Successes

Somehow, the Besties return. Reg Zeller joins John to talk economics, low demand, and how the B2B grind is fairing so far.
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The SMBesties are back as John and Reg Zellers hop on to cover a few topics on today’s show. They’ll jump into economics and how low demand even in the home services industry has forced some strategy changes. Business to Business is still doing well, but John talks about the struggles of Business to Consumer during Q1.

Reg talks about how his businesses are starting to get busier. He touches on his struggles to find people with labor shortages. The guys also discuss the shipping and freight issues and how they try to deal with it.

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John Wilson: @WilsonCompanies on Twitter

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Owned and Operated Episode 50 Transcript

Brandon Niro: Welcome back to owned and operated where we dive deep into the businesses we own, the businesses we are acquiring. And we also bring on guests to talk about their operating struggles. If you like what you hear today, follow John and Brandon on Twitter. That's John at Wilson companies in Brandon at Brandon Nairo.

Brandon Niro: Also check out our weekly newsletter where we teach you how to be an effective operator. You can sign up by clicking the link in the description of this podcast or by visiting owned and operated. com that's owned and operated. com. Check it out.

Brandon Niro: The SM besties are back as John and Reg Zellers. Hop on to cover a few topics on today's show. They'll jump into economics and how low demand, even in the home services industry has forced some strategy changes. Business to business is still good, but John talks about the struggles of business to consumer during Q1.

Brandon Niro: Reg talks about how his businesses are starting to get busier. He touches on his struggles to find people with the labor shortages. The guys also discuss the shipping and freight issues and how they try to deal with it. Enjoy!

John Wilson: If you run a home service business like painting, plumbing, lawn care, or cleaning, you know the work never ends. Customer service, hiring staff, mountains of paperwork. The to do list goes on and on. And plus you still have to actually do the work to pay your bills. Running your entire business with pen and paper is hard and messy.

John Wilson: You need a system to stay on top of everything so that nothing falls through the cracks. Jobber is a mobile and online app that helps keep your business organized and looking more professional than ever. With Jobber, you can quote jobs, schedule your crew, and get Send invoices and accept payments online all in one place.

John Wilson: You won't know how you ran your business without it. Jobber offers free one on one coaching to help you get started. No software experience is required. Get paid on time, go paperless and impress your customers. Try it free today at getjobber. com backslash O A O. It's no secret that Brandon and I have cleaned up a lot of poop in our career.

John Wilson: Unfortunately, we don't clean up crappy bookkeeping. That's where today's sponsor comes in. Appletree Business Services handles bookkeeping, payroll, and taxes for small businesses. Appletree Business Services is the go to choice for growing service companies so they can manage cash flow, know their numbers, and save on taxes.

John Wilson: The U. S. based team has taken care of small business bookkeeping and taxes since 2005. Find them online at appletreebusiness. com or email Patrick at appletreebusiness. com.

Reg Zeller: Good. Yeah. Love and life up there. It actually is spring in Minneapolis. Shocking. It's going to be 60 today. Oh my God. Crazy concept.

Reg Zeller: You just wear shorts and. Actually, as soon as I'm done with this, I'm going out in flip flops, shorts, t shirt, I might, Roll out like the muscle shirt or something. Show off my guns. Swear. Nice.

John Wilson: Sun's out. Suns outs out. Suns out. That sounds like you. You're always like talking shit about how you like to wear flip flops to board meetings, so

Reg Zeller: not gonna lie.

Reg Zeller: I love flip flops. I do. They're just, I made fun of by so many people ah, flip flops, man you're like a 40-year-old dude. I'm like, I don't care. I love flip flops. I just don't like them. I know. You said that. Do you not like the

John Wilson: way they look? Do you not like the way they feel? Oh, I don't care about how they look.

John Wilson: Like you do you. I don't like wearing them. They're just not comfortable.

Reg Zeller: Oh, I love them. Sure you don't have the right kind of flip flops. Do you have anything good, like arch support flip flops, like some Reeves or some Ola Kais or any of that? Yeah, you gotta get away from like the cheap flip flops and get yourself a real pair.

Reg Zeller: It's like an open top. It's like a convertible or a motorcycle for your feet.

John Wilson: Nice. That's a nice reference. So we don't have Kelsey with us today and we're already recording. So we're done. Oh, so he's not joining. Yeah. So what do you want to get into today? That's

Reg Zeller: a good question. Should have talked about this beforehand.

Reg Zeller: You want to talk about Q1 and how we're looking at April for you guys? Or what are you thinking? Cause it's crazy. Cause there's a giant bifurcation. I know we talked about the sodom, but. Man, my business, they're getting busier right now, which is insane. It's all their story. Cash flows would be interesting.

Reg Zeller: What do you think about talking about cash? Just how seasonality and cash flows. Now you

John Wilson: got to deal with small business. We can also just talk about economics too. I think it's interesting. So let's dive in. So we know a bunch of people who their businesses are struggling in an atypical way right now.

John Wilson: Now you said yours doesn't seem to be. Not yet. I wonder if it's B2B still doing okay. Cause actually our B2B side is doing okay. It's our B2C stuff that is seeing a slowdown in demand. So I think partly for

Reg Zeller: us, I couldn't tell you, in the whole, eventually we have to get the trickle down.

Reg Zeller: There's no doubt it would have to come. If you're seeing it one place, eventually it gets everywhere. But I actually am curious because of such massive supply chain shortages everywhere, I'm not even positive. There's not. And market drop for us, even in B2B, but because there's so much of a constrained supply in other places, I think we're just seeing other customers, either customers that we have, but our products somewhere else, overseas or some other locale, or, whether that be customers we don't have, it's a drumbeat every single day.

Reg Zeller: More customers asking for more stuff, and I think there's a huge labor shortage as well. Still, which is interesting because I can't wait to hear if you know anything more about those layouts because we still can't find people. It's crazy. I can hire another 5 or 6 people easily in our shops right now and not.

Reg Zeller: Still be able to fill all the demand. I'm not even sure if it's demand or just a supply constraint.

John Wilson: Yeah. So what we've seen? Oh, yeah.

John Wilson: I'm you're talking about trickle down. Are you guys seeing it in shipping yet? Because that's where it started with everybody like a month ago. Those were the first siren bells were like, Hey, freight is slowing down.

John Wilson: Like people are shipping less stuff, right? Yeah. So that means retail is slowing down. And then now in the past week, all of the siren bells for retail have Amazon missing their quarterlies. All the big tech companies bombing. And everyone we know in e commerce except for Kelsey, maybe everyone we know that deals with Amazon in e commerce is like eating shit.

Reg Zeller: Yeah, brutal. Yeah. And so we haven't seen our shipping. We've not got any, and actually very interestingly, we received something still not that long ago with people saying, partly because of our industry that was getting aluminum from Russia, Ukraine, et cetera, that they were saying that they were going to have more shipping problems actually.

Reg Zeller: So it'll be interesting to see. If we do see that load light, and because there's been problems everywhere across the country now, luckily for us, because we've got so many facilities and so many places that are close to other suppliers, we've been able to move that around as needed to get local supply relatively simplistically.

Reg Zeller: And we've had a few cases where. We'll actually ship raw material between our facilities just to cover up short term blips here and there. But yeah, we haven't seen shipments down yet, but again, what's really interesting is that normally, especially in the industry we're in and foundries, we're the leading indicator of things going down.

Reg Zeller: That's why this doesn't feel like a regular business

John Wilson: is spending less money.

Reg Zeller: Yeah. Yeah. And then you see that start to come back, but. We haven't, unless I heard business spending was up, I think early in Q1, I haven't looked into details and the GDP that is released, but that's one of the things where I think it's just that there's just that supply constraint.

Reg Zeller: And because we're local suppliers, I think that's what's really buoying us. And then, like I mentioned, I think a lot of our competitors have major labor problems where we're trying to solve with automation. But yeah, this is going to be interesting to see what happens, assuming this downturn does come.

Reg Zeller: This is not like anything I don't think we've seen. Certainly not in my career. Normally it was housing or it was the tech bubble or whatever. Now it's, you were on the front end. You're probably in the very front end of your career in 2008, 2009. You were.

John Wilson: Yeah. And the company was so small, we were able to do okay.

John Wilson: Cause yeah, maybe this is just my misconception, but if you only have four people to keep busy, it's not that hard versus, 80. I think that

Reg Zeller: right there, this is what you and I, is it yesterday? I can't even remember when we were talking about. The demand slowdown, can you go ramp up marketing to solve it?

Reg Zeller: That's always been, when I was in corporate, that was what we were always beaten up about. Even in the downturn, the bosses that be, they didn't let you off the hook for that. You signed up for 10 percent growth, the market's down five. Okay. Then just go take market share from your competitors.

Reg Zeller: If you only have 10%, that means you're missing 90 percent of the market somewhere. So that's always been my mentality is in a downturn, it's go market share capture.

John Wilson: Yeah. That's been ours too, works pretty well with COVID because everyone stopped advertising like overnight. So we troubled ad spend like that day.

John Wilson: So the issue that we're having right now, which is interesting is if you're doing like immediate outcome marketing, there's demand isn't on the other side. Sure. So it's not necessarily bad. You just have to like, that's normally the quick switch. Okay, we need some work. Let's go throw some money at PPC.

John Wilson: See what happens. Yeah. But can't do it right now because the demand is not there. So we have to engage. In different market. I'm not going to say exactly what it is just in case we're listening, but no, we have a strategy, but it definitely changes. But I said this over text, but we didn't say this on the show we've noticed a slowdown, but what got really interesting was for the first time that I know of since the great recession, our local Roto Rooter big outfit did a large layoff of technicians.

John Wilson: And that is an unheard of you don't get rid of techs that ever, like they're the lifeblood of your company that, so if everyone thinks they've been in a labor shortage for the past two years, we've been in a labor shortage for tax for the last decade, like you don't get rid of tech. Same with us in manufacturing.

John Wilson: Yeah. So this is just wow. Okay. Interesting. Cause sometimes when you're dealing with slowdown, you're like, is it us? What's going on with other companies, but no, we're seeing like right now, at least in our markets, we're seeing a sector wide slowdown.

Reg Zeller: And so for you guys, as you look at that, cause I mentioned B2B, B2C, if we think about cash flows, how does this impact your industry?

Reg Zeller: Q1, you've mentioned a little bit of this, but if Q2 is supposed to be the time you really build your balance sheets and Q1 was slow. And now all of a sudden you're seeing this. Do you think they're ripping that bandaid off ahead of time to rebuild the balance sheet or what do you think, or how is this going to impact you guys in the industry?

John Wilson: I'm really curious, honestly, because I'm not like Q2 is when you start rebuilding balance sheet, right? You cash up all year and then you just get your face punched a few times. By

Reg Zeller: the way, so why don't we just explain that for everybody just for you and I'll do the same for our business, but just why do you guys burn cash in Q1 in your industries?

John Wilson: Q1, it's a bunch of stuff all piled together. It's the highest cost of the year for everything. You're signing new contracts at higher costs. So if it's health insurance or if it's rents or, whatever, it all goes into effect in January. So it's the highest cost quarter of the year with some of that still getting figured in and getting costed in.

John Wilson: You have all the unemployment taxes that get front loaded. So the first quarter, your payroll's, 15, 20 percent higher than it is the rest of the year. And then on top of all that, there's low demand. Which always seems to surprise people that plumbing or HVAC has time of low demand, but it does.

John Wilson: And it's for Ohio, it's quarter one for other places. It's not like California. It's quarter three. It's just basically whenever the most moderate temperatures are, that is when you have slowed down.

Reg Zeller: So it's not the seasonality of the holidays coming off that people not having excess cash to spend January, any of that.

Reg Zeller: That's

John Wilson: always a part of it. Usually our pickup happens around tax day. People get tax refunds. They start spending money again. So you've got a couple things in effect as far as demand one It's a shoulder season. If you have a furnace break or like maybe not break but not operate optimally in March or late February you are not as inclined to fix it or replace it.

John Wilson: You might just repair it You might not replace it because you only have to make not even weeks Or you may not even know. Yeah. You may not even know. So that's the issue is the weather. It still can be cold in April and sometimes even may, but it's not like snowing.

Brandon Niro: Yeah.

John Wilson: So yeah, the consumer's a little bit more strapped from the holidays and then the weather is a little bit less extreme and you get shoulder seasons.

John Wilson: So shoulder seasons are basically, it's not too cold, it's not too hot. So no one's equipment is being stressed. So that happens in September and it happens in February, March. So you've got a bunch of stuff. Now quarter one's always the toughest because you have the higher cost too, as far as a lot and a loss in demand.

Reg Zeller: So low demand plus higher costs. And yeah, see for us, because the reason why we burn money and a Q4 into Q1 is B2B. Yeah. Especially if you're in big manufacturers, there's folks with a fair amount of. The Christmas season is already done for the most part by October into early November. By the time you hit Thanksgiving, there's a ton of vacation that happens between the last week in November.

Reg Zeller: And the first week in January. So naturally outputs up a lot of companies, especially big publicly held companies. They want to minimize the amount of inventory on their books.

Brandon Niro: So

Reg Zeller: they'll burn up their inventory, knowing that they're going to be paying out end of the year bonuses. Plus, they're not going to have as many workers in the facility, B2B just naturally slows down typically, once you get out of, or most of them do, once you get out of December into January, February.

Reg Zeller: And then you get the double whammy of that slowdown. Plus for us, we pay bonuses, cash bonuses to our workers in December. And, to your point, you have additional costs in January, but then because we've got cash cycles as well you're at 30 day terms. You finally start rebuilding.

Reg Zeller: You normally the first two weeks of January, customers aren't ordering a lot of stuff either. So now you've gone, in a. Relatively large slowdown this, especially before I bought the business in December into January, and then you almost re kick up your cash conversion cycle again. So you've burned a ton of money between Thanksgiving and mid January.

Reg Zeller: And then on top of that, you start building products. So now you're ordering a bunch of raw materials in early January. You're paying all your workers those whole times, and you're still not shipping product until second, third, fourth week of January. And then once you start to ship. Now they're out, some customers are 10, 15, 20 days, but other customers are 30.

Reg Zeller: And then some of your really big customers, it might be 60 or 90. And there's a few places there. So yeah, it's the same way for us from a cash burn. And then what we did when I went through this the first year understood it, we consistently were losing a hundred thousand dollars in the month of December alone.

Reg Zeller: And if you look at cash, even more and so we went out, we actively found customers that were counter cyclical. So more or less, we bid jobs that were low that would drive demand in and or we talk with customers and say, Hey, we'll level load. Here'd be the situation. You get product for the rest of the year.

Reg Zeller: Now, because we'll inventory it, get it to you much quicker, but that means that we're going to build it for you December, January, et cetera. So it becomes a low time for us and now we've continued to shift and that's helped immensely.

John Wilson: Yeah.

Reg Zeller: Yeah. I'm super curious because I know a lot of my competitors haven't been able to do that.

Reg Zeller: And yeah. It was a tough coming out, good year, but they think through COVID plus, people floated from PPP loans, EIDL loans, et cetera, et cetera, and then, they would have struggled December, January, February. And now to your point, if we're seeing slowdowns, man, this could be a reckoning in people that don't have solid balance sheets sitting there right now.

John Wilson: Yeah, I think so too. I think it'll be interesting. Home service plumbing and HVC specifically is touted as recession proof. And I think people are going to find out that recession resistant and recession proof are two different things.

Reg Zeller: As it breaks down, I'm sure every house is different per se, but is it, more, is it 50, 50 new construction retrofit or break fix versus, someone built on, I imagine tons of extra break down

John Wilson: of our

Reg Zeller: specific

John Wilson: business?

John Wilson: Yeah,

Reg Zeller: like HVAC, a furnace breaks versus someone upgrading their house. Or they're redoing a kitchen or whatever it might be. I'm sure there's been a lot more of that the last few years with extra money floating around STEM checks and whatnot, but.

John Wilson: Yeah. So our HVAC, it's almost all break, fix, replace.

John Wilson: Like 99 percent probably plumbing is close to the same. Electrical is a little bit different. Electrical. We do a lot of projects in. So electrical would be. What I would think would be our most exposed trade, but right now they're actually humming more, and I would imagine because it's our B2B. Again, our B2B is doing real well.

John Wilson: It's just the direct to homeowner stuff. What else are we still doing well on? Oh the septic. Drains are hilarious. Still doing well. Cause what happens with plumbing is during a slowdown, you start living with stuff. Yeah. Okay. That faucet is dripping. That's not the end of the world.

John Wilson: Whereas, you might, Hey, I'll call the plumber. Faucet started dripping or the toilet's running. It's not the end of the world, but you still get the big stuff like backed up drains. No one's going to ignore that. No hot water. No one's going to ignore that broken pipe. So you get all the emergency stuff, but you stop getting the less urgent upgradey stuff in service.

John Wilson: That's what starts to slow down first, and we are starting to feel that. Now, I don't know if it's just because we're having a late spring. So we'll have to see Hey, what's this look like at the end of May? Cause if it's at the end of May and we're still like dealing with what we're dealing with, then like sirens on something's going crazy and we're going to batten down the hatches.

Reg Zeller: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We made plans. Again, the group text, we had a bunch of these conversations about during early COVID, we've got a playbook of kind of, 5 percent down, 10 percent down, 50 percent down, whatever it is, what do we need to do to continue to be cashflow positive, pay the bills, et cetera, and that'll be a playbook that we're going to need to dust off because since then we've, and just like you guys, we've acquired a bunch of businesses and the calculus of that gets much more complex.

John Wilson: Yeah. We just rebuilt ours three weeks ago because it seemed like something, some of our leading indicators were a little Hey, demands not what we think it should be at this time. So it was about three weeks ago. We first noticed something was being a little weird. So we dusted off the disaster plan.

John Wilson: We call it disaster plan. Aggressive. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It gets pretty aggressive, but yeah, no, we have that. It enables us to probably same as you move fast. So you don't have to spend time deciding what actions to take. You decided them a year ago. Now you just go do them.

Reg Zeller: No, that's why we initially put it in place where it's not an emotional, you give yourself time, you've thought through it you understand, what we did is we built almost zero based, if you will, what's the smallest kind of Lego block that needs to fit together to run it.

Reg Zeller: And this is our very minimum that we would need. And then how do you add and or subtract from the minimums? Okay. You can have two of these chunks of Legos, X number of workers here doing these things. Okay. If you're going to go to a second, block, how many people does that mean?

Reg Zeller: And what are those sales have to look like and whatever happens. But like I said, as of now, I think part of this is because the last time we saw this was early COVID when B2B. Quickly turned off orders and then it's been almost quite literally two years that everybody in the industry has been struggling and it increased demand, you take a month or two out of the supply chain that demand kicks up and then the labor shortage kicks in and then all these other and it's just been chasing our tails for two years practically.

Reg Zeller: Yeah, for sure. So

John Wilson: nonstop.

Reg Zeller: Yeah. I've seen people that, Girdley mentioned it. I'm not sure who else was on. They were talking about, there's some folks that are hoping for a recession. Then I saw someone else comment. Yeah. I'd lived through this in 2007, 2008, 2009. It was, relatively early in my career, five, six years in, but that was painful.

Reg Zeller: I understand there's some sentiment that, oh, it could clean out some bad companies, maybe not great actors would be impacted. It still sucks. A really deep downturn, especially one that last, 12, 18 months like that one did that. That was terrible. It impacts everything. It impacts workers, families, just mental, the way people are.

Reg Zeller: Things are how you deal with it, everything you just, it's a weird deal as you go through, like you're going through like holidays, people are like, Oh, this still sucks. You don't have jobs or I can't manage. That was really rough really rough. I really hope we don't see something like that.

Reg Zeller: That was painful and it'd be really even more painful now as a business owner. Have to be the one making some of those decisions. It was one thing as a manager to make those decisions. It's a whole other to know the livelihoods of all the people that we impact and what we would need to do to make this work.

Reg Zeller: We've thought a lot about that as well. So it's not fun for sure.

John Wilson: Yeah, I definitely am not hoping for it, but. Everything indicates we're going one way, but the opposite opinion is if everyone thinks it's going to happen, is it really going to happen?

Reg Zeller: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. That's the bad part. Long term it's better for us.

Reg Zeller: We've got strong balance sheets. We've got good businesses. We're in a much better position than a lot of our competition, but it still doesn't mean I hope for it. But three years or five years, yeah. I guarantee you we're in a much, much better spot if it does happen just because of the leveled playing field that would then exist, or lack of a playing field that might exist.

Reg Zeller: So yeah, it still wouldn't be good to do.

John Wilson: Yeah. Anyway, I don't know. I'm fascinated by the potential switch of a labor shortage to, and we're seeing it in tech. Yep. So like tech has gone from. Like everyone, a massive labor shortage to now doing layoffs, like big layoffs, like double digit percentage layoffs of their companies.

John Wilson: And I think it's going to be fascinating to watch the transition of like labor being the commodity to labor, not being the commodity and how fast that happens.

Reg Zeller: And it's going to be interesting because there's folks like us that have built automation. And after living through all those years of pain, and there's very few things that are more painful as a business owner to know that you're leaving money and product on the table because you can't get enough people to get more product out the door where you just don't have the capacity to serve the demand.

Reg Zeller: And myself, I know, and a lot of other folks that are in the manufacturing space, we are actively building out automation, robots, cobots. And my concern is it doesn't come back. And this goes down 1, 2, 3 years from now. We're not going to stop out of this. I'm not going to go back to worrying about manual labor as the way that's going to save our company, all of a sudden.

Reg Zeller: It doesn't come a commodity. It won't matter. We're down this path and we're going to continue to go down that path. We have to just can't live through another shortage like this. And I think long term the demographics would say the more likelihood is that it does. I think immigration policies and everything else we've done on demographics as we've aged, I don't think it's going to get better.

Reg Zeller: And so that sucks. Cause those are 60, 80, a hundred thousand dollars a year, blue collar jobs that exist that we didn't want to fill. And now they're not coming back. They'll be gone. And it'll continue to get worse, probably a little different for you guys and with tax, but not manufacturing.

John Wilson: Yeah, for us, it's always people unless they come up with some sort of way to change that.

John Wilson: But I, maybe I'm not creative enough. This isn't like Uber and taxi driving. I don't know of how, cause we work in like a hundred year old homes. You can't like maybe model homes. You could make a robot or something, but I don't see how it happens. Yeah, not. Not in the next 20 years.

Reg Zeller: No, you gotta get a lot smarter robots before you're going to have the payback on that.

Reg Zeller: I think manufacturing where it's repetitive tasks over and over again. That's the future. The same thing in fast food. Yeah. You've seen that

John Wilson: stuff. There's like burger flipping machines now. Yeah.

Reg Zeller: Yeah. The burger robots, coffee

John Wilson: robots there. Yeah. I was talking, who was I talking to? I was talking to, Mike, he owns a bunch of Wingstops and he's at the Columbus meetup.

John Wilson: He's based out of Columbus and Wingstop doesn't allow it yet, but there are robots that now drop the wings and hold it there for the 30 seconds or whatever, and then bring it back up. And that's their whole thing. So he's getting yeah, for sure. I

Reg Zeller: mean, we literally, foundry, except we're dipping in.

Reg Zeller: 1400 degree molten aluminum. If we can do it there and pick something up and precise port having wings dropped in and out of a basket or putting a burger on a grill and slapping mustard pickle onion on it, that's simple compared to our world. That is nothing now. I just want wings.

Reg Zeller: Speaking of, yeah, you guys still doing like your weekly wing thing. We've never been there for that. It's been a while. I had to stop out of

John Wilson: there. Like I put on your midsection, I put on my midsection. Yeah. I've like never been someone that could gain weight easily. And for the first time ever, last November, I gained weight easily.

John Wilson: And I was like, okay, I'm done with the welcome to

Reg Zeller: your thirties, buddy. Welcome to the club. We've all been there. I love it. It'll be interesting to see as we walk this thing out, because I saw someone post this, if you've bought a business. We're operated one since 2008, 2009. You've essentially never seen a recession.

Reg Zeller: If you've been in tech since whatever it was, 2001, you've never seen a recession. It's going to be a different animal. I can tell you right now, the inbound calls from my competitors, people that are like, Oh, we live through this, we got our PPP. We went through COVID. It was already exhausting than dealing with labor shortages.

Reg Zeller: And now they're staring down like what they think might be another recession that they've lived through many times if they've been in this for 40 years. Yeah. These guys are just take my business, get me out. I don't care. It's now the running joke. They're like, all right, it's time for you young guys to do this.

Reg Zeller: I'm not young anymore. They're like you're a lot younger than us. So I had enough of this.

John Wilson: Oh God. See. All right.

Reg Zeller: I

John Wilson: feel like we knocked this one down pretty well. I love it.

Reg Zeller: Anything else today? I think that's pretty much it. Hey, just quick. The Columbus thing is awesome. And that's what I want to, I would encourage people.

Reg Zeller: I know we talk about it on Twitter all the time, but meeting people in real life is fantastic. Obviously I've got to know you and Kelsey really well. So after Columbus did my conference and then stopped over and hung with you guys, which is always great. Came up with a couple of new plans from our walking meeting, which was amazing.

Reg Zeller: And that's amazing, but yeah. So for anybody that hasn't done it, organize some meetups. You never know. Maybe John and I, because we're bored right now, we'll jump on airplanes and come and join you. Who knows? If you host it in Cleveland, I'll definitely go. Oh, here we go. Cleveland. I'm just not doing anything else anyway.

Reg Zeller: I got two young kids. I don't want to fly anywhere. That's right. You can't do that. Director of finance for all kids.

John Wilson: That's right. I get real stuff now. All right.

Reg Zeller: This was good.

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