Terry Hedden (00:00)
I’m excited to share with you Wes and Shane’s story of SD Tech. Like so many MSP leaders, they found themselves with a business owner owning too much responsibility. He was achieving success, but nowhere near the goals that he had for himself. So we figured out the answer was about dividing and conquering. You see, one of the biggest challenges that MSP owners have is handing over responsibility to others, but man, did they achieve success and they did.
Enjoy their story and allow it to motivate you to do what it takes from a personnel perspective to turn your dreams into expectations.
Hello and welcome to the Grow Limitless podcast. Our guests today are Wes and Shane of SD Tech. Welcome. Thank you so much. No problem, no problem. I’m so excited to get to know you better, learn a little bit more about your story, what led you to become an MSP, tell me about the successes you’ve had.
Wes & Shane (00:49)
Thanks for having us, Terry. Sure. back in the day probably when I first started getting interested in technology, it because my dad was an architect and it was probably mid 90s or so. You couldn’t go out and buy a computer. You had to build your own. And so was fascinated watching him build his own computers for his architectural firm and getting the operating system loaded and all that kind of stuff. So that interested me and kind of got into it and would help him with some of those builds. Learned a lot about MS-DOS and tweaking, configsys, autoexecbat, and things like that, which proved useful later when I started running games. You to do a lot of that tweaking to get every last kilobyte of RAM to get the game to run. ⁓ But I built ⁓ a love for technology. And then as I got out of high school, my first job was being a tech support over at ⁓ local research facility here in San Antonio called Southwest Research. They have a bunch of different divisions. Worked for one of the divisions to support their PCs and they had a broad range of PCs. is some Unix boxes like Sun Microsystems and things like that to do some simulations and some OS2 boxes. I used to use OS2 back in the day and really, really enjoyed that. I moved from there to a different position across the street at Caremark and Caremark needed a nighttime person. more of a night owl, so it kind of fit my schedule, show up at, I think it was like two or three in the afternoon, and I went home at like 11, and so it worked well. And so I did that for a while, and then I went from there to IBM up in Austin, did some Y2K stuff, and then back here in San Antonio for USAA, and that’s around the time that I said, you know what, this corporate life is not for me, and I wanted to strike it out on my own and see what I could do.
And so I had…SD Tech is kind of a side gig this entire time, but I really wasn’t pushing it or trying to grow it. And I said, you know what, let me make an attempt to see what I can do with that. so growth was very slow going over probably the first 10, 12 years or so. I had a couple buddies of mine that they also had an IT firm or a computer repair business, I guess you could call it at the time. And we decided to join forces and create a third company. We grew that for a while. We tried to do a merger, didn’t work out. Different personalities, we’re still good friends. No hard feelings. I pulled my book of business back out and kind of restarted everything towards the end of 2016, beginning of 2017. And it was difficult. was like, even though I had the client base, now it’s just me. So it’s like, how do I go from supporting this client base that I’ve built over these? And I had like one or two techs here and there and like an admin person, things like that. But when I merged in with the other group,
Terry Hedden (03:43)
Okay.
Wes & Shane (04:00)
I had a much larger employee base to help support me and I wasn’t worried about, if I get a client with 50 ⁓ endpoints or something like that, it was going to be big deal to support it. But now I’m back on my own again and it’s only me. As luck would have it, one of our installers, we had an installation coming up at one of our franchise clients. The installer, that was our main installer over at the other company, he decided to quit. He said, hey, are you hiring? I said, yeah, great, come over. ⁓
He joined me right in nick of time. We were able to perform on that build out. I got an admin person again to help me with some of the bookkeeping and things like that, follow up on invoices. And then we hired a helper to here and there and then I hired another tech and it was a very gradual process again, almost like starting from scratch. ⁓ As I grew back up to maybe about four or five employees, ⁓ by happens chance, I met Shane one day and that’s a funny story but. ⁓
We hit it off and I went and had lunch with him and I said, hey, I don’t know what you’re gonna do for me or what you can do for me, but let’s give it a go. I made him an offer and he came on board and we’ve just made tremendous strides in our growth since then. having the right partner in any situation is important, especially if you’re trying to grow a business. I’m not a person who’s had years of experience in corporate, running teams and things like that. So I’m like an amateur when it comes to that kind of stuff, managing people. But this guy over here, this guy knows how to do that stuff. So he was a game changer when I brought him on board. And we’ve just made exponential increase in revenue year on year. And it’s been really good for us. And so now here we are, and we’re ready to make the next leg up. And ⁓ then fortunately, we ran into you guys at the Pax8 Beyond.
We’re excited to see what the future can bring.
Terry Hedden (05:58)
Awesome. Wes, tell me a little bit about your side of that whole story. what do you, how do you, so you guys, you guys 50-50 partners? What’s the ownership? then how do you divide, you say he’s the people person, I guess you’re the technical person. Is that kind of the division of responsibilities? For the most part, Wes has, I’ve tried to assist Wes in moving into a true CEO, CEO goal, tool purpose with leading, our business development. So he handles primarily all of our tech and all of our sales. And then I assist with making sure that we have all the right people in supporting everything that Wes is pushing for our clients and all the new clients he’s putting in on there.
Simplified as possible. That sounds like it sounds like a great kind of division of responsibilities So you can kind of divide the stress by two at least and get some sleep at night That’s awesome, that’s awesome. Okay. So so so when did you actually start running the business? Shane so I have been assisting with running the business since about since late 2019
Wes & Shane (06:57)
It’s a tux.
Terry Hedden (07:12)
Okay, so you’re about five years in, six years in. Six years in. Right. So over the last five to six years, we have grown leaps and bounds. We are six to seven X of where we were. And our employee base has tripled.
Our footprint has gone from being primarily in Texas to all across the US, California, New York, Florida, and not everywhere in between, but ⁓ most of the places you would want to be.
I don’t think we have anybody in Idaho, but we haven’t really wanted to go to Idaho. know, like, so there are some places that we still don’t have a footprint in, it’s, we’ve done pretty well. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So how did you get where you are from a growth perspective? Does it mainly word of mouth? Did you have some marketing that was kind of working or really working? What, what, how did you get where you are? Cause it sounds like you’ve had a great deal of success, especially since, ⁓ since you guys partnered up.
Wes & Shane (08:10)
Well, I credit a lot of our ability to grow ⁓ on a couple of things. One of them is a lot of the relationship building that I’ve done over the year, the decades that we’ve been in business since 2000. ⁓ A lot of that relationship doesn’t pay off. You don’t start talking to somebody and then six months later it’s like, you won their business for the entire franchise. That doesn’t happen like that. ⁓
And then beyond the relationship building, it’d have to be what Shane’s brought to the table and his ability to take things off my plate and then get the right people in the right seats. So I don’t have to be thinking about that stuff all the time. And I can focus on just growing the business and optimizing our stack across the board for technology, not only like phone system and in RMM and all those kinds of things and marketing as well.
Terry Hedden (09:07)
I want to expand on that a little bit, Terry. what Wes just said is I agree with 100%. There are two main factors that have allowed us to grow. ⁓ The majority of people hear our story and they’re like, man, once Shane joined, that was the catalyst. That’s what clearly allowed for all of this expansion. And there is a lot of truth there. However, it is the decades of ⁓ hard work that Wes put in and the relationship building that made me interested in SD Tech first place, the way Wes runs his business and the way he treats every one of his relationships is why I was like, this is, this is what I wanted and I wanted to get out of a corporate structure and back to something that felt more local, even if it’s nationwide. And by taking that, that work off of Wes’s plate and allowing him to focus on what he was really good at it allowed for the expansion to happen very quickly. But about 90 to 93 % of our growth has come from word of mouth and referrals. Wow. Wow. That’s him. You know, that’s, that’s the work that he’s put in since 2000. That’s great. Wow. That’s a lot. And have you found that that you could count on those leads or were you just hoping each month that you get a new one? I mean, how reliable was the flow, especially like say the last couple of years?
Wes & Shane (10:09)
you got to cut. Think it’s different in different verticals. you take, you know, one example would be like Keller Williams is a client of ours and we have several of their locations here in San Antonio and the surrounding areas. But you think about like the heritage location. I’ve been trying to get into that location probably since we’ve had City View and we’ve had City View since about 2000. So 2000, 2001, somewhere in that, they were one of our first clients and trying to get a foot in the door at the other location was like pulling teeth. And finally, by chance, between the relationship that we had built with the technology director at the City View location, she was working more frequently with the technology director at the Heritage location. And she said, hey, if you guys are struggling with your IT, you should really look at using the guys that we use. We’ve had them for, you know, 12 years.
Plus years at this point or 14 years or whatever it was to have a conversation with them. And so we went and met with their IT director over there and I won him over and I didn’t think it was gonna be a very long meeting. I thought it was gonna be like a quick, you know, 30 minute lunch and then he’d use some excuse to leave, but we ended up being there for an hour and a half, almost two hours talking. And he liked our approach to doing things that the MSP that they were using would tell them things like, we don’t really do that or normally we don’t support real estate offices. It’s like, okay, if you don’t normally do that, then what are we paying you for? They were just acting like they were put out when they’d be asked to do things and that’s not really the way you should do business. If the client’s paying you, you should do your best to assist them in whatever form or fashion within a reasonable scope, obviously. And then beyond that, a lot of the relationships we’ve built with franchises. Good examples, Massage Heights. I had been seeing my massage therapist about 2012. And so it had been probably two, four years or so. And then when I went in there one day, they were messing with their phones. They couldn’t get them to work right. And I told them, hey, we do phone systems. Would you guys be open to trying our phone system? And they, yeah, let me talk to the owner. And I later found out the owner is actually one of the co-founders of the company that owns this particular location.
Ironically, it’s like four doors down from us in the same strip center. And so I talked to the owner of that location, also the founder of the company, and kind of sold them on trying out our phone system. And so then this is during the period of time that I was partnering with the other guys. I went to my business partners and I said, hey, I see this opportunity. We have to come out of pocket, maybe about $1,800 to get phones, get the license. We were using 3CX at the time and get a POE switch and like a peplink router. So maybe about $1800 with the phones and all that stuff added together. And one of the partners who dealt a lot with the money was like, oh, that’s ridiculous. It’s to take us years to ROI. And I’m like, you’re not listening. You’re looking at this one location. I’m looking at this is our foot in the door to get every massage heights location. And he pooped with the idea. So I went ahead and just put my money where my mouth was and pay for the equipment myself, set it up on my own time, went and implemented it, trained them on how to use it. ⁓ And still to this day, they have every phone that we originally gave them with the exceptional one they cracked the screen on. We replaced it. We made our money back tenfold and now we’re in 80 plus out of their 110 locations and we do MDM for every location they have. And we also support corporate now and that’s put our foot in the door to other franchisors as well. so it’s just, the payback has been multitudes over what we invested initially.
Terry Hedden (14:19)
I feel like that’s a lot of times how great MSPs are run. They find a way to get in the door. They sell them something. They get in the door and then they cross-sell and upsell and take care of the customer and expand over time. Yes. I applaud you for that. One of the things I’ve noticed out in the industry is that we’ve gotten more more uppity about what we’re willing to do and how we’re willing to bill and what we’re willing to start with. And we kind of forgot the fact that almost every relationship starts off crawling before you’re walking date before you get engaged, before you get married. Yet most MSPs are like, ⁓ my way or the highway, all in or nothing, know, $500 a user or I’m not getting off my sofa. You know, it’s kind of like it’s gotten almost ridiculous. So I compliment you just for having a bigger picture of thought. It’s a challenge that I’ve seen out there and I’ve considered it disease, but it’s been caused by frankly, people like me who get on stage and try to hype up their system or whatever by helping you understand you’re gonna get to three hundred fifty dollars a user a thousand dollars a user and it it creates this Unrealistic spreadsheet in someone’s head says well if I get ten customers and they’re all thousand each that’s you know Ten you know hundred thousand dollars a month, you know You’re like well, hold on. It’s not that simple, you know, it’s not easy to get a customer like that So I applaud you for that. That’s cool. So so if you were. Obviously most of it was word of mouth and godly been doing this a long time. So you’re celebrating your 25th anniversary this year? Is that the math holding in my head? Holy smokes, man. Congratulations. think time is the ultimate test. ⁓ So I gotta ask, I I was an MSP for 12 years before I sold and I was fried. How do you do it? How do you keep grinding for 25 years? What’s your secret?
Wes & Shane (16:11)
Have you met this guy Shane before? It is not me. So I will tell you that right now I am on vacation. I broke my vacation to come here today and hang out with you. to hang out with Wes. I need a lot of downtime. I need to make sure that I’m taking care of myself and my family. And I feel like I’m a relatively normal individual and how I manage my stress. Now I do handle and manage more stress than I would expect from most other people. But Wes is not like me. Wes isn’t like the majority of people I know. On Wes’s honeymoon when he was in Greece, he worked in the evenings, he worked in the mornings. When we go, whether it’s on a work trip or on vacation together, he works four to six hours a day while on vacation. That’s not good, man. Not good. But…
That’s where it’s weird is that when Wes needs to actually disassociate from work, he stresses out. It doesn’t sit well with him. When he’s able to put himself into work, he de-stresses and he decompresses. Knowing that the problems you’re solved gives you peace of mind, huh? Yeah. So I watched him and when I hear of individuals who say, know, ⁓
I want to build an empire or I want to build a legacy. The majority of people have heard those phrases and they’re repeating them. And I’m sure that to some degree they want that, but the majority of people do not have the ability or willpower to truly stand behind saying, I want to build an empire. I want to build a legacy. That is Wes. I want to support him.
Building an empire and building a legacy. I don’t have the same level of drive that he does and he is absolutely what has allowed for SD tech to To be celebrating its 25th year. That’s amazing. I compliment you guys. I I don’t think I would have made it so the great combination I love just knowing. Great one.
Terry Hedden (18:30)
Yeah, I’m with you. At least you have it. I’m just thankful I have hair at this point. I’m 50 now, so I have a lot of people my age that are starting to lose it a little faster than I am. So that’s cool. So I guess walk me through your growth journey. I know you started off on word of mouth leads. Obviously you came to a decision at some point that it wasn’t what got you where you are is not going to get you where you’re trying to go. And you made the decision to go out there and find another partner.
Talk to me about the firms that you consider, the decision making criteria, and what led you to make the decision that you made.
Wes & Shane (19:08)
in terms of how we’re able to make the growth.
Terry Hedden (19:12)
in selecting how did we get to market.
Wes & Shane (19:14)
Marketopia, okay. ⁓ We have tried a couple other ⁓ companies and it’s kind of lackluster ⁓ results. Sometimes it was okay, but it was never great. ⁓ I was very impressed with the process that you guys presented and the holistic view you have of selling the entire company and wealth of services that you guys offer and how you help us sell our entire suite of services to potential clients. it’s ⁓ not just like, we’re going to jump on the phones and hammer the phones for eight hours a day, five days a week. We’re going to help you maximize your collateral so you have the best chance of winning the client once we get the opportunity. We’re going to provide additional sales training. We’re using this great system to track all the analytics. I ⁓ love the little ⁓ email that I get every week. I think it comes out on Wednesday or something ⁓ with the contact rate and how many dials and all that kind of stuff. It’s a great just kind of snapshot of what’s happening so you can see there’s forward progress. You guys are reaching out to people. Any potential leads you’ve got and all that kind of stuff. I think you have a very good system together and I have high hopes for what you guys can bring to the table for us.
Terry Hedden (20:43)
Love it. How many leads have you gotten so far and have they held yet? And if so, tell me about how well you’re progressing to that second appointment.
Wes & Shane (20:53)
Well, you guys only started a couple of weeks ago, so I want to be fair to you guys. You haven’t even been a month in. ⁓ I know they’ve made a bunch of dials so far, and you guys have a list for us that you’re contacting. ⁓ no leads as of yet. ⁓ they were very good about setting proper expectations. can expect zero to one leads the first month. I’m good with that. It takes time to of ramp up. Once you kind of get that momentum going then, like next month, uh… you know maybe we have another call next month and see how that how it’s going at that point but uh… i think the process of procedure that you guys have in place can really lend itself well to to growth.
Terry Hedden (21:34)
You’re right. as I understand it, you’re just doing tele. You’re doing Legion, not marketing, right?
Wes & Shane (21:41)
We’re doing the, ⁓ we have that done for you package of marketing with you guys.
Terry Hedden (21:46)
Okay, so they are doing the marketing for you. Okay, cool. So that’s getting ramped up and that’s starting to come. That’s really cool. Okay. Yeah. So obviously it’s going to take time. The key is to make sure that you’re ready when that first appointment comes because it’s like a blessing and a curse when the, when the appointments start to set and they start to hold the pressure goes from my team to your team. And, and you know, at the end of the day, we all fail if you don’t close the lead. So you’ll feel that pressure. We, we, we really want to make sure you win and you one of the challenges to Marketopia in general is we’ve been doing this 11 years. We know what the heck we’re doing. We do more leads than everybody else. We’re more evolved as a company because we’re bigger and older and more mature. But our Achilles heel is the last mile. We set 100 appointments, 100 hold, and you close none, we still get fired. know what I mean? So we really try to focus on the sales methodology, making sure that you don’t use the word of mouth sales system that got you where you are when you’re dealing with a marketing lead. Have you started to take the training and work in the peer groups yet? Tell me about your experience with those so far.
Wes & Shane (22:57)
I haven’t yet. was really excited to, ⁓ I wanted to go to y’all’s event, last week, cause it was like perfect timing. Like I just got on board. You guys are having the, in-person event down in Florida, but unfortunately, ⁓ we had a family vacation planned down to the coast. So I did get to see the coast, just not the Florida coast. So I hear that was much nicer than the one here in Texas. So I would have probably, probably enjoyed that a little bit more, but I got to spend time with the family, got a little bit of downtime and things like that. So that was good. ⁓ I am looking forward to the peer group. think that’s a, fact that you guys have that, I think is a great idea. So it’s all the little things that you guys bring to the table. It’s like meeting ⁓ the other MSPs face to face and getting the peer groups going and doing the marketing for you kind of thing. And then providing that training. I think, ⁓ and I think Shane can attest to this, I’ve got a pretty high close rate. So I’m excited to see what opportunities you guys can bring to the table because if I can close a random internet lead from Washington state, I think I could do pretty well with what you guys bring that are warm leads that are interested in switching to another ISP or MSP. Sorry.
Terry Hedden (24:13)
If it doesn’t work, you know where the methodology is, you know that the training is there. ⁓ That’s awesome. It’s nice to kind of come in with a confident salesperson. think that’s a huge asset and probably one of the reasons that you guys have been so successful. So look forward to watching that and frankly seeing you kind of evolve and say, okay, well, I got this random internet lead, but this is the one we went out and got, or I got this word of mouth lead, but this is the one that came from. Two clicks on a newsletter, two phone calls, and then we finally got them on this email blast. So that’s awesome, man. I can’t wait to see what you guys do. Talk to me about your goals. I know you ⁓ have big dreams. Where do you see yourself in five years, 10 years, and how does Marketopia play into that?
Wes & Shane (25:03)
We are a small company doing very big business. And when I’m hiring frontline employees, one of the key things that I’m looking for, and I know that everybody says they’re looking for this, most people truly aren’t, I’m looking for self-motivated individuals. Individuals who do not require a supervisor or too small of company to be spending money on a supervisor. So I’m really looking for people who are self-motivated, ⁓ self-driven, and want to be part of your team and when Wes told me about you guys and your products it felt like something that fit with what I’m looking for from a frontline employee and Wes is super ready to get in with the peer groups he’s dedicated to utilizing the educational material that you guys have because we want to make sure that we’re doing our part so that way we can truly have a beneficial relationship.
And that I think is everybody really should be going into a partnership like this with that type of mentality. So over the next five to 10 years, other than the straightforward, you guys are continuing to send us leads, we’re going to continue to pose on them and it’s going to be great. How does it fit into our big picture? So our big picture is franchising. And not just supporting franchises, but we are a franchiser ourselves. We are looking at bringing on one to two new franchisees within the next three to six months. What we have to do is make sure that as we’re bringing these franchisees on, we have a relatively unique concept for how we franchise our MSP. And what we want to do is make sure that we are finding a great value add partner to set up with our MSP so that we, they have, or with our franchisees so that we, they’re already entering into it ground running and they know that Marketopia has been supporting us, hopefully right for the last three to five years and then when they’re ready to get the assistance they need in managing those leads then they have the other partner. And if we can make all of that work then we should just be able to compound some numbers and come out on the better side of things.
Wes & Shane (27:32)
Yeah.
Terry Hedden (27:33)
What made you ⁓ start a franchise? mean, what made you go that direction? You don’t see many MSPs that get into that. There’s obviously some out there.
Wes & Shane (27:41)
Remember how I told you about my ex-business partners? Yeah. am. I am. So Acronis offered them tickets to an F1 race up in Dallas, Fort Worth. And they had an extra ticket, so they’re like, hey, do you want to go with us? We hang out all the time still. We’re still very good friends. And we go to the movies. We like to go see all the superhero movies and stuff like that. Looking forward to Fantastic Four, by the way. That looks really good.
Terry Hedden (28:10)
Yeah, it does.
Wes & Shane (28:12)
We’re going to all go see that together. So they offered one of the tickets to me and said, Hey, let’s go up there and see the F1 race. Great. Cool. You know? so afterwards I was talking with one of the other brothers, because two brothers, and then a friend of mine that I’ve known for 20-ish, 20 plus years. And so I was talking one of the brothers and I said, Hey, you know what would be interesting as to the services that we offer, you know, both companies the one I started with them and SD Tech. ⁓ We offer a lot of services that most MSPs don’t like, some of low voltage work, the build outs, we’re able to do security systems and access controls and cameras and things like that. your average MSP doesn’t do that. VoIP phones, we do all that in-house, we use tier one provider like Bandwidth and have our own PBXs and things like that. So it’s not your average⁓ your average MSP, it can scale because everything that we’ve implemented, including you guys, we, we want to look at how does it scale? Like, is this just going to be good for, for ST tech corporate? And then beyond that, like we can’t make it work in another, another situation. I know we want to be able to, to grow infinitely without having boundaries around it. So I said, you know, it’d be interesting as to, with all the different kinds of services we offer, I think this world needs an IT franchise that allows, a lot of people that want to get into the MSP space, but where do you start? I mean, you guys have been around each other for 12 years. I just found you guys like two months ago. So it’s like finding the right partners, like PAX8, PAX8’s been around for a while. I think we started using them in like 2017 or something like that. It’s been a great relationship. I love them to death. Before that, I was using Insight, Total Garbage.
Not good support, interface is horrible, ordering and all that kind of stuff. Pax8 came along, I didn’t know who they were. I took a call with them, we decided to move forward with them, never looked back. ⁓ Ubiquity equipment, we love using ubiquity equipment. It scales great when you have locations like all these franchise locations we support that are all around the country. All of that stuff, but all that knowledge that we’ve gained in the 25 years that we’ve been in business, we’re able to package that up in a nice little package and sell it to somebody who wants to have their own MSP and they don’t have to worry about, okay, now I gotta deal with this R &D. What phone system do I use? What trunking provider? What networking? Who do I use to help us with marketing? All that stuff. Here you go.
Terry Hedden (30:49)
So you’re explaining this to Michael and Marlin and what was their response?
Wes & Shane (30:52)
Yeah, and so I was explaining to them and they said, it can’t be done. It can’t be done. And I said, OK. Challenge accepted.
Terry Hedden (30:58)
Yeah, just love that sometimes you need that motivation and someone telling you it’s not possible or whatever. That’s awesome. You know Go ahead.
Wes & Shane (31:42)
So we were already looking at expanding SD tech and we were considering a couple of different avenues and franchising was not on the table between Wes and I until that conversation and and that conversation where ex-business partners and close friends said, it’s not possible. That was the kick in the ass that we needed. And then we spent the next year and a half, about a year and a half researching, finding great partners to assist us in building out the franchise system. And then between a year and a half to two year mark, we, you and getting everything built out. now over the last year and a half, we’ve been neckling down and we onboarded our first franchisee and have seen him onboard his first client. And so it’s been a journey. It’s been very difficult at times, but we believe that it will absolutely. And the learning experiences have been phenomenal.
Terry Hedden (32:13)
Yeah, exactly. You know, I love that word, ⁓ empire, right? There’s a lot of people out there that dream about that. And it sounds to me like you guys have a passion for helping people achieve that. You’ve got a system, you’ve proven it internally, you’ve got a team, you kind of know, you kind of have all the skills you need between the two of you guys to be really successful and you want to help other people do that. What advice would you give to an MSP who was struggling to grow and unsure, I guess, what route to take. What advice would you give them now that you have the benefit of hindsight and experience?
Wes & Shane (32:54)
I think a couple of the biggest things that I would recommend, you know, get yourself a good right-hand man. That’s incredibly important. That allows me to be more focused on the growth side of things. This is what I enjoy. I enjoy the tech side of things and I enjoy the growth side of things. And then, you know, get a good accountant and get a good marketing system. are all really important. If I would have had a better accountant early on, I would have saved so much money on taxes. And yeah, and obviously if we would have found you guys sooner, we would be using you then instead of just using you now. Yeah, so and I agree with Wes. I think that that leveraging partnerships is is one of the most critical parts of not starting a business, right? Everybody knows that when it comes to starting a business, it’s you. You’re going to feel like an island and it’s a lot of painstaking effort. But to expand and grow out of that startup phase, leverage your partnerships, whether that’s with a right hand man or a good, you know, sales partner, accountant, your your partner within your clientele. Just leverage your partnerships. You do not have to be an island and honestly you can’t grow an empire on an island.
Right. I have an endless thirst for learning too. mean, that’s, I, know, when I go to the gym at night, I’ll, I’ll listen to, there’s a app called headway that you can get little like quick synopsis of various different books. listen to audio books sometimes, ⁓ watch a lot of Dan Martell. He’s really good too. Hmm. And just gives you ideas, you know, things to think about how to improve your, your operational efficiency and, and ways to grow and, the knowledge helps me better myself as well. I think Shane can attest I was pretty raw when he first came in and I would not have been a good CEO. I still was the CEO and I would not have a very good one as compared to now. I’ve been able to grow and focus more on that role and learn from experiences, both good and bad. ⁓ experience is still experience, right?
Terry Hedden (35:09)
Absolutely. Wow, that’s wise words, man. I really love your story. I love the teammate ⁓ concept. think I’ve been a solo ⁓ entrepreneur in the first part of my career and now I enjoy a life partner. My wife is actually a partner in the business, so I kind of get a little bit of benefits of that and ⁓ it definitely makes a difference when you can sort of spread that stress, spread that responsibility out just a little bit and have that redundancy, you know, because that owner’s mindset is not always easy to get and an employee, but if have that feeling with your partner, you can check out a little easier when you know the other person that cares just as much as you can step right in. So that’s wise words right there. I appreciate the plug from Marketopia too. We certainly hope to be part of your story and help you get to $50 million in recurring revenue and turn every dream that you have for your lives personally and professionally into expectations. So thank you for the opportunity. It’s a blessing for us to help people like you and I would just really appreciate the opportunity. Awesome. Thank you guys so much. I appreciate your time today. Take care, man.
Wes & Shane (36:11)
Absolutely, we’re excited. Thank you, you as well, Terry. Bye.
