Why The Highest Offer For Your Business is Often a Trap

Sean Weisbrot: Private equity isn't just about money. It's about people, principles, and making the right calls under pressure. In this episode, I sit down with Brandon Wolfe, co-founder and partner of Jordan Partners, to explore how trust, integrity, and strategy shape high stakes investments. We dive into what makes really great partnerships, how automation is changing the game, and the emotional rollercoaster of building and letting go of businesses. Whether you're a founder, investor, or just curious about what happens behind the deals, this conversation will shift how you think about growth capital and the power of choosing wisely. How is private equity doing in today's climate where a lot of companies don't really need investors anymore?

Brandon Wolfe: So there are millions of types of private equity really, so you can do anything from venture to leveraged buyouts and everything in the middle. And what's kind of in the middle is a little bit more like growth. I think what you'd find is not all companies need an investment partner. Some still will. Within venture. There was a big bubble only a few years ago and we're still working through that. So whether you are a fund that had capital then or is just raising right now, everyone is still kind of working through that in the venture world. On the other end of the spectrum, you've got leveraged buyout folks who required debt to buy a business. As we all saw with mortgages or anything else, money is not free like it was a few years ago. So you've got folks similar to venture, but a different kind of profile of company that are working through the portfolio. They already have. Figuring out how to make sense in the new normal, things like that. For us, we've always focused on bootstrap businesses that are unlevered and have never taken in institutional capital. So it's really fun about working with teams like that are that it's basically a blank slate for everybody. You can kind of build the strategy and the capital allocation plan. For what's right for that company. So in general, we can talk high level about what private equity broadly is doing, but it's just such a vast market that you just have to find individual operators, high integrity leaders, companies, and that's the magic of

Sean Weisbrot: it. So it's like taking a business that doesn't need you and then throwing a bunch of cash on it to grow it really fast. Doing something that's already good at.

Brandon Wolfe: In general, what you're mostly providing is some expertise and giving people the ability to do things they might not want to do if they had to risk it all themselves. So case in point, oftentimes when the first institutional capital comes in, you might see a little bit of secondary for the founders of the business. What people have found is that selling even a small stake in your business sometimes allows you to sleep at night so that you don't have to worry about losing at all. And that often causes people to take swings they wouldn't have taken just on their own. Um, but I think the biggest part is if you have an investment partner who you trust and someone who sees the world and the future, the way that you see it, you actually then have a person who sees companies all day every day who has capital markets, relationships all day, every day. And that's really kind of where it comes in. The operator and the investor have this sort of yin and yang type moment together. That's the ideal.

Sean Weisbrot: What do you look for in a business to

Brandon Wolfe: say, yes, let's work with you? It really starts with people. It absolutely starts with people. I've seen this time and time again. Things go sideways. Sometimes things even go down. The number one thing that doesn't change is the quality and the integrity of that person. So we have this profile of a high integrity leader. There's a handful of actual variables we look at. We can dig into that if you like. But the number one thing I'm looking for is someone at the helm who I can trust, who I can work with, who will actually take our advice, whether we're in a majority or minority position. And then after that, we really focus on software and tech enabled services. And our typical business is gonna be 10 plus million revenue growing, 20% plus break even, or profitable. What's nice about those numbers are 20% growth is a really nice number, but it won't. Be like the rocket ship example that you used a second ago. It's the kind of thing that you can sort of sustainably durably build over the long haul. The reason we really value break even or profitable businesses are that they've proven that they have the ability to actually, you know, sell a dollar for more than just a dollar out in the market. And at the end of the day, we're really trying to find software and tech enabled services run by the best possible leaders we can, where we can hopefully make them better. As a partner,

Sean Weisbrot: okay, why is it that 10 million is that number that gets you guys excited?

Brandon Wolfe: So 10 million is a rough number that you've clearly proven. There's something here. There's not only product market fit, like a venture capitalist thinks about, but there's also real scale separately at 10 million. The problems that you face start to be really problems of capital allocation. And that's where we can help the most. Kind of, from zero to 10 million, you're getting your first customers. You're figuring out what the flywheel is. There are investors who are fantastic at that. Where we are especially helpful is helping you think about how to make your financials stronger, potentially acquiring smaller businesses. That's actually one of the number one reasons to work with us and things of that factor. So it's just what we're good at, it's what we love, and it's also where we think we can add the most value.

Sean Weisbrot: So. You're, you're putting money into these businesses, what kind of a stake are you usually looking to get?

Brandon Wolfe: Most investment would be majority, but in some cases you can do a really significant minority for the right people.

Sean Weisbrot: Why go for a majority and in some cases accept less than a majority?

Brandon Wolfe: Yeah,

Sean Weisbrot: so

Brandon Wolfe: the benefit of majority is control and it allows you to really run the playbook that you think makes the most sense. Now you obviously have to have the team operating it, and there's still true partnership there. In some cases, people aren't ready to have a majority owner. They are ready for a 25, 40% owner who has a real say around capital allocation and other things that matter. But in some cases, um, people are just ready for a significant minority owner. So when you think about that, back to your question earlier. The real bottleneck for any strategy in investing is just high quality people. I'm a big believer that when you find someone who's got something special and they're doing something special, and you diligence them from all possible angles to realize that they are exactly the kind of person you wanna partner with, that's the kind of person that even if it turns out to be a significant minority, you absolutely have to

Sean Weisbrot: think if someone allows you to acquire a majority stake in their business. And they go along with your recommendations because obviously at this point, they don't have the ability to stop you and you tank the business like they're the ones that get screwed. I mean, you both get screwed, but it hurts them a lot more. So what happens

Brandon Wolfe: if you're gonna bring an investment partner? You really need to underwrite that person as a person, not as a. Brand's name or a, you know, splashy story, need to donate that person. Do they have a history of bankrupting businesses because of a lot of debt or poor choices or short term thinking? There's plenty of people who have that track record if you actually go explore it. Uh, number one, I would say when people are usually selling majority control, you'd often find the founder is probably exiting the business and someone who might have been number two at the firm is stepping into the CEO role. Or someone we've identified outside the firm is stepping in as the CEO role. But it's still a very valid point because if you're the founder, you might cash out all of your stake, but you also might very well have rolled some of your stake. And so you're asking the perfect question of when I have continued ownership in this business. Who are the people that are gonna be making the decisions for it? Do I trust 'em? Do I think that they're good stewards of my capital? That's exactly how a founder should be thinking when you sell control.

Sean Weisbrot: So what happens in the case that maybe not your firm, but another firm, let's say they they destroy the business by making bad decisions. Like what happens? I mean, every,

Brandon Wolfe: every situation's gonna be different. And so this, this is me like literally describing like all the, all the Ls of my industry. So this is not something we have a track record of doing. Let me give an example. And this is actually probably, I think, really illustrative for folks who are thinking about this. I have a friend who is also an advisor for our firm. She is a fantastic entrepreneur, built a business, bootstrapped it, real scale, incredible. Ran a process to sell majority control for the, she was just burned out, right? That's a, that's another reason you'll often find people do it like you. You scale it, you build it, and you just, you don't have enough gas in the tank, but you also realize it. So go long runway. She went with the highest offer, even though the person she liked the most was only. Five or 10% less than the highest offer. Ultimately the highest offer ran into a ditch. So what did that look like? It looked like her remaining stake not being worth what it could have been. It met a lot of agita and stress about watching the thing you created be run by the highest offer, but not necessarily the best owner. And fundamentally, it's like all the stages of grief. You just watch this slow moving train wreck in front of your eyes, and at the end of it, you just have to make amends with it. Um, now the flip side of it's, she sold her business. Well, she's still gonna do just fine. She's a wonderful person. But it's a good example of, the highest offer is not necessarily the best owner, the person you trust the most, the person you like the most. The person who references the best, that's probably the best owner.

Sean Weisbrot: Is there no way to sue them to regain control even if you don't own all the equity to, to maintain or regain some sort of control over the decision making to stop them from destroying the company.

Brandon Wolfe: So non-attorney. I'm gonna put a big disclaimer right there. What I would say in general is I don't usually think there's a recourse like that because at the end of the day, you made a transaction. The transaction was exactly, you know, like short of fraud or anything like that. There's not a lot of lawsuits that happen in the US for things like this, to my knowledge. And that's ultimately a good thing because it encourag us to take risks. I mean, you know, you're in Europe right now, Europe has a very different risk taking culture based on liability and things like that. We have much more of a entrepreneurial culture that it says you make a bargain, you get the benefit of the bargain. You don't get to come back and you know, decide that you just want it back for free. Now you've seen people sometimes try to buy back their stake in the business, but it just gets really messy.

Sean Weisbrot: So what are the hardest things that you see people face going through this kind of a transition? The hardest thing is

Brandon Wolfe: letting go. And I've seen this from friends and folks we've backed who even sold their business successfully. You spend years and years and years building this thing, living, breathing it, and then there comes a day where it's someone else's. And there comes a day where your daily routine is very, very different. And what I've noticed is that sometimes people almost just wanna like go start the new thing all over again. And of course, they're at a different stage of their life. They're 10, 20, 30 years down the road. The market they knew so well 10, 20, 30 years ago has changed. So I've seen a couple different reactions people have had to, this one friend who I thought was gonna jump right back into the deep end got really comfortable being like, you know what? I'm semi-retired. You know what? I'm actually retired. And so, but that was still a process. It took about like a year to watch unfold. There are other folks, they just kind of busy themselves with projects and whether it's a, you know, a software project they're developing themselves or something else, they just go right back into it. Now, whether it reaches the scale of what they did previously is TBD. By far the the hardest part is just letting go of this thing you created. 'cause at the end of the day, as much as a business is a business, it's also a creation of the entrepreneur.

Sean Weisbrot: Have you ever started a business

Brandon Wolfe: and tried to grow it? That's exactly what my private equity firm is. Anything that any entrepreneur has experienced, we've experienced it. And if we haven't experienced it, it's coming down the road. So what was your experience? I would say in general, you have to get your first coalition of people who believe in you. Whether it's your partners who back you, which is what we've done, or the vendors or companies who wanna work with you. And it's like all things, you really just have to show people your vision. You have to tell 'em your dream and where you're gonna take the business ultimately. So for us with Jordan Partners, we always say that we intend to have one of the best reputations in private equity based on performance, culture, and trust. And if you underwrite every one of our decisions based on how it impacts performance, based on how it impacts a special kind of culture, which our industry is not always particularly good at, and how it impacts trust. That's the vision we have. And we are really early days in that, but even 20 years from now, we're still gonna be really early days in that. So fundamentally, just like any entrepreneur, we have to go out and get the coalition of like-minded people to execute the mission. And so fundamentally. Absolutely passionate about that mission, otherwise you just give up. And the only answer that I've seen for entrepreneurship, for folks, I've studied for myself, for friends, you just keep going if it makes sense. You just keep going.

Sean Weisbrot: How do you separate yourself honestly from other people? How do you honestly build that coalition in a way that doesn't feel cookie cutter to everyone you're talking to?

Brandon Wolfe: Sure. So. I would say one thing that's interesting about this business, not a lot of folks actually lean into performance. Like we are obsessed with being one of the best performing funds of the future. Generation, but what is uniquely us? I'm originally from a small town in Virginia. It's called Covington, Virginia, on the West Virginia border. The main industry is a paper mill. There's a main street that supports the paper mill. I grew up knowing nothing about investing, but discovered it just out of pure love and passion really, after financial crisis, that was the first time I ever learned about. What investment bank was, or Warren Buffett or anyone. So what does that mean? When I go to meet a company, and most of the companies we back are in places like Nashville or Suburban Philadelphia, you know, not necessarily New York or the Bay Area, nothing against them. It's just there's a lot of those venture capitalists and everything else you've described are already there. When we go to these places, we're culturally aligned with the folks we're trying to back, and so the identity that we've built. That represents who we are is Wall Street Talent, main Street roots. So how do we try to stand out? Not only are we gonna give people anything that they could get from a competitive firm in Greenwich, Connecticut, or anywhere else, we're gonna give them the main street roots that I grew up with and my co-founder Gordon grew up with in a similar small town. I think that the way you cut through the noise is. You show up with humility, you show up with some expertise and some insights, and you just give people a much better experience. 'cause at the end of the day, this is all about one-to-one partnership.

Sean Weisbrot: So when you convince your, you have like a board of directors, so like how do you, how do you handle the actual process of, um, aqua like acquiring e. Equity and all of that.

Brandon Wolfe: For us, it's pretty straightforward since the co-founders are the deciders and we're also the ones who are really working with the companies directly. In most places, it's exactly what we described. There's a board, which is usually called an investment committee, and that investment committee would, you know, take all the layers of folks on the team who'd done the work, sit around a table, figure it out. In our case, my co-founder Gordon and I, are the ones meeting the, meeting the entrepreneurs, getting to know them, underwriting their business. We do have a checklist. We do have seven things we're looking for specifically every time we meet a company. Then we have a really extensive checklist that is meant to just kind of put speed bumps in your decision making. 'cause the number one thing about investing is. You don't wanna fall in love with ideas. It's one of the reasons I think sometimes, like true entrepreneurs, operators are not always good investors. 'cause the secret to operating and being entrepreneurs, you just run at the problem. The secret to investing is sometimes you take a step back and be like, hold on, lemme actually think about this 'cause it sounds good. But that might not be the way it plays out. So in our case, anytime someone's talking to us, they're dealing with the deciders. And that being said, the deciders still do everything we can to like slow down the process and make a really thoughtful decision. Start with our checklist.

Sean Weisbrot: It's funny you said that. Decider reminds me of, uh, president Bush. I'm the decider. I know. It was like 20 something years ago. It's like 20, it's like 23 ish years ago it was more his

Brandon Wolfe: tone and delivery. That

Sean Weisbrot: was more of the problem, you know? Yeah. So you come up with this process, they're talking to the decision makers, and then. Once you decide to go through the transaction and it and it goes through, are you specifically working with them or do you have someone that you put in place to manage that company? Something like this.

Brandon Wolfe: So we're specifically working with 'EM ourselves. We're also bringing to bear a network of advisors and so the network of advisors for folks who have had really great careers in the C-suite of software firms. They sit on the boards with us. Some of them might actually go operate at the company, or they're helping us find the the best go-to market people, the best C-suite that we can find to actually put into the company. And we are directly involved with every single company. And where we're really focused is kind of three things, being the organizer for our C-Suite advisors to make a big impact. We're separately very, very focused on capital allocation. Most businesses we buy or invest in are looking to aggregate smaller players around them. And so that's where we are hugely influential in terms of finding the targets, helping 'em think about the targets, similar to what we just said about how we make our own decisions, passing on targets, 'cause deal fever's, the worst possible thing you can have if you're looking to aggregate your competitors. Um, and then lastly, as technology investors at heart, we really lean into technology investments. What I've noticed in private equity in some other places is. Sometimes to boost margins or make the business look really profitable. In the short term, people will make these sort of like naive short term decisions, but in reality, everybody should be investing in automation. To some extent, everybody should be thinking about artificial intelligence deeply and to the extent that we can actually. Automate and, um, grow revenue or at least improve margins off. There's automation investments. That's something we're gonna lean into with everybody. Very, very much hands on Wallace, understanding that the business can't fulfill our mission without the great operators at the helm.

Sean Weisbrot: Once you've acquired the equity for this business, what is the, what are the steps that you take specifically? Do you have a process, like you said you have seven things that you look for during your diligence process. Is there. A checklist of things that you do after you've actually acquired them of what you do? Or is every business different in that regard?

Brandon Wolfe: So a lot of private equity firms like to say they have a playbook and playbooks can be quite prescriptive and sometimes it actually. Can maybe upset the apple cart, so to speak. We do a few things with almost every business, but it has to be tailored to what that company's situation is. And so what we do coming in is we immediately start looking for assets that we could be acquiring around them. We've got two investments right now. One, the m and a strategy just hasn't yielded anything of interest, but the business has been growing so fast that it hasn't in the second business. We found an incredible number of things to buy straight out of the gate. So that's one thing we do. The second thing, we're always looking for businesses that are already investing in automation. If you've got your head in the sand and you're not thinking about automation in 2025, we're probably not the right partner for you, and you're definitely not the right partner for us. So in the case of both businesses we've backed, we've just really encouraged 'em to lean into what they're already doing and to try to surface new ideas for 'em. The number one thing there you want is a partner who's not gonna tell you to take your foot off the gas when you've working because it helps profitability in the. I mean this respectfully operating is really, really difficult. But operators are not always great at capital allocation. So in some companies, we've come in and encouraged them to unwind a business line they were in 'cause it just wasn't producing the return on capital they thought it would. Operators love to think about revenue. They're like, oh, I should do this thing 'cause it's gonna get me X hundred thousand or X million in revenue. But if it's just empty calorie revenue, you sort of have to get them to unwind it. So that's really fundamentally what we do. What do you mean by empty calorie revenue? There's a lot of the times that you'll. Yet a big contract, but the big contract is eaten up by all the costs that are required to serve that big customer. Sort of the quintessential example is sometimes naively people wanna serve a Walmart or a similar giant like that, but they will find a way for them to get a. All of the value of that contract as opposed to something that's much more repeatable and much more profitable for the firm. The other thing we like to do with every company is to have them actually look at their unit economics per customer. So what I've found from bootstrap businesses, like we target one for instance, is they'll be like, well, my revenue's X and my profit is fraction of x. I'm good. But if you actually look in the middle there, sometimes you'll find similar to the story, we just. Empty calories. There are some customers that are losing money on, and you have this moment where you're like, how did not know you losing this customer? Like, well, but my revenues X and my profit is a little bit less than x. Profit can go up if you actually fix that contract right there. So that's a big part of what we do every time we come in.

Sean Weisbrot: Do you have a set group of contractors you work with? Like for automations for example, if the team doesn't know how to do it, you go, okay, well we've got this team and they'll come in, they'll automate this thing, or, okay, we've got a CFO, and they'll come in and they'll go through all of your books and cut your costs and like, do you have like a, this kind of a like, you know. Team, like external partners that you bring in for different things, you go up, you're exactly right, and we do

Brandon Wolfe: in all those cases. What we like about the finance function is that it's generalizable across companies. So you can have a quality earnings firm or a finance firm that you can always bring to bear the contractor on the software development front is a little bit trickier because at the end of the day, not all businesses need to have something. They don't all need to reinvent the wheel. Basically, so I think the, the first step for a lot of companies is just having best in class off the shelf software and technology in general. And then you can decide if you need to build anything customized for yourself in-house. But there are a handful of dev shops that we really like, we really trust and we would work with when appropriate.

Sean Weisbrot: And so they also handle automations and AI integrations and. This kind of stuff. Yeah. When necessary. Okay. That's good to know. Um, I was gonna say, 'cause I, I invested in a agency that does that stuff, so, but they're, they're like starting up. It, I, it is a good friend of mine and he, I invested when he had the idea so. I've learned as an angel investor, like you've probably learned from private equity, right? You go, okay, at 10 million, it's something safe I thought. I can have more value that I can provide to them when they're at the idea stage. But then the chance of success is much lower. And so my cash gets me a lot more equity, but I'm taking on a massive risk because I'm usually putting in the money that they need to get started. And so I've taken a step back as an angel investor 'cause I go, I don't really wanna keep losing cash because the people I'm investing in, a lot of them. Our first time founders and so, but he's, he had experience working with me as my COO for my last tech company, so he's really good at what he does and so I'm trying to help him to get access to more leads and all that. Actually, one of the other guests I was talking to is gonna probably work with him, so that's why I was curious to know about. What you're, you're doing, 'cause you were saying automations and all that.

Brandon Wolfe: Yeah. I'm happy to get to know him. And to your point about angel investing, I always say there's a thousand ways to build a business, which means there's a thousand ways to invest. And what you just kind of described about the risk reward continuum, whether it's angel or later stage or anything else, everyone's just gotta find a spot where they're comfortable.

Sean Weisbrot: And lean into that.

Brandon Wolfe: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: I think if I go back into investing, it would be at a point where the company already has money and they want to grow it. Right? But then I would have to put in more money and I'd have to get less equity, which I think is okay because like I, I've, I've wanted to for a long time develop a passive income portfolio of just flow businesses. That I don't have to run, but generally, the only way to get enough of a return is to get in super early when they need your cash.

Brandon Wolfe: For, for an individual investor like yourself, the percentage ownership isn't really that important. What matters is, is the share price increasing in value. I. Are the people, the kind of folks that'll take care of minority investors, will they steamroll them or railroad them?

Sean Weisbrot: Usually my, my goal has been to be the only investor where like, you don't need more than what I'm giving you to be profitable, and therefore, if you take a dividend, I take a dividend. What sort of percentage ownership are us usually winding up at? 20 to 30. Okay. Yeah. It's reasonable for like 25 to 50 k. Yeah, but it's failed almost every time.

Brandon Wolfe: You know, when you're writing checks of that size and, and the company's that early, they almost always fail. And I don't mean that negatively, it's just kind of how capitalism works. But when they work, as long as they really, really, really work, it can still be an okay portfolio.

Sean Weisbrot: The business ideas have always been good, is just that if they're a first time founder, I've already learned the lessons that they've yet to learn and the only way that they're gonna learn those lessons is not by listening to me tell them, you're gonna have this happen. Watch out for it is for them to experience it, even though I want to be there to advise them.

Brandon Wolfe: Right.

Sean Weisbrot: It's like, it's like teaching a kid. I dunno if you have any kids. I think we talked about this. I used to be a teacher of young children when I was in China, so I have experience, I don't have my own kids yet. But what I've found is when you tell them something or you teach them something explicitly, they generally always ignore you. Or if you say, don't do that, you're, you know, don't jump off that, that table, you're gonna get hurt. And they go, well, I need to, I need to jump off the table to see if I'm gonna get hurt. Right? So like, well you said it, but I don't know. I need to see it for myself. So I feel like first time founders are like that oftentimes where you go, look, be careful. You're about to come to a really precarious position. And you need to be aware of this. Like, ah, it'll be fine. And then there's happens and they're like, well, well I guess you were right.

Brandon Wolfe: So it's funny, I mean, such was on with so many threads. I mean, I've got two kids, one of them is an adult now, and I've seen this play out. I, I taught middle school math and Teach for America straight out of undergrad. Same dynamic. My joke about teaching school was that I couldn't hire fire or pay them. And so that was sort of like, you know, that was really difficult management experience. What you're describing is exactly right. And this is why, back to the start of the conversation, like it's all about the people. When we're underwriting people for what we call that high integrity leader profile, there's really two things we're especially looking for, which is a relentless learner and someone has metrics in place to change their mind right away. So one thing that could maybe help your screening mechanism. There are some folks who just don't do first time founders. They do serial founders, which is fine, but that's obviously a much narrower universe. 'cause sometimes when people are really successful, they just run the thing forever. But what I've often found can be really helpful is to look for someone who's relentless learner. Whether they read voraciously, they pick up new hobbies, travel the world, what are they doing to show that they're never really content that they know everything. But then they also have metrics in place to change their mind right away. If you walk into an office and somebody's got an LCD screen up with like all the metrics and things like that, or they're just on top of their numbers cold, that's really what you're looking for. I don't, this is why I'm not a venture capitalist. I don't know if anybody can ever kind of spot Jeff Bezos before he becomes Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates before he comes to Bill Gates. Plus there's always like an. I think in both those cases, first time founder or not, they are voraciously curious and very much on top of their numbers. So that's, that's one thing that could help. Or you could just give up angel investing if you prefer.

Sean Weisbrot: I don't care if they. Go public or get acquired. I'd be happy with someone that runs this business for 20 or 30 years and generates a dividend for me. Every quarter.

Brandon Wolfe: Yeah.

Sean Weisbrot: Or every month. Just a little share. Even. Even if I'm getting only $500 a month, like that's $500 a month, I wouldn't be getting otherwise. Like that's what I mean by a passive portfolio. I would love to have a passive portfolio income of 10, 20, 30, 40 KA month, 50 KA month, even. A hundred KA month. Right. Amazing. Because. You know that money's coming month after month and you can steadily plan for that. And you can take care of people, you can do what you need to do to, to have a, a life where you don't have to feel so much stress. Otherwise you have to run a business to generate that revenue. Right. So I, if I had to choose between running my own business that generates that revenue or investing in other people that generate that revenue for me, I'd rather invest in other people that generate that revenue for me. I tried that over the last seven New Years, and it hasn't really worked out, so I'm running my own business to, to do it for myself.

Brandon Wolfe: Yeah. Well, it's interesting. I mean, there's so many different types of investing that there's almost nothing that that is, that guaranteed 10, 20, 30, 40 a month, you know what I mean? If, if you find that thing, it will just get priced to the point where. You overpay for it on the way in most likely. Now you can invest in other people. I mean, that's very much what we do. Number one thing to do is just kind of pick the risks that you're comfortable with or not. And you know, the risks of something going to zero are higher when you're early stage. Like no doubt about that. The risks of going to zero are higher. When you're involved with questionable people. Obviously no one gets involved with bad people, but I've watched folks all the time be like, well. He's not really a nice person, but I'm sure he'll make me money like that, that that's a, that's a good way to kind of wind up like heartbroken almost. Or even worse, like I'll, I'll, I'll see professional investors back somebody and all you have to do is Google the person and go to like page three of their Google reviews to see that they have like an FTC order against them from scamming people previously. This is the level of diligence that is not always brought to bear on people by investors, so. Institutional professional crowd. What's the most important thing you've learned so far in your life? In professional, and I'll get to personal 'cause personal is a lot more important. We're not all just like investing robots right in, in the professional world. It's really one, I would emphasize what I've said, that it's all about the people. It's all about the people. If I give a second one, it would be, there's really only a couple variables that really. Matter. Everything else is just kind of noise. And to the extent you can look at any investment, whether it's an early stage passive income or something later, to the extent you can just isolate it to the handful of variables that matter the most and ask yourself how well you can understand them. What do you think is gonna happen with it? That's really where the best investments come from. Now, of course, you can fill out a really complicated financial model, a really long memo. You can do hours and hours and hours of diligence calls, but you have to get those core variables right? Otherwise, you're just bank on luck. I think in my personal life, the number one thing I've learned is you just keep going. As long as what you're doing makes sense. I, you know, I, I had a daughter when I was a sophomore in college. Both my parents passed away around the age of 60, which certainly hangs around the back of my head. As a 40-year-old, I've been divorced. Like I've, I've experienced things in this world. The way that I view life and success is pick a direction and you just keep your shoulders going in that direction. And if it's the wrong direction, then you need to pivot and you need to go elsewhere. For as long as you're marching in the right direction, the only thing you can do is like keep your shoulders square at it and just keep going. That's what I've seen time and time again, not just for myself, but for people through history.