Latest / The Inspired Stories Podcast / Beyond the Classroom: Howard Wu's Fight for Preschool Rights | Childcare Series

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Beyond the Classroom: Howard Wu's Fight for Preschool Rights | Childcare Series · The Inspired Stories Podcast

• 0:04
  Welcome to another edition of Inspired Stories, where leaders
• 0:07
  share their experiences so we can learn from their successes,
• 0:10
  how they've overcome adversity, and explore current challenges
• 0:13
  they're facing. Welcome to another edition of
• 0:17
  the Inspired Stories podcast, where leaders share their
• 0:20
  experiences so we can learn from their successes and be inspired
• 0:24
  by how they've overcome adversity.
• 0:26
  My name is Anthony Kotaspodi and today's guest is Howard Wu,
• 0:30
  co-owner of Aspen Leaf Preschool, a daycare and early
• 0:34
  childhood Education Center with four locations in San Diego, CA.
• 0:39
  They pride themselves on much better student teacher ratios
• 0:43
  and focus on something called continuity of care, which we'll
• 0:46
  hear more about. Their classrooms are designed to
• 0:49
  promote cooperative play and exploration in a calm home like
• 0:54
  environment where children feel comfortable and safe.
• 0:56
  They're given access to a variety of learning centers
• 0:59
  where they build play, pretend, investigate science themes, make
• 1:02
  art, or read. We'll hear more about why they
• 1:06
  put such a big emphasis on play based learning and positive
• 1:09
  discipline. And before we get into all that
• 1:11
  good stuff, today's episode is brought to you by my company,
• 1:15
  Add Back Benefits Agency, where we offer very specific and
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  and some organizations may not be eligible.
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  To find out if your company qualifies, contact us today at
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  Add Back benefitsagency.com. Now back to our guest today, the
• 1:42
  co-owner, Co founder of Aspen Leaf Preschool.
• 1:45
  Howard, I appreciate you making the time to Share your story
• 1:47
  today. Happy to be here.
• 1:48
  Good morning, Anthony. So tell us a little bit about
• 1:52
  the journey of getting to starting a daycare.
• 1:55
  We talked a little bit about this in the pre review offline,
• 1:58
  but I want people to hear it's kind of an interesting path.
• 2:01
  Yeah, absolutely. Well, so to kind of Fast forward
• 2:04
  a bit, basically I was in law school.
• 2:06
  I mean, that was kind of my path, right?
• 2:11
  And when I was in law school, about a month before I
• 2:13
  graduated, I was set up on a blind date with my now wife,
• 2:16
  Bridget. She was teaching preschool at
• 2:19
  the time. We quickly moved out to San
• 2:23
  Diego together. I was starting at a big firm.
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  She was teaching preschool out here and pretty quickly just
• 2:29
  became clear that she was the world's greatest preschool
• 2:31
  teacher. And it was just one of those
• 2:32
  things where, you know, you sort of say, hey, you should own your
• 2:35
  own school. You're really good at this,
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  right? And those conversations just
• 2:38
  became more serious. And pretty quickly, we just
• 2:42
  decided, yeah, let's do it. And so we looked around.
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  We found our first location, just signed the lease on it and
• 2:51
  tried to open. And it was one of those things
• 2:53
  where, you know, we were pretty naive, didn't realize how hard
• 2:56
  or expensive it would be. And I think if we'd known, we
• 3:01
  probably wouldn't have tried. But once that lease was signed
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  and we were locked in for five years, then it was really just,
• 3:08
  you know, the only way is forward, right?
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  So every problem that came up, we just had to solve and just
• 3:14
  felt like there's no choice. And that first location, you
• 3:18
  know, we got it open successful and then a few years later open
• 3:23
  our second location. And that was a real trial.
• 3:26
  But to answer your question, you know, how did I go from lawyer
• 3:30
  to preschool owner? I, you know, I never would have
• 3:31
  expected for myself, but it was just because, you know, I, I
• 3:34
  happened to marry the world's greatest preschool teacher.
• 3:37
  And how many years had Bridget been a preschool teacher before
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  you opened up your first location?
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  Yeah, well, so a good number of years, but it actually goes back
• 3:49
  to her being the second of 12 kids.
• 3:53
  So she had been sort of raising kids and effects since she was,
• 3:57
  you know, four or five. And I think that's where just a
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  lot of instinct and kind of her natural abilities and natural
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  empathy and just her personality kind of came out where even as a
• 4:09
  young kid, right, she was making teeth brushing time fun for her
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  little siblings, right? She'd set up a little store like
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  in the bathroom with a different toothpaste they could choose.
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  And so it was just, you know, so that that experience, I think
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  for her, it's not just about being a teacher, but it really
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  runs deep to just being around and working with children and
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  interacting with them and, and understanding kids from a really
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  young age. And then so how long was she
• 4:34
  actually in a center before? That's So she had at least a
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  decade. Yeah.
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  A decade, Yeah, Yeah. A decade or decade or more.
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  I mean, you know, she got her first job, you know, pretty
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  young. What's 18 or 19 or whatever the
• 4:47
  legal age is right at a Bright Horizons large center.
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  And so that's where she kind of. Yeah.
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  That that's where she got her first preschool experience.
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  And that's certainly helpful that she had that experience
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  with so many younger siblings and being nurturing and caring
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  and making learning fun for them that then to go and have 10
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  years working in a formal daycare center where she got to
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  see how things were run, right? She got to understand the
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  structure and see like, OK, here's how they on board, you
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  know, here's how they do the paperwork.
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  And so she had a lot of really practical knowledge to pull from
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  when you guys decided to open your first center.
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  Yeah, that's right. And she had AI mean she'll talk
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  about you know, she had a great mentor when she first started,
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  right? The the more senior teacher in
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  the classroom where she started. And that was the big thing is
• 5:35
  working in the school just learning classroom management,
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  right? Because obviously the kind of
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  structure of a class is very different from just being around
• 5:41
  kids in in your home or or with family.
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  But I think, yeah, the, the biggest thing is, you know,
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  there are a lot of kind of positive and negative
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  experiences over over her career as a teacher.
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  And so when we decided to create Aspen Leaf, I mean, she created
• 5:56
  a school where she would want to work as a teacher, right?
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  Where like I, I can remember how heartbreaking it was for her
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  life. I mean, she would, you know, it
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  was really hard when basically the school would take one of her
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  students away from her, not in a malicious way, but a lot of
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  schools are set up where, hey, this is the two year old
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  classroom. This is the three-year old
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  classroom. And there are a lot of places
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  where, you know, on the kids birthday, they turn three, you
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  know, they just move them right over.
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  And there's seems like there's not enough thought given to how
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  that affects the kid, right? I mean, they've they've made
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  those connections with their classmates and with their
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  teachers and that transition can be hard, but it can also be hard
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  on the teacher who really forms these connections.
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  And so, so Aspen Leaf again, was it was a place where she would
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  want to work, where the teachers are given ownership of their
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  classroom and the relationships with the kids and the families,
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  but also where the school is kind of supporting them.
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  Like I, I remember early on when we were dating, she said she
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  wasn't available one Saturday because she had to go paint her
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  classroom. And I was like, you have to
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  like, that's part of your job to make you paint the classroom.
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  She said, no, I just want it a different color.
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  And I said, are they paying you? And she said, no, but they're
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  giving me the paint. You know?
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  I mean, that was the kind of teacher she was where she was
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  always just thinking about her kids and what she wanted to do
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  for them. And yeah, she just really wanted
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  to take ownership of that classroom space.
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  And so we look for teachers who were kind of cut from that same
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  cloth. I think part of what you were
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  just describing a moment ago, Howard, is this idea of the
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  continuity of care and how that was really important component
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  of what you guys wanted to build into Aspen Leaf and and student
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  experience there. Yeah, exactly.
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  So continuity, I mean, we're not, you know, we didn't
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  originate it, but it's, it's pretty uncommon.
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  But basically, you know, right. So we have a nine year old and a
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  5 year old. Our five year old is, you know,
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  in, in a month is going to start kindergarten.
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  But so to take our five year old, for example, you know, he
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  started at Aspen Leaf when he was an infant and well, for
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  complicated licensing reasons that I don't have to go into,
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  but basically from when he was really young, you know, he had
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  these two teachers in his class. And that group, those teachers
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  and those students have stayed together for five years, you
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  know, from kind of being babies all the way up to going to
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  kindergarten. And they've moved physically
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  classrooms, but that group has stayed together.
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  And obviously, you know, teachers will leave, they'll
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  move away. So it's, it's not always
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  perfect, but you know, the, the model, you know, what we're
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  striving for is for a group of kids to stay with the same
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  teachers they're throughout their entire experience in the
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  preschool. And that has really allowed them
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  to form these really tight bonds and, and get to know each other
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  and, and just grow and develop and, and you know, when it
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  works, it, it's really magical. That's fascinating.
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  When I first saw continuity of Care mentioned on your website,
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  I assumed that that meant that just the students stayed
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  together and kind of like in a traditional elementary school,
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  you know, they all move from first grade to 2nd grade, but
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  it's a new teacher each year. And what you're saying is no,
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  those students all stay together and they stay with the same
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  teacher, assuming that there is a staff turnover in that
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  position? Yeah, exactly.
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  Yeah, yeah. You know, with all those kind of
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  assumptions and and sort of real life, the caveats, yeah, you
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  know, that that is what we strive for, is for.
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  This is for that pod, those teachers, and those students to
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  all stay together as as a group throughout their entire
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  preschool experience. And why do you think that is
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  such an uncommon approach in preschool and daycares?
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  Well, it's, it's logistically difficult.
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  Well, actually, you know, I, this is actually, this actually
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  gets to something that I've not understood about kind of other
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  preschools or, or the industry or the model in general.
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  And I think what sets us apart a bit with Bridget having had the
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  experience of being a teacher and the background and, you
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  know, we're very teacher focused, right?
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  Because the teachers are the school.
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  Is there a lot of things that we do that feel obvious?
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  Because this is one of those things where everyone's
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  interests are aligned, right? Like if you have a good team who
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  feel supported, the kids have a good experience, the kids have a
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  good experience, the families are happy, you know, And so
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  things like continuity of care, just kind of protecting the
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  teachers, making them feel supported, all of it helps the
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  classrooms and the business, right?
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  There's, there's no tension. So I actually don't know why
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  more schools don't do, for example, continuity of care.
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  But I, I do know from experience that a lot of schools actually
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  aren't owned by teachers, right? And I think they're just these
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  like models that just seem easier, right?
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  You've got a classroom, this is the teacher in the classroom,
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  different licensing reasons. And so you kind of shuttle the
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  kids. And and so I think in that
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  respect, we're a little different where we were really
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  focused on building a great school kind of from from how
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  that would look as a teacher. Do you think it has anything to
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  do with how a lot of daycare centers will have different
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  student teacher ratios at different age groups?
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  And is that something that is employed in your organization as
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  well? So, well, we have different
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  ratios. I mean #1 you know, we're
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  licensed by the state and so there are state mandated ratios
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  and these are minimums, right? And so if you go into any
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  preschool infant classroom in California, you have to see at
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  least a four to one ratio of infants to teachers, right?
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  So if you walk into an infant classroom and there are 5
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  infants with one teacher, well, they're out of ratio.
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  So they're, they're not following the regulation.
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  But then again, across any state, if you, once you go into
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  the toddler classroom, that state mandated ratio is 6 to
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  one. And then you get into preschool,
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  which is kind of two year old, two years old and up.
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  And then the state minimum ratio is 12 to one.
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  So everyone's operating with the same kind of ratios.
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  And then and then ours, you know, as a practical matter, our
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  ratios are lower, right? Like for example, our five year
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  olds, you know, most of our preschool classrooms have around
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  10 or 11 kids with two teachers. These are the preschool
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  classrooms. So we're kind of around 5:00 to
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  1:00 when the state minimum is 12 to one.
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  But it's, that doesn't prevent us from doing cognitive care,
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  right. What happens is our infant class
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  is small. And when they move into the
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  toddler classroom, well, that opens up a couple more spots.
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  We just enroll a couple more kids.
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  And then when they go up into the preschool classroom, couple
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  more spots open up. So we enroll a couple more kids
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  again. Yeah.
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  So I, I, yeah, I'm, I'm not sure why continuity of care isn't
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  kind of more prevalent across the industry.
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  Talk to me more about the curriculum and your overall
• 13:00
  approach to childcare and early childhood education.
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  Yeah, so well, as a general matter, our main focus is on
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  social and emotional development.
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  And so, you know, just to give a quick example, if you walk into
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  an Aspen Leaf classroom, say you know, a toddler classroom,
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  right, these kids are kind of pre verbal, but beginning to,
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  you know, well, they're always beginning to understand.
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  But you know, so Todd, the classroom, if you see two, you
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  know, 18 month olds get into some small dispute, right?
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  One is playing with some blocks, another one takes a block and
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  that causes the first child to cry.
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  You'll often, you know, you'll hear a teacher get down on their
• 13:41
  level and just narrate for the kids what's happened, right?
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  Oh, Jack, I see you're upset because you were playing with
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  the blocks and then Adam took a block and that didn't feel good.
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  Adam, do you see Jack is crying, right?
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  And so at that age, it's giving, it's giving them the words and
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  just kind of again, narrating what's happening.
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  And then a little bit older, that continues.
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  But once they're verbal, you, you give them the words, right?
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  So it's the same thing. Oh, I see you're upset because
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  Adam took your block. Jack, you can say, Adam, I was
• 14:16
  playing with that, right? And then you help the kids say,
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  Adam, I was playing with that. And then you turn to Adam and
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  say, Adam, look, Jack is saying that he was playing with that,
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  right? And so then, but then again, you
• 14:26
  continue and as they get older, you get into problem solving and
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  it's the same situation, you know, the same thing happens,
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  except you now you say, oh, I, I see we have a problem.
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  Like what are some solutions that we can think of?
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  And then, you know, the teacher guides them.
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  And then Long story short, you know, once they get to five
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  years old, they're about to go up to kindergarten.
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  The most amazing thing is when you look over at a couple of
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  kids who are playing and a problem arises and you hear one
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  of the kids say, you know, they, they say, what happened?
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  Like, Hey, I was playing with that.
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  Like we need to find a solution, right?
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  And so that's really our focus. So in terms of curriculum, what
• 15:02
  we utilize is what's called emergent curriculum.
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  So the contrast, if you go into some schools and you want you
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  say, hey, can you show me your curriculum for the year?
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  They could pull out a calendar and they could say, you know,
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  next week we're doing leaves. The week after that, we're going
• 15:14
  to do boats. You know, the week after that
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  we're doing sea animals or whatever it is.
• 15:20
  Our curriculum is emergent, which means it's not set, but it
• 15:25
  emerges based on what the kids are interested in.
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  And the example I always go to is when Bridget was teaching,
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  she had a group of kids playing in the block area.
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  And she got down on their level and just said, oh, can you tell
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  me about what you're building? And one of the kids said rocket
• 15:37
  ships. And so you ask the questions,
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  you know, the preschool teacher questions like, oh, like where
• 15:42
  does a rocket ship go? Like what does a rocket ship do?
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  And they didn't really know, but there was, you know, And so from
• 15:47
  the kids perspective over the next few days, all of a sudden
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  this the classroom becomes filled with, you know, now
• 15:53
  there's some books about space, right?
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  The sensory bin has some different kind of space and
• 15:58
  astronaut related things in it. And so again, the curriculum
• 16:02
  kind of emerges. And so you sort of naturally
• 16:05
  fall into this unit about space until, you know, the kids
• 16:09
  interest kind of naturally wanes.
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  And in that way, you help build the kids love of learning and
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  like, they begin to associate school with like just this place
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  where when they're interested in something, they show up and that
• 16:24
  interest is just explored, right.
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  They. And so it it, yeah, it becomes a
• 16:29
  really, again, just magical, like engaging place for the kids
• 16:33
  learning through play. Exactly.
• 16:37
  Yeah, what? What they're interested in.
• 16:38
  Yeah, and, and it takes, again, it takes teachers who are cut
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  from a certain cloth, right? Because there, there are no
• 16:44
  worksheets. And, and this is a question we
• 16:46
  often get from families like, oh, you know, how are they going
• 16:49
  to learn their numbers and letters?
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  And we talked 1st about how actually the kids who succeed in
• 16:56
  elementary school and beyond are not necessarily, there's
• 17:00
  basically no association between reading and counting early and
• 17:05
  you know, academic success in elementary school, but there is
• 17:08
  a strong correlation between emotional and social maturity
• 17:13
  and, and that success because you know, you'll, kids will
• 17:16
  learn how to read and count and do all those things.
• 17:19
  But a kid who goes into elementary school being able to
• 17:21
  identify their feelings, being able to tell people like how
• 17:23
  they're feeling, you know, to like set boundaries and say, I
• 17:27
  need space or I didn't like that, you know, that kids really
• 17:31
  set up to succeed just sort of in the context of school.
• 17:36
  And so we start with that, but then we also go on.
• 17:38
  But the kids do learn sort of the more academic things, but
• 17:42
  it's built through play, right? And so for example, you might
• 17:45
  have sorting activities where again, with the space thing, you
• 17:49
  know, they're a bunch of little tiny like space related toys,
• 17:52
  but maybe they have to sort it by color right there.
• 17:56
  There's given these like different bins and you know, the
• 18:00
  books that they're reading are about space.
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  And so that gets them more, you know, the kids are reading more
• 18:05
  because these are books that they're, they've already shown
• 18:08
  interest in the topic. And so it again, it takes
• 18:11
  teachers cut from a certain cloth because they have to be
• 18:14
  really creative and mindful and, and thinking ahead in terms of
• 18:18
  how to build all these things in sort of as you're as you're
• 18:21
  moving along. Let's take a step back to the
• 18:25
  beginning for a moment. Howard, when you were first
• 18:28
  starting, I'm curious how did you get the capital to start?
• 18:32
  This was self funded. Did you take some outside
• 18:34
  investment? Self funded.
• 18:37
  So like I mentioned, when we moved out, you know, I started
• 18:40
  working, I was, I, I graduated law school.
• 18:42
  So I was starting, I was working at a large firm, you know, like
• 18:45
  making good money, especially for that, you know, for being
• 18:49
  25, right? And so we saved up a bit.
• 18:52
  Frankly, we didn't save up enough.
• 18:54
  Like I said, if we had known how hard and expensive it was going
• 18:57
  to be, we wouldn't have been able to do it.
• 19:02
  And but, you know, since, and so we borrowed a little bit of
• 19:07
  money from my parents, but not too much, you know, I mean, I
• 19:11
  think, you know, we went in, I think we'd saved up 30 or
• 19:14
  $40,000, which just seemed like a, you know, huge pot of money
• 19:17
  for us. You know, like this is a huge
• 19:19
  pile. But, you know, at the time, I
• 19:22
  mean, now it sounds super cheap, but you know, the place we found
• 19:24
  to rent is, you know, $4500 a month or something like that.
• 19:27
  And then we're getting supplies and I'm just paying rent while
• 19:30
  we were building it out and, and painting and doing all those
• 19:33
  things, you know, that, that money kind of dwindled quickly.
• 19:37
  And then this was not, there was a strange, I mean, now I can
• 19:40
  just complain about the licensing agency for a while.
• 19:42
  But like, there was a strange thing where, you know, when we
• 19:44
  were getting licensed in California, you're required to
• 19:48
  send them like a budget. And it was weird because like,
• 19:51
  it was fairly paternalistic, right?
• 19:53
  Like, I don't, you're, you're just licensing us, right?
• 19:55
  You're just ensuring that there's like we meet minimum
• 19:58
  standards of health and safety, but there's all this paperwork.
• 20:01
  So we send it off and then you have to give them permission to
• 20:03
  look in your bank account. And it's like, well, why?
• 20:07
  And they said, well, we want to see that you have, that you can
• 20:09
  survive for at least three months.
• 20:12
  But the amount of money they wanted to see in the bank
• 20:13
  account was like basically three times the expenses in this
• 20:16
  budget. And for us, we didn't have that
• 20:19
  money. I mean, it was a huge amount of
• 20:20
  money. And I try to explain to them,
• 20:22
  well, if the goal is that you want us to be able to stay alive
• 20:24
  for three months, like this is not the number you're looking
• 20:27
  for. Because this budget assumes
• 20:29
  we're full, right? Like fully enrolled, which means
• 20:32
  we've got all these teachers we're hiring.
• 20:33
  But I'm but I told them on day one, we're not hiring seven
• 20:37
  teachers when we have zero kids, right?
• 20:39
  We're going to do that work ourselves.
• 20:40
  So you shouldn't include this in in the number and.
• 20:44
  Labor. There's a huge portion of your.
• 20:46
  Operating it's the biggest, it's the biggest portion and we're
• 20:48
  just not going to be spending that, you know, if we're not
• 20:51
  full and if we're full, that means we're making money.
• 20:53
  And so we're definitely surviving, right.
• 20:56
  But they just, it's not even like I, I would have accepted it
• 21:01
  if the, you know, the employee had just said, you know what, I
• 21:03
  hear you, but like, this is what I'm told.
• 21:05
  You know, I don't make the rules.
• 21:06
  Like I just got to go through my checklist.
• 21:08
  Fair enough. But it like they didn't even
• 21:11
  accept kind of like the logic of the point that I was trying to
• 21:14
  make, right? They weren't even conceding like
• 21:16
  that. I had a point.
• 21:17
  They were just like, you're just wrong.
• 21:20
  And so anyway, so but it was this weird thing where, OK, so
• 21:24
  we don't have the money. So what, you're going to deny us
• 21:27
  a license because we don't have the money, but we're locked into
• 21:29
  this lease. We've already bought all the
• 21:30
  furniture, we've already painted this place.
• 21:32
  So you're going to deny us a license so we can't operate.
• 21:34
  So you're just going to drive us into personal bankruptcy because
• 21:37
  we didn't have enough money to show you this like arbitrary
• 21:40
  amount? Apparently, yes.
• 21:44
  And so, you know, so basically what we were, you know,
• 21:46
  fortunately, like, you know, my family is not wealthy, but you
• 21:50
  know, they were in a position to at least where they could send
• 21:54
  us some cash for like literally three days where I just called
• 21:58
  just. So you could show the.
• 21:59
  Bank so I can show the yeah, I exactly, exactly.
• 22:02
  You know, so I explained the situation and, you know, my my
• 22:05
  family was they was like, OK, yeah, you know, like we can send
• 22:08
  you, you know, whatever it was like 90,000, a $100,000 to just
• 22:12
  hold on to for three days, like yeah, we're not spending it.
• 22:15
  And then so yeah, so we wired it in so the number was there.
• 22:20
  The agency took a look. They were like, OK, and then I
• 22:23
  just sent it back. Well, sometimes you got to game
• 22:28
  the system. Right.
• 22:29
  Yeah, exactly. You know, know the game to play.
• 22:32
  And so from the early days, you were still continuing to
• 22:35
  practice law as the center was open.
• 22:39
  Were you actively involved in the operations of it, or did
• 22:42
  that fall mostly on Bridget? I was.
• 22:45
  I've always been actively involved in sort of the back end
• 22:50
  aspects of it, right? So from the beginning, you know,
• 22:54
  you know, payroll, receipts, bookkeeping, I learned WordPress
• 22:59
  to like set up the website. I learned a bit of SEO to figure
• 23:03
  out, you know, the Google Maps listings and, you know, all all
• 23:07
  that kind of stuff. But yeah, I don't have a single,
• 23:09
  you know, ECE early childhood education credit to my name.
• 23:12
  So like, I can't, you know, Teach Bridge has always been the
• 23:15
  heart and soul of the school of the program, right?
• 23:19
  So when you're talking about curriculum, basically anything,
• 23:20
  you know, the actual experience for the kids has always been
• 23:22
  Bridget, but any of that kind of like background architecture,
• 23:29
  right? Like, you know, I found our
• 23:31
  insurance broker, the workers, all that kind of stuff I've
• 23:35
  always kind of handled or, or, or helped with.
• 23:37
  And so in that sense, we make a really good team.
• 23:41
  Yeah, You handle a lot more of the back office, the admin maybe
• 23:44
  a little bit more like the business side of things.
• 23:46
  Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
• 23:49
  And you, you've already touched on this a little bit and I'm
• 23:52
  kind of curious to explore this a bit more, sort of the
• 23:55
  difficulties in those first months of opening this first
• 24:00
  center. Like if we had known how hard it
• 24:03
  was going to be, we probably wouldn't have done it.
• 24:06
  Tell me about some of those difficulties, those hardships
• 24:09
  that you guys came across that you weren't expecting.
• 24:11
  Yeah. Well, so actually, I mean, the
• 24:13
  those first months were, I would say about as hard as we
• 24:16
  expected, right? I mean, Bridget was teaching and
• 24:21
  the director went. So when we open, when we
• 24:23
  formally open, right, Like we, we can have kids here that we
• 24:27
  can care for on day one, we had three kids enrolled, right.
• 24:30
  So Bridget was the teacher. She was the, you know, the
• 24:34
  director of the location. She was also going out and
• 24:37
  buying all the supplies, right? The snack supplies, the
• 24:39
  furniture, we were doing everything.
• 24:41
  And she was marketing, right? She, she, we had printed out
• 24:45
  Flyers and posters and she was going around to coffee shops and
• 24:47
  she was, she was working really hard.
• 24:50
  But that all I think was what we expected going in.
• 24:55
  And because it's a good school, but I mean, primarily because
• 24:59
  there's just not nearly enough childcare in San Diego, like a
• 25:02
  lot of places, you know, we filled up pretty quickly.
• 25:07
  And I, you know, it, it, it's hard to like explain, but it's
• 25:12
  folks who own businesses. It's just hard.
• 25:15
  You know, it's just constant. You're thinking about it seven
• 25:17
  days a week. All the, all the problems are
• 25:21
  your problems, right? If a problem doesn't get solved,
• 25:26
  you have, you know, there, there are these problems that come up
• 25:29
  where it's just either you solve it or the business is going to
• 25:32
  die. And so you feel like you have no
• 25:34
  choice. And so it's hard to kind of
• 25:37
  convey just the constancy of it. All, right?
• 25:42
  And it's one of those things where, you know, we hired
• 25:44
  teachers right as we needed them.
• 25:48
  But Bridget especially would get to a point where she would just
• 25:52
  hit kind of a boiling point or not.
• 25:56
  That doesn't sound right. She wasn't angry, but, you know,
• 25:57
  just a point where, like, we can't.
• 25:59
  I can't. It's just too much sustainable.
• 26:01
  It's too much, right? Yeah.
• 26:02
  And so having to let things go and delegate, I mean, you know,
• 26:05
  these are sort of the classic small business owner problems,
• 26:10
  you know, we went through. But so those first few months
• 26:14
  were about as hard as we expected, right?
• 26:16
  You just expect that hustle. But it's also fresh.
• 26:19
  And so I think the hardest thing is, you know, a year or two, you
• 26:22
  know, a few years later when a lot of those grinds are still
• 26:27
  just grinding right, to just be able to sustain that, keep it
• 26:31
  going is, is hard. Was there any point in those
• 26:36
  first couple of years where you guys seriously consider just
• 26:39
  throwing in the towel? No, never.
• 26:40
  Never. That's too much.
• 26:43
  You saw that there was a light at the end of the tunnel.
• 26:46
  There was enough joy in in some of the day-to-day that kept you
• 26:49
  going. Yeah.
• 26:50
  Well, yeah, I mean, number one, we were, you know, we'd signed a
• 26:54
  lease, right. And and we've we've signed
• 26:57
  personal guarantees on that. So there was really no choice.
• 27:01
  And I think that has really been the theme of business frankly,
• 27:05
  is that at every stage we've just faced these inflection
• 27:11
  points where there's no choice. We just have to keep going.
• 27:16
  We just have to like either fix this problem, we have to find
• 27:18
  the money we have to in, in our second location, which we can
• 27:21
  talk about, which was really the crusher for me.
• 27:25
  You know, there's just, you just don't have a choice like you,
• 27:29
  you, you have to fix this. You have to succeed, you have to
• 27:32
  push forward, you have to move. You just have to keep it going.
• 27:35
  And that, you know, from where I'm sitting today, I can look
• 27:38
  back and, and appreciate those things, right, because it's,
• 27:40
  it's given me a just a lot of, I don't know, grit and, and, you
• 27:46
  know, confidence and, and the ability to persevere.
• 27:50
  But in the moment, man, those things are are tough.
• 27:54
  So, but no, we've never quitting was just never an option, so.
• 28:00
  And I hear you in when the first location was there, a big part
• 28:03
  of the the reason that quitting wasn't an option is you had this
• 28:06
  five year lease that you'd personally guaranteed there was
• 28:09
  no out. We're going to make this work.
• 28:12
  At what point did the first location feel successful enough
• 28:18
  that you guys were like, let's replicate this, let's open up a
• 28:22
  second one? Yeah.
• 28:25
  So our first location opened, you know, October 1st, 2012.
• 28:30
  We signed the lease on the second location kind of if I'm
• 28:36
  call it January 2015, which was actually the same month that our
• 28:41
  first son was born. So I think what, you know,
• 28:45
  within a year, a year and a half of opening the first location,
• 28:49
  we felt like we had kind of our our feet under ourselves, right?
• 28:53
  Like it was a good, it was a great preschool.
• 28:58
  You know, the family's really happy.
• 28:59
  Like we, you know, you could just walk in and it was just
• 29:01
  this happy place, right? I mean, you get, you have all
• 29:04
  the normal problems. It's, you know, it's a hard
• 29:07
  business to own, right? Like kids are, are, are
• 29:10
  predictable, but unpredictable, right?
• 29:12
  They're unpredictable in predictable ways.
• 29:14
  It's a low paid workforce. It's expensive for the families.
• 29:20
  You know, it's brick and mortar, like all those challenges, but
• 29:23
  you'd walk into the preschool or the kids would leave and like
• 29:26
  you could just see their development and and if you talk
• 29:28
  to good preschool teachers, they all of them will tell you that's
• 29:31
  why they do it, right? Like the impact they're having
• 29:33
  on the kids. It's because they're so young
• 29:35
  and growing so fast. It's so apparent.
• 29:39
  It's so visceral. You know, like you just the, I
• 29:43
  can remember, you know, Bridges, some of the teachers would have
• 29:45
  this song when they're cleaning up the classroom, right?
• 29:47
  Clean up, clean up everybody everywhere.
• 29:49
  And then you know they're doing it and the kids are non, you
• 29:52
  know, the two year olds are just kind of.
• 29:54
  But then when you see a 2 1/2 three-year old just like
• 29:56
  cleaning up their little station and you see them singing to
• 29:58
  themselves, cleaning up, cleaning, you know, it just it
• 30:00
  just warms your heart, right? Like you, like you are having an
• 30:03
  impact and you know you. You're making a difference.
• 30:05
  You're making a difference. And you know the number of
• 30:07
  parents who would come to not just Bridget, but you know,
• 30:09
  their kids teachers, right? And just say, I don't know how
• 30:12
  you do it, you know, or they have a story about their kids at
• 30:16
  home and it's, you know, they pick something up at school that
• 30:20
  impact, you know that and, and, and it's just very real and it's
• 30:22
  very immediate because of how quickly the kids are developing.
• 30:26
  And so, yeah, there's, there's it's, it's the hardest, best
• 30:29
  thing we've ever done, right? Because even from the beginning,
• 30:32
  like that impact, it was a, it was clearly a special place.
• 30:37
  And so pretty early on, we got our arms around this.
• 30:41
  This is a great preschool. We want to open up a second
• 30:44
  location and talk me through how that unfolded then.
• 30:49
  Yeah, I mean this, this story, you know, we, we could spend
• 30:53
  hours on it. But again, like we'd still not,
• 30:56
  we have not lost a lot of that naivete that got us into the
• 30:59
  first location where we were like, Oh yeah, we could like we
• 31:03
  could, we could do this, you know.
• 31:06
  So the first location is it's, it's still is in an old house
• 31:09
  here in San Diego. And we kind of retrofitted and,
• 31:12
  you know, and, and did things, but structurally it, it, it,
• 31:15
  it's, it is what it is, right. We didn't move.
• 31:19
  Yeah. You know, we just like the
• 31:20
  living room, the dining room. These are classrooms now, right?
• 31:25
  The second location. Bridget wanted to open a second
• 31:29
  location that was a little bit bigger so that we could have
• 31:31
  infants and toddlers. And she would say the main
• 31:35
  reason was because, you know, we, we were married at that
• 31:37
  point. We were planning on having a
• 31:39
  family. She wanted to send her like she
• 31:44
  wouldn't trust anyone else to care for her babies, right?
• 31:45
  Like she, she wanted to be in charge of where our kids are
• 31:49
  going to school. And so we were thinking about
• 31:53
  it, planning it. Long story short, we found a
• 31:55
  location that was great, which is where our second location
• 31:58
  currently is, but they wouldn't lease it to us.
• 32:01
  They leased it to it because it's this, it's this commercial
• 32:05
  building and it was a it was an old laundromat right in the
• 32:09
  neighborhood called North Park. But it's not in this commercial
• 32:11
  corridor. Like it's just this, it's just
• 32:12
  this weird kind of thing where it's right on this corner and
• 32:17
  across the street is like a little convenience store, liquor
• 32:19
  store and flower shop. But those are the only two
• 32:22
  commercial businesses like within several blocks and it's
• 32:25
  all homes around. So you've got this perfect
• 32:28
  commercial space, but right. But it feels very residential,
• 32:30
  right? It's got this big parking lot,
• 32:33
  which we did turn into a, a playground.
• 32:36
  So it was just this like impossible location.
• 32:41
  So we really wanted it, but the landlords leased it to a spot
• 32:46
  that was going to turn it into like a little microbrewery
• 32:49
  restaurant or something. We heard that they, it became
• 32:53
  clear that they were not going to be able to get a liquor
• 32:55
  license. And so they like pulled out and
• 32:59
  the landlord, you know, kind of came back to us or we, I can't
• 33:02
  remember how it happened, but basically like on the second go
• 33:05
  around, they agreed to lease it to us.
• 33:08
  This spot when we moved in, like I said, it was a former
• 33:10
  laundromat, but when we moved in, it was 4 walls, barely a
• 33:15
  roof and nothing. So at the end of the day, like
• 33:20
  we, you know, every pipe and tube and wire and floorboard and
• 33:25
  sector drywall and light in that place we installed right?
• 33:31
  So this was a huge kind of like construction project.
• 33:36
  It's a huge, Yeah. I mean, the, the building's
• 33:38
  pretty small, 2700 square feet, just a rectangle, one floor,
• 33:43
  right. But like, we did not appreciate
• 33:45
  how huge this project was going to be to like, be a little sort
• 33:53
  of, I don't know, vague for legal reasons.
• 34:00
  I can't get into some of the problems we had with the folks
• 34:07
  we hired to kind of design and engineer the place.
• 34:12
  But I will say, you know, I got a crash course in.
• 34:18
  Yeah, basically just construct commercial construction, right?
• 34:20
  Everything from design and planning to permitting, right?
• 34:26
  Mechanical, electrical, plumbing, roofing, all of that.
• 34:33
  And I also the biggest lesson I, I, I took from that point was I,
• 34:37
  I had to learn the hard way about vetting people you hire
• 34:45
  and how dangerous of a combination over confidence and
• 34:51
  under competence is Like that's, that's a really dangerous
• 34:57
  combination in, in, in a person. But you know, to yeah, to kind
• 35:01
  of, we thought it was going to, we thought within nine months of
• 35:04
  signing the lease we'd be able to be open, you know, it, it was
• 35:08
  almost two years. Oh, wow.
• 35:11
  Yeah. And you know, there was like,
• 35:14
  you know, we negotiated some TI reimbursement rights, had an
• 35:16
  improvement reimbursement and like there was some stuff there,
• 35:19
  but the, the process was so long and so expensive that I can, you
• 35:25
  know, we got an SBA loan. You know, we also learned that,
• 35:28
  you know, after yeah, that. Well, sorry, you know, this
• 35:34
  opening up this, these, this memory box is bringing out a
• 35:38
  lot, a lot of different stories. But I, I can remember the day
• 35:44
  when I did that like kind of cash transfer from your credit
• 35:48
  card, our personal credit card, right?
• 35:51
  I put like, you know, I just transferred $25,000 of cash from
• 35:55
  one of our credit cards into the business account in order to
• 35:57
  make payroll at the first location that was still going
• 35:59
  on, you know, and what is that at like, you know, 3540%
• 36:02
  interest rate, whatever, whatever those are.
• 36:07
  And we were just tapped out. You know, we had started with
• 36:10
  the kind of very legitimate SBA loan that we thought would be
• 36:13
  enough. And then we kind of got went
• 36:15
  into the more dodgy kind of business loans, all to just keep
• 36:20
  the construction going to keep operating.
• 36:22
  You know, we were, you know, liquidated our retirement
• 36:26
  savings, which wasn't a lot at that point, but I was still
• 36:27
  working at the big firm, you know, at the firm, looking at
• 36:31
  all of our savings for a few years separately, I had been
• 36:35
  really into like churning credit card points, right?
• 36:37
  I was doing like the miles and points things just like, you're
• 36:40
  right, like they're just people who do that.
• 36:42
  And so through that process, I just amassed like $180,000 of
• 36:47
  personal credit, like all in the service of kind of like getting
• 36:50
  us free flights and free hotels and things.
• 36:53
  And we ended up maxing out pretty much all of that, you
• 36:58
  know, like we were just totally underwater.
• 37:01
  I, I think like rationally, you know, somebody like a, just a
• 37:06
  cold account looking at the numbers, I'm confident would
• 37:09
  have just looked at these at, at everything at an earlier stage
• 37:13
  and just said, you've got to pull the plug.
• 37:14
  Like you just got to abandon this.
• 37:16
  You have to declare personal bankruptcy.
• 37:17
  Like you're done. You know, you can't keep digging
• 37:20
  this hole deeper. But we just felt like we didn't
• 37:23
  have a choice. I mean, it was never, it was
• 37:25
  never even an option. But there were some really dark
• 37:26
  days, and the darkest was what you're.
• 37:29
  Describing is incredibly stressful.
• 37:32
  Yeah, go ahead, Robert. Yeah, unbelievable.
• 37:35
  Yeah. I mean, this was, you know, to,
• 37:37
  to be candid, I, I can remember in August of 2016, I mean, at
• 37:42
  this point, things are done. We like we had scraped and
• 37:46
  clawed and we had it like this, this building was built it, it
• 37:51
  had, it was furnished, it was painted there.
• 37:53
  There was kids furniture, there were toys there, right?
• 37:55
  Like we were trying to get licensed and we were trying to
• 37:58
  get through our final kind of things with the city.
• 38:03
  And, and we tried to set up the, the final city inspection and
• 38:06
  they came out or they didn't come out.
• 38:08
  They said, Hey, you've got all these special inspections still
• 38:10
  in the plans that haven't been cleared.
• 38:12
  I was like, what does that mean? They're like, well, they're, you
• 38:15
  know, you got to check these off.
• 38:18
  And I talked about that contractor and the contractor
• 38:20
  said, yeah, these are here, but they don't relate to anything.
• 38:22
  Like, for example, they were like, look, they're requiring a
• 38:24
  special inspection for welding. And a special inspection, just
• 38:28
  for context, is when you hire an inspector to come out and like,
• 38:32
  watch you do the thing that needs to be inspected, right?
• 38:34
  So there was a special inspection on the plans for
• 38:36
  welding where when something's welded, you're supposed to hire
• 38:40
  this person to come out, watch you Weld and say, OK, you've
• 38:42
  welded this correctly. I'm going to sign off on this.
• 38:44
  The contractor walked me through the plans and he said there's
• 38:47
  not a single Weld in this entire place.
• 38:51
  And so I went down to the city, You know, at this one, I was
• 38:55
  running the plans on my own, just sitting and, you know,
• 38:57
  pulling the number, sitting there for hours.
• 39:00
  And for that one, for example, you know, I just, I just, I
• 39:04
  just, I was just desperate. I was like, please, like, just
• 39:06
  look at these plans. There's not a Weld in this
• 39:07
  place. And so I found, you know, a guy
• 39:09
  who was finally willing to listen to me at the city.
• 39:11
  And he went through and he, you know, cleared ones that like,
• 39:14
  OK, yeah, this is fair. Yeah.
• 39:16
  I don't know why this is here, but there was a special
• 39:19
  inspection for concrete. And we poured a lot of concrete.
• 39:22
  And there was a very real chance I was as I was sitting here that
• 39:27
  he was going to tell me I cannot sign off on these plans.
• 39:31
  You cannot get these. You cannot get your, you know,
• 39:34
  you cannot get this project approved unless you rip out the
• 39:38
  flooring and the walls and you and you jackhammer the concrete
• 39:43
  like in the foundation and report it with a special
• 39:45
  inspector. And at that, at this point, like
• 39:47
  I said, I mean, you know, we were hundreds of thousands of
• 39:49
  dollars in debt personally in the business and I just begged
• 39:54
  and we were dealing with this. And I can tell you, like those
• 39:57
  months when all this kind of was going on, you know, I, I, you
• 40:00
  know, I had what I, I spent a lot of time talking with my
• 40:04
  therapist. Yeah, I started therapy at the
• 40:05
  time. And I was like, I'm not having
• 40:07
  suicidal thoughts, I don't think.
• 40:09
  But I'm thinking about like the idea of suicide, you know, just
• 40:14
  like just the concept, you know, and she said, well, this is
• 40:17
  what, what, what, you know, this is the difference between
• 40:19
  suicidal ideation and suicidal thoughts, right?
• 40:22
  I, I, we didn't have a gun, right?
• 40:23
  I wasn't, I, you know, a suicidal thought is when you
• 40:26
  think, hey, I've got this extension cord, you know, in my
• 40:29
  garage and I could tie it to this thing and I could, you
• 40:31
  know, keep it. Never got to that point.
• 40:35
  But I was thinking about, you know, you know, if this doesn't
• 40:37
  work, like is, you know, what, what, what am I going to do?
• 40:40
  You know, do I just, you know, and it was that was really hard.
• 40:45
  But there's a happy, you know, obviously, you know, we've got
• 40:48
  now it's 124. We didn't have to rip out
• 40:51
  everything there. Basically, I found a guy who's
• 40:55
  just willing to listen and work within the city.
• 40:58
  And at the end of the day, we had to cut open two relatively
• 41:02
  small sections of walls, hire a special inspector to watch us
• 41:09
  kind of reinstall a few lag screws.
• 41:12
  He signed off on it. And we, you know, we were able
• 41:16
  to open. But that, I mean, we did.
• 41:18
  We had weeks, if not days of runway left in terms of just
• 41:23
  being able to, like, meet payroll at the other location
• 41:25
  because, again, we're still paying rent on this place, you
• 41:28
  know, and then it was expensive. Yeah.
• 41:31
  We were just tapped out. Howard, I appreciate you opening
• 41:35
  up and sharing that because that clearly that, that brought up a
• 41:37
  lot of old experiences, a lot of old emotions.
• 41:41
  They're very raw. And these are things that people
• 41:44
  don't often hear or know about, right?
• 41:47
  They, they see the beautiful daycare centers.
• 41:49
  If people go to your website, they, you know, can see just
• 41:52
  these gorgeous facilities and they're like, oh, you know,
• 41:55
  these guys must be rolling in cash.
• 41:57
  Howards, he's an attorney. I'm sure he's sitting on a whole
• 42:00
  boatload of money. Things just come easy to him and
• 42:03
  to hear, you know, this real struggle that you guys went
• 42:06
  through almost went belly up like a lot of personal strife,
• 42:09
  the therapy that you've gone through to come through the
• 42:11
  other side. I really appreciate you opening
• 42:14
  up about that. You know, and I'm curious, you
• 42:16
  know, so you guys went from one location to two locations.
• 42:19
  Now you're at 4 locations. And as you go through that kind
• 42:22
  of growth, it really changes the way that the founders are
• 42:26
  involved with the business, right?
• 42:28
  You know, when you're a small location, your wife, Bridget,
• 42:31
  she's the teacher, she's the director, she's everything.
• 42:34
  Now you're in a second locate. Now you're at 4 locations.
• 42:37
  A lot of times you end up being more removed from the things
• 42:40
  that especially for Bridget that she, you know, really good at
• 42:44
  and really enjoys. I'm kind of curious to hear both
• 42:47
  of you how your roles have changed as you've gone through
• 42:50
  that growth. Yeah, absolutely.
• 42:52
  I mean, I, I know Bridget would tell you she hates her job right
• 42:55
  now. You know, she like the thing
• 42:57
  that she loved was teaching. Like she she wishes she wishes
• 43:02
  she could be a teacher at Aspen Leaf because it was again,
• 43:07
  making this kind of like having her kids, right.
• 43:10
  That was that's what she loves the you know, we love Aspen
• 43:16
  leave like I I don't wanna say she hates her job, but you know,
• 43:19
  now it's it's it's a lot of. She's not doing the parts of it
• 43:22
  that she used to. Exactly.
• 43:23
  She she lost the parts that she loved about, about teaching and
• 43:26
  and that's been really hard. And so, yeah, so, you know,
• 43:30
  we've grown and had to delegate, right.
• 43:33
  So like, in addition to the teachers for the classrooms,
• 43:35
  each location has a director, right?
• 43:39
  We've now have an enrollment coordinator who because that,
• 43:42
  that was another thing where for years she was also, she was
• 43:44
  doing all enrollment. And so that meant reaching out
• 43:47
  to families on the wait list and communicating them, giving them
• 43:49
  tours, you know, emailing back and forth, like kind of like
• 43:53
  talking about, you know, all all that kind of stuff.
• 43:56
  And so that's been a big thing is just learning to delegate for
• 44:00
  me, my role hasn't necessarily changed.
• 44:02
  You know, I, I think like the, the responsibilities have stayed
• 44:06
  consistent for me, right? But even there I've also had to
• 44:10
  learn kind of the beauty of delegation and just finding a
• 44:13
  efficient systems and processes. You know, like in the early days
• 44:18
  when we, you know, at Hillcrest when we had at most kind of like
• 44:20
  6 employees, it was really easy from quick and easy for me to do
• 44:25
  payroll. You know, we, we immediately got
• 44:27
  a payroll service, but I would just get their timesheets, you
• 44:30
  know, I would just tabulate their times entering in and it
• 44:32
  was fine. You know, once we got to 50, you
• 44:37
  know, we had kind of gone to the, you know, the T sheets,
• 44:40
  right? Like, but I was still having to
• 44:41
  like, tabulate things and figure out little discrepancies.
• 44:46
  So it took me a surprising long time to just realize like, oh, I
• 44:50
  should just teach each director how to like, calculate payroll
• 44:54
  for their location, right? So now they can send me hours
• 44:57
  and I, I can now I'm just now it's just data entry, right?
• 45:01
  And so, yeah, it's just for me, same responsibilities.
• 45:07
  But, you know, things have just kind of grown.
• 45:10
  And then over time, you know, in the beginning, we didn't offer
• 45:13
  health insurance. That was very uncommon just
• 45:15
  across the field, right? Like in 2012, if you went to any
• 45:19
  preschool, almost none of them would offer like health
• 45:21
  insurance, for example. But a few years later, we wanted
• 45:24
  to do it and it was becoming more common.
• 45:26
  So, you know, in order to kind of recruit.
• 45:28
  So, you know, I had to learn kind of about that, had some
• 45:31
  experience going through a few brokers until we found one who
• 45:34
  really worked. So you know, things have as you
• 45:38
  grow, you know, you kind of add things on like that.
• 45:43
  But but my role hasn't hasn't changed too much.
• 45:47
  You actually touched on something I, I usually like to
• 45:49
  ask a question around this. You know, retaining recruiting
• 45:52
  good staff nowadays with labor shortage is really difficult.
• 45:57
  You guys have been able to introduce health insurance
• 46:00
  recently as a as a way to help with that.
• 46:03
  I'm curious some other things that you've tried which have
• 46:05
  worked. This is, yeah, this is the
• 46:11
  biggest problem not just for but like for preschools in general.
• 46:17
  You know, it is a tragedy. It is a travesty that preschool
• 46:21
  teachers across the United States, like in this country,
• 46:24
  are basically the lowest paid profession, right.
• 46:29
  We've set up our education system in a really strange way,
• 46:33
  you know, K through 12. I mean, with all the problems
• 46:36
  and issues that, you know, folks go into about public school
• 46:38
  systems, it it is a public system, right?
• 46:44
  And those teachers are underpaid, but preschool
• 46:47
  teachers are underpaid even compared to their elementary
• 46:50
  school counterparts because it's basically entirely private, you
• 46:53
  know, and this is not kind of by design.
• 46:55
  It's just like we've just fallen into this situation where for
• 47:01
  years it has been too expensive for families, teachers are
• 47:04
  underpaid and preschools barely make money.
• 47:07
  I mean, this is a really low margin, 0 growth, high fixed
• 47:10
  cost business. And so right now, even though
• 47:15
  there are only half the number of childcare spots in our
• 47:18
  county, in San Diego County that the county needs, 75% of schools
• 47:23
  either break even or lose money. And because it's because it's
• 47:27
  just too expensive to run. So you're getting these
• 47:30
  childcare deserts where just the cost of opening a school and
• 47:35
  operating at the minimum ratios, what you have to charge for that
• 47:40
  the families in those neighborhoods just can't afford.
• 47:44
  But to get back to the recruiting, you know, cost of
• 47:47
  living in San Diego is a huge problem.
• 47:49
  You know, a decade ago, we had a lot of teachers who lived pretty
• 47:53
  close to the schools. And just over time, as the cost
• 47:59
  of living has increased, people who want to be preschool
• 48:04
  teachers just haven't been able to afford to live in this city.
• 48:07
  You know, we like, we lose most of our teachers to just moving,
• 48:13
  you know, either moving farther out of San Diego or states,
• 48:16
  different states entirely, right?
• 48:17
  Texas, Colorado, back home or whatever.
• 48:21
  And so that's been a huge challenge overall, like for the
• 48:24
  field, especially in this area for us specifically, like how do
• 48:29
  we attract and retain the best teachers?
• 48:35
  What we strive for is to create. Again, we've always been teacher
• 48:39
  focused, right? Bridget's a teacher.
• 48:41
  This goes back to just the, the heart of Aspen leaf, which is
• 48:44
  like, we are a preschool by teachers for teachers, obviously
• 48:50
  for the kids, but like, you know, again, the teachers are
• 48:52
  the school. And so I think, you know, we
• 48:57
  have had and have a reputation among teachers in the area where
• 49:01
  if you want to do this job, there's no better place to do it
• 49:05
  than Aspen leaf. You know, the small class size
• 49:10
  is just the support, right? And I, I don't know what rating
• 49:15
  this podcast is, but we, you know, we're a place where the
• 49:17
  shit rolls uphill with us, right?
• 49:20
  If, if parents are being difficult, if they're being
• 49:22
  unreasonable, you know, Bridget and I will meet with them.
• 49:26
  And, and you know, we're really commutative.
• 49:28
  Like we'll work it out. But at the end of the day, we'll
• 49:31
  tell you, you know what, this isn't a good fit.
• 49:34
  You got to go. And, you know, we'll, we have
• 49:37
  our teachers. Back so you'll actually fire
• 49:39
  families, You'll tell parents, yeah.
• 49:41
  And and thank. You, but no thank you.
• 49:42
  Yeah, You know, I mean, we, we, this is another thing.
• 49:45
  You're like, we, we, we do not expel kids.
• 49:47
  I mean, a lot there are schools where if a kid is just, I don't,
• 49:51
  you know, they're not difficult, but, you know, there's some
• 49:53
  challenging behaviors. There are a lot of schools that
• 49:55
  just say, we're not going to deal with this.
• 49:56
  But for us and for Bridget, those are the kids she's always
• 50:01
  loved the most. You know, she'll say those are
• 50:03
  the kids who need us, the families we have expelled.
• 50:09
  Almost 100% has been because of parent misbehavior.
• 50:15
  You know where it's clear is not the right fit for the for the
• 50:17
  parents and so. And so employees know that
• 50:24
  you've got their back. Yeah, and they're not.
• 50:26
  Going to have to put up with abusive parents.
• 50:28
  Yeah. And a lot of teachers, you know,
• 50:29
  who have worked a lot at a lot of different schools that, you
• 50:32
  know, that's, that's what they tell us, you know, and they, and
• 50:34
  we've heard a lot of stories of times where they were, you know,
• 50:38
  the school kind of threw them under the bus or undermined them
• 50:40
  with the parents. And their feeling was, well, you
• 50:43
  know, because the parents are the ones paying the money.
• 50:46
  But again, this is one of those things where I don't understand
• 50:49
  it because it is better for the staff, better for the school,
• 50:55
  better for the business. If you protect your teachers,
• 51:00
  you know, right, Because if they're happier, you're going to
• 51:03
  lose that one family, but you're going to create a culture where
• 51:07
  the teachers feel supportive and want to stay.
• 51:10
  And that's happier for the kids, right?
• 51:13
  And like, so then the families who are there are happier and
• 51:16
  you know, they spread the gospel like in their neighborhood and
• 51:19
  you know, you're getting all that inbound, you know, you just
• 51:22
  build a good reputation. And and so that's that's
• 51:24
  something I never understood. Yeah.
• 51:28
  What's the future? Of Aspen leaf, Howard, where do
• 51:30
  you see it going from here? Well, I mean, we want to, we
• 51:39
  wanted to keep being Aspen leaf. You know what I mean?
• 51:41
  This is we've had culture is just so hard, right?
• 51:45
  And it and it's always self reinforcing, positively or
• 51:47
  negatively. When, when things have been
• 51:50
  good, when we've had a, a, you know, team with chemistry, you
• 51:54
  get fewer call outs, right? Like they're supporting each
• 51:58
  other like the, but we've had times with, you know, we've
• 51:59
  hired, you know, we've been, we've had folks who should have
• 52:03
  fired sooner. You know, we've had kind of bad
• 52:05
  chemistry. And so it's, it's a, like, it's,
• 52:08
  this is not a business that you can ever walk away from it.
• 52:11
  It never gets automated. It's just too many people and
• 52:15
  it's too hard. And so the future of ask a
• 52:16
  league is we just keep working hard to like, keep the standards
• 52:19
  up to keep the experience going, you know, 'cause it's, it's,
• 52:23
  it's a good preschool. We just want to, you know, we
• 52:25
  want to just keep owning good preschools, but you.
• 52:27
  Guys have built a good model and you want to keep doing what
• 52:30
  you're doing. Yeah, but there are macro
• 52:33
  challenges that I don't know, like the like we that we can't
• 52:38
  solve. You know, like I said, there's
• 52:41
  no public support for us. Like we don't, we don't get any
• 52:43
  taxpayer money. And so for example, you know,
• 52:46
  Hillcrest 10 years ago or 12 years ago, you know, we had 29
• 52:51
  spots, right? That's our license.
• 52:52
  We can have 29 kids per day. Today, same building, our
• 52:58
  license is still 29 kids, right? It's based on the square
• 53:00
  footage. And so that location cannot
• 53:04
  grow. It's just, it's, it's, it's a
• 53:06
  building. But in that time, right, teacher
• 53:10
  compensation has more than tripled, right?
• 53:12
  Rent has more than doubled. The cost of all supplies has has
• 53:16
  increased, right? Milk and crackers and all those
• 53:18
  things. And so we've had to increase
• 53:24
  tuition. You know, again, 12 years ago it
• 53:28
  was about 1000 bucks a month to send your cadaspine leaf in
• 53:32
  September, same age, it's going to be over 2500 bucks a month,
• 53:39
  you know, because again, for that location, for example, we
• 53:44
  need tuition from 29 families to support all of this, right?
• 53:48
  And at some point, you know, like it's wages are going to
• 53:52
  keep going up. All these things are going to
• 53:54
  keep going up. At some point, families aren't
• 53:56
  just aren't going to be able to afford it.
• 53:58
  So I, you know, in five years, I'm not sure what the preschool
• 54:03
  and childcare industry looks like.
• 54:04
  I mean, you know, if, if you kind of Google it, like people
• 54:07
  are talking about this Cliff, right, this crisis, like the
• 54:09
  business model is collapsing. There are already, as I said,
• 54:14
  places in San Diego in the country that are childcare
• 54:17
  deserts because you just can't open one, right?
• 54:23
  The families just can't afford it.
• 54:24
  Like it just can't exist despite the demand.
• 54:28
  So there's got to be some kind of change because this is
• 54:32
  unsustainable. I was going to say, is there a
• 54:33
  solution on the horizon? Is there a proposed fix?
• 54:37
  No, it happened. Well, you know, I mean, the, the
• 54:40
  proposed fix is very expensive, right?
• 54:42
  Like it's got you, you've got like taxpayers, The government
• 54:46
  has to support it in the same way that we support elementary
• 54:50
  school education, right? Because the current kind of
• 54:55
  system of it's just too patchy, right?
• 54:58
  There are some families who are eligible for subsidy, but
• 55:00
  they're hard, They're difficult. There's a long wait list.
• 55:03
  It's not nearly widely enough available.
• 55:07
  Yeah. I mean, you got to support these
• 55:09
  things publicly. But we're actually going
• 55:10
  somewhat backwards where in in California we're doing an
• 55:15
  excellent thing, right? It's called universal TK or
• 55:18
  Universal pre-K, where basically the state is trying to add a
• 55:22
  grade below kindergarten, right for four year olds.
• 55:27
  And this is it's a good thing. The problem is they're only
• 55:32
  funding it in the public schools.
• 55:33
  You know, there were proposals. Let's what it's called mixed
• 55:35
  delivery, right? Like we want every four year
• 55:38
  old, we want every family with a four year old in the in
• 55:40
  California to be able to send their child to school either for
• 55:44
  free or, or, or low cost. So some people said, well, let's
• 55:48
  fund, let's create these classrooms in the public
• 55:50
  schools. Let's also fund private
• 55:52
  preschools to be able to, you know, offer these spots at a
• 55:55
  discount or, or for free to those families.
• 55:57
  And that would be excellent. But instead they're only funding
• 55:59
  in public schools. And now there are these problems
• 56:01
  where they don't have enough teachers and enough classrooms.
• 56:04
  So we're not offering them. So we're not offering it to all
• 56:07
  families, right. So there's still that shortage,
• 56:10
  but at the same time it's hollowed out enrollment for
• 56:13
  private preschools because now you're losing all your 4 year
• 56:16
  olds to the free program. And I've had a lot of
• 56:21
  discussions with families where they say we love you guys and we
• 56:23
  would absolutely stay. But the difference between, you
• 56:25
  know, $30,000 a year and free, that's a huge difference.
• 56:30
  And I fully understand that. But even then, you know, like
• 56:34
  there's a difference in quality and so we've had families come
• 56:37
  back. But so anyway, there there's all
• 56:39
  these problems where, you know, we have seen like this past year
• 56:43
  was was hard because that demand for that four year old kind of
• 56:47
  age range was just absolutely decimated.
• 56:50
  And so, you know, we're having to evaluate, you know, do we
• 56:54
  just get, you know, do we just not, you know, so for this
• 56:58
  coming school year, we're taking the four, what was kind of
• 57:02
  normally known as the four year old classroom.
• 57:04
  And we're doing it mixed age, right?
• 57:05
  And there are a lot of benefits to mixed age.
• 57:08
  But yeah, there were, there were times where, you know, we had a
• 57:11
  classroom with like, you know, you could have 11 students in
• 57:13
  and we had, you know, three or four four year olds.
• 57:16
  And so we're, we're actually kind of going backwards in this
• 57:19
  where at least our state is actually making it harder for
• 57:25
  private preschools to stay open. And a lot are closing because of
• 57:28
  what the state is doing to try to expand access, which is a
• 57:31
  laudable goal, which we support, but the way they're doing it is
• 57:34
  is just decimating the. Yeah, it seems like with the
• 57:37
  shortage of teachers in classrooms that they're
• 57:39
  experiencing in the state funded program that it would make a lot
• 57:42
  of sense to evolve the private sector.
• 57:44
  No, it makes perfect sense. Yeah.
• 57:46
  Yeah, because family, you know, like families, there's some
• 57:51
  great, there's, there are a lot of great preschools in in
• 57:53
  California and there and the families would love to stay,
• 57:56
  right. And it's one of those things
• 57:57
  where, you know, OK, let's subsidized those spots.
• 58:00
  So let's create the TK programs in the public schools, which is
• 58:03
  a good thing, but we can't meet the demand for all the families
• 58:08
  in California. And so let's also fund these
• 58:11
  spots in existing preschools that are already doing this.
• 58:15
  You know, you get a lot of families who are happy, want to
• 58:17
  stay. You know, the other side of this
• 58:20
  is that staff are also moving from preschools to the public
• 58:27
  schools, which has always happened.
• 58:28
  But now you've got this, you know, TK grades, they can
• 58:32
  continue to work with four year olds.
• 58:33
  You know, they're getting these signing bonuses.
• 58:36
  Again, depending on the school like it, it could be a tough
• 58:39
  situation, right? Like we've had teachers who work
• 58:43
  with us for a long time, have always wanted to be elementary
• 58:47
  school teachers. So they go and do that, but then
• 58:48
  they they, they come back because, you know, they love the
• 58:51
  age. But working in public schools
• 58:53
  like has it's own challenges. But yeah, it's, it's just
• 58:56
  created a lot of problems. And the solution seems it's
• 58:58
  expensive, but it seems obvious because everyone kind of
• 59:01
  benefits. Yeah, well, it'll be interesting
• 59:05
  to follow. We've had other daycare owners
• 59:07
  on from California and we hear everybody's talking about this
• 59:10
  same challenge. Some of them are, you know,
• 59:12
  they're talking about scaling back the size of the business
• 59:15
  that or maybe they're in a transition classrooms from, you
• 59:19
  know, that four year old classroom, you know, that four
• 59:21
  year old age range to, you know, younger groups and and maybe,
• 59:26
  you know, they'll find some balance there.
• 59:28
  But yeah, there's there's a lot of big things at play here that,
• 59:32
  like you said, are out of your control.
• 59:34
  I'm curious, just kind of shifting gears into something a
• 59:37
  little bit more light hearted. I'm What's a fun fact that most
• 59:40
  people wouldn't know about you, Howard?
• 59:42
  The fact that gets most people to just kind of like do a double
• 59:47
  take is that there were several years in my when I was in
• 59:51
  college where I had I had dreadlocks.
• 59:55
  Is that right? I'd love to see a.
• 59:56
  Picture of that? No, I, I I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll
• 59:59
  have to find it. But yeah, I remember my freshman
• 1:00:02
  year, I went on spring break with Habitat for Humanity, and
• 1:00:06
  there was a girl on the trip who had dreadlocks.
• 1:00:08
  And I Well, to be OK to like, I mean, you know, you kind of
• 1:00:11
  asked me to be vulnerable. So #1 I did think they look
• 1:00:14
  cool. And so then I was like, oh,
• 1:00:16
  could, could I do that? And she's like, sure.
• 1:00:18
  So I, I just grew it out and she did it, you know, beeswax and,
• 1:00:22
  and, you know, for a lot like, yeah, for years when I was at
• 1:00:24
  Penn State, like I would meet people and they'd be like, oh,
• 1:00:28
  I've seen you around campus. Like you're the Asian with
• 1:00:30
  dreads, right? I mean, you know, there's like
• 1:00:32
  50,000 people. But I was like, I was that guy.
• 1:00:36
  And so yeah, that's something people just can't believe.
• 1:00:39
  Like, you know, my hair does. It's it's just it's you know,
• 1:00:41
  it's Asian, wiry, straight. So I'll have to find that photo.
• 1:00:45
  But honestly, I think like, go ahead, I.
• 1:00:49
  Was going to say that was your visual calling card.
• 1:00:51
  I'm going to guess it probably encouraged you to keep the
• 1:00:54
  dreadlocks a little bit longer than maybe you might have,
• 1:00:56
  because people are like, oh, I recognize you.
• 1:00:58
  You're Asian with dreads. Well, that's The thing is combo
• 1:01:01
  is, I think looking back, a lot of it was just kind of like
• 1:01:05
  insecurity and attention seeking, you know, like, I think
• 1:01:08
  I, you know, I'd always like when I was in high school, I
• 1:01:10
  had, I had really horrible acne. I mean that, that was like,
• 1:01:14
  honestly one of the biggest challenges of my life, like just
• 1:01:16
  the dealing with that. And like, you know, I grew up in
• 1:01:20
  Pittsburgh, like, you know, I was one of what, like 4 Asian
• 1:01:23
  kids in my school. Like it was a very wide area,
• 1:01:26
  great school. But like, you know, the barbers,
• 1:01:28
  they didn't really know how to deal with Asian hair.
• 1:01:29
  So I just had terrible hair and I, I could make fun of.
• 1:01:32
  And so I was just really, you know, I was a confident.
• 1:01:35
  I was confident in the sense that like I was sort of the
• 1:01:39
  class clown, right? Like I always loved being on a
• 1:01:41
  stage, but really insecure, kind of one-on-one and and with a lot
• 1:01:46
  of just kind of like especially with girls and, and, you know,
• 1:01:49
  just my appearance and stuff. So I honestly, looking back, I
• 1:01:52
  think the dreadlocks thing was kind of like, well, let's you
• 1:01:55
  know, I've always hated my hair. I was going to be fun of it.
• 1:01:56
  Like, let's try something really extreme, right?
• 1:02:00
  And yeah, kind of get that attention as, as you know, the
• 1:02:03
  Asian kid with dreads because it's, I think, yeah, I think
• 1:02:06
  just kind of digging deep. It's one of those things where
• 1:02:08
  like if you're, if you're the one drawing attention to
• 1:02:11
  yourself, then it's not embarrassing when someone draws
• 1:02:14
  attention to you, you know? And so, yeah, I think it was
• 1:02:20
  sort. Of take control of the
• 1:02:21
  narrative. There.
• 1:02:21
  No. Exactly.
• 1:02:22
  Yeah. Howard, I just have one more
• 1:02:26
  question for you. But before I do it, I want to do
• 1:02:28
  2 things. First of all, if you're
• 1:02:29
  listening today and you like today's content, please hit the
• 1:02:32
  subscribe, like or share button on your favorite podcast app.
• 1:02:35
  The second thing I want to do before I ask my last question is
• 1:02:38
  I want to let people know the best way to get in touch with
• 1:02:40
  you. What would that be?
• 1:02:42
  Oh yeah, if they want to. I mean, e-mail, I suppose,
• 1:02:47
  howard@aspenleafpreschool.com. Just feel free to get in touch.
• 1:02:52
  Also, if you're a, we didn't even talk about the COVID stuff.
• 1:02:56
  But since then I've been helping a lot of preschool.
• 1:02:58
  Basically, we got into scrap with the, with the licensing
• 1:03:01
  agency and I, I held firm. And because I did anyway, I
• 1:03:05
  didn't think they had the legal authority to do what they were
• 1:03:08
  trying to do around masks. I mean, we were, we took COVID
• 1:03:10
  really seriously, but masking kids just didn't make sense
• 1:03:13
  because they couldn't wear them when sleeping and eating.
• 1:03:16
  So we didn't do it and they tried to get us in trouble.
• 1:03:18
  And I, because I was a lawyer, this is where my background came
• 1:03:20
  into. I just, I was like, yeah, you.
• 1:03:23
  I was like, I've dug into this. You actually can't you don't
• 1:03:25
  have the jurisdiction to enforce this.
• 1:03:27
  Got into a big scrap. We got sight, you know, Anyway,
• 1:03:31
  it's Long story short, like we did not go on Fox News, but like
• 1:03:37
  Tucker Carlson's show ended up just like talking about us
• 1:03:39
  because we made the news about this stuff about us fighting
• 1:03:42
  back. And we were like, well, we don't
• 1:03:44
  want to be like a, you know, a bullet in this like in the
• 1:03:47
  chamber for this like culture war, like we.
• 1:03:51
  But anyway, after that we had a lot of preschools in California
• 1:03:53
  reach out to us and just say like, Hey, we're rooting for
• 1:03:55
  you. Sharing stories of times that
• 1:03:57
  licensing abuse their authority. And again, like I realized, Oh,
• 1:04:00
  there might not be another like lawyer preschool owner in, in
• 1:04:04
  California, right? And, and so for the last few
• 1:04:08
  years I've been like helping preschools with licensing issues
• 1:04:14
  and legal issues. And I kind of put together a
• 1:04:16
  little kit to help preschools understand how to appeal
• 1:04:20
  citations because the agency gives you like a one page, like
• 1:04:24
  here are your appeal rights. But there are no instructions,
• 1:04:26
  no forms. They don't, you know, people
• 1:04:27
  know what to do with it. You can hire a lawyer for
• 1:04:29
  thousands of dollars, but it's not worth it.
• 1:04:31
  There's nothing kind of in between.
• 1:04:33
  So yeah, so if if preschool owners, especially your
• 1:04:37
  administrators. Want to search this?
• 1:04:38
  I'm glad that we touched on this.
• 1:04:39
  Yeah. And again, mention your e-mail
• 1:04:41
  address cuz I think that's gonna be super helpful to a lot of
• 1:04:43
  people. Yeah, they can reach out at
• 1:04:44
  howard@aspenleafpreschool.com. But also for owners and
• 1:04:49
  administrators in California, if they go to
• 1:04:52
  appeal.californiachildcarelicensing.com. This is where I put like, it's a
• 1:04:58
  little digital download, right? Just I, I personally wrote like
• 1:05:01
  a guide on like if I were sitting across from one of my
• 1:05:03
  directors, like, OK, if you get cited, here's literally how you
• 1:05:06
  appeal a citation. Like here's how you do the
• 1:05:08
  research. Here's how you make an argument.
• 1:05:09
  Oh, this is a free resource. It's not free.
• 1:05:11
  I'm I'm charged, I'm charging for it.
• 1:05:13
  But it's like this again, like I'm trying to make like a just,
• 1:05:15
  you know, it's a, it's a, it's like less than 100 bucks.
• 1:05:18
  And there are like templates and examples.
• 1:05:20
  Yeah. You know, like there's like a
• 1:05:22
  genuinely helpful resource to like, here's how to do it and
• 1:05:25
  here's like some templates to put it together, you know,
• 1:05:29
  digital download. And so.
• 1:05:33
  Yeah, because during that fight, I thought we were being treated
• 1:05:35
  unfairly. They said, no, we're treating
• 1:05:36
  you just like every other preschool.
• 1:05:38
  And I was like, I don't think that's true.
• 1:05:40
  So I just dug into every single report and citation they issued
• 1:05:44
  across all of California from the beginning of COVID.
• 1:05:46
  And I like, you know, like, this is where the big firm training,
• 1:05:49
  like, came into practice. Like, I was willing to just
• 1:05:52
  grind and just like, throw it into spreadsheets, right?
• 1:05:54
  Just do hours and hours of analysis and I, I could just, I
• 1:05:58
  statistically proved that they were treating us unfairly.
• 1:06:01
  And so I bought the domain California Childcare
• 1:06:03
  licensing.com and I wrote the whole story and I put the like
• 1:06:06
  data on that website and I just made it publicly available.
• 1:06:10
  And I was so yes. So that's why I own that domain.
• 1:06:16
  And what's the sub domain, the full URL that somebody can go to
• 1:06:19
  to to get that packet that you talked?
• 1:06:20
  About so, so actually, yeah. So actually, if you just go to
• 1:06:23
  californiachildcarelicensing.com, you know, you can, you can see
• 1:06:27
  kind of the back story, but now you know, like I, there's a link
• 1:06:31
  right at the top that says like, Hey, I also, I have this kit,
• 1:06:33
  you know, so if you, if you want to appeal your own citations, so
• 1:06:36
  it's all, you know, you can go to the main domain and then
• 1:06:38
  that'll take you to the sub domain.
• 1:06:40
  But that was one of those other things where like I would not
• 1:06:43
  like, the only reason I know how to do WordPress and like a
• 1:06:46
  little bit of coding and, and these kind of things is, is from
• 1:06:48
  owning the business, right? So like those skills, like I, I
• 1:06:53
  had no reason to learn that kind of stuff.
• 1:06:55
  But but I've I've found it's it's come in handy.
• 1:06:59
  That's a terrific resource. I'm glad that we touched on
• 1:07:01
  that. OK.
• 1:07:02
  So last question for you, Howard, Are there any specific
• 1:07:05
  mentors, books or experiences that have helped you shape you
• 1:07:09
  or your professional career which you want to give mention
• 1:07:12
  too? Oh gosh, I saw this question.
• 1:07:15
  I should have prepared a little better because because there
• 1:07:18
  there are a bunch, but well, books to start with.
• 1:07:23
  Yeah, for the yeah, for the men especially, there's a book
• 1:07:29
  called No More Mr. Nice Guy, which at some points touches a
• 1:07:37
  little too close for comfort to like the like kind of weird
• 1:07:40
  men's rights movement. But for a lot of it is actually
• 1:07:42
  like for me personally was a real game changer.
• 1:07:49
  I think, I mean, personally and professionally, because it just
• 1:07:51
  kind of touched on some mindsets that I, I've, I've had for years
• 1:07:56
  and years and years that were that kind of were, were holding
• 1:07:59
  me back, right? In terms of like fear, failure
• 1:08:03
  and just being seen as not good enough and kind of led to a lot
• 1:08:06
  of procrastination. And, and so in terms of just
• 1:08:09
  being able to like execute and run a business and work with
• 1:08:11
  people like that, that was a really important book for me
• 1:08:15
  where it just like really did kind of change my mindset and
• 1:08:21
  help me with that. And then in terms of, oh, also
• 1:08:28
  like deep work by Cal Newport, I mean, you know, like I, you
• 1:08:31
  know, we, we read a lot, but that was a, that was a really
• 1:08:35
  important book in terms of like productivity.
• 1:08:37
  Now, you know, with, with this, like the licensing appeal kit
• 1:08:40
  and, and a couple of businesses I'm trying to start like that
• 1:08:42
  has really been a game changer in terms of helping you just
• 1:08:46
  focus and, and delegate and, and just get a lot more done and,
• 1:08:49
  and just be productive. And then in terms of mentors,
• 1:08:53
  I'll just give a shout out to Cal Galumbic from from Penn
• 1:08:59
  State, Ken Fitzgerald and Bob Nyer, who who I worked with when
• 1:09:05
  I was still practicing a law who were really supportive, like
• 1:09:07
  they were when I was practicing a law with them.
• 1:09:10
  Like they knew I owned the business.
• 1:09:11
  And like that, you know, kind of had a foot in both worlds and,
• 1:09:15
  and and they were supportive. And so, yeah, those are those
• 1:09:20
  are a few folks who are who are important in my life.
• 1:09:23
  Terrific. I appreciate you calling them
• 1:09:25
  out. We'll make sure that we include
• 1:09:26
  their their names and if we can find them, links to them in the
• 1:09:29
  show notes. Howard, I want to be the first
• 1:09:31
  one for thank you for sharing both your time and your story
• 1:09:34
  today. I really appreciate it.
• 1:09:36
  Yeah, I appreciate the invitation.
• 1:09:37
  It was enjoyable. The first podcast I've ever been
• 1:09:39
  on. You wouldn't have guessed it.
• 1:09:42
  You're a natural. I appreciate.
• 1:09:44
  That folks, that's a wrap on another episode of the Inspired
• 1:09:46
  Stories podcast. Thanks for learning with us
• 1:09:49
  today.