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If You Don't Have a Client Plan, You Have a Time Bomb · Do Small Business Like a Big Boss Podcast

• Aisha Massengill: I like the idea of a mix, right? Because if you've got, let's say, two or three big clients and you lose one, that's fifty percent or a third of your business just gone, right? If you've got two or three big clients and a half dozen smaller ones, that changes the equation. And so I I like the idea of having a nice mix. and the other thing with that, with a small client, you never know what's gonna happen. Right. We've got a small client that we've been working with for the last three years or so that is actually showing signs may become a much bigger client. And that's fantastic. You know, we're and we're actively ⁓ engaged with helping them achieve the funding and, you know, do the technology planning and and do all that work to set them up for success. And as a side effect, ⁓ th there's a good chance that's gonna benefit us nicely. Welcome to Do Small Business Like a Big Boss, where we explore the real stories, hard-earned lessons, and game-changing strategies of entrepreneurs who've moved beyond the side hustle and build businesses that scale with confidence. This show is proudly sponsored by Project Icon. I'm your host, Aisha Jorge Massingill, your small business legal guy. Let's dive in. Welcome, bosses. Today I am excited to have David Castle, the co-founder and CTO of 4v Services. 4V Services helps enterprise organizations maximize the value of their Mark Logic investments while applying an operations mindset to application development. Welcome, David. Thanks, Aisha. It's great to be here. I'm very excited to to have you. You spent almost ten years at Mark Logic before founding 4v services with your wife. What was the moment or series of moments that made you think, okay, this is something that I want to try on my own? Yeah, so I had wanted to start a business since I was in college. It's just something that's always been ⁓ an inspiring idea to me. And ⁓ this was actually not my first try. My my first try started when ⁓ I was actually working at a different company and I was working in a research department and I thought this is the time to go back and get a PhD in computer science and really lean into the research aspect of it, found a place that would let me do the studies while continuing to work full time, which is important. And ⁓ so I got all the way through the coursework. I did my qualifying exam. That was great, really excited about that. Sat down with my advisor to talk about research direction and he passed away of a brain hemorrhage a week later. And that just inspired me to just stop and pause and say, is this the most important thing for me to be doing with my life right now? And I decided it was not. So the research aspect was fun, but I really enjoy building things. And I still had that aspiration to start a business at some point. So I dropped out and started a a part time business on the side while continuing to to do the ⁓ my full time job and did not make any money from that at all. From a business perspective, it was terrible. I think the lifetime revenue for that business was about a hundred dollars. spent a little bit, not a lot, but you know, I got some great experience ⁓ kind of getting some other people involved and just thinking through what it takes to run a business and learned some really good lessons from it. Eventually decided that wasn't working and decided to to set it aside. Fast forward and the thing I was looking for is what what can I do that's actually worth starting a business around. Right. I need something that's gonna help me stand out in the marketplace. So after working for Mark Logic for almost ten years, I decided this is finally something, right? This is an unusual skill. It's something that'll let me stand out in the marketplace. And I feel good about this, right? It's something I can I can so ended up launching this business as a essentially a solopreneur, ⁓ ish because my wife is very definitely involved. It's the ⁓ the the emith revisited talks about the three personalities necessary to run a business. And I've got the technician and the entrepreneur. My wife has the manager aspect. And so between the two of us we had it covered. So we went ahead and launched and ⁓ that's how we got started. It was important for me to be generating revenue from day one, just because you know this was the bulk of our family's income. And so I had aspirations about, you know, finding a product eventually, but contract work was a really good way to get going. There's a lot there. I I was taking some notes because you've already given me some really wonderful things to to think about. Number one, can you tell me more about the process you use to evaluate what's worth starting a business around? Because we all have passion projects, things we enjoy doing it doing, but if other people don't want to buy it, it's not very helpful. So what was some of that process in the In the early days, either in that first iteration business you went or now, where you said, like, how can I build a business around this? Early in my career, I was iterating a along a whole lot of different business ideas. And ⁓ at the time I had a friend and mentor who was kind enough to tell me when my ideas were dumb. So it's a much better way to to ha you know, for s somebody to tell you that and point something out to you. It's much better than investing a couple of years and who knows how much money only to find out, you know. That it's not a good one. So he and I would occasionally meet for just for lunch and I'd pitch him my latest idea to make a cajillion dollars and he'd just ask some pointed questions and I'd usually walk away saying, All right, you know, that that's not the one. And I had so many of these ideas, I eventually came up with four categories of them. So there's the ones that are just dumb. Okay, that might be fun, but it's well, okay, that's fine. There's it's not dumb, but nobody's ever going to pay for it. And that that can translate into an interesting hobby, but it's not a business. There's the it's not dumb. People would pay for it. And that's why somebody else is already doing it and has been for the last ten years. That there's something to be said for that. I've I've come to rethink some of these ideas after a while, but that would at least you've got market validation because somebody's doing it. And then there's the it's not dumb, people would pay for it, nobody's doing it. And the reason nobody's doing it is because it's really, really hard. Mm-hmm. So Most of my ideas fell into one of those four buckets and just at the time I didn't really have the I guess the push to get through those or or think through the angle that would allow it to to get out of those buckets. So the the first idea that I ended up pursuing was one where this this friend of mine, Greg, I showed that to him as just kind of a this is a hobby thing I'm just playing with. And he we talked about it for a while and he said, You know what? That one's the business idea. Okay. So I pursued it and I did not know enough about it. It was a two-sided marketplace concept. And I got really focused on the technology aspect of it, which was fun, but didn't spend enough time thinking about a marketplace isn't really useful unless you've got people on both sides of the market, right? eBay doesn't ha work unless you've got both buyers and sellers. So I I never really got focused on how to do that aspect of it. And I didn't I didn't know how to get past that. So all right, I let that go. The ⁓ moving ahead to aftermark logic and starting 4v services, this was something where the value prop was a lot more clear to me, right? I had ⁓ a specific skill. It was an unusual skill. There were companies out there that needed that skill. Okay, cool. It's just all I need to do is find those people and everything else will just work. That worked great for well, I should say I I was getting business with that. through referrals and that worked great for about five years. ⁓ I'm about seven and a half years in. So ran into a hiccup there eventually. Wow. So we should all have friends like Greg, first of all. Mm-hmm. I was actually speaking with another guest earlier this week and she said, she used a phrase, it's hard to tell someone that their baby is ugly. And I think we go through that as business owners, ⁓ when we have ideas either for the business or aspects of the business is it's having that truth teller in your life to say, Yeah. Mm-hmm. Not that's not gonna work. And even in in my own life having a friend slash coach who who gently, lovingly told me recently, cut and focus, like get it together. You gotta you gotta get it together. So it's really important, I think, for folks to remember that you have to have some of those truth tellers in your life so that you can conserve your energy and your resources on things that are going to move the needle. One of the things you said was I really needed to start to generate revenue early. And didn't have a long runway. So can you tell me, you mentioned referrals, but what were some of the the things you did, the levers you pulled to generate the revenue early and how successful were you? Right. So for that, the referrals essentially all came from Mark Logic, right? So the company I had previously worked for. But during the 10 years I'd been there, I'd had a number of different roles. Some of them were very public facing and That gave me the advantage of I know a lot of people in the company. A lot of customers of that company knew who I was. So and there was a difference in pricing, right? So they they had their own professional services division who were excellent. And you know, they had a certain price point. And I was charging enough to make me happy, but but a lower amount, but still really good knowledge. And so that that difference kind of worked out. You know, there were certain clients who they wanted. somebody knowledgeable, but they didn't want they wanted somebody a little lower in price. And so it was a good kind of balance point, right? So there were there was their professional services, it was me, and then there were the big international firms that were charging very little but didn't have the same level of expertise. Interesting. Tell tell I I don't think we we got into this sufficiently enough in the beginning. Tell us about Mark Logic and then tell us about your current company. Sure. So Mark Logic ⁓ As a as a system, it is an enterprise NoSQL database. It is a really good system. ⁓ it's actually been around for over twenty years now. And ⁓ I love it as a piece of technology. It hasn't gotten quite the the marketing attention that I feel it deserves, which is unfortunate. And so I I was able to build up a team of Mark Logic experts and we we did some good business for a while, but I think the main thing we ran into was I never really wrapped my head around the importance of sales and marketing. Like I knew in the abstract that that's important, right? But it's one thing to know it, it's another thing to act on it. And something I I came to recognize, and this is something that I'm taking with me as I move forward in my entrepreneurial journey, is if you don't have a plan to win clients, you don't have a business, you have a time bomb. ⁓ Right. And for me, the way that worked out was We had built up our team to about 18 people. And I I would do projections, right? So I've got this projection spreadsheet looking ahead to here's what I think our bank account's gonna look like as far out in the future as I could manage. And I was looking at it like making payroll on this particular date is a problem. Like we can't. And so, all right, what do we do about that? Well, you know, we need to get new more clients and how do we do that? And we tried a bunch of different things and I had brought in some help to to assist with that, but we just never really got that really going. One of the things that I recognized eventually is ⁓ you you can't be all things to all people, right? And you can't solve every problem yourself. And it's one of the challenges I think that we face as especially small businesses, those of us who form that kind of business, right, we we have a mentality of if there's a problem, I can fix it. It's it's a really natural and easy thing to do. And it'll take you a certain distance, but it doesn't necessarily go all the way. Because we all have gaps in what we're good at and what we can accomplish. And when you find one of those gaps, there's a couple of things you can do with that. You can say, you know what, even though I'm not good at this, it's not something that's all that important for this particular business. Skip. Right. That's one option. Another option is, okay, this is something important. So I'm going to go learn it and I'm going to get good at it and I'm going to fill that gap that way. And then another way is I'm going to bring somebody onto the team or get somebody else to build that skill so that The gap is filled, not by me. ⁓ And so knowing that sales and marketing were not my strengths, but we ended up hiring a fractional VP of sales. And ⁓ you know, because we're we're small enough. We didn't need a full time sales leader, but I recognized we definitely needed help. We needed somebody who knew what they were doing. So we brought in a fractional VP of sales, and he's been a great mentor, ⁓ great advisor, and it's really helped us think about, you know, the deals we were getting. getting the maximum value from those, which is really beneficial. We hired an actual sales guy at one point. That didn't work out so well. We hired a BDR, business development rep, to just do the cold calling and the the cold emailing and that sort of thing. And he was very active. He was very energetic. He was a great guy. But ultimately wasn't able to generate a lot for us. And I really think a lot of that had to do with lack of clear messaging, like on me, right? We we were working on trying to pivot the business a bit, right? So we were doing contract software development focused on this one technology and recognizing that being in this niche, ⁓ it it's great when we can find the business. But to really grow, it would be beneficial to not have all our eggs in one basket and Be a little more diverse in in terms of what we can address. So that got me back to the, but what does that mean? Right? If if our sales pitch is we're good at data management, okay, lots of people are good at data management. So that's going from like a really specific targeted message to, you know, something so broad it's meaningless. And we just kind of never got there, right? So ⁓ the state of the business today, we we actually had to scale down our team significantly, which was not fun for anybody involved. That was the most difficult part of the business so far. We had to really reduce the size of our team and we're kind of refocusing our business. So I'm launching a a fractional CTO practice and taking a lot of the lessons here and kind of moving forward with that about, you know, step number one, I'm gonna be I'm working now on identifying that target market. Who do we really want to pursue? What is the message that that I can take to market? And ⁓ hopefully ⁓ that'll launch really well and See where that goes. Yeah. Again, a lot of a lot of stuff to unpack there that you just mentioned. Going back to kind of the original question, one of the things I think I heard you say was you leveraged expertise when you needed it, ⁓ by bringing it in. So either you had it or you went and got it. ⁓ you talked about like the fractional salesperson, some other folks. How did you go about financing those things in the beginning? 'Cause you're starting as a new business, you have some clients. But what were some of the steps you took in order to deal with the cash flow and making payroll and being able to pay folks? We made a decision early on, my wife and I made a decision early on that any growth we were gonna do was gonna be organic, right? We didn't wanna take outside investment. We wanted to just let the business build and grow. And I think one of the pivotal moments in the business was fairly early on when we decided to make our first hire. And the motivation there was really about actually decreasing risk. We hired another developer who had the same kind of skill set and found another client. So we could put that developer on that client, me on the original client. And now if one of those clients, you know, if that project wound down, we'd still have the other. And so, okay, great. Now we're we're getting some traction. We're able to build up our bank account a little bit. And and as we started getting other referrals, we said, okay, cool. Now we can bring on another. And it just kind of built from there. So at some point I'm looking around and realizing, okay, we've this is great. We've got a team full of developers, a team full of people who all had the same skill set. That's good as far as it goes, but we're still relying on me as a techie to do sales. And so at that point, we had enough. We decided if we bring on somebody to help us with sales, that should help our continued growth. We've got enough, we've got enough of a war test at this point to to finance that kind of help. And the goal obviously was, you know, it'll it'll grow from there. Okay. So but you talked about kind of the the bell curve of you made this decision to hire to accelerate things and to lean into expertise. And then you had a moment ⁓ when you needed to draw back. What were some of the things, not just the economics of it all, but what were any other indicators? Because you you sound like one of my classic ⁓ science engineer guys where it's like, you know, you're very meticulous about this step, this step, that step. What were some of the indicators that it was time to draw down the hires and folks working on the team? Yeah. ⁓ we hit a point about two, two and a half years ago, I guess. Well, we had a great twenty twenty three, but toward the end of twenty twenty three, at that point we had three large clients and a few smaller ones. And all three of our large clients signaled to us that they were going to be reducing things. ⁓ and each for different reasons and was not related to the project specifically necessarily. It was yet one of them was they were doing their own budget projections and the following year they were looking at a big deficit and they were cutting everything. ⁓ you know, software contractors, they laid off a bunch of employees, and we just got caught up in that. Okay. There was another client where they they they reached a point where they decided they could handle the work themselves. Right. So you know, we're doing the specialist technology stuff. And as we're doing it, part of our engagement model is we're not just gonna come in here and sit and do the work. We're going to help you understand what we're doing. We want to elevate the people around us. They got to a point where they felt they could handle it. So successful engagement, but not as good for us. ⁓ And then the third, it was a similar kind of story. They they decided to change directions and just didn't need as much help from us anymore. So from being this much business, it was gonna go down to this much business. Okay, that's that's a challenge. So hit the pavement, see what we can find. We did find another client that was ⁓ in need and and ramped up there, and that was great. But what we were seeing was we're just struggling to find enough new stuff coming in at the scale we needed to maintain the size of the team. And if if that happens for a month or two, okay, you suck it up and you deal with it and you move on. A two year period where that's going on, something's off. Right. And yeah, we just we weren't able to really to really pin down how is it we need to attract that to fix that. So my my view of it is that what I had to kind of step back for myself and ask, you know, what is it I bring to the table? What is it that I can do for clients that really makes a difference? And yeah, I can write code for this particular technology, I can do that, that's great. But I think I've got a lot more to offer when it comes to engineering leadership. ⁓ So I've had a couple of times in my career where I've built up teams. We've had great culture, great success with those teams. Product market fit, not so much. Right. So in in switching the goal of the company now to more of the fractional CTO work, I'm really trying to lean into the things that, you know, I know that I can do. And importantly, I can convey a clear message about what it is that I can do. It almost sounded like you are too good for your own good because you trained them up and they then they figured it out and they're like, okay, we don't need we don't need Dave anymore. We're gonna we're gonna move on. I always viewed that as just a I I think a reasonable and necessary part of that kind of engagement, right? Because when I start working with somebody as a contractor, I just have in the back of my head They don't want to work with me forever. They want their own team to be able to handle this eventually. And so I embrace that, right? Because I've always taken the approach of if you do what's good for the client, word gets around and you're doing your best thing, right? You're you're serving your clients well. And the universe should reward you r reward you for that. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's interesting. So as a an employment attorney, one of the things working with businesses that they struggle with and one of the biggest compliance concerns. Is keeping contractors too long because they've outlived their purpose and they really are becoming more a part of the team. And there's always this tug of war because people don't realize like listen, they are really s c supposed to come in here for a specific purpose. They're not your employee if it's structured well. And so they're not going to be here forever. And there's not a magic time by which you roll them off, but it should actually operate as you just described that. They come in for a discreet, specific purpose. They help you to close that gap and then they move on to their next client and you decide this is a head that I need to hire or I no longer need that, you know, expertise. But instead we have the in the contractor be in there forever and then the mean lawyer like me comes and says, you know, you gotta move Dave on or you gotta bring in a different resource other than Dave, because now Dave looks really much like an employee and you're gonna get sued by the government. One of the things that you mentioned though is you had some kind of big whales or big fish and then you had some other smaller clients. I'm really curious your thoughts about as you think about your client roster, are you more comfortable leaning into having a couple of those big ones that really help sustain you or the aggregate of a bunch of little folks? Because I've been having that conversation in my circles, even in my own business about that. What are your thoughts? I like the idea of a mix. Right. Because if you've got, let's say, two or three big clients and you lose one, that's fifty percent or a third of your business just gone. Right. Right. If you've got two or three big clients and a half dozen smaller ones, that changes the equation. Right. And so I I like the idea of having a nice mix. ⁓ and the other thing with that, with a small client, you never know what's gonna happen. Right. We've got a small client that we've been working with for the last three years or so that's is actually showing signs may become a much bigger client. And that's fantastic. You know, we're and we're actively engaged with helping them achieve the funding and, you know, do the technology planning and and do all that work to set them up for success. And as a side effect, there's a good chance that's going to benefit us nicely. Excellent. Okay. We're going to pivot a little bit because you you work with your wife. And as I understand it, she's the CEO and you're the CTO. Mm-hmm. What is that like working with your spouse? And what kinds of conversations, if any, did you all have in the beginning about roles, responsibilities, boundaries, and how that can impact the marriage? So we've been married more than thirty years. So we've got a great relationship on many levels. So got that going for us. Something else that I think helped is that I've actually been working at home since two thousand nine. When I started working with Mark Logic, their nearest office was 130 miles away. And so part of that discussion was I'm gonna work here in my house. I I'm a little bit west of Philadelphia. And their nearest offices were DC and New York. Yeah, when when 2020 came around and everybody had suddenly had to start working remotely, I'm like, yeah, whatever. Yeah. Yeah, that was easy. So we were accustomed to kind of both being here and each doing our own thing. ⁓ I had An office early on from ⁓ when my daughters, well actually, wait, spare bare spare bedroom was my initial office. And as our daughters grew up and each moved out, you know, to go off to college and stuff, we've taken over their rooms. So you're you're seeing here my younger daughter's room, and right next door is our older daughter's room, which is my wife's office. And so it's it's kind of fun. You know, we'll call out to each other. It's like, ⁓ hey, this interesting thing happened. And because we've got a fully remote team, we often will, you know, we'll be on. The same call sometimes from neighboring rooms. So we always have to remember to close the door so we're not hearing those weird things. So yeah, it's it's it's worked great for us. There's still enough room in the house that we can't, you know, we don't have to be right in front of each other's faces 24-7. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. But having that great personal relationship has been a great foundation for us. And on the business side, how does it impact decision making? For example, if there are strategic points of Difference or friction, how do you go about resolving those? We've been really good about being collaborative when there's a strategic decision to be made. We talk it through, ⁓ we each bring up our points. And essentially it comes down to if we're not both on the same page about something that's going to be a ⁓ b a risk, right? If we do this then, if we're not on the same page, then we're not doing it. Mm. So that's been something we've discussed about hiring, pursuing different markets, anything like that, those big strategic things. We want to be in on the same page, pulling the same direction. Cause we each have our aspects of the business that we we take on and we we own those. And at the end of the day, we need to make sure we're both fully bought in. With a small enough group, it's a practical thing. I can't think of a single case where we've just been not able to come to agreement on something. Yeah. ⁓ I would imagine in thirty years you you figured you figure it out. Yep. Now you talked about the pivot to the fractional CTO part of the business. And it's funny because I'm a fractional general counsel. Depending on the audience that I'm in, people may or may not get it. And I I like sometimes can struggle with the level of detail that I afford people based on the room I'm in if I think they know it and give it. In fact, I had a a call today and I'm trying to break it down and it happened to be that she was a fractional marketing officer. And I was like, I could have saved a lot of words. I'm so sorry because I could have just said fractional G C. So for folks out there listening, can you explain, you know, the concept of the fractional CTO? What do you actually do for small businesses and who specifically needs it? Sure. So the idea of a fractional executive in general is that instead of having somebody come in full time, On a particular role, expecting the, you know, full level of compensation and all that. You get somebody who's going to work for you at the same time, they're also working for some other clients. So for example, our fractional VP of sales, he was available to us as an advisor and would participate in meetings. Anytime I had a a prospect that I was looking at, I'd have a chat with him and he would coach me on how to approach that prospect. When we got to the point of doing a proposal, I'd run it by him. And he'd often come back with some suggestions about how this could be a little bit better, more likely to win, or ⁓ a better deal for us, or whatever. So a fractional CTO is very similar to that. And there's different levels of engagement that can be an advisory role where essentially the fractional CTO is available to answer questions, to help set some direction, but ultimately it's the company, the client who's working with the CTO. It's their responsibility to execute. On those plans. There's also more of an engaged level, which is a case where the fractional CTO really is the CTO of the company. They may be responsible for hiring and firing staff, for building teams, for really setting direction and taking ownership of milestones, but they're not doing it in a full-time capacity. There's there's good benefits to that for the client, especially for small and medium business. They may not be able to afford a full-time CTO, but they still have the need. So I think that kind of a role, it's a rate it's a great way to tap into a level of expertise that would often be unavailable otherwise. Excellent. What what are some examples of problems that you've solved for your small business owners as that fractional CTO? Sure. As ⁓ one of our current clients, the engagement started with a time materials by the hour doing software development for this client. But over time, I realized at some point I hadn't put this label on it, but I really have been a fractional CTO for this client, in addition to some members of my team doing ⁓ doing actual development work. So for example, that application, that client has an application that was it had grown the amount of data that it was managing over time, but the infrastructure that it was using had not. And it was coming to a point where that was just not going to work. So I investigated different options for how can we make this scale, eventually settled on something, worked with the client to establish that yes, this is a good plan. And we replatformed that solution in something that's ⁓ been working really well ever since. That that's one example. There's other cases where I've helped clients actually hire. They're looking for if they want to build their own capacity with this in their technology department. I've done interviews, technical level interviews, to evaluate, you know, is this candidate that the recruiter is sending to you, how well do they know this material? Is are they going to be a good fit? And in those cases, on a cultural level, I wasn't as engaged in that for that particular client, but it was a technology I knew better than the client did. So I was in a good position to evaluate their knowledge. What are some of the biggest technology mistakes you see early stage business owners make that a fractional CTO could kind of catch quickly. I think a big part of that is making assumptions about technology. And sometimes a technology can be a really useful, really productive and powerful thing once you get to know it. ⁓ But it can take some ramp up time and just jumping to, well, we'll figure it out. That'll work. You'll get there. But what's the impact on your business if your time to market is six months later than it could have been or a year later than it could Right. So helping clients understand where their gaps are and helping them not only acknowledge but fill those gaps, that's that's an area where a CTO can really make a difference, either by filling those gaps directly or by recognizing we need to build out a team and recognizing the kinds of people who are gonna be the right ones to fill that gap. So a lot of times I mean technology is a tool, but people is really what drives things. Right. And having the right people working together, all pulling the same direction makes the all the difference. Yeah, I think For me, it is getting too many tools that do the same thing because I don't take the time to get deep enough with the tool and then I do the squirrel thing, ⁓ and I go over to the next thing and I'm like I have redundancies that I don't need all those tools. If you could go back as you think about the lessons learned. I asked you just tell me about some mistakes that small business owners make in the beginning and also we've talked about some of the lessons that you learned. If you could go back before you launched four V services and give yourself one piece of tactical advice or one piece of strategic e advice, what would that be? I think two things popped into my head immediately. One of them is figure out a sales plan, right? How are you going to find your your clients and how are you going to communicate with them? And the other was thinking about scaling. ⁓ it's something I did not do very early did not do well early. Yeah, that I love what you said just about thing the four things that you look at in terms of whether or not it's a viable business. But once you nail that down, you really have to spend a good deal of time figuring out how you're gonna get people in the door. ⁓ whatever that whatever that door looks like in in your space. So that is so critically important. And I thank you for highlighting that for the listeners because it o otherwise it's a passion project that we're doing. Yeah, exactly. We're in business to you know There's some goal we want to accomplish, right? We we wanna maybe change the world in some way. We wanna help our clients. But if you're not doing that in a way that generates revenue, you're not gonna do it very long. Right. Right. Right. Unless unless you just ⁓ change it to being a hobby. But in order to be a sustainable business, there's gotta be that way of bringing things in. Bringing clients in. Yeah. All right. The name of this show is called Do Small Business Like a Big Boss. When you hear that phrase, what does it mean to you? I thought about this and I think it's important to know your place in the market. Right. And there's a place in the market for both Burger King and Michelin-starred restaurants. They each have their place, and that's great. And knowing what yours is, right? Knowing that, you know, for me, it was we're not the cheapest, we're not the High end, we're high value. And just being laser focused on that and owning that, right? Every business out there has their place in the market. And I think big businesses tend to know that, what their place is really well. And as small businesses, as entrepreneurs, we sometimes can circle around that or just pivot every few days or that you know, we we don't have as clear a picture. So nailing that down, understanding what it is you bring into the world and and really focusing on that counts for a lot. Wonderful. Now Where can the people find you and four v services and your fractional CT services? So four vservices.com is the digit for the letter v services.com. And you can also find me on LinkedIn. Love to have people ⁓ connect. ⁓ I encourage you to throw in a little note to say that you heard me on the podcast and ⁓ love to network with folks. And this podcast hop host would love if you would say that as well. Thank you so much for your time. Really enjoyed the conversation and and learned a lot. And from our bosses out there, that's all we have for you today. If you got any value out of this episode, please don't forget to rate, to like and subscribe. And just remember, build that dream messy, build that dream scared, but just don't build it small. We'll see you next time. Thank you.