Latest / Better Together / Fractional Leadership with Fred Garlington
Transcript
- Shawn Sundsvold: Hey everyone and welcome back to the Better Together podcast. I am Sean Sunsvold and I'm here with Kelly Sunsvold, my co-host. By the way, we run a business together called Gold Bear Media, and we're married, so it's proof that you can do both things together. Today's guest goes back with both of us further than most. Fred Garlington and I have known each other since middle school, and I'm not gonna age myself, but that might be 30 years or so. So this one's personal. And he's been a longtime friend to Goldbear Media as well. Professionally, Fred is a fractional operations leader. He's the founder of Zero Point Creations, where he implements the systems and processes that give business owners back at least two hours of their day. For over 20 plus years, he's helped companies scale, including OneStretch where he helped take a company from 8 million to over 25 million in revenue in just eight years. Along with the business side of it, Fred is also a husband. He's a father of two bonus kids, which we'll talk about. And the guy behind three mini doodles running around the house. He's also a professional musician with the band Homeslice. He's a part-time Jim Bratt, and being Colorado through and through, you'll usually find him outdoors with a craft beer in hand and maybe a bourbon. And along with we talked about it just a minute ago, but Homeslice the Band is a nine piece party band that is that's been packing dance floors at weddings and events in Colorado since 2002. So lots of fun things to talk about with Fred today. I'll stop talking. Fred, welcome to the show. Fred Garlington: Thank you guys so much. It's a pleasure to be here. Shawn Sundsvold: Awesome. So before we get into too much of it, for those of you in who are just meeting you, for those who are just meeting you, what is a fractional COO? And how did you land on the thing that you're doing? Fred Garlington: Well, most people think of the term fractional and first if the if their first reaction isn't what the heck is that, their reaction is, ⁓ so you're just like a part-timer, you're somebody who just hangs out, doesn't do much work. The difference is fractional couldn't be any more different from what most people think. There's so many people out there that need the sort of expertise that a COO can bring to the table, but they don't have a quarter million dollars sitting in the bank, just laying around to bring somebody on 40, 45 hours a week to sit there and implement all of their processes, procedures, SOPs, and everything else that goes into operations. Enter the fractional operations leader, somebody that can come on specifically with whatever mandate your company needs from an operations perspective. If you bring Me on, I don't need to be there 40 hours a week. In fact, I don't want to be there 40 hours a week. Because if you're bringing me on, you're in that slightly lower revenue range where you need the sort of expertise I can bring, but you need it to be able to be done in 10, 15, 20 hours a week. And the nice thing about being fractional is I come in, I get the job done, and I am ready to let you guys execute on the plan while at the same time making you, making sure you have the support you need. I'm not just there to collect a paycheck, I'm there to make a difference. And like Sean said in my intro, I'm there to actually give the founder hours back into their day and back into their life. So that's where I fit in. Kelly: Yeah, that's perfect. I mean that fractional space has been something that's been kind of up and coming. I feel like, you know, you you take back, you know, fifteen years ago and fractional really was not a thing and there's really been a niche for that ⁓ market that, like you said, couldn't you know, maybe afford that quarter million dollar employee, but they need that expertise so badly. ⁓ so on that, you've worked across B2B, B2C, SaaS companies. Oversea let's see, or vendor management, how did you end up with that range instead of just specializing in one lane? Fred Garlington: So th the story of how I kind of Became a fractional that idea and kind of understood not just the small little lane of operations, but really the whole company aspect was starting at a small entrepreneurial company. When you, as you guys very well know, when you're part of an entrepreneurial company, your fingers in every little piece of the pie. And one day you're doing finance, and one day you're doing marketing, and the next day you're doing sales, next day you're doing operations, the next day you're learning logistics. All of these things come, become part and parcel. Of growing in leadership as a small company as that company grows. And as the story I like to tell is I unintentionally found the cheat code to be coming a fractional. And I had some disagreements with the founder of the company that I was an employee at. I told him that I was going to move on. I'm gonna go do my own thing. You know, it's time for me to look for a new opportunity, you know what that happens to mean. And through some conversations, we decided, you know what? Right now isn't the right time for me to leave. I'm gonna hang on for a couple of months, I'm gonna help hire on the new leader of operations for the company, you know, whatever that happens to look like. And you know, fast forward two years, I'm still there, having discovered what fractional means, and that realistically what the company I was with needed was a fractional leader. We just didn't know it. And so That's why I say I found the cheat code and I became an accidental fractional without even knowing what I was trying to do. But like Sean mentioned during my intro, when you help a company basically triple in size and you're a part of everything going on, operations became the right lane for me. As the person who sits at the founder's right hand, in most cases, the founder is going to be the person who's responsible for creating the revenue. And my job sitting at the founder's right hand is the person that's responsible for protecting the revenue. And those two people need to work hand in hand. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah, so true. And I I think you touched on something there and you said it a couple times of being the founder's right hand. Right? Like as a founder, you cannot do everything. You know, you've you've got a list of things a mile long and you need somebody to help you integrate those things and get those things going. And that's really where, you know, a good COO's gonna sit, right? Fred Garlington: And it's it the COO sits there, but the COO also has to earn that trust. And in a traditional environment, that trust is earned over months and years. But working with a fractional, the most important thing that I can do is come on board, prove myself to you as someone who's going to be able to sit there, understand all the 57 tasks and projects that are going through the founder's head, help them understand what's today, what's tomorrow, and what's on the shelf for next year. Because if you can actually help A really smart, really energetic founder compartmentalize their brain and their thought process, you can actually help them execute on the stuff that moves the revenue needle and moves the profit needle, and not just whatever happens to be the shiny object that day. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Yeah. So I'm curious, you know, we ⁓ as a fractional, right, you're you're coming in for a period of time. So you talked about building that trust with somebody, you know, for that fractional engagement. How do you do that specifically for your business? Like what is your way of coming in and building that trust really quickly? Fred Garlington: The simplest way to do this is to walk in, understand what's going on by asking a lot of questions, and then to counter the very first thing that most founders think is the purpose of operations is to slow things down. Nothing could be further from the truth. What operations has to do is establish legitimacy immediately. I've got basically a three-prong test that I've run as soon as I come in to a new company and figure out what they're looking at. Have you clearly defined your team's roles? Have you given all of your leaders visible metrics? And is your communication transparent? Those are the three bullet points that you must cross off the list. Before you can implement anything successfully from an operation standpoint or from an operations side of the house. If you don't have those three things, operations are the breaks. Because those are the three things that are necessary to put processes, procedures, SOPs, and all that sort of stuff in place. Kelly: That's a really good explanation. so you've talked about, and I I know I've heard some of this kind of coming through while you've had conversations with Sean. Obviously, the three of us are friends. ⁓ and you've talked about spotting the blind spots companies miss when they grow. so easy to do. So it's the process, the leadership, and a disciplined roadmap. What's the most common blind spot you walk into when you work with a company? Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. Fred Garlington: The thing that I see most often is the solution. The belief is the solution to all problems is more revenue in the top of the funnel. And that is always the quickest fix, the easiest fix, because my experience has been that most founders are very much revenue focused. They don't like to think about the back end. They don't like to think about profit. They don't it it sounds strange to say it, but there's a big difference between revenue and profit. Revenue is fun, it's exciting. I can always make more. Profit requires discipline, it requires saying no to the wrong projects, it requires saying no to the wrong people, and it requires a sort of deep understanding that not all money is good money. And that's something that a lot of that's a trap. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. Fred Garlington: lot of founders go into. They will always chase the next dollar without spending that additional five minutes to decide if that dollar is the right dollar to chase. And that's where the right fractional can step in and say, Time out, time out. Yes, I know that that's a that's a shiny object over there. But over here is this big pile of money that you've been figuring out how to chase for the last 10 years. Bring your focus back here so that we can figure out how to stop wasting so much of that. Shawn Sundsvold: Shocking what every actual business owner wants to do and why they started their business. To have more time to do the things that they find enjoyable and fun, and you know, they they started a business to have freedom. So speaking on founders for a second, have you ever walked into an engagement, done the diagnosis, and realized the problem was actually the founder or owner, not the operations? And where do you start that conversation? Fred Garlington: it it has to come it it's gonna sound ⁓ sound a little woo-woo, but that conversation has to come from a place of love. Challenging a founder is it's a privilege that is earned. It's not a privilege that's given. You have to prove your own value, your own knowledge, and your own belief in the end goal of what the founder wants to create before you can pull that founder aside in a one-on-one conversation and say, have you ever thought about X, Y, and Z? When you challenge at the wrong place at the wrong time, without the mandate to be able to actually find the problem, all you're doing is masking what's going on. you know, working with a ⁓ smaller company that Sean that all th all three of us know, it was a to it was a the the point was education. The point was helping them understand what they didn't know. And not because they didn't have the capability, but no one had ever given them the tools they needed to take the next steps. So they were working their little tails off, but they weren't going in a specific direction. And so once you've earned that mandate, you can focus and get them on the right path. Kelly: That's really good. And such a tricky balance between you know, because you want to come in and help the company, but if you've got a founder that is kind of getting in their own way, it's it goes back to what you said previously was building that trust. ⁓ and I think that's so important. So that way they can they can go, ⁓ okay, you're you're kind of showing me a little bit of a mirror and I need to kind of step it up. So with that You had a your previous full-time job, you helped them increase their credit by 37%. You tripled their revenue and hired your own replacement as a full-time obs leader. ⁓ that's amazing. ⁓ like and you know, I heard about your journey all the way through, and it was just like, damn, he's killing it. what is it like building yourself out of a job on purpose? Fred Garlington: Yeah, indeed. It's it's a really strange experience when you have to tell somebody, you know what? I know you're used to coming to me for that, but I need you go talk to this guy. I know I'm the one I know I'm the knowledge leader on this one, but you're gonna have to go talk to this lady over here. That's the most that's the sort of like the transition point is I'm sorry, no, I'm not available at that time. Well, what do you mean? That's when the manager's meeting is. I know that. But I'm not on that meeting anymore. What do you mean you're not on that meeting anymore? You know, you realize that you have become everybody's security blanket. Shawn Sundsvold: Yes, yes. Fred Garlington: And that's what somebody who's basically part of the furniture at a company that you've been with for so many years, when you actively step away, or not step away, but step back. And I do, I've done what I call job crafting, which is what when when you're looking at a company and realize that you had this role that encompasses all of these things, but those things are no longer providing the value to the company that you feel like you should be providing. Writing. You have to step back and say, is there somebody better for A, B, and C so that I can focus my talents on X, Y, and Z? And that's really where the job crafting thing comes in and where I can step in and say, I know what I'm really, really good at. I know where I'm just coasting. Yeah, sure, it's easy, but it's not the right thing for my team, for my partners, for the people that I'm working with, and for the people that count on me. They need someone over here that's gonna focus on those things and give it all their energy so that I can come over here and do what I'm best at. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Yeah. And it's that that sort of eighty twenty rule, right? Of, you know, focus on the find that twenty percent that gets you eighty percent of the the the thing you're trying to accomplish, right? And really, really focus on that and delegate out the rest. And I I you know, when you're in that level of a position, you've got so many people that you're working with and that you manage, I think sometimes it's it's hard not to be that security blanket, right? Fred Garlington: It's it's easy. It's easy to be the security blanket. It feeds your ego. This isn't a Fred thing, it's an everybody thing. When you're the guy, when you're the person everybody comes to because you always have the answers, the biggest problem with that is you're always the guy that people come to when they need the answers. Part of our responsibility as higher-level executives is to create other pockets of expertise within the organization. Whatever I leave behind. Shawn Sundsvold: ⁓ Fred Garlington: At my previous companies needs to outlive me. The knowledge, the tools, the processes, the attitude, the culture changes needs to be embedded within the company, not stuck within one person. That's the only way to actually create lasting change is to push that change through the organization, not try to own it all yourself. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Let's talk about pushing it through the organization 'cause I 'cause that can be a challenge, right? You know, you're an executive, you're coming with new ideas and new ways of doing things, and it often gets met with a lot of resistance, we'll use a good word there. ⁓ how do you work through that? Especially as someone coming from the outside as a fractional, right? How do you help them work through that and build that trust? Fred Garlington: ⁓ yeah. My experience has been as an outsider, there's yes, there's always resistance. You're a hundred percent right about that. But the most important thing you can do is, you know, as the old saying goes, is you've got two ears and one mouth. Is sit down, ask a question, and wait. Because I promise you, every single person has something they want to complain about. And once you start to synthesize all the things that they're complaining about, it's payables over here, it's receivables over here, it's quality control over here, it's ⁓ what's what's going on with the new prototyping over here, the sales model's broken, we don't have SOPs. Everybody has a complaint. And if you can listen and come back and say, I heard you, here's what you guys told me. Now let's have a group collaboration when we decide what we fix first, what we fix second, and what's going to fix itself because it's no longer a priority. And when people actually realize that they're being heard, it's something that's surprisingly uncommon in the corporate world. We don't have the time to listen to our people. We don't have our time. We don't have time to pay attention to the boots on the ground that actually know what the problems are, because we're too concerned about looking at KPIs and deciding did we move the margin half a percent last quarter? When John, who's over here and he's been a mechanic for 18 years, can tell you that everything is wrong with your process, but nobody wants to listen to him because he's not wearing a suit and sitting in the board. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. ⁓ Yeah. Man, that's deep. Kelly: All right, so here's a tricky one. yeah, yeah, yeah. ⁓ without it throwing anyone under the bus, wits a time a client did not take your advice and you watched it play out exactly the way you warned them to do. ⁓ did you say I told you so or bite your tongue? Fred Garlington: Ooh. ⁓ yeah. ⁓ they're yeah, the the I told you so ⁓ it feels good in the moments. But you know, a a really good example of this as I, you know, sanitize the language a little bit, right? Is a lot of times We we as we as people, especially founders, have a tendency to want to chase ⁓ bad money with good money. The sunk cost fallacy is very, very, very real in the business world. You've already put, we'll just say, six figures toward this project. You are committed to seeing it through. You know, it i if there's a five percent chance that you're gonna be able to see it through and make back all your money and more, you're gonna go down that path. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm. Fred Garlington: Even when, you know, your fractional leader and the legal representative and the quality control representative that are all involved in this project say, you need to cut bait right now. These products that you shipped, it's not gonna work. This is a lawsuit happy company. You need to refund this money now and walk away from the deal, and it's gonna be better for the company long term. And it's just y it's actually heartbreaking to be right. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm. Fred Garlington: In situations like that, because these people are family. You know, even if it's 15-20 hours a week, you spend as much time with these people as you do with your own family, right? Between everything that's going on in your personal life and your business life and whatever's happening outside, it's never good because that's money that's out of everybody's pocket at the end of the day. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Fred Garlington: W and it's ⁓ and it's not just that, it's the thing that you can't purchase back, which is all the lost time. And the the really hard thing is to sit down and when part of your post-mortem is to actually do an analysis and saying not just how much money did we spend and then how much money did we lose, but ⁓ by the way, how much payroll did we spend on this? Between the founder's time and the legal team's time and the operators' time and the quality control team's time and the freight team's time and everything else that goes into that, you realize you're another six figures deep just in payroll dollars. ⁓ Shawn Sundsvold: Ooh. Yeah. Fred Garlington: And all of that is just one of those that really makes you shake your head. So ⁓ that's I think probably as much detail as I could give you on that one, Kelsey Kelly: It's a great answer. It's a great answer. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah, for sure. ⁓ alright, so I wanna switch gears here for just a minute. And we talked about it kinda at the beginning of the show, but you and I have known each other a long time. Like, we met at twelve, thirteen, somewhere in middle school there. We were we were nerdy goofy kids, right? We were friends in high school, we stayed friends in college, you were a groomsman at our wedding. You know, like we have a very long relationship. So I'm curious to know. Fred Garlington: Somewhere in there. Mm-hmm. Shawn Sundsvold: What's different about you now versus when we were kids and what has stayed the same? Fred Garlington: ⁓ my gosh. There's I like to think that I've grown as opposed to just saying I've changed. Because I don't ever want to come across this that I hated who I was and so I tossed that all away. I like to believe that I've taken the best from the people that are around me and made it part of my personality. And y y you go through your life since I've known you and you think about the transformational moments in your life, the good and the bad. Graduating college, getting fired from that first job after college, and then in my case, you know, a couple of ⁓ real tough times, losing both of my parents suddenly, that sort of thing, getting married and spending my life spending my life with my wife and understanding what it means. to have kids who count on you. And what what that actually means. And I th the biggest piece ⁓ the biggest thing I have kind of changed about myself is the level of patience that I have now. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm. Fred Garlington: With life and the world around me and everything else. ⁓ there's a a great book that I basically recommend to everyone, and it's by Mark Manson. It's the subtle art of not giving a you guys can finish the rest of the the rest of the top the rest of the subject from that. But what it really comes down to is you really, really have a tiny, tiny fraction, limited amount of time on this planet, and you have to choose very, very carefully what you're gonna care deeply about. Shawn Sundsvold: Love it. Fred Garlington: Everything else is just noise. And that's the sort of realization that really makes you step back and focus on the stuff that matters. I don't have much reason to get upset anymore, you know, knock on wood. Some sometimes I just sit back and I'm just in awe of how blessed my life is. And the thing about that is it's a choice. You can always choose to think about all the things, people, experiences you haven't had. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm. Yes. Fred Garlington: Or you can go the other way and approach life with gratitude. And it it sounds it sounds very cliche to say it, but it really is a choice. But I would say one thing that hasn't changed, man, I still love being a musician. I still love playing live. I still love being with my friends. I still love the rush of being on stage and connecting with an audience and everything that goes into that process. It is it's addictive, and I am so grateful I still have it in my life. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. It totally is. Yeah, for sure. Kelly: Yeah, for sure. ⁓ yeah, y you're crazy talented. I know Sean ⁓ finally had the honor of like seeing you guys ⁓ a couple months ago, which was great. and if I remember correctly, you have your own custom trumpet. Is that right? That's wow. Fred Garlington: Yeah. I do. Yeah. ⁓ so and yeah, shout shout out to ⁓ shout out to Del Quadro Custom Trumpets. ⁓ I met with very, very briefly Met him at the ITG, the International Trumpet and Trumpet Guild Conference. ⁓ got to talking to him, flew to his studio in Vegas, test drove a whole selection of different trumpets, decided what I wanted to do for the bell and the valve block and the lead pipe and the different metals that go into it and how everything is put together. That was an amazing experience to actually be holding my one-of-one custom trumpet and playing it. It's pretty awesome. Kelly: Yeah, I think that's really neat. I mean it's cool to see like, you know, you have to think, you know, way back I could imagine, I didn't know you guys back when you were in middle school. ⁓ but like I could just imagine the little ⁓ you know, Fred back in middle school band going, someday I'm gonna do this as an adult and like make money and also have my own trumpet. Like, how fun would that be? So on that. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Kelly: You've got twenty plus years of weddings and events. How does running a band compare to running operations for a company? 'Cause you do all the behind the scenes for your band too. Fred Garlington: Yep, very much so. And it's that this is the true small business, right? There's I'm the I'm the quote unquote sole owner. I have y you know, my my same my basic nine subcons, which are the people that are at 85% of all the gigs. And then you got five to ten s five to ten ⁓ substitute musicians who are at the rest of the gigs and stuff like that. And we're Homeslice is a legitimate business. And a lot of people don't really think that it's like, ⁓ you got a little garage band. No, no, it's not really like that anymore. The amount of work I do, and you know, the amount of money that I am blessed to be able to pay out to everybody that we make during the course of the year and all that stuff. How does it compare to like sitting in my sitting in my role where I'm at right now? Really, I think the biggest comparison is have trusted people around you that are good at things that you're not good at. And Kelly: Ha ha ha Shawn Sundsvold: No. Fred Garlington: For the band, I handle the legal stuff, I handle the money stuff. ⁓ you know, I write all the horn arrangements for everything that the horn does, but I don't do the booking, I don't handle the website, I don't do the SEO, PPC, GO stuff, I don't work in that world. I've got great people that are part of the band that do that work. And it's that collection of, ⁓ well, today we need to learn how to do this. Who's on it? ⁓ Fred, okay, Fred, you're on that. Learn that, do that. That go find that insurance policy. Okay, we've never worked with a sound company like this before. ⁓ okay, I need you to go learn that so that we can talk to the sound company. ⁓ I can bring a lot of what I do as an ops leader and a mentor and an action, not just a manager, but I use the word leader intentionally because it's not so much as pointing and saying, go do. It's listening and saying, let's do this together like this. I'm gonna own this piece of it so that you can own this piece of it. And that's where I think the leadership learning comes in. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Yeah. And I I wanna take a moment here and I'm you know, for lack of a better way to say this, I'm gonna kinda toot your horn a little bit. ⁓ as a musician, like, you've had some opportunities to play with some amazing people. Right, over whether it's in college or as a professional musician. ⁓ you know, in college I know you had a chance to play with Arturo Sandoval. Like, for anybody who's a musician, they will know that one right off the top of their head. ⁓ y what's it like being able to do music and you know, as a sort of a side thing and be able to spend your time doing something you love that much? Fred Garlington: That was well one of the defining musical moments of my career. Yeah. You know, it's really is one of those the the phenomenon is you get home from your quote unquote nine to five, right? I don't hate my job, I don't love my job, I enjoy what I do and I enjoy the people I work with and I do something meaningful for a living. But that feeling when you go home and you get excited. Because you just finished your regular nine-hour day and you're gonna go spend another nine hours until two and o'clock in the morning when you should be exhausted and all your all you are feeling is excited. That you get to go make music or you get to go, ⁓ if I'm if I don't have a gig that night, I'm gonna head down to my studio in the basement, I'm going to transcribe some music, or I'm gonna get the opportunity to practice, or it's Saturday morning at 11 o'clock and I'm taking a call from one of my bandmates because we have to figure out logistics for the next day. But none of it ever tires you out. You're never- you never don't want to continue down that path. And I've again, like you guys said, I've been doing this for 20, 25 years. I've been a professional musician. And I still tell people: I don't believe I get paid to be a rock star on the weekends. Like this is this is a dream come true, it really is. Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah. Kelly: Yeah, it's pretty cool. ⁓ I know you've had probably some things that happen. I know you're operations, you know, manager of like home slice, obviously you're fractional, but like what's the wildest thing that's ever happened at a home slice gig? Fred Garlington: Okay, I was gonna say we'll we'll keep the we'll keep this PG. Kelly: We can keep this PG, PG thirteen. Did you meet your wife? Didn't you meet your wife at a concert? ⁓ Fred Garlington: That's actu actually the story I was gonna tell is I met my wife at a home slice show. So the why the the short version of the story is it was another day up at the little bear in Evergreen, and we load onto the stage, we're playing, we're getting ready to play, whatever, and you know, then Mickey's side of the story is she's out for a girls' night. And so they get a limo, they're going up to the little bear, and they've got a they've got a table there, they sit down, and all the girls at the table, there's five or six of them, and at this point in time we're all very young. We're still in our we're still in our early to mid-20s at this point. And this the story from Mickey's side of the table is all the girls are looking up on the stages, ooh, I'll take him. No, no, I'll take him. No, I I'm gonna take him. And so us guys up on the stage, because we're immature 20-year-olds on on the stage saying, ⁓ yep, yep, I'm gonna talk to her. I'm gonna talk to her. No, I'm gonna go talk to her. Without knowing it, we had picked each other. So after the first set, yeah, after the first set, I walked down off the stage. ⁓ I I got down, I went to go talk to her at the table, and to this day I still laugh about the first words I ever said to my wife as she turns around with a drink in each hand, because somebody had just brought her a drink. I said, you know, I was gonna introduce myself and buy you a drink, but it looks like you've already got that covered. Kelly: Dang. Fred Garlington: And it just turned into conversation from there. And ⁓ you know, we were both we were at at that point both getting out of You know, long-term relationships. And so we were just friends, l true, honest to God, just friends for a good year before we ever decided, like, okay, we're gonna try this dating thing, but if if we if this doesn't work out, we're gonna stay friends, right? Right? So, you know, again, fast forward twenty three years, I think we've been together now. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Wow. Fred Garlington: And so that's that's ⁓ that that's probably the most impactful life changing part of being in a band, right? Shawn Sundsvold: Yeah, and with that kinda came the we talked about at the beginning, the two what you call bonus kids. Fred Garlington: Yeah, my bonus kids, Ryan and Emma. And ⁓ they're they're young adults now. I say young, Emma's 31, ⁓ figur figuring out their life and what that means. And Emma's Emma's ⁓ homeowner for the first time now, and Ryan's ⁓ figuring out his life and ⁓ you know moving in with his girlfriend while they get ready to start their life and everything that that looks like. And it's it's a strange dance to be I s I say the bonus dad because When it comes down to the difficult conversations that I have to have with Mickey or that I have to have with the kids, it's it it's that sort of maturity to realize that my first re my first reaction, my first emotion might not be the right way to approach this. I have to put on my what would Mickey do bracelet and understand that's gonna be the way I need to handle this situation. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm. Fred Garlington: Because at the end of the day, as much as I love my kids, I'm still the bonus dad. You know, there's that sort of set of rules and that relationship that existed before I was part of the picture. And it's still, even after twenty years, it's important for me to respect that. And how do I fit into that piece and that puzzle? Shawn Sundsvold: Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, so one last fun question, ⁓ and it's only 'cause I got to see you guys play for the first time back in April at Little Bear, by the way, ⁓ which is a fantastic venue. What is the best song in you guys' entire set list to get a dance floor excited in a movie? Fred Garlington: Yeah. Mm-hmm. ⁓ it it it's funny because it changes based on time. Right? You know, every couple of years there's a new song that's kind of in the zeitgeist that You know, as soon as those first opening chords are are they hit, that's the song that's gonna pack the dance floor. If you talked to me five years ago, I would have said, Uptown funk, every single time we start hitting those opening chords, it's gonna pack the dance floor. And this one's gonna surprise you guys, but right now, as soon as the guitar hits the opening lick of Mr. Bright Side, the dance floor is Shawn Sundsvold: ⁓ great song. Fred Garlington: Cannot stop it every single time. And I don't know why, because that was 15 years ago that song was popular, right? But and it's also possibly because it's wedding season and so it's like wakend after weekend after weekend after weekend. That's that's the song that today is just packing the dance floor. For whatever strange reason. Yep. Kelly: Wow. Shawn Sundsvold: Mm-hmm. Kelly: That's funny. Yeah, a little little throwback there. Yep. All right. Well, Fred, thank you so much for being a part of this podcast. Appreciate it. ⁓ just, you know, value our friendship as well. Even though we don't talk every day, it you're still you're still there. So how can people get in contact with you? Because you have actually helped one of our clients recently. We referred them to you and you made a huge difference in their business and still continue to today. So if someone's looking for your services, what what are ways that ⁓ they can get in contact with you? Fred Garlington: ⁓ first of all, it's my pleasure. I appreciate you guys wanting to have me on here. I am super easy to find on LinkedIn. If you go to LinkedIn and you search for Fred Garlington, I'm one of three that are on there. I'm the only one that has a profile picture, so it's pretty easy to click through. My website is zeropointcreations.com. ⁓ on the website as well for those folks who might be fractionally curious, as I say, people are trying to figure out what this whole thing needs. If you go to zeropointcreations.com slash survey, I've actually put together a DIY survey that you score yourself. And as if you get down to the bottom of that, you're gonna have a you're gonna have like a zero to ten, eleven to twenty, twenty-one plus, that sort of thing. It's gonna tell you I'm not ready for fractional. Maybe I should think about it. Or if you get down to the bottom, let's have a talk. It's basic it's free, it's a zero pressure thing. for people to sort of figure it out. You can also email me zeroptcreations at gmail.com ⁓ or reach out to Goldbear. They know how to get a hold of me. Shawn Sundsvold: We do indeed. We do indeed. And ⁓ you know, there you've even ought given us some help along the way as well, so ⁓ I can't speak enough to the skills that you bring to the table to help businesses. So ⁓ Fred, thank you so much for being a part of the show and I we will definitely have you on again. Kelly: Yeah, that is true. Yeah. Fred Garlington: ⁓ it's been my pleasure. I love you guys so much and ⁓ looking forward to helping you guys more in the future and I know you're gonna continue to help me, so thank you all so much. Bye guys. Shawn Sundsvold: Take care.