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8. The Context is the Close - Sales Lessons from a Scrappy yet Sophisticated Stephen Steers · Scrappy but Successful [Consultant's Personalities When No One's Watching]

• 0:03
  Jack Tompkins: What's going on everybody? Welcome to Scrappy What's Successful. It's a show where I sit down with your favorite consultants and we take the comedic route through their life, find out if they're successful today because they're sophisticated or because they're a little bit scrappy. I'm your host, Jack Tompkins, CEO of Pineapple Consulting Firm. And fun fact of the day, squirrels forget where they bury over 50 % of their nuts. I mean, it's classic entrepreneur ADD, am I right? Today I'm joined by my friend, Stephen Steers. He's the founder of Steers Consulting Group.
• 0:28
  Stephen Steers: You
• 0:33
  Jack Tompkins: He's, I mean, we got a long list here. He's a consultant. He's a comedian. He's a keynote speaker. He's the author of a superpower storytelling, the creator of context selling. He's advised more than a thousand companies across 40 plus countries. I mean, we got some household names on the list here, like Google, Nike. I mean, the resume is pretty strong. Stephen, my friend, we know that you are successful. I mean, just by alone, but the question that we have for you today. Do you think you fall more on the sophisticated side of business or the scrappy side?
• 1:05
  Stephen Steers: Before I answer your question, want to say thank you for having me, Jack. It's great to be here with you. We're going to have a fun conversation today. I love the question. I got to say I'm scrappy, man. That's why I'm still here. I have some sophistication to it, guess. Like, Resmay might say, oh, like super sophisticated. No, but I'm resilient. I hustle. Brute force sometimes is what's been able to keep me here, and I think that's scrappy. So I'll go scrappy side. How about you?
• 1:08
  Jack Tompkins: course. Absolutely. you You, I'm also scrappy. I'm also scrappy for sure. There's a, I have like a sophisticated bone, maybe two, but most of it's just hey, something needs to get done and I'm gonna figure out how to get it done.
• 1:40
  Stephen Steers: you Yeah man, yeah, the cool thing about being a consultant with a small company, quote unquote, the decision tree is real small. Yep, this is cool, let's do it right now. Let's be done with this. Yeah, don't have to wait for somebody or send all these different emails, you can just get stuff done. So I like that type of speed.
• 1:55
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah. Exactly. It's so much more fun. I was talking with my team the other day. I was like, Hey, like we have this new like this a high tool that we're rolling out. It's really cool. And they're like, Oh cool. Like, you know, we'll we'll like talk about it when it's ready in six months. I was like, No, I said in a proposal this morning, we're doing it next week. It's my favorite. But alright, so where'd you grow up? Did you have any entrepreneurs in the family? Give me the backstory.
• 2:14
  Stephen Steers: It's now. Yes. Yeah, I grew up in New York City, small town in the east of the United States. ⁓ My dad, I would say, was an entrepreneur. He had a marketing agency in the audio space for a few years and then shut that down and went to different stuff. So that's probably the closest entrepreneur I have in my direct family. Not many other folks, if I could think of.
• 2:26
  Jack Tompkins: You
• 2:47
  Stephen Steers: No, most of them got jobs. So my family's from Jamaica, West Indies. So the kind of the safer bet was to just get a job. And now thinking about it, I had some aunts and uncles who opened bakeries and stuff like that, but you know, nothing too crazy. But they had a, they were able to feed their family and live good lives and retire. So it was kind of around, but I was one of the few people who was just like, I want more. How do I have it? And I'm still finding that out. Cause entrepreneurship is mostly not that having more, but. it does give you some freedom which is also worth it most of the time.
• 3:18
  Jack Tompkins: They tell you make your own schedule and you'll set the rules and then you get clients and you're like I have no control.
• 3:24
  Stephen Steers: There's a guy, you ever heard of Simon Bowen? Okay, he has a quote, I saw him on some podcast, love it. He's like, everyone becomes an entrepreneur because they want to work a half day. But what they don't tell you is that only means you get to choose which 12 hours you get to work. And that's a fact, I would 100 % agree.
• 3:26
  Jack Tompkins: Sure. That's so well said. Yeah. Okay. So families from Jamaica. Did you go from Jamaica to Jamaica Queens, New York? Okay.
• 3:49
  Stephen Steers: ⁓ So I was born in the United States. My father came over to the United States when he was 14, I believe, and my mother when she was 26. And then two weeks into her moving to the States, she met my father at the same church they still go to, which is about 46 years ago. 47 years ago, yeah. So still married, still together, still go to the same church. Yeah. Wild stuff.
• 4:16
  Jack Tompkins: the American dream.
• 4:18
  Stephen Steers: I suppose so, I suppose so. Shout out to my parents.
• 4:20
  Jack Tompkins: That's awesome, man. ⁓ Did the entrepreneur and you start really young? Like, do have a lemonade stand or anything?
• 4:27
  Stephen Steers: Didn't have lemonade stand, I think. So I'm the youngest of three boys. by the time I was coming up, also for clarity purposes too, both of my brothers went to boarding school. So did I, but I was at home the most with my parents while my brothers were out. like, kind of have seen it before, third kid, you know what to do, you know, whatever, we're gonna go back, we're gonna go work and stuff like this. But sometimes they would leave me with my uncle and my aunt. who lived like around the corner. just didn't want me like at the house all day by myself on like a Saturday, because I could probably get in some trouble, which is I did on occasion. But my uncle Willie, uncle William. He would pick me up on a Saturday and then he would be like, do you want to make money? I was like, yeah. He's like, all right. And he's like, he said to me, as long as you have your two hands and you put them to use, someone will always pay you for something. And I was like, okay. So that's like one of the first lessons I got. And he's like, all right, you want some money? And he would have me cut his grass, take out all the trash, clean the, clean the garage, you know, all the chore stuff. And I would get 20 bucks at end of the day, but back in this time, pre-inflation or pre-crazy inflation that you could really buy something with 20 bucks as a kid.
• 5:12
  Jack Tompkins: I'm
• 5:37
  Stephen Steers: So that was the first kind of thing and every week I would go over there and we do that I would hang out with him he's hilarious one of the most funny people I've ever met and we would just hang out and I would do this over and over and over again and I Would also I also learned to have pride in my work. So anytime I would pass the house You know, I did all the edging on the lawn all the planting the trees and everything else I just have a little more pride for it and that's you know 20 plus years ago when I go over that house that they still live It's like I planted that tree I did that. Stuff like that just feels pretty good. So that's probably the first place I learned real, quote unquote, entrepreneurship as a young kid. And then in high school I would sell the ice pops you get from Costco. So like the 300 count thing. You get it for like, I don't know, five, seven bucks and I would sell them for a quarter a piece. There's 300 in there and then you make 20 bucks, but that's a lot of money ⁓ when you have to really fix costs. So that was helpful. That's kind what got me into it. And then after that... I would sell things from yard sales that I found on Craigslist and then repost them on Craigslist after I fixed them. And that's how paid most of my student loans for like the first two years of student loans was just flipping things from yard sales and selling them on Craigslist. So yeah, scrappy. Yeah.
• 6:41
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. I was gonna say I got a bunch more questions, but I think we can render a verdict. Dude, getting a $20 bill as a kid. Oh my goodness. You're like, I'm gonna go buy the Empire State Building.
• 6:58
  Stephen Steers: Definitely, definitely. Dude. Dude, the amount of candy you can buy for $20, just like, oh my gosh.
• 7:10
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah, so it's funny. One of my standard questions is did you sell candy at school and what year are you selling the popsicles?
• 7:18
  Stephen Steers: The popsicles would be 2001, 2002. That is, I was like 14, 15. So it's more high school, yeah. I mean, I worked in the candy store at my junior high school, because you would get like a free bit of Sour Patch Kids and they couldn't pay you. So there's that. But yeah, from 12 to 14, 15 would be the age where I was like doing the candy thing and flipping stuff that way,
• 7:24
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, what grade are you then? Okay, so early high school. Dude, I love it. That's also the best employee incentive for a 13 year old, you know, some Pat Sauer patch kids.
• 7:52
  Stephen Steers: Sugar, yes. Yes, absolutely.
• 7:57
  Jack Tompkins: That's awesome. Okay, so you're selling stuff, you're flipping stuff, you've got the mentality, hey, I got two working hands, somebody's gonna pay me to do something, right? Do you go into more of that like kind of blue collar labor of I'm gonna use my hands?
• 8:05
  Stephen Steers: Mm-hmm. Yeah, kind of. At my house, was like stuff needed to get done and we didn't come up with a lot of money and stuff, so was like we had to do it. I'd ⁓ fix fences around my parents' house. I would cut the grass. I would plant trees. I would paint the house where my mother told me I had to. We would fix leaks. Whatever it was, we would kind of learn to do stuff with the hands, do our own oil changes, wash the cars, all that type of stuff. Our parents definitely... gave us life skills, which I owe them a ton for, because I'm pretty self-sufficient in a lot of stuff, so that's really awesome. The blue collar side, yes and, so like I'm gonna be jumping around when I tell this story, and you're asking really fun questions. My first job out of college, like first official, like real, real job was in the construction business, like with like a proper like paycheck and benefits and stuff. And so that's kind of blue collar, but I was more on the project management side. And then I worked in that for about four years and then almost died. And then that's when I was like, I'm done with this kind of life. I'm going to go into sales because you can't die physically in sales. You can die mentally and spiritually, but that's a whole nother conversation for another day.
• 9:26
  Jack Tompkins: Sure, you can lose your soul, but that's different.
• 9:28
  Stephen Steers: yeah, yeah, sales is either like absolute complete vigorous winning or crushing depression. There's no in between. Yeah.
• 9:34
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, so it's funny. I'm from Connecticut and I, you know, I've never lived in New York, but I always visited there. Both my parents were born in the city. A bunch of friends went there after college. like New York is the city still to me, even though I live in North Carolina now. All of my friends had, you know, the highest of highs, but also quite literally near death experiences. And you're no exception, it sounds like.
• 9:54
  Stephen Steers: Yeah. No, ⁓ and again, very blessed that I made it through that, but it also gave me a really good perspective, and that's kind of what set me on the path that I'm on now, so I wouldn't change it.
• 10:08
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. Are we talking, I don't want to pry too much. this like, you know, something, something's fallen from the construction site that you're walking under? ⁓
• 10:10
  Stephen Steers: No guys, go away. That's exactly it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So ⁓ I've told the story before, but on 6th Avenue and 53rd Street's a building called the Back Rat Hotel and Suites, right? So I'll take it back to one of my favorite exercises was I would lay down on the floor and put my hands out like you know on a cross and the square footage.
• 10:30
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah.
• 10:34
  Stephen Steers: that I occupied, price per square foot with my whole body was more than I would make in a year. That's how expensive some of these apartments were. I wasn't making any money. That's how expensive some of these things are, which was like really depressing when I really started to think about it. But I was on this building from when it was a hole in the ground all the way through when it was done and people were moving into their 20, 30, 40, $75 million apartments, like absurd amounts of money that these people are paying for.
• 10:39
  Jack Tompkins: home. You
• 11:00
  Stephen Steers: Midtown apartments, which is crazy. But was doing an inspection, walking all the way down from the roof to the street level. And I was with my foreman. most people lived in the building, so it was basically done. And so we walked to the construction entrance. So I just had on a sweatshirt and sneakers, no helmet or anything. And my foreman showed me a picture on his phone. of like a repair he did somewhere and then he taps my shoulders like let's go to lunch and I take one step in a cement block falls where I was standing as someone was cutting up literally cutting out the wall on the other side and didn't mark it out so like that's how much I missed it by that's how much I'm still here or not horribly injured so after that I went for a really long walk around New York just kind of like you're still here and then I was like well what do I want to do I'm gonna die one day
• 11:30
  Jack Tompkins: I thought of a cartoon.
• 11:49
  Stephen Steers: I want to if I'm gonna die I've got a died trying to do something that I really want to do and so that's where it was like you know what I've always wanted to have a business you know listen to all the podcasts back in this era and I was like all right well what am I good at I'm decent with people maybe sales is the path and if you know to sell stuff you'll always have some kind of business and sometimes I wonder if I can sell stuff but most of the time it's okay but yeah that's how I got into it and then I just turned my life into that and that's where I've been since
• 12:19
  Jack Tompkins: How long after that near-death experience do you go into sales?
• 12:25
  Stephen Steers: So I to say that happened in November of 2014 and then by March of 2015 I was in a role.
• 12:39
  Jack Tompkins: So that's pretty immediate. That's like, okay, decision made. I'm going to go look and I've. Yeah.
• 12:42
  Stephen Steers: I'm out. As soon as I get something, I'm gone. Yeah. And I probably should have been a little more patient with it because I landed at a company that I don't think taught me as much as I could have learned. they, know, startups, they sell you all their dreams of what it's going to look like. And ⁓ that was a little, that was a tougher transition than I'd imagined, but you know, I've made it through and that's kind of given me a lot of frameworks to give me reasons for why I do what I do, which I think is really important because that gets me up on the tough days.
• 13:10
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, so I was listening to some stuff that you've done in the past and reading a couple things. It seems like you kind of intentionally go with, all right, I'm gonna kinda start at the bottom and learn the trade, get my hands dirty, stuff like that. Let me earn my stripes. This is probably right.
• 13:24
  Stephen Steers: Two hands, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
• 13:29
  Jack Tompkins: Is that the scrappiness that's like, like I'm the new guy here, let me figure it out. Like, you know, if you got to move chairs, I'm going to move some chairs, but like give me a sales lesson while you're doing it. Do you have that sort of mindset or is just, Hey, this is in the industry that I want and screw it. Let's see what happens. I'm going to try it out. Yeah.
• 13:44
  Stephen Steers: It's a lot of both, but I know for a fact, like I said, two hands, like I know I'm gonna be a CEO one day. I don't care if I got to pick up the trash. I don't care. I was a janitor. Like my first job job out of college was working at a bar, cleaning bathrooms and cleaning the bar. Like I don't have any ego about it. I don't want to do that again, but it's like, yeah, I got to pick up some papers. learn a couple of things. I don't have, that's not going to stop me. I'm here. I'm going to show up and I'm going to win this thing. I'm not worried about that.
• 14:13
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, that's a beautiful mindset, honestly. Let me try and go on the other side. Did you ever collect anything as a kid that you thought was gonna make you rich?
• 14:24
  Stephen Steers: No, I never collected things that I thought would make me rich as a kid besides money. I was really into Legos as a kid and I stupidly gave my huge Lego collection away which would probably be worth a ton of money now. Like I had a chest that's like, I don't know, like multiple briefcases of Legos. I bought all the sets, that was like my thing. Kinects. ⁓ I was more of a, like...
• 14:29
  Jack Tompkins: You
• 14:51
  Stephen Steers: Mike, you're asking me good questions. You're making me think here. My uncle, Uncle Willie, always tells people a quote I said when I was like six, okay? So one of things I was famous for in my family is if you put your keys down and they were missing, Stephen had your keys.
• 15:09
  Jack Tompkins: Okay
• 15:09
  Stephen Steers: No matter what wherever we were any house any party anything else keys are missing go find Steve and Steven has the keys and my uncle was a little annoyed at me one time because he was in a rush he's like Why do you always take the keys Steve why and I don't know what five six years old I was like because a man can't leave the house without keys and money
• 15:27
  Jack Tompkins: Wow, profound.
• 15:29
  Stephen Steers: Don't know where I got that from, that's what, that was my mindset from six, five, six years old, right? So ⁓ I think, and I think this will bear out in the wash, throughout my life, you need skills to have staying power to earn things. And so when I'm taking, moving the chairs, taking out the trash or whatever, I'm learning the whole thing. And, So far that's that's worked out pretty well for me I think for whatever else I wind up doing next that's gonna work out even more for me because I I'm not afraid of Doing the thing or figuring out what the thing is that's gonna make it work And so that's where I say the scrappiness. It's like we have I'll have a goal ⁓ What is the quote that says that the path to victory does not contain constant conditions? Something like that. Which is true. And I think that's a scrappy mindset. I know where I'm going. There's gonna be mountains. ⁓ dude, you got me thinking here. That quote. Have you ever heard of Ernest Shackleton?
• 16:18
  Jack Tompkins: Hmm, very true. like Shackleton Whiskey in Antarctica, that guy.
• 16:33
  Stephen Steers: It's probably named after this guy, Ernest Shackleton. He's a British explorer and he is famous for a failed expedition where he took 28 men to Antarctica.
• 16:36
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. Yes.
• 16:49
  Stephen Steers: I don't know if you've heard of this. Their boat gets trapped in the ice. They lose their entire ship. They have to trek across sleeping on like ice flows. They then have to take their dinghy boats to another island because they're like running out of supplies. He has to leave the team and he treks across an 800 mile journey in a dinghy boat with five other guys to an island to try to find help. They land on the wrong side and they have to trek through undiscovered territory for like three or four days at a time.
• 17:01
  Jack Tompkins: Whoa.
• 17:18
  Stephen Steers: to then land at a whaling ship and he rescues all of his men and none of them die. It's a true story. Antarctica, right? Just complete and utter, I'm going to go after this and make sure everybody's okay. And everyone's fine. Like I just read this book this week. That's why it's on the top of my head here. It's like just the, I'm not an emotional person per se, but like that moved me on such a huge level. ⁓ Suffice to say.
• 17:22
  Jack Tompkins: Whoa in across Antarctica.
• 17:45
  Stephen Steers: I think one of my traits is like I'm a survivor type of person. You get punched in the face. Like again, sales is analogous to anything else, life, business, anything else. Like you have to put yourself out there. You're going to get rejected a bunch of times, but if the times you aren't rejected are worth it enough, it all pays for everything else. And so not afraid to get punched in the face, not afraid to fall over. I'm going to keep going because I know where I'm going to head to. And so far it's worked out so far, worked out well.
• 18:13
  Jack Tompkins: Dude, that's awesome. mean, the Shackle and story definitely, because presumably that's like 100 years ago. don't know, I'm guessing. 1916, okay, wow. But yeah, that mindset is so just like, all right, everybody, this sucks, we're gonna figure it out.
• 18:20
  Stephen Steers: It's a hunt of 1916. Yeah. Yeah. It's absurd. Yeah, yeah, and it took him like three months to go get his guys. He tried four times over three months. Yeah, just read, the book is called South. It's his like personal accounting of it. Unreal. Unreal, definitely worth a read.
• 18:38
  Jack Tompkins: Wow. That's crazy. That's so cool. mean, yeah, inspiring in so many different levels too. And like, I think your correlation to sales too, like there's, it may not be trekking across Antarctica, but get punched in the face, get a couple of declines like, right.
• 18:57
  Stephen Steers: It's definitely not. It's absolutely not. Yeah.
• 19:04
  Jack Tompkins: But still there's a mindset there of like, it's very similar of like, okay, everybody, there's 28, 29 of us, whatever. We're in Antarctica, everything sucks right now. Everybody hates us and we're lost. Whereas business is, I just started a company and I have no idea what the hell I'm doing. We're pretty lost and I'm making ramen noodles, three meals a day for three months straight. We're going to figure it out though. And it's all going to work out. Yeah. Yeah.
• 19:29
  Stephen Steers: Burning cash, yeah, and you gotta figure it out. And this is the interesting part about this too, even if you fail as an entrepreneur, like completely poop the bed and it's all over. you'll probably be able to fail into a better job than you were when you started it because you have real business experience. So where an employee is just like, I'm going to click this button and I only click the button. I don't care why the button's clicked, how many times it's clicked, or if it's clicked more efficiently versus you're like, well, why is that button? How does that button affect this and that? And the fact that you can have that conversation with leadership. you're a more valuable person because you understand the why behind things. And so you can't really fail. If you fall on your face, you still fall six feet closer to the place. And that's, that's been a motif that's helped me keep moving.
• 20:16
  Jack Tompkins: Dude, asking why is the easiest and most powerful thing that an employee at like a regular old W2 corporate job can do. And it's crazy how, like, I was, I didn't spend very much time in the corporate world. I only made it like four, four and a half years. And I was like, I was just doing my job. You know, I would stay late as much as I needed to, but I didn't really think anything of it. I got so many compliments, because I just did what they asked. and then did like half a step beyond that and people like, my God, you should be CEO. And it was crazy how often that doesn't happen. People like, Hey, like he didn't do his job, but that's all right. Cause like nobody does that asking of why or anything. like when you're, we're going to jump throughout the timeline. When you're working with these big corporate companies, Nike, Google, whatever, who were you talking with? And is that like, do you start the conversation there of like, Hey, what's your job? No, no, no. What's really your job? Like, do you have that? moment of like, holy crap, let me rethink everything.
• 21:17
  Stephen Steers: Yes, and ⁓ one big way that's been helpful for me across any size of company that I work with on anything is what's the outcome they're looking for. So that's an important for anyone listening, just a way to frame things is you can only work with people who know what they want. And once they know what they want, you're able to determine is that something I can help them get to. And you can ask people I work with if I can't help people. pretty like, yeah, I'm not the right person for that. And then that gets me out, right? So if the outcome they're looking for is something I can help with, that helps me create a conversation and an element where I can talk about what I've done and how that can help what they want. And that usually guides the rest of the conversation. And then I just ask lots of questions and pretty good at asking questions. that enables me to, so I'll share a quick framework as a thought. Over the last, last probably three years, I've gone more into looking for source material from sales trainers and sales gurus. So not these Instagram folks who are regurgitating stuff. I mean, we all do. It's like, it's sales. Like how much is new? But I've gone back to the people who wrote books when nobody talked about sales. And one of the guys I found is a guy named Tom Hopkins. and check him out, has a book called Mastering the Art of Sales. And he's famous for at the age of 26 selling one house a day for a year. Yeah, so this guy knows his stuff, right? So he's got scripts and he's got ways he does stuff. And again, it's probably somewhat outdated for the modern person, but again, the rue of the information is there.
• 22:51
  Jack Tompkins: Whoa. Hello.
• 23:03
  Stephen Steers: Right, like you can really start to be like, oh, I would apply it this way, right? The more you study and look. So one of the things he says that I like is if the customer says it, it is true. Okay, if the customer says it is true, if you're asking about data, about numbers, about opportunities, whatever, whatever they say, that's the standard of truth that we then work from. And so I've amended that quote to what the customer says is true, but what we say as salespeople, we must defend.
• 23:32
  Jack Tompkins: Mmm.
• 23:32
  Stephen Steers: So in order to defend it, we have to then make our offering in reference to what is true. That is the only way the offer has any validity or context as I like to say, because hey, based on what you said, here's how I can help, here's what I can do, here's what I have done.
• 23:50
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, this is very much like ⁓ we both value something differently, but price is where we meet in the middle kind of thing.
• 24:00
  Stephen Steers: Tell me more about that.
• 24:01
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, so if you're saying, or sorry, I'm the client here. So if I say, hey, this is the truth. And you're saying, okay, here's the thing that we're gonna do that is defendable while matching up to what I define as the truth. Those two have to be starting out at probably slightly different points, but they have to meet somewhere, right? There has to be a, okay, you're defending my point, which is the truth, so we're on the same team, right? There has to be that sort of like, okay, we end on the same team here. The I value something as, if you're gonna say, Jack, I'm gonna get you five new clients, great, I'm gonna say, easy numbers, that's $5,000, and you're gonna say, great, I would value that as $20,000 because I just made you however much opportunity. So the price between that is where we kind of meet in the middle. That's at least a framework that I've learned. It seems like they're kind of similar in principle, but I think yours is much more applicable to a lot of different scenarios.
• 25:01
  Stephen Steers: Yeah, I think it's definitely applicable, but I say that the main piece here for me and how I sell, and I'm not saying I'm selling the perfect way, there's people who sell, outsell me day and night, right? But again, I'm able to take care of myself and live a pretty good life, is the context for what you offer, and again, I sell consulting, which is very bespoke, so I need to listen very, very intently. I'm not selling a product, per se, is if anything I'm gonna offer has to be in reference to what you told me.
• 25:31
  Jack Tompkins: Sure, yep.
• 25:31
  Stephen Steers: Otherwise it won't land. So that's the main piece. And again, price is the place where we meet when we've understood the value and everything else. But I can't make you an offer if I don't understand what you need and I can't say, Hey, here's why this is the right thing for you based on what we've talked about. That's what I found works really, really well, builds great rapport and has people understand to build trust. And that's an essential piece for, for me in the sales game and in consulting for sure.
• 25:56
  Jack Tompkins: Is this what context selling is? Okay, nice.
• 25:59
  Stephen Steers: Yeah, it's how do we establish more context, draw out things that can enable us to have more context and then tell the stories around that context that allow that thing to resonate better.
• 26:11
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, okay, very interesting. Where do you, where do you develop this? this, mean, shout out to Uncle Willie, he's already come up twice. He might be coming up a third. Like, do you, do you kind of like get piece of this? Obviously you're a profound six year old with a man can't leave his keys, but where was it keys in a wallet? Do you start kind of like piecing that together or like when you look back?
• 26:18
  Stephen Steers: Shout out to Uncle Willie, yeah for sure. Yeah,
• 26:38
  Jack Tompkins: at your childhood, like early jobs and stuff, are you piecing this together throughout the way or is it more of a light bulb moment later?
• 26:45
  Stephen Steers: It's both. It always lines up in reverse as they say. I could point to things where, I don't know, you just remember stuff sometimes and then it doesn't hit you that it matters until later. That's just kind how life goes sometimes. The light bulb moments where when you start seeing something over and over and over again, you're like, something's going on here.
• 26:50
  Jack Tompkins: Sure.
• 27:09
  Stephen Steers: And I've done a lot of work, especially earlier in my career with startup founders. So people who have raised money and then they want to sell, but they have no idea how to sell anything. And one of the key things that kind of turned this over in my head was they would just sell features. They're like, look, we built this widget. Look, it's got this type of language encoding. And it's like, who cares about this? Nobody cares. I was just like, why are you selling it this way? And I was like, we start talking about outcome. was like, what do they want? What are you going to help them do? And then we start to get to it. And generally speaking in most business B2B sales, there's four reasons a company is going to buy something, right? Make money, save money, increase efficiency and mitigate risk. And I was like, which one of these is your product? And they're like, oh, we help them make more money. How do you do that? Well, we help them make more money because our technology goes through this system and has this and it gets to that. And I was like, why don't you just say it that way? And they're like, huh. I was like, try it on your next call when they ask what it is you're up to. And then I was like, oh, that totally makes sense. You know what? We should probably bring in this person because they work with this too. Sales move faster, it's smoother, it's easier, it's cleaner, it's clearer to understand. And so that was a light bulb moment for me of it's more succinct to talk about what you do in reference to how things work when it is told in somewhat of a story form based on an outcome that you can defend. And it just kind of... Just seeing it over and over again and seeing that people don't leverage who they are is one of the most interesting pieces about what they do is also a reason that I'm doing what I do.
• 28:46
  Jack Tompkins: How long have you been running the company?
• 28:50
  Stephen Steers: 2019. six, six, years, Yeah.
• 28:51
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, nice. Yeah, okay, very nice. Was it, tell me about the early days. Is there, are we in struggle and scrappy mode at the early days?
• 28:58
  Stephen Steers: Ooh, pain. man, so much struggle. I thought it would go a lot smoother than it did. ⁓ For many reasons, I don't think it went as smoothly as it could have, but one of which was COVID for me, for sure. ⁓ I started off 2020 amazingly. Booked a keynote in New York, got a bunch of leads from that, booked a workshop in Istanbul, Turkey, got flown out for that, came back.
• 29:08
  Jack Tompkins: Don't we all?
• 29:27
  Stephen Steers: had a good pipeline and then the amount of people who were like, yo, we got to hold off for now. Almost created my business into the ground, like almost quit and went back to get a job, but stuck it out, stuck it through. And we started to come out of it a little like probably 21, 22 is when it started to get a little bit more reasonable. And then, yeah, it's been, it's been moving in the right direction. yeah, 20, 20, like right when we started it was, it was really rough. It was really rough. I thought it'd be easy, which is the only reason people get into entrepreneurship most of the time. Or one of the reasons. Yep, but thankfully I'm a saver and I learn fast.
• 30:03
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah, I'm going to be able to control my schedule. It'll be easy and over to. There you go. That's all you need. What's the version of ramen noodle dinners during those first few kind of scrappy struggling years?
• 30:22
  Stephen Steers: Never, never, never, never, never. No, food is a huge important thing for me. I probably spend good money on good ingredients more than anything else. know how to cook, so I know how to stretch a dollar at the supermarket and buy good stuff and cook. I'm eating well every time, no matter what. Yeah.
• 30:24
  Jack Tompkins: Never. Good for you. I just started a thing where like it's, so my friends will visit me up at my condo like 30 minutes outside the city, but I called it Jack tries to cook stuff and it's just, it's like, me a recipe. I'll try and follow it. I do not have the skill, but are you like in that time you can make a nice dinner where like if you had, if you've got like at the time a friend's birthday, significant other's birthday, something like that, are you making, are you skimping on the birthday gift at that time?
• 30:52
  Stephen Steers: Mm-hmm. Hmm... You probably a little bit, but my general language is like acts of service. So I'll take someone to go do something really cool. I may invite them over for and have a party for them at my house. You know, I'm a scrappy person, so I've made connections at a bar and then I can get...
• 31:22
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. Okay.
• 31:38
  Stephen Steers: cheaper drinks and it's still good. I'm a New Yorker, man. I figured out a way to do a lot of different things, get into places I had no business getting into because I met somebody. I'd always make it work and most people wouldn't know if I was... I'll say this much. There's skimping on stuff because you don't have money and then there's being resourceful and getting access to things because you know people. And I've been much more on the latter side than anything else.
• 32:04
  Jack Tompkins: power of having a network is so unbelievably powerful. Say AI takes over the world and everybody, whatever. The amount of times this come up, recently had the Super Bowl right a month and a half ago, whatever. And I was like, okay, those Super Bowl commercials are on there because some people had a handshake a couple years ago and said, hey, great, I know you and you know me and you get a Super Bowl commercial. I feel like that is how the world works and it's so focused on them.
• 32:32
  Stephen Steers: And you have five million dollars to spend on one, but yes
• 32:34
  Jack Tompkins: Right. It's the value of a network is so underrated. Even though people value it very highly. just, can't be under, it is the thing.
• 32:47
  Stephen Steers: Nothing like it. It is 100 % agree.
• 32:50
  Jack Tompkins: It's a thing. So, okay, are you still in New York when you started the business?
• 32:56
  Stephen Steers: Still in New York when I started the business, Fall of 2019.
• 32:58
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. When does the move to Mexico City come or Mexico in general? Okay, so this is during COVID you're like, hey, why am I in this frigid weather or terrible weather in August? Let me just go to the beach.
• 33:02
  Stephen Steers: August of 2020. Yeah. Yeah, terrible weather. Again, that time was tough for everybody who was involved, world over. I just, New York was an insufferable place at that time, especially. It's already a tough place to be, but it's not very inspiring and beautiful. And then when it's not moving, it's very like, look at how ugly this place is. It's gross. Like, yeah, just all that started to compound. And then I was like, I can't do this anymore. So I left and moved to the beach. I reset a little bit about myself and my life, my business, everything else, and it took me little while to get over that. And then we're out on the right side of it now. I went through a lot of changes I didn't want to go through that I had to go through. And that was the right moment to do that because everything else was on pause. So, yeah.
• 33:55
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah. Do you, this could be an out of left field question. When you make that move, New York is very New York minute tall buildings, right? You've got all this stuff. The beach is very, ⁓ do you have that like, just like clarity in life by just getting out of the city and like that kind of permanent vacation feeling?
• 33:59
  Stephen Steers: Go for it. So this is gonna be a hot take. I don't love the beach for more than like three four or five days like I can't it's really tough for me to turn my brain off and just ⁓ Look, there's a wave like I'm just not that person but it was the fact that
• 34:24
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. Thank
• 34:39
  Stephen Steers: I had to do something. just, knew that I had to take some action, right? Short decision tree. I was like, Hey, I'm out. I have to leave here. This isn't going to work for me. I'm not going to do well here. And I was right. It stayed on and then like it was lockdowns and stuff in New York, which doesn't get any cheaper by the way, during any of that stuff. So the, the idea of relaxation was helpful from a, from a mind perspective of like, it's not that serious, like slow down. That was really helpful for me.
• 34:53
  Jack Tompkins: Right.
• 35:06
  Stephen Steers: And then because I was very much out of my element, used to running hard and running from place to place, I had to learn patience and tap back into other parts of myself that I put on the hold because I live in New York. So permanent vacation, that was a tough environment to be around because a lot of people are on permanent vacation. That's not my style of people. know, God bless them. That's awesome. But I needed that at that time. It was the perfect thing for me at that time to just give myself a reset for sure.
• 35:34
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah. There's a mental weight that's just lifted in a situation like that, especially thinking back to that time. ⁓ yeah, that's, mean, good for you, man. What made you choose down there?
• 35:38
  Stephen Steers: Yes. I had one of my best friends, a former colleague, lived there specifically and then we'd stayed in touch and he was like, you don't look like you're doing that great, come down here for a couple months and see how it's like and just, you you work online so why do you have to be in New York? And I was like, that's a very good point. That's a very good point. And I'd always wanted to live in Mexico from when I started working remotely, I've always loved it. So it was kind of on the map, but Mexico City was the place, but I wasn't like, I'm gonna move from a big city to another big city. that's not gonna be good. yeah, Beach it was and it served me well for about two years.
• 36:18
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, okay. All right, so let's jump to, I'm gonna do a today question, but reflecting back to the early days a little bit. So one of the things that you kind of like coach and teach is like, obviously the sales process, but there's a lot of confidence that comes with that. Back in like high school, you a super confident kid? Are you a super awkward kid? Give me a little high school, Stephen.
• 36:39
  Stephen Steers: High school, Steven, great question. I think I was pretty confident in high school. I went to boarding school, so very small. I think it was about 100, 100 people in my whole freshman class and the whole school was about 500 from freshman to senior. So small group, that's including boarding and day. Shout out to Blair Academy. I was... around the same height I was, very skinny, probably 50, 60 pounds lighter than I am now, which is very, very skinny. I was athletic. I had my struggles with it. Boarding school's an interesting experience when you don't come from any money or, yeah, just seeing people with so much money. It's, I'm still dealing with some of the things for that. It's a whole other conversation, I suppose. But I was very confident in sports.
• 37:09
  Jack Tompkins: you Sure.
• 37:33
  Stephen Steers: Like I had a, I hit my forehead on the rim one time and cut my head open. Like I was, I was a, I was an athlete. I was very, very nimble and quick and rough around the edges, but in sports, I was very confident. I could jump. used to be able to jump very, very much. ⁓ Yeah, that helped me a lot. I was, I was probably just average confident kid. I had fun. I enjoyed myself and I learned. And yeah, I think that taught, that set me up in some good ways to be an independent person and to.
• 37:43
  Jack Tompkins: But you could jump.
• 38:03
  Stephen Steers: figure out stuff of my own, because you kind of have to at boarding school, Your parents aren't there, you have to manage your schedule and stuff like this. And I think that set me up in some really good ways and I think it was a good thing for me overall. But confident? I don't know. High school is a weird time for anybody. And then just being around people who are so different. obviously like, would, when I say obviously, had people from, went to high school with people from Singapore, Korea, Saudi Arabia, ⁓ Belgium, all over the world. So like I got a nice exposure at a young age, but just seeing how much money people have, it was just like. My definition of wealth was like, maybe you have a mansion and a nice car or two and a vacation a couple of times a year. These people get flown in from Singapore a couple of times a year. Uh, some people invited me on their private jets to go to the holidays with them. Like, you know, when I went and it was cool, it was amazing, but it's like, Whoa, there's a different world out here. And that's an interesting thing to see for sure.
• 39:10
  Jack Tompkins: Did you know where money came from at that point?
• 39:14
  Stephen Steers: No, school doesn't teach you that.
• 39:15
  Jack Tompkins: Right. I was, I'm thinking back in high school, I'm still, I'm still hoping out for 20 bucks from mowing the lawn and I'm like, yeah.
• 39:21
  Stephen Steers: Yeah, it's like how many $20 is it to get a jet? Sheesh.
• 39:25
  Jack Tompkins: That's literally, I thought in units of $20 bills. That's the only way I could picture it.
• 39:28
  Stephen Steers: Yeah, 100 % same here, same here. But I mean, it was a good thing to see like, wow, there's a whole nother world out here. And kind of the way people taught you stuff. Yes, some of it's true, but it's not always true. And I think that's still something I'm working through ⁓ as a man. But cool experience. I learned a lot and it's given me a lot of range, right? So I can go into ⁓ blue collar and talk that language if I need to. And I can go to a a yacht week or hang on some really exclusive places with people who have billions of dollars and I'm a stranger in every place but I'm not out of place.
• 40:07
  Jack Tompkins: Very well said. ⁓ How do you, I mean, that's so much experience, especially at a young age to mold so many different things. How do you give a sales folks or sales team or whoever, how do you give them the confidence in their sales role today, knowing that they probably don't have the same, both ends of the spectrum experience that you do.
• 40:30
  Stephen Steers: Great question, it depends on who the person is, what their role is, how long they've been in sales. We have to start with some, I'll give you the most general answer here on this, but the main piece when I work with anybody is I wanna get them understanding why they're doing what they're doing. If we don't have that, we don't have anything to work from. So no amount of push as a sales manager or coach or whatever, and be like, oh, you hit that activity? Like, yeah, who cares about the activity? I don't care. Nobody cares. But if I know that you're saving up so that you can get that new house for your family, if I'm managing you and coaching you, and I say, hey, do I have your permission to help you get that house? And they're like, yeah, of course you do. And it's like, hey, I'm going to buy you a bottle of champagne. When did you get that house? And they're like, yeah, all right. So in order to get that, here's what I'm going to need to see every day to make sure that we get you to that number and way more. Now that's a different context for why you're doing what you're doing. And so if we're not hitting those numbers, which can happen, it's natural in sales. Most people aren't successful salespeople, believe it or not, no matter what you hear online. Now we have a different way to push you.
• 41:31
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah.
• 41:43
  Stephen Steers: based on what you care about. And that's what can move things. that's a, that I think is an important piece no matter what level you're at. So like again, super advanced sales people, I work with some people who sell over a million dollars a year. Their motivations are different. They want to hit that next plateau. They want to get more efficient. They want to outsource different parts of it. Their mindset is different. They've already been very successful, but there's smaller nuanced things to change for them versus somebody who's more junior in their career. It's establishing the right foundations that keep them in the profession, even though it's going be very difficult. Sales is super easy to get into, but it's really difficult to be successful. And so it's the right mental inputs across the board, because it's a mental game more than anything else. But at a very junior level, it's implanting those seeds of, this is the mentality you're going to need to be here. Make sure you know what to fall back on. Two hands for me. and how you can change and affect things. And then why are you, what are you saving up for? What is it you want to accomplish? And we make those the central focus and then we build the activities or whatever else around those things in order to help them get that goal. And I hold them accountable to the thing they want.
• 42:54
  Jack Tompkins: How do you measure success then? Is it you, we don't care about the activities, but is it still you hit your number or is it hey, you got enough to buy a house?
• 43:05
  Stephen Steers: It's a little bit of both. It depends on the person. Generally, like, so I'm accountable to the people I coach, of course, but also to the business. It's like, where are we at with these numbers? And so coaching sessions are different than when I'm talking to execs. Cause if I'm coaching a team, I notice patterns and I'm like, Hey, here's something that I see that's going to be a problem. This needs to change. This is worth investing in. Success is definitely hitting numbers. It's definitely adding clarity and it's the speed that we move through a process. But generally speaking,
• 43:07
  Jack Tompkins: Okay.
• 43:33
  Stephen Steers: We establish what the KPI or success metrics are per engagement and then we follow those.
• 43:40
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, so that's something you're tracking throughout the whole way. There's some sort of a scoreboard and you can say, Johnny's doing great, Sally's level 100 or whatever it is. And it's still, I imagine it's still in most cases revenue or like gross margin focused, right?
• 43:45
  Stephen Steers: Mm-hmm ⁓ Yeah, mostly revenue's generally the one. Gross margin just depends on the type of business, ⁓ yeah. And sometimes we're raising prices and stuff like this so the gross margin can be one, but generally revenue is the cleanest. How much money do we make?
• 44:13
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, okay. All right, let's, we got just a few more minutes here. Let me hit you with some lightning round scrap you were sophisticated. ⁓ Tell me about you at the airport. Are you TSA pre-check, global entry, what do got? Neither. Okay. Okay, are you? Okay.
• 44:21
  Stephen Steers: Okay. Neither, I just go straight in. Yeah, raw dog the airport, yeah. Cause I like to show up really early and then I just go hang out in the lounge. I'm in no rush to go through security. I just, I'm prepared. I have one bag. We're good. You?
• 44:43
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, efficient, I respect it. ⁓ I'm TSA PreCheck and if my flight is at noon, I'll get to the airport at like 11.15 and that way I've got just enough time to get through security, fill up my water, hit the bathroom and I'm the last on the plane.
• 44:58
  Stephen Steers: Nice. I usually get there at least two hours early, go hang out in the lounge, do some work, post up, yeah, good.
• 45:03
  Jack Tompkins: guy. you a preflight cocktail kind of a guy?
• 45:08
  Stephen Steers: No, I don't really drink that much, No, I'll just have some tea, I'll have some water. There's some really nice lounges all over the world, by the way. ⁓ man, just cool out, hang out, bring a friend. It's a great time. Yeah. Credit cards, yeah. Yeah, huge, huge, recommend it for everybody.
• 45:21
  Jack Tompkins: Just be in there. Do you have that because of miles or credit cards or? Yeah. Pretty sophisticated. Okay. I'm curious about this one. You're a sales guy. Do you leave a voicemail or do you send a text?
• 45:32
  Stephen Steers: Hehehehehe text if anything. I don't even have my voicemail set up.
• 45:45
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah. Right. How many phone numbers do you have? Yeah. Only one. Two.
• 45:52
  Stephen Steers: For myself, one, two, two. But one's Mexican, one is American, so one. I had the same number since high school college. Yeah.
• 45:59
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, alright, fair enough. Okay. ⁓ How often are you working from the couch? Zero.
• 46:08
  Stephen Steers: Zero. Yeah, I'm standing or I'm at my desk. don't, like, this is lightning round, but short answer is I'm even like working from home, I change into work clothes. So I'm mentally in a space of this is work. And then when I'm not working, I'm doing not work things and not work clothes.
• 46:29
  Jack Tompkins: Good for you.
• 46:29
  Stephen Steers: because I've had that blurred separation for years where it's all the same thing. It's like, well, I can just work at the couch and be comfortable. Like, why would I do that? Have work time, get away, get away from this thing. Because I'm thinking about it anyway, I might as well try my best to separate where I can. So never on the couch.
• 46:45
  Jack Tompkins: Wow. My desk, I can literally see my living room TV 10 feet away from my desk.
• 46:51
  Stephen Steers: I mean I have a couch right back here if I'm in between a meeting I'm sitting and I'm like yeah but I'm not working from the couch no not a chance.
• 46:58
  Jack Tompkins: Okay. Tell me about the setup. Do you have how many monitors are on the desk?
• 47:03
  Stephen Steers: I have a 27 inch monitor here that I'm looking at you at and I have my 15 inch screen on the left. Yeah.
• 47:10
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, docking station or do you have like bunch of individual wires going every which way?
• 47:16
  Stephen Steers: docking station. I'm organized. What year are my earbuds? I bought these probably 21, 22. And I always keep things in duplicates. So I have one that's in my travel bag. So like I can just grab everything and just run. And it's all packed on my tech. Don't unpack stuff.
• 47:18
  Jack Tompkins: What year are your earbuds from?
• 47:40
  Stephen Steers: ⁓ I wanted to mention this. You mentioned do a work on the couch. I have a rule. I can't check email unless both feet are on the ground.
• 47:47
  Jack Tompkins: Ooh. can't check email, ⁓ does the plain floor count if you're in the air?
• 47:55
  Stephen Steers: I mean, don't have, I don't go on wifi on planes. Yeah, because I want to separate. Yeah.
• 48:02
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, I actually, do kind of similar. do like offline, if it's gonna work, I do strategic thinking and I can't check email, no wifi, nothing.
• 48:11
  Stephen Steers: Like I'll save a couple of documents for like work offline if I need to do something, but I'm not, I don't want to be pinged and like, no, it'll be there when I land.
• 48:22
  Jack Tompkins: How many unread emails is too many?
• 48:25
  Stephen Steers: One. I'm in box zero.
• 48:26
  Jack Tompkins: Nice. I talked with somebody last week who's like anything under 200. I get a little squirrely. I was like, what?
• 48:34
  Stephen Steers: No, if I'm not gonna read it, I'll open it or delete it. don't want it there. It bothers me.
• 48:38
  Jack Tompkins: If you copy and paste something from somewhere else and you paste it into an email and it's totally different fonts, do you leave it as is or do you correct it all to be the same?
• 48:47
  Stephen Steers: If I remember I correct it all. Like I sent an email to a client last week. Like I write, do you know this thing called Dark Reader? You ever heard of it? It's a plugin that turns the white's black and the black's white, so it's just easier on your eyes. So I'll change my whole thing. And sometimes if you copy from that, it'll have the text be black. sorry, text be white. But it looks fine on my monitor and then I sent it to the client and that whole paragraph was just not there. was like.
• 48:55
  Jack Tompkins: now. Gotcha. Yeah.
• 49:17
  Stephen Steers: Yeah, so if I can, will, yeah, I will highlight it and adjust, preferably.
• 49:17
  Jack Tompkins: Just a big blank email. It's funny. Do you, instead of saying like, thanks at the bottom of your email, do you close it with a saying?
• 49:32
  Stephen Steers: say best.
• 49:33
  Jack Tompkins: Best, okay, fair enough. You ever gotten paid through Venmo? Okay, all right. ⁓ Where does your to-do list live?
• 49:38
  Stephen Steers: Yeah. my calendar, and on a piece of paper.
• 49:46
  Jack Tompkins: Interesting. And okay, so a physical reminder. Have you ever given out multiple places? Okay. Have you ever given out a metal business card?
• 49:52
  Stephen Steers: and my whiteboard, multiple places. Yeah, I have a whiteboard over here. Yeah. Metal business card, no.
• 50:03
  Jack Tompkins: If you're at a networking event and somebody, the conversation's run its course, we all know. How do you end that conversation?
• 50:11
  Stephen Steers: Hence, but generally, I'm laughing because I remember my networking days, heavy networking days. Have a beverage, sip it judiciously and always be in a position to leave and go get water if you want. That's the first. So just have a physical object that's easy to mark your time. I just say, hey, this has been really fun. I I promised I would talk to this person. I'm not precious about being super, super nice. Like I might be a jerk, but it's like It's been great to meet you. I promised this person I would talk to them. I'm gonna go get food, I'm gonna go get a drink, I need to use the bathroom. Yeah, standard stuff, I get out of there. Yeah.
• 50:50
  Jack Tompkins: pretty good. That's pretty good. All right, last one. Do you thank people for quick replies via email?
• 50:57
  Stephen Steers: Do I say, thanks for the quick reply, like something like that? No. No, not that I don't want to, but most people don't reply that quickly.
• 51:00
  Jack Tompkins: Yeah. Okay, look. That's a point. Sort of not enough data to be accurate there.
• 51:15
  Stephen Steers: I might say thanks for your response or great to hear from you, but it's never like thanks for the prompt reply like
• 51:21
  Jack Tompkins: Okay, I don't know man, we started out pretty darn scrappy, but you walk in both worlds, there's a lot of sophistication going on here.
• 51:26
  Stephen Steers: You But you know what I would say I agree with you I think from scrappiness you start to recognize patterns and then you start to find efficiencies in the way that you work in your style and the way your customers work and just what makes your life easier for the the scrappy things that you're always gonna have to do and so any level of sophistication that I do have is You know, thanks to my parents. Thanks uncle Willie. Thanks to my two hands for sure But more than anything else it's that I have a clear direction of where I'm headed And that allows me to say, all right, I'm sophisticated in my approach, but I'm scrappy in my actions and tactics. I'm willing to get dirty.
• 52:08
  Jack Tompkins: Love it. Practicing what you preach, know your goals, know what you're trying to do. Stephen, buddy, thank you so much. I wish we didn't have to cut it off here, but we got to get you out of here. Thank you so much for coming on. Is there anything out there that you want the folks to know? Anything you want to promote, anything like that?
• 52:24
  Stephen Steers: First off, thanks again for having me. This was a fun conversation. It's great to meet you. Looking forward to keeping in touch and maybe we do this again sometime. You wanna get any information on me, go to stevensteers.com slash podcast. I have a bunch of resources on book writing, on calls and sales related frameworks that should be helpful to you. That's where I would send anybody. And find me on LinkedIn if you want.
• 52:30
  Jack Tompkins: course. Perfect. Awesome, man. Well, I really appreciate it. Thanks so much. I'm gonna say equal parts scrappy and sophisticated. Final rendering.
• 52:50
  Stephen Steers: You