#220 - Tom Stimson - Business Coach, Consultant and life long AV Expert!

0:02 Hello there and thank you for joining me again today on Geeses of Gear Episode #220. A great podcast. Today I will tell you more about it in a little bit, but for now, today's podcast is brought to you by ACT Entertainment. Nearly every project brings unique constraints and criteria for lighting control. There's always a request for integration with other systems and everything needs to be smart and easy to use and maintain, Not a simple task even on the largest projects. That's why ACT Entertainment is thrilled to be distributing the Visual Productions line of Incredible control products. Designed for continuous and reliable deployment in installations as well as live events, these versatile and easy to use devices deliver on the promise of complete project integration on budget.

0:55 If you are obsessive about control, the Visual Productions lineup was made just for you. Learn more by visiting actentertainment.com and today's podcast is also brought to you by a company I know a little bit about, Gearsource. Gearsource was founded in 2002 with a mission to help global events businesses to move gear around the planet. Since that time the company has transacted in more than 100 countries and has sold 1/4 billion dollars in sound, lighting, staging and video gear. I remember almost every one of those transactions. Now Gearsource has completely evolved its platform for massive global growth, enabling 14 different localized currencies, payments held in escrow to protect buyers and sellers and AI powered logistics back end system behind a new global logistics brand called Gear Moves and so much more.

1:52 Visit gearsource.com today and expand your access to global markets for your gear and global gear for your markets. Did you hear that podcast Episode #219? The last one, the previous one with Jamie Mardis from Coffee Cult. And you know I talk about it all the time. Geezers grind from coffee cult, which is my daily drink and so many other people in the industry and goes to support Roby backstage and helping people who need the help in our industry. But great story. If you haven't heard it, please go listen to 219. Jamie's a good guy. He comes from our industry, longtime roadie lighting guy, etcetera. Had his own company.

2:36 Still does actually in live events in. He had a generator company, he had a lighting company. He's had several businesses staging and he's always done really well, but he's super passionate about coffee, knows a lot about it, taught us a lot about it on the podcast. So go listen to 219. It's a good one, but I'm really, really excited about today. You know, I am a business geek. I'm an entrepreneur geek. I love the tech, I love systems and processes and things that make businesses better. I constantly read books about it. I'm constantly following different podcasts, and this gentleman happens to be one of those podcasts that I do follow.

3:17 So Tom Stimson is a is a business advisor, coach, speaker, and works exclusively with hands on owners and management teams who want to improve their decision making and elevate their strategic thinking. His intentional success framework has helped hundreds of companies remove the clutter of past decisions and focus on better goals with resolute efficiency. All of that stuff is amazing. I just basically read his bio information, but the guy is just a really smart dude. He's great to listen to, really do. Check out his podcast, which I believe is called the same thing as his coaching business, which is intentional success. Tom Stimson. Intentional success.

3:59 I know you can just search for it on on Apple or any of the podcast mediums and you'll find it. I listened to a couple of them on my walk this morning. They're all pretty short episodes, really easy to listen to. Anyways, without further ado, Mr. Tom Stimson. Hi Tom. Hey, how's it going? Fan flipping Tastic couldn't be better. It's funny because the biggest off expert that we've ever had on this podcast I think had the most trouble getting on the podcast. So he's on like Camera 7 now? He is, Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm I'm wildly engineered here, so. Yeah, it's it's pretty cool. I'm, I'm not used to even having guests on that have headphones on. It's it's a struggle just to get them to use like an air pod, you know?

4:44 So yeah, as you probably know, yeah. Yes, as I, as I, as I, as I have experienced many times, yes. I mean, it's crazy cuz I'm always looking for better microphones, better mixing boards, better audio, yet I'm at the mercy of my guests, so. I I will tell you, Avav, people are really the worst at this. You know and I, you know back when I was out in the field visiting companies all the time you go in their conference room, big integration company, they they could never get their conference room to work all living, right. And then I couldn't get any of my clients to use Zoom before. Oh really?

5:25 I would. I'd book a Zoom meeting and they'd call in on their phone. I mean, it wouldn't touch the thing. So I really want to get into a lot of things with you today. I've actually, I've had this one circled on my calendar for a couple of weeks now because I really am a business geek. But first, you know, I'd like to start with every single guest we have on just sort of what your background is, the foundation that got you to where we're at today. And then we're going to spend a whole bunch of time talking about where you're at today. So how how'd you get started? I I know you started more like on the AV Show side of things, right? Well, I mean, I'm a failed theater kid, right?

6:06 So I mean, I actually grew up doing theater and doing so. And I finally got out of college and stopped working in the Roadhouse, went to go find Real. What I found was I could work in theater and make nothing. Or then I answered an ad in in a We had newspapers back then for projectionists. Well, I do a big deal. And I found an AV company. I didn't know what AV companies were. I knew what AV was because, you know, we did it in the big university stand. But I didn't think it was an industry. So all of a sudden it's like, yeah, we'll pay you 10 bucks an hour.

6:50 This is 1983. We'll pay you, which is good money for a freelancer back then. It's like we'll pay you 10 bucks an hour if you'll come babysit, slide projectors and run and, you know, sure, microphones through M68 mixers into house sound. I was going, well, this is not rocket science. Oh, but you have to wear a suit. And we need you to shave your beard. Oh, man, this is not working out for me. But yeah, so you know, yeah, I I still owned a suit. And I shaved my beard and found myself working in hotels. And they fed you and you know, you're working inside. It's easy. And then and I was like, how do I get more work? Well, we only have, you're the only freelancer we know, but we just hire you when we have a one person gig.

7:30 I said what do you do when you have a five person gig? Well, we, we call the union, but they hate doing our jobs. So I said OK, well what if I find some more freelancers hyper, So I started a staffing company. I mean it's like. How old were you then when you started a staffing company? That was a while ago still too, right? 2022, I was probably 22 years old. 22 years, Yeah, that's wild. Yeah. So you were, yeah, just trained people. I I was. I just gigs and got more gigs. But I ended up, you know, anybody that came from out of town into the Dallas Fort Worth area. We were the we were the local labour people. Yeah, so.

8:16 Yeah, that's interesting. And then, so from there, I think you've got into Alfred Media at some point, right? Yeah, I mean they were one of my clients and well I I had the staffing company. I I had business agents who ran it and they did most of the day-to-day and filled most of the gigs and you know I, so I went off and I was traveling and doing shows, right. So I had my clients and I would go doing my gigs and the guys from Alford, you know, were at a company before that called Kimball AV. And so we'd worked together for years. We did the Coca-Cola 100th Anniversary in 19 with 72 slide projectors. We were the slide guys and when they started, you know the the current iteration of Alford Media in 1990, I I started January of 91 and they finally figured out that, hey, I went out and did shows.

9:09 But I was the person who made the show, made the, the, the stuff work. I wasn't a great technical with crew chief, right. So. So they got organizational skills. Would you come in and run us? And so Tom did most of sales. I did sales. I created the operations. We did. Any time there was a process missing, I'm a process guy. So I'd make a process. And being a theater person, where we have processes that are, you know, a millennia old, it was not hard to find better practices than what we were doing right? So well, Alford was much smaller back then, I'm assuming like. It it was a start up. I mean it, it was, I mean I was probably employee number six on the rental side and the other three people were named Alford, so.

9:59 That's. Wild and the and you know it was their first year of business and it went from like 6 employees and beginning of 91 I think we had 80 in 2000. I am So they went from a from $1,000,000 company to a $20 million company in eight years. It was a wild white the 90s were something to. Yeah, I I mean, I guess that's where you really discovered most of what you teach today too, though, or at least a foundation of it all is, you know, there's nothing like growth to teach you a lot of stuff, you know, especially that kind of growth, right?

10:39 Right. Yeah, it's, it is, it was. It's very foundational. Lots of things that I learned that I still apply. The big thing is the mindset, you know, understanding how to constantly exceed what you perceive your capacity to be. It's impossible to grow if you think you're only this big. And the cool thing about the Alford culture is we were used to being the underdog. We started out as the underdog. We were competing against Big East Coast and West Coast, big name players. We're using the dumbest technology we have and we're just sticking with it. All right. It's working now. Tom. I can hear you. I can see you.

11:20 OK. There you are. Sorry about all of this. I don't know what's going on. This has honestly never happened. It's bizarre. That makes me feel so special. Yeah, well, I wanted you to feel special here today. You're on geezers of gear and we're geezers and so. Here we are. We could use some gear apparently. So anyways you were, you were talking about Alford and how you were there for sort of the blitz scaling that they went through when they went from 1,000,000 to $20 million, which to me those are two entirely different companies like a company doing $1,000,000 in revenue versus 20 million is? Not, yeah, I would say it. It was 5 different companies. Yeah, yeah.

12:02 You know, it was, you know, five different iterations. You know, going from 1,000,000 to to 5 million was a company. Going from 5 to 10, was a company 10 to 15? Yeah, you know, there's a point in time where we had three offices. We had an office in Atlanta, LA as well. Yeah, I mean, so, you know, there was 2 Duke. I mean it was just every year it was like, you know, the the, the bar just got raised and we figured it out. You know, Tom, in in that There's a lesson though, 'cause it's funny. I had, you know, I, I operate a marketplace company and I had a, a startup marketplace founder contact me a couple of weeks ago. And you know, because I'm sort of an OG of marketplace, I've been in the marketplace world since before it was called the Marketplace.

12:49 And so, you know, I get these people reach out to me all the time. What do you think about this? What do you think about this? And so I asked him where he was getting all of his ideas from. Because I said these are big ideas like you're a startup, you haven't even really product market fit yet. You haven't hit your first, you know, 100,000 in revenue yet, let alone a million. And he said, Oh yeah, I'm reading every Amazon book and listening to every Jeff Bezos podcast that I can and I'm just duplicating what he does. And and I said, you realize that a trillion dollar company functions a little differently than a than a $0.00 company. And you might wanna back that up a little bit, like there's some good principles you'll be able to find in there. But you need to understand that hiring a person into a A1 employee company is very different than hiring a person into a, you know, 100,000 employee company or whatever. So yeah.

13:47 Yeah. It's nice to have aspirations, but we first have to have some sales. Of course, yeah. And. If you don't have, if you're not in to have sales, you have to have a product or service. So I mean there's so many things. It's like, yeah, that would be really cool. Yeah, right. Yeah. But there aren't that many Jeff Bezos out there. Yeah, right. I don't wanna go too far off your story here, but I was listening to one of your podcasts this morning and you were talking about how when you first start out with a new client and you sort of have a checklist that you go through and see in my brain, I would always start with revenue.

14:27 What's your revenue look like? And you said no, you want to end up at revenue because otherwise if you don't know how the revenue happened, you're not going to know whether there's problems in there or or whatever, right? Right, right. Yeah. When you're when you're talking to a new prospect and and you know all consultants, all solo entrepreneurs, all freelancers, you know we have a certain complex where we think we're not worthy enough, right. So if you ask him about the show and you go, Oh my God, that's the biggest show I've ever, all of a sudden you've talked yourself out of being qualified, right. So part of this goes back to the psychology of being a consultant. It's like, hey, I've never done business with a $500 million company. So they tell me they're $500 million company. I'm not thinking I have any solutions but I tell you what I've worked with $500 million companies. They're just as messed up as $5,000,000 companies. It's just it just has a bigger ramification. Well, so, yeah.

15:23 You start with you know, how do you feel about things? Are you? Are you comfortable with what you're doing? And if you're already getting issues there, there's plenty of stuff to do. Oh. God, we have the Max celebrations happening right now on the. Screen wonderful. Yeah. So yeah, that's like. Everywhere are watching this on YouTube and cringing right now. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It's like, well, that's why I don't watch. Yeah. So it's like, yeah, let's start with, you know, something that matters and you know, figure out how do you feel about it And you know, how confident are you and your people and do you like your customers, right. And and then you you kind of get to, do you have any idea what business you're actually in?

16:05 And then, OK, tell me about how much money you do and how much money you're making. It makes a lot of sense. You know again I've I've always sort of come from the sales angle and and for me sales solves everything and sales solves all the problems and all of that stuff. But The thing is it makes a lot of sense taking sales out of the equation and and getting down to sort of first first principle thinking or whatever you want to call it, right? All of our problems start with sales. True, right. So that's right. So you know, there's a lot of $10 million companies out there that are not making money. Everything they do is hard. They don't like all of their customers. They would be a wildly profitable $6 million company and love their life. Yeah, yeah.

16:47 Except for sales. Yeah, by the way, I've I've, I've done that mistake on my own. Like I had a wildly profitable in a different business. I had a wildly profitable 7 or $8 million business that, you know, the whole world told me you can turn this into $100 million company very quickly. You just have to do this and this and this. And the worst thing that happened was an investor came along and threw a bunch of money at me to do that and just completely destroyed my business. And so I learned a valuable lesson, you know? I mean, yeah, you know. Yeah, you know, I think it was, Tom offered. I mean, he had a flaw. He says anybody can sell.

17:27 Revenue is not hard to get right, so revenue can't be the goal. It's got to be the right. Revenue, well, yeah, I mean says the guy with a lot of revenue. You know sometimes revenue is is really hard to get and and you know I know like in marketplaces in particular and you, you and I could have an offline conversation about this one day. But marketplaces are very unique businesses because you have the supply side and the demand side and sometimes you have three sides you know like in a in a like one of these DoorDash companies or something you have the driver, the, the food company and the customer. So you have a three sided marketplace and then the marketplace.

18:08 So in a sense it's even a four sided marketplace, but you know you when you start up a marketplace you have to basically make a a very early decision on which side you're going to focus on the supply side or the demand side. And of course it's hard to create demand with no supply. It's hard to create supply with no demand and they call that the cold start problem. And it's something that I was fortunate I didn't have to learn much about because my supply and and demand side are the same people. And so as soon as you added to two people, you basically had a network and network effects started happening.

18:48 When you added a third person, network effects started happening. And so it's, I love the marketplace business, but it's one of the hardest businesses in the world. It really is. And and you know that's why I sometimes I say that that finding revenue isn't the easiest thing. You know, I'll give you a quick example, Tom, sorry to talk so much, but COVID happened. Most businesses shut down completely and we had this weird situation where we got a lot of supply all of a sudden because companies and you actually wrote a really great article about it. I'll give you credit for some of this because I helped share your article.

19:30 It was something like you know your your greatest asset is in your warehouse or something like that. And and I pushed that around like crazy and companies literally were using inventory as currency, you know to pay their rent and to pay their employees or whatever. And so we had a lot of sellers and very few buyers really like bottom feeder sort of opportunist buyers who were sitting on a lot of cash and went, yeah, I'll buy twenty of those, I'll need them eventually you know. And then 2021 happened and all of a sudden it just completely flipped the script and we had no supply and a shit ton of demand that we couldn't fill. So.

20:12 And then 2022 the, you know the supply chain is shut down, so you can't buy new products. So all of a sudden used product is. Very valuable, 23 manufacturers overbuilt everything and we're not only dropping prices, they were financing it. They were so aggressive. So now we had supply ish and very little demand because now all of a sudden new prices were less than used prices in many cases. So it's just it's it's been a weird and wacky world that I live in for sure cuz you know and we'll get into that later. But anyways, Alfred Media. Yeah, what I'm saying, but what you're talking about really sounds like fun and there's a lot of parallels to to that that Gogo 90s experience I talk about where if you figure out what the knobs of your of your business are or faders if that's the way you go you know I'm. Gonna say push when my business yeah, I'm just a big knob at the end of the day, so.

21:13 Right. So and there of course is like OK, how much of you can we turn up and turn down. But what we want to do is we want to get a little parametric on you and have more versions of that so that we can dial those things in. And that's the, that's the challenge for businesses that are that are evolving, growing, expanding, whatever it might be because I mean people generally want to grow. I I deal with deal with owners who are happy where they're at, just want to make it better. Yeah. But most of them aspire to something else and and of course, you have to grow with the market too, right. Yeah, $2,000,000 now is not what $2,000,000 was 10 years ago. True. Yeah. So you know, you should be a $4 million company, so. Well, not.

21:55 Knowing which knobs to turn is important. That what you just said 2,000,000 today is different than two million a long time ago brings up 1000 other questions. So I want to get through your your foundational story first. So you you spent roughly 15 years at at Alford learned an awful lot. I assume you you learned a ton about like I think if I were to guess you know your next stage in business where you got into consulting and stuff was really created by going through that you know 01 to 5,000,005 to 10,000,010 to 20 million at Alford, right? Would be my guess like it because you learned every business model in doing that, right?

22:38 We learned, we learned every business model and I was involved in so many aspects of the business, you know from, you know from the, you know, finance side, the CapEx side, the IT side, you know, we had our own software platform, you know. So I was touching a lot of things. You know, my my style is I like to learn something. I don't need to understand it well enough to delegate it. Yeah. And so when I could, when I could delegate it, then I can just touch base with that person or that team to understand what's going on. When the when the other teams when things are changing and we need to go back and get this thing to change. If we need to bring our our platform or software platform has to evolve, well that's because of changes in sales, changes in operations, changes in warehouse, changes in finance. Now we go back to software development and meet their needs, right.

23:31 So that's a that's a great learning experience. But there gets to a point in time when one's career, when you've run out of things to do, you know, I was very fortunate. We had a fantastic team, you know, by, by the time I realized it was time for me to move on. I also realized that in probably less than a year I I spent about three years winding down. But in less than a year I had delegated 90% of what I did. Wow. Right. So that when it came time to exit, it wasn't a huge transition. You rendered yourself redundant. I did. And. Which is something and which is a lesson from my father, right? You know, I watched my father and his career as a business executive moving from company to company.

24:13 And he would get promotions and we'd get to go out to a fancy dinner and get a promotion. We go to a nicer dinner. That's the only thing that changed in our life is we got to go out to eat. But I asked him once what he's doing. He says whenever he took on a new role, he worked himself out of the job. He tried to make that management role, that director role, that vice president role obsolete to free himself up to go on to the next thing because there were people who needed to be empowered. There are processes that need to be put in place. The only reason you have this organizational man there is because we didn't take the time to develop the people and processes so that we don't need that person. Yeah.

24:55 No, that that makes so much sense. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, it brings up 1000 different questions, but so in roughly 2006 you left you again all of those lessons in education and everything became the foundation that created a consulting business, I think, right? Yeah, yeah, that was the toolbox that I started with. Yeah, which is pretty much where you, you continue today. And you've added all kinds of different wrinkles onto it. And I think you've written a book balance. Yeah, I've got. To build a scalable business with less stress and more profit. And yeah, I'm, I got to go get that book myself because I got to figure that one out, you know?

25:37 It is balance. I mean, balance is kind of like is taking everything that I've learned over the 40 years and distilling it down to what I consider my operating system now. Yeah, And it This book couldn't have happened without the pandemic. Oh, really? Because the pandemic taught us what we needed to understand before the pandemic, particularly in the in the live event production rental industry. We have an an entire industry which one not scalable at all. A seasonal industry that isn't scalable. It's it's insane. So everybody was focused on job costs. How can I reduce the cost on this job and make this job more profitable rather than how can I make the business more profitable? So they hire more technicians and they buy more gear to reduce their outsourcing and their sub rental so they can say yes to one more job on the off chance that somebody wants to hire them.

26:28 Yeah. And then on the bus when they're slow, they go, Oh well, well, we were busy cleaning up the warehouse and doing, you know, deep QC on the gear and trying to justify all their expenses and go, this is totally untenable. Yeah. And you know, the pandemic kit knocked all of that revenue away. And you know, I had clients that went from 60 employees to five employees. Yeah. But within a year they were doing half the revenue again because now they're doing streaming events. They're outsourcing everything cuz they're scared to death to hire anyone. Thank goodness, right. And then we start to see, OK, here's the problem we have, we're over build for what we do. That was some of the problem. So I won't say who the owner was, but I I helped an owner sell his company and you know, relatively a very experienced company.

27:18 I think they've been around for around 40 years and this owner sat down with me. This was right at I'd say early 21 when he he was getting ready to close on the deal to sell his company And him and I went to dinner and and he said, you know Marcel you're helping me in so many ways right now, you know, and I really appreciate it and all this stuff. But he said, you know, some people don't understand something. And I said what? And he said the pandemic was a really good thing. And I said what do you mean? And he said, and you know, for me, I have some very good answers to that, by the way, because I think it was a great thing for most of our industry, as hard as it was. But he said there's a lot of people that I had to lay off that I in a million years never would have let go. And now I'm not hiring him back.

28:06 And so he said it allowed me basically to clean house and it's such an important thing because you know there is so much dead weight that was sort of hovering around our industry, whether it's on the manufacturer side or the the rental companies or everywhere. I mean just all over the place. There's people who are lifers who really think I've kind of earned my chops and I don't really need to do it anymore or I don't need to do as much anymore. I don't need to be as, as functional as I once was or whatever, 'cause now I'm a veteran. And yeah, I I mean, I think at my age I still have to hustle just as much as I did 30 years ago, or else I'm going to find myself less valuable. Right.

28:50 And and if you're your heroes, 'cause you're talking about the heroes, the people you've kept around, because they save the day once every once in a while, they save the day. So they're protected. They're franchise players, right? But whenever there's a problem, which usually is because they didn't solve it, yeah, their solution is we need more people. Yeah, we don't have enough people. That's their solution to everything. Well, we need to hire more people. Oh, these guys aren't good enough. We need to hire better people instead of getting down to what the crux to the problem is. Yeah, so true. I don't know. What? So it's like I. Hit my bubble thing and it grew. Oops. Yeah, no, you're you're completely right.

29:31 And and you know, I mean So what were some of the other things that you think COVID did to really help our our industry? There's a few things that it did obviously to hurt our industry it. The most the most important thing it. Hurt companies P and LS it hurt companies Balance sheets a little bit. Way too much debt. Companies brought on way too much debt because it suddenly became easy to get and cheaper than it was. But now that they're paying it back, they're going oh jeez, maybe I shouldn't have taken all that money, but. You know the the thing that and it it wasn't just the pandemic on our industry. It really was on the the entire economy change the value of people. OK, So we had all these people leave the marketplace involuntarily.

30:19 I'm sorry for everybody who lost their job, who struggled and did all of that. You know, it wasn't good that happened to them. What's good is that we started to pay better attention to what people are worth, and people didn't come back to work unless you paid them more money valued, The more that's true, gave them the right responsibilities. Freelancers left the marketplace because, well, one we weren't paying them enough anyway. We were paying them less than what we sold when we sold it for too little. Yeah. Right. So I was like, I I take people all the time and say, like, you've got an audio engineer on your team that's making 100 grand a year and you're charging $600 a day for him. Yeah, do the math for me, right. How many days a year does that person have to work to pay for themselves?

31:04 So it's like we completely misconstrued the value of Labor and the pandemic was a reset for us. And so now we've got labor rates up to probably where they should be. It was a huge, painful jump for a lot of buyers, but we also lost a lot of buyers, which is another great thing because all the price shoppers got fired because there was nothing for them to buy and then they didn't get hired back. They put a younger person in their place who is more interested in relationships than being the hero for beating up a supplier. And so our boxers have changed. So now we can have value conversations instead of let's just compare prices.

31:48 Well, these other guys will do it for this or they're cheaper on this than you are. Can you match their price on this one light item and then they do it to you 50 times. So we got out of price shopping situation because during the pandemic, if you could do a streaming event and you were available, you got hired, they say I don't care what you charge me, I have to do this thing. And then during 2022 during the supply chain shortage, at the same time we're having revenge meetings because now we're back in ballrooms again. It was like the first question you ask is, are you guys even available? If you're available, great.

32:29 What is it going to cost me to do this, right. And so now you're setting your own price. Well, man, it's hard to, it's hard to go, you know, go you know that 25% profit that people were making in 22, it's hard to give that up and go back to that 4% net profit you were making and 2019. So true. Yeah, so true. So like going into COVID, early in COVID there were a bunch in my own head. There were a bunch of myths, you know, like this is going to happen, this is going to happen. And I'll tell you, two of my biggest ones were this concept that I used to call day 91. I said this is a 90 day problem and you want to basically take this time to clean your shop, clean yourself, clean your skills at upskill a little bit if you can and you want to improve the outlook for day 91. I I just came up with this whole concept of day 91 and so that was one of the things that I screwed up badly and I was way wrong.

33:29 It was like day, you know, 591 or something. And and the other one was that I thought the the people who were going to hurt the most or the companies that were going to hurt the most were the manufacturers. And you know, because I'm in a different part of the business technically than you are, you're more on the AV side. I'm talking primarily like the large lighting, automated lighting manufacturers for example. I felt like there was going to be some, you know, some some attrition and some roll ups and and some brands were going to go away. Like if you started with 20 brands you were going to end up with 10 and God was I wrong, I mean they're all bigger today than they were pre Pandemic by a long shot. You know they're all hitting record sales every month by a long shot.

34:17 And what were some of the ones that you you sort of fumble on? In, you know, in the early days, everybody thought that lots and lots of companies were going to go out of business once, once we got past that idea that this is only going to last 90 days, right. You know, people go, man, we're going to so many companies are going to go under so many. It's like, no, I mean I I personally talked to five owners who said, you know what, I'm just going to hang it up. You know, I'm almost 70. I should have sold the company years ago. I'm just going to liquidate and move on. Yeah, that could happen on any year. The fact is between the government subsidies that were available and the fact that if you got rid of your overhead, OK you we had a lot of runway to work with. So the people who pivoted more quickly and got into virtual and find other ways to be valuable and reduce their overhead actually did OK, which is most companies. I actually one business owner that I was working with right at the beginning of Pandemic because 100% of my business went away, right.

35:19 And we were going through a big change management project so you know, he could sell his company down the road. And he, he called me up and says I'm just going to shut it down. He laid off all he had like 40-50 employees. He laid off all of them. He kept 2 on retainer, one of them which you know was a relative, right. And if, if the phone rang, he answered it, and if he felt like doing it, he did it, he says. I'm going to shut down for at least a year and see where we're at and then hire back. So there are lots of different reactions, but we really didn't lose anyone. We got people thinking about their business differently. Yeah, true. But your 90 day thing, you know, it's like you were forward thinking there was a lot of people who thought this was going to last four weeks, right? That you know that my first I had a webinar, it was I think it was March 17th or 18th and I realized that wait a minute, I can't do a webinar on what I was going to do about, I got to talk about this, you know, what are we doing? What's going on here?

36:17 Because you know, we are now, you know, four weeks into cancellations, you know, the wheels had fallen off the wagon. So I got on there and I started doing these weekly webinars about how to respond to this. And on that webinar I started up and said guys, here's the situation we're in. You are not going to have any revenue before next August. Zero. None. Start planning that now. Yeah, if you want to hang on to people and clean the warehouse and do the inventory, you can. I am telling you right now you're not going to have any revenue by week three of those webinars. I was telling them you're not going to have normal revenue again until 2023. Damn, you were very.

36:58 Very on top. Of it much more so than me it. Became very clear that we were going to have to have vaccines. All these things that were going to happen, that's going on, we're not going back in the ballroom for a really, really long time. You better embrace virtual events. You better figure out how to do it because that's where demand is, you know, and that's time, you know, it was now. Now it's May of 2020 and and the big business was outdoor graduations, you know, where the kid where the parents drive the kid up in the car and they hand them the diploma through the car window. You know, they're doing them in Drive in theaters. You know, it's like that was our, that was our big business, you know, for that month. But then we still have to communicate. We still have to talk to people.

37:39 Yeah, well, streaming. Events. Again, different for the off side of the business than for the, call it rock'n'roll or. Entertainment. And entertainment side of the business because they tried to do virtual events and there were a few that worked out OK. But for the most part like virtual concerts sucked, you know, drive in, concerts sucked. And they weren't very profitable for anybody involved. The artist, the, the production company, the promoter, anybody. Nobody, nobody could make any money with these these pods that were 10 feet apart with four people in each pod or whatever. I mean, yeah, it was just, it was ridiculous, those. Pictures of those outdoor things where they've got these 12 by 12 skirts.

38:22 I know people in it. It's like, oh crazy. Yeah, I mean, again, how do you make money on that? Like the logistics. And I remember one of these outdoor concerts and you know, all these, they showed renderings of it. Look at all these people in their cars and they can listen to the concert and stick their head out the window and cheer and stuff. And I said, where do they go to the bathroom? And they just went dead silent. They were like they didn't even think about how are these people like what are they pee in a bottle, in their car? Or something like. How do they go to the bathroom? And yeah, that hadn't been considered at the. Time, yeah. And entertainment was tough. Touring obviously.

39:02 I mean there's that. That was probably the the most difficult thing to get back into a viable model. But the interesting thing is, is as a as a modest consumer of of music, the number of artists were able to find a following by embracing virtual and doing their own mini concerts. There's a lot of people that I still follow that I only found out about because they had the presence of mind to get out in the world and and expose themselves. And then when things came back, they're out touring and you know, comedians, you know, one of the comedian, they did really well because they they could do that virtually so. Although I listened to a few of them like on on Joe Rogan and stuff and and they said that was hard, that you know, because comedians are funny because of the interaction.

39:51 With audience. You know, the audience is what makes them vibe and makes them funny and stuff. And I saw some artists say the same thing like, you know, Metallica did a a virtual thing where they had like that Tony Robbins 360 screen around them and they could point and go Bob in Kentucky, let's rock and you know Bob would be like. You know, on the screen and they had, I think they you paid extra to be part of the VIP group that was the 2000 people on the screen or whatever. Right. And that was one of the few that I saw that worked well. But when you heard interviews from the band, they said it was, it was so hard. You know, we're a we're a metal band and to stand in a room in a round screen and try and make it seem like we're having a good time, it's hard.

40:38 And you know, there was a lot, I mean, there was a obviously a lot of social pushback. I mean, yes, we're an event industry, live event. People have to be there. That's what makes it a live event. And you know, we can't have lockdowns, we can't have social that we can't have all of these things. That's more important for people to get together, which was part of the problem. Right, exactly. Right. It's like say the the the the, the, the, the quicker you embrace the solution, the sooner we're going to get back to the thing that's important to you. So that's the thing that you know talking to my audience is getting them to guys process this, think this through, right. OK. Yes. You may be in a market where people are comfortable with out and going meetings. I live in a major city.

41:20 We're not going anywhere. We're putting a hazmat suit on to go to the grocery store until we understood what was going on. So like I said, it was an opportunity to start to understand some things that what's valuable and what you do and what's valuable and what you do is not own equipment and have technicians that you're back in call. What's valuable is you get a show done for your customer. Yeah. Absolutely. And my message was a virtual meeting is a show. Yeah. Get over it. It's a show. Yeah, you can treat it like a zoom meeting, OK? Which in which case it's going to suck. Or you can treat it like a show. Now what are you going to do about it?

42:01 How do you make this a show, Huh? And some people probably did it really, really well and others didn't, I would guess. Right. They they created their own platforms. We had people developing software, you know, to create virtual environments. And you know, you know, you walk out and you're standing in a lobby and you choose the the meeting room you go to next and you interactive. There's huge things that were developed. They're all sitting dormant now, but they were extremely valuable for a long time 1. Of the things that I thought was so cool during the pandemic was it, It made me proud of the industry that we're in. And because there was so much innovation, because they're people refused and hated just sitting back watching Netflix and stuff and just accepting we're closed, you know? So like I did that whole red alert restart thing with a group of people that we pulled together and and lit up 3000 some odd buildings across the country and stuff. People were so happy to go out and hang lights, you know, and program lights and hit buttons and stuff like they were just so excited to do that.

43:03 But you know the other really positive thing I think that came from COVID in in the entertainment space is the pent up demand created such an explosion of growth in in the market and an explosion of of demand for live events and live music that you know you have every average or better artist playing in stadiums, you have comedians playing in stadiums, 5060 thousand seats stadiums and it ain't getting any smaller. It isn't slowing down. You know one of the things that and I keep quoting this on my podcast but Rapino from Live Nation said in there I think it was their quarterly earnings report or something. He said that growth is is going to continue in 2024 and here's why.

43:59 These artists have like 10 million followers on their platforms and all I my job's easy. I have to sell 500,000 tickets out of 10 million followers. I have a really easy job. So the artists, the promoters, everybody's looking to expand that from 5% to 10 or 15% of their followers, right? Right. But they didn't have those followers before. The pandemic. Pandemic is what got them those followers because they had to adapt, right. You know, they they we're going to, we're one day we're going to call it. They had the Taylor Swift it. Right. So they, they swifted an audience together and that's what fills their stadium.

44:41 You know, back in the day, you know, we we did concerts to sell records, then we did records to sell concerts of. Course, yeah. Now we build social networks. Yeah. And we can sell anything we want. Yeah, yeah, it's, it's, it's crazy though. I mean to me that's one of the craziest things that's come out of COVID is the amount of demand and growth in the. I didn't see it coming. I didn't see the the live music, live event, entertainment space growing as much as it as it is. And I know the AV side of the business, conference conventions, corporate meetings and stuff is still coming back like it's it hasn't had the explosive growth from what I understand anyways.

45:22 Oh, I'm not sure I agree with that. I think it has had very explosive growth. Yeah, 'cause most of the companies that I talked to say that, you know, it's still coming back. Basically, like, you know, a lot of the the massive stuff that they used to do is still coming back, 'cause there are companies that laid into even 23 were uncomfortable putting 5000 of their staff in a in a ballroom or whatever. Yeah, so there's a certain there's a. There are types of events that have not come back, but they've been replaced by three other events. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, right. So there's, I mean the the, the surge of work that we saw in 20/22/2022 revenue far exceeded 20/19/23 exceeded 2019 though it didn't exceed 2022, yeah, because remember 2022 we had pent up demand, it was wild Wild West prices were through the roof. 2023 is pretty darn normal.

46:17 It was way better than 2019, much more profitable, right. And 2024 is even more normal in that our lead times have gotten longer. So big events are are definitely back, small events are bigger because we're pricing them correctly, right. And the difference between, you know, in 2019, the difference between a good company and somebody who is a poser, their difference in price was 5%. The difference in price between those two companies now is 30%. Really. Yeah, there's there's tons of posers out there still. Those are the people who have the same revenue or less than they had before and are telling you that meetings aren't coming back.

47:04 Yeah, because they're the same company they were before. Right, Yeah. Right. That's probably not all of them. But typically when I find somebody who has not seen the upside of the post pandemic era, it's because they're the same company they were before. What about So as a as a consultant, business coach, etcetera, are you dealing with a lot of the downside of that explosive growth in you know, mental health, physical health? You know, I know people who have literally worked themselves to death since since the pandemic where, you know, they just said, well, I lost a truck driver, I'll drive the truck. I lost, I lost, you know, whatever, I'll, I'll do that gig too. And their weekends became shorter and shorter, their rest periods became shorter, their sleep became less and their health went to shit.

47:51 And they died, you know? Yeah, there are. There are certainly business owners out there who took on too much and didn't. I mean that's always been true. You know what they were like that before. What what I think we we have to come to grips with that the pandemic was traumatic. I don't care how well you think you survived it, it had a significant toll. And what I see in the owners that I deal with is a lot of untreated trauma, and particularly particularly in the older generations. You know, the the folks under 40 fared a little bit better, a little bit more resilient. The older guys, they don't realize how big a toilet took on them emotionally, how much pain they've been packing down.

48:38 They've lost a lot of their their vim and vigor for the business because they they missed the self-care. Yeah. And and you know, again, maybe it's different on the concert touring side because I'm actually seeing the problem more so in some of the younger people who who didn't necessarily grow up in touring in the grind where, you know, you were on the road 11 months out of the year or whatever. It's much more corporate now and people have more normal hours and stuff. But since COVID, they've been worn down to a point. Like I had a call with a guy today who's a fairly successful young production manager who's done some sort of mid size acts and done really, really well with it and he's leaving the industry. He's he's looking to to do something entirely different. And he was asking for my help to help him figure out what that next step is and introduce him to some people and stuff. And I I have a lot of those conversations with, you know, whether they're lighting people, sound people, production management people, whatever they are, the last two years has just worn them down.

49:46 Yeah, and I and and I wonder about that, 'cause I do have clients who are in the concert space and they struggle to find people, right. Which means that, you know, people are doing stuff more back-to-back. You know, their local crews aren't as much help as they were before the pandemic. They can't. You get a 20 man order for stage hands and you know, 10 show up. So everybody's working hard for them. You know, there's there's a lot of things going on there. But what I'm really hearing is somebody who's employing these people is not facing the reality that you can't keep these people in the field and not address these issues. Right? So the industry has changed. We need to do something different. Yeah, burning people out. And I mean, I hey, I mean, I manage, I manage staff, I manage freelancers, right?

50:33 The most precious thing you have when you're managing the resources of your company is time. You got to reduce the amount of time equipment is not working, as in out of repair, out of service and you've got to manage the amount of time your team has downtime. Yeah, and. If you're not managing downtime, and you're not looking at the schedule and being first and foremost aware of the downtime for that person, you're just shooting yourself. You're just creating a problem that you can't. You're saying making sure that they take downtime? Yeah. Who's giving? No, no. So if if my if my employee, if my employee gets to choose when they work and their tendency is to work themselves to death, management needs to take notice. Yeah, right.

51:20 First of all, why would any employee get to self select how hard or how long they work? What are they working on? So are you just taking advantage of somebody and hope they don't die on your show, right? Or are you are you burning out an asset? Right. Yeah. So what's the highest and best use of this person? It's not running him into the ground. I mean, I did horrible corporate touring shows in the 80s, right? Yeah, you know, with a with a 27 hour day. Yeah. Yeah, you. Sleep under the You sleep under the front of house console or whatever you take. Yeah. Yeah, no, I I completely get what you're saying and it's it's an important thing. And I mean, I think a lot of the older school owners, myself included, tend to forget sometimes that you do really need to manage that and pay very close attention to that 'cause we didn't when we were younger, you know.

52:09 And and look at how you buy touring. You buy on a weekly rate. Yeah. You don't really think that you need to pay more than you did four years ago? Yeah. So what do we short? We short the labor. Yeah, yeah. Touring companies don't want to. I mean, they want to own all the gear. They're not going to sub rent gear to send it out on a tour. They're going to own all that gear. Yeah. So all of a sudden they're not really making money on labor. They have to put people on the show. Yeah. So I mean, we're cutting quarters at the one place we can't cut corners because we aren't willing to tell the the tour manager or the producer saying, I'm sorry, I can't do this for 6000 bucks a week. Yeah, well, I mean, even your gear, you know your gear, if you don't take it out of Commission every once in a while and make sure that it's cleaned up and fixed up and checked and everything else, it's going to start failing you too. Let me ask you this.

52:59 So let's say you have a business owner who's who's been, you know, sleeping for the last 20 years and he comes to you and goes, Tom, I'm going to reboot my business. What are some of the things that have changed in the industry, like some of the big things that have changed in the industry from 20 years ago to today? I love the question. 20 years ago I started when I was back when I was doing magazine articles, when we used to get, you know, paper magazines that would come in the mail and pile up on your desk. And there was I. It was three different trade magazines that I wrote for every single month. And I remember writing this article about scope of work proposals. We're an industry which until really 15 years ago, the norm for 99% of the people in our industry was to write in a line by line equipment list, line by line labour, show the client 24 pages of line items with a price on each one and maybe a discount somewhere or a few price adjustments. Yeah, right.

54:00 That's how everyone sold. So 20, somebody coming, you know, out of a coma from 20 years ago when they write a a proposal, that's what they're going to do because that's what we all did. And I was like, that's the worst possible way to sell. Now, there are channels and stuff where you have to sell that way. If you got a technical buyer in touring, you're damn right somebody's scrutinizing every part and piece that you're sending their commodity buyers, right? But if you have a good tour client, you're going to tell them I'm going to send everything it takes. It's 8000 bucks a week. Yeah. And they're going to go. Thank God you're available. We want you to have on the show. We can make that number work.

54:42 You know what's interesting? I didn't know that that change had taken place because I'm not on that side of the business, of course. So, but that's how I've always quoted things because a couple of reasons. You know, one you make it too easy for them to just take one line out of it and go Google it and get a lower price. And it's not fair because you know, nine of my other 10 prices might have been lower than the other ones. And you can't just pull one line out and go price shop it. It doesn't make any sense. And this this show isn't just 10 lines, you know, it's it's so many other things. Well, so and do they know what can be pulled out, right. You know, I remember you know you know back in the day you know when we were doing slide shows we had a an item.

55:27 When you're doing multi image slide shows, you had a computer and you had a data booster which is basically what we would think of as a DMX splitter right. And it and it, it protected the signal, so it's and and you put it on each end of the snake to get to wherever your control devices were and producers look at that oh we can we don't need two of those. We just need one because they want to. They want to save 15 bucks. And we started saying, well, this is stupid. That's going to screw everything up. Yeah, right. So we just sort of saying this is not negotiable. Here's everything it takes to do an 18 projector slideshow. Yeah, right. And so it's not 18 projectors and six stackers and, you know, 18 lenses and 18 mounts.

56:08 And you know, no. Here's everything it takes to do an 18 projector slideshow. And how did they accept that though? Like what? That had to take some time to create that behavioral change in in the buyers. It's It usually takes one time, huh? So you lose that show and and. Sometimes. Often you often you don't. Often what they'll do is they'll piss and moan about it. You'll give them a little break somewhere else. That doesn't matter, right? You throw them a little because you're not changing the price. It's the same price, Yeah. You're just taking away all the little things that they can pick at. That one is not helping anybody's time and the fact is, I'm gonna send it anyway.

56:58 Yeah. So if you were gonna send it anyway, why are you even telling the customer you're charging? For it, it's totally true. Just wrap it into the price. And so we started doing things like, say, when you run a video projector, it includes all the things it takes to make the video projector work, rather than listing all the things that go with the video projector. Well, one of the ones so. That's the beginning. Yeah. One of the ones I used to always remember with automated lights, with moving lights was especially if you had cameras on a show or it was a video shoot of some sort of television shoot or something, they didn't want to pay for new lamps, right? You know, I want to pay X amount of dollars per light and I'm going to rent these lights and I don't want to pay for any. And then they'd come and they would complain for days that the color temperature doesn't match perfectly in all of the lamps, you know, and you know, I gave you that option.

57:46 So now the only thing we can do is filter down to sort of the lowest temperature that works for you or whatever. But I mean, it was always, it was always this argument over, you know, no, we don't wanna pay for new lamps, but yes, we want all the lamps to match. Well, how can I do that without putting new lamps in the fixtures? Sir. You know, I mean, it just doesn't make any sense. Yeah, I mean people always, you know, lighting is always a hard thing to price, especially in the AV world, cuz if you're competing with a entertainment lighting people, the price points are much, much different, right? And you could rent a a source for ellipsoid over $18.00 a week, but if you go to the AV company it's $60.00 a week, right.

58:27 So one of the things we used to say and it doesn't always work as saying, well, does the company you're running from bench focus it after every job? Well, no. Do they put new lamps? What? What? Right. So it's like no, there's so it's a different value proposition. So again, it's understanding what it is you're doing, where you fit in the marketplace that makes a difference. Yeah, I mean, that quoting thing is interesting because again, I I didn't even know that that change happened. It makes a ton of sense, but are there any other major things that you'd you'd tell that freshly awoken business owner? Hey by the way, this is going to be a lot different now.

59:07 I think that's the big thing. The other big thing is that, you know, compared to that era and now if you own all the equipment and people that you need to do all the jobs that you're going to do, you are not going to make money in this economy. Really. That model does not work. It is not viable because you'll never have the utilization unless you have solved the seasonality problem, which I always ask whenever I stand in front of an audience and say guys, quick quick conversation, you guys all talk to each other, tell me how you solve seasonality for your business. Go. There's no answer to it. Yeah. We're a seasonal industry, so how can you run a business that has overhead that's not being used three or four or five or six months out of the year just so they can be super busy for the other half of the year?

59:57 But how do you outsource that overhead if everybody else is busy too? That's not true. We haven't. We were over saturated right before the pandemic. Everybody had too many employees on staff. There was tons of freelancers out there. Nobody had trouble finding people to staff a show. Right. Right. Why do you have direct labor on staff? Name a theater company that has full time technicians. No. You're right, Name an act that has full time technicians. Yeah, you're right. Why do we have full time technicians? It's a gig industry and all the best people gig the best people. There are some fantastic people who are staff, but if you want to know who the best of a job is in any segment, I guarantee you as a freelancer.

1:00:49 Yeah. You were saying though that that you know it's you can't be profitable if you own all your gear and all your people and stuff. But is that different at scale, In other words, if if you're a much larger business with 20 offices? And there's no scale that it works. OK. Because you're always going to have seasonality. You're always going to have to sell. You're always buying equipment and hiring people ahead of demand, right? If that's your model, you have to hire ahead of demand. Then you turn away work, right? If you could always sell beyond your inside resources and you can always outsource, you can sell as much as you want. In the example I always get one of my one of my clients that I've had for many years, they had 70 employees. Pre Pandemic they did $15 million a year of business. They were not profitable, I mean just not profitable right? Post Pandemic 2022, they did $18 million worth of business with 30 employees and they did over 20% net profit. And the team, no one in sales, no one in operations, no one in finance.

1:02:05 Broke a sweat. End of the year meeting. How was the year for you, man? We did a lot of business. Who's burned out? We're not burned out. Yeah. They they had not a single technician on staff. They did not buy any new equipment. They subreddited whatever they needed to. They hired freelancers. They built a they went from a fifty person freelance pool to a 300 person freelance pool. Yeah, but so you know again different industries but comparing that to the the concert industry 20/21/22 when when equipment shortages were such a a massive problem and people shortages, the companies who had their own equipment and people were a able to charge more B able to take on more work.

1:02:49 You know C probably more profitable because the the people who had to sub rent people and and gear were overpaying. Often times they were unable to get everything they needed. I did not see that at all. No, no, I mean, I mean you you yourself experience fact. We have a surplus of gear. Everybody's dumping gear on your platform. Yeah. Right. And then they weren't. And then there was like. But then they. But then they weren't, right? Yeah. So again, we can't, we can't use 21 or 22 as a benchmark. That's true, yeah. 2023 is our benchmark. Yeah. OK. 2023 is our close.

1:03:29 To normal as I. Think is our is our first pretty normal year. We're as normal as we could be all year. We haven't had any shutdowns. We haven't had any things that's caused people to cancel meetings. It's been fairly normal demand. But again, if you have a seasonal industry and so let's call it corporate meetings and it's seasonal. If if I don't own all my gear or all my people who am I cross renting from? If it's seasonal for them as well and their season matches mine because it's the AV industry or am I renting from the rock'n'roll or theater industry because they're not as busy? There's there is always somebody who's not busy that week, but the fact is you know we have a wholesale market.

1:04:12 Yeah, there are plenty of wholesale suppliers out there particularly on the pro AV side. There certainly is I mean if you look at it half APR GS business is being a wholesale supplier, yeah for sure to to other companies, right. So there are plenty of suppliers out there who are B to B suppliers that we can rent from in every local market. There's five other companies that do what you do who have parts and pieces available that week and we trade back and forth just like we did in the 90s right before der, right, right. So before there was a wholesale market, we had all these people who did business together. We never had trouble finding gear. So there's plenty of gear out there. You just may need 10 go to suppliers instead of two. Yeah.

1:04:54 Now it makes sense. I mean I completely agree with you. It's it's you know those are the most expensive moving parts in these businesses. And and again when you're when it's a seasonal business and it's a down season, the last thing you want is a huge warehouse full of inventory and tons of people that need feeding. And it it just doesn't make any sense. Like you need your you need your expenses to rise and fall with your income. Right. And that's, you know, that's the plug again for my book balance because this operating system, it works the same in in in concert touring companies, corporate AV companies, you know, I got Broadway clients, right? It's all the same problem.

1:05:37 Yeah. If we put too much direct labor and direct resources into our resource pool, we have to sell on revenue. We got to sell on price in order to keep it busy. Yeah, yeah. It's a death spiral, and the only way to break the death spiral is to be inherently profitable and outsourced whenever you need to, so you don't buy permanent overhead to try and keep up. Let's let's get a quick plug on that book. Where can people get it at? On Amazon, I would assume. Well, you you can certainly get it on Amazon balanced by Tom Stimson. Yeah, can you get it on your website and. You could drop on my website, it gets it sold on your website. No, I don't sell it on my website.

1:06:17 I want as many people to have at Amazon is way better at this than I am. But if you pop by my website at trstimson.com, shoot me an e-mail, have a chat, something like that, I'd be happy to send you a copy. Yeah, now I'm definitely gonna grab the book because I I love what you're what you're talking about. I like all of this stuff a whole bunch. So going back to our guy that was sleeping for 20 years, let me ask you something. What do you tell him about AI? This this poor SAP? What are you gonna tell this poor SAP who probably hasn't even seen an iPhone yet? You know, he may have a BlackBerry. Well, assuming he actually was in a coma, but you know, if they were just out of the industry, you know, I'd say AI is just a tool, right. I'm, I'm not sure what in our industry AI replaces except that I use it.

1:07:09 Yeah, every meeting I I take with a with a client or a prospect. You know my note taker is an AI bot. You know it's giving me notes and bullet points and reminders and you know transcripts and everything. It's being it's very intuitive. We're using AI to you know to generate podcast content to do intros and outros. There's so many things that we could use for AI for in the meetings industry right to make life easier. How you know, I'm from the the old days when we used to do, you know live walk ONS, you had to have the voice of God Mike to to walk the executive on and then we sort of like recording on tape and we're splicing reel to reel. Why not just type the script in and run it through your AI bot? It'll be perfect every time.

1:07:51 Yeah, I mean, of course, the industry though is concerned with the fact that we can't be that far away from lighting consoles that program themselves and audio consoles that read the room and set themselves. And. Yay. But again, those are those are jobs that are pretty well paying jobs as. Well, we're not. We're not getting rid of jobs. You know what? You know? Remember what consoles used to be like? Yeah, you know, they were so big that you had to lean to both sides to get to the faders, right? Yeah. Technology gets easier, easier to apply. It gets easier to engineer. You need to be less of a rocket scientist in order to make it work, which means you get to be more of an artist.

1:08:32 Yeah, yeah, I. Agree with you, AI. Agree with you. We know that AI AI sucks at art. OK, there's still gonna be an operator there, but God, what? I mean, how many people are using something to wring out the room? Why do you say AI sucks at art? Cuz I've seen some pretty incredible AI art. Is it? Is it art or is it? This is always the question, no, but this is always the question. The same with music. Music that's created by AI. Is that art, or is that something else you know? Right. So it's it's the self driving car thing. At what point in time do you not want to be. I'm not ready to be in a self driving car. Yeah, right. I I, you know, I want an operator there because there's that moment. Yeah I might.

1:09:16 I know the. Car instead of the Uber driver these days, you know. But there's a point in time. We all want to make sure our show goes well. And there are things that are always out of our control. And I trust me to mute the CEO when they're barfing up along on stage or they're going to the bathroom with their mic on more than I trust AI to do it. Yeah, Did you hear that one? I think there's always. That one live thing that they did on on Twitter or whatever, where Vivek Ramaswami went and took a leak and he had his mic on and they kept going. Vivek, you got a live mic. Vivek. Vivek, you got a live mic. There's a there's a piece on Welcome to Wrexham where Ryan Reynolds does that.

1:09:59 I remember that that is. Such a great. Show. By the way, I don't even know whoever turned me on to that show. Thank you, because I I, my girlfriend is British and a huge soccer fan. But I am. I'm Canadian. I don't. I don't know what. Soccer is it's it's a it's a great show. It's a great show, really good show. It has been great visiting with you. This has been a blast. Thank you. Super, super cool. No, I mean, I, you know, I could talk to you for another two hours, but I obviously have to be very cognizant of your time. So you know, your book balance, how to build a scalable business with less stress and more profit. Get it at Amazon. Give me two minutes. What is intentional success? I know that you have groups and you have coaching and. So attention to success, this is really my philosophy. I mean, what are you doing to have success? What are the steps that you're taking? We spend so much time wishing that things were better. What are we actually doing about it? So most of what we have to do is overcome obstacles in order to be better.

1:11:02 And that takes intention. Yeah. So we can let business happen to us or we can take steps to make business work better for us. So that's what intentional success is all about. There are things that we could all be doing to be better. So, right, Intentional success clubs are my peer group clubs where we meet monthly, we meet in person, we help each other with their businesses. I do, of course I do the intentional Success podcast. So these. Are like CEOs in in the AV industry and company owners. Yeah, these are these are owner operators for the businesses. I've got a group that has, you know 2nd and commands with them as well. I do management team groups. We do one-on-one coaching. I do business assessments and road mapping.

1:11:44 When you've got competitive business owners all in this group talking about intentional. Another thing that that guy from 20 years ago was going to find out that if he's worried about his competitors, he should just go back to sleep. Yeah, you're not wrong. No, nobody. Nobody is your competitor. Yeah. Now, what are the odds that, you know, two people in my group work across the street from each other and chase the same business? They're not. The fact of the matter is, when you find out that even if you knew everything about your competitor's business, what are you going to do with the information? That's true. Yeah, right. Why not learn from each other? You support each other and the fact is they're not competitors. They're people who are doing the same thing and need support. Yeah, the transparency that has become from social media and stuff, it's one of the things that I really like is we're not hiding all of those secrets anymore. It's all blemishes and all are put out there on social media. So.

1:12:37 So these groups are meeting how often? We meet every month. OK, so once a month and they're all virtual meetings? Yeah, they're once a month virtual meetings. We do meet in person a couple of times a year and then all of my club members get one-on-one coaching with me whenever they need it. And again, if anyone's interested in that, they just go to your website and they can. Sign, go to my website or e-mail me at tomtrstimson.com. Happy to chat with you about it, Help you understand how it works, how it might apply to your business. Yeah, so cool. Again, I've been following you since. I think it was Griff Palmer who sent me article that you wrote about inventory and he said, Marcel, you got to get to know this guy, smart guy. And I read the article, loved it, shared it a whole bunch and I've been following you since.

1:13:21 So I appreciate you taking the time to come on and look forward to talking to you a whole lot more. We'll bring you back on again when I know more better questions to ask you and. Well, it's it's been a treat. I'm happy to do it again and we'll who knows, we might even have better AV. Yeah, yeah, our mics might work. Thanks again. All right. Cheers. All right.