#253 - Paul Vincent

0:01 Hello there, and thanks for joining me today for Gears of Gear Episode 253. I just finished recording the podcast about probably 30 minutes ago. And again, thank you so much to our sponsors on this podcast. Today was Ultimate Support Act Entertainment and Gear Source. And so I recorded this with Paul Vincent. Paul was in the industry since the mid 70s and has such a great story to tell. I didn't know that his parents were both enacting and I also didn't know that it took him 10 years to sell his business. So hearing his multiple stories discussing how complicated that was, how how difficult it was to sell a business, and then ultimately dealing with private equity companies, what that's like sort of the good and bad of private equity. And just a story from somebody who who is a very good storyteller.

0:57 So I hope you like it. Hello and thanks for coming to episode #253 of Geezers of Gear. Today's podcast is brought to you by Ultimate Support Systems, a part of ACT Entertainment. For over 45 years, Ultimate Support Systems has provided musicians with unique Support Solutions just like this one that's holding my microphone right now that I happen to love. These are crafted with unparalleled innovation and quality. Ultimate Support has always been determined to invent, design and manufacture the smartest Support Solutions and musical accessories in the music industry, and that commitment to innovation continues to this day. Be sure to visit ultimatesupport.com where you can learn all about their solutions for content creators, touring musicians, recording studios and more. From acoustic treatment to best in class speaker stands, Ultimate Support has premium accessories that you can count on.

2:01 And today's podcast is also brought to you by Gear Source. Founded in 2002 with an ambitious mission to support live events, businesses buy and sell gear globally. Since that time, the company has transacted in more than 100 countries, selling 1/4 billion dollars in sound, lighting, staging and video gear. Gearsource continues to evolve the platform for massive global growth, enabling localized currencies, payments held in escrow to protect buyers and sellers, AI powered logistics behind a new global logistics brand, and much more. Throughout 2024 and beyond, the company will continue to grow its toolbox for the benefit of users worldwide. So why not take full control over your gear with a visit to gearsource.com today?

3:21 Hello and welcome back to Geese of Gear. Believe it or not, I don't actually have much to talk about today on our intro. I will tell you that one of our great sponsors, Row Visual, is involved with the I would call it soccer, but all of you smarter than me. People would call it football, but UEFA, which stands for I'm not sure what EU is, but I'm sure it's European Football Association. EU might be united. I don't know what it is, but UEFA UEFA 2024 live broadcasts have been upgraded by using Row Visual and I'm not sure exactly what it is. I was looking through the article trying to figure out exactly what their part was, but it looks like a lot of really cool stuff is going on.

4:20 Row has provided not only the backdrop, but I believe also the floor, if I have this correct. But anyways, it looks cool. It's there's a shiny floor, a shiny LED floor, and just a lot going on. So yeah, good on row. I mean, this is beautiful. I actually thought that this broadcast was being done with all these buildings and stuff in the background. It's just so well done when you look at the images, like it's sort of a surround LED screen that looks like a cityscape at different parts of the day depending on when the broadcast is.

5:03 And then the floor might show things like what teams are playing, a score, whatever. Super cool. So check that out if you can. I think Rowe has it published on their website. Maybe Sarah can provide a link to it in the final recording. And of course, back to my favorite topic, which is currently AI. There's a lot going on. You know, I, I didn't actually grab any articles to talk to you about today, but one that I've been following, Google has something and I already forget what it's called. It's called like something DJ or music something. I apologize, I read it yesterday and I meant to keep a copy of the article, but it's basically DJ software that it's sort of like DJ version of Muzak where you can just put in a few things.

5:56 Like I want something that's 108 beats per minute. I want it to be sort of a, you know, hip hop, blah, blah, blah. Like I don't know what terms these DJs are using to explain their music these days, but you know, basically you put in the vibe that you want what instruments you might want. Like I want bass, drums and piano in this song and, and it'll spit out a a beat for you that has all of those elements in it. It's not perfect, but it's pretty darn good. And, and then there's another version of it where you can tweak it, where you can slide faders, more hip hop, more bass, more drums.

6:37 And it'll, you know, the AI will tweak that, that response back. So, you know, again, like there's all kinds of screaming going on over this new Google product, which I guess is part of their new Gemini AI system. But you know, it's not meant to replace DJ's. I guess at the lowest end, if you talk about your lowest level DJ, somebody who's in a car dealership DJ ING because they're having a 4th of July sale in the dealership and he's just putting together a mix of songs that can easily be replaced. But that could also be replaced by, you know, Apple Music or Spotify or any of the systems have have a setup that will mix music for you and put together like songs and stuff.

7:25 This is this is more than that. Like this actually creates songs based on what it is you want. So this is geared more towards like performance DJs, DJs who are going out and doing festivals and stuff like that. I don't think it's all the way there yet for the real professional folks, guys, girls, but it does seem promising. And you know, so I actually saw, I think it was CNET had a video of a New York DJ called I believe it's Nas or Paz or something. Sorry if everyone's laughing at me right now. Not a DJ guy. But anyways, he, he was reviewing the system and he had some very high grades on certain parts of it and then just beat the hell out of it on other parts. But the system claims not to be trying to replace DJs necessarily, but to augment and to support DJs and make their job easier, allow them to create music more and leave sort of the boring stuff to to the AI.

8:26 However, it oversteps that because it's actually creating the music too. So I don't know if that's what it intends to do or if that's what its main function is, but it is creating music and it is putting together these beats and these mixes. And so very interesting. And really that's all I got for you on on AI stuff today. I, I just didn't do a lot of research. It's been a crazy busy week. And so there you have it. So today's guest is someone that I think most of you will know. Paul Vincent is the founder or was the founder in 1978 of Vincent Lighting Systems which sells and services theater, television and architectural lighting and rigging systems and related equipment. I'm sure most of you know that Vincent Lighting Systems also provides an extensive rental inventory, production and rigging services and in stock theatrical supplies. Paul sold the company to Cleveland based Canterbury Capital in 2017 and retired from the business in 2019 after a successful transition to their new leadership. Paul has presented numerous lighting management and business workshops and seminars over the past 45 years to students and users, designers, architects, electrical engineers and electrical contractors.

9:48 So please join me and welcome Paul Vincent to the podcast. Hi, Paul. Hi, Marcel, how you been? I've been OK. I've been, I'm up in Canada so I'm freezing to death. And it's, it's very weird. Like June 20th we got snow. We had snow on the ground like it, it wasn't 2 feet of snow. It was maybe 1/4 of an inch of snow. But we had big flakes of snow blowing through the air and landing on the ground and, and surviving. And you know, it's been a weird year in Canada. I wasn't here. I just got here early June, but they didn't really have a very cold winter at all. Skiing was terrible.

10:33 They didn't get a lot of snow until March. Like March is basically when winter started and they just got piles of snow and cold weather and everything else. So it's kind of delayed the start of summer too, which is, which is very interesting. But, you know, I grew up up here, so I know that, you know, don't get too friendly with the weather because it's about to change very dramatically, you know? So like right now, you know, this morning we had a fire going because it was in the high 30s. And tomorrow it's, I think going up to 78 or something. So just weird weird. Stuff. Well, I'm on the southern shore of Lake Erie in Ashtabula, OH, which is a small city about 50 miles from Cleveland.

11:22 I grew up in Cleveland originally, and so I've been on the shores of Lake Erie really my whole life. And today it's going up to 88. And we're supposed to, I'm hoping we got a lot in the garden. So I'm hoping that it rains later and I don't have the water. Well, so that's the other thing up here is, you know, there's everyone's complaining, it's just been raining all the time because literally pretty much every day, almost every day we're getting some rain and it's going to start going away over the next few days. But what that's done is it's pretty much completely negated forest fires for this summer. And so some summers I'll come up here and you got to leave your windows closed because there's just so much smoke outside, not to mention, you know, the damage to houses or property or whatever.

12:14 But I'm just talking from a comfort level, you know, breathing this air and it's, it's not good at all. And so this year, I think we're going to have a pretty knock on my wooden head, you know, a mild fire season, hopefully as a result of all the rain. Well, we're familiar with your fires because we get the smoke coming down here. Yeah. Was it last year or the year before where like Chicago had to close the airport and stuff? Right, right. It was, I think both years. Yeah, yeah, it was really. And The funny thing was like last year, we didn't get any of it here. The year before was pretty bad up here. But yeah, last year it just kind of blew right by us to you guys.

12:54 And New York was a real problem even. Yes. So yeah, it's crazy. I I don't know, you know, we were, we were right before we started talking or recording. Anyways, you were telling me about a book you're reading right now about, about, you know, climate change or, or whatever everyone wants to call it this week. But what? What is that book? It's called the Ministry for the Future and it's it's set probably between 10 and 20 years from now. And the the few, the agency is part of the UN and it's located in Switzerland in Zurich.

13:36 And it's about the woman who runs the agency. And then it's about the topic is mostly about climate change. And climate change shouldn't be confused with global warming. It's true that the globe is warming. At least that's what I think. And ocean temperatures are rising. But climate change can also be, as you said, forest fires. Forest fires because people did not, the native peoples were not allowed to continue to burn the brush that needed to be burned. And now they've started, you know, doing some of that. And the question that is posed in this book is, is it too late or is it not too late?

14:20 And I'm on chapter 78 and and we don't know yet. We know that it's bad. For example, 20 million people die in India because of heat exposure. Old, young, a wide range. And one of the protagonists or maybe hero, I don't know yet, we'll see in the book is a young American who went to India in order to help people. And he sees everyone dying around him, and the power is out for the entire country. 20 million people ultimately die. And somehow he's the only person that survives in his town. And he ends up actually in Switzerland.

15:02 And he has this encounter with the head of this agency. It's pretty fascinating. Wow, how? How do you find this book? Seth Godin who does a blog and and I read his blog most every day. Some days it's really weird and some days it's just so spot on. And I share it with my team in my company, you know, a Side Story. So I probably started following Seth Godin, I'm guessing before you did, just because I started following him in like 2000. And so a very funny story. So when I left the last company where I was sort of employed, I was a minority owner, but there was a board and a management team above me. But when I left that company in 2001, I wasn't sure what I was going to do next, but I knew I was going to do something on completely on my own.

16:00 Finally, I, I was just too entrepreneurial to be inside these companies. And I also didn't want to just go work for another moving light manufacturer, which I had done for 20 years. And so I, I don't even remember how I learned about it, but there was this CD set with a really cheesy name like making money on the Internet or something like that. And it was Seth Godin. And I think by that time I had been reading his newsletter because he had a, an e-mail list and a newsletter. And I think I was on his newsletter and it announced this CD set. And I bought the CD set. And at the time I lived on a golf course and I had a pool in my backyard. So I'd sit out there and listen to these CDs and I went through it twice.

16:47 And so really what I knew was that I wanted an Internet company. I wanted something, I wanted a remote company. And remote companies didn't exist at the time. But by then I had a place up in Canada where I'm from, and I lived in Florida where my business was based. But I wanted to be able to be back and forth without it causing any disruption whatsoever. And in my mind, I was starting to create a scenario for a remote Internet company basically. And so listen to the CD set and he tells this story of a a particular bird in in Africa that rhinos or hippopotamuses, I can't remember which one it was, but one of them sits in the water with their mouth open.

17:34 The bird flies in their mouth and eats all of the stuff out of the tea, out of its teeth and cleans its teeth. And the moral of the story is, you know, the hippo ended up with clean teeth and the bird lived off of that food, you know, out of his teeth, as disgusting as that is. And but what he was suggesting is what you need to do is create a business where you're taking a very small amount from lots of different sources, but something that's not a meaningful amount from them. And that becomes your food. And to them it's it's meaningless. But you're providing them a service which is quite generic as an idea. But immediately I saw that as manufacturers in our industry have have a problem that many of them don't even see coming yet. And part of this was based on my concept that technology was suddenly moving much more quickly than it had been in the past, especially automated lighting. Automated lighting was now going from version one to two to three to four very quickly.

18:39 You know, because you were on the painful side of it where you had to keep up with this in your inventory. And but manufacturers and distributors that I had worked for and that I was very knowledgeable about, we're not recognizing this pattern. And what was happening is inventory was get getting pushed further back on their shelf while the new models were coming in and going in front of it. Because what do sales teams love to do? They love to call their customers and say we've got a new thing. You know, it's got a new widget and and new features. You know, sales people, and I've been one all my life, are generally pretty lazy. We'll go to the lowest hanging fruit.

19:20 We'll use the easiest pitch we possibly can to get the order. And so that's usually the latest, greatest stuff. It's hard to motivate a sales team to take care of your last year's inventory problems unless you incentivize them and say I'll pay you all the profit on the sale or something. Well, at the. Same time, you know, if you can get a customer to say yes the first time, it's so much easier to get them to continue to say yes and you can create lifelong relationship with them. Well, because now they've gone from a prospect to a customer to a friend or or at least a relationship, right? And I've built a career on relationship selling. I've created relationships with thousands of people. And some of them are very shallow relationships where it's just a transactional relationship. And some of them I go on vacation with these people, you know, like they're true, just like you. I know you have very deep friendships in the industry and it's one of the great things about our industry. Indeed.

20:17 But just to finish that story, so you know, I created this concept for what is now Gear Source based around manufacturers needing someone to focus on discontinued inventory or B stock inventory stuff they were sending out on demos. It was coming back and getting pushed back on the shelf again, right? And I saw this on my own inventory control reports in companies that I was managing or working for. And so I knew it was a problem that existed. So I was solving a real problem. And then from there it sort of developed more into like where rental companies started saying, can you solve this problem for me to like get rid of my old stuff. And that is the bulk of our Business Today really is, is rental company both acquiring inventory and disposing of inventory. That's our biggest market today.

21:10 But that was all based on Seth Godin. So it's funny when you bring up his name. Yeah, he's, he's a pretty interesting guy, I'll just say that. He's definitely colorful, you know, starting from his presence, you know, a big bright red or blue sunglasses and he's but he's so smart. He really is so smart. He's not everyone's flavor, but you know, I've read most of his books, almost all of his books. I have his latest one something song. I have it sitting in my to be read file. But you know, I'm I'm a huge fan. Like Purple Cow was a great book and, and just like again, one of the things that I was really early on when I started Gearsource in 2002, I had a permission based e-mail marketing list. Nobody was doing e-mail marketing at the time, hardly anyone, not, not no one, but very few companies in our industry were doing e-mail marketing. And so I focused on building that list, which is now I think 25,000 people or something on our e-mail market. And we still to this day people think e-mail is dead, but Gearsource a big part of our, our marketing focus really is on our e-mail list and our subscribers and providing good valuable information to them on a timely basis. So.

22:34 Yeah, it doesn't surprise me. Yeah. So you've been retired now for what, five years and I'm guessing? Retired to the funny word June of 2017 and then I retired when Bill Greener came in as the new President on December 1st of 2018. So I usually say I've been retired since 2019 because it was near the end of the year. Right, right. Fiscal or calendar year 2018, fiscal year 2018 or whatever. But no, that's, I envy you in a sense. You know, you got out, but at the same time, I'm sure you know, you've found other things within our industry that you're still involved in. I know that you've been a big guy on boards and stuff like that.

23:26 Like that's always been a really important part of your life and your journey. Are you still doing a lot of that stuff? I was, I'm still involved with the Musical Theater Project, which is a nationwide organization, but it's located here in Cleveland. I'm a, an Ameritai board member and an advisor for them. And I, I am a scorer, volunteer. Scorer is the Service Corps of retired executives, a part of the Small Business Administration. And so I volunteer my time to help small businesses improve or to help someone establish a small business primarily in Northeast Ohio area.

24:07 I have some specialty work but most of my customers are here. So it's like a mentorship program, sort of. Correct, correct. That's. Really interesting. Back in the day, you know, Score's been around since 1964 and they've helped, you know, thousands of business owners. We have about 10,000 volunteers in 300 chapters and I'm part of the Cleveland chapter and I've done that for three years. And before Score, I was in a similar position with Business Advisors of Cleveland, same thing. I was a volunteer, mentor or coach as they call it. Interesting, Interesting.

24:47 I didn't even know that program existed. That's, that's really, really cool. I, you know, as a business owner who started on my own in my bedroom in my house, building a business and not knowing what the heck I was doing other than I had run other people's businesses for them. But when it's your own and you're responsible for everything from accounting, banking, paying the taxes, paying payroll, you know, etcetera, business development, it's so nice to have access to that kind of a resource. And I had no idea. I didn't look for it either of course, but. Yeah, it's I've hired. Lots of consultants along the way, but. Well, it's a free service, always confidential and so I I enjoy doing that.

25:34 That's really cool. Are you on other boards right now or or those two are are? No, that, that's now primarily it. I, I, you know, was of course involved with ESTA for many years in the earlier days. And I was the vice president and then I became president and there was a group of us, we, we created the former president. So Glenn Becker, who's not with us anymore, John McGraw, who's who is still with us and myself, we're all presidents. And then our little group of included Frank Stewart, who was in in theory treasure for life. That was not the case. And in a way Eric Magnusson who was the original secretary or maybe the second secretary and during my time he was secretary, we became what we like to call the has been society and and occasionally the the new board would ask the three past presidents along with any other help they could get to do certain things on behalf of ESTA to investigate a trade show or things of that nature. And so we did that for several years as well. Weren't you part of like the earliest foundation of ESTA or whatever?

26:49 Like I remember ASTA for me is synonymous with Paul Vincent. You know, I mean well. I don't know about that, but it should be synonymous with Lori Rubenstein, who has been the was the executive director for many years and did an outstanding job, and then the three original founders of the Theatrical Dealers Association. TDA was when it first started and that was Bob Dement, who was Lori's boss at San Diego Stage and Lighting, and then Bob Cannon at Bash and Glenn Becker from Grand Stage. They were the original leaders, if you will. They created the first meeting in Las Vegas and that we were one of 25 founding members of the Theatrical Dealers Association.

27:38 And then about two years in or so, maybe three years in, we became, there was a push because standards making was important and we were approached by larger dealers and manufacturers as well who wanted to be full-fledged members. They we had them as associate members of the TDA. But there was sort of a, you know, it was sort of like this. And I wanted and Lori wanted and other people, I think rightly wanted to create an organization that was inclusive. And so we invited manufacturers to be able to join as full members and change the name to ESTA, the Entertainment Services and Technology Association, at that point in time.

28:26 And that allowed us to bring in a much broader base of support. And ultimately, let's say, during my time, I think we grew to 300 members. And then over time, there are close to 600 members, I think now all based on, you know, work of new volunteers. And the thing that I always loved from the very beginning was that the organization was and is volunteer driven. That's certainly true. And standards development as well. It's volunteer driven. And every time we would have a meeting, whatever that meeting was, we really concentrating on let's get the job done in front of us because we're here for 1-2 or three days maybe, and then we won't be.

29:11 And so let's get it done. That's also very challenging though, when it's when it's all volunteer based because you can't just say, hey, spend the next three weeks doing this, Bob or Tom or whoever, right? Like here's your responsibility for the next couple of weeks. Please get it done. Because people can push back and say, no, I've got a meeting, I've got vacation with my family. I've got, you know, this trade show I've got to be at, so life gets in the way, their own business gets in the way. So it can be very frustrating, I'm sure. It is, but I think that's why when we met, we knew over the next three days we better accomplish 3 months worth of work because it's going to be hard to get people to pay attention when they get back to their families, back to their businesses, etcetera, etcetera. Yeah, I had Jim, Jim Digby on, I don't know, a few months ago talking about that.

30:04 And he said similar things. Like he said, one of the really hard things about a volunteer run organization is just getting the work done, having enough people with enough available time and hands to be able to get the work done. And it can be very, very challenging. You know, even if it's just copywriting or whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is, somebody has to take ownership and and champion that that project and somebody actually has to physically do the work. And it's not always easy to do that. We were fortunate because we had good leadership and we had a good executive director in Laurie and that helped keep people focused. And as we added more things like technical standards, for example, with the, the organization grew within itself.

30:51 In other words, we hired Karl ruling. Eventually we hired the right person, as it turns out, Mr. Weber, who put together the policies and procedures, and everybody complained. You know what? Why does it take so long, blah, blah, blah. Well, he was absolutely right. If you get the policies and procedures in place, and if they're good and they're right, it can become a national standard through ANSI. And that's exactly what happened. So yeah, we were lucky. Going back a bit, I I think you said there were something like 2525 original founding members in the TDA. What was the mission at that time? Well, I think the mission at that time was different because we, we sort of had in the minds of many dealers, not all dealers, but in the minds of many dealers, it was a we versus them, meaning dealers versus manufacturers. That's what I thought and.

31:45 We had to change that thinking and it didn't work for her. There were a few dealers that still even to this day potentially probably look at our becoming an inclusive organization as being negative. In other words, they wanted to see dealers do battle with manufacturers. Yeah. And my approach was, well, the manufacturers, we need the manufacturers to do the right things and they need dealers to do the right things. So let's team up together. And yeah, to me that. Makes more sense. Yeah, much more sense. Well, as soon as you start saying it's US against them, the side with the most guns wins, you know, and that's going to be the manufacturers. Now today, different story.

32:29 Now there are customers who thanks to private equity and and all of that, there are customers now who are larger than the manufacturers and swing a big stick. But back in the day, you know, we were talking about a whole bunch of 5 million to $10 million companies fighting against $100 million manufacturers. And it it's a tough war to win, you know, no. No question, the landscape has changed. It's changed, no question about that. And that's that's healthy. Yeah. So then as you grew into SA, you've already sort of said you wanted to bring manufacturers more into it, you wanted to get into creating standards and stuff.

33:10 So did that become the mission basically as an entire industry based on technical standards and stuff or or what changed going from TDA to ESTA primarily? Well, I think the largest change was the creation of standards that could be recognized through ANZI, because that allowed ESTA to be basically the group that focused on standards and work together with other standards making bodies. Let's face it, USITT, I've been a member of USITT since 1974. USIT has always been in the standard side, but it took the combination of dealers, rental houses and manufacturers together to start creating national standards and creating those policies and procedures that are so important to create successful ANSI standards.

34:08 And you need that recognition. That's important. And so really ESTA became the body, if you will, that created standards on behalf of the entertainment industry and other organizations You just mentioned won the Event Safety Group. They do very important work. And, and I can understand that 'cause I, I attend many of their meetings. I'm not on the board, I'm not involved directly. I'm a member of the ESA and I love the work that they do. And I think it's very important work. And if you if you own a rental company, how can you not be involved with safety? I mean, you know, we all know that as soon as the word safety comes forward, people's eyes gloss over, you know, and that's sad because it's.

34:57 And we all also know, yeah, yeah, we also know that it's never an issue until it's an issue, right? You know, safety is not a concern for people until it becomes a concern for all the wrong reasons. You know, one of your staff members gets hurt or worse or, you know, a local company that you know, has a problem and it puts them out of business or something like that. Like until it becomes a problem for our industry, it's generally not a problem. And, you know, I look at some images of rigors and stuff from the 70s and, and 80s and just some of the stuff that we as an, as an industry did back then. You know, just some of the, they're funny to look at, but you look at them and you just go, Oh my God, I can't believe people did that. You know I.

35:46 Remember being in a, in an arena, an ice arena in Cincinnati, local 5 stage hands. And you know, I was a student and so I was jobbing in and I'm on the top of a 40 foot A-frame ladder being dragged along the ice. And of course they wouldn't let me come down. Every time you had to be moved along the Truss in order to focus more lights. You had to stay right where you were and just pray that they didn't hit a rut or something happened. So the things that we did, that was in 197374. So the things that we did, I'm, I'm just amazed. When you say 73 or 74, do you stop for a second and go? That's 50 years.

36:29 That's 50 years ago. Oh my God, you know. I'm 72 now, so yeah. Oh. Wow, yeah, I I thought you were in mid to late 60s still, but yeah, well, you're doing well. You know, the whole board thing to me, I'm in awe of people who do it, whether whether we're talking about an HOAA homeowner association or condo association or we're talking about associations like the ones that we're discussing right now, like industry associations, which are so vitally important. I'm never the guy raising my hand saying please put me on that board.

37:09 And it's not because I'm lazy. You know, trust me, I'm, I'm not lazy at all. I'm not always a fan of the, I don't know whether it's diplomacy or, or bureaucracy or whatever you want to call it that goes on in these boards. So I will tell you for the first time in my life, other than within my own companies, I've joined a board and I was invited to a board. It's, it's a private equity company that's buying other companies and they invited me to the board. I joined the board and I'm really enjoying the process. But I will tell you that after the first meeting I had just because I've always run my own businesses or my own teams or even when I was an employee, I acted like the owner always for good and bad reasons, right?

37:58 And after the first meeting, the the CEO of the private equity group came to me and said, Marcel, you've got great ideas, but you need to kind of calm them down a little bit sometimes. Like you don't want to just suck all the oxygen out of the room and make everybody else feel stupid. You got to do this with a little bit of diplomacy. And I was so embarrassed and so upset with myself. And I talked to so many of my friends saying, Oh my God, I can't believe I did this. I feel like such a tool. And the second meeting I had with them, they contacted me right after and said, you're amazing. Like, I don't know how we could have this board without you on it at this point.

38:40 You're, you're so valuable to us. And, and so it was really, really great to get that, that positive feedback because I was so nervous and, and just like, I just felt like a fish out of water, like just out of place, you know, like a, a leader in a position that I needed to be a follower or at least a, a representative, you know, an equal. Well, there's a big difference between for profit companies when you're on the board of a for profit company like a private equity group and nonprofits. And in the case of ESTA, ESTA isn't really a nonprofit. ESTA itself is a it. It doesn't have 5O1C3 status because it's really a trade association, so it exists for the benefit of its members.

39:28 Whereas ESTA created the ESTA Foundation originally and then which is now behind the scenes, that ultimately became behind the scenes and that does have 5O1C3 status and is a full nonprofit organization and, and there's a real difference. I was on the BTS board for a while, but I think they grew weary of me asking too many questions and so that happens. That does happen, Yeah, I do it. I I can understand and so. And, and that was not very diplomatic. They were not diplomatic about it. And so that was troubling to me. But none the less I understand.

40:09 I understand that. And, and there are times when you have to hold your tongue and times when it's smart to ask a question. I thought I was asking a very simple, straightforward question. It turned out not to be the case. So it is what it is, no? It's a great. Organization. I've had similar, I've had similar situations on this current board experience that I'm going through where I really am holding my thoughts and trying to listen a lot more than I talk and things like that, like stuff that I'm not used to doing in my own company or companies that I've had. But now it's a must. And it's working out really nicely and I'm really learning a lot from listening to other people, believe it or not, and then just finding a way to massage my information into the conversation, like to kind of sneak it in instead of just, you know, here I come. But, but you know, like I said, I, I appreciate very much people like yourself who are so generous and willing to give time and energy and effort towards these really thankless positions where everybody's always yelling at you and mad at you for one reason or another.

41:25 And like in the case of ESTA, I remember in the early days of ESTA, I was at Martin and I remember you guys were doing the fog and smoke stuff. And, you know, we were one of the, the biggest probably enemies of that situation at the time because we were doing everything wrong, you know, like we just didn't know what we were doing. The machines were made in Europe and the fluid was made by a chemical company. And and so, you know, I think we were a bit of an offender in in the early days and we really didn't have the technical people on staff to send to these meetings and and to be a real contributor to them.

42:09 But one of the things that we saw very early on was really just how many battles were going on and, and, you know, there was still a little bit of manufacture on this side and, and dealer on the other side or, or technical people on one side and manufacturers on the other side just trying to hold on to what was theirs. You know, no, please don't take this away from me. But yeah, like again, everyone has experience with condo associations and HOA boards and stuff like that. It is a job I've never volunteered for because I appreciate the people who do it. I know most of them are doing the best they can.

42:49 Often times it's easy to complain about the jobs they're doing or the decisions they're making or even some of the things like where, you know, the guy next to you is getting his lawn cut for free because he's on the board and I'm paying to get my lawn cut. That's not fair. Well, hey, invest some time in the board then, and you might get some perks, you know, so. But yeah. You know, it's interesting when you bring up FOG standards, for example, you're right. It was it, there was more, it was more cantankerous in those days, there's no question about that. But some very good standards were created and the vast majority of manufacturers, including Martin, were contributors to creating a good standard. And so, and that's what I mean by volunteers, ultimately, even Martin provided good volunteer work in order to help create good standards.

43:42 And I also remember writing a check and and I think when we couldn't contribute smart technical information, we just wrote a check you. Supported the program. And that was helpful, you know, And so when you have nothing good to say, write a check, you know, and and everybody will be happy. So yeah, that seemed to work for us. So I don't know where to really start, even though we're we're deep into it. But you know, you, you actually were one of the people I think, Oh, no, you didn't go to school for like theater or. Or yes, I did. Oh, you did. I did. My father was an Equity actor for 55 years and my mother was an actress and they work together and they were both teachers.

44:30 My father was the head of the theater department at Edinborough State Teachers College back in the day, now Edinburgh University in Pennsylvania, in northeastern Pennsylvania, northwestern Pennsylvania. Sorry. And so we spent our early days there. And then he became the head of the theater department in Cleveland at a local Community College track, Cuyahoga Community College, the Western Campus theater. He ran for many years. And then he retired in 1982, moved to New York and became a character actor. And he did that until 2002, 2003, when he retired and moved to the Actors Fund home.

45:13 The, I like to say the Disneyland of elder care facilities. They are wonderful and they help, they help support behind the scenes actually. And, and it's a great organization. And he spent his last years there. They had a small little acting troupe. They they created shows. He was with kindred spirits. There were actors and directors and stenographers and costume designers, a whole range of people from the entertainment industry in Englewood, NJ, and so and. What's that facility called again? It's the Actors Fund home. Wow, yeah, that is cool.

45:53 And and so it's it's exclusively for people from. And for anyone in entertainment, could be a technician, it could be a star, it could be, you know, I remember walking down the hallway once and Lynn Redgrave walked right past us, you know, so, so it was a fascinating place to be because they would bring people from Broadway and so on, and they would do presentations. And it was a really, really, really, and still is. It's a cool place. What a great idea, what a 'cause you know, as we all know, it's, it's such a, you know, terrible way that most people are treated when it comes down to that part of your life and.

46:41 It's it's a great place. You know my, my mom's in a dementia home and she's in a really good one in Calgary, Canada. It's very nice. It's very clean. The staff are all really nice, but there's no theater. There's no, you know, there's none of those really cool activities that keep people's brains working. I mean, yes, they bring in a, a guitar player every once in a while and they'll all sit around and sing nursery rhymes and stuff, you know? But I just find that it lacks sort of a central sort of thing that everybody can wrap themselves around and be excited about when they wake up in the morning. And that really is a cool, cool concept that you're talking. About they they created a little touring company.

47:23 They would go to other other nursing homes and and elder care facilities and do small productions. You know, such a great idea, say an act or two from Macbeth or, you know, pick your show. So anyway, I went to the University of Cincinnati and I got my undergraduate degree in speech and communication. And I was lucky and I went into the theater department one day and, and I tried out for a show. I played Doctor Spivey and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and, and I became a technician and I just fell in love with lighting. And my mentor there was a guy named Steve Carmichael.

48:03 He and some of his friends had all been to Juilliard and had gone through the program there and had worked at Juilliard and then came back to Cincinnati. There was a stage manager, Tommy Warner, and his wife, who was a costume designer, and my wife worked for her for a while. It's this whole nice group that you see. And this was in the day before the theater department was merged into the College Conservatory of Music. So most people are familiar with CCM, but back in the day we were part of A&S Arts and Sciences. It was just the theater department. We didn't often do musicals, I'll put it that way. And we work in this really old, old, you know, Depression era auditorium, Wilson Auditorium. It was dangerous.

48:50 And, you know, somehow we all survived. I remember the assistant technical director fell and came crashing down on to top of a cabinet. He managed to survive just fine. His name's Jim Houlihan. Really good guy, but he, he went on to do good things, went to North Carolina School of the Arts and was a teacher there for a while. And Steve went on to eventually move to Colorado where he taught for a while. And then now he lives in Santa Fe, NM. So he was very, very important. Taught me a a ton and I got my master's degree in theatre from University of Cincinnati. And then I got lucky. Joel Penn, Joe Nell Polanski was working at Kliegel Brothers back in the day.

49:37 We're talking, you know, 1974 and she came to Cleveland. Sorry, she came to Cincinnati because we were doing a company on the Showboat Majestic and we were moving company to the Netherland Hilton Hotel for the Southeast Theatre Conference. And the Kliegel Rep Sheldon store at the time brought her in and, and I was the lighting designer and she was my board up and she brought a Klegel Q level 2000, a brand new newfangled memory system to run that show and it was great.

50:17 And she asked me, well, what are you going to do when you're done? And you know, I said, well, I'm not sure I might. My father was acting in summer theatre, Kenley Players in Warren, OH. And they did the Kenley did the circuit and he brought in Star power, you know, people like back in the day, Paul Lind and and Florence Henderson and you know, et cetera. And, and he would do this circuit between Warren, Dayton, Cincinnati and sometimes Flint, MI and sometimes down in Florida too. He was an impresario. Very, very interesting and colorful guy. Anyway, I thought, well, maybe I could do technical work for for Kenley. I thought my dad might be able to help me out there because he knew Kentley pretty well.

51:01 He's been a character actor for Kentley for many years. In the summer before that, he's at Music Carnival in Cleveland, which is run by Johnny Price, another impresario kind of personal producer. Anyway, none of that worked out. And so Jonelle said to me, why don't you come to New York and come to work for Kleagle? So she arranged for me to have an interview with Joel Rubin and he's my second mentor that I mentioned, I think in the information I provided. And he was, he was amazing, hard to work for, had a big ego, but deserved that ego. To be honest. He was very knowledgeable. He's the best salesperson I have ever witnessed. He was unbelievable.

51:43 Of course, he just passed away several months ago now. But what a, what a great person and so useful, so knowledgeable. He, he would, he had this group of people and he knew what our strengths and weaknesses were. So he'd point Vincent, you're going to go down to Florida and work with Ralph Snailock, our Rep down there, or Jim McHugh, you're going to go here, or Mike Connell, you're going to go over here. You know, back in those days, it was really interesting to work for Joel, for Doctor Joel. He, he was amazing. And Kleagle, at the time they were, they were number one. This was before ETC was born. They came along in 1975 and of course stole everybody's hearts because Fred Foster, you know, knew what he was doing and he created marketing that really worked and he created good products, right?

52:37 So anyway, working at Kleagle was great. And then I worked at Color Trend for Bob Benson. He was also just a spectacular leader, became a consultant eventually and but he ran the east eastern half of the United States for color Trend. So I was one of his sales people and then I went to work for Bill Leento at Strand Lighting and eventually hatched the idea of starting my own business and coming back to Cleveland. But it's interesting though, because you, you, you know, you went to school, you got your master's degree, you came out, you were a lighting designer. How, like how or why the transition into becoming a sales guy? Or was that just monetizing, You know what you knew you wanted to be a part of?

53:22 It was just a way to make money. I'll tell you a story about that. So when I went to New York, I, I, I thought my ship had sailed in as, from a lighting design standpoint. And, you know, I was going to work for Klegel almost like being a lighting designer instead of having to work as a waiter somewhere, you know, in New York, I could be in the lighting business. What could be better, you know? And so I tried to learn as much as I could. I got involved with video lighting. I wanted to learn more about that side, not just theatrical lighting. I did some great stuff. I lit some ballet companies, not not big, well known companies like American Pal, a theater, but smaller regional stuff, you know, in the New York area.

54:08 And I did some work with CBS just again, assisting the lighting designer, you know what I mean? But when I went to work for Kleagle. So Joel interviews me, We finished the interview. He offers me a job, tells me when I need to report, says to me, OK, it's we're at the in April or first part of May. The first thing I want you to do is come to New York, to the USITT Conference, and you must join USITT. So that was his first commandment. You must join USITT. And then he says to me, let's see now, Vincent, Vincent, let's see. Do you know Larry Vincent? I said, well, that's my father.

54:48 And he said, oh, I work with your father's mother at Game Park in Cleveland. He was from Cleveland originally. He says, I work with your mother and dad at Kane Park. He was the lighting designer there. And my mom and dad were acting at Kane Park. And so he got to know them. That is nuts. And so this was after he had already hired me. So I thought, wow, Providence, you know? No kidding. Yeah. Jeez. Well, and you know, I mean, I'm sure that helped you a little bit in just your relationship with him and, and you know, not getting in trouble if you were 5 minutes late for a meeting. I'm not sure about that. I think he was, he held pretty high standards regarding sales in particular.

55:34 And you know, if there was a marketing meeting or a sales meeting and, and I was in the desk, so I took Jonelle's desk. She, she continued to be a lighting done and she was always a lighting designer, well known back in the day and she lit the Saint Louis Opera, for example. And, and so she did a lot of work even in New York, off Broadway and so forth. And so I took her, get her desk. She moved out in May. I moved in in June and took her desk. Well, it was right next to Joel. Joel sort of sat over here and I was right next to him, right? And so I would hear all the conversations, etcetera. I would even hear it was an open plan office at Kleagle and John Kleagle, the third nice guy by the way, but I think he was quite happy to have Joel lead sales for him. But he had some of his, I would say friends, you know, or family members that were part of the company. And you could hear the purchasing agent, I think his name was Tom Moran.

56:36 I think that's right. And he would, these conversations would get really loud and then next thing you'd hear is the phone going Wham right off the wall. He'd throw the phone against. Well, do you know Tim Brennan? I've seen him do that about 25 times. Well, yes, yes. But those days at at Kleagle were that was a real learning experience. And then the same thing, the same thing. The reason I mentioned Marshall Spiller at Strand is, you know, Marshall used to run quotations for them, for Bill Leonto. And Marshall was a real stickler. I mean, you had to do things a certain way.

57:16 And I worked for him initially and so it was good because he taught me a lot about how to put quotations together and how important they were, you know, and, and he worked also, we worked with Marsha Madeira, who was a lighting designer, still is a lighting designer, I think to this day. Off Broadway stuff and so forth and musicals, etcetera. And boy, we all, all of us grew up together during that time period and just learned a ton from people like Joel and then Marshall Spiller and Bill Diento. You know, Bill was I, I used to have a sign on my desk.

57:57 I loved Bill and he was very knowledgeable and very helpful. But I had a little sign that said, my mind's made-up. Don't confuse me with the facts. And that was to remind me that that that's how Bill worked. It's just how he worked. He was, he was, you know, very, he was a A type personality, way, way, way up to the top, you know, but very knowledgeable, very good in sales. But Joel Ruben, he was the quintessential combination of, you know, ABCD. He, he really was, he was so excellent with customers, just amazing. Anyway, so those were my days at Strand, and then that it was very helpful to work with people like Bill and Marshall Spiller and so forth because that helped me figure out how I might be able to start my own business.

58:50 And what what drove you to do that though? Like where, where did the inspiration or idea? Why did you decide that there needed to be a Vincent Lighting Systems? Well, let's put it this way. I knew early on when I was about six months in at Klegel Brothers that I couldn't work for someone else, that at some point in time I would need to start my own company. And I knew I needed to learn more. And so I I hatched this whole idea of working for Klegel, working for Color Tran, and then working for Strand. That's interesting. At that time period, that was a great way to learn. I call it getting my PhD.

59:32 Well, I seem to recall looking at at when I was looking through the notes before recording this, that you spent like almost the exact amount of time at each of those three companies. So it looked like it was a plan, like you had that whole thing mapped out. Yeah, I tried not to burn any branches as I went along. Of course, that's important because you know, at some point if you're going to start a dealership company somewhere and I didn't, well, you need product, but I did it the easy way. When I started my business, it was called Paul Vincent Associates. And we were a manufacturer's Rep for strength. And that was easy to do because they needed a new Rep in Ohio. And, and I understood what they needed to do and what they would want me to do as, as the Rep.

1:00:18 And so I worked together with Sam Cercone. He was the Rep in Pittsburgh. I was the Rep in Cleveland. And he had his business and I had my business and eventually after a few years, we put those businesses together and created Sercon Vincent Associates and that lasted for five years and we did very well. Sam was also way up on the chart, so to speak, very good in sales, very strong in sales. He still he runs a company called Brightline, now manufacturer of of video and film lighting products and Vincent Lighting became one of his key dealers actually in in back in the day, so to speak. Interesting. And he and I, we are good friends.

1:01:00 We're different. You know, I'm, I'm much more geared towards operations and he was geared towards sales. So we made a good team. And luckily I was in Cleveland, he was in Pittsburgh. If we're in the same city, we'd probably killed each other. Yeah, it works. It works like that often. Because he wouldn't have been able to tolerate me. After a while, he told me that that's what happened. At the end of four years, he said, well, we are 5050 partners. And he said, well, I don't want a partner anymore. I want to be a 60% owner. And I said, well, I don't want to be your employee. So therefore we're going to split this up. And we, we both got good attorneys. We spent the time needed to create a situation where we both left each other alone.

1:01:42 He took his part. I took my part and the rest is history. So it's a. Very civilized way to handle it. It was the right, it was definitely the right thing to do. It was good for both of us. You just basically backed out and went back to being a a Rep. You were still a manufacturer's Rep. At that time, because we had created, there was still Paul Vincent Associates out there as a separate little company and there were still Sir Conan Associates out there, his little Rep company. We created Sir Cone Vincent as the dealer as a distributor. Of. All these products, right? We did that in 1981 and then we created another company called performance lighting and production services that became the rental company, OK. And eventually he sold that other words, when, when I, I was on the banking agreement, when we got our first loan in order to buy all the equipment that we needed, We got a, because it was mostly located in Pittsburgh at the time when we first started that it was geared towards the commercial video and film marketplace.

1:02:48 So we had a grip truck, we had quite a quite a nice package from Matthews. We had a generator, film style generator, you know, etcetera and you know, a complete HMI package back in the day, etcetera. And you know, I think we probably spent $250,000 or something like that, which back then was quite a bit of money. And we had, we went to, I think it may have been Mellon Bank, may have been our first bank I think if I recall correctly anyway. And we were able to get a good loan back in that time period and we built that business up. And eventually when I exited, what I got out of the deal was I got off the debt. So that was good.

1:03:33 And I got all the theatrical equipment, not that there was much, but there was enough to get me started, you know, maybe sixty, $70,000 worth of theater lighting equipment. And of course, Sam kept all of the video and film side, the grip truck, etcetera. And there was another guy who was a partner with us in performance lighting and production services guy named Jim Forrester. He's not on the planet anymore. He was a great guy, very knowledgeable, very hard working and he was a well known gaffer in the Pittsburgh marketplace and he did work all over Pennsylvania, Ohio, etcetera. He was very well known. He was very helpful in helping us create a really good business because his grip truck, his little grip truck that he had came into the fold as well. And that was important to have small stuff and big stuff. Yeah, you.

1:04:25 Need you needed both, no question about it. So anyway. This was 1981. You're saying though when you guys split up? Well, no, no, what what happened was we put it together at USITT. That was our coming out party, so to speak, at USIT in Cleveland IN on April 1st of 1981. OK. At USITT and then we built from there. We had actually the, our official start date was at the end of 1980. So in January of 1981 we began Sir Cone Vincent Associates, but we didn't announce it to the public in any big way until April 1st. And that was always the we always used April first as our original date that Sir Cone Vincent was founded. Was there ever an argument over Vincent Sarcone? No.

1:05:25 Was there a coin flip or anything? I had nobody had to pick up a dinner bill. Knew that his name would need to be first. He needed that and that was fine. I had no and he deserved it. It was fine. He was. He was the better salesperson at that point in time, especially for that marketplace, meaning for the video and the commercial video and film marketplace. He knew that marketplace really well. He had worked in Pittsburgh for companies in that business. He got his degree in communications from Bowling Green State University. He had the knowledge base, so I would help him on theater and architectural lighting and he would help me on video lighting and so forth.

1:06:08 And that's how it is. We came together and eventually created Sir Cone Vincent Associates. At a certain point in time it became clear that we were creating confusion in the marketplace 'cause there was Sir Cone and Associates, Paul Vincent Associates, Sir Cone Vincent who were we, etcetera, etcetera. And eventually we merged all of it into one company. It all came into Sir Cone Vincent and that that did very well for four years. And about I, I think around 1983 is when we created performance lighting and production services and got officially into the rental business. So that was the rental, that was the rental side of the business and and Sir Cone Vincent was the sales side.

1:06:52 Yes. Basically and distribution, yeah. Got it. Yes, that's right. And and we were both the the three of us, Jim Forrester, Sam and I were partners in performance lighting and production services. And then when we went our separate ways, Sam, Sam and Jim continued performance Lighting production services as a separate company. And then he reinstituted, so to speak. He created in fact an umbrella company called the Performance Group that was Sam's company. And he put everything into the Performance Group. And then I kept everything that was in Cleveland. The people that we had any of the any of the theatrical equipment that we own moved up to Cleveland.

1:07:36 And then I started Vincent Lighting Systems on January 1st of 1986. And. It's funny, the the and Sam's brother Jody worked for me and he was great. I love Jody. He did a great job. And and so he stayed with me after a while. He originally went to work for Sam for about a year or so. And then he rang me up one day and said, by the way, you would talk to me about, you know, working for you. What do you think? And so, and so I brought him to, brought him to work for me and that's what he wanted to do. So it, it worked out fine. And I, I reached out to the employee team and I asked the group, the original group, I think there were five of us.

1:08:21 I quickly hired 1/6 'cause I brought in a really good accounting person, Joanie Roker, who ultimately became our vice president of finance over time. And John Seaman was our technical person. We always, our approach basically was we had an outside salesperson who was supported by an inside administrative person and an inside technical person. And if you break that down at Vincent Lighting Systems, even to this day, now called VLS, even to this day, you find that same team approach and I think you find a similar approach. It's not. There's nothing new about that.

1:09:01 Yeah, you know that in your day as a salesperson, you had to have good inside support. And I've, I've always liked that sort of POD structure, you know, and high end did it really well too. When I went to high end for a short period of time in the late 90s, they had a similar thing where you had your own finance person and your own inside person and like you had your little group and you didn't have to contact people in finance to get anything done. They did it. Yeah, yeah. That, that worked very well. And so anyway, we we went on from there 1986, the team said, well, you're well known in the industry, we should call this Vincent Lighting Systems.

1:09:44 And so, OK, that wasn't my decision. That was a group decision. So that's what we did. And eventually, you know, after another many years in the business opening up, we opened up the Pittsburgh office. Jody ran the Pittsburgh office originally. Walt Weber, who had been with me for many years, including the Sir Cone Vincent days, he opened up the Cincinnati office for us, you know, and eventually we opened a Columbus sales office, not a full rental office, but a sales office. And eventually, we created a sales office in Michigan together with Glenn Becker at Grand Stage. Interesting, huh? So we covered the state of Michigan, but it was a partnership with Grand Stage Company in the early days. Well, the name, the Vincent Lighting name seems to have stuck, you know it.

1:10:36 It lasted an awful long time and was quite a successful company. Well, hopefully it's stuck without hurting anybody. Yeah, I want to get into, you know, the not only the sale of the company and how, you know, what that did to you as a human and how you got through the process and stuff. Because I know especially when you've built a company with your own hands and, you know, you've put blood, sweat and tears into it for so many years and you know, where everything is on every shelf and you know how everything operates in the business, it's hard to hand over the keys to somebody else. But the other thing you know, I find and you might have some input on this is most of our industry has no succession plan.

1:11:24 And I know way, way too many business owners right now who are in their mid to late 60s and have 0 succession plan. And that's a scary thought. A very scary thought. It is a scary thought and I think one of the reasons for that is many of us in the lighting industry don't come from a business background. We come from a lighting background. And so without the business background, there are certain things we have to learn the hard way. And I would say that that certainly happened in my case as well. And, and I, you know, I say that, you know, I sold the business to private equity in 2017, but that took ten years.

1:12:10 That didn't happen right away. I knew, I knew early on that I had a small really as far as industry standards are concerned or business standards if you will. I had a small privately held company which would be very difficult to transition to do to new management. So the first thing I did was I asked my kids. I wanted to see if they were interested. I have two daughters and a son and they they did work for the company, but as much or as little as they wanted to. I never had this dream that, you know, they would take over the business, etcetera, etcetera. That was up to them.

1:12:51 I always said to them find something you love to do and get somebody to pay you for it. Make sure you do both. And so they they've been fine. It's a good. Lesson right? There it is. A good one. And they've been fine on their own, but they and I went to my kids twice over various years to see if they were interested in and they were not. And they were doing fine in, in their respective work that they were doing. And still to this day they're doing just fine. So they were not interested. Then I went to my managers to see if the managers would like to invest in the problem was my my basic team, Chris Schick that ran the rental side, Joanie Roker who ran finance, and John Seaman who sort of ran the technical end.

1:13:42 He ended up buying. We had started another company by then called Future Light, and Future Light became in a sense, at times in conflict with Vincent Lighting. By that I mean there were other dealers out there across the country who would have viewed Future Light as a competitor because they viewed Vincent Lighting as a competitor and they knew that. I own both companies, you know, and so eventually I sold that company to John Seaman, which was good. I think it was good for him. He still has that company was good for him. We had various products and so forth that we had created, some which we had invented from the rental team, some products that work there, that work really well, some that came from Jody on the video side. And then the original product which actually came from Van Phillips at Jones and Phillips, he was looking for someone to build a light and orchestra shell lighting fixture. This is well before LED, OK, Yeah. So he wanted someone to build an orchestra lighting fixture that would fit in the orchestra panel and the reflector would automatically adjust to be parallel with the floor. OK, So we we.

1:14:56 Very specific need. Very specific. That's what we started with. We call it the the Future Light 1000 and we started with that way back in the day. That was our first product and then we created other products and eventually sold the business to John and he still owns it as Future Light. And there's no competitive worries because that's that's what he owns. That's the business that he owns and and he was the kind of individual just to be honest about it. He was the kind of individual, but in some ways was better off being on his own rather than being part of an organization. He would drive I. Understand that as well as anyone could. He, he became our operations manager and at times could be because he was so analytical at times he could be a real roadblock and you know, because you know, that can happen in businesses.

1:15:53 And so we use that as his nice exit strategy that he bought future life. But he and I are still friends to this day. I greatly respect him. You know, I'm very pleased to have worked with him for so many years. And he was the original. He was the original when my, my, the first three people that back in the day were myself as a salesperson, Marty Donovan as the administrative person who's the first person I had hired, and John Seaman, who was the 2nd person I had hired. So he was the technical person. Marty was the administrative person and I was the sales guy. Wow. Interesting. Anyway, we, the original management team was close to my age and so when I when I thought about the idea of pursuing them to become owners of the business, they just did not want to take on the risk.

1:16:46 So that didn't work out then because we're in the state of Ohio and Ohio is a good place to do an ESOP. I thought about creating an ESOP and and Kent State University has a an incubator program. For for people who don't know what that means. ESOP, sorry employee, I know what it is, an employee owned company basically where the employees have stock in the company basically so they have an equity stake in the future of the company. And when you do an ESOP, you have to create the ESOP itself. Usually that's gets funded by the bank because usually most companies don't have enough cash. So you fund the ESOP, well, you got to pay that loan back, OK.

1:17:29 The other problem is once the employees become owners and they get vested, they want out. And if a lot of the employees, because I had people that had worked for me for 20-30 years, right? So you had a lot of people. I'm thinking to myself, how am I going to do this? In order to have a an ESOP, to be honest, to have an ESOP, you got to be doing this, right? You can't be doing this and you know what the lighting business is like. There's a lot. Of this there's. Not a lot of this. OK, you could take ETC as a good example of this. You know what I mean? Manufacturer had it going, so to speak. Yeah, but boy, on the dealership rental house side, it's difficult to make that happen. Even on the manufacturer side as well, I mean, you know, look, look at, you know, the job ahead of Graner right now. Like he's he's.

1:18:19 Got his hands full, you know. It's no question. It's not an easy world out there, even moving like manufacturers. They've got a pretty good run since COVID opened to back up, but you know, there's already sort of chinks in that armor starting to appear as well. Right. So it's it's hard to create an ESOP. Companies have done it, ECC did it, Barbizon did it. I believe they were big enough to be able to do that. I was not big enough. So two times I tried to create an ESOP and finally at the end of it all after studying it all, it's over. They said, no, this is just, this is not going to work. And so I went out, I, I got a business valuation done and I went out to the capital markets, if you will, and, and to other markets. I, I hired an investment banker as they're called. Never understood that name.

1:19:14 Why are they called investment Naters? Doesn't make sense. OK. So they're really business brokers and so and so he did a great job. The guy that I work with did a really, really fine job and he put me out there to probably 400 potential people. We created a data room. We give them access to the data room. Those that were really interested in, you know, looking at it, we put our financials in there and we didn't identify the company at the time. Instead we just laid out a sort of an 8 page teaser as it's called, and then we created a book. Well, and, and the reason for that, like obviously it's very potentially harmful to a company to put a for sale sign on your front window and your customers start getting nervous, your staff gets very nervous, your suppliers might get nervous. So.

1:20:06 Yeah, I understand why. You, but I was honest with the staff. In other words, they knew they they could, they had to know because by now, you know, I think five years had passed or so and they knew I had tried doing the ESOP because I had involved them. See, I ran an open book managed business. I had read about that back in the day and I really liked the idea of sharing the financials with the team, putting together in place opportunities for them through a four O 1K and through profit sharing to be able to get more money. Because I, I said straight up, I said the pay in this business is not as high as other businesses. You might find out there be it computers, programming, whatever it might be, you can make more money elsewhere. And so I wanted to create something where the employees would be able to gain if we did well, the employees did well. That was the whole idea.

1:21:00 And so we were always open book managed for many years and, and we actually worked with a few other companies in the business that I met through ESTA that were also open book managed companies. And so we would trade, you know, not secrets, that's not the correct term to use. But you know, I would partner up with businesses out on the West Coast, for example, because they didn't view me as a competitor and I didn't view them as a competitor per SE. And we'd stay out of each other's way and not get into trouble. And we would benchmark with each other. And that was very useful. So eventually. When you say, when you say open book managed, you're, you're basically you're sharing the the deepest, darkest numbers and and secrets of the business.

1:21:47 Like you're basically, it's like you're talking to your executive team in a sense. Yeah, open book means you're sharing your financial results with your team and you're, you're creating an ownership culture without creating equity. In other words, I couldn't afford to create the, the what I wanted to create an ESOP. I thought we had the right temperature. We, we have the right out of values. All of those things were right, but economically we just couldn't do it. And so that's why I went out That's why I got a valuation done. I, I, I hired that the investment banker did not only look at the valuation, but then also put it out there to the marketplace, including, you know, some of the competitors in the marketplace, some of the larger companies out there that might be interested.

1:22:38 And we heard back of the 400. He put it out. So we heard back from about 30 and that that list then got narrowed down and eventually we had four different people come in and two made offers. One offer was ridiculous. So we didn't even put another offer was actually not bad. OK, so this was in 2008. Yeah. And what do we think happened in 2008? Yeah, yeah, right. Terrible. Terrible. I got lucky though that it did happen of course, and it affected us, particularly affected the rental side of the business.

1:23:19 But I was able to get through it with the bank. The bank stood by us. We were with, by that time we had been with National City Bank for many years, but they got taken over by PNC. So it became PNC and PNC and National City all the way through. They treated us pretty well. In terms of bankers, we know that bankers are very conservative, OK, And that's OK. You know, you got to learn to work within their rules of the road if you want to be able to borrow money. And of course, to capitalize rental equipment, you're going to have to borrow money unless you're so big that you got enough cash flow coming in that you don't.

1:23:59 But most of the time, most companies out there, they have to borrow some money in order to capitalize this stuff. So anyway. And it ain't getting any easier. No, no, no. It's not getting any easier, no question about that. But PNC was always good with us. They were good financial partners, so to speak, even though they were a bank and our bank. I get it. Anyway, So what I realized was I had been AC Corp when I created Vincent Lighting Systems. S Corps didn't exist. They didn't come into effect in Ohio until about two, until about 1987 or 88. We should have elected S status, but we didn't.

1:24:41 So we were AC Corp. Well, over the years, AC Corp accumulates retained earnings. And when you accumulate retained earnings, if the buyer wants to buy assets, which is the case in most instances, most companies out there, whether they're private equity or others, they want to buy assets. They don't want to buy your liabilities, they won't buy your stock. In other words, if they would have bought my stock, it would have been a tax situation of capital gains, which back in the day was 15% and then you had stayed at about 4% or so. And so it was reasonable, you know, just around 20% well in buying assets and, and you have, you have those retained earnings that accumulate, you get a double taxation event that occurs if you're AC Corp and therefore the tax rate was about 55%.

1:25:36 And So what wasn't such a bad deal all of a sudden became a really lousy deal, really bad. So I didn't proceed after I'd done all of that work and everything else. Put everything together, worked with my team to make this happen, Brought the people in, done our presentations, got some offers, all that stuff. We said no, Wow, it was a local. Private tough. Decision. It was a tough decision and I was sad to have to make that decision after we had what was really a decent offer and I, I went back to them to the private equity company at the time and said would you be willing to buy my stock? They were not and I said, look, I'll do everything we have to do in terms of investigating everything, etcetera, etcetera.

1:26:23 I don't want you to get hurt with the liabilities and, and I don't think we have very many. And so no, they wouldn't do it. So that was the end of that. So I decided that that point, OK, it's now 2009, I'm just going to take a break from all of this. And I did for about a year or so and I went to USITT and other trade shows and, and just, you know, hung out and a few of us got together and thought maybe we could create a merger of several companies in the business. So at the time it was Magnum Companies. The son who's a really good guy, Todd, he's now part of Four Wall.

1:27:05 But at that time he would have been actually the largest shareholder 'cause he had the most equipment. He he had the majority of the cash, so to speak, OK, because Eric and his wife had done a really good job and and Todd and his sister had done a really good job building the business. And so and then in addition to that, it was production advantage up in Vermont. They would, they would have been the smallest shareholder. It was Vincent Lighting, and then it was they changed their name. The folks in Milwaukee, the two brothers, the Stern Keys.

1:27:47 Yeah, yeah, Dennis and. Craig and Oh I. Know I know who you're talking about, but I it's been so long since I did business with them. Yeah, that company still exists, OK. Yeah, Main office now down in Memphis. They were going to come into this as well and they would have been the third largest shareholder and we created, we were, we were, we were pretty far along, pretty far along at that point in time. And we had spent a year together working on this and putting something together and everybody was going to come into the Vincent Lighting System's financial and administrative and operational end of things. Basically, they would use our sales system, they would use our rental system, etcetera.

1:28:38 Was that because yours was considered the strongest among the group or whatever? It was pretty robust, pretty robust. And we were pretty well organized. We had a good team of people. We had a good leadership team. We had good sales people. And so that was agreed upon that that's what we would do. And the day before we were going to sign the agreement, Todd calls me up and he says I'm out. And I think it's because his local folks, his accountant, his financial partners, you know, his attorney, they knew they'd lose his business, right? So they convinced him that he shouldn't do this.

1:29:19 And, and I'm sure also remember it, it carried the family name, so to speak, you know what I mean? And so that was a tough decision. And I'm guessing he probably decided I don't want to lose all of that, you know, and, and I think he became concerned because it's Craig and Dean Sternke. Dean was going to run sales and I and and Dean was also an A type guy. OK, Now I felt OK with that because I had dealt with an A tape type guy in Sam Cercone for many years. And, and let's face it, a type people have advantages. They bring good things to the table if if you can, if you can keep them under control.

1:30:07 Here's what I mean by that. I don't mean control them personally. I mean, as an example, Sam back in the day always wanted to shoot for the stars. And I would always have to say, Sam, we got to get to the moon first. If we get to the moon, we can then get to the planets. Once we get to the planets, then we can shoot for the stars. We can't shoot for the stars right now. Right and. That's why, that's why he he was tired of me holding him back. Yeah. Wow. The same thing would have happened potentially with Dean. Dean was a very hard worker and a very good salesperson and would have really pushed the organization. And some of my people came to me and said if if you do this, I'm out. Oh, boy.

1:30:52 Yeah. Well, so, but what I mean, if it's if it's if you're able to tell me what was the structure of that? Like when you're merging 4 companies together, these are owners who basically want to sell their company. So our PR like is a bank funding that transaction and then everyone's taking cash out. And now there's a new entity where you might retain some ownership or some stock in it, and there's a management team and a board of directors and all of those things. Is that pretty much the structure? All of that was true, except that remember, you don't have that much cash. So people would have to take a note, right? And, and, and the organizations would be owners of the new company.

1:31:37 That's what the deal was. And ultimately, yes, the hope was the company would then be bigger, then it could be sold to private equity, then there would be a payday for the owners. But that might be 5610 years down the road now for some of the people. From my viewpoint, I was fine with that, but some of the people in the room wanted to get out as soon as possible, like the owner of Production Advantage, Penny. I don't remember Penny's last name. Penny wanted out because her husband was the one that really owned and ran the company. It was really Schraff, David Schraffenberger who really ran the company. You're right. And he was the knowledge base, so he was going to be part of the team going forward and his team of people up there were going to be part of the team going forward.

1:32:27 And they would have handled standard goods sales as production advantage always had, right? That made the most sense, right? And then the folks like Dean and Craig would have handled rigging because they were already in the rigging business and they had a place in the rigging business. So they would have handled rigging and of course lighting in their various locations. Right. I mean, it's a sensible deal. It all made sense. And obviously somebody got cold feet on the eve before or whatever, and that blew the deal up. The problem is the person that got the cold feet would have been the largest shareholder. The largest one, yeah. The largest amounts of bankable assets to the table and therefore I was bringing the bank in and showing my bank PNC here's what will happen these are the assets coming in we need you to finance this and they were willing to do so it was fine until. It wasn't quite as good once.

1:33:27 Magnum pull up. I had to go back to the other folks and say, folks, we can't bank this. I don't have a way of banking this. I don't have enough assets. You don't have enough assets. So then ultimately Fast forward and and you sort of restarted the program well again. Yeah, after, after that didn't work, I was really tired, let me tell you. So I decided again, let's take another rest. And I just got lucky. One of the people who was going to provide mezzanine financing for the deal in 2008 called me up one day just out of the blue. I was on vacation up in Michigan with my wife. And he calls me all of a sudden.

1:34:14 And he says, by the way, whatever happened with your deal? And he was a pretty interesting guy because his, his family, if you will, created a foundation that I think came from Murphy's Oil Soap. OK. And so they had a lot of money in, in Cleveland behind them. And we had done a big project that they had financed. It was at a local Catholic school. And we had provided the theater lighting system for them. And that's partly how they knew of us. But that family they'd. Written checks to you. They knew your name. They wrote your checks. They wrote checks to somebody who then wrote checks to us. I see.

1:34:58 Yeah, it went, it went through a construction manager, right. So anyway, but it all turned out well, it was they were very happy with the equipment that's still working to this day. They've added to it. They're still a customer, etcetera, etcetera. So anyway, he's a really good guy and, and he calls me what happened? And I explained to him what happened. He said, well, that's, that's really interesting. But I can tell you I have three or four people that you know, might be interested in doing this with you because the play that I had was, you mentioned this earlier. I, I'm a child of the 50s and 60s, right? So I'm an old guy, right? I'm part of that generation.

1:35:43 And there are a lot of baby boomers out there that started businesses about the same time that I did, right? And I identified for the capital partner that was coming in, I identified about 20 different businesses that I thought they could pursue if they so chose to do that. And I laid it all out. I put a whole plan together of how you could basically put this group of companies together to do a roll up in essence of small, smaller size dealer companies in our business. That was the idea. And so this guy calls me up, he says you, you still have that plan. And I said, yes, it's just as much could be done today, just as much as it was would have been done in 2008 and so. Except everybody's 10 years older now. Eight years older, yeah.

1:36:37 That's, that's correct. And so he said, well, let me introduce you to a few people and he did. And one of them was Canterbury capital, Bob Onjad and there were a couple of others. I talked to all of them that that he had brought forth and as it turned out, he works for Morgan Stanley. He's been very successful. And so and I like him a lot. He's a really good guy. So his name is Peter Carfagna. And so I basically pursued this and once again, I got about 03 different legitimate offers. I did evaluation, if you will recall, Mike Griffith had started a company along with the gentleman that passed away recently. Oh, I forget what his partner's name was from, ETC. They were both from ETC.

1:37:29 Yeah, shoot. And he, he Mark, Mark was his name, but I don't remember his last name now. I'm sorry. Anyway, they, they did a valuation for me, which I thought was great because it came from within the industry. OK. And, and it wasn't just based on, you know, you compared to other companies out there, you know what I mean? Because how many companies in the theatrical lighting business are publicly traded companies? Not very many. OK. So, so I wanted to be, you know, part of the group that of the not very of the of the very many rather than the not very many, if you know what I mean.

1:38:11 So anyway, we did this valuation with with Mark and with Mike and, and, and Mike also had a relationship with the folks at 4 Wall and SO4 Wall was in there too. But four Wall ultimately at the very last end of it all, they ultimately dropped out because they viewed that, you know, most companies that get in the rental business, they're 80% rental, right. And we were really more like 60% project business, 30 or 20% products and then the rest was rental and production, right. So that wasn't a model that at the time? Rental was a small part of your business, yeah. And he didn't like that the, the owner at the time, Mr. Cannon, Mike, you know, he didn't like that very well. And I understood that and and and, and Bill Rayner was working there at the time.

1:39:10 So once again, our paths crossed together. He and I had sort of painted a picture together of how we might become part of Four Wall. OK. It didn't happen ultimately because again, if we were a much larger rental company, it might have been different, but we didn't have enough rental assets. And I think that was their viewpoint. We were very strong in project sales without a doubt. To this day, still the case, same case, very strong project sales. So anyway, it didn't happen with, with them, but Canterbury Capital took an interest in the whole idea and they, they were willing to buy my stock and that's what made it work because it became a capital gains tax.

1:39:54 Now I had to retire the debt, you know, etcetera. But nonetheless, they bought my stock and I had gotten our debt down from about $1,000,000 down to about half a million. So that was good. And and so it it made the whole equation work. And it, it in general terms, it worked pretty well, except, except I had to go to my people eventually and say, OK, we're going to be bought by this private equity company. You all need to recognize it's not Paul's world anymore. This is a financially based company. They are interested in financial performance. That'll be their number one thing. It wasn't my number one.

1:40:42 I kept reinvesting in the company, though. At some point, they're going to want to take cash out. Right, that's. What private equity is all about. They don't buy companies to make them smaller, no or less profitable. Correct. They're a little different from most private equity in that they buy and hold. So they try to buy good companies and then make them better, not to spin them off right away after five years or seven years. Instead, they're long term folders. Yeah, they want to increase earnings, not necessarily the top line valuation of the company or whatever, even though that goes up with earnings, but that's that's correct. And so that's the deal we did in 2017 and it went through. It was good.

1:41:25 Harder than anybody I know in the industry to sell your business. That's incredible. What a story. It was the right thing to do though, there's no question. In my mind, a while ago, you said that you went to all three of your kids and said, you know, are you interested? And you went to them twice and they said no. And what a great response in a sense, because imagine how much worse it could have been if they said yes but meant no. You know what I mean? Like they, they answered correctly, but their heart and soul wasn't in it at all. And that's, that's my son, 'cause my son keeps dabbling with coming into my business, but I know it's not what he loves, you know? It's not where his heart is at, you know.

1:42:08 I gotta tell you one more story about this cause the one area that I didn't tell you, the other thing I tried to do was I decided to make an attempt to go down to the next generation of managers at Vincent Lighting. And I did that. And I, I had a guy at the time that I had a, a good deal of trust in who I thought could manage the financial side of it all for me. And, and he by then had become our, our, our vice president of finance. So he was going to be taking over for Joni, who was going to head toward retirement. That was the theory. OK, interesting guy. One of the best people I've ever seen in terms of creating financial statements, looking at the past. But he was very audit oriented and I didn't really realize how much so at the time, but he was.

1:43:03 So I created four other managers. I took four other younger people, younger sales people. Some of those folks still work for the company today, but I tried to go down to the next level because they were younger. And we created a deal. The same thing happened. We had a deal the day we're going to sign the deal, OK? This guy who was the financial guy, he was their spokesperson. Basically he had agreed to the deal. But that day he says, well, we're not going to do it this way. This is the way we're going to do it. Basically they wanted me to continue because you know, back in those days and even some today most of cases in small privately held businesses, the owner has to sign for credit. You're going to sign personally, right? And I had signed personally and I had gotten that, I had gotten that responsibility over time down, you know, from half a million to 250, eventually to one and a quarter, you know, etcetera.

1:44:05 And eventually I got my myself off. But then in the bad financial end that hit in 2008, 2009, it all reversed. Back up again, right? And so I had to sign again personally, but I had even got that down a little bit, not off, but a little bit. Well, what he said to me is, OK, we're going to do this. We got to do it as a note. And I knew it was going to be a note from the company. That was the company would buy back my stock and the company would pay me out for that stock over time. OK, I was prepared for that. That was OK. But then he wanted me to back the whole deal personally. So in other words, he wanted the playground, he wanted all the toys in the playground, and he wanted me to, in essence, back the financing of the playground and the toys, right? I said, I'm selling.

1:44:57 I'm selling the company. That's not how it works. And he was convinced, Oh no, that's how it has to work. And I said no, no, no, that's OK. This is not happening. So that was the end of that. That was another one I had tried. Wow, wow, yeah, you literally worked harder than anybody I've ever spoken to. Cause I've helped some companies. I've done like during COVID I helped a company do a roll up. They bought five or six companies out there and I introduced them all and help get those deals pushed through and stuff. And you know, it's never easy. And you know, right now, if you're in a certain window, like there's a sweet spot where one of a few conglomerates will buy you, But if you happen to be outside that sweet spot, it's, it's a whole different ball game. So, you know, we're not going to have a ton of time, But I, I wanted to ask you in particular, your thoughts on capital needs in this Business Today and even at a larger level. So, you know, one of the things that I constantly complain about on behalf of company owners, rental company owners, is if you go back to like the 90s, you bought an Intelibime for 2500, call it $3000.

1:46:14 You bought an Intelibime, you rented it out for about $250 a week for years. It was rented solid and in two or three years, you could sell it for $3500, right, More than what you paid for it. And, you know, it was such a successful model, like where you were able to buy this thing, pay for it in half a year or less, and then continue renting it out and then sell it for full value at some point. And Bob Cannon was the master of doing that very, very well. I don't think I ever saw anybody do it better. And it's where Mike Cannon learned his ropes as well.

1:46:55 And we talk about it all the time, but today you have a moving light that costs $10,000. You're renting it out for 200 a week, you know, in many cases. And it never pays for itself. And they launch a new model, you know, one year into you trying to pay for that light. Like, is there going to come a time when normal privately held businesses cease to exist in this industry? Well, I think the model that you're talking about is not sustainable. There's just, there's no question about that. And I'll, I'll use an example and I wish Bob Amjad, who's the president of Canterbury Capital, who were listening to this, because I told him a similar thing, basically because the way he was financing his deals was he would in essence be using the company that he just bought to help finance the deal.

1:47:59 And what I said to him was, problem is you're tying our hands. If, if we have to finance the deals or other deals going forward and you don't provide all the financing and instead you're going to go to a bank. And what I mean by finance means those assets then are already tied up because you got a bank loan in order to get those assets. Well, he wants the bank to tie up the assets again. Well, that doesn't happen, right? And, and he's convinced that this is a good way to finance these deals. And, and I'm not surprised. And of course, the one thing I will tell people about private equity, they know everything. You don't know anything in their mind.

1:48:41 And that's how it was here. I had 40 years of experience and. And. Once they started doing the finances, they come to me each month. And we've gotten to the rigging business by then too, right? Which was really important. We had a really good guy, Herman Sayre, who now works for, ETC. But he had, he, he helped us get into the rigging business. And so he would, they, they would come to me every month. He and his guy Blake, they'd come to me every month and they'd say, OK, who are you going to lay off? And I'd say, excuse me, you just show me the financials. So I first I'd like to absorb that information, but I'll tell you right now, I'm not going to lay anybody off. They had hired me as president of the company, right?

1:49:23 And my thought was, well, I'll, I'll do five days a week, four days a week, three days a week, two days a week, one day a week. Well, about a year into it, after this, you know, coming to me every month, ask me who I'm going to lay off. And I'm saying no. Every time. I realize after a while they're going to tell me to get lost. So I'm going to get myself replaced as soon as possible with someone else from this industry who has worked with private equity. And who do I think of Bill Greener? He's the. Perfect guy, the old standby. Well, but, but he had, he had done so many different things in the business. He and I got to know each other back in the day when when he was with Strand lighting back in the day.

1:50:03 You know, I'm talking about 19801981 And so he was a good guy because he had also worked for Four Wall and he knew Michael Cannon well and he understood the world of Private. Equity, Yes, yes. Yes. So I thought he'd be perfect and, and I said I just recommended him. They, they interviewed him at Canterbury and they hired him and they were glad that they did. And he stayed for three years and he did a good job and then moved on and someone else came in and took over, didn't necessarily do a great job. Now there's a new president that's coming on. And I like this guy. I think I've, I've offered all of them. Like Bill and I, we still have a Zoom meeting every month. Oh wow.

1:50:47 That's cool. Just. Because we're friends just to say hello. How you doing? How's your family? What's going on? How are things at Altman? You know, all that stuff. And he'll ask me the same. I have so many people I do the same thing with, you know, it's just comparing notes on the industry or on whatever, Yeah. But you're right, this, this method of financing, you know, the other thing you got to keep in mind, which I know maybe you relate to, maybe you don't. I, I'm not sure, but remember my company was in what I call C level cities for the entertainment world. Yeah, Now A4 wall or a bash, they're in A level cities. New York, Las Vegas, LA those are A level cities for the entertainment business.

1:51:35 It's a different. Business, yes. And then there's B cities like Chicago, Dallas, those are Boston even even though it's a smaller city than Cleveland. It's it's Boston is a entertainment Mecca and has been for a long time. So I consider Boston AB city, OK, or Washington, DC, et cetera. Those are Atlanta. That's AB even now close to an A city in Atlanta or Orlando, FL, right? That's an that's an A city, no question about it. You got Disney and all the other people down there, the theme parks, et cetera, et cetera. I'm in B cities, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit. Detroit's a pretty big city. It's still a a sea city, so to speak, for the entertainment business. I'm talking.

1:52:19 I get it. Yeah. Yeah. So you can imagine how long it takes. Yeah. Maybe you get you. Maybe you'll get that 250 a week. OK. But you're not going to get it for. Not every week. No, no, you're going to do short term rentals, man. It's hard to finance equipment on a short term rental basis. Yeah, yeah. You know well. You know, Paul too, like some people I consulted on who were buying some companies, you know, they were putting these financial models together and showing them to me. And, and I would say, where's the CapEx? And they'd say, what do you mean the CapEx? And I said, well, you know, if you're going to buy a company for $5,000,000 and, and they're doing, you know, 10 million in sales or 8 million in in in rental revenue, you're going to need to figure out what the percentage is. And it's going to depend on the market. It could be 20% annual, 25% annual, but a percentage of that revenue is going to have to be invested back into CapEx. Well, why does does the equipment age out? And I said, not only does it age out, but there's this whole fashion thing that happens to where suddenly there's a better model and all the designers spec that one and trying to explain to these people CapEx models for our industry. And the fact that if you're buying a company, you have to leave enough money in play because you can't expect this company to suddenly have CapEx capital to invest out of cash flow because you know, you've

1:53:51 taken over their bank line, you've taken all the debts gone or you've repurposed the debt and and you now own the debt or whatever. But it's not like they suddenly have this magical cash pile that they're going to find in the backyard or something. So it's amazing that companies rolling up, other businesses will expect to do that without putting CapEx in play. That's right. If they're outside this business, they just don't see it and they and you try to explain it to them, they just don't get it. No, because the gear should last forever, you know, and, and in some cases it does. I mean, I know some rental companies out there who have Intelli beams in their rental stock. Not very many, thank God. But you know, our industry is very capital intensive, very capital and doesn't work the same way. Like I know a private equity group that I consulted with a little bit who compared us to the car rental business and was showing me the model, the financial model for car rental business.

1:54:53 It doesn't work. You know, it's not the same business. Like the way the rental works, the rate of rental that you're getting back and then the sale price on the car is much more predictable and, and, and it's safer than our industry. Like our industry, sometimes the sale price is 40% of the original purchase price. So you're going to lose 60% on the value when you go to resell it, you know, I mean, it's so anyways, yeah. Well, when you complain about that. All day. It means it's bankable. And the problem is in our business, it's very difficult to get the bank to give you the line of credit that you need to do CapEx in any reasonable way. And let's face it, even in these sea cities that I talked about, we were putting 300 grand a year into, into capital equipment. And that's not nearly as big as say, a Broadway house like a what, what production arts probably used to do and certainly what Bash and what four-star back in the day used to put in.

1:55:52 They, they do more than but but they could get their money out over time. They could, they could show a business model that would work and and they got enough money that they didn't even necessarily have to depend on banking. Banks were not that important back then, not not like they are today, you know it. And then the other thing while we're complaining about these private equity deals, the way they operate or whatever is, you know, I was talking to an owner recently who's looking to sell his company and he's talking to a private equity group. And he said to me, you know, what's it like once I sell the company? And because I'm signing on with them for three years, which is pretty common, right?

1:56:35 And I said, well, you know, you're not the boss anymore, so don't think you're going to be the boss. Like you're going to have to ask mommy and daddy for permission for everything you do from now on #2 whatever they're paying for your company, they're going to pay it in cash probably. But then they're going to go finance that. They're going to go get a bank to give them their cash back. This is how these private equity groups operate. They're going to want to take their cash right back out of that deal and now they still own the majority of the equity. The business itself is strapped with that debt. So if you have an earn out or if you still own stock or whatever it is, just understand that whatever you're selling the business for is probably going to show up as debt on the books, if not today, very soon in the near future.

1:57:24 And I've seen way too many deals that are structured that way. Way too many deals. And you'll have to pay exorbitant management fees to the private. Exorbitant, exorbitant, and I'm not knocking private equity, it serves a purpose when you have customers who are renting thousands of moving lights and thousands of square meters of these video screens and, you know, 3 or $4 million line array systems and stuff. Somebody's got to pay for that, you know, and the the sad thing for me is it's doing away with the Vincent lightings of the world. The mom and pop really great businesses that are the foundation of our industry are disappearing.

1:58:08 And again, I'm not knocking 4 wall either. You know, four wall serves a great purpose. It's a great business in many ways. And by the way, I'm sure you've heard, but it's very close to being sold. So, you know, and this is the other thing, like, you know, your private equity company that you sold to Canterbury, they they're a buy and hold. Most of them are not, most of them are buy, grow, flip and they're going to want to get probably at least three X on their money. And they it all like there are private equity groups that work really well from zero to 100 million in value, then there's some from 100 to two 5250 to 500 and so on. They're different private equity groups that focus very specifically on that range.

1:58:54 And so when you get to 250, you're getting sold to the next level of private equity group and you know, it's just an asset that's changing hands and and going up to the next level. And so, I mean, there's a need for it, but. Well, I find it interesting. I find it interesting. I, I think you're absolutely right about that analysis. And I think that Four Wall is owned by Odyssey. I think I couldn't be right. And they're, I think they're the number 2 private equity group in the country. So I don't know exactly who they're going to sell to, but maybe they're going to sell to the number one private equity company, I don't know. From what I understand, it started as a pretty big list, somewhere around 25 or 30 different buyers and over a period of a year, it's been a very rough year. You know, I've heard all kinds of things, which I won't repeat here, that some of which I know are true, but it's now down to two potential suitors and likely one. And, you know, The thing is some of these deals get done when both parties become a little bit unhappy with the deal. Like it's not usually one side's really happy, the other side's really unhappy or both are really happy. They're usually both a little uncomfortable with it. And I think they're getting to that point now where where it's very close.

2:00:17 I'm, I'm hearing it should at least be announced at some point before the end of summer and and should close, you know, not that long after. And from my opinion, it needs to happen because the old whole industry is holding their breath for the last year based on, you know, just four wall obviously isn't spending the CapEx that they normally would. That hurts the manufacturers. They're maybe not paying as fast as they normally would. Pardon me, I'm gut the tail end of a cold here. And that's hurting the manufacturers, customers, employees, everybody's on hold.

2:01:00 So it's problematic. So it needs to get done. Hopefully it closes. Soon. I wish them well, hope it works out. I mean, again, I'm all concerned. Everybody loves to hate the big guys. Everyone loves every time PRG is going through some pain or whatever, our industry doesn't want the big guys to crash because that hurts so many people. It gathers, it's like a, a tornado. When a tornado builds, it grabs all that air around it. And that's what happens when, when big businesses crash Enron and companies like that. So the Enron in our industry is PRG. And you know, when PRG and VER came together, that solved a lot of problems and created some other ones, you know, and the same thing will happen with this four wall thing thing, you know, because they'll now have a larger private equity group behind them.

2:01:53 They'll buy a bunch more companies, they might buy another big one. And I've already heard the rumors of who that might be. And so, yeah, I mean, again, for me, the bottom line is just that smaller companies with lots of attitude and lots of personality and character are going away and becoming sucked up by these private equity groups or, or just being crushed by by the large companies. And I don't like it. It's it's kind of boring. It's making the industry more boring. So unfortunately I'm running out of time. I actually wanted to talk to you a little bit about your thoughts on the future of the industry and product and, and all of those things. Maybe we'll have a follow up discussion at some point in the future.

2:02:37 Now that I know you've got all this free time, we can talk. Well, that would be fine. You just need to remember, although I try to keep up on things somewhat, I Emma has been so. But you're a smart to stay true to that, you know. Yeah, you're a smart, has been, you're a smart guy. You know, you know what's going on out there. You know where we've been, where we've come from and and you're a smart guy. So I do value your opinions and stuff. So what do you do to keep busy now other than all these boards and stuff that you're on or you still? You used to be a big diver, right? A scuba diver I think. Yeah, yeah. Still do some scuba diving, but that's tailing off a little bit.

2:03:18 You know, I'm 72. I'll be 73 in December, so it's time to slow that down. I do my score volunteer work. My my wife is a Master gardener. She's the number one master gardener in Ashtabula County. Even though there was such a. Thing, yeah, sounds like some yummy. Salads are in order though. There are that part is that part is good. We, we and this year has been an interesting year of growth in terms of crops. The lettuce, we've we've harvested lettuce I think three times. We've harvested kale three times. We've got tomatoes. You know it's and this is early. Why is that for Ohio?

2:04:00 Why? Why is it so different? Because it was so hot early, we had a lot of sun and we've had enough rain and, and plus I'm her waterboy. So, so, so I keep up with that. In fact, if it's, it's clouding up, I can see the clouds because this condo that I'm in is our, it's our getaway place. Most people go down to Florida, right? Or somewhere warm and wonderful. I love Lake Erie, so I stay up here. Good for you. Good for you. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like me, I, you know, people are wondering why I rush away to a colder place up in the mountains. And it's because I live in a really hot place on the ocean. Or I don't live on the ocean, but next to the ocean in South Florida, and you look for the furthest thing away. But plus, I was raised here and my family are all still here and stuff, so it's a nice place to come to. But.

2:04:52 Nice for you man, time with. You and you as well. Very nice catching up. I haven't seen you in a while at, at at shows and stuff. And so it's nice to see you and and talk to you and hear a lot about your story that I didn't know. So I appreciate you sharing it. My pleasure, I hope you have a wonderful day. And you, Paul, and take care of yourself. Yeah.