We are joined by Jody and Adam to talk to one of our clients. Casey Cobb of Ricochet Group has an amazing backstory, and Summit CPA was able to help Casey Cobb manage his business through incredibly challenging times. We talk about Casey’s story, how he found the blue ocean strategy in growing his business, and the value we were able to bring him with our virtual CFO services.
Quote
“Let’s build the plan and plug the engineers into the plan instead of the other way around.” - Casey Cobb
The finer details of this episode
Episode resources
Jami Nau: Hello and welcome to today's podcast. Today I am joined by Jody and Adam, and we have an awesome guest that I'm really excited to talk to. We have a Casey Cobb, one of our clients, Project Ricochet. He has a really amazing story to tell us. So I'm not going to give him much of an intro because I don't want to steal his thunder. But before we get to your story, Casey, do you want to give us a little bit of a background on your company and how you came to Summit?
Casey Cobb: For sure. So I led and lead a digital agency, and my partner at the time who I've since bought out of the company, his responsibility was kind of the stuff that Summit does for us now. And he's like, man, I just really don't want to be doing this, and so let's look for someone to do it. We needed a tax person. We had somebody helping us with our books, but we didn't really have any strategy. We had some spreadsheets and stuff. Our tax person, who was like my dad's tax person.
All: Laughing [in audible]
Casey Cobb: She was part of their firm.They were like, hey this isn’t our core thing and unless you move a bunch of money with us because that's where we make our money, the financial stuff, we're not going to really be available for taxes anymore. So I was like, well, I got all my money in index funds, I don't need it to be managed. So we were looking for people, and there's all sorts of snakes, you know, people out there, and you know, we finally learned about you guys at one of the owner camp events or maybe we had known about you before, but we started to talk. And you know, I would never go back. It was an amazing decision. So, yeah, that's how we found you guys and you’re a key part of the team on many fronts since that. So it's been great.
Jody Grunden: Thanks. Definitely a step up from the tax person?
All: Laughing [in audible]
Adam Hale: Yes, I definitely remember it was at the bureau event. Actually, it was San Francisco, because that was the very first one that I have ever attended. So it was kind of like a different thing for me. We had quite the crew at that San Francisco event whenever we were there.
Casey Cobb: I talked to so many CPA firms, though, you know, like you're just one of the many.
All: Laughing [in audible]
Adam Hale: I remember that conversation, you kind of changed the way that I pitch because I can't remember you were going back and forth. I mean, it was like a technology conversation. I remember it was like Drupal versus WordPress. You and somebody else were, just like, there was a lot of adult beverages. So we were drinking and having a good time. But then you kind of started talking to me about what we do and how we do it. And we were talking a lot. I was you know, I was giving you my good pitch. I was telling you what we do and how we do it, and justifying, you know, basically what we do. I was talking a lot about the tactical stuff like we can do your bookkeeping, we can do all this other stuff. And then, oh, by the way, we do all the strategy and advisory stuff for free, you know, because I was really leading with the tangible stuff first. You were the first one to really call me out on it. You were like, you know, Adam, I heard you talk, like your whole thing sounds amazing. But what strikes me is that you start off with, and like this was really good feedback. You said, you talk to me about all this other like, accounting stuff that I could really care less about. I would pay that fee that you were talking about just to talk, you know, because it's all about the strategy part of it. So that made me kind of rethink how I presented, how I talked about our services to clients. So yes, I was a little heartbroken that you didn’t remember which event we met because it was so meaningful to me.
All: Laughing [in audible]
Jamie Nau: Don’t feel bad Casey, this happens all the time. People don't remember meetings with Adam.
All: Laughing [inaudible]
Casey Cobb: I think that’s interesting because I have discussions with people all the time, right? I'm always trying to take something from that discussion and I just pick out these kernels that kind of stick with me. Like, actually, I was talking with a guy who is a friend of mine who I ended up not utilizing the thing that he sells for many years, but something that stuck with me for like years is he told me once, like, hey, if you're going to do a deal, like just set the conditions that make sense for you, like just stick with that. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. They don't kick it out of hand and then not accept it because you're worried about all these things. You say, okay well, if I'm going to do this, I need to make $500 an hour, or something like whatever, just whatever, and see if it works and if it doesn't then whatever. That's stuck with me, like that basic concept. Then five years later, I was talking to him and I was like, dude. You said something that stuck with me through the years. He's like, oh my God. My dad told me that. I don't even remember telling you that.
Jamie Nau: Yeah, it's crazy how that works. That conversation that you just talked about. It's something that I talk about all the time is like, you know, this is the services we provide. And like, you know, we want to make sure we find the right fit. The last thing you want to do is try to someone into a service they don't belong in. You want to get them in the right service levels. So let's start going down your story a little bit, Casey. So I know you had a turning point a couple of years ago. So you want to kind of go into that, and again, with what that turning point led to and kind of some of the thoughts you had coming away from that.
Casey Cobb: Yeah, well, so the digital agency space has gotten. I mean, to say it's gotten crowded over the past decade is like the understatement of the century. Like open source technology became a thing. All of a sudden, all these people that couldn't afford million dollar projects now could afford a hundred thousand projects, people that couldn't afford a hundred thousand for ten thousand other projects like it just lopped zero off of the cost at least. So there just was a tremendous influx of work, and a ton of agencies crowding that space. Then the punch happened. COVID was just like the final Mike Tyson punch. But through over the past 10 years, my business partner and I were trying to figure out the solution to that. And it became clear that we were going down different trajectories. And so you guys helped us broker a deal because we just couldn't come to a starting point. And finally I said to you guys, hey, here's the problem. Can you turn it into something tangible that we can push against to come to an accord? And we did that, and we did a deal. Then it was me and you guys basically running the company. I had found out like a couple of years before that I had a brain tumor that my doctor was like, don't worry about it. It's not a big deal. I was like really? He was like, yeah, it seems like it's in the middle of the brain. It's not cancerous. We can tell because it's this kind of thing, the world's rarest brain tumor, but it's not cancer. So don't worry about it. Every six months I would get it scanned and it would grow like a little bit. But then the way the MRI takes the measurement, it could be a different side. It could just be the same thing, but it's just different level of it. So it could be the same, And every six months it got bigger. And then like the third six month scan, it had grown like 40 percent. And he's like, don't worry about it. And so Kaiser has a reputation. So I talked to the specialists, like actually I went into a Facebook group for the super rare condition. Everybody in there was like just talking about how they're like Dory, the fish with memory. They have permanent short term memory loss. When they has the tumor removed. I did an informal poll, a Facebook poll. Over seventy five percent of the people had like severe long term, short term memory loss. I was like, holy crap. I'm barely hanging on, like with my brains that I have. So somebody pulled me aside and they're like, you have to find the best person for this condition. You can't just leave it to some guy who's never done it or has done it a couple of times, like you need to find the expert. So I found the expert and I sent my scan to him and he's like, dude, you need to have this out now, like, right away. And I was like, oh, crap. So I talked with you guys and you guys referred me to a guy who, because we have a bunch of employees in different states, we didn't have a health care plan, like a company health care plan. We were just basically adding it into the comp for the employees. So I was able to roll out a health care plan that could let me be seen by that guy within like two weeks. So then I had that covered. Then I prepared my estate trust. I did like everything, put a will together. Like I wrapped everything up because I'm a partner in a brewery as well. I don't know that I ever told you that. You probably heard indirectly because I've got a complex case. I had this big mess to like wrap up and tidy up because you know, I could die. I could go into this thing and, and either come out severely disabled or die. So like I prepped all that stuff. Went in and had the surgery, and came out fine. This guy was a pro, he's like the best surgeon for this this condition. He's done hundreds of them. It took me about, I got about one percent better every day. So I was having, like, the reason people have short term permanent memory issues is the doctors are so worried about bleeding in the third ventricle, the middle of the brain where this thing is, they get in and they cauterize the whole inside of your brain. They just zap it to prevent bleeding. But when they zap it, they zap like your personality and memory. They just fry the whole system to keep it from spreading.
Jody Grunden: That's why you're cool now?
All: Laughing [in audible]
Casey Cobb: Yeah, exactly. My life was a little disappointed. She was like, I thought you were going to come out like, you know, different. So anyways, I came out and I was dealing with the stress of, this is the best part. So right when I came out of it, two of my biggest clients were like, hey, we have to pause on everything because of the budgeting isn’t working. So like the clients that we were hanging on to, artworks drop from like hundreds of hours a week to like 10 hours a week. Like nothing. Dropped down like the bottom fell out. I was like, oh, crap, so I'm dealing with, like, just my life collapsing. I'm dealing with like cognitive issues from the surgery because my brain got all scrambled and like, just anxiety issues in general from the condition. Then you just add on like gasoline to the fire, and the brewery was having challenges. The worst it could possibly get. And I was like, all right, so Tom, what do we do? My son, CFO is like, all right, let me make a plan. And he came up with like a runway based on the cash in the bank that you guys advocate that we should have. And he's like, all right, this is what you can do. So I was like trying to figure out how to get more work, but I was just chasing after just a commodity, like just stuff that is not survivable. Just survival of the subsistence stuff. That's not how you're going to grow your company. Then I talked to a mentor of mine and he was like, dude, just shrink down to the size that you need to shrink down to and then just figure out your way forward. I was reading Blue Ocean strategy. Like I read a bunch of books at that time and I was like, okay. What's the Blue Ocean? I was like, I don't know what it is, but I'm going to figure it out. So I basically just told the team, find new jobs. I'll pay you to find new jobs right now. I've got money in the bank. I'll just pay you guys, like what do you need? Most people were like okay, if you could pay me half of my salary that would be enough right now. And I was like okay, you don't even have to do anything. Just go find jobs. And they did. Everybody found jobs. They're all great, great folks. It went down to just me and my admin. And I signed up for this like, you know, how on LinkedIn you get these like these LinkedIn spam things?
Jody Grunden: Oh, yeah.
Casey Cobb: In 2018 that was a new thing. So I signed up for that. like a service to do that. Just to talk with CTOs and CIOs to like try to understand the crowd like what is the new blue ocean, right? I talked with like probably 50 people, maybe one hundred people, and they're all waiting for the sell, but I was like, I don't have anything to sell. I'm not selling anything. I'm just trying to understand. So I kind of validated the problem. And the problem that I saw was that everybody is looking to technical teams to solve their pain, and then they give the technical team the problem or the pain, and then the technical team tries to come up with a solution for it. And they're really bad at that, like technical teams, technical people get lost in the weeds all the time. They get fixated on stuff that doesn't matter. They spend way more time, like it's not their money. So it's like if you were trying to buy a dresser for your house and the only way you could get dresser is to have somebody build one. So this guy's like building stuff from like ancient redwood, old growth stuff he's carving in a dresser, you know. Like he's like I'm almost done with the you know, the ornate decoration of the history of your people. And you are just like, dude I want a place to put my socks, right? An IKEA dresser would be fine. But you didn't know that was an option, right? And this person certainly not going to give you an IKEA dresser for one hundred bucks, right? He wants to spend four years creating a masterpiece that’s going to quote unquote last. And he may or may not even ever deliver it. It may never work. It may never open. The doors may never open. And that's what technical work is right now. Like, you go to this tech team and they're like okay, I'll start it, and they just get lost. And there's the two principles that I found that I ended up writing a book about was The Pareto Principle and Parkinson's Law, which is like the 80/20 rule. You get 80 percent of the way there in 20 percent of the time. Like, how can you instill that concept in your tech team? that was like a huge part of the puzzle. It's like if you think about it, 80/20 rules everywhere you get 80 percent of the accidents are caused by 20 percent of the drivers. 80 percent of the taxes are paid by 20 percent of the taxpayers. 80/20 is everywhere. So if somebody had one hundred thousand dollar project that they needed to get done, if you could help them figure out what the 80 percent solution was, you could do it for twenty thousand dollars. This was a huge swing of what that thing could end up costing between the IKEA dresser and like the magic, the amazing built for a thousand years dresser. And then the other thing, you know, is like Parkinson's law, like the amount of time something takes is how much time you allot it. If you've ever slept through your alarm clock, you know, you can get out the door in like ten minutes. You just brush your teeth and get coffee on the way. You just don't do the stuff that you do normally. You naturally find that Pareto, that 80/20 solution in the morning because you don't need to sit there for 30 minutes browsing the news. You don't need to make coffee. You don't need to, like, do all these other things. You don't need to sit in your bed for fifteen minutes browsing reddit before you wake up. You know these are the things that you can cut out. So how can you instill those in your software process.
Jamie Nau: Glad you gave a name to it, because I've always called Parkinson's theory Jody’s theory because that's what he's always telling me. It's like people are going to fill their time. And I've always called that Jody’s theory. I'm glad we know the real name.
Casey Cobb: Yeah so what I was trying to figure out is like okay, I've been doing this with my clients for years. The best analogy, not to get lost in the tech work, is like let's say you buy a spa on Costco.com for like two thousand dollars, and you want to put it in your backyard. You call the electrician and say okay, I want to put it right here. He says okay, that's going to be ten thousand dollars’ worth of electrical work to do that. And you're like, dude, the spa is two thousand dollars. I don't have the ten thousand dollars to install this. I guess I can't have a spa, right? That's like most technical work. It's like I want to do this thing, okay, it's going to be five hundred thousand dollars. Oh I guess I can't do it. What you would prefer that person do is walk around your house and say okay, but if you put it over here, it's not going to be a ten thousand bucks because it's right next to the circuit box and it's going to be a simple job. You might look at that spot and say, well the neighbors can kind of see it. It's under a tree. So there's going to be some leaves I have to clean it out. But, you know, I mean, it's not ten thousand dollars’ worth of inconvenience. Just put the spa there, and when I get a bonus at work, or I win the lottery, I'll put it back where I actually want it. That's good enough for right now. That discussion doesn't happen in technical work. Like, people don't come around and say, hey, this could be five thousand dollars or it could be five hundred dollars. Here's how you can get it to be five hundred. And so, like, how could we set that up? And so I developed this whole intake process and estimating like how can you plug engineers into this whole machine so that if any one engineer leaves, it's okay because another engineer can see the whole thing and go okay. I see what I can do. I see these tasks, I see how much time they're supposed to take. If you think that's going to be to three hours, then here's what needs to be true to make sure that that happens. So the whole feedback loop is built in this beautiful machine. I went to a bunch of people and I was like, where could I have this machine? Sell this machine rather than the people? I don't want to sell the development hour. I want to sell the machine, the orchestration layer. I went to a bunch of people. I talked to coding boot camps. I talked to a bunch of different organizations. One time this guy was like, dude, if your thing is so amazing, why don't you just go sell that thing and just make a bunch of money? Like, why are you trying to get us to use it? He was like, why don't you just use it to build stuff and not try to sell the system and then figure it out later? I was like, you know what, fine, I'll just sell this thing. So I went to all my clients and just said, hey, I'm not selling you development by the hour anymore. I'm selling you this process. We're going to plug people into it and then I'm going to deliver it. It's going to be the same to you, except it's going to be way cheaper. I'm just going to mark this up like twenty five bucks an hour right now. I will add twenty five bucks an hour under the cost of whoever I find to plug into this process and do the work. So now I'm working with like Fortune Five companies to do this. I'm working with a number of digital agencies because the pain for digital agencies is like they have fluctuating work and they may not have the ability to keep these guys busy all the time. So then they're just like stuck with this one guy who specializes in this one technology. What I can do to marketing agencies, design agencies or even development agencies is like, hey. With your clients, use this process to really understand the need and come up with an estimate, get that cemented, and I will spin up a high performing engineering team in like a week. I can have folks from all over the world plugged in and I'm just going to tack on a small fee per hour for this management. And then when we're done, we dissolve them or you keep some people that you want if you still have an ongoing need. And we actually did that for this agency that had this, like start date that they didn't know when it was going to start because the client was delaying. And then finally after like two years of, like, kind of stringing along, they were like okay, we got to go now. We've got to have it done in four months. We've got to have this thousand hour project done. I was like all right. Click the machine, got a bunch of people plugged into it and we were up to like two to three hundred hours a week of work. Delivering between front and back end data migration specialist. They had the design all covered but we spun up this team. We had one guy who kind of like flunked out really quick and we could see it because our machine is like hey, red alert. Then we were able to coach him and it was clear that it wasn’t going to work. Plugged another guy in, just barely a blip. We hit the deadline and then at the end of that, everybody went down, for the for the people. One of the guys stayed on my team. I've had them on other projects since, but like, they scale up and scale down and they don't have to worry about creating this perfect bespoke team every single time. To them it's amazing because they can still make their standard rate. They pay less than they otherwise would have, even in some cases. And then they take all that stress, the same thing that you guys help me with when I was coming out of this thing. Like, I just know that when I have a problem, I go to my CFO and say, hey, help me solve this. They come to my firm and I help them solve those technical challenges. Then they don't have to carry that team after the fact, like engineering as a service. So that was the new blue ocean that I found and all the other things that I was doing to solve my client's needs before I just sell as an actual like system now. And I've been scaling that up. I wrote a book.
Jody Grunden: How do you get that book?
Casey Cobb: I just send it out. I didn't put it on Amazon because the thing is, how do I say this? The title of the book is flipping the script, because I think that it's really unfortunate how engineers have become like the king of the castle for technical work. They fall victim to all these cognitive biases, right? Like overengineering, overbuilding, combative, like blaming you when they delivered something that wasn't right. And people are really frustrated with this. So my whole thing is like, let's build the plan and plug the engineers into the plan rather than going to them and saying, please save me oh king. So I know that if I put this book on Amazon, like the people that I'm dethroning are going to just flame it. So I will just send the book out to control the review process of it. But yeah, I'm happy to send you a book.
Jamie Nau: We will get your email address out there. If you want to plug it right now you can. We'll also have it in the show notes.
Casey Cobb: Yeah, just casey@projectricochet.com. Ricochet is spelled different than most people spell it. If I were to go back and pick a new company name I probably wouldn't pick that because every time I say, I'm not saying that you would misspell this, but I think you probably would misspell this.
All: Laughing [inaudible]
Jody Grunden: So question on your clientele. What's the client size that would typically benefit from this. It sounds like really any size of business.
Casey Cobb: That's the thing. It's like this process doesn't care whether the project is, you know, a five hundred dollar project or a five million dollar project. Like I've literally done this for super tiny stuff. I have clients that are just tiny little clients who use the help for this. I have two of the Fortune Five companies using this right now. I have prominent universities. They just come with a problem. We chop it up. Say here's what the size of it is going to be. Do you have anybody who can plug into this on your own? Oh, you do. Let's take these two guys and then we're going to need based on the math, we're going to need three more people. We're going to find those folks. Do you have to have them, like some people can only do domestic engineers. Some don’t care. We can go to Eastern Europe or Latin America or wherever, and we can resource those folks for less money per hour. Then we build the team. There's also a thing that I built. I had a video made that I can send you that I call it my space station model. Where you have like an integrator domestic worker within your company. Then we spin up these engineers. The way we chop up the work, they may not even know who they're doing it for, but they have specific tasks that they deliver to the integrator on your end. Then that person kind of integrates and puts it out to all the sensitive systems, sensitive systems with confidential information. So it allows you to scale up really quickly with that single choke point. And then if that person leaves within your organization, one of those external people can become that integrator for a short period and then they can go back to being external. It's kind of like how our countries dock with the ISIS, like they can just kind of like step over and they don't have to like be in it really. They just kind of connect and go. So it can be for super large, super small firms. That's why I think about it like orchestration layer, like there are services like Google, the cloud computing, you don't know the servers, you just know that you put some push code and it's just available. Then it can scale up and down. Then when you're done, you can just turn it off and then it goes away. So Google doesn't care whether it's a tiny little thing or a huge thing.
Adam Hale: So if you're an agency, and you have a team but you maybe don’t have a complete team, if you kind of plug into this this plan, the system, are you able then to just augment that? So I have three the different disciplines that I need. Is that still a solution, or does it have to be like the whole team?
Casey Cobb: Absolutely. That's the whole idea, right? So the whole idea, to use that example with an agency that I worked with, they had comp's, they had designs, and they're like okay, we chopped it up into an estimate. I call it the five things analysis. So it's like a five by five. What are the five high level things? And then what are the five things within each of those five things? Oftentimes it's more than five and five. Sometimes it's seven and eight or whatever. But roughly we try to break it up into that, and then that turns into an estimate using agile planning poker and then that turns into hours and dollars across the board. So it's like okay, we have five hundred hours of development work, and like five hundred hours of project management and QA and release management and like kind of X Factor, who knows what could come up like all that stuff. So it's like a thousand hours and you have two engineers, you can give 20 hours a week. So we have 40 hours, and you need to get this thing done within two months. Like if you divide 40 into a thousand, you know, there's no way it would take way longer. So we're trying to solve for in order to hit this deadline, we need to get, you know, an extra one hundred and fifty hours a week, I am doing the math in my head. But one hundred fifty hours a week, which is going to be if we get guys working 30 hours a week, right? This is how many engineers we need to find. So they're going to work alongside, like, what are your folks going to do? What are our folks going to do and how are we going to work together to be able to scale this up? Then we just plug those things in. It does require that the other team to be following the same methodology unless, because if we're tracking budget and like, alerting them if it's going to go over, like we have to make sure we are all on the same page, but it's minimal. It's very easy to do that. So yeah, we can work alongside and that's the whole thing is a lot of these people that are saying give us everything and then we'll just deliver it. It's the same problem. You don't know if these people are going to actually deliver it. You don't know their practices or whatever. But what I do is say okay, here's the zip line. Here's the system. We're going to run your folks down the zip line. You're going to run my folks down the zip line. Then when we're done, your folks stay, my folks to distend. Then we're ready, if in a future project maybe your people can handle it. You don't need external work. But then at some point you need to be able to snap your fingers and scale up 300 hours a week. That's really hard, man, because engineers are a fickle bunch. In busy times it's hard to find good people. In tough times like now, it's hard to find good people because you just get so many applications. You can't ever sift through it. With technical people, you don't know whether they're a good fit until you get into the weeds with them and then you're like oh, crap.
All: Laughing [in audible]
Adam Hale: Yeah, you have to have a bench. I mean, we promote that all the time. But to have a bench with a system on top of that, they can kind of plug in just kind of adds that extra layer to it that you know, a lot of times people are missing.
Casey Cobb: Yeah the things that keeps me up at night is like if I have a rock star, if that person quits, man, as an agency leader, I'm screwed because I have the relationship. I have the project, my reputation. If you're an owner of a company, you know that you cannot trust from a week to week basis your intuition on how people are feeling. Everybody's been in that situation where you get this like hey, can we talk?
All: Laughing [in audible]
Casey Cobb: Then you get into it and they are they are like I got another job. I'm giving my two weeks or maybe not. Maybe it's like I'm out. And you're like, no, man, you just told me you were great. You just told me everything was fine. And that's the thing. That's just what you have to deal with. That anxiety used to eat at me, man. Now I am like, all right. I wish you success. I snap my fingers and then we've got more engineers that plug into it. Now I don't have that anxiety anymore, just like with you guys. Like when I get anxious and I email Dave, like, dude, can we talk because I want to talk about taxes for like an hour. And he is like okay. Let’s do it. I just know that I don't have to deal with that anxiety anymore because you guys have it. You guys have it covered.
Jody Grunden: Yeah, it's kind of amazing. Everything you said, we have the same issues right now. We have, you know, the technical people are our accountants, You tell them to do something, they'll go from A to Z and they won't think outside the box. We can't have that in our world, you know? Our world has to think outside the box. They need to be more consultative than they do simply going from A to Z. It’s amazing how similar the two really are.
Jamie Nau: Yeah I think everything you talked about really does apply. As you were talking I was like, how can that help me? My job is running this accounting team. I was trying to think through a lot of what you were saying. I think that, you know, this podcast is really helpful. I think you went down two very important parts. You talked a lot about how to run a successful project and what it takes and the things you need to look at. But also, you know, earlier, I think talking about your change in vision and the things you did when you had that change of vision, and the conversations you had with your CFO, how important that was. So I think we've unpacked a ton in this podcast and we're pushed on time right here. So any final thoughts from anybody?
Casey Cobb: I do want to share one final thought that I thought was great from you guys. So when I was going through my brain surgery recovery and stuff, and I was like okay. I got to go down to just me, and build it back up. I did a lot of reading. I did a lot of talking. I came back from my vision quest, and I was like, all right, this is the path forward. This is what I have to do. I told my Summit CFO. I told Tom, hey. This is what we're going to do, and he was like, dude. That's pretty dramatic, man. Like, are you sure? Are you okay? I know you just got your brain drilled into, like are you good? Should I really be listening to you right now? And I was like, yeah man. Like here's the logic. Like you can try to argue with me, and he was like alright. I just want to give that little push back and check point to make sure we're good. And I thought that was so great because you need that as a boss of a company. You never get people who say hey, dude. Are you mentally there? Okay. Alright, let's do it. Or I disagree with you. Go to hell. I quit. Like two extremes. But when I said no, this is the future. This is how we're going to build this thing back up, he's like, alright, here's how we're going to do it. And we made a plan and we've been executing on that ever since then. I mean, it's been over two years now and we're still marching toward this path. Every week Tom is like, here's how we're progressing towards the plan we came up with so many years ago. And by the way, I don't ever want to lose Tom. He is my rock.
Jody Grunden: We don’t either.
All: Laughing [in audible]
Casey Cobb: Yeah whenever there's a new guy on the call I'm like, Tom, you're not leaving are you?
Jamie Nau: That's awesome. Any final thoughts Jody or Adam?
Jody Gruden: You know, it's been great working with you. I mean, I do remember San Francisco as well. Adam wasn’t the only one there. I remember you talking about the DiSC profile. We never heard of it at the time, and you were going through it and talking about it, and breaking everything down. It was pretty, pretty cool. That's what I got out of it big time. We went back and we started implementing that type of service right away with our team just to get that same feeling that you had. So, you know, we tend to learn as much about our clients as our clients learn from us, which is really cool. The relationship, we look at it more as a partner relationship, not a vendor relationship type of thing. I think that's what you're trying to do as well. You're trying to be a partner with companies you're working with, not a vendor, which is which is huge.
Jamie Nau: Adam, final thought?
Adam Hale: Yeah, I agree with everything Jody said. I really appreciate the feedback and learning from one another. I do remember the DiSC profiles. You and Eric were going back and forth, and Jody and I were like, who the hell are these guys?
All: Laughing [in audible]
Adam Hale: That was a good time and definitely enjoy hanging out and hope we get an opportunity post COVID to be able to attend events together and have a few drinks.
Jamie Nau: Awesome. Well thanks guys for joining the show. This is a great one and thanks for joining us, Casey.