Michael Dermer, Founder of The Lonely Entrepreneur | Entrepreneurial Lessons From A Category Creator

Thanks again for joining me today. I am sitting down with Michael Durmer, who is the founder and CEO of the Lonely Entrepreneur. He is considered the pioneer of the industry to reward people for being healthy, very excited to understand his story, what that means, what he's done, what he's doing now. Michael, thanks so much for sitting down. I appreciate it. Thanks for the time. I really appreciate you having me. No, it's my pleasure. So you have a really interesting story. And I want you to tell it because I think that's when I look up your name, when I look up your past and the company that you had and the struggles and the issues that you went through building it and scaling it, and then tell me what your origin story is and how you got to where you are today. Sure. I started my career as a corporate lawyer in New York City. I was doing M&A for a large New York law firm after graduating from Northwestern Law School. But I was in the start of business. Back then in the early 2000s, it's not like today where people through business plans on your desk all day long. And I was just looking for something to start, even though I was in a big corporate law firm. And I literally stumbled upon and started what got to be known as the first company in the United States to reward people for being healthy. I was literally at the dinner with some friends. One of my friends wives was pregnant. And she said, Hey, do you realize that for every 10 people, 10 women that don't follow their prenatal care, they cost the health care system a million dollars? And I was like, wait a minute. Why wouldn't you just pay these women to get their prenatal care? And that was it. The beginning of the end. That was the idea. And worked, you know, at one o'clock in the morning, ready to business plans after my M&A job. And then left and started, again, like that's been known as the first company to reward people for being healthy. So it went from this very prestigious law firm to a basement like a lot of us do. And, you know, in the early days of that business, you know, not only was that concept new, it was offensive. You know, the health care industry said, we are never going to reward people for being healthy. And we're like, wait a minute, every other consumer industry does that. And so for the first five years, plus, you know, we battled and scrapped and clawed and bootstrapped. And then from, you know, 2006 to 2008, we really grew a lot after some very lean early years, venture capital back to that point. And so by 2008, you know, we had built it up to, you know, a 500 person company. And we had, you know, quote unquote, made it. And basically defined this new concept. And as you know, literally almost got destroyed overnight by the financial crisis of 2008, all of our clients were what every young entrepreneur dreams of, right, large corporate America, right? And, you know, as those companies got decimated, we almost got decimated with them was a health care technology, you know, SaaS license business. And, you know, our three biggest customers were Washington Mutual, Countrywide Financial and General Motors. And only one of them still exists today. And nobody called me to tell me. And so we spent the better part of three years, you know, working 20 hours a day to basically save this thing. It's been 10 years building and was fortunate enough, you know, on the other end of the financial crisis, there was everybody had this interest in health care. We bounced back and got approached by a bunch of investment bankers and got bought. So it's a great story in the end. But as you can imagine, an incredibly wild ride made only for big boys and girls. Yeah, that's a lot of a lot of stress. It's funny. You had the highest highs and the lowest lows as an entrepreneur. You had the whole range, right? And I'm actually on your site, it said, you got destroyed in 10 days by the financial crisis, 2008, nearly destroyed in 10 days. So I only imagine the toll that took on your mental health and well-being. That's tough. Well, you know, it was literally true because, you know, if you remember October, 2008, when their sterns went down, it literally unraveled the financial markets quickly. And because we had a lot of financial institutions, those customers, they literally, you know, Washington Mutual, we probably had a $6 or $7 million dollar, very highly profitable software license contract with literally we filed for a bankruptcy a week later. Because, you know, their whole mortgage back securities on loud stuff like that. But that was not in the brochure. I can tell you that much. So what do you do? What is the lonely entrepreneur? So you sold your company. You still want to work. What's what are you doing now? Well, you know, after that experience, we write from saving the company to M&A and selling it. And I was literally just chilling out in New York where I'm from and and all I was doing was helping entrepreneurs for fun, you know, just having cups of coffee with friends and friends of friends. And I wasn't really looking to do anything else. I'm only really attracted to bigger things that have an impact on society. So, you know, things like rewarding people for being healthy was very attractive to me. And when I was sitting with somebody, they said being an entrepreneur is really lonely. And I was like, huh, that's interesting. And kind of forgot about it. And then I was walking down the street with a friend of mine in Union Square in New York. And I told him that and he's like, what did you just say? And I'm like lonely entrepreneur. He's like, you realize that's what we all share is the struggle. And I go, yeah, yeah. And he goes watch this and we walked into drag me into Starbucks and he yelled, who here is a lonely entrepreneur. And everybody raised their hand. And I was like, okay, I got it. But my goal was there were so many people out there with passion and great ideas that literally had so many gaps. And there's so much you need to know as an entrepreneur to be successful. And I didn't have a desire to kind of just write a book and stand in front of 20 people and give a lecture. I wanted to try to help people all over the place who were talking about this over dinner or thinking about leaving the job or, you know, dealing with having to become one in COVID. And so we started lonely entrepreneur. We wrote a book about our journey. And then launched what you probably know is this kind of one stop shop platform, which was really designed to give people a lot of the knowledge tools and support they need to have a better better chance of success. So what we call it at lonely entrepreneur is turning your passion into success by actually learning a lot of the different things you need to know to be a more successful entrepreneur. And what is and what is that that? Well, first of all, I'm curious, how did you figure it out? Because, you know, you were that lonely entrepreneur. So what resources did you lean on and and and and growing your company be the first time? What was really interesting, I had a pretty good background to start. So I had a finance and eliminate background. So the financing stuff and the corporate stuff was pretty easy. The hardest part that you learn along the way is that you you have to build this organism. You know, at first, your company looks like a solar system with your head in the middle, right? And then as you grow, you've got to you've got to start to look like an orchard, right? And you have to learn that. And I just remember a lot of people saying, you know, the people that started early stage companies were not the people that should be ones running them longer term, right? Because there were different skill sets. And so I just really embraced the journey of trying to get better at it. No different than, you know, I played college baseball, you know, the number of hours you spend in a batting cage trying to get better at, you know, and I looked out at the same way and I just, I just learned and read and talked to people and what you realized it was a pretty it was a hard to execute, but it was a pretty standard formula, right? Of what does a good company look like? Didn't always get it right by any means. But I just kind of embraced it, made mistakes and just tried to stay very true to what I think is the most important thing, which is the thing that makes you different, you know, your vision. But then how do you translate that into like an operating organism that actually can make that work? And, you know, what I just described, people have written hundreds and hundreds of books about to try to solve. Yeah, yeah. But, but, you know, you're not, you're not wrong. The tagline is the difference between success and failure is your perspective, which sounds nice, but then there's obviously operationalizing it and actually bringing that and working with it in your specific, you know, industry, niche, environment, vertical. But you're saying that there can be some sort of methodology for an entrepreneur to understand that perspective and then apply it to everything they do as they're growing and learning and scaling a business. Yeah, 100%. What is it? Yeah, yeah, sorry. Well, if you think about it, no, no, you're exactly right. When you think about it is once you kind of put the entrepreneur on your chest and you're this entrepreneur for superhero, we all think that the normal operating metrics for businesses don't apply, right? And like, like setting a goal and priorities and operating metrics and process like all this really unsexy stuff that is actually what makes a vision come to life in something, right? And, and the ability to connect those dots was really the key, especially, you know, during the financial crisis, when things are moving all over the place, then you literally need to say, Hey, my goal is this, my, my priorities are this and the strategies I'm going to use. And then I need, you know, basic boring stuff like people and process and metrics to make it happen. But I still think the most important thing, and I know your audience is very attuned to kind of sales and marketing. We still think the most important thing was, what we say is finding a playground when nobody else is playing. You can do all the stuff that I just said and execute the best way. But if you don't have something that really defines that playground for you, I mean, if you think about my business, rewarding people for being healthy, all we did was take the same exact concept that we're used being used everywhere and, you know, credit card programs and airline programs and and retailer loyalty programs and apply them to healthcare. But once we did, you know, we found our playground and we started to own it. And then, hopefully, if you're smart enough to either buy yourself or with your colleagues to put that into place with those kind of operating foundations, that's, I think, the combination for success. I appreciate that. And I think that that's that's a smart way to look at it. Now, as as people sort of understand more about the lonely entrepreneur because you did, you know, you did create a community for entrepreneurs. What type of entrepreneur, what are people looking for when they go and see you? What do you offer them? What's what's the value add for lonely entrepreneur? For example, as opposed to you're an Y-convenator, you know, there's a lot of these types of programs that want to differentiate what you do. Yeah, so the product that I mentioned you, the subscription based product is called the learning community. And what we're really trying to do is guide you every day. You know, there's great programs out there like Y-convenator and incubators and accelerators and workspace programs. We just feel like there's so many things that you need to know as an entrepreneur. You can almost define entrepreneurs and not by the way it's been defined maybe historically like passion. Like you have passion and grit, right? And that's an entrepreneur. As opposed to an entrepreneur is the amalgamation of 100 skills, right? And so what we're trying to do with our platform is to say there's all these skills that you need to learn. You need to be able to manage yourself. You need to be able to do great sales presentations. You need to be able to manage your team. You need to be like there's all this stuff that goes into it, not to mention the personal stuff. And so I think that there's so many kind of early stage entrepreneurs that have passion, have grit and have a great idea, but haven't had the opportunity or the wherewithal to develop those skills. And as you know, as we were talking about before, everyone's at different stages, right? Someone's in corporate America thinking about leaving somebody else's just got an idea and somebody else's got a six person company, right? And they're raising money for the first time. So for us, it's about how do you get to be a better entrepreneur every day and through this online platform and the support we provide, were there were trying to be their sidekick at every step of their journey where they have online learning, but at the same time, they have access to a community and coaching that guides them at every step of their journey. And one thing that you mentioned and you sort of highlighted on your site, and I like it a lot, there's people that are in all walks of life all stages in their journey trying to do a thing, you know, the side hustle is more popular than ever now. And one of the pieces that you actually mentioned was entrepreneur, entrepreneurism is not nice to have. It's a skill that must be unlocked in every company. So speak to me about what that means for somebody who's in a company that doesn't understand how they can associate with the word entrepreneur. Yeah, it's a great point. So there's two kind of lens of this one lens is, okay, you're in a company and you're thinking about leaving and doing your own thing and that applies to some of the things that we've just been talking about. But companies to compete have to think like entrepreneurs, right? I mean, I mean, Amazon should not exist, right? Walmart should have created Amazon and blockbuster should create a Netflix and so many should have created Spotify. Like these organizations had all the way with all the duties of things. And today, if you don't think we call it think like an entrepreneur, if you don't think like an entrepreneur within a larger company, you're just going to become kind of the next, you know, company that just doesn't stay up at the times. And that's a difficult thing to do, right? Because large companies don't operate that way. They think about quarterly numbers and it's really hard for them to innovate. So we have a program called think like an entrepreneur, which is a training program, which helps large organizations take what you learn from entrepreneurs and employ it within a corporate environment to try to create some of these methodologies and thought processes that entrepreneurs have all day long, but just don't regularly get deployed in a in a corporate environment. Do you feel like you have advice for people that feel like they're being, I guess, held down or or just like just like their ideas are being choked out in the organization, like how do they how do they actually thrive in a company that is by the quarterly numbers with all the red tape? I'm curious as to how to do that. So there are people the people that rise, the men and women that rise to senior levels within organizations are the ones that are able to deliver results, right? There are ones that if you ask them, what do you do with your job? The first thing they're going to do is give you a number, right? I deliver X. I deliver the sales or this expense savings or whatever it may be. I just shareholder value. Those people are always interested in innovations that work, right? So if you're stifled and you're in an organization, I mean, I think that we talked about before, we sold the health plans. Health plans did the same thing for 50 years and the people that you were selling to were the very same people that put in place the things that you were trying to get rid of, right? So and the same thing exists with an organization. What I would say is I would respectfully whether it's the innovation people or the senior leaders in your group and say listen, you know, do your homework, like come up with a business plan, come up with a business case. Don't just walk in somebody who's the executive VP of blah, blah, blah and say I have an idea. Do your work and put it in a package, but say, this I believe that this can deliver us revenue, competitive differentiation, significant cost savings, and I'd like to have the opportunity to present it to you. And I can tell you that the people that are in those roles, certainly you and me, we would always want to have that conversation if it was something that was that was credible, even if you're stifled at different levels of your organization. Yeah, not a good very good point very well said. I think that that's something to take note of like you don't even if you feel like the organization doesn't support or perhaps you don't see the peers, your peers working on things like this, take that initiative. And I think the takeaway message of the lesson is to, you know, you'd be surprised at what you can accomplish if you start going out there. And like you said, acting like an entrepreneur within a company and pushing these ideas in front of the right people or presenting them in front of the right people, it could really take that career to the next level within an organization. I can tell you what I did when I started my company and our clients were health plans. And we're an early stage company. I used to literally sit down at eight o'clock at night and leave voicemails for the CEOs of our nation's largest healthcare companies, United Health Care, and I got seven out of 10 calls back. And that wasn't because of my bubbly personality. I basically said, listen, there's going to be a health plan here in the United States that's going to have a reward program just like Marriott and Citibank. And the one that does is going to win the consumer and the one that doesn't is going to fall behind. This is what we're doing. Give us a call back. Hey everyone, Scott here. 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But the people that arise to senior levels rise to senior levels because they cut through things and ultimately deliver some kind of financial performance. One point that I wanted to highlight because you list off a whole bunch of problems with mentors that align themselves with entrepreneurs, people that oversell themselves, people that are only looking for winners, so on and so on, that keeps going going. So as an entrepreneur, it's scary out there to align with someone. How do you look for the right person? There are a lot of mentors that are doing all the right things. But then there's also a bunch of mentors that are trying to sell you things, trying to bring in their own financial partners, trying to bring in their own marketing partners and things like that. Here's what I would say. A lot of times mentors that maybe don't always have your best interest at heart. Like I said, there's many that do. A lot of times they prey on the risk that entrepreneurs are feeling. When you're talking to somebody and you have a mentor and to somebody you really like and you're connecting with, go ask a colleague of yours. Not somebody that has the last thing, last name in you or somebody you're dating or your brother, just somebody who's business judgment, you respect and say to them, hey, listen, I'm thinking about getting involved in this mentor. Can you talk to them for a half hour and hour? Because they're a completely objective view, right? And they will come in and say, well, I think this person's a little to this, a little to that. And that can really help you, especially when you talk about the book and this whole idea of perspective. We all know this. We're in the middle of it. We have a really tough time seeing things what other people can see really clearly. That also works a lot when you're hiring employees, right? When you're working 24 hours a day, the person in front of you might just hire them just because they can speak, right? Because you're so busy. If you go to, like, if I went to you and said, hey, listen, could you interview this person for me? You would give me a reason, thoughtful, you know, objective view. And I'd be able to make the right type of decision just like I would with a mentor. Yeah. Good advice. It's very good advice. I've never heard a frame like that. I've never heard that suggestion before, but I really like that a lot, especially when you're, you know, as an entrepreneur, you're right, you're just over tired, absolutely exhausted. No decisions you're making are probably the right ones. So you're trying to look for all these little tricks and tips to make it easier on yourself. I like that a lot. I'm not what we said before about, like being a series of skills, right? It's not, yes, the big things matter, but it's also, you know, you hire the wrong person, you get the wrong mentor, you know, you're already kind of, you know, behind a fall a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. One other, the last thing, not to end and date with lessons from the book, but I thought there was a few really, really good ones. And then I wanted to ask just some, like, some personal insights from your career. But the four piece, you mentioned that perspective can be influenced by pressure, passion, pleasure, pain, or a flawed perspective. Yeah. He speak a little bit more on that and extrapolate just what that means exactly and how to sort of watch for that as an entrepreneur. I think we sort of touched on it a little bit, but just to make it clear and distinct. Yeah. It's really interesting when you take a step back after I sold my company and you're like, what is up? What do we all really go through? Like when we were writing the book, we were saying, what do we really go through? And, and this whole idea of a four piece, can we start saying, well, you have passion, and you're like, well, I'm going to make meatballs, right? And somebody will go, well, the world has plenty of meatballs and you'll be like, well, not my meatballs, right? So we all have that kind of, but then you also have, you know, pressure, right? There's a lot on you, sometimes financial pressure, sometimes you leave a job. You know, you have the pleasure of, you know, the first time you print your business card, you get your first customer. It's like your first kiss, right? And then the pain, you know, when the first time an investor tells you that they don't like your business, it's like somebody's calling your baby ugly. And, and we're really invested in when you're, we're always under the influence of these four piece that make us do the wrong thing. When we're under pressure, right? We hire the wrong person, right? When we're feeling all-passion about our meatballs, sometimes we're not listening to the feedback of the market saying, hey, it doesn't work this way, but it might work that way. So we just always have to be really cognizant of the fact that we're kind of under the influence of these things. So we can employ some of the techniques we were talking about before. Smart, smart. I wanted to ask a couple like life lesson, professional lesson questions just from your past, but before I move off the topic of lonely entrepreneur, what you're working on now, was there anything that I didn't ask that I should have about what you're working on? Now I think, you know, all this stuff is about lonelyunter.com. The only thing that we're doing, which we're super excited about, is we're launching a Black Entrepreneur Initiative, where we're taking our platform and with the help of corporate and philanthropic and government sponsors throughout the country, to try to have, you know, our little place in the world on the social and economic justice issues, trying to empower 100,000 Black entrepreneurs across the country. So super excited about, you know, obviously the institutional issues are wide and deep, and while those are getting fixed, you know, we think what better way to try to have an impact than to put the tools in the hands of Black entrepreneurs. So that's all. Is that launch? Is there like a place people can go and check that out? Or is that still in the works? Next week. One take. Okay. Next week. Yeah. Okay. So by the time this comes out, it's going to be a two weeks from now when this comes out, it'll be, it'll be live. So I guess still same domain, lonelyunter.com. Okay. Yeah. Very good. Okay. So now, just a few life insight questions that I like to ask giving your past and experience, what was the biggest challenge in your mind of being an entrepreneur, and how did you overcome it? I would say that when, when everything was kind of crumbling in 2008, you know, up until that point, it was hard, but we very much believed in our vision. I would say the balance of ego and humility, you know, I was a guy, I was a college athlete, an emanate lawyer, you know, you're so hard-charging about your vision, what you want to do, and what you realize is great leaders combine that ego, if you will. Now listen, we were telling the healthcare industry that you had to do things you would never do. I mean, that takes ego, right? You're going to tell you how else there. They're going to do something that they said they would never do. And sometimes, and I would say I was included in this, the humility that has to go with that, because you have to learn, like you have to get better at being an entrepreneur. You know, I remember saying to my board one time, you know, there's not one book about being a CEO. Like if there was one book you just go on Amazon and say give me the CEO book and you'd follow it. So I think the one thing that I really learned is you have to be able to have this very delicate balance between your ego to push forward and get your whom's humility to understand that you've actually got to get a group of people to follow you, right? And that's, when you do that, then you kind of got the great combination of the passion along with the execution that goes with it. It's one of the lessons that I think I probably learned the hard way. Well, yeah, but still it's the fact that you did learn it, right? That's what that's the take away. That's the hardest part, right? You know, I think every entrepreneur is going to struggle with personal and identity issues and ego issues and self-awareness issues, but it's like the success, the key is to overcome those eventually. That's really, that's what will take you to the point where you can have, I think you said a 500-person company that can eventually exit, right? Because I don't think you can ever get to that point without overcoming those types of issues. You know, when you two, if you ask a mother, right, the day after she had her first child, were you great at this mom thing, right? Most moms that would be honest with you would say, no, I'm just trying to make sure that I don't kill this little person the next day, right? And they embrace the journey because this is their child of doing whatever they can, however they can, to make it happen. And that ends up being a series of skills, right? That they get better at that they're committed to. And I wish kind of somebody had said that to me when I was 20, right? That you're just going to get, you got to get better at all these different skills to have a better chance of success. And some of these are these perspectives like we're talking about that are not, you know, just income statements and balance sheets. What is the biggest area related to entrepreneurship or startups that you're curious about, you're investigating and that you're interested in right now? I think more so than anything is how do we move the needle on some of our less fortunate parts of society that we're either less fortunate before or now have been forced because of COVID to turn to entrepreneurship or as we would say, their entrepreneurs either by choice or necessity. So there are so many more people, right, that are going to have to do their own thing. So what I'm really trying to have the biggest impact on is don't get me wrong, I was a Wall Street, you know, M&O guy and that's all sexy and that's what games gets people's name in the paper. But I had all this education like we talked about before. What happens when you're the, you know, the kid that graduates high school in Queensbridge, New York, right, who's going to have to do their own thing, right? And the educational system is not necessarily empowering them. How do we teach them skills? They may not create the next Facebook, but they sure as how it could go and create a little graphic design business, right? And so that to me is the part of entrepreneurship that I'm most interested in is how can we empower the people before that case challenges, but now that has become whatever it is, 10, 20, 30% of the population now that has to figure out a way to create a better life in themselves and can't rely on, you know, what's going to happen in the next five years? I liked that a lot. Do you have any suggestions? That's a tough, that's a tough one to figure out because it's a huge amount of people now that are suffering from unemployment. Yeah, I think the foundation of it is really, you know, as I said before, finding that playground, that playground doesn't have to be big, right? It could be really small. Like, if you, if you want to create a pizza store in your local neighborhood, you can get a really good pizza store in your local neighborhood, right? It's, those things on a smaller levels are very doable, but you have to really find your playground that makes you different, right? Not just something that everybody else doing. If you think about take a yoga studio, right? Every single yoga studio is now online, right? In fact, if you got dropped here from Saturn and you started a yoga studio, you wouldn't even think you could have a physical yoga studio. You'd be like, oh, of course, it's all online. We've got to be able to compete against that and compete against that when everybody's charging less and less just big, good customers. So finding that unique niche, like I said before, rewarding people for being healthy was not that different. It was right next to these reward programs that were run by really, really big companies. So taking the time to really find your special sauce where you have special know-how, you know, when you go running by your apartment or your home and you know when you turn right, there's a pothole right there, right? You possess, every one of us possesses some kind of know-how that can be turned into a business that is actually unique. And to me, you know, we call it finding this playground, but that, to me, is the most important thing because then you can turn that into a business. If you don't find that, then you're obviously competing with a lot of people with oftentimes more money and resources and with a lot of people doing the same thing these days. Good. How do you continue to learn and grow? What are your resources or your go-to sources? The one thing that I think the Lollion Spur knows is we know what an organization is supposed to look like. What's great for us is we interacted so many entrepreneurs of every way, shape, or form, stage, industry, gender, ethnicity. And we just learned so much from the language we hear about, we hear from them. And probably the biggest learning that we have is a lot of times the question that they're asking is not really the answer they need. Right? So somebody says, you know, what kind of legal entity should I form or when should I launch my website? And I think the biggest learning for us is, I mean, think about it. It's almost like if a retailer could be in the minds of every single one of their customers and hear exactly what was going on. We get that type of learning from the people that we're interacting every day. So for us to learning is how do we make the journey simpler and take these really complex things and turn them into really simple steps. Here's the five things you got to start with. Here's how to do number one, even if you don't know how to do it. That, you know, really, you know, they say great leaders are great simplifiers. And that's what we're really focused on. How do we make it easy for people that maybe don't always have the foundational skills? And that's that's the learning that we're really embracing. Do you have personal resources that you rely on, that you like books, podcasts, audibles that you think people should go check out that are great entrepreneurial resources that are more tactical than? To me, I love, there's a book called The Art of War. And obviously it's a big, big, big, long book. But some of the tactics in there are, you know, about, you know, how do you win when you're disadvantaged? Which is a close, undercipal oversupplication about the message rings through. I get it. I get it. If your opponent is fast, don't try to outrun them. That's the stuff. That's the, that is the stuff that I really, you know, embrace more than anything. I don't think that, I think that with respect to other resources, I mean, we're always, and I'm always exposing myself to different things, but I'm trying to take it and put it into kind of a method. Because how many times do we all interact with these things? And we take a piece from here, a piece from here, a piece from here, it doesn't all fit together nicely. Or we just pick any pieces. And then it's just a waste of time, yeah, I agree. Yeah. And so I'm kind of, in everything that I listen to, I try to take the snippets and fit into a framework. But I love The Art of War. I mean, it's a long book that they have little religious digest versions. That's a heavy book for, for a light, light entrepreneurial read. But like, I appreciate that. Listen, I love, I love some history lessons too. I think that, I think that you can always find some, some insight if you, if you read history, because I don't think anything has, I think, I don't think aiming we're trying to solve for now hasn't already been solved for in the past. So, that's a, there's a, there's a baby version too. There's like a 100 person, 100 page little short version too that I encourage you to pick up. Good. I know. That's good. That's good. You mentioned this before and let me know if it still brings true. But the, the lesson you tell your younger self, you mentioned one less than you tell your younger self, is that the, the lesson you would tell your younger self? That's a great question. I would just, I would just say go slower. I think that after I sold my company like about a week later, after the kind of air came out of the balloon, if you will, I really felt like I hadn't used my brain for 10 years, right? And we have this thing in the, in a little amount of book about being a deliberate thoughtful and unemotional leader. And I was trying to think back about, you know, how many days was I actually that? And going, you know, going slower and the things that you pick, right? You do well and you do with intensity. But a lot of times in your early days with all the passionate energy you have about your baby, you just don't stick to certain things, do them, do them well. You can do them with intensity. That's fine. But if you decided you're going to sell 10 bananas because that's a strategy and go sell the hell out of 10 bananas, but don't go orange as bananas and apples and and all that. So I think just going slower would have been, you know, probably the biggest piece of advice. And the last question before I get some, some socials and websites from you, what does success mean for you? That for me was really easy because it was never about money for me. I was fortunate enough to grow up in my family and my family in real estate. And for me, when I was looking for a business, if we said we could, you know, take the jacket you're wearing and we could guaranteed make a billion dollars, I wouldn't have any interest in doing it. To me, it had to have an impact on society and it had to be new and different, right? And I felt incredibly fortunate to stumble upon that with rewarding people for being healthy. And I frankly wasn't looking to do something else yet. And then when somebody said to lonely entrepreneur to be able to, to, you know, say to anybody, lonely entrepreneur and you're tapping into that same thing, something that actually can help society because it's helped people, you know, have a better chance of being fulfilled. That to me is success. Success is just when you hear about an entrepreneur that said, I closed the sale, I raised money, I hired this great employee and, you know, the next day they get to wake up before the alarm rings, not because they're worried, but because they're excited. That to me is, is what success is. And there's money that goes with that and all that and stuff, but that's what it's all about for us. I like that a lot. And most important question, where can people get the book, go check out the website, your socials, all of that. First of all, thank you so much for such a thoughtful conversation. I really appreciate it. No, my pleasure. I really enjoyed it. You know your stuff and there's a lot of value here. So thank you for really good answers. Thank you. LonelyEntrepreneur.com is our website. There's also all this social stuff, which is you'll find LonelyEntrepreneur on Instagram. The LonelyE is Twitter. LonelyEntrepreneur on Facebook and the book can be found both on our website and on Amazon, all called the LonelyEntrepreneur.