This week is a bonus episode. We are cross posting a guest appearance I had on John Wilson’s Owned and Operated podcast. I’m a big fan of John and enjoy his podcast immensely, and I wanted to share it with you all. In this episode, I share more about my philosophy behind the Operator’s Handbook and all the ins and outs you want to know about podcasting. Near the end, I manage to turn the mic around on him and learn about his idea of bloating before optimizing and growing Wilson Plumbing and their other acquisitions. I hope you enjoy this Owned and Operated episode with John Wilson and myself.
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Think Like an Owner Sponsors:
Live Oak Bank — Live Oak Bank is a seasoned SMB lender providing SBA and conventional financing for search funds, independent sponsors, private equity firms, and individuals looking to acquire lower middle-market companies. Live Oak has closed billions of dollars in SBA financing and is actively looking to help more small company investors across the country. If you are in the process of acquiring a company or thinking about starting a search, contact Lisa Forrest or Heather Endresen directly to start a conversation or go to www.liveoakbank.com/think.
Hood & Strong, LLP — Hood & Strong is a CPA firm with a long history of working with search funds and private equity firms on diligence, assurance, tax services, and more. Hood & Strong is highly skilled in working with search funds, providing quality of earnings and due diligence services during the search, along with assurance and tax services post-acquisition. They offer a unique way to approach acquisition diligence and manage costs effectively. To learn more about how Hood & Strong can help your search, acquisition, and beyond, please email one of their partners Jerry Zhou at --@----.com
Oberle Risk Strategies– Oberle is the leading specialty insurance brokerage catering to search funds and the broader ETA community, providing complimentary due diligence assessments of the target company’s commercial insurance and employee benefits programs. Over the past decade, August Felker and his team have engaged with hundreds of searchers to provide due diligence and ultimately place the most competitive insurance program at closing. Given August’s experience as a searcher himself, he and his team understand all that goes into buying a business and pride themselves on making the insurance portion of closing seamless and hassle-free.
If you are under LOI, please reach out to August to learn more about how Oberle can help with insurance due diligence at oberle-risk.com. Or reach out to August directly at --@----.com Transcript:
John Wilson: Welcome back to Owned and Operated. Today, we have Alex Bridgeman on. Alex is the host of Think Like an Owner podcast, which is an amazing podcast, and also a good friend that we met off Twitter and just developed a friendship over the past year. And it’s been a lot of fun. We saw each other Capital Camp, came to the Akron meetup, about to see each other again in like a week at the Small Business Bash. But welcome, Alex, to the show.
Alex Bridgeman: Thanks for having me. It’s been fun to see folks like you and others start podcasts around the SMB podcast media landscape because the whole purpose of starting Think Like an Owner was that there wasn’t anything out there. So now that there’s other podcasts out there, I feel like that’s been really cool to see. And I’ve enjoyed your show and hearing about septics and all that sort of stuff.
John Wilson: Yeah. The podcast thing did sort of blow up pretty quick. Like Kelcey and Reg both want to start a show called SMBesties. And it would be us getting on and riffing for like half an hour, which is basically just going to be us just like ripping each other apart.
Alex Bridgeman: I love it.
John Wilson: So not a high quality show probably. But it is interesting. Tons of new shows. Girdley’s got some cool stuff. I don’t know. It’s cool. It’s interesting.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Justin Vote and I have talked about the need for the My First Million for SMBs. And I don’t think it’s something that I could do because I think what makes My First Million so interesting is that both Shaan and Sam are former entrepreneurs who grew and sold companies, and so they are very experienced, but they also have now like more time to focus on these random rabbit holes and different businesses that they come across. But where like an operator who’s currently running a company might not have that same time availability, and then someone like me doesn’t have the expertise of running the company. So, I think there’s like a couple of missing pieces that the SMB world needs to figure out to kind of get that perfect show together. So basically, I’m saying you need to sell your company and then start My First Million. So that’s my advice.
John Wilson: Yeah. So anytime Alex and I talk, he always has a motive. The last time it was to get me to raise a fund. And now this time it’s to sell the business and become maybe not My First Million, but my First Hundred or something, My First Dollar.
Alex Bridgeman: That’d be good. All the early days of lots of companies, and then you can switch back and forth to the post-sale lifestyle, that sort of thing.
John Wilson: Oh, speaking of, your episode with John a couple episodes ago, talking about the exit and life post-close, was amazing. That was like- We’re all surrounded by these people on Twitter who are buying companies, and it was just a totally different perspective, and I loved it. It was a great episode.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. John was really fun to chat with. I think what he was really good at in just chatting with him was making his experience his own versus something that’s like they’re trying to teach you on like how- like this is how you should run your company. Instead, John was very much this is the experience that I had, situation my company was in, and here’s what I did with my team and revealing a lot more of the emotional side of it, too, because a lot of those times were really stressful, like getting told that his biggest customer is leaving over a weekend is terrifying. So, to hear a little bit of that was really, really cool. But John’s awesome. Kelcey was so excited to introduce me to him. He was like Alex, you’ve got to get over here, go talk to John. He’s got tons of great stories and war stories. You need to talk to him, have him on your podcast. And he was awesome. So ever since then, it was pretty easy to chat with him and get him on the show.
John Wilson: Yeah. We totally skipped the first part of the show because I just enjoy talking to you. So, a few minutes in, Alex, could you give us like a 60 second origin story? Like what’d you do? What do you do now? How’d you get there? Walk us through Alex Bridgeman.
Alex Bridgeman: Sure. I’m from Portland, Oregon, currently living in Omaha, Nebraska, for my wife’s PT program at Creighton. I met my wife in college at University of Portland. I got an accounting degree and then started the podcast late senior year because I was becoming more interested in folks who acquired and ran small private companies. And the job I took after college and then I also interned in during college was with this wealth management firm where my main role was as a research analyst. So, I didn’t have like a typical financial advisor experience. It was more of researching specifically microcaps. We had this microcap strategy that became a fund pretty soon after I left. And it was just this interesting world of companies that are public but less than 50 million in market cap. So, they have a lot of the same problems that SMBs do, and it’s just a fun place to research because you get to talk with people who are- the only people who could buy these companies are generally individuals or very, very small funds. So, you get to know other investors in this space really well and kind of how they see these different companies. It’s really fun. And then about a year and a half after I left, the podcast had grown enough just doing it monthly that I felt I could get sponsors. And so, I reached out to a few sponsors and then left my full-time job two days before my wedding. My wife and I had a small twenty-five-person [inaudible [RD1] [RD2] 6:40] wedding, which is awesome, highly recommend it because when there’s less people, you can bump up quality of food and beverage and all that. So, it was just super fun. And then since then I have made it a weekly podcast because the sponsorship allowed me to outsource audio editing and get a good editor, build a better website, that sort of stuff, get a better microphone. So those investments made the podcast, I think, a little bit better over time. And so, I think it’s just been a consistent growth since then from August 2020 until now January 2022 where it’s becoming a little bit more of a business. And it’s been just a really fun project to start. And then back in September, we released the Operator’s Handbook, which is this quarterly print publication that we have an article with you, of course, and each article is focused on a different operator in a specific topic that they’re focusing on. So, with you, we did positioning your financial balance sheets for growth. We’ve done articles on raising prices, going through EOS, that sort of stuff. So, there’s a bunch of like articles from an operator’s perspective that have been fun to assemble. I think that’ll be a fun kind of business that’s kind of similar to the podcast where I started the podcast because I didn’t find any other good SMB podcasts out there. There was a few; there’s like Polsky Center’s search fund podcast, but it was kind of dormant and they only released episodes every so often, and then Invest Like the Best would have, I think they had like two or three episodes on search funds maybe, and that was basically it. So there just wasn’t anything out there. And so that’s why I started Think Like an Owner and same thing with the Handbook. I didn’t see any good SMB magazines, so I started that too. And now we are in Omaha, Nebraska. So that’s the journey so far.
John Wilson: When does the next handbook come out?
Alex Bridgeman: I’m always more optimistic than realistic on deadlines for getting the Handbook’s next issue out. As it grows, we’ll develop a better process to be more consistent, which is also why we’re charging on a per issue basis. So, we charge for four issues versus like 12 months. So that even if it takes 14 months to get every issue out, you’re not being charged for no issue. So, the next one is almost done with our illustrator and then it goes to the printer. And then from the printer, it probably takes either two to four weeks to get printed and mailed out. And then you should see it on your doorstep. So hopefully by mid-February, it’s in mailboxes is the goal.
John Wilson: Yeah, I thought I saw, didn’t you post a tweet of like a box of them. Like, are you bringing them down to SM Bash?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, those are issue ones. Those are the originals.
John Wilson: I was like can I bribe you for one of these issue two? Yeah, that was cool. Obviously, my article in there was just absolutely incredible, just totally unbelievable, of course.
Alex Bridgeman: Definitely a headliner.
John Wilson: Right, right. But I mean, everyone, it was a really good and interesting compilation of stuff. I took it on vacation with me when I first got it, and I like read through the whole thing and it was awesome. It was a good one. One of the funny things about your story in general was I remember talking to you a year ago, almost exactly, and you had just gotten sponsors like a couple months before. You were sort of describing what you were doing, and I don’t think it had like sunk in yet that you were a small business. So, it was just sort of a funny thing to like watch that develop over the past year where you were a guy who was like I’m interviewing business owners and just like I’m learning about it and I’m doing all this stuff. And I’m like, Alex, you’re a small business owner, too, like you are doing it. When do you think that shift sort of happened where you’re like, okay, this isn’t like a hobby, I think this is a real business?
Alex Bridgeman: I think around Capital Camp actually is when that started to happen, which of course, is where we got to meet in person for the first time, which is awesome. But Capital Camp was a wild place to go because there’s all of these entrepreneurs who have started big projects, big businesses, many of whom have become really, really successful. And it’s just kind of this room of people who have viewed their career through a like thinking bigger type lens. I know we’ve talked about that a lot before, just this idea of, okay, take whatever vision you have for your business or life, what have you, and try to imagine what’s the 5X or 10X version of what you’re doing. What does that look like? And then how do you make something like that happen? And so, I came away from that, and there’s several interactions in particular. I remember talking with Moses Kagan on the last day at lunch, and he was like, you need to build a team and make this into more of a real business and treat it like a business. And I think that was enough of a switch that like, yeah, he’s making a lot of sense, like he’s been down this road before. He’s talked with a lot of operators and entrepreneurs before; this is making more sense now after I’ve kind of heard that message over and over, over the course of meeting folks at Capital Camp. I think that was a big turning point. And then just since then, trying to deepen relationships with folks like you who I admire and trust and want to learn from. And so, I think that’s also been helpful where instead of trying to go for breadth, like try to pick a few key relationships and really build them and try to learn from those people and ask them for advice or even dumb questions. I think stuff like that has been really helpful in getting an entrepreneur who’s maybe 5, 10, 20 years down the road and getting their thoughts on what might be helpful to start doing. So, I think that was a big switch for me.
John Wilson: Yeah. Obviously, we are two people on a podcast that have a podcast. Okay so, when I’m asking this question, this is for the listener, but can you walk us through the podcast business model?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, sure. It’s a really simple model. So, podcasting in general is pretty cheap if you do it all yourself, but of course, you don’t really want to do six hours of audio editing per episode, so you inevitably have to outsource that. And so today, the cost of putting an episode together is probably around 700 bucks or so, something like that. And so, with that, if you really want to make it a professional or more professional podcast, you need to make investments like that. But that requires revenue. And so, there’s two basic ways, well, really like three ways of making money off of a podcast. There’s just the straight sponsorship model, which is what I’ve done, where you find a few sponsors to pay you money either on a per episode basis or per month based on listens and downloads and referrals to their company. There’s the paid subscription model, which I haven’t seen done nearly as much, where people pay to listen to your show. So, there’s a key- like a product key that they get to a special link after they pay, and they just add that to Spotify or iTunes or wherever, and they can now listen to your paid podcast. Peter T has done that pretty well; he’s got a pretty interesting model for that.
John Wilson: I have some friends that do that with like, there’s one for news and there’s one for like a crime- What’s it called? Real Crime or-?
Alex Bridgeman: True crime.
John Wilson: Yeah, that, a true crime podcast. But it’s interesting, they pay two bucks an episode. So, it’s by episode, not by month. And I was like, okay, that’s cool.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, some of those are really cool. I’m excited to see more fiction serial podcasts. So almost if you think of like a TV show where there’s different seasons, there’s folks who are starting to do more of that for podcasts. So, you’ll have this ten episode season of this story. And a lot of them are audio based, I mean, they have to be audio based, but the story is this reporter who is exploring this like abandoned town or something, and there are like different, weird things going on in this town and they are reporting on it through the podcast, which is what you’re listening to as the listener. So, there’s been some unique ways to turn this story and make it fit into an audio format. One of my favorite podcasts in that regard, it doesn’t make any money, but it’s just a fiction podcast, it’s a horror one, Knifepoint Horror. And it’s the most bare bones podcast I’ve ever heard. There’s no intro. There’s no outro. There’s no like, hi, I’m Alex Bridgeman doing this podcast. There’s nothing like that. It just jumps right into the story. And there’s occasionally some background noise or small amounts of music or sound effects. But it is just this person’s telling of this horror story over like 15 to 40 minutes or so. It is super interesting. And then, so that’s the first two ways, like paid sponsorship or like paid subscription, and then there’s kind of the third way where you have a bigger business on the side and the podcast is acting as a lead gen to that business. So, I think of Chris Powers’ podcast. To me, he has sponsorships, but I’m sure the bigger benefit is that it’s attached to FORT and that folks hear about his business through his podcast and then reach out to be an LP or they want to reach out and be an employee or they want to sell them a piece of real estate. So, there’s kind of a couple of models, but that one I think is the most like high leverage model over time. But then you look at Joe Rogan making a hundred million dollars off Spotify, so upper ranges of things start to get definitely a wider range of options.
John Wilson: Yeah, that was a good overview. So, I’m just trying to like get the landscape from your perspective, so this is my opportunity to just totally grill you. When you think of the levers you can pull on a podcast, like those three modernization methods sound really great. I think for perspective, it’s probably like 0.1% of podcasts are actually sponsored. Right? It can’t be that many.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I don’t know what the numbers are. I’m not sure it’s a huge amount, but there’s definitely lots of shows that are recurring and have a consistent release cadence tend to be more sponsored. So, I think if someone is clearly trying to make this into a formal show that lasts for a long time, I think they inevitably run into the need for sponsors. And yeah, there’s also a lot of folks who’ve run podcasts for hobbies or some folks even have internal podcasts. They’ll have a podcast meant for employees that isn’t shared on iTunes but just internally shared among the team. There’s a bunch of use cases for podcasts. But yeah, I’d be curious what the total number of sponsored podcasts is because I know the total number of podcasts that lasts more than six episodes is very, very small. The tail is a very, very long tail of podcasts that are not active or don’t make it past episode six or ten or whatever the number is.
John Wilson: Yeah. I think in general, I know when I got ready to launch Owned and Operated, I had a lot of friends or family that knew someone that tried to start a podcast and they’re like, oh, it didn’t work. And I’m not sure what not working means to them. I don’t know. Like I didn’t get the metric, like is not working like you couldn’t sign a sponsor when you had no listens or was not working no one would listen? Did you try to build it and they will come? Like what made it unsuccessful? I think in general, it’s a bit of a long road. Like how long were you producing it before you were able to bring on- like make it into a money generating activity?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it took a year and a half of consistent monthly posting before it had enough of an audience or attraction that I felt it could go weekly. But that is a problem. And anyone who wants to chat about podcasting, I try to encourage them to make sure you want to do it for at least- like commit to doing it for at least like a year or so. There’s probably nothing that’s going to happen for at least a year of podcasting. If you’re kind of on the fence of starting the podcast, then maybe it’s probably not going to work. But if you’re dedicated enough that you’re willing to push through that long time where nothing happens and no one listens to your show, then I think it can be successful. But your point is true, like why does it not work? I think as podcasts have become more popular, there’s a lot more podcasts that are huge and really well listened to. And so, I think this subtly sets some sort of a bar where I feel like if I don’t get ten, twenty, a hundred, fifty, a hundred thousand or a million downloads a month, that my podcast is a failure or like immediately when I get those downloads. So maybe just a little bit of patience. Generally, anything that’s valuable or is a good thing to build takes a long time. So, if you’re able to be patient, I think your odds are a lot better. If you just go for a consistent pace and even just basic marketing, like telling your friends or having a newsletter on the side or using Twitter, like I did, there’s bunch of ways to over time get your message out there. But being consistent for a long time is still like a really, really key ingredient.
John Wilson: Yeah. It’s an interesting model. Okay so, you podcasted for a year and a half before you sort of turned into your job, which I totally just love that story in general. I think that’s awesome. You’ve been podcasting full-time for 15 months now, right, or 16?
Alex Bridgeman: That sounds about right.
John Wilson: Yeah, it was like September or October of###-###-#### Okay. And then you realized it was a business halfway through last year and you’re like, okay man, I should do more with this. You launched the Operator’s Handbook. So, I think we touched on the Operator’s Handbook, but could you dive a little bit deeper into like there had to have been a bunch of other monetization methods or ideas that you had about, hey, I have a media business now, what else can I do? And you landed with the Operator’s Handbook.
Alex Bridgeman: There’s a couple of different monetization options or like new product options beyond just the podcast that I considered. For a while and several times, I’ve considered doing a second weekly show on Thursdays with a slightly different format or more issue focused and then just getting another set of sponsors or the same set of sponsors for those shows. Getting feedback from that was, first, two episodes a week is really, really hard. One episode is already really challenging to just make sure your backlog is good and you are getting it figured out. Two episodes with guests for both episodes is really, really hard though. And so, if you’re going to do it, you better be confident that you have enough different topics or folks lined up that you think you can do it. And so, for that reason, I was a little bit hesitant, but also sponsors just were, I think, more concerned about the overlapping, having two episodes and having their sponsorship diluted. So, appetite for a second weekly show on the business side, like revenue side was not quite there. And on top of just being a lot of work, I decided to try something else. I have a newsletter; I have not made that into a paid product. There’s a bunch of really good paid newsletters out there today that are pretty successful, and some of them are really successful. I didn’t think that that was something I could pursue though. I didn’t think I could have enough content that I could write or talk intelligently about, about running companies that would be helpful for people. I think that’s better left to other folks who are able to do that a little bit better.
John Wilson: We did a paid newsletter for like six months. And it was honestly really interesting. Obviously, a lot of the people that subscribed listened to the show; they said it added value. But it was a really interesting process because we basically launched a newsletter, which is just like, hey, here’s the episode coming up this week, here’s what’s going on in our lot, just like basic, low hanging fruit. And then in the same breath with zero subscribers on the free newsletter, we were like, hey, let’s launch a paid newsletter too, which breaks like every rule. You’re not supposed to try to monetize until like 10,000. But we were like I think we just have something interesting to talk about. And we ended up talking about integration of a company and how to integrate a company into your platform, which is a very extremely niche topic of conversation, but it was a cool process. And we ended up getting 30 to 40 subscribers at 50 bucks a month, which was cool. I was like, okay, this is interesting. We added like a ton of value; for a few hundred dollars, you just learned how to integrate a multi-million-dollar transaction. So yeah, I mean, we added value and it was fun, it was interesting. But it took a ton of time because you felt the weight of like I know I’m providing value, but like someone’s paying for this, and we really want to do right by the people paying for this and make sure it’s sustainable. So, we ended up only doing it for about six months because I was like I don’t know if we can continue doing this at a high level for like forever. But it was an interesting model to try out.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. And so, I think that’s like a good use case for a paid newsletter or even if you charge that as a course of some kind and bundled all the different newsletters you’ve written into some sort of course, that makes a lot of sense, but I didn’t see any way I could do something like that that would be valuable or would add value to someone. But looking around, I’ve always been kind of an admirer of like newsletters or really niche publications. I love Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, or I read The Economist, like things like that – The Economist isn’t niche – but I like reading these print publications and seeing kind of what they’re doing. And I just thought that was interesting. I spent a lot of time looking for one that talked about running small companies, like less than 50 million in revenue, and Inc Magazine used to do some of that coverage but stopped, and you can get the Harvard Business Review, which comes close, but it’s still meant for kind of larger corporate type businesses. So, there wasn’t really a whole lot out there that was interesting. And then Tim Ludwig was tweeting about how he wanted this kind of magazine, because he read this publication called Outstanding Investor Digest, which is this print publication that will come out kind of randomly. The writer would only release an issue when they had something to talk about. And it was this public markets newsletter, so effectively when they had an idea, they would write about it, or if they had a really good interview, they would write about that and then publish. And so, it was kind of sporadic, but you knew every time it showed up that it was because it was really valuable. So, he was curious about what’s that for the small business world, and that was like a light switch for me, like, oh, that makes sense now, like that clicks. Like all these ideas I’ve had about magazines or print publishing like now make sense, and there could be some demand here for a really high-quality kind of low volume publication that focuses on quality and design really well but also on content and takes a little bit of a different approach. So, we don’t have sponsors for the magazine. So, it’s only paid publication or paid by subscribers. And a big part of that was just kind of trying to design something that an operator would be excited to read. And so that’s something that’s a little bit maybe a smaller than a magazine, higher quality paper. We have a better focus on design and illustrations, and then the articles are long form. There’re no ads, there’s nothing distracting you. And it’s only print. So, there’s no digital version. We figured that if we’re going to write something that is going to be really helpful and is long form with lots of good content, it might be better to do that as a print product because you can play with design a lot more than you can play with kind of the design of an email newsletter where it’s hard to get a sense for like just value from touching something. And so, we decided to make it print because it would be less distracting. Because if we turn this into a paid newsletter, we would be competing with, first off, the other emails in your inbox, but we would also competing with your texting, your Slack, your web browser, any other documents that you’re working on at the same time on your computer. I think it would just get kind of lost. Whereas a print product can sit on your desk, you can pick it up and read it at your leisure. There’s nothing kind of popping up and distracting you as you flip through. And so, you’re able to focus a little bit better and take things in. And so, as a reader experience, we felt that that would be a better route. And it just allows me to be a print publishing nerd and try all these different things and tactics. So, it’s been fun to build that project. And we got a bunch of good feedback from the first issue. A lot of folks liked the content; some wanted to see a little bit more like data side to it. So, what we’ve done with the second issue is we surveyed subscribers on sales and marketing and what they’re doing for best practices, how much of their revenue they’re spending on sales and marketing, if they have a sales team, all these different questions that we asked folks, and then we also compiled questions for this CEO confidence index that we’re going to start tracking. So, each issue we’re going to have a new confidence index published showing kind of how excited or scared small business owners are relative to their industry too. So, I’m pretty excited about that. So, we want to start making this more into like a life data product where there’s this kind of ongoing surveyed data that we’re pulling from our operators and subscribers who are mostly CEOs. And so, we have this kind of long list of operators who are subscribed, and we can poll them on how their companies are being run and how confident they are in their company over the next 12 months. And so that’s a piece of research we’re going to put out in the next issue. So, from the first issue to the second issue, there’s a lot of growth and evolution and we’re making the articles a little bit more editorialized. There’s an extra article we’re putting in. So, there’ll be nine articles. So it’ll be closer to like- the first one was about 60 pages. The second one will be 75 to 80 pages. So, it’ll have a little bit more thickness to it as well, which on the design side is more fun. I can’t show you because we’re using audio, but on a thinner spine on a magazine, it’s harder to write kind of the spine decals, so it would be the name, the volume number, and that sort of thing. Whereas as you get thicker, it’s easier for the spine to hold together and show that text a little bit more strongly. So, there’s certain things like that that we’re excited about. But as a business it’s been, I think, pretty successful so far. If you pay for a four-issue subscription today, like the business will be around for four issues to give you a subscription, to give you your four issues. So, I’m pretty excited about that.
John Wilson: Yeah. I liked your breakdown of why you chose print. It was just interesting. I hadn’t thought about it. I was definitely curious why you chose print, aside from knowing that you’re a print nerd. But the competition of inbox is like real, the competition of attention.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, especially if you’re an operator where you have emails, some people will have hundreds of emails a day. Can you imagine if-
John Wilson: Most of us.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, true, but can you imagine trying to read this eight page article on like EOS implementation and then an email from some sort of DocuSign arrives or an investor or a customer emails you, and you literally have to like leave and go answer that before you can come back. So, I think putting out this high quality product in someone’s inbox feels a little bit contradictory where you want them to get the information that you’ve created for them, but putting it somewhere that’s inherently distracting and pulls you in all these different directions and lots of context switching, we felt that would be a bit challenging as a product to design. Whereas print exists on its own. It can sit in a bookshelf forever and you can read it in 50 years. There’s also a sense of permanence to that. So that was another thing we were excited about. So hopefully in like 40 years, I’ve got this long shelf of Handbook issues that we’ve come out with that we can be proud of.
John Wilson: I’ll have it, too. but I’m also just sort of agreeing with you even further here, I’m thinking about like the reopen, maybe the total value out of it, right? Like I forgot that there was an EOS implementation article, and in September or October, when I got it, we weren’t on EOS. We weren’t even thinking about EOS, but we joined EOS in December. So now from this conversation, I’m going to go reopen that and read the eight page article on EOS implementation. And I think that the print is like someone’s much more likely to get years of value out of, oh yeah, there was a conversation about leadership or EOS or whatever, and it didn’t apply at the time, but it applies now. Whereas I would never do that with something in my inbox.
Alex Bridgeman: Right, exactly. To be fair, the EOS article is coming out in this next issue three, I believe. But just as an example, so we had like an article on hiring technicians and retaining them with Rich Jordan. So, if you owned a business that you didn’t have technicians in, and then you went and acquired one that had technicians, suddenly that article from issue one that you received two years ago is now more valuable to you. But like you were saying, if it’s an email product, it’s just a newsletter that gets delivered to you or even if it’s searchable on a site, there’s less of a chance that you’ll go back and read it, versus just pull it off your shelf and look through and see if there’s something that addresses that, especially because we put articles on the cover. So, we have our table of contents directly on the front cover of each issue, so you know immediately what’s in there. So, the second you pull it out of your envelope, out of your mailbox, you know exactly what types of articles are being discussed. And then also if you want to go back later, you just check the covers of each issue to find the article that you want instead of having to flip to find the table of contents for each copy.
John Wilson: So, you’ve shipped out one of the Handbooks so far, you’re getting ready to ship out the second one. How long does each issue take to fully create? It seems like a lot of hours.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, it takes a deceptively long time because we have the different collaborators that I’m reaching out to who over time I’ve gotten to know them well. So, I know they’re really passionate about certain topics in their business. And so, I ask them about those and turn those into articles. And so, we create an interview and then go back and forth after that interview with the article that we’ve started editing. So, we take the transcript, edit it into article format, and then from there, we add tons of stuff. So, we have my editor, Taylor Cothran, who lives in California, she loves doing this sort of stuff. And so, she helps figure out, okay, there was a- he went through this section really well, but we need to update here, or she mentioned this city or town, let’s give a little bit more background on why they’re there. So, there’s tons of stuff afterwards that we add or missing content that we want to make sure that we add in there, or a little bit more context. So, we spend probably at least a month or a month and a half on each article, just going through it and making sure it’s exactly what we want. And then from there, we send it to- once we have all the articles assembled, and I’ve written my letter from the operator, I’ve written the research report, and then we’ve kind of- there’s like little bits of text throughout as well. So, we have, at the end of each article, we have a QR code – if you want to learn more about John Wilson, go to this QR code, and here’s the different links and a book recommendation that he has. And we have to write that text. And so, there’s like little pieces and random bits of text you have to come up with too and taglines. And once those are all assembled, then we give them to our illustrator who is awesome, and she takes them from literally Word docs into the PDF that goes to the printer. And that process takes two to three weeks or so. Because that involves not only taking the text and adding it into a PDF format, but it includes taking the charts from the research report and turning them into more illustrated types of charts, a little bit of different formatting and custom formatting to the rest of our kind of template. And then it also involves we’re now going to sketch the operator at the start of each article, so you know kind of what they look like, and there’s a face to the information you’re about to read through. So that takes time. We have a different operator at each desk. The woman at the desk is our logo. And so, we’re going to switch to a different operator with each issue. So, over the course of like six issues, we have now this kind of group of operators representing each issue that we can now use as other illustrations. So, there’s lots of illustrating and design that we do. And then deciding even something like which articles do we put first? What’s the order of articles that we want to have? And then how do we organize the cover with the table of contents there? What color do we want for the spine? So, there’s a whole bunch of little details you have to figure out. And then it goes to the printer. And with printers, I run my annual letter that we lost our original printer when I was on honeymoon in Hawaii. Literally on a beach, I got the email that they couldn’t get our paper anymore because they switched suppliers and they couldn’t get the paper we wanted, and so we had to switch to someone else. But the printer usually takes two to four weeks to print, and they mail directly from the printer to the different addresses that we give them. And then there was also stuff like in the first issue we used like Amazon type bubble wrap packages, but the different issues got kind of beat up in transit. So, we’re now switching to a higher quality kind of thick lie flat almost cardboard type envelope that’ll be a little bit more higher quality. So, you have to kind of make adjustments and decisions like that as you go. So, the whole process takes definitely the full three months, if not a little bit longer. And over time, we’ll refine that to be a little bit faster. But in the early days, when you have no process and you are literally making it up as you go or trying to figure out from friends who run print publishing businesses what they do, of course, usually what they do involves lots more revenue and a team, and so a deadline is a lot easier to accomplish when you have millions in revenue versus something smaller. So over time it’ll get better. But right now, it’s definitely the full three months, if not probably three and a half to four months per issue.
John Wilson: Yeah, that is a lot. I don’t know. I feel like I knew it would take a lot of time, but that’s a lot of time. So how many subscribers did you end up getting off the sort of first launch?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, we got about 140 subscribers, which was enough for a full year of operations, plus a little bit of kind of cushion. So that was enough that it would survive. I remember reading about Jim Grant, starting Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, and he talked about how he had just published this book right before launching the Observer, and he said folks are going to read my book and that book’s going to be a best seller and we’re going to get tons and tons of subscribers from it. And I think he got like four or five on the first day on the first like couple issues and had to take on an investor at some point. So, the fact that we’re able to at least survive is like enough for me. Like that was a huge success. I just didn’t want it to have to kind of limp along. I know that we know now that there’s enough demand that we can keep publishing these for a long time. So as long as it did that, like I’m very, very happy with that result. There is no expectation that we’re going to get thousands of subscribers immediately. To me, it is like a word-of-mouth kind of product that is meant for like a niche audience, but it’s high quality. And so, products like that I think are just hard to market for versus something that’s more mass market like The Economist. So, I know it’s going to take a while and it’s going to be a kind of a slow build, but I think over time it will be a really fun business to run that hopefully makes a big impact to a lot of operators out there.
John Wilson: Yeah, I’m sure it will. Who’s on the team? You’ve mentioned we a lot when discussing strategy, not just design, but like actual strategy. So, who’s working with you on this?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, we have four freelancers who help me. So, the one I chat with most is our editor Taylor Cothran in California. She worked at this forensic accounting firm and became really good at writing documents that would be read in cases or in court. And so, spelling and editing became really, really important and she loves doing this and then also has the business mind. So, she’s been awesome as our editor. And then we have my cousin who runs my website. He’s also running our website for the Operator’s Handbook. He’s done a good job. And then our illustrator Katherine Messenger is also the illustrator for Grant’s Interest Rate Observer. And she’s awesome. She does a great job. She knew this proofreader who now works with us. He works at the Wall Street Journal but does proofreading in his spare time. And so, he helps us take care of those last minute tiny little edits that we need to make throughout articles to keep consistency. And so that’s been really helpful. So, we have four folks total, but it’s hard to say, like there’s no full-time employees on it. It’s just me with a few folks who help me in their spare time. I’d like to eventually build a more full-time team. But I also consider other folks kind of semi members of the team who I just chat with frequently for advice, like, hey, what would your advice be for ordering articles in this order, or within this survey on sales and marketing, what questions should I be asking? Like which ones would you care about? And to me, that team is like 20 or so people of folks who I text every now and then or have phone calls with or email, asking them what would you want to see in this article? Or in this issue where they’re talking about this topic, like what’s your thoughts here? How should we edit this or improve this? So that team is pretty large. So, when I say we, to me, it means this group of people that actively help the Handbook but also kind of this bit of community around it that provides advice and contributions all the time on how best to run it.
John Wilson: Like the thing’s grown, profitable podcast, the Handbook, I’m sure there’s going to be more stuff to come. But when do you bring on a team? What does that begin to look like?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I’ve thought about this a lot. I think the first hire is probably a head of product who can run the handbook process and then help on the podcast end as well, getting guests and just making sure we have like sponsorship audio clips tying to episodes cleanly, that sort of thing. So, I think that would be probably the first hire. And then over time, we could probably hire a full-time editor, either Taylor who’s great at it today would potentially be that person or someone down the line could be a good full-time editor and help us with that process. But I don’t think the team has to be very large. A lot of comparable publications run themselves with maybe four to ten employees total. There’re companies that I’ve just gotten to know, there’s folks on- there’s companies for sale on BizBuySell that run similar models that have five to ten employees and with several million in revenue. So, I don’t think it needs a huge team, but I think you just need a couple folks who are really, really good at certain areas to come in and help on a more intensive basis to grow the business and to be a little bit bigger. So, I don’t know when exactly or what revenue number you hit to trigger each of those hires, but I know that those hires are in the future and we’ll have to decide when to make those hires, but hopefully it’s sooner than later.
John Wilson: You just said BizBuySell a second ago, and I’ve got to latch onto this for a second. I know that media businesses trade, like they’re for sale, but apparently, they’re on BizBuySell. Like what was that business that you were looking at? Like what did it look like?
Alex Bridgeman: There’s a couple. There’s been a lot of real estate magazines. So ones that just have listings from brokers or agents that would be in a printed magazine. There’s been some local magazines, like there’s one in Denver that talks about local businesses and they would have local ads from those businesses, and that would just be delivered almost as junk mail to different homes and neighborhoods. To me, the most interesting one I looked at was this cattle magazine. So, it was focused on like ranching and managing cattle farms, and that was in all forms of livestock. That one was pretty interesting. But it had fairly small team as well and kind of a niche audience. And they also, interestingly enough, had real estate as well. So, they had like different listings for huge, huge acreages throughout the West. And that was pretty interesting.
John Wilson: Is this print only? Or did you see, like did some of them have like podcasts or like a multi-channel media company?
Alex Bridgeman: At the time, I was thinking about trying to acquire other media businesses and then just slapping on kind of like a playbook that you develop over time of improving the product, getting a podcast or some other more free top of funnel product built for that business that can lead into other paid products, and then also building out that kind of bottom of funnel, where it is like the high-end conference or more higher end data product that you might be able to build on top of this publication. The livestock one was a little tricky, just because the audience was- it had been pretty stable for a long time, but there wasn’t- just looking at their product range and the SIM, there wasn’t a clear willingness to pay for higher end products. So that one was just a little bit tricky, and I’m not super passionate about livestock. So, it’s easier to kind of build a business around a topic you’re passionate about. And you’re more, I think your brain is just easier- It’s easier for your mind to find new ways to grow it if it’s something that you’re at least a little bit passionate about. And livestock wasn’t that for me, but I also just didn’t think the audience would be a good fit. But there’s kind of a playbook that a number of B2B acquirers have run where they go find the plumber magazine or electrician or septic, like any sort of business that is like home service, B2B services has a magazine for its industry and there are companies that roll up different magazines from different industries and either reinvest in them and building better products or better marketing or just create kind of this portfolio of companies. So, I don’t know if you’ve followed Craig Fuller at FreightWaves, but he acquired FLYING Magazine from one of these acquirers that had acquired a bunch of sailing and golf magazines and owned FLYING, and then they decided to sell FLYING to Craig. But there’s companies out there that roll these up. I haven’t seen individuals do it, but I’m sure there are individuals out there who own a handful of small niche media businesses. But they’re interesting businesses when they kind of find that perfect audience fit and product mix, but it can be hard to find. And the owners of the good ones know that they’re good, and so, you’d have to pay a pretty penny for them.
John Wilson: Yeah. So, I think acquiring media companies in general is really interesting. And the only person that I know that did it at scale, I think his name was Dennis Felix or Felix Dennis, I don’t remember which one. But he’s the guy that spent like a billion dollars on cocaine or something. Did you ever read his book?
Alex Bridgeman: No. What’s it called?
John Wilson: Oh, it’s the worst book name. It’s like, “I Can Teach You to be Rich,” or it’s something like ridiculous.
Alex Bridgeman: I’ve heard that title before, that book title. I didn’t know it was Tim, though.
John Wilson: Yeah, he built this empire of magazines and I think he started like Tech World and he started an Apple magazine, and he did all this stuff in the eighties and it blew up and he became a billionaire on the back of print publication.
Alex Bridgeman: That’s awesome.
John Wilson: Yeah. It is an interesting book, especially like even more so probably for you like inside the industry. I’ve never thought about acquiring magazines, that’s just never even crossed my mind, but I mean, that sounds really cool.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I mean, any media property out there you would think be acquired, right? Like even if you grow a Twitter account, you could probably sell a Twitter account. You could probably sell YouTube videos or print publications or online magazines or online newsletters. I would imagine you could acquire any of those things. You might have to go like more direct to the operator. If you had a strategy, you’d have to lean pretty heavily into proprietary of just finding like big lists of publications out there that you would be interested in and then going to reach out to them in some way. And I think that would be kind of interesting as a strategy. But I think at my stage, it would probably be more distracting for me than anything because now you have to run all these other publications and can’t put energy back into the podcast and handbook. So, I don’t think it’s a strategy that I could do well, but I think eventually given enough kind of mass where you have a team that can handle things for you as you go off to find other stuff, I think that becomes interesting. But I think before then it becomes a distraction.
John Wilson: And you don’t think acquiring- I guess this started with a question, but it’s going to turn into more of a comment. So usually like our philosophy here is we bloat, then we optimize. So, we go acquire, we bloat very quickly, and then once you’re big enough, you have the resources, the talent, whatever you need to then optimize and like do better. So, if you have a motive of convincing me to raise a fund or something, maybe my motive is to get you to acquire new media properties. So, you can bloat, bring in a team and then start to optimize all these activities.
Alex Bridgeman: That would be interesting. It’d be fun to just roll up all the SMB podcasts or the different newsletters into one massive SMB conglomerate. But there’s also probably an ancillary podcast too, like there’s podcasts within each industry. So, there’s a plumbing podcast, there’s really good landscaping podcasts that talk about running companies in those industries. And so, you could kind of like look around for what are the most well followed podcasts in these different industries that have different tangential relations to each other where they kind of operate the same, and folks who own one company often own a company in the other industry and find those podcasts and kind of stitch them together almost in this podcast network. Something like that could be kind of interesting if someone wanted to go find all the best podcasts in the various industries that were tangentially related to each other, and then create a network where the different audiences can be shared across different podcasts. And then you have one person within the network who manages ad revenue for all of them and can optimize better because now you can go to someone like ServiceTitan and say we can do more than just this one podcast. We have eight podcasts that are all in these different industries that I know you serve. You should sponsor all of them, and we’ll give you certain discounts or something like that if you do all of them. So, there’s stuff like that that I think starts to make sense. And then you centralize stuff like editing or posting and like the admin backend of managing a podcast, like that becomes pretty interesting too. So that’s a strategy I think would be fun. I’d like to either do it or see someone else do it. I think that’d be fun.
John Wilson: I think you should do it. Yeah, I’ll support you in that activity. I mean, that sounds like fun. But yeah, bloat then optimize. That’s recently become our mantra around here is let’s expand rapidly, and once we get there, it becomes easier. I was just having this talk with Rick Vazza, he had a great episode earlier on our show, but if we had to do it again, like go through this whole process we’ve gone through over the last decade again, we would have blown up like five years earlier. Like we would have expanded five years earlier because we spent all this time and energy focusing on processes and like system optimization when we were too small for any of it to actually matter. And when we got big enough, all of that time and energy spent was wasted because it all broke. So, the processes that work at ten employees have nothing to do with the processes that work at fifty or a hundred or two hundred or a thousand. And I’m sure we got good lessons out of it, but we could have also learned those lessons just when we got bigger. Like we should’ve just focused on just getting bigger and then optimizing.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I think the motto is also interesting as a bias to action and experimenting and trying things. Like it’s kind of this organizational lean into doing something, like try it. If it doesn’t work, it’s fine, we’ll optimize later, or try this new territory or grow this new side of your business and we’ll figure it out later. But I think stuff like that is really helpful because a lot of stuff you don’t really know until you try it. And so, if you had this constant bias in your company of trying things, I think you’d probably get farther, even if it does, you do kick your shin every now and then on stuff.
John Wilson: Yeah. And I think that, yeah, definitely encourages action, but it also just prioritizes. And now, as we’re sort of thinking about the next step, it puts us in the right framework for the next couple of years where, okay, we want to continue growing, like where we are isn’t where we’re going to end. So, we need to focus on like our MVP. So instead of minimum viable product, it’s minimum viable process. What is the minimum viable process that our company at this size requires for us to run in order to get to the next 10 or 30 or whatever million on our top line? So that way we can just get there and then focus on optimizing once we get there and leaning in and building out the right teams once we get there. But it’s okay if we duct tape it together for a couple of years.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. Or do you get there and then you realize, oh wait, I can actually go to a hundred or two hundred, and now this time that I was going to spend optimizing, now I need to actually just keep all the duct tape together before I get to that next process. Or do you think there’s like a maturity phase where you start building an executive team and now processes can be a little bit more ingrained and solidified even through different levels of growth? Like what’s been your experience thinking through some of that?
John Wilson: I think you take a rest period. So, we’re in a rest period right now. So, we did three deals in six months last year, which was a lot.
Alex Bridgeman: That’s a lot.
John Wilson: That’s a lot, and I’m tired. So now we’re going to be spending like the next six to nine months resting, optimizing. We bloated, now we’re going to optimize. But we’re going to get- instead of like focusing on, hey, we need to be at a hundred percent, we need to be firing on all cylinders, let’s get to like 70%, 80%. Let’s write the minimum amount of SOPs that we need. Let’s build the teams that we know that we will need. So right now, we’re in team building mode for HR, team building mode for finance, building out some leadership development stuff that like without these key components, we are not going to get to 50 million. Like we’re just not. The company won’t be able to, it would crush under its own weight. So, you need some stuff, so that’s the minimum viable process that we need to get there. But the stuff that we can afford to not fully optimize at this point is we can afford to be a little bit more lenient with our marketing, we can afford to not have our purchasing totally integrated cross-brand, we can afford to have some roles a little wonky for the next year. So, it’s like, okay, this is important, this problem; it is important in ten years, it’s going to be really important, it’s important right now, but we can deal with it for another year or two. The things we can’t deal with is no wait, like not enough of an HR team and not enough of a finance team, because we’re not going to get anywhere if those aren’t built. So, we’re going to focus on the radically important. We’re going to make it the minimum viable process, and then we’re going to expand again and optimize at that size. Okay, we have our HR, we have our finance, maybe now we really need to be focusing on our C-suite and we need to be focusing on an academy for emerging leaders or market development or whatever it is.
Alex Bridgeman: I like that. I love that minimum viable process idea. You should tweet that or have some sort of thread of the minimum viable processes that you’ve come up with and created.
John Wilson: Well, I think it’s for the most part, you try to avoid process. Like I have a friend who runs a company that’s like $400,000 in sales. It is the most organized company that I’ve ever seen in my entire life. I mean, it’s incredible. Like he’s smarter than me, he’s organized, he has all this incredible process built, and the company’s $400,000 in sales. It’s like none of it matters because you’re $400,000 in sales in a service company. Like it’s a one or two man show. Like go get to 5 million and then organize. Like what are we doing spending all this time figuring out a perfect workflow on this company? Just bloat, like get big. So, I think people just get in their own way.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. But it’s interesting though that some folks will want to optimize later or sooner than maybe they have to. Do you think there’s almost like a personality trait that a company or a leader has to have to be okay bloating with an imperfect process though? Or do you think that’s something you can learn over time, too? Like enough people could tell you that message and you’d be like, oh yeah, okay, that’s probably a good idea, let me go do that.
John Wilson: I’m going to answer that. But I’m also laughing because this just turned into an interview the other way.
Alex Bridgeman: We can do both.
John Wilson: Yeah, we did. We just did. Most of the people that I know that are good at it were sort of born that way, with a done is better than perfect mentality. I think it could be trained, but I think people have a natural leaning. Like if you’re obsessively organized, that’s an amazing trait, and there are some really good roles for you to have inside an organization. But I think that that would be a difficult trait to have as a CEO where literally nothing is ever perfect, and attempting to strive for that is like just a fool’s errand. And you have to be willing to accept imperfections and sometimes some really big imperfections in order to focus on something that’s much more important. Like for us, it would be warehouse optimization. So, our warehouse is not optimized at all, which is-
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, I saw it.
John Wilson: Yeah, it’s not good. It’s a real problem. Like it is an actual problem. It detracts from our business. Like I could go on and on about how bad our warehouse problem is. So, we could spend another year trying to figure it out, or we can add 10 million top line, and I can hire an absolute baller at warehouse management to come in and lead our five warehouses. So, I’m totally going to lean towards that. And why waste the energy? Like it’s a big problem, it’s an urgent problem, but it’s solvable just by mass. It’ll get messier in the process, but you have to be okay with that. And I’m okay with that.
Alex Bridgeman: I like that. That’s good. And I assume you’ve talked to Kelcey a lot about warehouse management and all that sort of stuff.
John Wilson: Oh yeah. Well, his warehouse is a trip to go through. It’s crazy. There’s like 13,000 SKUs in there.
Alex Bridgeman: It just kept going. Like the room just kept getting bigger and then you’d go to a different room and it’s just as big as the last one.
John Wilson: It is like 80,000 square feet I think of just inventory.
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah. I had a hard time visualizing what a warehouse would look like. But after seeing his, it was like a mind-blowing experience. Like this is what 80,000 square feet of product is like in these giant bins. He was selling like hairbands, and there was like a four-foot bucket of just hairbands, like as many as you’ve ever seen in your life are there, and that’s for maybe a few weeks of sales or something like that. It was just wild.
John Wilson: Yeah. So, like his urgencies are probably different than mine. Like his warehouse imploding would be very different than mine imploding. But he probably, I’m sure he has issues that they’re nowhere near perfect on, and they’re just like, okay, we’ll solve that at 30 million or 40 or a hundred and we’re just going to deal with the suck for the next couple of years. So, we got off onto a tangent on my business there, which was funny, but sounds like I’ve convinced you to buy some media companies. That’s my takeaway for most of this conversation.
Alex Bridgeman: There’s definitely some interesting media properties you could acquire that I think would be fun. We’ll have to see if that becomes a strategy in the next few months, but you have given me another like kernel of thought to kind of think about for a little bit.
John Wilson: We did it, we did it, everybody. You heard it first here. That is great. Well, when you went on to Acquisitions Anonymous, I’m sure you guys talked about deals that you thought would be interesting. I didn’t hear that episode yet. But if you were into the deals, you’d grab them?
Alex Bridgeman: Well, we talked about that livestock publication. That was the one I was thinking about the most. BizBuySell, they’ve had a few different publications. I have kind of a trigger set for any sort of media property that gets posted. It gets emailed over. That’s probably the most relevant one that I’ve seen in a while. There’s another one that focused on retail. So, like people who run retail businesses, and I can’t remember how big it was. It was really profitable though. It was small though. It was like that 400,000 super optimized business versus something that’s 2 to 5 million in revenue that has kind of like the rough bones of a team that you can just fill in over time. So, I think that stage of business for something like a magazine is probably less interesting. It’s fine for a podcast because a podcast making 400 grand is probably a huge podcast that is doing really well. But 400,000 for a magazine is a less interesting. So, there’s different scales of businesses that come across BizBuySell that you have to kind of recalibrate around. But there’s a few every now and then that become interesting, but only two or three I’ve seen just through a broker network. I think you’d have to probably reach out to folks directly through doing that. And I know of other B2B acquirers who do that same strategy of reaching out and they buy, funny enough, they buy the same size of companies. Like there’s a company I know that wants to go public in the next few years and they buy niche publications with 1 to 5 million in revenue, which is like right down the ballpark of what you’d want to buy, but this huge company has figured out how to do it. And so, an email comes in from both of you, like who’s the more reputable buyer for that business that that seller paid more attention to? So, I think that becomes a little bit more challenging, just knowing that there’s acquirers out there who have studied the landscape for a long time. So that could be kind of tricky. But like anything, there’s room in the margins for interesting deals, so you just have to go find them.
John Wilson: Yeah. Well, I look forward to following up in like a few months and hearing about the five deals that you transacted on in that time. It’s going to be great. I appreciate you coming on the show, Alex. This was a lot of fun. We dove into podcasts, we dove into media, we dove into the Handbook. This was awesome. And I think, I’m in the podcasting sphere obviously, but hearing it from you is like a masterclass. This was great. If people want to stay in touch with you, how can they do that?
Alex Bridgeman: Yeah, a good way is following me on Twitter at aebridgeman. We also have a website, alexbridgeman.com, which has the podcast. And the Handbook, it’s kind of a messy organization, we’re going to clean it up this year and make everything one website, but the Handbook is at theoperatorshandbook.com, and you can find it there and subscribe if you’d like. But there’s kind of a couple different places, but we’ll consolidate this year. That’s going to be one of our projects. So, I’ll look for a little bit more simple process going forward. But right now, that’s where you can find me.
John Wilson: Awesome. Well, thanks so much for coming on. This was a ton of fun.
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