Are You Working ON or IN Your Business?

Welcome back to another episode of the Knot Brothers podcast. Today, we're talking about something near and dear to our heart, which is ⁓ offsite. So at least that's part of the encapsulation. The working title is, are you working on or in your business? Because it's really hard to do both. So ⁓ we'll dig into that. We'll talk about some additional strategies and topics and ways that you can discover whether you're working on or in your business. And we'll talk about some mechanisms that you can use to stop working on and push towards in. because it's a work in progress for every entrepreneur. So ⁓ Ryan, we have an offsite coming up next week. ⁓ And as we were talking and preparing for this, we're like, you know, maybe we just talk about like how offsites are meaningful and how they've shaped our business and how it's ⁓ allowed us to recognize ⁓ whether we're working on or in our business and help us pivot along the way. So why don't you give like the 10,000 foot view of what are offsites? Why do we care about them? Why should we listen to you guys about them? ⁓ Go from there.

Yeah, I mean, ⁓ offsets for us began.

14 years ago, about a year or two into our business existing. And that was when ⁓ we found ourselves ⁓ working in the business every day. We were operating the business, ⁓ we're executing things for our clients, we're doing everything that needs to be done, and we feel like we're really busy all the time. ⁓ But there are question marks that start adding up of, are we going the right direction? We're really busy, but are we working on the right things? ⁓ We weren't exactly sure how to solve for that. ⁓ And our ultimate solution became, let's do an offsite where the three partners, you, me and John, ⁓ we're just gonna go away. ⁓ We're literally going to physically remove ourselves from at that time, the office that we worked in. ⁓ We're not gonna be around the work. We're not gonna be. contactable by clients, we're out of office as far as everybody's concerned, ⁓ and we're gonna spend that time working on the business ⁓ and just really picking apart what are we doing, why are we doing it, what are the directions we wanna go, digging into financials, strategic, like everything, ⁓ as a way to kinda unplug from the business ⁓ and... ⁓ Focus on what it is that really moves us forward and what we've seen in every one of those, know They've changed over time right ⁓ our early on ones were very tactical and figuring out, know ⁓ What our contracts look like and what are our packages that we sell and you know, how do we just exist as a business? to ⁓ more strategic ⁓ ones where you know from the beginning to the end of the offsite, we really don't have anything tangible to show because it's really just been a lot of discussion or research or ⁓ ideation around what it is that we do, ⁓ what direction we wanna take to company, ⁓ and all of that turns into other things down the line. So, ⁓ what we do for an offsite is it's typically... ⁓

four days, three to four days-ish, plus a couple days of travel, ⁓ where we go away from where home base. Now we kind of all converge somewhere else, right? So ⁓ I'm in John and I are in Florida, Mark's in Ohio. So we converge somewhere ⁓ and we spend that time working on the business, ⁓ like pretty much from the time we wake up to the time we... ⁓ crash out and go to sleep at like two in the morning. ⁓ We're doing something related to the business and we obviously have ⁓ some team building activities in between there where we'll go grab dinner or ⁓ whatever we get into, steal each other's minerals, playing StarCraft ⁓ II. What kind of person would do that? ⁓

Who does that?

You know, as much as we've ⁓ used that time ⁓ to build our business and build, ⁓ you know, make decisions, strategic direction decisions about our business and figure out, you know, tactical things that we needed to figure out and ⁓ have some really hard discussions about everything along the way. We've also used those as some really strong team building. ⁓ Time for the three of us and we've even done kind of an extended off-site with our broader leadership team ⁓ To sort of do the same thing right a little bit of a modified forum, but ⁓ you know ⁓ doing those things like ⁓ playing Starcraft together and fighting over minerals or ⁓ Figuring out how to break back into our place ⁓ that we locked ourselves out of or ⁓ watching John be terrified of ⁓ sharks in the ocean. ⁓ Those are all things that have been woven into the fabric of ⁓ our partnership and friendship and all of that that ultimately leans back to the business and what we do on a day-to-day basis too.

wasn't even an offsite but you do despond a memory of John swirling swirling wine all over his shoes trying to be fancy ⁓ at an event ⁓ completely unrelated but also adds to the fabric

Yeah, ⁓ there's seriously some Johnisms that have come from some off-sites. We have to let him be here to at least defend himself on some of those. I mean, that was a comical one. That was like a pseudo. Actually, that wasn't off-site. That was the... It was a conference, but didn't we do... ⁓ Didn't we also stay an extra few days? ⁓

I'm ⁓

For sure.

thought that was a conference. I think we turned it into an offside. think was a little bit of both. I think so. think you're right.

to like we kind of merged it together because we've done that a couple times we did it there ⁓ and I think we did that in Anaheim one time too we stayed in ⁓ Somewhere else in LA ⁓ But it was after Blizzcon so we went for Blizzcon did that and then stuck around for a little bit longer Because that was the trip that we all three ruined our shirt. We all three spilled red wine on on ⁓ our t-shirts ⁓

You

oops, ⁓ it happens. Yeah, ⁓ off sites. There, there are a ton of there can be a ton of fun. And all this depends on who like who you're in business with who your partners are how how ⁓ well your personal relationship is how much fun you like to have as a person, or how buttoned up you want to be for business. All those factors come in right? For us, we've we've treated this as an extended version of friendship where they're ⁓ the lines of business and friendship are are

it.

we're very fortunate in that way. They're very blurred. ⁓ And there's really no difference between the two. ⁓ So for us, they end up being a bit of a business vacation meets a whole heck of a lot of work meets ⁓ a lot of fun. ⁓ And those things do get woven into the fabric of ⁓ what the business culture ends up becoming ⁓ in a lot of ways. And also ⁓ can make pivotal impacts on the direction you want to go. ⁓ like preparation for an offsite stuff we're doing right now is if you don't have your extended leadership team with you at the offsite, you have to have information. And so what we're, what we always do ahead of an offsite is a couple of weeks of ⁓ ahead, we'll do info gathering. And sometimes that's as simple as, Hey, tell me the things that are, are, you know, start, stop, continuous of things that are going well, things we need to stop things we need to keep doing as a business. And you just kind of pull your leadership team and in a formal way, sometimes the formal way other times it's like, all right, well, We need those tactical things maybe, but we also need ⁓ some bigger strategic inputs. What type of business should we go after and why? Where do you think we have the right to win? ⁓ What are the threats and weaknesses? You know, the gold SWAT analysis. So ⁓ polling your leadership team to go a little bit deeper to give you more Intel and more insight into those things. You can kind of take all of that and then you end up merging it together. So our leadership team is, think five or six ⁓ other people other than us. And so you take those six individuals points of view, which are going to be very different because of where they sit on the bus. And then you sort of ⁓ bubble up what the themes are. And from those themes, you can say like, all right, from a, the next level down, from a leadership point of view, this is how they're seeing the universe. What do we see differently and why do we see it differently? Or do we have the same point of view? And you can sort of start steering that and it ends up becoming an opportunity for you to reset your quarterly goals and themes. So what we do is we have annual goals, but really if you can't hit annual goals, unless you hit quarterly goals. And so we break up ⁓ all the annual things into quarterly rocks and quarterly themes and quarterly ⁓ objectives that we then distribute to the rest of the leadership team to have some level of responsibility towards achieving those. ⁓ And then kind of track progress towards those as we, as we go and offsites become a way for you to measure how did we do last quarter? Cause we do these quarterly ⁓ and what should we be focusing on this quarter and next quarter?

so that we can stay on track with wherever we're trying to go. Oftentimes that ends up being ⁓ small pivots and meandering a little bit ⁓ of where we need to go. Sometimes you have big pivots in big areas of opportunity that you can, because something happened in the marketplace or something happened at a business level. ⁓ And ⁓ you kind of work on those things a little differently. I want to kind of back up and talk a little bit about what you said. That's our off sites. at first were very, very, very tactical. They didn't sound anything like what I just said, which is like bubbling up themes and thinking about all that stuff. ⁓ It was extremely task oriented. And so they felt incredibly productive. We get to the end of the offsite and we have like 100 action items, 50 of which we got done while we were there and another 50 we were going to get done in the next 90 days. That's not, that's more the definition of working in your business than on your business. ⁓ they kind ⁓ of blur between those two things because it can feel very productive. But those are things you shouldn't be doing all that often, like creating contracts and creating ⁓ all these tactical things you need to just survive and live as a business. Those things should exist, but they're done once and they live forever.

I think in those cases, was more, those were the early years, right? ⁓ I can remember when there was ⁓ a shift from our perspective of what we were focused on and what we weren't, because for the longest time, we would come back from ⁓ an offsite and kind of have a team waiting ⁓ to hear all of the things that we were bringing back with us, right? ⁓ And then one time we just came back and we didn't have anything. And it kind of left people ⁓ confused to an extent because they're like, no, this is when you go create this ⁓ mountain of action items and then disseminate them and then we know where we're going. ⁓ We came back one time and we're just kind of like. Yeah, it was great. ⁓ Nothing for you to worry about yet. ⁓ And I think that, you know, over time people have ⁓ come to understand ⁓ sort of ⁓ the difference and the organization, like the business is more evolved now and we have a lot of those things locked down. ⁓ I think there are still sometimes, ⁓ and maybe that's like the caveat, right? We just sort of naturally do it. But if you were, if you were trying to adopt this framework that we do, ⁓ you do have to kind of make a plan going into an offsite and say like, okay, what is it that we, what's our objective with this? ⁓ There are very few scenarios where we say, hey, like we just have these ⁓ more tactical things that we just need to get done. And it's just impossible to get it done. in the midst of the day-to-day activities, but it's incredibly important that we just get it done. And those might be things that we would have sort of more of a tactical week of work for those things. ⁓ Or more often, like the one that we'll have in a couple weeks, it's more like, ⁓ hey, ⁓ what are the market pressures that we're feeling? How are elements of our business doing? ⁓

A lot of times we ask ourselves the ⁓ question almost ever, at least once a year, ⁓ of if we started this business from scratch right now, would we do what we're doing right now? ⁓ And go through that whole thought exercise. ⁓ you know, oftentimes it's at least a variation of what we're doing, ⁓ but we find things that we would do differently, right? Either because technology exists that didn't exist when we started. We know things that we didn't know when we started. We found things just to not be what we thought they would be. So those all give us answers to those questions of, okay, well, if that's not working or that's not something we're interested in, how do we pivot away from it? And how do we do it in a way that makes logical sense and is fiscally responsible and, all of the things that come with running any business?

Yeah, I think that's a, ⁓ the underpinning of what you just said is off sites for us end up becoming an alignment tool as much as it is a strategic tool. And so it allows. Yeah. ⁓

It's sort of like our board meeting, like it's a very extended, very extended, you know, ⁓ not as structured ⁓ board meeting ⁓ week. Cause we do it about every, about every quarter. Usually it's like three times a year, right? One of them, ⁓ because of holidays and all that kind of stuff, one of them usually gets nuked. ⁓

Yeah.

Yeah, we usually do first, second and third quarter and then third quarter sort of serves as, you know, the 2020, whatever the next year is, ⁓ the following year's annual plan. ⁓

So what are some tools or frameworks or anything else that ⁓ we could give people for ⁓ determining whether they're working on or in their business or preparing for something like an offsite? Someone's never done one of these before. What do I do to get prepared and get people aligned?

I mean, think if you're a business owner and you find yourself really busy every day, like so busy you can't just sit back and think about the business, you don't own a business. ⁓ You work in a business. ⁓ And that's a really hard truth to accept as an entrepreneur. Right? You get in business because you want to ⁓ build something. You want to build a business that ⁓ you own and operate. ⁓ And there's a big, big, big difference between owning and operating a business and just working for yourself. ⁓ For us, that's, ⁓ think, where some of that line gets drawn. ⁓ ⁓ And you know ⁓ part of that reason of needing to back up to work solely on the business for a minute to ensure that it at least Three very, you know for three weeks a year There's a lot of effort being put on the business by the three of us and that the amount of effort it's hard to quantify how much we accomplish in just that period because you're not just talking about ⁓ a day Right you're talking about ⁓ an extended period of time of Not not ⁓ of focused energy Zero distractions where we've gone so far in some cases as to like not even have cell phones We're not that hardcore anymore but

You

⁓ At certain points, ⁓ there are no distractions. There's no handling emails, there's no taking phone calls, there's no sitting in at the meetings, nothing. So when you think about, you take three people who have a collective interest and focus all of their energy and attention for a week long span, basically, on one objective and goal. and that's ⁓ the strategic direction of the business, and do that three times a year, that's worth three months of side of the desk work, or one day a week work, or all of those sorts of things, because we do, not only that, we're also a little insane in that we work from like, 10 in the morning usually, like you get up, you have breakfast, kind of get rolling until about two in the morning. ⁓ So ⁓ it's, ⁓ you know, I don't necessarily suggest that schedule to everybody. ⁓ And obviously it's often, right? We'll kind of meander out, we'll go get dinner, we'll just kind of be chatting and then inevitably over dinner we're like, you know what? I was thinking about what we were talking about earlier with ⁓ XYZ. What if... And then we spend the next three hours talking about a potential pivot or potential path and what that would mean and how that would work and how we do it. And we may get to the end of that and be like, that's a terrible fucking idea. shouldn't do that. ⁓ And just throw all of that away. ⁓ but many of those have turned into this is absolutely what we should be doing. ⁓ And, ⁓ turned into our, like, how do we put this into action and how do we start?

Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

going down that path.

The difference for us too and why we insist on these being off sites is because of the zero distractions. I have kids, John has kids, you have a wife and dogs, right? So there are distractions and the extended working time, right? So there's pressure, we all have family pressures, there's pressures to work a normal schedule, quote unquote. Well, as an entrepreneur, there are times where you just can't do that or shouldn't do that. ⁓

Yeah, I mean, think that's a ⁓ good clarification too, because like that is the whole point, right? ⁓ We. ⁓ I think we tried it one time like an like an on-site off-site and it worked. And our families are very respectful ⁓ of of things, but it's still challenging when you have a weird schedule that you keep. You might be a little loud and rowdy. ⁓ You might be get you might get into an argument or two ⁓ about. otherwise. ⁓ And also just those pressures that you feel, right? If you're at home and your baby's crying, you feel compelled to go take care of your kid as you should. If I'm here, I feel compelled to go take my dogs for a walk or something. So we just remove that by removing ourselves from the location and the elements. It's ⁓ I can't go for a walk with you. I can't go have dinner with you. I can't go help with X, Y, Z, because I'm not fucking there. And it kind of just removes all of that ⁓ potential distraction and challenge from the equation as well. That's what we do with our leaders as well, right? We all went to Orlando, and that removes everybody from any sort of ⁓ family obligations or I'll just run over and do X, Z. ⁓ and really keeps everything focused on the activity at large, which is sort of part team building, part strategic direction.

Yeah. ⁓ So ⁓ I'm remembering back to Brad sugars and I don't even know what Brad, Brad and crew are doing these days, but he said something when you and I went to a conference that, that, that stuck though. Right. So when ⁓ the difference between working on and in your business, I think is his definition of the seesaw. So if you find yourself consistently on the seesaw, where you get the work, that's one side of the seesaw, and then you do the work, it's the other side of the seesaw, and then you get the work and do the work, and get the work and do the work, and the seesaw goes back and forth and back and forth, and it's you that's the pivotal piece of that seesaw, moving both directions, that's definitely a problem, that is the number one thing to be addressed, because now you're the number one bottleneck in your business. ⁓ you know, removing that as the bottleneck becomes the number one objective. You know, we've sort of had an unwritten rule of We have to do every job in the business until we work ourselves out of that job and then delegate that to someone else on the business so that we can work on things ⁓ that either ⁓ other people just don't have the skills to do or we just don't want to do those things. ⁓ And you know, those things ebb and flow, right? Like you sometimes you're still doing things that you don't really necessarily want to be doing, but it's required to get to the next rung on the entrepreneurial journey. It's just, that's just kind of how the journey works. But The goal is still to work yourself out of those jobs so that you are more business owner than business operator.

So where do we go from here?

good question we kind of talked ourselves into a corner here. ⁓

⁓ Hahaha. ⁓

We talked about what off-sites are. We've talked about how we've found them to be valuable and potentially how others could use them in their business or partnership. We've talked about sort of how they have grown and evolved for us, how it has professional impacts and personal impacts. And we've even touched on how... we've sort of extended that to ⁓ a broader team, right? In this case being our leadership team. ⁓ I'm sure there are organizations who have even gone beyond that and taken their whole team places. ⁓ We haven't quite gotten that brave yet. ⁓

Well, I know there are are definitely leaders that I know of that use these because they're tax write offs, right? And they use them to, you know, kind of turn into family vacations at the same time as they do business vacation. We've always I've always been very averse to that. I can't speak for you, but I've been averse to that because it it removes the ability or at least it impedes on the ability to do all the after hour stuff that we just talked about, because you feel compelled to go back to the equivalent of the family unit. when quote unquote work is over. And for us, that ⁓ flow, that dynamic, ⁓ it's not as impactful. ⁓

I yeah, I think what we've talked about anytime we've debated that is that maybe the better setup is to, I mean, it makes a weird traveling situation, especially in like your case where you have four kids, but as to have, you know, the spouses join sort of later in the trip, right? That would be ideal. We've never figured out a good way to do that. So we just haven't done it. ⁓

Partially because it's it's extended time away too, right? You feel compelled not just to ⁓ get back to the family unit, but if you did it that way and you extended the trip for an extra two, three, four, five days, whatever it is for a vacation, now you're away for two weeks instead of one from your quote unquote day-to-day work. ⁓

Yeah, we haven't solved that one. But I mean, it is common, right? A lot of people will use it as like a ⁓ tax write off vacation, basically, or something similar. I think probably the difference in those cases is that like, it's more tax write off than it is work. ⁓ In our case, it's a lot more work than it's tax write off. ⁓

statement.

So I think we have found like legitimate, tangible value out of it. And it's something that, as we talked about in the Rituals in Business podcast, there are many things that I would consider changing or getting rid of within our business. ⁓ Offsites are not one of them. ⁓ That's a constant, ⁓ and maybe that'll change at some point in the future, but.

Mm-mm.

You know, anytime we go too long without one, start to feel, we start to feel that. ⁓ And, ⁓ and then, you know, we go away, we work on some stuff, we come back, we get, we have alignment around a lot of things and a lot of those pieces and parts, whether it's, you know, some of our EOS model that didn't feel quite right or some directional pieces that don't feel quite right on a day-to-day basis or whatever it is. ⁓

Yep.

⁓ they're all solved for. ⁓ Or if they're not solved for 100%, there's at least directional alignment and there's a clear path to get them solved for. ⁓ That's usually what I'm coming away from those with as like most valuable.

Yep. ⁓

I think ⁓ a good takeaway from this is probably that ⁓ while these off-sites, at least for us, have evolved into being... highly strategic, highly discussion oriented, we still have artifacts that we come away with from these things, right? They don't always get done during those conversations, but the action items are like, hey, we need to make sure that we're documenting all the things we talked about in places that can become an artifact and represent the decisions that were made. ⁓ For us, that's like the EOS traction model ⁓ or the scaling up. ⁓ models and know, Tractions is the VTO, the Vision Traction Organizer, and Scaling Up is the seven strata and the one-page strategic plan. We've bounced between both of those frameworks over time, but those things get updated based on the conversations that we've had in the business and serve as a strategic marker that we can then go share with the rest of our leadership team and the entirety of the company of what did we decide, why did we decide it, where are we going, what are the priorities, ⁓ and ⁓ how are we going to get there. ⁓ And I would even say, I would go so far as to say, Even in periods where you feel like, man, you know, taking whoever is on my leadership team or partners or whatever ⁓ to an offsite is, gonna, ⁓ is going to be a financial burden. You got to look at it like a, ⁓ an investment in your business. ⁓ it's the last thing that I would cancel. Do you tighten those up a little bit? Maybe, but it's the last thing I would cancel because they're that important, ⁓ for, for our business.

I think maybe an interesting question or factoid. What do think our best off-sites are, Ruben?

⁓ Depends on how you define best. ⁓

I was just thinking about it as I was gonna ask the question. was like, there's a lot of ways to take that. I'd say, know, best could be most memorable, most productive.

Mm-hmm.

most memorable is probably the US Virgin Islands when we were chased off the island by a hurricane.

100 % the most memorable one. That's the one. I don't even remember what hurricane that was.

I don't remember. I don't think it ended up hitting, but it was a threat of hitting. And so we chased off the island and went to Orlando and

I just remember John talking to the owner of ⁓ the place we were staying, was Airbnb. And he was like, you know, what do you think? And she was like, yeah, you guys got to go. ⁓ We were like, ⁓ so this is real then. And then that was my first time flying on Spirit Air. We flew Spirit to Orlando. And then ⁓ we actually...

Yeah. ⁓

Yeah.

rented a house in the neighborhood where we have our rental properties now. ⁓ Which at that time was only like halfway finished maybe. I remember walking around that neighborhood ⁓ and them still doing construction in like the main areas. ⁓ And I guess one of our houses we own now wasn't even built.

So yeah, that's definitely the most memorable.

Definitely the most memorable, most impactful. ⁓ I think I might have to go all the way back to late Cumberland days. Maybe some of ⁓ the early on ones, ⁓ they feel very impactful because they were so important for us getting alignment of where we were going. ⁓ And I think those early days we were still figuring out what business we were in, what business we were not in. ⁓ getting alignment on like what that even looks like and means, what our roles are in the business and why each of those roles ⁓ need to have the ⁓ distributed responsibilities. Those were really important alignment tools ⁓ in the early days.

Yeah, we had a lot of whiteboarding and... screen sharing ⁓ back then. or any other ones that have been. like really ⁓ sort of pivotal, I guess is what I would say. I they all have been in their own way, ⁓

In way,

I remember, I remember one, ⁓ I think we were in, where were we? Florida, Arizona. can't remember. Somewhere warm. We usually go somewhere warm, but ⁓ I remember. ⁓ Yeah.

⁓ That's kind of the common thread ⁓ especially if it's in ⁓ the shittier months of the northern hemisphere

I remember getting a phone call. were all psyched. We were getting ready to ⁓ what felt like set the world on fire. And then a key member of the team ⁓ calls me in the airport and is like, Hey, I need to talk to you. I think I want to, this is before we had fully remote setup and a bunch of other stuff that we have now. Yep.

I know exactly what it was. That was Cape Coral. And the reason that I know that is because I flew out of Fort Myers not that long ago and had like a weird deja vu moment walking through that section because we had stopped to get food at the restaurant there in the airport. So as I was walking through, I was like, I've fucking been here before. And I don't like it. And then it was that.

Yeah. Yeah, it was one of those moments where like you you had an agenda going into the the offsite of all the things and then you had a key member of the team that was a big part of that vision, decide that that they were going to go do something else and wanted to move in ⁓ to a different part of the country and do work on something completely different and ⁓ good on them for knowing their objective and wish them well but totally changed what we were going to do for that entire offsite. ⁓

I mean, that is probably a good example of one. I forget exactly what ⁓ the outcomes of that were. ⁓ But I do remember, kind of our plan going into it was to figure out a bunch of stuff. And what we wound up figuring out was totally different than that. ⁓ Sort of on the basis of the fact that ⁓ the team dynamic had changed and shifted dramatically. And that individual was gonna be a big part of that. ⁓ ⁓ So we kind of walked away with a different plan and we executed that plan and we were successful ⁓ Doing so I think we've done that multiple times in multiple different ⁓ Different arenas in different ways and that's always the thing so ⁓ chances are in a couple weeks will come away with You know some new directions. ⁓ It's been ⁓ I mean, it's been a while since we've had our last get together, probably almost six months at this point. And ⁓ with everything existing in business, the state of ⁓ the marketing world, ⁓ the state of technology world, what has evolved over the past six months. ⁓ And obviously we're making changes every single day, but I think this will be one of those opportunities to really evaluate and try to look at some of the stuff we've talked about here of where do we think this stuff's going? And not necessarily being reactive to it, but trying to figure out where the entirety of the marketing industry is going and where the entirety of the technology industry is going and how we can exist at that pivot point. where they sort of up a year down the line, two years down the line.

Yeah, we tend, we've been talking about this as like quarterly and that kind of thing, but it's important probably to note that ⁓ these things are, we're trying to think three years out and in our world, that's a long time because things change and pivot so incredibly fast. And so while we, you know, we throw a dart and say, this is what we think three years looks like and ⁓ what we think the marketplace looks like. And some of these tools like the VTO and ⁓ scaling up have frameworks that we follow to kind of at least loosely put these things on paper of what our thoughts are. Usually we're directionally right, tactically we're very wrong. And that's okay. ⁓

We should do some time. It's just maybe one of these is just going back through all of our ⁓ VTOs and ⁓ other things to like other ⁓ EOS documents to compare where we where we thought we would be or where we thought the market would go versus where it actually did. In some cases we were we were correct and ahead on that and in some cases. ⁓ it changed and usually because something, ⁓ you some sort of predictor came out that ⁓ changed it. you ⁓ know, thinking back to when we started the business, when we started the business, digital agencies, ⁓ digital marketing agencies were very niche still. ⁓ Typically they were very small and they would work under a traditional ⁓ print agency, ⁓ advertising agency. And ⁓ for years, we predicted sort of this flip that would happen, in that your traditional agencies will try to morph themselves into digital agencies, ⁓ and ⁓ AOR, ⁓ agency of record relationships, will be more with a digital agency than they will with a traditional agency, because that's who owns the lion's share of spend, and that's just what makes sense in the future. And I think we're there. We've been there for a couple of years now. ⁓ And ⁓ so we built our business the whole time to kind of orient towards that. We never went down the path of trying to become a traditional agency so that we could take on agency of record. We really just work with people who see this vision ⁓ and take on agency of record engagements from a digital first perspective. ⁓ and we'll bring in traditional agencies for the pieces and parts that we don't do, we don't have coverage for, just like traditional agencies have always done with digital.

So wrapping this up, ⁓ we talked a lot about off-sites in particular, but ⁓ the root of this is about working on or in your business. And we've talked about some mechanisms to be able to identify that, the seesaw approach ⁓ or being extremely busy ⁓ and knowing those signals and signs. ⁓ some of that kind of bubbles up to do, when do I need to change the structure of my business and introduce something like off-sites so that I can work myself out of some of these jobs ⁓ and not be the bottleneck ⁓ as an entrepreneur. yeah, ⁓ until next time.