Think Big, Buy Small, with Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff – Episode 488 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, Harvard Business School professors and co-hosts of the Think Big, Buy Small podcast, explore the growing trend of “acquisition entrepreneurship”, including the type of person who might be right for it, the type of opportunity to look for and how to find them, the relative LACK of risk involved, and a deep dive into the economics of pie.

About Richard:

Richard S. Ruback is a Baker Foundation Professor and the Willard Prescott Smith Professor of Corporate Finance, Emeritus at the Harvard Business School. He is currently focusing his research in applied corporate finance, especially on corporate-control transactions and valuation. His course development work parallels his research interests. He has taught a variety of corporate finance courses throughout his career.  Over the last few years, he and Royce Yudkoff have been developing and teaching a new second year case course titled “The Financial Management of Smaller Firms” and a field course called “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition”.  Recently, Ruback and Yudkoff published their book, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business.  Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is a practical roadmap through the steps required to find, evaluate, negotiate and finance the acquisition of a smaller firm.

Ruback earned his Ph.D. in business administration at the University of Rochester in 1980 and taught at MIT’s Sloan School before joining the HBS faculty as a visiting professor in 1987. He was appointed associate professor in 1988 and full professor in 1989. Ruback has served as an editor for the Journal of Financial Economics and is the author of numerous articles on corporate finance and valuation.

Ruback has served as a consultant to corporations on corporate finance issues and has acted as an independent advisor to outside directors. He also served as an expert witness on valuation and security issues.

About Royce:

Royce Yudkoff is the MBA Class of 1975 Professor of Management Practice of Entrepreneurial Management at the Harvard Business School and a General Partner and co-founder of ABRY Partners, LLC in Boston, MA. Alongside Professor Richard Ruback, Royce currently co-teaches a second year case course titled “The Financial Management of Smaller Firms” and a field course called “Entrepreneurship through Acquisition”. These courses focus on how to acquire, finance and operate your own smaller firm. Recently, Ruback and Yudkoff published their book, HBR Guide to Buying a Small Business.  Published by Harvard Business Review Press, the book is a practical roadmap through the steps required to find, evaluate, negotiate and finance the acquisition of a smaller firm.

In 1989, Royce co-founded ABRY Partners, a private equity firm focused on the media, communications and business and information services markets. Since 1989 the firm has completed over $27 billion of leveraged transactions and other private equity investments involving approximately 450 properties. Over this period Royce has also served on numerous private and public corporate boards.

Royce graduated from the Harvard Business School in 1980 as a Baker Scholar and is an honors graduate of Dartmouth College.

Learn more at HBS.edu.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

LISTEN:

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

__________________________________________________________________________

(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Today’s guests are Richard Ruback and Royce Yudkoff, Harvard Business School professors and co-hosts of the Think, Big Buy Small podcast from Harvard Business School, which explores a growing trend in business leadership, which is entrepreneurship through acquisition. Richard, Royce, great meeting both of you. I really enjoyed your book.

Royce Yudkoff
Thank you. Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, and it’s fun for Rick and me to be here.

Adam Outland
You know, I know there’s so much to unpack in your recent work I would love from both of you just a quick quip on the early years.

Richard Ruback
My dad was a caterpillar mechanic. Worked on heavy machinery. He worked with his hands a lot. I worked at a fruit stand from junior high on, and didn’t want it to be my life’s work, and so I discovered economics, actually, by happenstance. I discovered it in high school, we had a teacher mentor who was big on getting our students, her students to go to National Science Foundation summer camps. So I was not very good at natural sciences. I took a two week summer camp because it was so much better than working in the fruit store. And it was an economics department, and when it came time to come to college, you know, we didn’t have a lot of money as a family. And St Olaf, as you might get a sense of, is not a Jewish school. I am Jewish, and so they invited me to come there and gave me a great financial package, I think because I was one of the five Jews on campus. And so I went to St Olaf college and studied economics because it was so interesting. And so I decided that maybe I should go get an MBA, and as fate would have it, got my PhD in Business Administration instead of economics, and then went to MIT, and then Harvard. So that’s, that is my backstory.

Adam Outland
And Royce, you kind of took a little bit of a different path.

Royce Yudkoff
Sure, I did. Yes, you’re right. I grew up in New York City. My mom was a full time mom. My dad was actually a writer and a filmmaker. He was a very independent, professionally independent person, and he loved his independence. He was determined to do work that he found interesting. And also he was in a field where, you know, while we were like Rick, while we were never poor, you know, the economic vicissitudes were a little scary to a kid. Nothing bad happened. But, you know, it definitely had my attention. And these three factors sort of shaped my life. I think I came away from that upbringing with a desire to sort of be my own boss, to have work that I found truly interesting and that I wanted to sort of insulate myself against some of the sort of economic faci tubes that life just naturally brings. Went to college, worked a couple of years for a large bank in New York City, and then came to Harvard Business School, which I found a transformative experience in my life. The school really I joined a consulting firm called bait and company. I ended up staying longer than I ever thought, because it always in my mind was to be an entrepreneur. I just didn’t know how. I didn’t feel quite ready. Became a partner co heading their media and telecom group, and then my co head and I left to form a private equity fund which focused on that space. And for the next quarter century, we ran that. And after 25 years, you know, we actually, my co founder and I looked at each other and felt like, this is great. We’re really happy, but, but as we look ahead, do we really want to do this for the next 15 years? And the answer was that feels like a lot. We stepped aside in a very carefully coordinated plan, and I came back to Harvard Business School to work with Rick, who had we had known each other through some case writing Rick had done, and Rick had originated an idea of doing something in small firms, and wanted a partner to build this out. And together, the last 15 years have been spent building a small firms program at HBS and beyond, and it’s been a joyous experience in my life, both working together and doing what we’ve done.

Richard Ruback
At the time, it seemed something where we could make some headway. We could learn something about the market. We could learn something about the opportunities.

Royce Yudkoff
This didn’t exist when we started. There was nothing.

Richard Ruback
When we started. I went to my then unit head and said, I want to teach this course on small business. I want Royce to come join me. And he looked at me, and he said, there’s going to be no student at the Harvard Business School wants to take that class. You’re going to have to give that up and go back and probably teach in the first year, because you got to meet productivity requirements. And I said, Well, I’m willing to take that risk. But it turned out that we had, what did we have, 17 students in our first class, and then by the next year, we were sold out of one section, had offer two. And since then, I believe we’ve basically sold out every seat we’ve offered for the last 13 years. What is interesting? And so at HBS standard room, a. That I teach in, that we teach in, has about 102 seats. So you need to have two seats for the instructors couple seats for gas. So that says the maximum number of people you can have by fire code in the room is 98, 97 students. That’s the maximum number. If it’s 90 or 85 it’s viewed as full in our classes, we’ve had literally 97 or 98 every year, and students who don’t get in our courses sit in for a week or two in the back. Waiting for somebody to drop out is quite remarkable.

Royce Yudkoff
Yeah, we get people contacting us from beyond Harvard Business School who have either read the book or heard about us through their friends, and it’s one reason why, you know Rick and I have launched the podcast, think big, buy small, because, you know, the school’s mission isn’t just to teach people who are on our campus, but to reach out to lots and lots of people who are not MBAs, but maybe mid career executives and want to be entrepreneurs, but don’t know how So, and that has further increased the number of people we meet.

Richard Ruback
You know, a funny story that I find just emblematic of this is, my oldest son went to high school with a guy and who’s on our podcast, Jeff Duckworth, and about four years ago, five years ago, just soon after the book came out, my son and Jeff happened to be at some gathering, you know, they said, What are you doing? And Sam said, you know, I’m a salesman, and what are you doing? Jeff? And he said, Well, I read this really great book from two guys at Harvard, and it’s really changed my career. I’ve decided to buy a business, and I just bought I just finished closing on this business. And Jeff said to Sam, my son usually should read the book. And Sam said, you know who wrote it? And of course, Jeff says, I don’t remember what the guy’s last name was.

Royce Yudkoff
Really hilarious, full circle, isn’t it? Full circle.

Adam Outland
So how do you determine who’s right to take the risk of entrepreneurship and what’s your what’s your take on the risk of getting into this small business acquisition part of entrepreneurship?

Royce Yudkoff
Both Rick and I, after careful examination, feel that entrepreneurship through acquisition is dramatically different from entrepreneurship through startup with respect to risk, and the reason that is is because when you buy a small firm, you’re buying a company that has been around for 1020, 30 years. You can look at its historic financials and see what its revenues are, its profits. It has a team of people that know how to do the work. It has a collection of satisfied customers. You can measure their pattern of recurringly buying the company’s product, and so you know a great deal about the business, not only how it operates, but how stable and predictable it is. And this is just a complete world of difference from starting a business up where you know almost none of those facts. And so even though they’re both linked together as entrepreneurship, this type of entrepreneurship, while it’s surely not without risk, is dramatically lower risk than starting starting a small business. And almost always, when you buy these companies, part of the purchase is a transition agreement with the seller so that you sort of have a smooth onboarding. So, you know, when Rick and I look at this, we do think there are a couple of risks. You know, one risk is, you could spend some time looking for a business to buy and not succeeding. That’s a risk. But to us, it’s a very controlled risk, right? It’s, you’re missing out on some salary. You’re delaying career alternatives for a while, but it’s, it’s a, hardly a dramatic risk. And the other risk is that you buy a company that’s been successful in the past and ceases to be successful under your management and while that is certainly a risk that happens very few times in entrepreneurship through acquisition, and we can talk about that in more detail. So the first thing I’d say is the risks are really very controlled in this space.

Richard Ruback
You know, those people who get a lot of social value out of their careers, you know, they want to be able to meet interesting co workers. Maybe they’re single and they’re interested in having a life mate, and they’re going to find that by somebody who they’re going to meet through a work experience. You know, the social side of work. They want to work with people who are like them. They want to work in highly resourced organizations. Those combinations of people probably are not terrific, at least when they’re coming right out of school for this path. But if you tend to get your social interests elsewhere, your work can be separate from your social you don’t feel that you need some affiliation to feel fulfilled, and you love the idea of having executive control, taking this blank page every morning and figuring out what’s important to do for those people. This is a great path, and by the way, that’s what. I think draws a lot of our veterans into this path. Veterans, particularly as an officer, you’re given, you’re given lots of control over how you execute your mission, whatever that mission happens to be. In big companies, that’s not the case, and so they miss that autonomy. They miss that that’s what I meant by executive control.

Adam Outland
Yeah, that does make a lot of sense, yeah. And so you’re not the one making the pie. If that’s your business, you know you’re, you’re the one building the business that makes a lot of pies. And you’ve got to be really interested in the widgets, the behind the scenes, and the systems and the people more, almost more than the product that’s delivered itself in some ways. I mean, is that a fair…..

Royce Yudkoff
That’s a very good insight that you’ve just communicated because you’re right. People who are drawn to entrepreneurship through acquisition are drawn by that challenge of being a manager, managing people and creating marketing strategies and overseeing product. They’re less focused on what the particular product or service is they’re a little bit more agnostic and more interested in managing, and that can be a dividing line between people who choose startup and people who choose entrepreneurship through acquisition.

Richard Ruback
To use your analogy, most people, most people who start bakeries, are really good at baking and are fascinated by the idea of, you know, cutting up apples and how to make the right crust and making that delicious apple pie, they may not have that skill at actually making the pie in a cost effective way, and pricing it properly, and distributing it properly and alike, and marketing it properly. So those are, those are the skills that are often required to take that bakery the next level, I think about entrepreneurship. You know, startup is, you know, you might not have ever seen a pie before, and you’re now inventing this idea that you could put these interesting ingredients with some crispy crust on top and and you don’t have a recipe, and you don’t have pricing, and you don’t have a model, and you don’t know if it’s going to work. And so for most of these you finally do the equivalent of baking a pie, and you’re very excited about your prototype pie. You don’t know how to price it, and you don’t know what the competition’s like. You don’t know what other pies are out there. So this is a lot easier you buy a business that people have proven that it has an effective model. You can improve the model, but it begins with a with a starting point where you know that that the company under its previous management can produce the product and sell the product at a profit.

Royce Yudkoff
That happens all the time. It’s one of the sort of catalysts of success in entrepreneurship through acquisition, which is that Baker, to keep using this analogy, that knowledge of baking was hugely important when he, he or she started the business 20 years later, when they have 35 people in the plant, that person has become a manager. They’re not baking pies anymore. They’re dealing with payroll and staffing and regulation and customers, and so maybe what the business really needs is someone who’s been trained as a manager, not trained as a baker. And the second thing is that that person who founded the company has been really successful, and now at age 65 they have more money than time, and they’re acting accordingly, and they don’t want to work on Fridays to figure out how to expand into a neighboring territory, but that hungry young entrepreneur, they’re willing to work on Fridays and Saturdays to figure out how to expand the territory. And those are catalysts. What are the reasons we see so much success in this.

Adam Outland
So just as a little bit of a switching gears, once you’ve decided that you’re right for this approach of acquiring small business, you begin to search and find them. And I know there’s brokers and websites, and how would you advise someone go about finding the companies that might be worth acquiring?

Royce Yudkoff
A number of paths, but I think a good starter path is to reach out to the brokers who deal in small firms. There are about 3000 of them, just in the United States, who broker a large chunk of the roughly 250 300,000 companies that come up for sale every year and start to get in the flow of just looking at small businesses for sale, you’re going to learn a lot about what small companies look like. And then Rick and I teach our students a set of criteria that they ought to be filtering for that tend to tend to lead to high returns and safety of principal and but that allows you to sort of screen through this and look at a population of companies that have good prospects. That would be the way I would suggest starting.

Adam Outland
Let me just… a question occurred to me here. I’ve something I toy around with is what do people optimize for in life? You know, in this Instagram world of business acquisition, you know, it can seem that the optimization a lot of people have is like, how do I just get reoccurring revenue? And, you know, sit on the beach, let all my businesses do the work for me. Maybe. That’s what someone wants to optimize for by buying businesses others might want to optimize for purpose or optimize for impact. Do you kind of factor that in, I guess?

Richard Ruback
I think that couldn’t be more wrong. I don’t know anybody who works 40 hours a week. I am waiting for the person who is 40 years old, successful, and hanging out in the ski slope or the beach or the golf course or the weight room, but I don’t think they really exist, because I think it’s always a lot of hard, hard work. It is not the case that if you have a business with lots of recurring revenue that you can go hang out in the beach, because the reason you have that recurring revenue is because you have some kind of barrier, and usually that barrier is that the company delivers this service really, really well, and that as soon as customers get unhappy with the service, they’re going to move on. We often hear stories where sellers say, I’m unhappy with the price I can sell my business for. I’ve been getting a million dollars of cash flow out of my business a year in which I’m working 60 or 70 hours a week on I’m gonna take my number two, who I’m paying 75 or 80 or $100,000 a year, and I’m gonna make them CEO, and I’m gonna move to wherever they go to retire, and what they see is that their million dollar business very quickly becomes a $500,000 business, and very quickly becomes a $200,000 business, and then it’s really not saleable because it’s had three bad years. It really does take the energy and creativity of an entrepreneur, of a CEO, to keep the business successful.

Royce Yudkoff
This is not a career to go into because you don’t want to work. It’s a career you should go into for professional independence, for the opportunity to build wealth, because you like making decisions, even though some of them can be anxiety provoking. You like being at the center of a team. Those are reasons to go into this.

Richard Ruback
One of the great things about entrepreneurship through acquisition is that you the entrepreneur, are going to pick the company you’re going to acquire. If you’re allergic to fur, don’t buy a pet shop. Don’t buy handguns. If you’re a gun control don’t buy a handgun manufactured and similarly, if you really want to live in a particular part of the world, only search in that part of the world and buy a business in that part of the world.

Adam Outland
Yeah. Understood, yeah. Talk to me about focus too, because there’s another thing that I think is maybe, maybe a myth that’s propagated, but maybe not, is the idea that the acquisition of many companies is always a wonderful thing, that you’re not just buying one small business. You know, your your goal is to have 20 small businesses.

Royce Yudkoff
Over the 15 years, Rick and I have been doing this. We’ve seen all sorts of experiments by, uh, entrepreneurs through acquisition in different ways of using this field. You know, if you go back a decade, virtually everyone who went down this path, their vision was to buy a business and run it as the full time CEO and the major owner of the business, I would say, Rick. Over the last half decade, there’s been a stream of people in the group who really want to assemble a portfolio of companies, not be the person running them every day, but sort of be supervising and guiding that person. So you can almost think of them as a little more investorly in their careers. They raise capital, they find the company, they diligence it, they buy it, they recruit in a CEO, or promote someone the CEO, and guide that person. And while that’s a minority of the population, we see it’s another interesting way of of utilizing entrepreneurship through acquisition to fulfill their lives. And the two things I’d say about that are one that’s like so many other ways of using this to fit your life, like having a geographic focus or an Industry Focus, as opposed to being having a generalist focus on your acquisitions, things that Rick was talking about earlier. But the other is it’s not just sort of spreading your opportunity or spreading your risk across multiple companies. If you choose that sub path of entrepreneurship through acquisition, you’re leading a very different life from what a CEO does. Right? You’re not really the center of a team. You’re not really making lots of decisions every day. You’re not dealing with all different kinds of people, like customers and regulators and lenders and employees. It’s a good life, but when you closely examine the career, it’s a very different type of work you’re doing every day. And I think, I think it’s what Rick and I try to do, is sort of hold up a microscope to that and say, Your days look very different. It’s not better or worse, it’s just who are you? It’s an important thing to remember about small companies is good. Small companies aren’t small because no one wants to buy their product, or because their customers keep getting snatched away by competitors. Good. Small companies are small because the market niche they focus on is small, but within that niche they are devastating effects. Competitors or for some reason or another, customers are reluctant to switch. They see value in sticking to this supplier, and perhaps their costs to switching. And so you can have a great business that’s still a small business. I think one of the early moments of realization for Rick and me was a trip we took to Dallas Fort Worth in the early years of our teaching. And we met these two sisters who were selling their business. It was a high rise window washing business, and they were taking down about two and a half million dollars a year, which they split between them, year in and year out, serving these highly recurring tall businesses operating out of a sort of inconspicuous warehouse in Dallas, Fort Worth. And we kind of looked at each other and said, Here’s this sort of obscure small company out of many possible industries in one city, out of many possible cities. Do you realize how many opportunities must abound? Because we see this, and that’s what the world of attractive small businesses is comprised of.

Richard Ruback
And note how much money they were making.

Royce Yudkoff
Yeah, note that.

Richard Ruback
They were making over a million dollars a year. Each one of the things, I think, is very interesting is in the small business space, you can find a lot of businesses that are capable of generating that kind of annual income, like, a million dollars a year to their owners. That’s a lot of money. That’s nothing to say. Oh, yeah. Well, what would you do if you were successful, right? That is successful.

Adam Outland
So do you two feel like you suffer from, like, this disease, where, everywhere you go, you’re always assessing the business model, like you’re at a gas station, or you’re….

Richard Ruback
That’s such a funny question. So this drives my wife crazy. Every time somebody comes to do a service, I want to engage in a conversation of like, how does their business model work? So just a couple weeks ago, somebody knocked on my door and said, Hey, see you have apple trees. Would you like us to start taking care of your apple trees, and, you know, revealing perhaps too much about myself, but I hate heights, and I also hate failure, and I’ve had these apple trees for about 15 years, and they’ve grown so that I now have to deal with heights, and they almost never produce apples. So I hire these guys, and then I can’t help but wonder, so how many people? How come they have two schedulers? So I can call to schedule the appointment in there, somebody else is saying, How come that work? And seems like, it seems like it says that it’s one of, you know, such and such company, like, it’s part of a funeral home, you know, it’s like a roll up. Could you do an apple tree maintenance? Roll up? How could that possibly be possible? And I spent hours and hours and hours, and my wife is always Rick, would you just let them do their job?

Royce Yudkoff
I agree with Rick. I do this too, all the time. I actually never thought of it as a disease, though. I thought of it as a superpower. Like, you know, every time we encounter some service, we’re thinking, Well, how many can you process in a day? And what’s your average charge, and what’s your cost, and what might you be making? So yes, we confess. We do that all the time.

Adam Outland
Shifting gears for just a second, negotiating a potential deal with a seller, right? There is such a psychological small business world, you know, they’re they put their livelihood in this thing. They’re emotionally attached. I mean, some of it’s not uncommon for a small business owner to refer to their business as their child, right? Because of the blood, sweat and tears that went into it. How do you account for the psychological element when you’re navigating a deal?

Royce Yudkoff
You’ve raised a very important point, because the actual buying from a seller is a is a challenging experience and hard work, and there are at least two reasons for it. One is almost every seller you deal with is a first time seller, so they’re embarking on a intricate transaction of something that’s very important to them for all the reasons you’ve said, plus their family wealth is concentrated there, and they’ve never done it before, including never picked the advisors like lawyers and accountants that they need, so you have to sort of help them through the process. But the second piece is, do they really want to sell? And you know, Rick likes to say that finding a committed seller is actually harder than finding a great small business, and I think that’s really true. Part of your early diligence when you’re looking at the company, is not just the numbers or sales recurring. Does it have any customer concentration, those sort of hard skill assessments, but making sure that you understand? Does this seller have a compelling motivation to sell? Now they’re getting older and they really want to move to a retirement community. They don’t have a natural successor inside the firm. They don’t have partners where they have to get alignment of three or four people on selling. There are a bunch of clues that you can look at that say, Yes, this, this seller probably doesn’t have to sell, but they have a strong propensity to sell. By the way, hiring a broker is a is a good clue on that too, particularly if the broker charges. A retainer, and not just a success based fee. So there are a set of clues you should be looking at early on to determine to borrow Rick’s words, is this a committed seller?

Richard Ruback
One of the things that’s challenging is first time sellers are first time sellers. And so there are standard parts of any negotiation, like working capital, that almost invariably create conflict and hassle if they use a broker. The brokerage community is, you know, it’s really important to get a broker who’s really good at getting deals done. Suppose you’re selling your house, so everybody’s going to come in and say, Oh, your house is really special. We really love what you’ve done with it. It’s just It couldn’t be better? No, no, no, let’s not paint the walls or anything like that. I’m going to get you a high price for your house. And people get enamored by this idea of a high price, but they don’t ask questions like, how often does this broker find a buyer in a reasonable amount of time, how much discount off the asking price normally occurs. Or even worse, how much premium above the asking price normally occurs, right? Because that just says they’re not doing their pricing job well, how much delay, how much hassle? People don’t ask those questions and they should, probably should. How often is this broker able to bring the firm to sale in an orderly way. How many deals get busted? How good are they at managing buyers? How right there are all these questions about what a good broker does, and a good broker does a lot more than sweet talk the seller. A good broker has to understand the business has to market. The business has to be able to anticipate the kinds of questions that a buyer is going to have. Is this really recurring revenue? Can we talk about revenue quality? What’s going to happen when I hire the Q of E firm? Are they going to find out the accountings not as it’s represented? All those things, all those things a good broker can help you with most first time sellers don’t know the questions to ask, and similarly, is when it comes time to get legal advice, they often hire their estate attorney to help sell their business, and so they don’t have any understanding of what terms and conditions are in a reasonable, small firm sale, and the estate attorney feels like they’ve got to earn their keep by being obstructionist. Oh no. We can’t do it that way. We have to do it this way. We need to have a personal guarantee in the selling out. We need to do this. We need to do that. We’re not paying any working capital, crazy stuff that are just not market terms. And all those lead to bad outcomes.

Adam Outland
Wonderful and well said, knowing the knowledge that you have now, what is an 18 year old version of yourself get in advice from who you are now?

Royce Yudkoff
Adam, that’s a that’s a very provocative question you’re asking, because what you can’t possibly know is that both one of Rick’s sons and my son both have elected to become entrepreneurs through acquisition, without any solicitation on our parts at all. And so the idea of giving a young person advice is not only our profession, but is very personal. I think I would say that if you’re a capable person, this field is definitely accessible to you. You can do what the people who are running small firms, does it takes grit and energy, and you have to hang in there, even, you know when you get bad news, but it is definitely achievable, and if you have a taste for professional independence and making decisions and having a lot of control over your life and potentially building significant wealth, this is a path you should examine very carefully.

Richard Ruback
A simpler way of saying that is that I would tell my 18 year old self to hang out with some 40 year olds and see how happy they are in their jobs and their families and have dinner with them. And one of the things I think they’re going to discover is the 40 year olds and 50 year olds who own small business are a lot happier.

Adam Outland
Wow. Thank you for ending on that note. Thank you both for your time. Please chime in. Chime into their podcast. I know I will.

Royce Yudkoff
Thank you. Adam, it’s been a pleasure.

Richard Ruback
Thank you.