19 - Zero To One: Mastering The Entrepreneurial Journey with Jordan Fishfeld

How do you go from idea to execution? Where do you start? I like to test ideas with people for like trusted advisors. For a long time, I start testing the idea with folks. Does this sound like something that's a good idea? Building small, testing small, validating small so that you're not jumping out of a career or ruining your entire savings account for something that you're not. From an entrepreneurial perspective, being laser focused is critical. I think if you try to do too much, you are going to fail, period. Hey, everybody. I am super excited for this one. I've known our guest for almost two decades now, and he's an amazing entrepreneur. It's been awesome to watch his story. He has a lot of great stories to tell about different businesses he started and different successes and learnings along the way. And I'm super excited you're here, Jordan. So, Jordan Fishfeld, welcome to five. Thanks so much. Yeah, I'm excited to be here and looking forward to getting with done this with you. It's going to be great. Cool. So you are the, you're an entrepreneur in every sense of the word. You've had multiple businesses that you've grown successfully and in a bunch of different industries. So where I want to start is I want to start at the ideation phase. And for you specifically, how do you identify a good business opportunity? Yeah, I think for me it always started with solving a personal problem. So that kind of drove the excitement and desire to spend my time to do this thing right. I think that's really what it came down to. And so if I think of kind of my first few businesses, they were all very personal problems. You know, I don't know that they were necessarily problems that were shared by mass swaths of the American population because they were high finance problems, that they were personal problems. And I was like, I want to solve this. I want to gain access to lots of different deals in small portions so I could diversify into the private markets. And so I built a crowdfunding platform. I want to be able to sell this asset when I want to sell it because I believe that I should have control over that even in the private markets. So I built a secondary market trading platform. And so a lot of it really became solving a personal problem and hoping that there were enough people that, you know, had a similar problem. And in some cases there were, in some cases there were, but I wasn't the one to give it to them. And in some cases there were, and I was right. So for me, it really always started kind of with that, you know, as I've grown and matured and done this a few times now, I still think that needs to be at a core. And so when looking for businesses now that I'm going to buy or invest into, I look very, very personally for does this really solve a problem that I have or that I know I will have? And then now I take that second step, especially if I'm investing in it. Is, is that a big enough problem that the world is also going to want a solution for it? And. Right. So, yeah, of course. So that was, that's a lot. And having personal connection to solving a problem always gives you the best chance at success. Right. See, so many entrepreneurs start businesses that they see an opportunity but don't have a connection to it. And so they're not willing to work hard, not willing to put the nights and weekends in. They're not, not willing to invest the time or invest the money to hire the right team around them. So you start your career building two markets, that your entrepreneurial career, at least building two markets, which is a pretty complex business to enter into. What was it about that industry that attracted you at first and how is it getting those businesses off the ground? Yeah, well, again, it truly started with a personal issue. I really wanted, you know, I wanted probably to be into certain deals that I had yet to earn the right to get into based on the definitions in American securities law and, and recognize like this is either not fair or we just have to find a different way to access those things. You know, I recognized in my first business or kind of generally that, you know, kind of beating the market is halfway impossible in a public market scenario. And the real opportunity for, for alpha generation is in private markets. And so how can we help people focus and access that? So say more about that business. What was it that you were doing? What was the initial idea? And then what did you actually go to market with? Yeah, I mean, so the initial idea was, was online kind of capital raising for real estate deals. And again from, from my pers, I would see a lot of real estate deals because I just happened to grow up in that world. But the minimums were 150, 250,000. And I was 25 years old at a law school, so that wasn't an option for me to go out. And they don't take debt that you've issued to the lenders. Exactly. But I was working as, as a private practice lawyer for a large firm. So I had some disposable income. And it was like, okay, where can I put five grand, ten grand. That's not the S and P where I'm actually going to get some type of larger return where I have some insight and very quickly recognized that this is probably whether it's a problem for a lot of people. It's a problem I wanted to solve and I enjoyed it. And so we built a real estate crowdfunding platform in the Midwest. It was kind of right the early days. It also helped draft some of the rules and regulations around that and the JOBS Act. So I had some insight into what the rules should be and how they're going to kind of work within. Within the regulatory infrastructure. And so I tried. And there were other great companies that were building similar businesses at the same time. And so we all kind of started educating the marketplace about this new way of deploying capital and moving away from, you know, public securities into private securities, moving away from savings account, which, as we all know 15 years later, like holding cash, is probably the worst thing you possibly could have done over the past 15 years. And so, yeah, that was, that was a big part of it too. Like, how do you just take money, put it into something and then kind of, that. That created the second problem, which is, well, what happens if I want to buy a house or get engaged or get married? I have all my money in private securities that don't have much liquidity to it, naturally. So I said, let's make a liquidity platform. And that was business number two. Wow. And, you know, that's a pretty. That's a really ambitious start to your entrepreneurial career and highly regulated business. How do you go from idea to execution there? What are the things that you need to. Where do you start when, when you have an idea, what are the things that you've deployed either? What, what did you do at that time that worked? What did you. What did you do that didn't work? What'd you learn? What have you learned along the way that can help some of our listeners? I think the first thing for sure is I like to test ideas with people for, like, trusted advisors for a long time. I actually have another rule which kind of is funny because it interplays with this, but whenever I want a tattoo, I draw the tattoo and I won't get it for a year, meaning I need to still want it a year later. And so I kind of have that same mentality with, with most of the businesses that I've either invested in or started, which is, I start talking about it, I start testing the idea with folks. Does this sound like something that's a good idea. And for people who say that's a dumb idea, I ask them why. You know, what about it is dumb? Why do you think it's stupid? Is it because I'm stupid or is the idea stupid? And you really just need to be comfortable with people testing you. But at some point, there have absolutely been things where, like, enough people gave me really good reasons why the thing that I thought was smart was not smart, and I didn't end up doing them. And six, seven years later, they were. Some of them were right. And there was definitely ones that I probably should have gotten into if I had the capital behind it or if I had the time behind it. But what were those examples? Give me the one or two that you walked away from. It's probably still going to be an idea. But. But blockchain title is a great one. Like title should be on blockchain. And there's a. And the reason why everybody tells me it's bad and stupid and wrong is not necessarily because it shouldn't be. And there are definitely a bunch of lenders and bankers and lawyers who say it shouldn't be. But the real reason is because it's just an impossible market to penetrate. Right. It's just so hard to get those stakeholders who have such entrenchment and money at risk within that industry of title that to change over to something that's clearly better in my mind and clearly simpler in my mind and clearly more efficient in my mind is going to be impossible. And so unless you're coming at it with hundreds of millions of dollars and a bank partner, you're probably not getting there. I don't know that that's true. It's been true since I first launched the idea, like nine years ago. So nobody's done it. So it feels true, but there's definitely things like that. And then I'm trying to think of one of my other bad ideas or good ideas, but we can come back to there. But you were talking about how you go from ideation to execution. And so you test the idea. You see if there's reasons to either validate your thesis or invalidate it. You build a little. You test out a few things. Like, you know, we have something a friend of mine are looking at, you know, a little bit ago to see if we can get 100 customers in 100 days, right? And if we can get 100 customers in 100 days for this thing, then it's clearly a business that should grow exponentially. And if it doesn't then you just kind of move on. And so, but that building small, testing small, validating small so that you're not jumping out of a career or ruining your entire savings account for something that you're not, I don't want to say certain of because you're never certain of anything, but at least have some data to validate a little bit of what you want to do is I think, I think a great entrance. You know, I do know entrepreneurs who jump two feet into the deep end and somehow came out Olympic swimmers. Like congratulations to them. It's a lot easier to do it from 24 to 31 when you don't have family and kids. You know, your, your risk is a little bit less. But, you know, I think that's when you can take those big jumps. After that, maybe you can. I don't feel comfortable doing it. So I kind of like to do my small tests, small validation, small builds, see what happens and then go from there. So let's stick with the testing idea. What, what does an average test look like? You allocate capital, but what does that capital usually go to? Is it building a test site? Go to market? You have to get the product in place. Where, how do you allocate those initial funds to figure out one, is their product market fit? And then two, how do we build something that scales from the beginning? Yeah, I mean, so my business now is obviously not product based. It's an investment platform. And so the real kind of test of whether we had a good idea or a good concept in a good business was finding a deal that we thought was great, spending the time, energy and money to underwrite the deal and then see if the investor community found the thesis that we were promoting interesting and had to vote with their dollars, like give us real money. And so, you know, very quickly we found out they did. And the investor community was excited about what we were doing, at least at some level. It was a little unique. It's very focused. It's very, very, you know, kind of pinpoint. And, and that was appreciated by investors. And so. And that's made it a little bit easier, I think if I was, you know, the same, the same group of people looking at stabilized multifamily probably doesn't garner the investor attention that we did for, you know, value add, middle market, healthcare, real estate. Because that's one again, as I mentioned, personal to me. It's something I've been doing forever. My entire family's involved in it and my team has been kind of around it for A long time as well. But we're also much more specialized than most other teams and the multifamily space, you know, we're competing against everybody, literally everybody. And so, you know, so are we the best choice? Probably not in that scenario. If you're, if you are at, you know, the Bear Country Club in, in West Palm and you have 15 guys that are raising money for the same type of deal, like, why do you need us down in Miami or Weston. Right, right. So, so again, I think starting with that and kind of making sure that what you do is both personal to you, specialized, that you are special at it, and then, and then spending money to show people what's special, how you're special and why you're special and whatever that means. Right. If it's building a prototype and showing folks if it's, you know, if it's a hot sauce and pushing out 500 units of this specialty hot sauce and giving them to people and letting them hear their thoughts, like, however, you need to show that what you have is unique and special and worth people's attention and money, you have to do it. Right. So I, yeah, for us it was, it was really, you know, finding the right thing that, that investors were excited about. Yeah, that's awesome. There's a lot to unpack there. So let's, let's, let's go back a little bit. We're talking about obviously your, your latest venture, it's called Corporal and super niche, super laser focused, which gives you a lot of opportunity. But also the other side is that it's super, it's, it's more risky because it's not diversified. Right. So there's two areas, two sides of the coin, depending on how you're looking at the entrepreneurship lens. And so when you approach this, originally you're looking for deals. Did you approach the deals before you had committed capital or did you know you had the capital available so you're able to underwrite deals with some sort of sense of confidence that you're going to be able to close. Yeah, So a combination of both. But which is, I was fortunate that they were looking at deals that in a worst case scenario I was going to buy myself. And I loved this asset class. Right. I think that made everything that happened after that a little bit easier, which is I was super focused and passionate about this specific asset class. I believe that this asset class was undervalued, underutilized, inefficient in its execution. And I knew it a little bit better because of my entire upbringing. So that for us, if we couldn't find investors, I was going to buy the deal and that was it. And that was obviously a fortunate position that I was in based on some things that were happened in my life. But that made it a little bit easier to test that thesis. I also just going back from an entrepreneurial perspective compared to an investor perspective, an entrepreneurial perspective, being laser focused is critical. Like I think if you try to do too much, ever, not even, but ever, you, you are going to fail, period, full stop. And, and I, so all of the best companies I love are laser focused, you know, symbol single solution companies. And then from there they're bigger. If you look at, let's call it Facebook or Google or whoever, each division is still singularly focused. They've just created a corporate parent above it. But you have to be laser focused if you want to solve any individual problem. When you're a startup, you just don't have the resources, time or bandwidth or knowledge base frankly to solve more than one problem. So focus on that. As an investor, very different mindset. Right. I need to diversify because what if they don't execute or what if that problem is not big enough or what? You know, so, but so from my perspective in this case as both an investor and as an entrepreneur, like, you know, you're absolutely right, we're very focused and now a big chunk of my net worth is in middle market health care, value, add an opportunistic real estate. And so I'm not investing in that, you know, otherwise except through my company and I get my diversification otherwise. But I think as an entrepreneur, absolutely, you need, you need to be laser focused and it just makes it more enjoyable and it's more fun because we. Right, yeah. So the optics are, you're, you're clear on, on what you're doing today. So going back to this, you knew that you were going to be able to close on these deals. At what point did you, did you have your first deal and you thought that you had something that you could, you could raise outside capital? And what were those conversations with, with investors? Like how did you message that? So for people looking to raise capital, how are you communicating the opportunity to investors to get the commitment? Well, first off, I have a good team all around. What does that team look like? Yeah, we have a capital markets team that helps on the capital raising side. We have an investments team that helps find the deals, underwrite the deals. I have a fully integrated property management team that helps manage the deals. And so I don't know that I would 1, 100% would not grow the way we've grown without that team for sure. And two, you know, I mean, you remember I'm a little bit of a social creature, so I like to be around people. Even though I've chosen a life of entrepreneurship where I work at home, I need a little bit of help and a little bit of interaction. And so the team has been critical. But did you have that team to start? Yeah. No, I didn't. I got into this with the team. In fact, my business partner who runs our capital markets team, I had sold my company and was kind of semi retired teaching entrepreneurship and financial literacy to high school kids and was really trying to just chill and he asked for some help and it just turned out, you know, I was buying this asset class on my own account for my own account and he was doing the same thing and we kind of came together. So it was very natural. It wasn't forced of like I need to start a business. But it, it turned out there's, we liked working together. We had developed individually the very similar thesis of an asset class to focus on within the real estate space. And our mutual best friend kind of put us together and, and, and it's been great since. So you know, that, that made this, this business a lot easier and kind of much more natural almost the way that you meet, you know, a spouse or a significant other. Because I wasn't looking at all. I was actually the opposite. I was trying to kind of enjoy some time with my kids and, and was just teaching at their school so I could spend more time with them. And then this came about and unfortunately for I guess my family, when I get involved in something, I like to do well at it. So we've done pretty well so far. Those are good lessons to impart on your children as they lead by example. Hey everyone. I want to take a moment to talk about how we at Pro Seer are simplifying accounting and finance for entrepreneurs. Through our outsourced accounting, fractional CFO services, proactive tax planning and accounting software implementations, we cut out unnecessary complexity for business owners and entrepreneurs. Our approach provides real time insights, practical tax strategies and a clear roadmap to help our clients grow their businesses. If you'd like to learn more, feel free to book a free consultation with me by visiting Proseer Co. That's P R O S E E R Co. Now back to the so you have team of subject matter experts, it seems where everyone knows that they're part of the business better than anybody. Else in the industry. Let's, let's stay on trying to raise money for that first deal. What are those conversations with investors? Like how are you messaging the business? So for listeners that are starting businesses in other industries that need to raise capital, how are you communicating the opportunities of the business, the cash flow? Do you have financial models? What are those things? What are the, what are the conversations look like and what are the materials you put together to raise money? Yeah, I mean so on a real estate deal, obviously the numbers matter significantly. So we have, you know, we had great models built. You know, we obviously had a great third party firm helping us with, with all of our property management, financial accounting and developing some of our performance. I think if I'm being honest, that's like a necessary baseline for that discussion. Like it just, if it's not good and your projections aren't clean and you can't really defend everything, nothing matters. But also, even if they are, you still haven't raised a dollar. Right. And so it's just, that's just the baseline of what you need. It's just to get to the conversation. Yeah, because I mean there are tons of deals who, that exist out there and, and so, and they all project the same type of return. And so the questions that the investors are going to ask are, you know, why is what you think true and if it's not true, how are you going to react and, and, and, and be solution based. And so I think coming from a founder background who's always just purely solution based and, and, and in that way that, that brings a little bit of extra confidence. I think, you know, one of the reasons why we selected this asset class is because there's a ton of data around it and both me and my CIO come from technology backgrounds and so being able to analyze that data and present that data has been pretty valuable. And then the easiest thing that I, from my perspective, if I'm being totally honest, which I know is not something that everybody can do and it's a privilege, but I invest in everything I do and so that, that alone like my money is going in and, and I want to do these deals. If you don't want to do the deal, I'll do it like I don't really care. Right. So it lets us grow faster and I think there's an opportunity and obviously I make, you know, I make more money off of promotes and things if more people are coming in other than just me and I can diversify across a broader base of assets because I do have A finite amount of capital. But at the end of the day, I like the deals. Every deal that we do, I want to invest in personally, and I wouldn't otherwise. So that makes it a little bit easier in this business that I'm in now, I think that just has to be the way. I don't know that necessarily. You need to be a deep user of your product for every entrepreneurial endeavor. Like if you buy an ABA therapy, that doesn't necessarily mean you must have a child with autism or have autism yourself or a direct user, but you need to have a personal connection to that and recognize why you're doing it. Otherwise it's going to be really hard to get for investors to just understand, like, why are you the guy that's going to wake up at three in the morning worried about something that happened three weeks ago, solve it and move on and fight another day? Right. And that's what you need to be doing. And so, yeah, so I think they know it for me because it's my money at risk also. They know it for me because it's something that I've wanted to do forever on this business. And, and they should know the same. And if you can convey that passion, confidence, you know, empathetic connection and you somehow are showing that you're at risk with them, then it's just a matter of finding the right people who want to be, you know, part of that. Because. Right. Because that's all, that's all you can do. That's really all you can do. Right. It's to qualify yourself in addition to qualify the opportunity. So you're kind of selling two things at the same time. But the numbers have to speak and clearly articulate the opportunity without, without any doubt. Right. You got to have your story straight. Has to be founded in the right numbers. As you mentioned, it's kind of step one or even step zero before you even do it. I would even do that. I think it's just, it's truly step zero. It's like if the numbers don't work, there's no discussion. Yeah. You know, and so finding the, finding folks and, and that's why I love having kind of a partner in that space that I can have more and, you know, good or bad, I don't know, but I can have more long and drawn out conversations with my, with, with, with my, you know, numbers person. And, and that allows me to really figure out, okay, what, what, what do we believe? How is somebody else going to be looking at this and can we defend it like in every way. And if we can, then I have an easy amount of work to do because my confidence is there. I know that everything that I'm saying and stating in the numbers is true. And I've gone through the defense process with my, you know, with my accountant. Yeah, so. And then tracking it. Yeah, and then tracking it. That once you do execute the deal, right. What did we think? How are we performing against what we thought? What we thought? Are we doing better? What's driving the growth? Are we doing worse? Why? What can we analyze and compare? Where were we off on our thesis? What's working compared to our thesis and then iterate from there. What's that process look like for you at Corgrow? Yeah, I mean, so at Corgrow it's a real estate transaction. Our projections are pretty tight. You do a decent job and if we're off by anything substantial, there's an entire meeting about it because we shouldn't be Right. So if our revenue numbers are off by 10, 15%, there's a big problem. Um, and so, but we, you know, again, one of the things I love about more of a subscription based model when it comes to my accounting team or even, you know, whatever that is, consulting based. But the idea is like I'll. I'm going to get insights much faster. It's not like I'm sending my reports out every quarter. They're getting handled over the next six weeks and then sent back to me like in real time. If shit's starting to. If stuff is starting to go off the. The rails a little bit. You know, I'm gonna get a call and be like, hey man, what's going on? I'm. I'm noticing, you know, your rent has gone down or this guy's not paying anymore. Like, is that. Did you expect that? Or you know, I see that there's this new expense that came in that's dragging a lot of your profit. What happened? And so the fact that that immediately kind of gets. That immediately comes to me, makes me, you know, much more able to solve problems before they become really big problems. And you can only do that with somebody who's, you know, a partner and who's really looking at. Yeah, you need a finance team, right? You need finance and accounting. You need to run your, your business by real numbers that you can trust and tell you accurately how you're performing. And you need to know as quickly as possible when things are working, when things are not. So having a finance partner for every business, regardless of whether it's real Estate or, or E commerce makes, makes a ton of sense and is, is value add. So, so let's. So things are going great. Congrats on the success. Let's talk about some learnings throughout your career about things that, you know, maybe you had to learn what the entrepreneurial journey meant the hard way. Do you have a story that can relate to some of the earlier on entrepreneurs on things that you had to learn just through pure experience investing in some businesses that, you know, you got the wrong numbers and you know, someone just maybe unintentionally sold a story that, you know, wasn't, wasn't real. Yeah. And you know, whatever it is, what are some lessons you've had along the way of things that you're not doing now because you had to learn the hard way? Yeah, I think kind of two different buckets there. As an entrepreneur, as a founder, I think one of the things that I got probably a little bit better at over time is recognizing some decisions just need to be made and others you need to have like a collaborative decision making process. And so, you know, what, what are those two buckets? And really doing a good job of putting problems into one of those two buckets. How do you do? Yeah, I mean, I think it comes down to, you know, recognizing one, you know, whether in this scenario, whether, whether it really matters or is it something that just has to happen? Right. If it just has to happen no matter what, then bringing everybody along and making everybody go through the heartache of whatever that decision is, and it's usually not a good decision is sometimes unfair. Right. Like you have heavy as the crown. Right. The weight has to sit somewhere. Yeah. Now if there's again, there are definitely decisions that are bad decisions that you need the team to buy in on because they're going to be part of the process of what that might be. So whether it's changing course, and this happened in one of my businesses where we were heading in this direction, we had to change course. We, we had raised a bunch of money and we had hired a bunch of employees for this. And now that we were going here, like we were going there no matter what. And so the decision was done and there was nobody that could change that. The pro in this case, you had to kind of help people get there and almost help work them to think they're part of it. But it's happening. So, so that's one, I think two, going into every, every relationship knowing that it may not last forever. So that's an easy one. And, and you kind of that, but that's not to say, and this is where I think both entrepreneurs and people who are dating get this wrong is just because it may not last forever doesn't mean you shouldn't start the journey. Right. And so they're like that, that just make sure you're aware and you protect yourself. And so I think people, especially in dating, they don't start the journey and then they find themselves really in a bad position. And entrepreneurs too. I think there are entrepreneurs who've given up huge opportunities because they didn't see 15 years. They wanted to be doing this for 15 years and it's like the company sold after seven and like they would have been in the perfect spot. Right. But it was a lot of travel and it was a lot of, you know, time moving around and not being able to settle. And again, you know, nobody knows what would have happened had they taken the job. But when you're looking at just those two variables, you're like, yeah, man, if you were Talking about year 15, it wasn't going to work for you because you wanted to have a family at 40 and you were 22, but the company sold by the time you were 29 and then you would have been sitting on, you know, $40 million. You tell me what, whether you made the right choice or not. But so yeah, I think those, those things have been helpful and then, but otherwise, you know, I still get to learn every day. That's the fun part of being an entrepreneur. You learn every new things about everything all the time and it's. Yeah, that's great. I love that. You have to commit, right? You have to commit in order to make something successful. That doesn't mean that you can't change course, it means you can't test. But you have to make a commitment in order to have success. Rarely do we see entrepreneurs dip a toe in and not put a lot of effort and strike gold. It's just not something we see often. Sure, it's happen. You see people catch lightning a bottle, but it's just, you know, I don't know, I don't even know if there are examples of that where like a part time entrepreneur has made it big. I can't even, I can't think of any of them. You could definitely like side hustle five grand a month, but like that's not. Yeah, they're gamblers of course I'm sure. But well, yeah, that's different. The guy that won the lottery. Congratulations. Yeah, we're talking about actually creating something that means something to you. Maybe creates some opportunity for other team members to join you on the journey, build something of substance and execute on a shared vision. And you've done it multiple times. Really well. I asked this to many of our guests. When do you know, you just talked about being in something for 15 years and knowing that you're in the right spot for the market to come around to it. When do you know it's the right time to sell? Yeah, I mean, so I've, I personally love going from zero to one, so I don't hold, I don't stick around for much longer after that. So companies that I've sold have gone on to sell and now sell third time, and they're gonna probably go public, which is great for them. And, and maybe I should have. I'd probably be wealthier, maybe, I don't know. But I love the, the concept of taking something from idea or, or new and, and making it a going concern that can survive without me and then, and then either selling it or, or stepping back and becoming an advisor or consultant and then doing it again. So I don't know that I'm the best to say when to sell because a lot of people, once they make a baby, they want to just, you know, be with that baby forever. And I'm very much like, let's see if I can teach the baby how to be independent and then watch from afar. I, I just enjoy that. It's, it's more fun for me. I, I like to be, I also recognize my skill and, and what I'm the best at. And, and you know, when I look at my skill compared to ultra specialists at Fortune 500 companies, like, they, they're better at me than at the one thing that they do. And I'll never be close to as good at that. And I can hire a person for everything that I'm good at to be better. And so maybe I could be the leader, I don't know. But for me it's, I love going from zero to one and, and, and then from there, you know, kind of pushing off the opportunity to somebody else and trying to do it again. And, and if you do it right, you should, you should be, you know, able to make a living. So that's, that's what's fun. Awesome. All right, let's wrap up with a few rapid fire questions, if that works for you. Sure. Cool. What's the one book you see yourself gifting or recommending to other entrepreneurs? Most. So I have a couple, and, and I'll say, so this my favorite Book to gift to financially financial illiterate people is Rich dad, Poor dad. And I know it's like the, the main book that everybody reads, but you'd be surprised how many people have not read it and don't understand the most basic financial con concepts. And so as a financial literacy teacher in high, for high school kids for a couple years, like that was, that was an easy one. There's, there's a couple books around, you know, 100 habits of successful people. And there's another one that was written by, by. Oh, shoot. Was it, it wasn't Mitt Romney. It was. I'll, I'll remember in a moment that the, from Utah, big chemical tycoon. What's, what's that? No, the, and his son was the ambassador to China and vice presidential candidate. And then, and he worked. He, he was Huntsman. John Huntsman. John Hunman. Right. So John Huntsman has a, has a great book as well of I think how to do business the right way and be a good business partner in person at the same time. And I love that book and some of the anecdotes in that and so that those are kind of the big ones. And then I think it was Annie Duke, if I'm not mistaken. Thinking in bets is another great one because everything that you do is, is risk analysis and, and cost benefit analysis. And if you can think in, that's quickly and recognize, okay, there's a 2% chance that this is going to blow up on my face. And if it does, it's a hundred thousand dollar problem. I probably shouldn't throw $150,000 at it. Right. People just, they really bungle that a lot, especially lawyers. Love them all. I am one. But recognizing that is, I think, a big one. So those are probably a couple. I have like 25 more, but big fan, a big library. Is there one motto or saying you come back to every day to wake up, to run your business, to stay motivated that keeps you grounded? I don't know if it keeps me grounded necessarily. But I mean I, I, my, my attitude is, is kind of no excuses, don't fail. Right. Like it's that simple. So you know, take accountability. You don't know excuses. And, and you know, I had pretty significant health issues throughout my entire life. And so I had more excuses than most people not to push and push and push and for whatever reason I wasn't allowed in my house. And it just feels like the right way. And so that's, you know, even with my kids now it's probably a little harsh, but I don't know. Excuses don't fail. That's great. Well, I think that's, that's a great place to wrap up. This has been an awesome conversation. A lot of takeaways from our listeners. Where can people find you if they want to learn more about you or any of your businesses? Yeah, I mean, LinkedIn, obviously, I'm the only one with my last name in the world, so feel free to reach out and then, you know, cor.com feel free to, to reach out to the team. And that's about it. I mean, I love what we're doing and if you're interested, let us know. Cool. J Jordan, it's been amazing. Thanks a lot for taking the time and. Sure, we'll talk soon. Perfect. All right, so thanks so much. Thanks for tuning in to 5 to 50. If you found today's episode helpful, be sure to subscribe, leave a review and share with other business owners. Looking to grow. Do you have a question or a topic you'd like us to cover? Connect with us on LinkedIn or reach out to us at Proseer, where we're empowering entrepreneurs with real time, actionable insights and financial infrastructure through smarter accounting, tax and financial strategies. Let's keep this conversation going. Together we'll help our businesses thrive. Talk to you soon.