 Good afternoon everyone. Welcome to your DAV caffeine connect. Last week we held our first in-person DAV Patriot Boot Camp event here at National Headquarters. And we want to thank all the alumni for participating speakers, panelists and mentors for their contributions to programming and the DAV National Veterans Entrepreneurship Council for their support. I want to make a quick announcement before we get to our distinguished guests. On October 20, we will be hosting an in-person DAV Patriot Boot Camp event here at National Headquarters near Cincinnati. Like all DAV services, it's going to be provided at no cost to participants. The event is open for new to Patriot Boot Camp founders, preferably ones who have an EIN and website already in place. We'll be accepting up to 50 applicants. You can register at PatriotBootCamp.org to participate and you can sign up for the newsletter there. The ability to succeed and sustainably grow a winning team is dependent on a company's capabilities to scale operations and resources. Fresh off the 2022 DAV Patriot Boot Camp alumni event where she led a panel discussion on scaling and building a winning team, Charlotte Creech is here to present ways companies can scale and ultimately grow without sacrificing their culture, disappointing customers, or burning out. Charlotte leads claims and innovation and new products at longtime DAV sponsor, USAA. And on a side note, a lot of people aren't aware that USAA has products and services to support entrepreneurs. For those who are interested, I encourage you to look into USAA Small Business Insurance. That said, Charlotte isn't here today because of the great work she's doing with USAA. She's here in a different capacity altogether. Charlotte's passion for supporting the military and veteran entrepreneur community arose from her experience growing her own tech startup, combat to career, which she founded to match veterans with higher education programs to a personalized college search platform and GI Bill tuition calculator. Prior to her current position, she served as Patriot Boot Camp Executive Director. She's definitely one of us. And she's a proud veteran spouse and alumna of the program. Charlotte, thanks for being here. Thanks, Dan. Thanks for having me today and hello to the DAV Patriot Boot Camp community and all of those of you out in the interwebs watching us today. So really excited to be here. I'm going to share my screen and we'll get started with the presentation. The presentation coming through. Okay. All right. Well, as Dan mentioned here today to talk about building a winning team and really this is meant to be in the context of the startup environment. So as you're maybe venturing off on your own as an individual interested in starting a company, or maybe you've already made the decision to start a company and you're looking to grow that venture. That's what we'll be talking about today. A quick look at our agenda. We always start with why. And so the first thing I want to talk about is really why you should care about this topic and why you should view building your team truly as an investment and not just an activity or function of being a business owner. We'll also get into the house and some tips and tricks for how you can effectively build your team. I want to touch on the importance of leadership and authenticity. What is the difference between a leader versus a manager and how does that all play a role in this topic and then finally we'll end with some community resources. Just to help you better understand what's out there to help you launch and grow your business. I mentioned a little bit about myself, you know, first and foremost, I am the proud spouse of an Air Force veteran and that's really what connects me to this community and has driven my passion and desire to support the military veteran community. And as part of that journey, I've been a two time founder so first as a single entrepreneur venturing off and starting my own tech company and having to build a team there. I'm a founder as the former CEO of Patriot Bootcamp on the nonprofit side. And then today in a very different role as part of a corporate team where USA has 35,000 employees and I'm leading one of our business units there so I've seen a little bit of everything and certainly have an appreciation and understanding of what it looks like when you're at the very stage of growing a company and building a team to what you know high performing teams look like and how you manage performance once you've scaled. So that let's jump right in. Why are we here today and why should you care about this topic. Let's talk about why effective team building matters and it matters because people matter. At the end of the day the work doesn't do itself it's the people that lead the work. You'll be judged by the quality of your people your business will be evaluated based on the quality of your people as well. There's a couple things that factor into this, you know, certainly, if you're on a path where you think you might need to raise venture capital to grow a scalable venture. And then you may need to pitch to investors and you'll hear time and time again that having a solid business plan is table stakes. Obviously any investable company needs to have a great plan, a large market opportunity that it's going after. And, you know, the ability to generate revenue and have a large customer stream. So that's foundational to everything as being a business owner, but where the difference really lies is in the execution. But before it's people that drive the execution so at the end of the day what can often make or break your success in building a business is in how effectively you build your team. So, you know, that's first and foremost why you should care. And I'll say secondly, we all want to do something we love nobody wants to be part part of a job or have a company that they don't enjoy working for. You may be able to get along for a little while doing something because it makes lots of money or doing something because you're interested in solving a problem. But what will be the difference between how persistent you can be how much you can endure, and how great you can grow is whether you're able to have a team around you that you genuinely love and enjoy working with every day. So I say at the bottom there, you know, teams that work well together, when together, and it's equally important that you have the talent, the skills, the experience and in many cases, the folks with the right credentials on your team because that's what will drive the business execution and growth of your business, but you also need to have the right diversity, the right attitudes, those team members with the aptitude. You can call that a growth mindset, the people that are willing to go above and beyond. And maybe they were hired for one thing, but because they have a growth mindset and as the company matures and grows and has additional needs, they're able to morph and evolve their own skillset, learn something new and truly be there to support the organization through its own evolution. And that is eventually what drives culture, the personalities and how well that team works together functions together and collectively drives results And so I won't say one is more important than the other, I will say they're both critical and they can look and grow differently depending on the stage of your company. On the right hand side, I have a little infographic this is a very simplified view in, you know, you might see different versions of it on the internet, but again talking about people first and why people matter. It all starts with happy employees. Happy employees studies have shown are more productive, they're more creative, and they deliver better customer service and they're more productive or said that already. So that in turn, with those productive employees that are delivering excellent customer service can be felt by your early adopters and by your customers. So when you deliver excellent service, it generates customer satisfaction and also customer loyalty. So instead of just buying a product once. Now you've generated this environment where the customer really aligns with your company it aligns with your sales people. They want to keep buying from you or maybe even buy more products from you, because they align with your mission your people in your values. And so that loyalty and excellent customer service helps you generate profits helps you build your business helps you expand into new market opportunities and revenue streams. And eventually grow your bottom line. And once you have a healthy bottom line where you're generating revenue, you're profitable. You can use some of those profits to reward your employees to offer additional incentives to create and foster a working environment that is supportive and addresses each of your individual employee needs. And is just generally a fun place to be a place where people can feel valued and supported so with those incentives and rewards that you give back to your employees. It then generates happy employees again and fuels that cycle so I truly do look at it as a continuum and a cycle of everything starting with the employee. And that is why investing in your team is so important. Okay, so we've talked about why we're here today why this topic matters. Simon Sinek for those of you who have come across him he's a great thought leader in business leadership startups etc. He always encourages us to find your why start with why so before we can really get into the tactics of how to build your team. We really need to take a step back and understand why your company exists first because you need to be able to set clear expectations for those employees that you want to bring on so I've outlined just a couple of questions to get you thinking about that topic. And this is really more for the entrepreneur for the CEO, the business leader to introspectively take a look and understand, you know, what is my purpose, what is my company's purpose. It's hard to bring on talent. If you can't communicate to those early employees, why they should care, what they should be excited about doing and why they should be really eager to join your team. So having a clear definition of your purpose, your mission, your core values as an entity is really important as one of the first steps, even before you make your initial hires. As part of that it's important to differentiate what you'll do best in the market as entrepreneurs, you know, it's, it's, there's so many things to do and so often we get stretched really thin. And we want to, we want to boil oceans we want to do it all at once we have these great ideas and we're passionate and we want to make the world a better place but it's really important to stay focused and so I like to encourage CEOs to really look at what is the one thing your business will do better than every other business as a way to help you stay focused on building that out first before you expand. And that will also help you stay focused on the type of talent you need to attract. And then finally why are you the best person to lead the company. Again this factors into culture and eventually leads to some of the tips that you can use to bring on talent but in the early stages when you're just a solo founder and your first venturing out a lot of the reasons why people are going to want to join your team is because of you. It's because of the confidence that you have the excitement that you have the ability you have to sell your vision and to convince them that you're set up for success and that you're the best person to lead the company to to growth and beyond. So those are some of the initial considerations on a side note at the bottom right hand side of the screen I sharing with you all my why and over my career as I mentioned already. I've been very much driven by my connection to the military via my husband service and some of the things that I witnessed in his transition. So he went from being active duty military and currently he is a fire captain and first responder and we have two beautiful children together and so when I think about my why all of those other things that we discussed have to be true but there's a more piece of it for me, which is alignment to core values, and I personally, you know, not the type of person that would align with a brand or want to join a team where I'm not also a customer of that product so if I'm going to work for a team or if you're going to convince me to join your team. I need to be not only excited about working with you and for you but also the product and make sure that there's a good alignment of core values and the change that we want to see in the world so that to the call out action and box at the bottom of the screen. My advice is to clearly define your company mission know what your value proposition is to the market and understand your values, because you're not you're going to need to communicate and sell all of that to your initial team as you bring them on board and even as you scale that will help you attract the right talent. Okay, switching gears, let's get into the strategies and tactics of the how how do you build your team. And I think really the natural starting place here is to consider what your options and your trade offs are, you know there's different types of team members, and I've outlined for kind of general buckets we have 1099 contractors co founders, employees or your typical full time employee, and then also a bucket for interns and volunteers so your, your unpaid help and support. And I do want to take a few minutes just to individually go through each category and maybe talk through some of the pros and cons of each. And I think really is not an exhaustive list and can often differ based on the type of company or industry that you're growing a business in so starting with the 1099 contractors. The benefits of bringing on contractors as your first team members is flexibility and cost. Typically contractors aren't as expensive to hire because you don't have to provide full benefit so, you know, a 1099 contractor you're not usually offering health insurance benefits you're not providing them with insurance and other things so you can typically bring them on for a lower cost and you have a lot more flexibility in the contract terms and agreement so they're a great option when again you're just starting out and maybe you don't have consistent revenue so you get your first customer and you know you need help delivering on that initial customer contract or building out a service, but you're not sure how long that will take or how long you can pay them so it's a great way to bring on some, you know, temporary assistance, and I look at it as a great way to also try before you buy so giving you the opportunity to scale up and scale down as workflow for revenue and contracts. So, you know, it's a great way to get involved and fall but also giving you the opportunity to get to know the talent, and from there you'll be able to make a more informed decision about whether this is something somebody that you want to bring on for the long term, or if this is just somebody that you're bringing on for short term temporary help to fulfill customer requirements and contract obligations but you don't necessarily see them as being part of your, your permanent team. So let's have a look at the initial pros. I think the cons for contractors. For me at least is retention and expertise and more specifically, it's harder to retain 1099 contractors. Sometimes the downside is that if you do bring in temporary help, but you work with them every day they learn a lot about your business about your product about your ways of working about your, your value proposition in the market and so it can potentially be a risk if they, you know, come with the expectations of only being temporary assistance and then they leave and go work for one of your competitors or take that knowledge elsewhere. So the brain drain side of working with contractors can sometimes be a factor and certainly there are ways that you can mitigate that by giving them very specific narrow scope of focus. And you know maybe you don't want to bring them into your board meetings where the most confidential business strategy is discussed but rather you're you're giving them those actionable items tasks that don't exchange proprietary information or intellectual property. We'll talk about co founders next. A lot of us, especially those that are starting tech startups, you know start with a co founder model usually there's one person that's the business guru and has deep expertise in the industry or in building businesses and then oftentimes there's at least one other co founder that has the technical expertise and hopefully can do all of the back end engineering to build out the product and by those cat powers combined hopefully you're on your way to building something great and selling it in the market. One of the opportunities with co founders, you know it's really a teammate and a partner in crime and I'll say finding a co founder is much like getting married. And so that can be a really great thing. But you need to make sure that expectations are aligned up front and much the same advice that I would give somebody about to get married you know you want to have lots of conversations up front you want to share your vision make sure that you have common goals and importantly make sure that you are willing to take on you know whatever the other person shares is what they're willing to commit is acceptable to you so it doesn't always look like a 5050 split. And there are many different arrangements that make sense, but it just all depends on the company who the co founders are, but a great thing about having co founders or actual business partners is that you can offer them equity and equity can be a really powerful initiative to bring on the right talent top performers without necessarily being able to pay them a market salary, or what you know they might earn working for a more established business. Now it doesn't always work out that way and so again, it just depends on your business and where you're at but potentially, you know, you can motivate people to join you in your cause, and offer them lesser compensation upfront in exchange for the potential upside benefit of having equity, and assuming that you've done a great job outlining your your business plan and how you're going to be positioned for success. Ideally that equity eventually converts into a much larger opportunity for cash and compensation than if they had received that incremental revenue or salary upfront. So the flip side, you know cons for co founders we kind of touched on already but it is like getting married, and it can be really difficult, and people's needs and wants change over time so you may start off on the right page, or on the same page somebody might get burnt out somebody might decide that you know they need to go in a different direction for personal reasons and so it's much harder to break up when you have that person as an equity shareholder in your organization, and that can be a tricky dynamic to navigate so again just things that you want to be mindful of and prepare for upfront. The next category is full time employees this is just your standard, you know w to full time employee it's somebody that is hired by a company they go. Typically it looks like a 40 hour a week work week, they get a paycheck, and you know they're not necessarily a partner. They may or may not have equity, you, you sometimes do see startups offer equity to its early employees but not always. And so this is a great opportunity if you want to bring on the right talent and really make an investment in them so I think the big differentiator here between a full time employee versus a contractor is like the intent of the permanence of the role where a contractor, you might not see as somebody that you really want to invest in and is going to be a long term part of your team and a full time employee is somebody that you're going to hire you're going to train, you want to train them well because you want them to stay with your company and be an important part of the team. And then finally let's talk about interns and volunteers. You know certainly you don't want to bank the entire success of your company on unpaid talent, but I do think there's a place for it. And again it just depends on the specific needs of your company and what stage of maturity you're at so I'll give you a couple of personal stories here. On the right hand side is a picture of me with one of our Patriot bootcamp alums Ray Antonino, and Ray and I, you know I met him because he came through Patriot bootcamp I just really latched on to his company because he has him, he and his wife are co founders in the business they're both wonderful people and so right off the bat I was just really committed to trying to help them succeed. And it was hard in the early days, you know they were trying to figure things out they were making pivots with their business. And they needed a lot of help and so there was an opportunity where their company got accepted into the tech stars accelerator in Austin which is where I was living at the time. I mean, we did everything together they came to my house for Easter dinner, and we just got to know each other on a really personal level and I would always ask them, how can I be helpful. There was one day where Ray said, Well, we really need help with customer research, would you be willing to come sit in an office with us and cold call municipalities and ask research questions, not make a sales pitch they weren't asking me to make any sales or to try and sell a product but truly just to do some customer discovery work. Probably not, you know top on my list of fun things to do but again I was really invested in helping them succeed and so I said yes. And we went through that and if Ray were here he would probably laugh and tell you what a horrible job I did at this customer research and making cold calls because it was completely outside of my comfort zone. The point was that I was there to help. And, you know, you get what you pay for right. So, maybe I wasn't the most effective source of help, but at a time when they just didn't have the the funding or they you know they were trying to reinvest in growing their business rather than spending money on a lot of paid help. This was a great compromise, and I was happy to support them and help them along their way just a little bit and then fast forward a year or two maybe and as their business was growing they entered a South by Southwest pitch competition and Ray took home the top prize and won $15,000 in cash and this picture makes me smile because I had absolutely no skin in the game. I am not employed by this company. I have no equity in the company. I just care a lot about them and it meant the world to me that Ray invited me to the pitch competition as his guest. And when it wasn't was time to accept the big check the thing that all of us always dream of like how fun would it be to get to take home a large check like that. Ray invited me up on stage to accept it with him. So, again, you know I think there's a place for sometimes some unpaid help and whether or not they're good at cold calling for customer research is one thing but certainly it always helps to have a team of evangelists and community supporters that are out there to advocate for you. Thank you so much Charlotte. We have a few questions here. Let's start with one. How would you define what is your definition of a winning team. What does that look like what's the performance. How do you know when you're there. Yeah, great question Dan. Everybody has a different version of this and so again, you know it might just depend on the type of company but for me there's a couple things that really matter. A winning team needs to have clear expectations of their goals. They need to have the ability to communicate effectively, and that should result in high collaboration with and among the team, and from that collaboration will really drive the results so I think all of those things are really important. At the end of the day, you measure the results. And that might be your key indicator of whether your team is effective or not, but the variables that go into generating that effectiveness are really more about the soft skills they're about the enjoyment that comes from working with each other again. What are your expectations is everybody on the same page. Do they have a shared understanding and commitment to the mission and to what they're trying to achieve together. Thanks. Talking about culture. I'd seen a meme recently where it said something along the lines of, if you're saying that your, your company culture is very family oriented that it's code for toxic, because that's not always good but with smaller larger companies with tenured employees sometimes that's just how people perceive that it's a very family oriented organization. Why is culture important how do you align your talent with your culture. Can you speak more to that. Sure. Yeah, so for me culture is what connects us to the mission, and it's what eventually motivates us to show up at work every day I think, you know, to some degree we work because we need to pay our bills and because we have families to support and all of that but that only takes you so far. What keeps us invested in working for a particular company or towards a particular cause is the culture and whether we work effectively together whether we enjoy the environment, whether we have fun being there to some degree and so culture is a really important part of performance management as a team grows now a lot of times culture is missing in the early days because you're just stretched so thin and your company is changing so fast. So it's not always as tangible and well articulated in the various early in the earliest stages of starting your company but certainly as you work to grow and scale your organization culture becomes a much more important part and as you define and develop a strong culture, you'll start to see wins and those wins will then keep your employees retained keep them excited about continuing to work there and small wins generate big wins and big wins eventually lead to an overall culture of winning. Thanks. Tony Hollinger has a question here. He's asking this goes back to your why. What has driven you to get involved with leading multiple veteran entrepreneurs supporting entities. Thanks for asking. Again, it's my husband, you know, we had a tough time navigating his separation from the military and figuring out what his post military career was going to be. And it just happened that as we were both trying to research that together. He was still in the reserves and got called up for deployment to Iraq and so I ended up really being the one trying to do all the research and kind of figure out what resources were available to him. And in the process of all of that, I realized I wasn't alone and he wasn't alone that his experience was not unique that there were lots of, you know, separated veterans as well as military spouses that were trying to get help. And the help is out there but we just often don't know where to find it or where to start. And so, from I think that feeling of failure and maybe even a little bit of desperation and frustration of having to work so hard before we finally got the information or the connection point to the resources we needed. It just really motivated me to say if I can make this easier for someone else, then that has to be part of my purpose and I've just personally always found that you give and you get and so it's the most fulfilling thing in life is to give to others, and you typically get back far more than you ever anticipated when you start and that's what motivates you to want to keep giving and wanting to keep doing more to solve an important problem. Thanks. The pandemic has been a great experiment on one topic and that's remote work. Do you have any thoughts on remote work versus being in person and how that affects your culture and how that affects your ability to operate as a team. I wouldn't say one is better or worse than the other they're just different. As an entrepreneur and CEO, I always worked remotely, and I led completely dispersed teams we rarely saw each other face to face. So I do think that you can certainly be successful in a remote environment, but I've also felt the energy that comes from having face to face interaction, and at the end of the day we are all humans with like a social need. And so my advice would be, you know, either can work either remote teams or in person teams can work. If you do go their direction of fully remote and dispersed teams, find opportunities to come together, at least once in a while you know maybe three or four times a year on a quarterly basis, you come together and get in a room and just enjoy the connectedness and team bonding that comes from being face to face but either either can be a viable option. A few things impact your team quite like your, your culture quite like the people you hire. So when you're looking at hiring someone what do you think is more important attitude or aptitude. Yeah, that's a trick question Dan it's both. They're both important. And I would say, once again it depends in the early days when it's just yourself and you're trying to bring on your initial teammates, credentials, sometimes count for more and direct industry experience can be really important. But generally speaking, I will always hire for aptitude and attitude over hard skills and having like you don't necessarily need to have done the job before you need to have a growth mindset, and show me that you're coachable, you're willing to be a quick learner, and that you're a go getter and self starter so I'm really not interested in somebody that I have to handhold I want to be able to bring members on to my team that are resilient, adaptable, and that have leadership skills and so working with the military community is a great fit with all of those things. And what I found out during the alumni event was the need for entrepreneurs to be able to hand over key responsibilities to be able to trust people and and establish kind of a framework for for not doing everything themselves. And Taylor Macklemore talked about the need for founders to do less writing and more editing. Do you have any advice for leaders who are reluctant to share key responsibilities. You'll find out the hard way, you have to learn to delegate you'll find out the hard way if you don't that you're going to get burnt out. And that eventually you'll reach a plateau where you can no longer grow the business because you're not delegating effectively, and one person can only do so much you know time is our is a finite resource and it's our most important So, you know as far as how you do it, it goes back to what I started within the beginning of the presentation and kind of what is the one thing that you want to be the best at at the in the world. The founder or the CEO should continue to focus on the few small things that drive the most impact. You do need to have instrumentation in place and you do need to have defined metrics that you're measuring. And over time you might find that, you know, originally you're, you're the CFO, you're doing the books, you're also the chief product you're building the products you're also the chief marketing officer, and eventually you need to make a decision on what's the thing that you do the best and also is driving the largest impact for your organization and then delegate all of the other things that aren't the most meaningful use of your time. Thanks, Emilio Vargas asked, he's been talked out of using volunteers by his lawyer because he's a for profit venture. Do you have any advice on bringing in volunteers without putting yourself at risk legally. And again, some of this is dependent on the size of your organization so it's not always an effective strategy or tactic for large established organizations but startups are kind of in a different light. Personally, how we use volunteers was through other entities and specifically through university programs. So it wasn't me just randomly finding an intern and bringing them on it was me partnering with the university program so the partnership was between the university and my business, and via that partnership, the university supplied summer interns so the university had the relationship and kind of the quote unquote contract with the student. And then through our companies contracts together supplied the interns to come work for the company for the summer so it's not something that I would recommend doing for long periods of time because it can trigger employment concerns about, you know how you're using summer but certainly for a short defined period of time like a three month summer, while somebody is in between, you know their junior and senior year of school, for example, can be a really effective way, and then I'll also copy of that by saying, you do have to be careful what you task them with same thing with the contractors you know you don't necessarily want to give them access to your intellectual property. But I was able to effectively use a university program to get summer interns that conducted unbiased university based research on the value proposition of my company and the market opportunity and that in turn helped us raise venture capital dollars. So I can hear Matt hide saying, Emilio do not ignore your lawyer work with your lawyer to try and resolve that. One thing to keep in mind during the event. We talked about values and a lot of, you know you talk about values and a lot of people think well that's, don't lie don't cheat don't steal. Don't cheat on people, whatever, but but it's really more than that. Can you speak to how companies need to define choose and promote their values. Yeah, it depends and I don't want to impose my own views on others. My alignment with USA and USA is core values come are very closely tied to the military so things like honesty service loyalty integrity, all ring true, and you have to choose what matters to you. My own degree is just about being a good person and treating others the way you want to be treated, but I think when you find that right alignment to core values, it is infectious and it helps bring that clarity to build the culture that you want. Matt and the panel there was a discussion about using investing with customer dollars, other types of financing some traditional and then venture capital. Can you speak to some of those perspectives and do you have any other thoughts about that. I have a lot of thoughts about it. I don't consider myself an expert in raising venture capital but I did raise precede funding from a group of investors, as well as angels. When I was growing my own startup and so I'll give you that same generic answer of one isn't necessarily better than the other but they are very different. I would always advise folks to start with customer dollars or growing your business by making sales as a as a first option before going the route of raising venture capital and here's why one raising venture capital is a full time job. You might pitch to hundreds or even thousands of investors before you find the right investor that is interested in your idea and so it takes up tons of time. And it really does take your time away from actually building your business from engaging with customers from building your product making sales, etc. So, it's just a big distractor, but there are key inflection points in growing a business when venture capital might be the best option and the right option. I really want to factor the timeline and the amount of resources that need to be devoted to that. So, again, you know, I'd say growing your business by generating revenue is always the best validator and kind of the. But it's it's probably easier still than raising venture capital but there are some unique industries especially in a medical device or other industries where you have a really long tail of research and development before you can launch a product where venture capital might be an appropriate fit but typically you go for venture capital when you're scaling so when you're going through a time of extreme growth, not when you're just starting out and incorporating your company. Great. I'm Charlie did you have any other thanks for your expertise. Do you have any other comments thoughts resources. I do I can share my screen again. And keep it up so that you can see the resources. Of course I'll say DAV Patriot Bootcamp is a great place to start. There we go. So, these are more just general business resources not necessarily targeted resources for hiring or recruiting talent. But really that's part of this community. You'll see a variety of resources some are government funded some are private entities nonprofits. There's a listing of accelerators like tech stars and other veterans focused programs like DAV Patriot Bootcamp like Bunker Labs, etc, etc. And the one thing we didn't talk about but I think is also really important is connection points into other networks and communities. If I had one piece of advice and we don't go it alone so an important part of building your team of course is bringing on the right talent and hiring the right talent but you also need to take care of yourself as a founder or as a CEO. So if you really want your employees to be the ones giving you advice, necessarily you want your advice, you want to have a supportive network for yourself so sometimes that looks like a board of advisors or a board of directors. Other times it looks like just mentors and other folks like you other entrepreneurs. So, can I keep you afloat that can be your coaches and your cheerleaders that can give you the hard advice that you maybe don't want to hear but need to hear. But that can also lift your spirits when you're having a tough day because there are so many ups and downs in growing a business so don't underestimate the power of being connected to a broader ecosystem and community and there are so many great organizations out there that can help you find your tribe. But again, I think, you know mentorship and having that board of advisors can be a really foundational part of your success. Thank you so much Charlotte. Just a reminder everyone on October 20, we're going to have our in person dv patriot boot camp here at National headquarters near Cincinnati. This is for new, new founders, people who are new to patriot boot camp so if that's you or if it's someone you know who has a venture. We're looking for folks preferably who have an in and website already in place. We're going to be accepting up to 50 applicants you can register at patriot boot camp dot org. They're there and and they can get started or share that with the folks you know. Thanks everyone for being here. And we'll see.