 If you don't get that foundation and I've made these mistakes, these are mistakes I've made. I mean, I'm a serial entrepreneur, so I have other businesses I do and I've made all these mistakes and I share these with other people for them to make their best choices, right? So my goals may be different from theirs. That's okay. Yeah, yeah. But in either case, some of the basic foundational of how you plan and execute your business relates to everybody. Okay. You want to share some of that? Do you have anything that prepared? Oh, boy. You know, Eric, I appreciate you asking these open-ended questions, but it's dangerous. Oh. I'll talk for an hour. Okay. You need to stop me. You need to have the red light that lights up on my computer that's all right. You need to pull back a little bit. But you know, basically one of the things, I'll start off with just the diversity. There are many programs. There's city, county, state, federal programs. I think there are great opportunities on the federal side. What is it for you? Is it for you? What is it for you? And so I did this talk this week in New York for the veteran conference, and I said, you don't go get certified and then try and get work. You find the work that you can provide value for a client, maybe the EPA, or maybe it's a federal reserve, or maybe it's the GSA, maybe it's the Army. You see that you can provide value, but you're like, wow, I can provide value. Not only that, I can be profitable because you don't want to just get work. You want to get bottom line work where you're making a profit. Those two things fit. Now you set up your plan to say, I need this certification. And this is what I'm going to go do. And this is the plan for how I'm going to go after the work. So early on, the reason I share that is, if I could make money from being certified, I would have made a bunch of money. I was certified by every agency, city, county, state, federal, I had thirds. In fact, I was attending events and outreach programs. I mean, you full-time attend outreach programs, full-time go to events, and some of them are great. Some of them are okay. Some of them you've already been to. So the next part, when I talk about that, I'll share with you how I look at that and how I suggest you look at managing your time. Okay. No, no, no. That's great. And again, man, you're just flowing, so you're taking me even off topic. That's why I just keep going along the path that you're taking this conversation. Because these, you are touching on all the critical points, right? And it's interesting that you say that in terms of, because for me, what I've experienced recently is there's a lot of people teaching people, say, how to do contracting, right? But I think that there's other things that are, like I said, is it right for you? What about the non-contract business side, right? Leadership, mental toughness, resiliency, you know, all that stuff. That's where I see people are falling short in some areas. Even if you were given all the tools, right, per se, to do these things, what would you do with those tools and how would you use them? And so that's kind of what you've been talking about. And that's why I was really excited to let you keep going along that line. Because I think, like you said, getting, bring this one to your office, because I've had a few entrepreneurs do this. They brought people in and you could give someone a contract, but are they ready for that contract? Can they handle the contract? Is it a profitable contract? Is it what's in their best interest? And I think a lot of those questions have to be answered. Hey, and when you're a young entrepreneur or newer into that industry or whatnot, our excitement counts our judgment. If you're a real entrepreneur, I've been excited many times and lost some money. I mean, you know, I had a restaurant that was my MBA right there, you know, it's like, spent all this money and it was cool and it was a thing to do. But is that what I should have been doing with my time and my money, my energy, my skill, right? Is that where the best place was for my long-term goals? So I think it's normal that the challenges, we also live in a silo. So entrepreneurs are living a silo and often don't have other entrepreneurs, especially in their lane or doing what they're doing. And so their beliefs that they're doing everything right is only looked at against themselves. So they believe strongly, we believe, Hey, this is what we're doing. I'm on track. I'm leading this. And, you know, I'm the owner. It's going to be great. Well, what we need is other entrepreneurs to say, Hey, what do you think of this? Not a pat on the back, like, great. You can get that from your family. A great job, a way to go to start your own business and make it happen. But really, I mean, I say things to some of these small business sometimes. And if, and if they're, if they're open to it, it's pretty raw. I'm just like, how you making money? I don't see it. You know what I mean? I mean, I'm challenging. Maybe I, maybe you know something I don't, but I don't challenge you to say, do you want me to push you or not? Or are you okay? Do you want a pat on the back because I can give you that. You could go, or do you want me to challenge what you're doing? Because it's only when we challenge ourselves when we could sharpen that saw and make sure we're on point. Wow. Wow. Excellent. Where did you first get your, so obviously I, I tracked, I saw you went to college, but let's go back even further. Do you believe you're always hard work to be an entrepreneur? Yeah, you know, like when you're younger, did you trade baseball cards or self potato chips or boy, I'm going to be these open end of questions. This danger. So I do a little TED talk thing in it. And I started off and I say, I've always been a serial entrepreneur at age 14 was my first hustle. I was handling out flyers really. So I don't know how old you are, but you have flyers and you put them on cars and you put them on houses. That's getting the message out. That's the advertising. That's the first Twitter, right? Yes, put the message and get it out. I remember those. I remember that. Yeah. So you put a flyer out and I was making cash and then I started shoveling snow mowing lawns. Doing work supporting, you know, just some labor work for people. But yeah, after that, then I got caught up in the hole. There's a little multi-level marketing, looking at that stuff. OK, OK, a lot in real estate and I do some real estate now. So but yeah, ever since 14, I just kind of had it. But my parents are immigrants. So born here in this country, I thought, for sure, you've got to get an education. And I still do believe that a little bit. But the schooling that you see on my on my on my LinkedIn or my profile is good, but that's not where I learned to be an entrepreneur. In fact, I think that what helped me most to be an entrepreneur was my bootcamp for the Marine Corps. That training was fantastic. Yeah, I could do that. I'll share with you one quick example. When I do this little talk, I'd say I call I call it the sharpshooter's blueprint, but a sharpshooter, you know, they handed me I was 18 years old. They handed me a rifle, said hit the target and you could picture holding the rifle in the target. But you know, that target was 200 yards downrange. That's two football fields. Yeah, yeah, how do you do that? Well, the Marine Corps in particular, I think is the only branch that qualifies at 500 yards. So five football fields. I'm taking a rifle and hitting the target. How did I do that? And I did it, by the way, I shot expert and I qualified sharpshooter. How did I do that? And it was a big lesson. What I learned is a very clean and well maintained weapon, which I like into ourselves, right? Our personal self. We got to be mentally, physically and in a good place to perform, right? Be ready to perform. So this weapon was in great working order and then we managed everything surrounding hitting that target. So we learned about everything that's going to that's going to affect or impact hitting that target, having a solid foundation, watching my breathing, watching the wind and squeezing the all these little things that you learn. And all of a sudden you take this little round out of this rifle, it hits five football fields and hits a target. And so I liken that a little bit to being a sharpshooter in business. No, I like I like that. What so you were in the Marine Corps. And then I see that when you got out, that's when you kind of start your business. And like I said, you're a solo entrepreneur. How did you get into construction in particular? Yeah, you know, I got out, I got my degree and then after my degree, I got a job. I had my first and only job and I decided quickly it wasn't for me, but I didn't know what I was going to do quite honestly. I'm not going to, you know, I'll tell you, I knew it was not true. I want to do something and I looked to leverage some of the small business opportunities in the state of Chicago. So I did that and I floundered a little bit over the years because like I share now, I didn't do what I share now. I didn't plan it out. I didn't look at the opportunities. I just want to go get contracts and work. And I did. I landed contracts at the city and the county and the airport and it was going okay. I don't know where I was going. And then I went back to school a little bit more. I really found myself leaning towards construction. I always did construction, but now we're a prime general contractor. And so I just gravitated towards that. And then I did construction management for a long time. I'm pretty conservative. So I was a little nervous about the bonding and the 8A, that's what made me turn to prime at risk because the opportunities were to a great for construction. I say for construction because I don't know how it is for IT or architect or things like that. But for construction, quite honestly, the opportunity was very significant relative to the open market. And so I'm like, let's get the bond and let's go. And that's when in the last 15 years, that's where I scaled and started at zero bonding and grew my bonding program so that we can prime large contracts. Yeah, I see that along the way. So I know you did some of those smaller contracts. Did you ever work in a private sector where someone didn't pay you, like one of the big, large GC firms? Yeah, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that happens. Oh, I was that guy, you know, everybody kind of goes through this. Some people get stuck in it and live their lives as a sub that's check to check, waiting for it to come in, sort of a hamster wheel. I try and take them off. I try and talk them off the wheel. I'm like, I need you to just put your phone down and listen to me for a second. Because you can get stuck on there because you have a lot of volume, you're waiting to get paid. It's rare. And once you get paid, you've got other bills. It's hard to scale when you're always chasing your tail. Right, right, right. I've been there. I've been there that sort of a, I don't, I don't know, you know, I don't want to blame large business. I don't want to blame the big companies. You know, they're trying to be a profitable company. Yes. I tell the small businesses own what you do. Now, when you're first starting off, I tell you, I would take projects. I would take them if they're a low margin. I'd take it if I didn't get, because you're trying to grind, you're trying to grow. Right, right. But what I tell them is that's okay, only as long as it's a means to something else, as long as it means to get where you need to be, not what you're going to do forever.