A True Draftsman w/ Tony Pease | Ep. 168

In this episode of the Biz/Dev Podcast, David and Gary sit down with Tony Pease, founder and CEO of Carimus, to talk about the wild world of software development, AI’s role in shaping the future of dev work, and the values that make great leadership. Is AI the secret weapon for building better applications, or just another tool in the developer’s belt?

LINKS:

Carimus on LinkedIn
Tony on LinkedIn

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

[00:00:00] David: When DeepSeek came out, which was the Chinese 

AI bot that came 

outta nowhere, right? 

[00:00:05] Gary: The Temu Open AI. 

[00:00:07] David: The Temu of AI. 

Hi everyone. Welcome to the Biz Dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I'm David Baxter, your host, joined Per Usual by Gary Voight. You're looking spiffy today. You actually have a caller on what is going on.

[00:00:22] Gary: Yeah, I got some buttons on the shirt today. I don't know if

I've ever had 

[00:00:26] David: I don't understand. No beanie and a collar. It's I don't know you.

[00:00:30] Gary: I was interviewing for a better job.

[00:00:32] David: No, that is so wrong. So wrong. Anybody who wants him can have him. He's free and he works for business cards. Anyway, more importantly, we are joined by Tony Pease, who is the founder and CEO of Carus. Welcome, Tony. How are you?

[00:00:48] Tony: I'm great. How are you?

[00:00:49] Gary: Tony.

[00:00:50] David: I cannot complain. It is not snowing. So that's a winner for me, at least right now.

I enjoy snow. I was ready for it to go though.

[00:00:57] Tony: Yeah,

[00:00:58] David: you have a good Snowmageddon last week?

[00:01:00] Tony: Yeah, my kids are a little older, so they're, when they're outta school, it's nice. It's not like you have to have parenting duties. They stick to themselves and sleep till noon, and then you get to go out and play in the snow. So it wasn't so bad for me.

[00:01:12] David: Nice. Very 

[00:01:13] Gary: Yeah, today I have the Florida equivalent of the snowstorm, which is just

[00:01:18] David: 65 degrees.

[00:01:19] Gary: 67.

Brisk 67, 

[00:01:23] David: Did you have to put on your, under your long undies?

[00:01:25] Gary: No, but that's why I'm wearing a second shirt today.

[00:01:28] David: Gotcha. It is. That's quite brisk. That's right. Alrighty. So tell me about Carus.

[00:01:35] Tony: Well, AMI is a strategic consulting firm and a brand agency, marketing firm, and software development firm all in one.

So we say we specialize in brand experience and digital transformation. We're about a. 40 or so people headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. Most of our employees live locally. We do have a few that we've either picked up remote or that have moved. But we focus on large organizations, publicly traded companies fortune 500 type clients. And we do a lot of work for a few clients.

[00:02:06] David: So that's an interesting mix. Were you originally software development or marketing and then became the other? Or were you always Everything

[00:02:15] Tony: My background was always in technology. This is my third company of significance that I've worked with. One of the things that we found as a gap in the technology space was there's always great engineers but are bad with design, ui, ux,

and then there's great creatives, but they're not so proficient in technology.

And so our thought was to put those two pieces together so our clients could have a one-stop shop and basically create user-friendly, brand aligned technology.

[00:02:43] David: Nice. So what makes you is how did you get started in large companies? That's a tricky nut to crack, right? You got some slow sales cycles and all that. How does a relatively small company work with big monster companies? I.

[00:02:57] Tony: Yeah, my historical experience has been working with large companies. And then when we started Carmi, we actually started it for startups. So the idea was that we could create faster points of progress for small businesses. What we found over time was, startups don't always succeed. They can't always pay their bills. We went up market. We found that the skills were very transferable and the larger organizations have more of an appetite to go deeper. And so we could really get more brand aligned. We could spend more time on projects, be more thoughtful, be more strategic. And so we started making that transition in

earnest maybe three years ago. And since then, we've been mainly working with large companies. But yeah, for sure, slower sales cycles.

[00:03:41] David: Since you've worked in both big and little, how I. How do they compare? What's it like except for the slower sales cycle, but is it just, is it the same as working with a smaller company, bigger? Is there a lot more bureaucracy? Most of our clients are relatively small, 

[00:03:56] Tony: I.

mean there's some, the big organizations aren't gonna pivot as frequently as a small corporation, so you can get a little bit more continuity. They have annual goals. They tend to be pretty consistent with their brand messaging. With their product focus, small companies are really reactive and so you can get a lot of whiplash when you're working with a small company.

'cause they, if they're going out for investment and they had an investor pitch that told 'em something different, they want to adapt their story to that. So what we found in the large companies is really outside of the resources. So the people that you work with in a large company change more frequently and their jobs change. More than a small company. 'cause you're, in a large company you're not working with the CEO, you're working with directors and VPs, whereas a small company, the CEO will typically be involved. But yeah, the cadence is very different.

[00:04:44] David: I had heard that when you're working with big clients like. The example I heard was Microsoft. If you're gonna work with a company like Microsoft, you don't actually have a relationship with the company. You have a relationship with an individual or two, and the scary part is if that individual or two goes somewhere else, you've got just got kicked outta that big company, even if you've done great work for them.

Have you found that to be true in your world too?

[00:05:09] Tony: Not necessarily in our experience, but we do find that when chief marketing officers change, they want to bring in vendors that they've used previously. On big companies, you can get yourself ingrained in multiple different business units. So there's a little bit of durability. Whether it's small or big company, people do business with people they like, people do business with people they trust.

That reigns true always. If the person that you were working for goes to another job, and that's happened for us when we have an opportunity now to go work with that other company. And so we've followed customers from various jobs into new deals and that's been pretty helpful.

[00:05:42] David: Nice. So when you guys talk about technology, what are you guys building? Are you building websites? Are you building full big old apps? Are you building portals? What are you building? I.

[00:05:52] Tony: It's a little bit of everything. So we have some work that's dashboard based, where there's already some underlying systems and they wanted more usable visualization models. There's a very robust application. So for instance, in the Puerto Rican, Nashville Energy grid, we do a application for them that helps their customers pay their bills online. And then websites too. And then we're finding that the line between what is a application and a website is blurring. So there's a lot of things you can do with mobile responsive web apps. And so that's quite a bit of what we do.

[00:06:24] David: Nice. Do you prefer, maybe this is a loaded question, but do you prefer the creative versus the technical or vice versa?

[00:06:33] Tony: My background is in mechanical engineering, so I actually, not a software engineer, but I do prefer the engineering aspect of it, like the problem solving. But the visualization, it's always nice and I think our engineers really appreciate seeing, their great technical work highlighted by a really amazing user experience.

I like the engineering problem, but I like the visual aesthetic. And, to be fair to the ui, ux designer, a lot of the problems that they can solve visually. So it's not just about a pretty picture, it's about a thoughtful workflow, a simple user experience, getting it right for the right device, getting it right for the right user.

Definitely I prefer the engineering side, but the creative is really cool to see.

[00:07:13] David: So after doing this for, I think I saw 11 years, is that about right? You guys are about 11 years old.

[00:07:19] Tony: Well, Karen in its current iteration is about seven.

I had this as my personal consulting business prior, which is how the date that we use, but

[00:07:28] David: Gotcha. So over. That's, and that's interesting. So that leads to my question even better. So as the years have gone and you've gotten bigger, you're 40 ish people now, how has your role changed? I make the joke that a CEO's is the only job in the world that your job is to give away your job.

How has that played out for you?

[00:07:47] Tony: Yeah, it's actually, that part's been really good. Where we were when we were small, it was doing everything, I, every function, I did payroll, I did, all the HR functions, the finance functions, the sales functions, et cetera. And as our business has grown, I've been able to focus on more of the things that I really do enjoy.

In addition to the kind of overall business and the vision values of the company but we've gotten some great people to step up and take on meaningful weight. And quite frankly what people don't tell you is as you get older, you're not as good as at these things as you once were. You don't maybe have the pace or the speed or you're up on technology. So we've got a really good group of managers that have taken on a lot of weight in our organization and are frankly doing it better than I could. That actually makes it, if you want to keep somebody out of your your business, just do a better job than they could. And so we see that happening quite a bit.

[00:08:39] David: So tell me about your average day breakdown. Like percentage wise, what do you like? I find myself about 50% is networking and salesy kind of stuff. 30% of it is mentoring, leadership kind of cultural stuff. And then 20% of is doing development and kind getting in the weeds still for me. How does your day breakdown?

[00:09:01] Tony: Yeah, I'm not really in the weeds on much because

I'm not a developer and I'm not a creative, so I really don't have any like appreciable skills to the space. So if I am in the weeds, it's gonna be on the strategic consulting side, which I still do quite a bit of, whether it's running workshops or doing discovery process. I spend a lot of my day on sales and then, visionary stuff, like, where are we going? What's the research look like for the next step of care, miss and then mentorship. Of course, there's always that, and that comes in the form of. Regularly scheduled meetings, little questions throughout the day. I joke internally that I don't really start my day till five o'clock 'cause I have this ambitious goal of getting certain things accomplished every day and then it just gets interrupted and then I gotta do it when I'm at home and I have some quiet I.

[00:09:47] David: Totally understand that. So are you guys remote or do you guys go into the office nowadays?

[00:09:51] Tony: We're hybrid. I spend most of my days in the office 'cause I'm old school like that. But yeah, we're hybrid. So three or four days a week for most of our staff. Obviously the people who don't live in Raleigh don't come in,

but it is nice to see people, have coffee, have a hallway conversation, that sort of thing.

[00:10:09] David: So when you talk to businesses both big and small, what do you find is the number one improvement that most of them can make? Or is that too general? Does that have to be, certain sizes? It's this, certain sizes, it's that.

[00:10:25] Tony: I think there, there's always an improvement in simplification. I, I think when people are growing a business, they think they've gotta be everything to everybody. They've gotta be really complicated. They've gotta have all this, process and stuff like that. And at every level, what you find is organizations have to continually adapt to create more infrastructure to support their team, but then, reduce it and cut out things that are not driving efficiency. So I think, creating a habitual focus on efficiency, is I think really important for a business of any size.

[00:10:57] Gary: When you approach a new project for one of these larger companies what do you see as something that is gonna either slow you down or speed you up? And what I mean by that is like usually a larger company, I. If you're trying to implement a new process or some new tech, if you're building a new website or a new app or some features to an existing app, do you see the, I guess the adoption rate from them as fast as you guys can put it out?

Or is there do you have to kind figure out how to put your newer stuff into their older system and then slowly iterate on that?

[00:11:31] Tony: Yeah, I, it depends on the client. I think what we try to do is we try to get all the stakeholders bought into the process that we're gonna take them through early. 'cause if you have resistors, so for instance, if you're doing something like a website, does it is it aware of it? Do they feel like it's a threat to what they're doing today? How do they become part of the process and how do they, how do you make the customer overall look good for picking you? Organizational change management is always something that people and the smaller agencies don't really think about. But what we try to do is we try to make sure that we're very clear about what the expected deliverables are. And then again, stakeholder buy-in. So if you don't have anybody who's gonna throw a grenade in the room, the day before you're trying to ship something because they've been part of the process and they feel like they're, they're a champion or an advocate versus somebody who's potential job might be being affected by the work that you're performing.

[00:12:22] Gary: Yeah, we're recognizing that sometimes the smaller, newer companies always want like the latest and greatest and how can I use AI and throw this and throw that in there? And I just read about this, how can we use that app where some of the older I could just say bigger companies have been around for a while, are more standoffish when it comes to the newer stuff.

Even ai, some of it scares them. In that way. So I was wondering if you've run into that same situation? 

[00:12:46] Tony: Yeah, actually we have.

[00:12:48] Gary: part, but with the software

[00:12:50] Tony: The design is important part of the software for us. So what we really do is we take the requirements, we understand the use case, the expected users, and we create clickable prototypes for our clients so that they can see and experience what the software is going to work like. At least from a workflow perspective, before we even start designing code or building code. And that's actually pretty important because that helps us get early buy-in. And then the next thing to your AI point, that's pretty much. On everybody's mind. And so there's two types of people. There are people who are trying to move too fast, and the people who are moving too slow and we try to bring everybody to the center and bringing them to the center for the laggards is, if you're not doing this, at least considering how an AI workflow will work within this new application you're potentially putting yourself at a competitive disadvantage. And then other folks who want to try and. Throw everything in AI so that they can potentially reduce headcount or be more efficient. They've gotta think about what is the actual process, what's the quality of the data that they have that they're gonna be using to feed into these systems, and what's the outcome? We always say internally that AI tools need craftsmen and AI is a tool. Now people can have this idea about how it's gonna replace every developer or every artist, but it's not, it's never been the case where some tool's been so disruptive that people aren't needed. Good craftsmen will always be necessary.

And that's one of the things that we try and focus our team on, is being good craftsmen. And when they're having a conversation, focusing the conversation around the craft of the output versus the technological input.

[00:14:23] David: Are you finding that your technical people are hesitant to dive in because they're afraid they're training their next overlord? I.

[00:14:33] Tony: Yeah, I think there's some of that. I don't know if we have that too much in our team because we pretty much got them on copilot right away. And, this is a benefit to our customer. 'cause if they're more efficient and they're doing better work, in their 40 or 45 hour work week, that's a value that we're creating.

And I

think that creates a little bit of durability in the industry if you know how to master the tool. Certainly you're hearing, I'm sure you're hearing this too, where there's a lot of new engineers that are having trouble getting their first gig. Partially because everybody's remote, so there's not really the training infrastructure that there was, 15 or 20 years ago when we were coming up. But the other part of it is that companies are a little, optimistic about what they can get out of some of these AI tools. And again, it's promising. It's promising everything, right? So all of our jobs are gonna be created by, taken by AI at some point if watch the news at all.

That's what they're saying, but it's, we've been around long enough to know that these big advancements in technology, they're still people. The analogy I like to use is I came up in mechanical engineering and, I'm old enough to remember that there were rooms worth of draftsmen who were the guys in the shirt sleeves and the ties who were hand drawing the engineering schematics. And then CAD came along and completely negated the need for that. Now there's still. Really good engineers required to do anything in any manufacturing process. And I think that's gonna be the same for software.

[00:15:55] David: I have equated ai. To me, this is like the third generation of. Major upheaval in our world. When I first was out of college, we had web versus desktop, and if you were a desktop developer, you had to jump on board or you were gonna lose your job. The next one was cloud. If you were building on a, on-premise box, you were gonna lose your job.

And then now it's ai. You either get on or you're gonna lose your job. But I also equate it to the offshore. Exodus of the early two thousands where every, especially the big companies, everyone embraced offshore and just shoved everything over there. It didn't go well if you if you're old enough to remember those days, it didn't go well.

The caller support, customer support went to nothing 'cause people just didn't enjoy it. The users didn't enjoy it, the quality went down. So people started bringing them back. And I was part of that early on in my career, watching a lot of my friends lose their jobs to this kind of thing. But downsizing, consulting companies got really hurt.

It was real. And now you kinda got this hybrid model that you see very commonly. And a lot of companies will do some onshore, some offshore, but they figured it out. I equate AI as falling on a similar thing. All the big companies are just wanting to throw everything into AI so they can drop head count and do this, that and the other, and they're gonna realize, boy, that's not gonna work.

And we're gonna go through the, and the sad part is a lot of people are gonna lose this. Lose their jobs because of it. A lot of junior developers in particular, I think Zuckerberg is leading that charge, right? He's telling the world on Joe Rogan that he doesn't need, he doesn't need any junior devs anymore.

And in all honesty, when I see that, people ask me, Hey, I'm coming outta college. What should what? Should I be a computer programmer? For 20 years I've said. Yeah, absolutely. And now it's scary if you're a junior dev, that's, this is a tough world. 

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[00:18:20] Tony: I'm kind of an ever optimist as most entrepreneurs are, but I don't really see the, uh. I think the Facebook example in particular is actually gonna ruin the company more, more than it's gonna help. 'cause I think people are looking at this and saying why are we giving our money to this company? They're posting billion dollars in profits and they're firing all these people. And then they just gave bonuses to all their managers, which, it's his business to run.

But people are, I wouldn't be surprised if we see that in some sort of precipitous decline.

[00:18:48] David: Hmm. I wish that were true for a lot of companies nowadays that if you make a bad product that it goes away. But some of these tech monsters are so big that it's like, how do you get rid of them? They're like, like Google is under going to be under a major change in the next few years. Do I think they're gonna disappear?

No, no way. They're too 

[00:19:09] Tony: all still use Microsoft. We have to be, everybody still has Microsoft somewhere.

So you can't get rid of Microsoft. You can't get rid of anybody.

[00:19:16] David: It is tough, man. These com these things are like the biggest cockroaches ever. Not that I'm, that sounds horrible. For the most part, I like, I, I'm not a huge fan of meta, even though I do own meta glasses. I think that's the only product I own of theirs. But, for the most part.

Yeah. It's tough. It's a weird world, just the world we live in now. Not without diving into that too much, but it's just strange world I think.

[00:19:37] Tony: It's strange. You know what's interesting is these macroeconomic effects used to happen. On a slower pace, when we were in the 2000 to 2010 to 10 to 20, and now it seems every year we're dealing with something, new and potentially catastrophic as business owners. And it really 

[00:19:54] Gary: more than once a year, like

[00:19:56] Tony: right?

Now those.

[00:19:57] Gary: a year, 

[00:19:57] Tony: It's like the news cycle now. Such bad stuff happens. It doesn't even affect us now. I don't know, maybe it happening, maybe there's a speed at which it happens so mad we don't even have time to react, so it doesn't even, have a trickle down effect. But in the Covid era, which was we thought was gonna be the thing, it was the.com bust, it was the housing crisis.

It was the thing of the decade. And then we followed that back up with the war in Ukraine and we followed that up with, now we've got, what's happening in the federal government, with all the people who are just being unemployed and what, and now not hiring juniors because of ai. There's just so many things that are coming and the macroeconomic effects are just impossible to manage. So you just like persevere through it.

[00:20:39] David: So 

[00:20:40] Gary: of my favorites, oh, sorry.

[00:20:42] David: Yeah, 

[00:20:43] Gary: I was just gonna say one of my favorites was the rise and fall of NFTs in two months.

[00:20:47] Tony: The good, the best thing about getting old is that you realize that you don't have the interest or the mind space for any, with, any of the cool thing. I've never been on TikTok, I haven't found that. That's, I never messed with NFTs. I. I only played around with the Bitcoins and that sort of thing. Staying away from those sort of things, keeping the main thing. And so that's been helpful. But yeah, the NFTs are, that was the thing. And then there's all these, the FTX story, which I think is really good about, the kind of global fraud that everybody just brought into.

So I think it's helpful to ignore a lot of the change or, a lot of the hype cycles.

[00:21:24] David: it the tricky part is, and I think what the winners and losers is choosing which thing to ignore and which to dive into. Because like we were saying, if you ignore AI right now, like you did NFTs, like I did NFTs, I. You'd be in a really bad spot, I think in five years. And I think the difference may be simply that NFTs came and went before they got our attention.

[00:21:47] David: Ai, at least so far, it's doesn't do everything that, it's not the digital gods that they are imagining, but they are very useful. As long as you. Still have a human in the mix. I think they're highly useful. I think, are they ready to give, do things without a human in the mix? Doing that final check, did he just make that up?

Did that's where it falls apart. But if you're okay with it or it's low stakes, what am I going to eat for lunch today? This is what's in my pantry, right? Low stakes. No, it's fine. If it makes up mayonnaise in your fridge, it is not a big deal. It's not. But it still saved you some time and all that.

So I. I, I think that maybe that's the, I maybe I answered my own question, but are you have any thoughts on that? Which do you ignore? Which do you dive into?

[00:22:31] Tony: Yeah, is operating your own self-interests, so if it's something that's interesting to you, go after it. If it's not interesting, ignore it. It doesn't have to be deeper than that because if you're not really interested in the AI and you're in software development, there are still mainframes out there, there are still cobalt out there, in the government space.

So there's

always 

[00:22:51] David: the federal government needs you.

[00:22:53] Tony: But there's always, you don't have to keep up with the times. You can just choose to dig into your craft, and I think that there's always a space for that.

[00:23:02] David: I think 

[00:23:03] Tony: Maybe it doesn't pay 500,000 a year, 

[00:23:05] David: It might, if you're a Cobalt programmer right now 

[00:23:07] Gary: You are one of them. Very few. 

[00:23:09] David: magic.

[00:23:09] Tony: that's right.

[00:23:10] David: I actually know a friend of mine owns a development company that specializes in those older languages. And he's just printing money because he's found, I think in his world is banking and insurance and those sorts of things where these old companies that have these mainframes, they need this and they're like, he, I can't find enough people.

And what's really funny is it's he has hired all of the world's greatest of this older language. And so they're all over the world. It's not like he's offshore. That's literally the only place that guy is. And so he's got developers all over the world that, they come in, they're charging five, 600 bucks an hour and they fix your bug 'cause they're the only one who knows that's how this works. It's just really interesting. I like that. Most people get so bent outta shape for staying on top of things. But I like the idea of follow your self-interest. Normally self-interest is often a two-edged sword, but I like that saying, Hey, just take a breather, man.

If you want to do some Fortran, there's, it's out there, man. Just go find it. If you don't wanna do ai. Now, I will say if you want a desktop app right now, that's hard, man. But I'm sure someone's needing one 

[00:24:18] Gary: be browser based.

[00:24:19] Tony: or the future of cloud is on premise and everything is cyclical, right? So everything is cyclical. And you saw the Nvidia AI box that they built for CES, and 

[00:24:33] Gary: Yeah. I 

[00:24:33] Tony: our sick of the internet connections all the time, and we decide we wanna lock down our stuff.

[00:24:37] David: I 

[00:24:37] Gary: With the AI models, the models,

running locally versus over the cloud too. Seems a lot more

[00:24:43] Tony: Think about all the, think about all the subscription we pay, like we pay some email. How hard would it be to replicate email and have local storage of your email? Number of us wanna read it anyway. Who cares if we lose it? It's there's a use case for, this all coming back into local storage because there's no reason to be paying, so many dollars a month for terabytes when you can just have it locally and have it backed up and if the AI model's creating it, just recreate it, whatever it did. So who knows what's gonna happen, but I wouldn't say anything is out of the question.

[00:25:13] David: That's fair. Yeah. I have a theory that because of the LLMs, like Microsoft's gonna shove copilot into windows. They do it now, but it'll be more and it'll be part of the install and if you want and that AI bot Apple will do the same thing on their phone. That bot that's there will know about you personally, right?

That will, your personal information will be locked down tight inside of your computer like it is now, but it's gonna, so it'll be able to say, Hey, your favorite foods are this, you do this. So it can really answer some really cool questions. And now as an app developer, you're gonna wanna tap into that.

And the only way you can do that is if you talk to the local thing. Now you're back in. Desktop world and you're on a I guess you're still on an app, but I think there is, in the next few years, you're definitely gonna see some of that come back around. Very interesting 

[00:25:58] Tony: Yeah. Yeah. Think about all the intellectual property that we're donating to the science of ai just by helping it get a prompt, right? Or telling it something's not

good or whatever. Maybe there's some value in having it and owning your, imagine you have a 40 year career. And during that 40 year career, and it starts, let's say you're about to graduate from college and you're about to spend 40 years working on some craft, imagine if you could just own that craft as a, in your own local models and you're building up your experience and your knowledge, your training it. Then now you have something you can potentially license. Like how does Tony think about this or, we have, there's board of advisors, right? So you can theoretically put in any MBA texts and the best ideas of any, advisor that you can get and ask the questions to the LLM, but that, negates the need for a human 'cause.

It's basically research and experiential base. But we're training these things for free. 

[00:26:54] David: Or they're stealing it, one or the other, it's fine. 

[00:26:56] Gary: Yeah. It's funny that you used the word donating.

[00:27:00] Tony: donating.

[00:27:01] David: are donating, but they're also 

[00:27:03] Gary: Yeah. We also don't know we're donating.

[00:27:06] David: When DeepSeek came out, which was the, for, if you don't know the, those Chinese 

[00:27:12] David: outta nowhere, right? Not, I was 

[00:27:13] Gary: The Temu open AI. 

[00:27:15] David: the Temu of ai when they, when they came out, my favorite thing was Sam Altman saying it clearly they have stolen some of our technology.

And I'm like, dude, you stole the internet. Come on. You cannot say sour grapes 'cause someone stole some of your tech. That made me smile so much Anyway.

[00:27:34] Tony: It was open source anyway, right?

[00:27:35] David: Yeah.

[00:27:36] Gary: Yeah. Tony, through your years what would you say would be your top three pieces of advice to any new startup or a new entrepreneur?

[00:27:46] Tony: New start, for a startup or an entrepreneur, it, it changes based on the var, the position in their career. And I think it also PA changes on their age. But, so if there's somebody who's, my age, 40, mid forties liberal with the mid. The one thing I would say is that is the top three things are, one, be comfortable saying no, ration your time.

'cause it's a limited finite resource. It's the only finite resource that you have. And so I think people have this idea of fear of missing out and so they wanna say yes because they think about what could possibly be happening. But, say no more than you say yes and really only do the things that are intellectual interesting to you. The next one, I would say is keep the main thing. If you're not focused on, if there's not one outlying goal in your mind that can recenter yourself on any decision then I think you're setting yourself up for a distracted practice. And then the last thing is, define what your values are and be unwavering on those values. Never change 'em, never adapt 'em, never bend them because ultimately, while you might miss an opportunity. In the short term, over time, you can build an opportunity. You can build a better experience with people who are right-minded in the values that you have.

[00:29:00] Gary: That's good. Now, if anybody wants to learn more about you or your business, what's the best way to get in touch?

[00:29:05] Tony: The website is probably the easiest care miss.com. You can find out about our service offerings. Yeah, that's probably the best. I'm on LinkedIn. I'm not hiding my identity, so if anybody wants to reach out to me directly, they're happy to do that. But those are the best.

[00:29:19] Gary: All right. We'll put those links in the show notes too.

[00:29:22] David: Very good. Thank you so much, Tony. This has been a lot of fun.

[00:29:25] Tony: Yeah. Great. I appreciate it guys. Thanks for the time and the opportunity.

[00:29:30] David: Absolutely. And on that note, we are out for another week. We will be back next week. Thank you everybody.