The Transparent Podcast
The Transparent Podcast
Johnny Palumbo - AI Revolution and The Entrepreneurial Journey
Johnny Palumbo's entrepreneurial story starts at just 16 years old, when he won $20,000 from a high school business incubator competition. That early success planted a seed that would eventually bloom into Simplified Tech, his rapidly-growing AI consultancy now serving businesses across the US and Europe.
After studying computer engineering and computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Johnny landed an internship at BlackRock building their AI initiatives just as ChatGPT was emerging. Though Johnny initially took a full-time role at BlackRock after graduation, he resigned just five weeks later to go all-in on Simplified Tech - a decision he hasn't regretted.
Beyond AI insights, Johnny shares hard-won wisdom about entrepreneurship itself. Success requires persistence, risk-taking, and resilience through inevitable failures. As he puts it: "Starting a business is like running a marathon, but you're out of shape when you start. You have to get fit as you go, but you can't stop to rest." For aspiring entrepreneurs, his message is clear: roll the dice as many times as you can, and enjoy the journey along the way.
Hi, my name is Nick Ford and I'm the host of the Transparent Podcast. We believe in bringing transparency to the world of small business and this week I am joined by Johnny Palumbo. And Johnny, I will let you introduce yourself.
Speaker 2:Hi, nick, thanks for having me on today. It's an absolute pleasure to be here. Yeah, so my story really starts back in high school. I uh was fortunate enough to be part of a business incubator program in my hometown. Um, as a 16 year old kid, I learned all the ins and outs of starting a business, ideation, legal marketing and, uh, my group uh did pretty well. We uh we were good communicators, we were told, and we received $20,000 of funding to launch our business in early 2019. So, as a 17-year-old kid, having that experience absolutely just planted a bug for me, worked on that for a good two years, learned a lot. Unfortunately, we were shut down by the global pandemic as our business relied on the live entertainment industry.
Speaker 2:Good thing for me is I decided to go get a college degree. I went to the University of Wisconsin, where I picked up a whole lot more skills, was able to focus on a lot of my academics and really where I got my deep dive into AI. In Wisconsin, I was fascinated with artificial intelligence, machine learning. I decided to study computer engineering, computer science, so I spent my years building machine learning models, but what really fascinated me was the business use case. During my junior year of college, I got an internship at BlackRock, starting their AI initiative. This was in 2023, when ChatGPT was just starting to make the rounds and BlackRock decided to invest a couple billion dollars into it. So I was one of the first people at the company starting to build out their AI initiatives. And that summer is actually where I met my co-founder for Simplify Tech. He came to me one day at the ping pong table and said hey, you're doing some pretty cool stuff here. You think we can take these skills and serve them to small and medium-sized businesses. So that's when we started talking. Simplified Tech was formed officially in, I want to say, august of 2023.
Speaker 2:We went through a lot of trial and error of building out a dev team, wasting money on marketing and bad hires all throughout my senior year of college. After I graduated, which was last May, I decided to take my return offer at BlackRock. I told my co-founder I didn't just do 16 years of education and not take a full-time job. So I did that. He said, johnny, I'm going to make you regret it. He decided not to take his return offer, and he was right. About five weeks into my BlackRock full-time tenure tenure, I handed in my resignation, and that was last october and I haven't looked back since. So simplified tech has grown into a pretty large ai consultancy. We've got a team of around 30 to 40 now serving small and medium-sized businesses across the us and europe. We've been able to do a lot of cool things, from workflow automations to full agentic systems. We're just trying to make an impact and, like I said, going back to college, trying to find some business use cases for what I learned in AI.
Speaker 1:That's awesome, man. I love that you got into entrepreneurship at 16. So you got about a 10 year head start on me from when I started my business around 27. So that's that's awesome and I and I love that you won that uh $20,000 incubator program. You know you have to learn a lot about business at a young age. That that's, I'm sure, helping you now with your business.
Speaker 1:You know AI. Obviously everyone is talking about. You know everyone's wanting to know how to implement it. What's a smart way to implement it? Some people are, you know, pushing back on it and resisting. They're going to be probably the late adopters to the technology. But AI does have the potential for sure, to change the way we all work. You know, depending on our industries and things like that. How do you see, where do you see it going from here? Cause, like for a lot of people like me, you know I didn't jump on early in the chat GPT, just even using the basic. You know chatbot functions and stuff like that. You know I use it some now, but I'm even, you know, feeling like a late adopter already, even though this is the beginning of the wave. But where do you see it this year, the next three years, taking us?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I wish I could tell you where it's going, but my honest answer is it's going fast and the use cases will determine where it goes. I think a lot of people tend to compare this AI bubble to the dot-com bubble of the early 2000s and definitely the hype cycle is similar. I think AI relates most back to the industrial revolution. Industrial revolution was the last major rescaling in which the global workforce had to learn new skills to adapt and not fall behind to what machines were doing and replacing. I think a very common fear is that AI is going to replace a lot of the human workforce out there in the world, but for the most part it's just going to replace 95% of the busy work that we do. The magical thing about AI and what we use in our business and what we install in our clients is AI can remove 95% of the tedious busy work and allow the humans to focus on the high leverage outcomes. So AI will write your emails for you. It'll write your proposals, it'll do the first draft of almost anything you want it to. It's not going to be perfect and it does require reskilling where back in the industrial revolution, people had to learn from forging metals themselves to helping machines do it, but that human in the loop is a key part of any industry and it's going to remain so. I think businesses are going to be able to do a lot more, but the human workforce as a whole isn't going anywhere anytime soon.
Speaker 2:Johnson Huang from NVIDIA had a quote earlier this year where AI had a big boom in January and he went out there and told the people we've seen a lot of AI advancements in 2023, seen a big boom in january and he went out there and told the people uh, we've seen a lot of advancements in 2023, seen a lot more in 2024, but we are hitting a point of such rapid acceleration, uh, with all the money being poured into it, where we're estimated to see more ai advances in each quarter of 2025 than we will, than what we saw in 23 and 24 combined. So it's going fast. You need to stay on the wave, um. Fortunately, as a young guy, I uh got a lot of energy to learn about it, um, but it is important to stay up to date. Uh, you won't be left behind too fast, but your competitors will definitely believe it out of you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean, I think I would have, uh, you know, compared it to the Industrial Revolution too. You know people that are scared of it, are scared of what you said. They're scared of humans being replaced, and there are probably some jobs that may replace you know kind of low level hands on tedious type positions that are, you know more administrative roles I think you could replace, like scheduling, meetings and you know paperwork and stuff like that. I think that it's going to, you know, on the plus side of it, though, the people who aren't scared and what the way I view it is, it's going to just help us be more efficient in our jobs. We're going to be able to do more and, like you said, focus on the higher outcome, you know activities versus the more tedious administrative things, um, which to me sounds amazing as a business owner, because I definitely am constantly in pain of like, oh my gosh, I have too many administrative things that I have to deal with and I can't focus on the stuff I want to do, like you know, do the recruiting or do the, you know, follow up on, you know, client leads that I, you know, really want to connect with, um bogged down with this administrative stuff, so I'm excited to learn how to use it.
Speaker 1:Well, it does scare me a little bit, cause I want to make sure that I'm not making things worse by implementing it the wrong way.
Speaker 1:And you know I'm uh, I am using it some and, like you said it can, it can put out something about 90 percent Like I'll use it to write job descriptions and it'll put out something about like 85 percent accurate. And I see you go tweak a few things and then that saved me probably 30 minutes an hour from you know, having to write that all manually. So I can, I can definitely see the benefit of it and I don't think that people need to be scared of it, but I do think that, like you said, they need to keep up with it if they want to, if they want to keep up with their competition, because their competition is definitely investing in it and learning how to use it. So, so yeah, we'll tell us a little bit about how you know when you're implementing these kind of AI tools, how do you consult with companies on how to do it in the most efficient way, and what is kind of some of the objections that you have when bringing this to companies.
Speaker 2:That's a great question, and I want to start off by touching on something that you said there, just about wanting to make sure you do things the right way, because AI is a very new technology in the business environment, so there are a lot of growing pains that happen when you're installing it, a lot of upfront work, but it's for a lot of long-term benefit. I think one of the biggest objections we run into is just the cost. Our target demographic is large-scale enterprise solutions, so most of the time we're doing five-figure, six-figure deals. It's tough to justify that upfront because it might replace four or five salaries. That's a lot of upfront spending for a pretty new and unproven technology. As for what's the most efficient way to go and implement that, it really looks different in whatever your business is. Every business is different and that 95% of the busy work is different for every single person within the company, not just the company as a whole. So oftentimes when we walk into a consultation, we start off by saying what are your top three technological goals for this year, and that gives us a good place to start. A lot of times it's well. Our HR department has a lot of overspending. They don't get a lot of work done More often we'll see that in the marketing departments is we got five people and they put out two posts a week and they'll be medium quality posts. So it's a lot of cutting costs and it's a lot of scale.
Speaker 2:Something that we do a lot of is using AI to help companies outreach to 10 times the audience you'd be able to In the previous world of cold selling. Cold calling is the most efficient way to do it. You make 20, 30 calls a day and that's about it. With AI and some of the automations that we've built here at Simplify Tech, we enable companies to, on LinkedIn, reach out to 20 to 40 connections a day, hitting up to 400 or 500 people a month. With email, you can easily scale that to 1,000, 2,000 emails sent out per day. So, while you might have smaller response rates, if you get a 0.1% booked call rate, that's easily one to two booked calls per day, and AI has been able to make a big impact for a lot of our clients in that way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm curious with you know you mentioned that I think you said you had around 30 to 40 team members with Simplified Tech now. So when you're, y'all are obviously growing very quickly. You started this last year and you're already. You know where you find it more beneficial to engage the entire team in that process and you know get as much buy-in from team members as possible, or do you and you know your co-founder tend to think that it's better to. You know y'all come up with what the best solution is and implement that from that standpoint, and you know another way to ask the question is do you think a B plus idea that you have you know buy-in and collaboration from the whole team on is better? Or maybe an A plus idea that was come up with in a silo? Maybe just you know one or two people that are making an executive decision.
Speaker 2:That's a great question. I think buying is definitely important, but, I'd argue, much more important from the client side than from our internal side. Our team, most of our developers, are kick-ass dudes. They get good work done, they do it efficiently, but it is unfortunately silent most of the time. There's a lot you can do with AI, so if you check out our website, I tend to think it's a bit of a mess. We got a lot of different stuff going, a lot of different offerings, and while we're trying to dial it in, we also don't want to restrict ourselves to doing less than what we can do.
Speaker 2:Buying from the other side is important because, like I said, a lot of the enterprise solutions we're installing are fully custom. It is customized to your workflow, to your tech stack, and it's trying to get your business's work done. So, to get an A-plus idea, it definitely is important for me and my co-founder to be highly educated. I'm fortunate coming from a background where I built AI for one of the biggest corporations in the world, so I have a good roadmap for how that's done, how to approach that, and I think the leadership at BlackRock does a great job of really laying out a roadmap for how to do it for themselves and for their clients. What I took from that is you got to be on top of your game on any call, because AI is something people are scared of, to be honest about it.
Speaker 2:So a lot of people that we run into they want to install AI. They obviously don't know how to do it themselves. They want to install AI. They obviously don't know how to do it themselves. It does take a highly qualified person and educated in the space to be able to know just all the different ways you can approach something and what's the best way to derive the maximum business impact out of that. It's a lot of top-down leadership and it requires that on our end and from the client. So clients their motivation to get a project done oftentimes is pretty correlated to our success and making a lasting competitive advantage for them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that makes total sense and I think for you know, any leadership or business owners that are listening to this you know. I would say, with AI tools, focus on your skill set and what you're great at in your business and if you really want to implement AI, pay someone like you who knows how to implement it and don't try to do it yourself, because I could imagine it getting very messed up if someone who doesn't know what they're doing is trying to implement these kinds of tools.
Speaker 2:I'm going to cut you off there. I'd argue the opposite, Nick.
Speaker 1:Really Okay.
Speaker 2:I think AI is something to go experiment with and the technology is so accessible. Go make a custom GPT. Go try some of that. We do offer free consultations because so much of what we do in the AI space is education. A lot of our sales calls. We prefer to call them discovery calls because a lot of times clients don't know what they're looking for. There's not a bunch of competitors out there and there's not a lot of prior knowledge out there about the type of work we do. So we call them discovery calls because a lot of the time it's just educating the client about what AI they should use, and sometimes it does tend to be the case that they can do it themselves.
Speaker 2:So one of my favorite moves to pull on sales calls is I'll just tell them exactly how we do it. We'll use this technology to do this. We'll use this technology to do this part. You guys can go do it yourself if you want to figure it out. More often than not, they end up coming back to us with a check. The best way to learn about this stuff is to go try some of this stuff yourself. For LinkedIn outreach, there's a bunch of great tools out there for less than $100 a month. Email outreach is a little more complicated just because of deliverability standards, but uh, making a chat bot? There's tons of great online resources, and if you are a business owner out there listening to this, I'd urge you to go give it a try.
Speaker 1:That's awesome. Well, I'm glad that you chipped in there, because that was not the answer I was expecting and I'm glad that you said that. And, uh, you know, I I think it's. It's good to to tinker around with it and to see how it could help you. You know, that's what I've done so far is just kind of play around with it. Definitely more to explore as it can be used within transparent staffing. But you know, as you are scaling so quickly, you're bringing on new team members, you're obviously implementing new systems. What's your biggest challenge that you are having with scale, with growing?
Speaker 2:it's a great question. I gotta think about that one. I'd say we've had different challenges in different parts of the road. We are about 19 20 months old at this point. Biggest challenge year one was consistent, reliable development teams. Um, ai is expensive so we do outsource most of our labor and I think about half of it goes to subcontractors at this point.
Speaker 2:So lots of growing pains early on about finding the right teams to get the work done, both being able to provide in-house project management throughout the US, but then also getting a lot of the work done for an affordable budget for our clients. As I mentioned, a lot of this stuff is expensive to install and we want to make the biggest impact we can with whatever budget our client has. So, early on, definitely a lot of growing pains building out the team. At this point, we've got a bunch of solidified relationships. Our in-house team is growing very quickly.
Speaker 2:At this point, I think the biggest challenge is just keeping up with the industry. As a startup, we're really forced to be on top of our game. For example, last night I got an email that the OpenAI API now has O3 Mini and O1 accessible and stayed up late last night installing O3 mini into a couple of our client workflows because 93% cheaper than O1. So being able to do that, being able to be on top of it, is a very important part of what we do here at Simplified Tech, but it's a challenge. We got to constantly be on top of all the updates and trying to focus more on our YouTube channel right now and get more education out there about the type of work we're doing.
Speaker 1:That's right. Yeah, and content creation takes time too. I'm sure, with the, with the YouTube channel and making sure that's, that's been a big growing pain for sure. Yeah, yeah, well, um, that's exciting. You know, I can't imagine trying to keep up with, uh, you know, you being in AI every day trying to keep up with the trends and what the new things that are coming out. I mean, it's just changing so rapidly. I mean I, I don't keep up with it as much as you do. But like just the deep seek, like how did, how did the introduction of deep seek, you know, change anything for y'all? Does that, was that an impact? Does that change how y'all feel about things?
Speaker 2:or I'm glad you asked that. The week deep seek broke news I think it was the third or fourth week of january we booked more consultations that week than we did november and december combined. Deep seek that big deep seek announcement was what we saw really sparked a lot of fear in people. It is while people are like ai is moving fast. That was in january when people really started realizing that ai is going to pick up this year. A lot of people booked consultation calls and said what do I need to do? You tell me? I don't know anything about AI and we need to get into this.
Speaker 2:From the technological side, I think DeepSeek is incredibly exciting because they were able to replicate a lot of what OpenAI and NVIDIA are doing on much older hardware with open source software. So we don't use any DeepSeq ourselves. We are a big OpenAI advocate. We do try and stay as up-to-date as possible. But in reaction to DeepSeq, openai released their O3 mini models which, like I mentioned, 93% cheaper than 01. So the competition in the ads space is exciting. It's done a lot to accelerate the adoption within businesses across the US.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and you know, I think a lot of people now are seeing, you know, on the world stage, ai being talked about in big ways. Obviously, there's a new administration in America. They're very focused on making sure that the United States stays at the front of the AI race, and that involves NVIDIA, that involves semiconductor manufacturing. They're constantly making announcements about new investments into that in the United States. So I think that's just bringing more and more attention to it and people want to make sure that they don't miss the boat, absolutely. They see everyone else jumping on and they don't want to miss it, and so you know, I think that it's something that people are focused on. I think you're exactly right. It's going to continue to just grow very quickly and change quickly and people are going to have to adapt to it and, you know, make sure they're using it in a in a positive, productive way, that uh have a bottom line impact for their business.
Speaker 1:But, um, a lot of uh startups on new companies tend to fail in the first five years. I don't know the exact statistic that's out there right now. What percent of you know new companies? Uh succeed. But uh, when you, you know, study or look at other companies. You know new companies succeed. But when you, you know, study or look at other companies, you know obviously BlackRock, I'm sure it was invested. They are invested in a lot of different kinds of companies. You know, what do you think separates those businesses that succeed and the ones that end up, you know, having a shut of their doors?
Speaker 2:I have a bit of a optimist approach to this. I think anyone who's got rich got lucky. Um, it takes a lot of hard working, a lot of guts to get to that point, but, um, there is just unsustainable amount of luck that goes into anything. You got to be in the right spot at the right time. I like to refer to it as rolling the dice. So there's a lot more that goes into it, like willingness to take risks goes into it, but that again is just taking a risk is a gamble. It's a lot of luck. I think the people that make it are the people who roll the dice the most.
Speaker 2:I quit my job at 22 years old with not that much money in the bank account. There was a lot of fear that came with that. A lot of excitement, for sure, but a lot of fear as well. And I was just. I was determined. I said I'm gonna go roll the dice as many damn times as I can. And I think a big part that also goes into if you look at elon musk and his successes. Spacex was the third business he built. He said I'm gonna go build a rocket, and it was. Nasa and boeing were the only two companies doing that at the time and they were both public government funded entities and elon musk said I'm gonna go privately contract a rocket, build that's.
Speaker 2:That takes that's a big risk and that was insane at the time takes a ridiculous lack of fear to go be able to do that and just an incredible amount of willingness to go get the job done. So I think it does comes. It goes a lot more down to the person running the business than the idea itself. It takes a lot of guts, a lot of courage, but also there there is an undeniable amount of luck that goes into it. So, hey, like, if you're out there starting a business, roll the dice. Don't stop rolling the dice. Some of the biggest success stories in the world of entrepreneurship started with 20 years of failure. And, um, absolutely I don't know if this is going to be my, the company that gets me big. If it is great, if it's not, I'm going to keep trying and that's all we can do.
Speaker 1:I agree completely. I think that you know, not everybody is as uh doesn't have the lack of fear that you have with with taking a risk, because obviously you, you had a really good job with BlackRock and chose to walk away from that and jump with two feet. It's entrepreneurship and not everybody's willing to do that and they're not willing to sacrifice the stability of a paycheck. And you know, I think, that the people who have the greatest successes are willing to take risks. I think you can take educated risks with some protection in place. You know, make sure you're in a position where, if something does go wrong, you have something to fall back on. But you know, someone like Elon Musk didn't do that. He just went for it and was willing to risk everything to see his vision come to fruition, and that's what the most successful people do.
Speaker 1:But my favorite definition of success came from a guy named Earl Nightingale. He was like a Tony Robbins motivational speaker from another era and the way he defined success was the progressive realization of a worthy ideal. I like that, so so you're. So you know Elon Musk, for instance, as an example. He had a worthy ideal that he saw, that no one else saw, that no one else thought he could do, and he was willing to be persistent and tenacious and take risks to get to that. And he continued. He still continue to work toward that goal of sending rockets into space and he wants to colonize Mars, which is insane, but he'll probably end up doing it.
Speaker 1:Like now, seeing what he's done, it's like he'll probably end up doing it at some point. That's not now. I believe that it's possible. So I think that you know, for people that want to be successful, you have to have goals and you have to be able to relentlessly and persistent uh, you know work toward those goals and not let the failures bring you down. And, uh, you know. So if you stay focused on goals and you can relentlessly pursue them and be persistent about it, I think that's's what's going to separate the successes from the failures in my mind.
Speaker 2:No doubt, and I think a key word here is resilience.
Speaker 2:It's it's the ability to keep your head down and keep going. Like you and I both know as business owners, there's good and there's bad Um there definitely exists bad in your days without good. There's no such thing as a good day without a bad consequence. There's, it's a constant paradox around the business the more work you got going, the more work you got to do. Um, so it's keeping your head down, regardless of the successes and failures. If it's, you gotta let go of what you don't have control of um, and at the end of the day, all you can do is wake up, do the best you can and do the same the next day.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think you have to spend a lot more time celebrating the successes than you do, you know, feeling miserable about the failures. I listened to. I'm a big tennis player and Roger Federer is, you know, one of the best tennis players of all time and he gave a commencement speech that I listened to recently players of all time. And he gave a commencement speech that I listened to recently and he talked about how he won 80% of the tennis matches that he played in, but he only won 54% of the points that he played, and so he was like.
Speaker 1:his point was you can't get caught up on the losses. You know, if he got caught up on losing points, he lost half of the points, every other point he lost, but he stayed focused on the points he needed to win, to win matches, and that's why he was the greatest player of all time. And so you know, I think, that, uh, having your the right focus and the right, like you said, resiliency. You know, I played baseball in college and a really good MLB baseball player fails seven out of ten times. You know, a major league hitter that's hitting 300 is in the top class of the MLB and they're failing seven out of ten times.
Speaker 2:You just got to keep going, man. Yeah, the failures build you up, you learn a lot more from your failures than you do from your successes, completely agree.
Speaker 1:So you know you're a business owner. How do you choose how you're going to spend your time? Where is your time most valuably spent in the business now?
Speaker 2:I'm sure you can relate to this. I wear a lot of hats every day. I think absolutely. It's really hard to separate yourself from the day-to-day operations and the growth. It's really hard to separate yourself from the day-to-day operations and the growth. The day-to-day operations keep yourself afloat, but the growth is what pushes you forward. So it's getting enough work done to keep the clients happy, to keep the ship going straight. But you also got to build the ship at the same time.
Speaker 2:I think one of the greatest quotes out there about this is by Alex Ramosi. He said starting a business is like running a marathon, but you're out of shape when you start running. And you got to get in shape as you go, but you can't stop to rest. So you got to build up the muscle as you're running, except you don't know where the finish line is, or if there even is a finish line. So running a business is like that. You just got to do it as you go, focus where you need to, um, focus on the maintenance, but also focus on the growth yeah, and I would add to that delegate the things that are not your skill set.
Speaker 1:You know. You know if you're if for me, for instance, like I'm really good at sales and recruiting and client management and networking, I hate accounting, I hate bookkeeping I'm going to pay somebody else to do that, I've spent, I've wasted a lot of time trying to do that stuff myself because I didn't want to have to pay someone else to do it. But you know, let's say you're a business owner and let's just say you make a hundred and you know $50,000 a year. Calculate out what you make an hour and is it really worth your your time to go spend on a bookkeeper by pay bookkeeper less than what your time is worth to go do that and they'll do a better job than you will.
Speaker 2:Absolutely.
Speaker 1:So, so yeah, I think that, uh, finding that's a constant thing. That's changing, though, as a business owner, for me is, you know, where do I focus? Where's entrepreneurship? To kind of hear from people who have done it and and make that more real for them. So what would you share with the, the entrepreneurs out there that are listening, to kind of inspire them into entrepreneurship?
Speaker 2:Man, it's hard Like this is a hard life. I'm running, running shit. Like we spend our whole lives being told what to do. The entire educational system is built around someone is telling you what to do and you got a deliverable. People don't know how to make their own deliverables.
Speaker 2:And this is where I trace back so much credit to that business incubator I was in. I was the first class in my life I didn't care about my grade where the motivation was not get the work done, it's do the work for myself, it's get more than the work done. So I think, like my advice starts out with that is it's hard and we're all in this together and you just got to keep pushing. And then another thing is just you got to separate yourself from the successes and the failures, because your success as a business owner is never going to be linear. I'm sure you and I both is like we take the absolute minimum cut we can from our business, as the rest of the money goes right back into it. So the life of most business owners is you're rich or you're poor. There's no in between. Um, I've been poor for a while now and man, I love it uh you just gotta keep pushing forward.
Speaker 2:Success is not linear. Um you will find your way eventually. You just gotta keep pushing towards it.
Speaker 1:Yeah, my advice is just to get started. You know, whatever idea you have, go test the market, give it away to someone for free and see if it's a value to somebody. And you know, I think it's a lot easier to just go take the first step, whatever that might be. You know, if it's a service based company, go offer that service and see if it's a value. And and that's a lot easier than sitting around thinking about it and wishing that you had done it, uh, in 10 years, versus just doing it now and and being able to look back and say, hey, at least I tried it, or look at how successful I was and how much fun that was if you did jump in one more thing there is enjoy the journey, dude, it's, it's, it's a, it's a tough life, but, wow, no one ever talks about being rich.
Speaker 2:They talk about the path to get there, they talk about the journey. Um so, enjoy it as much as you can. It's like you said earlier you just got to relish successes and learn as much as you can from the failures.
Speaker 1:Absolutely Well, johnny. It's been a pleasure having you on the podcast. I appreciate you taking the time to join.
Speaker 2:Hey Nick Pleasure's all mine. Thanks a ton.