Comprehensive question. Um, so I guess I'll start near the beginning, so I'm one of the few people that is in marketing that is actually with the school for marketing. I can't say that schooling necessarily influences much of what I do day-to-day because marketing has changed so radically in the last decade, a decade and a half. But I graduated with a marketing degree, went to work at a bunch of marketing jobs that I absolutely hated. And then through just happened, Stands got exposure to the startup world, and that's really where I discovered what I think I've been looking for all of my life at that point, which was kind of the ability to do a lot of different things in a really rapidly evolving environment. So I joined a payments technology company as their marketing director, moved up to VP of marketing to eventually took over sales and became the Vice President of Sales & Marketing there and eventually had an exit within that business and thought that I would just kind of hang out for a year and go travel, ended up hanging out for three days when three organizations over the course of the of that week, reached out and asked if I could do it. I felt like joining them, want to come on board? And I said I wasn't really looking to get a W2 anymore, but I would come on as a consultant. And so that's where lead MD, which is really my primary adventure these days, was born from. It was an accidental business for me, and we've grown that to just over currently $13 million. And that was 10 years ago, so that's kind of the accidental way that I fell into owning a marketing agency.

I think the value that I've always brought as a consultant is the ability to roll up my sleeves. So, like I was doing fractional CMO work. But also implementing salesforce.com and marketing on this automation system called Marcato. And I was doing those concurrently, right? Like so advising on really the go-to-market strategy of the business, how are we gonna engage buyers, how are we gonna onboard them? What was our customer life cycle gonna look like, and at the same time building those processes into a software layer? So that was, you know, my vision as a consultant and in starting a consultancy simply because I wasn't able to find that in other organizations. And so in the early days, I was servicing all of those clients on my own, out of my spare bedroom at my house and really just kind of waking up, East Coast clients, so waking up very early and signing off super late at night cause I had clients in California as well so, in those early days, it was really just about trying to find the time in each day to dedicate to each one of those clients.

We, since those early days when I started bringing on employees, and this is 2009 right? So marketing automation is not really a thing yet. Certainly, there are no methodologies or frameworks at that point, so we productized everything, we productized how to build out a lead scoring model, how to build out lead nurturing, how to technically set up a marketing automation tool. And so all of those milestones, in effect, had a list of tasks that were associated to them, with dependencies and so forth. So productization has always been kind of a cornerstone to training new talent, getting out everyone up to speed with a degree of consistency. With that and as we've grown, we've started tackling things that are not as rigid and regimented. So creating a go-to-market strategy for a client, for example, like that's very difficult to build into a milestone with, you know, task that you have to follow in a very rigid manner. So, as things have evolved over time, we've taken more of that framework approach, giving enough guidance so that we get that consistent output in that we're serving the needs of the client, but at the same time, it allows for, you know, some leeway for the consultant working on that project to implement their own, and engage their own imagination and creativity. So definitely frameworks are incredibly important to this day. I find that they're also very valuable from a sales and marketing standpoint, everyone wants to see how you do something, and that visual representation is very powerful. From a software standpoint, we've always been absolutely just committed to the fact that we are going to use the same platforms that we consult around. And so, even as a business with three employees, you know again,2008-2009, we were using enterprise-class software, we were using salesforce.com. We were using marcedo, we're using Doc you Side. We had integrated all of these platforms together. These days we have over 60 different platforms that we used, to run this business and it gives us kind of that sandbox and just the space to play and understand those technologies before we consult on them for our clients.