In this podcast episode, I was interviewed by Matthias Smith.
We discuss my journey into entrepreneurship, my retirement industry ventures, and my journey visiting 10 states in 4 weeks and meeting 200-300 successful entrepreneurs.
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Full Transcript
Matthias Smith: Awesome. Well, Rand, good to be here in Salt Lake with you and on the standalone podcast episode to talk business, buying, operating, and just ETA community stuff.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, it’s gonna be really fun. Thanks for putting this together. This is Matthias bringing us together to talk about podcasts on this podcast.
Matthias Smith: Yep.
Rand Larsen: And here for SMBash. And we’re pumped to see a bunch of people for more community stuff. It’ll be fun.
Matthias Smith: Absolutely. How’s it traveling in?
Rand Larsen: It was good. It was good. Like normal flights. Nothing to complain about.
Matthias Smith: Nice. Yes.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, I have trouble, like, working on airplanes, but doing a bunch of preparation for what we’re gonna be talking about today here, man.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, well, you’re wearing the shirt for this, the Rand Run. So let’s dive right in. I’d love to hear about your background pre-ETA community building, business, buying stuff. Can you talk about it from the ground floor, you know, college onward? And then from there, can you segue into the SMB space?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah. I think a lot of people start these podcasts and they were, like, entrepreneurial from a very young age. They were starting lemonade franchises. And I wasn’t really that way until college. I’d probably say that the youngest I started in the general entrepreneurial space was just investing. I started investing when I was 16 in stocks. In college, I tried to make that a thing and day trade, which did not go well. I lost a bunch of money. Do you have any good stories?
Matthias Smith: Of stocks that you day traded?
Rand Larsen: I have a couple. I was a part of our—I went to Boise State, and I was part of our student-managed investment portfolio where we managed, like, 300, 400 grand for a variety of investors who wanted to basically give a bunch of college kids free money to play with. And I made two large investments there. One went really well, one went kind of poorly. The one that went really well was really just lucky. It was a triple-leveraged S&P 500 tracker. So I think the stock ticker was UPRO. I was like, well, if the S&P 500 is so reliable and steady and always goes up, why don’t we just get three times that? That does not work for a bunch of reasons—it is pretty dangerous, especially in turbulent times where you’re not really certain that things are going to go well. It just does not work like that. But I got lucky, and we were in that investment for six months, sometime in 2017 to 2018. And we ended up with a 30, 40% gain. My professor—we switched professors, and the first professor was laissez-faire. He was just like, yeah, go for it. Invest in whatever you want, sure, I don’t care. And then the next professor came in, he was like, whoa, what the fuck are we doing?
Matthias Smith: Right?
Rand Larsen: And I was like, what do you mean? And then he told me why this idea had paid off, but it was a bad idea. And then the other ticker was a chemical company, which I was like, well, yeah, everyone needs chemicals. But for reasons that I don’t know, it just took another 30% dip during a similar period.
Matthias Smith: Interesting.
Rand Larsen: Chemours, or it was a spin-off of a larger chemical company.
Matthias Smith: Buying something that’s doing, like, 3x or a magnifier of the S&P in turbulent markets, to some degree, is almost like putting an extra turn of EBITDA leverage on a project-based revenue SMB. And we’ll get there, right?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, but it’s just much more dangerous, right? Well, and then, you know, as we’re moving forward, I got a corporate job out of college, didn’t really like it. Moved to startups with more—I don’t know, I thought, you know, I’m a generally ambitious person. So I started—the first startup I joined was a company called Pharmacann, a very small team selling cannabis to seniors to solve things like arthritis, dementia, and psoriasis. Went okay there, but left there, started making—started my own company making documentaries about seniors in retirement communities to preserve life stories and legacy for future generations of people’s families. I could tell you about how that panned out. I started B2C selling to the grandparents. Didn’t work, went to their children. They loved the idea, but it still didn’t work. And I actually pivoted to a B2B model where the plan was to get other videographers work because the idea of these is really good. And what you can do is you can take the videos, the documentaries that you actually film in the retirement communities, do them for the residents for free, and give those materials—give marketing materials back to the residences to use on their social media pages, on ads, as well as, you know, these facilities give 30 to 90 tours a month to prospective residents and their children. And so this, you know, these documentaries would have been a valuable proposition for them that no other retirement community had around them. Super passionate about that, and it worked.
Matthias Smith: Okay, how did you come up with the idea?
Rand Larsen: You know, I don’t know. You just iterate until you find a good customer. The idea was good. Everyone told me they loved it, and then no one would pay for it, which was frustrating. So yeah, it’s very simple. You start scratching off customers. Okay, can’t sell to the grandparents. Children are still difficult because they can’t convince their grandparents to buy into it. But you can absolutely give away a free product that turned into marketing for someone else because, you know, you raise those communities’ occupancy rate by a 70 to 80% difference—for those, that specific gap is hundreds of thousands of dollars in profit for most.
Matthias Smith: Most communities everywhere love free.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. COVID killed that business pretty quickly. We were in Washington State. We got hit very early on by COVID, and, you know, no one knew what was going on with COVID. No one knew when it was going to end. And in July, I was finally like, this is not gonna end anytime soon. Started figuring out the next thing. Heard a podcast, Brent Beshore, talking about buying companies. That sounded a lot easier than starting companies.
Matthias Smith: Which pod was that you’re asking?
Rand Larsen: That was My First Million.
Matthias Smith: Oh yeah?
Rand Larsen: Yeah. Still like those guys. Fantastic pod, listen to all the time. So listened to that. Jumped on Twitter, found a bunch of other people, which is where, you know, other M&A people are. Which is where the next part of the journey is—where I meet a guy named John Wilson who’s hiring an entrepreneur-in-residence to train someone how to buy and run companies, either for him in his portfolio or to invest in them.
Matthias Smith: What year was this from a timeframe standpoint?
Rand Larsen: This was 2021.
Matthias Smith: So I got on Twitter March of ’22. So this would have been the year before me.
Rand Larsen: You said you got on Twitter March of 2022. Yeah, then this was the year before you, pretty much exactly. I think I started working for John in March or April.
Matthias Smith: Got it. Okay. So you get on Twitter, you kind of go down the rabbit hole of sorts.
Rand Larsen: Yeah.
Matthias Smith: You connect with John, and then what happens next?
Rand Larsen: I move out. I moved to Ohio. I was born and raised in Washington State, so it’s a 44-hour drive, and you lose the timezone difference. So I moved to Ohio.
Matthias Smith: Why Ohio?
Rand Larsen: That’s where John is. That was, you know, where he’s buying and running companies—plumbing, septic, HVAC, skilled trades businesses.
Matthias Smith: So the job had to be—
Rand Larsen: Oh, yes. Yeah, yeah. Well, initially when we were talking, there were others—I’d sort of beat out other private equity people who could actually help him buy companies because I had this weird—He wanted to start, own, and operate a podcast.
Matthias Smith: And—
Rand Larsen: And, you know, I had this weird background with videography and making documentaries, which I think he liked. And then the other private equity people who were applying for the position wanted it to be remote. And I was like, that is a stupid decision to have this cool of an opportunity. I’m like, I don’t care if you give me the job. Whoever gets it should be in person, though, because it was a phenomenal opportunity. I still think I probably got dealt an incredible hand that no one else got. There are other people hiring entrepreneurs-in-residence, but it’s a couple of people—like Kelsey Larrick, Michael Girdley—but I don’t think many other people got the amount of access that John gave me.
Matthias Smith: And, like, think of it, in all honesty, I mean, who wouldn’t want Rand Larsen instead of, like, Archibald Proctor the Third, right? Like, the PE guy from Wharton or Harvard. You’re just more fun to work with, honestly.
Rand Larsen: You know what? I appreciate you saying that. It’s interesting when I think back because I look back and, like, even something—the early acquisitions anonymous episodes—I was like, guys, can you please spell out what EBITDA is? I don’t even know how to spell that to Google it online. Can you please tell me what the acronym is? And that is the lack of information that I had going into acquisitions. I knew nothing interesting.
Matthias Smith: So let’s segue back for a second. You went to college in Idaho. When I think about Idaho, I think about Napoleon Dynamite and, like, “Hey, Tina,” whatever the phrase is. What is it like living in Idaho? And then also, you’re in a frat, too. I was looking at your LinkedIn to prepare for this. Any good stories that you can share there? I know there’s kind of a code of conduct, right? What happens in the frat stays in the frat. But what got you to do that? And then just Idaho living.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, Idaho living first. I mean, it’s super outdoorsy, lots of kayaking, a couple of fun lakes there, boating. Very, very outdoorsy. Probably my favorite place to park this—that’s a part of the city. Good, decent hiking. Tons of foothills around the area. Really like Boise. And for the fraternity—so, I don’t know. There’s fun stories. I was our risk management chair, which meant that, yeah, I had to deal with all of the shit that came down from any type of issue.
Matthias Smith: So you’re that guy.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was—I don’t know—I was bulking during the time, so I was literally the big guy in a leather jacket who was standing at the front door deciding who gets in and who doesn’t.
Matthias Smith: Interesting.
Rand Larsen: And some nights that was much more difficult than others, like on Halloween or any type of large party. We called them sober brothers, and I was sober most of the time.
Matthias Smith: Was there a pretty big Greek scene at Boise?
Rand Larsen: No, no, no, not really. The fraternity I was in was Tau Kappa Epsilon. And, you know, a lot of other colleges have actual houses dedicated to them. We just had people’s duplexes.
Matthias Smith: Interesting.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah.
Matthias Smith: So I went to Wisconsin-Madison. You may or may not know, I actually rushed a fraternity. Long story short, I decided not to. But there were a couple that got disbanded or disbarred from campus while I was there.
Rand Larsen: It’s a problem, man. It’s a problem. There’s some cult-like behavior that goes on. We didn’t do anything nefarious, certainly.
Matthias Smith: No, yeah. When you were there, no one died, I take it.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, no one died. No one died.
Matthias Smith: Good.
Rand Larsen: That I know of.
Matthias Smith: Yeah. So going back to—so, okay, pivoting from frat life to being the entrepreneur-in-residence working for John. What was the day-to-day like doing that? What did you do?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, I’d probably say there were maybe three main activities we did every day. One was honestly just learning and shadowing John. I shadowed a lot of seller calls. I obviously didn’t play a part in negotiations, but taking notes and watching John go through the process of acquiring a company, sitting in on phone calls, that kind of stuff. Another part was just Own an Operator. We were getting it off the ground, so that was a large project. And then, early on, I was in kind of a do-everything role. So we let go of our recruiter at the time. I stepped into those shoes for a month or two and just started hiring plumbers, drain techs, that kind of stuff. Let’s see. And later on, we got into actual operations. So it’s hard to say because that role had to do a little bit of everything. But eventually, we bought three companies, like, six months apart from each other, which is a ton of work. During that time, I built and documented everything that we were doing so we could basically hand off my role to anyone who wants to be the new acquisitions assistant to John.
Matthias Smith: So making SOPs, just—
Rand Larsen: Yeah, we have a 55-page document I built to walk someone through everything that you could want to know about basically helping John buy companies. We built our SOP or a wiki sort of, but it was really just a Google Sheet with a timeline of when do you get certain pieces of seller’s information—like bank statements, tax returns—when do each of those things fall, when do you need them, and when do they need to be communicated by the bank? And we used a lot of Live Oak’s information to create our own organized system of it because a lot of times when you work with a bank, it’s like, “Hey, by the way, now we need this.” And then you get that, and they say, “Okay, now you need this.” And you have to go back to the seller, say, “Hey, now I need more information. Why didn’t we just do this last week?”
Matthias Smith: Basically, the process is piecemeal, right? Because they want one thing, then that—
Rand Larsen: Leads to the next versus just getting all of it at once. It’s just an annoying process, and it should have been done better. And now we built it to know all of the information we need immediately. So instead of a bank coming to us and requesting something and us going to the seller to get it, we would already have it. So we could email the bank the same day and then wait for them to come back to us a week later and ask for the next thing, which we had already gotten also.
Matthias Smith: Now, were these SOPs all written, or were any of them Loom videos? I know now some people talk on Twitter about making the Looms to train the VAs, and they can train the next VA, and before you do it, you have the Russian army of VAs—
Rand Larsen: Helping you buy an egg carton company. That’s a cool story—Sarah Miller. Yeah, we did a bunch of Loom videos as well. I’d probably say that the big three core pieces were maybe two or three Loom videos, but they were an hour each, walking through each stage of an acquisition process or just explaining it. And then a second part was the large Google Doc, which was just a ton of writing. And then the third piece was a Google Sheet, which again was just, “Hey, here’s the pieces of information checklists, when you need to get it, by which stage of the information-gathering process you need to get that information.”
Matthias Smith: Got it, got it. So you went from working for—so one thing I want to cover is you went from working for John to starting the peer groups thing.
Rand Larsen: Yeah.
Matthias Smith: And then there is a transitional period between there where you’re doing ghostwriting stuff. Walk through that. What brought you from being the entrepreneur-in-residence for John to pivoting to the ghostwriting and then doing the community-building stuff now?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah. This is a funky transition. So the plan when I was working with John was to go buy and run a company and for him to invest in me to do that. I started that journey, and I started it prematurely. I didn’t have the amount of cash to retain the amount of equity that I would want in an acquisition. Buying a company, going through five years of work, and giving away 80, 90% of the equity to someone else just didn’t make any sense to me.
Matthias Smith: Right. And I think you probably have to be the one guaranteeing it too, right?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s—it just didn’t make any sense to me versus me just starting my own business, making another 100 or 200k to then go and actually put down most of a down payment and give away 10% equity instead of 80%.
Matthias Smith: And doing more of the common preferred model with you being the majority common holder and preferred being different.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah. So anyways, I started that prematurely. I was like, okay, I got through the LOI process and basically saw, you know, if I got into dead deal fees, I would have to go back to a W-2 and work to recoup that for another year until I go buy another company and restart the process. I was like, this is not a smart thing to do because dead deal fees would set me back years if that happens.
Matthias Smith: And, like, in all honesty, who wants to go back to a W-2? I mean, you have to—
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah. Now it’s much more difficult before I go back. So one skill I had was just social media, media writing. I hit up a bunch of friends, asked them, slowly built a small clientele. I tried to scale that business a little bit, which just meant hiring other writers, which proved to be incredibly difficult. Good writers are very, very hard to find. It’s hard to get them to care about a client’s work. But, you know, I realized at that time, once I was like, okay, this is gonna be a very difficult business to scale, I had this other thing which I had been doing for a while. While I was working with John Wilson, I took a vacation, went home to Washington State, and I met up with a buddy who had recently bought a large commercial HVAC installation company. I go to visit him and just—
Matthias Smith: Have curiosity to pop in. Is this someone on Twitter that I know?
Rand Larsen: They’re not active. No, no, you probably do not know them. Okay. So anyways, I go to meet this person. I’m not gonna say their name because, for everything I’m about to say, I’m not gonna say their name. They were going through an incredibly difficult period of their business. They had a large exposure to construction and installation and worked with a ton of builders. I think interest rates had just risen at this time, which was spring 2022. The first interest rates rising had just been announced, and that caused builders to pull jobs. It caused them to pay him even slower on work that he had already performed. This leads to a ton of cash flow problems.
Matthias Smith: Yep.
Rand Larsen: You know, he’s five, six months into the acquisition, so he’s just getting punched in the mouth with all of these pains that keep happening. And I’m talking with him. We’re at a diner, just chatting. And it’s very clear within 10, 20 minutes of talking that he’s in distress. And he starts bringing this stuff up to me. And after a while, I’m like, how can I help this person? I’m just trying to act like a therapist, right? Just asking him, how does he get out of it? And after a while, I’m like, I can’t help this person. I was managing our septic and drain company at the time. We were doing a quarter of his sales.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: And, you know, I have no ownership, no equity in the business. So he’s just at a completely different stage. I say, “Hey, man, you need other people who actually relate to you, who share these similar problems with you, and talk to them regularly because I am not the person who’s gonna help you solve these problems.” And he says, “Yes, I need other people.” But he didn’t have them at the time. I had a small following on Twitter. I was like, “Well, would you like it if I tried to get people together for you?” And he said, “Yes, that would be amazing.” I sent out a few tweets. I’m sure if you scroll far enough back, you can find them. And that’s how we started the first peer group.
Matthias Smith: Got it, got it. Super, super cool story. So basically trying to help someone solve a problem where you yourself did not have the solution at hand, but you knew the people collectively that were in that industry that would be okay. And that was the impetus.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. I think that first—it’s like, I didn’t even know what a peer group was back then. And I think that first peer group had just a very random collection of people who—it was mostly just a business therapy call. We’ve moved on to something way more professional now. I was gonna say way more—just more professional now. More structured on feedback and getting advice and helping each other run better companies versus just complaining to each other. But there’s an element where, you know, you do one event with another business owner who understands you about something shitty happening in your company.
Matthias Smith: Yeah. And so the comment you mentioned just while you were talking on that point, I was looking at prime over time here, and it’s jumped. I mean, I remember back a couple of years ago—my phone’s being slow, so I don’t want to sidetrack the podcast—it was like three and a half, and now it’s eight and a half. And so if you’re taking out debt when prime is three and a half or four, and then it goes up, if you don’t have a good debt service coverage, you’re gonna be—
Rand Larsen: And this was a maximum. You know, he took out every dollar of debt he possibly could.
Matthias Smith: Wow.
Rand Larsen: Yeah.
Matthias Smith: Okay, so the next thing I want to talk about—so the peer groups you covered, how you started that. How has that developed since you started that?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah. So we started that first peer group, we ran it for free for a little over a year, started another peer group, ran that one for free, and eventually, you know, when it came time to move from the ghostwriting business to the next thing, when I realized the ghostwriting was not gonna work—the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze is actually the appropriate term. It’s just, you can grow it, it’s just a ton of work.
Matthias Smith: When was that from a timing standpoint? Like, year, month?
Rand Larsen: Man, I honestly can’t remember it. Sometime later 2022.
Matthias Smith: Got it. Okay.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, that was around the same time. It was January 2023, I think. I told myself I was gonna take the peer groups a lot more seriously, and it took me a while to actually do that and to actually get out of doing the ghostwriting, but that was around the same time. It was January 2023 when I at least wanted to make the transition to the peer groups. Sorry, your question—there was more on the transition.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, yeah. So more on the transition side. Like, going from the ghostwriting to the peer groups and having that become what it is now, where you have multiple ones that are built out. What did that look like as far as building, getting the traction in the peer groups, and making that pivot, if that question makes sense?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, the—I mean, the first thing I did was I was like, well, is this worth being the thing? And I think I had started—it was just those two peer groups. I was like, well, I’ve been doing this for these guys—one peer group for 12, 14 months, another peer group for six, eight. And I said, well, if I’m gonna figure out if this is a good business model, some percentage of people in these groups are gonna pay me. And so that’s the validation right there—actually charging for the thing that you want to build a business on. And it works. One peer group was a little bit more of a struggle. I had to really convince people. Another one was just like, yeah, sign me up, let’s do this. And then after that, moving even deeper, it just goes into the classic, I don’t know, put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other story of being a business owner. I’m like, okay, try to launch new peer groups. You probably can—again, you can scroll through most of my Twitter and see, okay, this is when I really started launching it. Yeah, I launched three peer groups at the same time. I expected them all to go really well. I’m pretty sure they all failed. It’s such an interesting thing that I’ve learned—what makes a good peer group and how the ones that I thought were going to succeed easily totally failed. Not totally failed—they just weren’t good enough for people to pay to commit to.
Matthias Smith: I feel like that’s kind of the classic story of entrepreneurship to a degree. Like, peeling the onion back a layer, right? Sometimes you have an idea, you want to see if it’s gonna work, and you just have to test it. Unless you’re buying a business, when you’re starting something, you don’t always know if there’s product-market fit. And it sounds like that was what you were working to figure out. You got the three going, and some worked, some didn’t.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It is just—does it actually make money? I think everyone has ideas of great businesses, and I have the same thing all the time, but the proof is, does it actually make money? Especially when you’re getting it off the ground. You can see a bunch of people’s business ideas on Twitter, and the number of times that they actually charge for something and make money from it is—I’m guessing it’s lower than the amount of ideas people put out on the internet.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, it’s definitely interesting. I mean, in starting my business—not to change this from talking to you—but you find something where you think there’s a market, and you kind of have to go through the skill factor, getting your name out there. I imagine that’s the same with the peer groups. You had one person that was kind of the champion, like, “Hey, this is going well.” Then they tell their friend, they tell their friend, and before you know it, it’s a snowball effect where you get the critical mass going. Was that kind of what it was like with the peer groups?
Rand Larsen: No, not as much as I would have thought. That just hasn’t happened as much as I would have thought. I think a lot of times these peer groups do get built out of word of mouth and authority and reputation—like EO, YPO, Vistage have a ton of that. But even they do a lot of sales and marketing. Vistage chairs are aggressive. Pretty much all of them are aggressive. They push hard. They are salespeople. EO, I don’t know, maybe a bit less so. They do a bunch of free dinners, and I’m not really sure how YPO markets or sells, but Entrepreneurs’ Organization, I think they’ve got either 4,000 or 14,000 members nationwide.
Matthias Smith: Wow.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, it’s big. I think their average yearly fee is $8,000, I think.
Matthias Smith: Wow. What is your goal for these peer groups? What do you want it to become?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, that’s a good question.
Matthias Smith: I sort of put you on the spot there.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, well, there’s a balance of having a big, audacious goal and doing what I actually need to do every single day, which is literally DM people who I think would be great fits to be in a peer group with each other, start them, run them on a free trial, be engaged, ask people for feedback on how they’re going, actually build the next peer group. That takes 99% of my focus, and even picking my head up to think about what lies down the road five years—I’m like, so little. It feels like it doesn’t matter right now because the actual work it takes to get to wherever is in five to ten years in the future is way more micro—like me sprinting every single day versus me pulling myself out and thinking about much. Maybe that’s the wrong mentality, but that’s the way my mindset is currently—just building the next peer group. But to answer your question, yeah, I think it’d be awesome to build something like EO. It’d be awesome. Probably closer, a little bit niched down. We’ve got the Silver Tsunami happening. Pretty much all of our members are acquisition entrepreneurs. And in my opinion, acquisition entrepreneurs probably need the most help with other people who are doing similar things, right? Because there’s a certain level of ambition, risk-orientedness that it takes to go out and buy a company or multiple.
Matthias Smith: Yeah. And if you think about someone going from a W-2, working in corporate finance, buying a plumbing company, they presumably have no to minimal transferable experience.
Rand Larsen: Yeah.
Matthias Smith: And the other people in the group are ones that are maybe a little bit further along, do have that experience, so they can tell them, “Hey, these are going to be roadblocks or surprises that will come up.”
Rand Larsen: Yeah. And there’s a few elements there. Number one is someone who’s used to corporate W-2 life, right? Jumping into business ownership—just business ownership in general. The second part is acquisitions, which has its own dynamic—you’re a new person, new company, you usually have to have an ongoing relationship with a seller and have to make them happy, even though most of the time they’re not going to be making decisions that you as the new business owner agree with. You have to get buy-in from the team. Just the acquisition part of operations is enough of itself to be something different from EO, where you’re an acquisition entrepreneur. Sure, you’re going to be put in a peer group of other people who have been running their businesses, probably mostly, certainly not with a $5 million personally guaranteed SBA loan on their balance sheet. That’s very, very different. And then there’s the third element of you buying into a plumbing company where you were the corporate accountant, and now you’re in plumbing, and you don’t know what that is. And you need to talk to other acquisition entrepreneurs who are buying skilled trades businesses.
Matthias Smith: Interesting.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, it’s levels there.
Matthias Smith: So my thought is, I would imagine, given how many people you’ve worked with in these peer groups, that you’ve learned a lot about different industries. What are, just super high-level, some takeaways—if I don’t know, this might be a corny, generic question—from running these about things that you didn’t envision or that you wouldn’t have known about what it’s like being an operator, or that these people have shared in these peer groups? Just surprise things that come up running a business.
Rand Larsen: Man, there are some really difficult topics that I would have never thought could happen as a small business owner. I’ll move through them briefly, but these are things that are not common in our peer groups, but these have happened—like buying a company and then five months later an employee dying on the job. And how do you deal with that? There’s actually an article on my website, smbcommunity.co, that goes through an entire dialogue between me and a towing company owner who had an employee die on a job site—exactly what he was doing minute-to-minute because, what the hell do you do? And again, you just acquired this company five months ago. You barely know towing at this point. What the hell do you do? And a couple of the answers there were, well, you call the other towing company owners you know and ask them for their support. And this is an industry where, if you’ve been in towing long enough, you know you will have an employee die. And you have to figure out how to deal with it. What that means is you have certain—imagine buying a company and not knowing that after an employee workplace accident, you have either 16 hours to report something where, if it’s an eye injury, it’s reported at a different timeline than it would be a hand or foot injury. If it’s a death, it’s a much shorter timeline—I think it’s four or eight hours—that it needs to be reported to OSHA, or you run into an entirely different liability where, oh, you delayed getting back—it looks nasty now. And this is something that you acquired this business, you had no idea that this is something you were supposed to do. Luckily, the specific business owner handled all those things and had good advisors to help him walk through that process legally—exactly what he needed to do during.
Matthias Smith: These things, for something like that too—I mean, isolating the legalese and OSHA—you have the personal side, right? Trying to support the family of the person that died, which is huge. Death is terrible. But then you have the business side, and how do you balance those, I imagine, right?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah. And the article goes into that balance because it’s tough. You have to do the best of what you can for that family. And there’s also a chance that they sue you for negligence. In this case, there’s almost a 100% chance that the towing company owner is in the right and he did everything he possibly could to prevent this situation. But this is just a dangerous industry. And then the other couple of things on my mind—what are the other things in business ownership that are either difficult or you wouldn’t expect? One is just partnership dissolutions, which are brutal. I think they’ve happened twice in our peer groups now. And it is just—they come from stories of people knowing their business partners for 15 years, and it just doesn’t work out. Someone stops doing what they said they were going to do or potentially goes through a mental health struggle.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: And that impacts the business relationship. And then you, as the business owner who’s actually involved and committed, have to deal with that, which means taking on more debt, buying a partner out, getting investors, and also negotiating by kicking someone else out of your business or getting a lawyer to help you fight with another person’s lawyer. It can get nasty. That’s another one. And then there are a few others I could say, but I just won’t because I don’t want this to be too depressing.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, right. And just to keep things on track here—so pivoting from people dying at towing companies to something more positive. You are what I describe as a road warrior.
Rand Larsen: A road warrior?
Matthias Smith: You’re big on driving. My whole thing is if something’s farther than four hours, four and a half hours, it’s gonna be a plane ride for me. It’s not gonna be a car ride. There’s some math involved there, depending on if you have to connect or what airport it is. But anyways—so last fall, you drove 10 hours from Akron, Ohio, to Columbia, Missouri, for Main Street Summit. Talk about, just super high-level, your love for driving. I mean, you just seem to be always driving to these meetups.
Rand Larsen: I don’t know. I just like driving. There’s no reason or rhyme for it. I balance it with both doing—you know, if it’s 10 hours to Missouri, it’ll be three hours of work stuff, which is just me putting a bunch of calls on my calendar of either prospects or just getting ideas from current peer group members on how I can improve what I’m doing. So a few hours there, frankly, a couple of hours of just popping some music, just having some fun.
Matthias Smith: What sort of music do you like, man?
Rand Larsen: It depends. Honestly, whatever—like, the hippity-hoppity stuff. I don’t know.
Matthias Smith: Does it depend where you’re driving? City versus highway?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, cities—I end up turning down the music, especially if it’s a large city. I’m just like, I need to pay attention. It’s one of those things where I’m like, I can’t see, I need to turn down the music. But highways, yeah, I pretty much just go hard.
Matthias Smith: Got it, got it. So we’re now going to pivot to the shirt.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, let’s talk.
Matthias Smith: Talk about the Rand Run, just from a super high-level—like the impetus behind it and how the idea came to mind.
Rand Larsen: Yeah. So for everyone maybe listening to this, if you go to the video, you can see me wearing a shirt of—I promise you this is not North Carolina.
Matthias Smith: Do we have the shirt on video?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, this is not North Carolina. This is—
Matthias Smith: It’s also not California.
Rand Larsen: Well, it’s definitely not California.
Matthias Smith: You’ve seen all my suits in California.
Rand Larsen: Oh, yeah, yeah, I have. Yeah. I hope that acquisition goes well. Good luck with the water rights. So anyways, this was the original planned Rand Run. The way it started—it was a joke from Reg Zeller on Twitter. I don’t know if it was a joke. He posted something about local communities—I was inspiring. I was like—and I’ve always had this idea of, why aren’t people doing local SMB owner meetups everywhere? Every single time I’ve gone to an event or a local meetup, it’s been really fun. I don’t know why people don’t do it, especially—I’m like, you guys are down the road, right? You’re in Madison, right? There’s 10 of you guys, and you could talk with each other, but why is no one doing it? So anyways, I had this idea. Reg commented on me to help the Denver event—Kyle Durstler’s Denver small business owner meetup event there. And I helped. I flew out. I mostly just did the promotion of it.
Matthias Smith: This was the Denver one back in February, right?
Rand Larsen: Yeah.
Matthias Smith: Okay.
Rand Larsen: Yeah. So I just did a bunch of promotion for it, let a bunch of people know about it. There were a variety of ways I did that, but generally, it was just emailing and DMing people, saying, “Hey, come to this meetup. It’s gonna be fun.”
Matthias Smith: And that one had, like, what—30, 40, 60?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, 60 to 70 was the number.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, yeah. People were coming and going at different times, but that was packed.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, it was fantastic. Shout out to Kyle Durstler, Zen Windows. He’s the guy.
Matthias Smith: The Viking.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, he was the guy with the Viking beard. That’s how I regularly introduce him.
Matthias Smith: I’m just gonna—next time I see him, I’m gonna call him the Viking.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah.
Matthias Smith: I don’t—
Rand Larsen: I don’t know if he enjoys that so much. I think he tolerates it when I say it. But anyways, we do—so we do this event, and I meet up with one of the guys in my peer groups, and all my peer groups are virtual. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone in person. And I see this guy, and this is—I don’t know, this story is more important to me. He left our peer groups. The reason he left wasn’t because of any problem with the peer groups or with the other members. He left because he was getting out of his business. He had gone through the gamut. He was the W-2 corporate sales guy. He bought a company for all of the good reasons that you’ve read on Twitter. And he ended up struggling with the journey a lot, for a variety of reasons. But for the most part, it was—the stress was tough for him. The time away from his family was tough for him, and he didn’t see the financial reward as really worth the amount of pain that he was going through. And he was in a bit of a tough industry, which was hard to scale. It’s one of those interesting niches, but very hard to scale out of because it’s a niche.
Matthias Smith: Can you share the industry?
Rand Larsen: No, it’d be too direct, especially since I met him in Denver. You’d know who he is. So anyways, he gets out of his business, he successfully places a GM, and—dude, I’m super, super happy for him. He’s going to go raise his family. He’s got a new kid on the way, and he’s going to raise his family. He’s going to take a couple of months, and he’s going to go back to a W-2. He’s got a minority ownership in the business that he bought that he’s going to retain. And as long as that GM stays around, I assume everything’s going to go well. And I see him in person—he was the second person ever to sign up for our peer groups. He was the second person ever. And I was like, man, I’ve seen this guy go through the entire gamut of the small business ownership journey. And it was just a super cathartic moment meeting him in person. Very special, very happy. We had a good, long conversation, and at the end of it, I was like, “Dude, I want to meet your family. Let’s go. I want to live with you.” I was like, why do I feel this way? And it just brought a new perspective of local relationships, which I think are incredibly powerful, especially being able to build with others and talk with other people who are in front of you and around you—not just on a Zoom call. I love the virtual peer groups, but the in-person stuff is just a different experience in a really, really positive way. And again, the question on my mind is, why isn’t everyone doing this? I was like, okay, well, I’ve got time. My business is literally called SMB Community. It’s the only thing I care to invest in. I’ve got a great incentive to grow the SMB community. My business is literally just community-focused. What was that Charlie Munger quote? “Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the result.” I don’t see a lot of people who are incentivized to grow the community side of what we’re doing on Twitter. And I thought, hey, this makes sense for me. If I meet enough people, I can probably build a couple of peer groups out of it. And this has probably been a really, really fun series of events, and it’s probably going to kick up a lot of dust, and it’ll be a really interesting experience either way, whether it pays off or it doesn’t. And that’s sort of how I started it. And from there, it was more about executing, which just meant planning the road trip and reaching out to a bunch of folks.
Matthias Smith: Wow.
Rand Larsen: Super.
Matthias Smith: Incredible. You know what, in all honesty, what you’ve built with these meetups is nothing short of incredible. Just seeing the community that’s coming together. In each of these pictures I saw last night as I was preparing for this, I was watching a video of one in Toronto where it was some guy’s truck, and everyone was checking out the truck. I don’t know the whole backstory.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, I can tell you, man. I took notes on this for every single city—of the interesting things—and this was one of the most interesting things that happened. So this was Toronto, and Toronto had—man, this is crazy. I’ve got family in Toronto, and originally we were gonna do it at a bar, and a couple of people reached out and said, “Hey, man, that bar is gonna be packed on Thursday. You’re bringing 40, 45 people—that’s not gonna work. It’s gonna be way too packed. No one’s gonna be able to find each other. Even with us all wearing name tags, it’s gonna be way too busy.” So I look for a new event. My cousin—he’s a subcontractor for a security company, and that means he does a bunch of events, and he knows some managers of local bars around the area. So he hooks me up with one of them—I think it was Black Lab Brewing in Toronto. And we went to that event, right? So that’s one thing—we changed the original event that we went to.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: And then at that event, everything goes really well. Meet a bunch of people, just have a good time. And then towards the end of the night, I’m getting—it’s like 8:30 p.m.—the event was supposed to be over by 8.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: But we stayed for a while because everyone was having a fun time. And this guy walks in, and he’s got the thickest French-Canadian accent you’ve ever heard. I’ll spare the audience from trying to do an impression, but it was unbelievable. And he walks in, he’s like, “What’s this going on?” Okay, I did the accent. He’s like, “What’s this going on?” More French than Canadian. And I’m like, “Well, this is a meetup of small business owners,” and obviously I’m the host. Somehow he also found—we met right at the cash register at the time. And he was like, “I am a small business owner.” I was like, “No fucking way.” I was like, “Okay, cool, what business?” And I was expecting to hear any of the boring stuff that you and I have come to love—like, “I run a plumbing company,” whatever. And then he’s like, “I outfit”—I forgot what he said—”I outfit Mercedes Sprinter vans into”—then he had some really fancy words like “outdoor living experiences” or something. He had a really cool phrase that he said on top of it. And yeah, he takes these $60,000-$70,000 Mercedes Sprinter vans and just outfits them—pimps them out—to be totally—what do you call it—like van life. He’s the pinnacle of van life. That’s the vehicle you want.
Matthias Smith: I’ve heard van life can be dangerous for young couples. I don’t know if—not—
Rand Larsen: In one of these vehicles? I bet he’s got some security features, man.
Matthias Smith: Right?
Rand Larsen: Man, I wish I could give him a shout-out. I forgot the name of his business. And just to tie it up—his van was parked outside, and I was like, “Hey, guys.” I took the remainder of the people—I was like, “Hey, I know the event’s over, but this guy’s got a dope van. He’s also a small business owner. Let’s go check it out.” And we did. You can see it on my Twitter. We did a walkthrough of his van.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: Showers, he’s got some awesome batteries. I think you can stay off the grid for three or four weeks at a time because of the quality of battery that he had. And it was a really unique experience. So we got a few more of those in different cities that we visited.
Matthias Smith: Yeah. In that video—I mean, I’m not sure what date it’s gonna post, but I did retweet that because I thought it was pretty awesome. My internet’s being slow here, so we’ll keep going.
Rand Larsen: Yeah.
Matthias Smith: But yeah, I guess just to be cognizant of time, just to speedball a couple of questions here. So how many cities for these meetups?
Rand Larsen: 16. We hosted in 15 of them—the D.C. event, Steve Rustler’s, I was not a host—so we hosted events in 15 cities. But on the Rand Run, there were 16.
Matthias Smith: Which city had the best beer, and which had the worst beer?
Rand Larsen: I don’t know which city had the worst beer—that wasn’t a thing I really kept track of. And believe it or not, I only had beers in eight cities. I didn’t drink a beer in every single city. So of those, it was Baltimore—I forgot what—and again, this is also on Twitter—Adam Markley recommended some dark beer, which is usually what I go for, and it was absolutely delicious. I forgot the name of it. I forgot what it tasted like, but I was like, I’m not really a beer guy, but I was like, I want another one of those, which is pretty rare for me.
Matthias Smith: Got it. Okay. This might actually not be a people question. In your view, what has been your impact on the SMB community?
Rand Larsen: Man, I don’t know. In my view, I thought about this—there’s—it’s hard for me to see the results. I was thinking about this. I got 300 followers from Twitter off of this. Frankly, I expected over a thousand. I was like, this has got to be—this is really cool, what I’m doing. People must love this.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: And people did. But it didn’t get the result on Twitter I was sort of expecting. But what did happen was a lot of the people I really respect in the community—everyone you know on SMB Twitter—reached out. Not everyone, but a lot of people reached out to me personally just to say how cool it was that I was doing it, and knowing that other people who I really respect, who are 8, 10, 15 years down the road from where I am, admired what I was doing—that was really important for me.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, no, yeah. What you’re doing is super cool. I mean, I know people like Eric Pacific, one of our good friends, Reg, and others are definitely supportive of it.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah.
Matthias Smith: What do you think is missing from the SMB community—either Twitter or just as a whole, like the operator space post-acquisition or even the acquisition side? If you had to pinpoint one thing.
Rand Larsen: I’ll say two things. Number one is, again, this goes back to no one is incentivized to grow and support it. I think it’s the reason that Madison doesn’t have a regular small business owner meetup. I’ve got a list of 10 people—like, you guys should just do it. And that’s what you and I are going to do. We’re going to throw out a Madison, Wisconsin meetup. It’s been great. The reason that a lot of people aren’t doing this is because no one’s incentivized to do it. And I’m incentivized, again—it’s just that Charlie Munger quote: “Show me the incentives, I’ll show you the outcome.” Very clearly. And right now, what we have is no one is really incentivized to grow the community. And this is the only thing that I care about and I’m focused on, and I’m heavily incentivized to do.
Matthias Smith: You’re the champion of the community.
Rand Larsen: I wouldn’t—thank you for calling me that. Someone asked me—
Matthias Smith: Someone has to be the guy, right?
Rand Larsen: Yeah. Sorry, what was your original question? I had—
Matthias Smith: Yeah, what are we missing?
Rand Larsen: I just think people aren’t talking about what happens after the acquisition. It’s the same thing—yeah, we’ve got the horror stories that we’ve already talked about today, but how do you actually operate your company? How do you actually handle the transition? The idea that there’s no—it’s like on Twitter, where’s the thread that says, “Here’s my guide to firing employees”? No, people can’t post that because their employees are going to see that.
Matthias Smith: Right.
Rand Larsen: That’s why you’ve got operators who can’t talk about that stuff because their employees are going to see them—
Matthias Smith: They’re going to have real problems in their company because of what’s on their Twitter.
Rand Larsen: And there’s other things like that—like, “Hey, here’s our post-acquisition announcement space.” I mean, how many people have you helped buy companies? And we should be getting all of this data information together to help new people who are acquiring companies or talk more about the philosophy of what makes a good transition. And there’s a lot of people who are incentivized to help you acquire a business, but not incentivized to help you with what comes after, which is what I’m trying to talk about.
Matthias Smith: Yes. So it sounds like, generally, the lack of knowledge that’s out there but not disseminated across the space for new entrants.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, man, it’s not even out there. It has to be created in the first place. And it does just start with conversations in private peer groups. And then I can talk about this stuff—like, what happens when you deal with an employee death? Does that need to be in your acquisition playbook? Probably not. But no one has talked about that ever.
Matthias Smith: Do you think having some sort of central wiki with these guides is the way—or something that’s paid because someone has to go through the effort—but altogether, I don’t think so.
Rand Larsen: I honestly don’t think so. The problem with wikis is that internal company documents that you basically force your employees to use—but also help them because that’s where everything lives—make a lot of sense. But wikis where other business operators go to learn about problems—there are difficult things. Number one, you will never get the full gamut of the SMB ownership experience in a playbook or a document, or if you take every single Twitter thread—again, I’ve never seen someone say, “Here’s how I fire my employees. Here’s how to deal with employee death.”
Matthias Smith: So someone should read that as a tweet—the whole—
Rand Larsen: Someone should, yeah, please, just to prove me wrong, frankly. But the problem with wikis is—those are a couple of things that people are going to have to deal with. And if it’s a paired problem, you will never have the full gamut of the experience on a wiki. And number two, to actually make a wiki valuable, you have to retrain someone’s brain—like an operator’s brain—that when they encounter a problem, they go to the wiki because they know they can find the answer. That’s a two-part problem: you will never have the answer, and you have to retrain someone’s brain, which are two incredibly difficult things to do.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, completely makes sense. I think that answer is super helpful. Two more questions for you.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, let’s do it.
Matthias Smith: So in your travels doing these meetups, doing the Rand Run, what common thread or threads—I’ll let you pick one or more—connect the searchers from state to state?
Rand Larsen: Sorry, repeat that.
Matthias Smith: Yeah. So in your travels doing these meetups, are there any themes from one to the next that connect the operators and business buyers?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, this is an entirely different thought, but I have a new appreciation of what the American Dream is because, in every single city, it felt like I met and spoke with the same type of people. In every single city. The whole SMB Twitter thing is fantastic—everyone has a similar level of ambition, risk—I keep saying risk-orientedness—risk aversion, but everyone has similar goals. People want to do really great, compelling things. And it felt like I met the same level of ambitious people in every single city. So that’s the thing that unites everyone.
Matthias Smith: Just people that want to grind and want to create a better life for themselves and their families.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Matthias Smith: Definitely. Lots of those people out there on the acquisition side.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, again, I met them in 16 different cities. You met the same type of person. Everyone’s doing something different in a different business, in a different city, but everyone had very similar goals and ideals, which, I don’t know, is reflective of what America is to me.
Matthias Smith: And I think to that point too, I can definitely attest that that’s indicative of when I talk with searchers or buyers on Zoom calls. Because I’m not crazy like you doing all these meetups, albeit I do travel a lot.
Rand Larsen: You can co-pilot with me, man, passenger seat.
Matthias Smith: You can fly the jet—like the jet. Yeah, yeah, okay. That’s definitely a theme that I see—people just want to grind, and they want something that’s better, subjectively, for themselves and their families in whatever way you want to define that.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, I agree. I don’t know, I just agree wholeheartedly.
Matthias Smith: One last question. What have you learned from your tour that you did not know when you started?
Rand Larsen: I actually didn’t expect the number of cool ideas that were going to come out of this. There have been four large things I want to execute on—all of them. I can only do one at a time, which is very frustrating. But I had no idea the amount of ideation that was gonna happen. I think if you’re in your business, heads down, working like I have been, it’s easy to fall into a mindset of—you sort of know how to do everything, and what you need to do to advance your business is just repeat that thing more. In this case, I found four different big ideas that are really, really compelling. One of them is just a mixture of a new peer group I’m gonna host. Typically, we’ve got five to seven people in each cohort, and we charge $3,000 a year to be a part of that. There’s a free trial associated with it. I was like, man, there are so many people I talk to who run either smaller businesses, or that price point is just difficult for them, or even that they just dislike the format. Some people join a peer group, try it for a free trial, and say, “Hey, I just want a different format.”
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: And I didn’t think about this until I was on the Rand Run. But I was like, well, what if I just add more people, increase the time, charge a smaller amount, and change the format to be something different? I’m like, yeah, I could totally do that. I could help more people doing this, and I can still make it profitable and incentivize it for me to grow and help other people. So we’re going to be testing a new peer group format out here soon that should be more inclusive—people with lower price points who are still buying companies. And a couple of other ideas—Steve Weissner wants me to do the same Rand Run again but hire a videographer to ride passenger seat and just do the whole lifestyle vlog content. I’m like, yeah, this could actually totally work. And immediately when we started talking about that on Twitter, I got four people to offer sponsorship—not hard offer sponsorship, but they’d be like, “Yeah, I’m interested.”
Matthias Smith: You could make a Netflix documentary—hit every state.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, that’s true. Getting the Netflix deal would be a different challenge.
Matthias Smith: So, okay, last question—not from the notes, just in the interest of time here. For someone that’s recently bought a business—an acquisition entrepreneur that is constable in the peer groups—what is your pitch to them? And I know you’re a salesperson, but just in general, why should someone join a peer group, and what does it look like from a high level as far as the times that you meet every month or week or the cadence?
Rand Larsen: Yeah. I think there are three main reasons to join a peer group. Number one is camaraderie. The business ownership journey is lonely. Being able to talk with other people who understand you, who have been in your shoes before or will be in your shoes, and people who care about you—I think it’s incredibly important. It makes life more fun, just the personal aspect. The second aspect is far more practical, which is a return on your investment. You join a peer group, you talk with other smart business owners who are doing interesting things in their companies, and you are there to solve problems in your business and get ideas and inspiration from others on how you can be doing your job better as a business owner. And the idea is that you need to be able to see those benefits on your P&L. You should be able to take tangible conversations that you have inside of your peer group and apply them to your P&L and pay for the cost of you joining a peer group in the first place. Ideally, you pay a few thousand dollars, whatever the price is, and then you end up coming away with $20,000 in cost savings, revenue generation, anything like that. So, the first reason is just the personal aspect—it’s very fun to be in a peer group, solves the “business ownership journey is lonely” problem.
Matthias Smith: Meet people, make friends.
Rand Larsen: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And then see them in person.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: The second problem is just very practical—see it on your P&L. Benefit your business, join a peer group. And then the third aspect is a combination of the first and the second, but it’s emergencies. When you go through a true emergency in your business or your personal life, you need a peer group or support network of some kind—people you can lean on, who you can basically call at 12 a.m., and they will answer the phone and actually stay up with you until 3 a.m. until you’ve talked yourself out of whatever is going on. It could be a business emergency, it could be a personal life crisis. You need those people, and those relationships have to be developed before you hit an emergency. If you had an emergency or a crisis and you’re alone, that’s what you will experience—alone entirely. And going through those experiences is very, very difficult. But with other people—even just having someone to soundboard something, someone who you trust and have talked to for a while, who already understands what you’re doing—you don’t have to give them any context.
Matthias Smith: Yeah.
Rand Larsen: Into anything that you’re doing. It’s super powerful when you hit those bumps in the road. So those are the three main reasons.
Matthias Smith: And what is the cadence for the number of meetings a week, a month?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, we’ve got a couple of different formats at this point. It’s every three or four weeks, between 60 and 90 minutes at a time. So depending on how you boil that down, every year, 12 to 16 meetings.
Matthias Smith: Do you give homework, or are these structured? How does that work?
Rand Larsen: Yeah, the structure is pretty simple. I send an email a couple of days before the call asking people to answer a few simple questions. Feel free to steal this, everyone, but the first question is just, “Hey, give us an update in the last few weeks. How has it gone for you? Just tell us how it’s going.” Number two is, “Bring a topic or discussion point or idea—anything you’re struggling with in your business—to the group. Anything that you want to talk about. Where do you want to focus the discussion around?” And then the third question is a revolving question that I change. It could be, “Hey, we’re just running into 2024—what are your 2024 goals this year?” Or it could be, “Hey, we are a couple of months into 2024—how did 2023 wrap up for you? Did it wrap up in a way you expected?” That kind of stuff. So the third question is a revolving question—I change it every month.
Matthias Smith: Got it. Well, Rand, thanks for hopping on here. It’s been great catching up, and I feel like I know or understand a lot more about your business now than before. Good talk with you, man.
Rand Larsen: Absolutely. Thanks for hosting. Thanks for doing this. We’re at SMBash today, and that’s gonna be a fun event, man. We’re gonna meet a bunch of cool people. And thanks for hosting this podcast one more time.
Matthias Smith: Yeah, of course.