Brian, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. What a great podcast to be on. Thank you, man. That means a lot to me. How about you get started by telling us a little bit about yourself and what you do? Sure. Well, what I did, we could start with what I did. So I built a few large home improvement businesses, actually sold a couple of them to private

equity a couple of years ago. So today I spend my time writing books and mentoring others and

just trying to make a positive impact in this world. It's kind of a fun life. Yes. And listeners,

we, as you could probably tell, with the guests, I like to vibe with them before the episode starts.

And I feel as though our friend Brian here has reached enlightenment.

And I'm excited to get into this.

Because with your background, Brian, there are so many different angles.

Because we could talk about the negotiation with private equity and

like selling those companies we can talk about building and managing those companies but i thought what

was interesting is when we were just chit-chatting before authenticity and connecting with others that's

really what we focused in on and when you think about authenticity and authentic connection, what does that mean to you?

Yeah. And to your point, by the way, while we could talk about negotiating with private equity,

I probably wouldn't have had an opportunity to have a wonderful exit with private equity

if I didn't have an authentic business culture. So I don't think it's either

or. I really think it's both end. I think it's about value creation. And if you can create

value for the people inside of your organization, you're creating tremendous organizational value as

well. So I think it all works synergistically. This is so good. This is so good. And I think that's incredibly

important for the folks who are like traditional deal makers to really understand. Because a lot of

times we can get so transactional and focus just on like the dollars in the sense. But we forget

that value comes from the value that we generate

amongst ourselves within a culture within an organization too. Yeah, if you think about

...