E155: OG Of SearchFunds, Created and Teaches ETA for Stanford GSB Shares ETA Success

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello, and welcome to the How2Exit podcast. Today I'm here with David Dodson. He is the author of The Manager's Handbook. A best selling book in the business space. And, on top of that, you're retired investment banker, investor yourself, CEO of multiple companies. You got a really cool life in the business space.

[00:00:17] I'm looking forward to getting to know you today. 

[00:00:20] David Dodson: Great. I am too, Ron. 

[00:00:22] Ronald Skelton: Cool. Let's just do, let's do what we always do. I jokingly, tell the same joke on every, the beginning of every show. Is like you were born then, now you ended up on a show about mergers and acquisitions. Can you like fill out that little gap in between. Like, give us your origin story, let the audience connect with you on, what led you to writing the book? How did your life lead up to this point?

[00:00:40] David Dodson: Sure. So I grew up in rural Colorado. The closest town was probably a population of about 300 or so. And the whole world was divided between farmers and ranchers. That's how we define ourselves. My dad manufactured farm equipment. So he had a small business, small to medium sized business. So I grew up walking through the sugar beet fields with him behind the tractor, but where his implement was being drawn behind the tractor and he had a voice recorder and he would be making notes about how his farm equipment was working.

[00:01:10] And I just, I always wanted to be like him. I wanted to run something and I'd go to his manufacturing facility and the welders, the sparks would be flying and in the paint booth, they were taking these things that were, rust color and turn them into blue and white. So proud of him. 

[00:01:25] So my whole growing up was I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I wanted to run a business. But then a couple of interesting things happen, Ron. The first thing was that farm policy changed in Washington, D. C. In the mid seventies and basically put my dad out of business. And I remember I didn't have any less regard for entrepreneurship or for what my dad was doing, but I didn't want to be in situations where some external force could undo all the things that I had done. 

[00:01:54] So I really wanted to have control of my own destiny to the extent that I can. Which probably also fueled my desire to be an entrepreneur. Went to Stanford undergrad, got an economics degree. Went to work for McKinsey and Company. So I was doing a standard MBA fancy job the whole time thinking this isn't for me.

[00:02:12] This isn't for me. This isn't for me. So I went back to Stanford to get my MBA. And in my second year, so it was a two year program in my second year, I was getting offers to go to the conventional jobs that at the time MBAs were going to and I had this, just this voice that was saying, no, this isn't you.

[00:02:31] This isn't you. So this is in the late 80s before email and so forth. This is the kind of fax machines were just coming out. And I called everybody who I was having any offers with, or I had gotten offers with, and I just burned the boats. So I took myself completely out of the employment market. And then I went to this one professor who I had really admired, who had built this huge business in cable TV, Continental Cable.

[00:02:57] His name was Irv Grousbeck, and he and his son now actually own the Boston Celtics and run the Celtics. Very successful person. And I knocked on his door and I was really nervous when I knocked on his door and he said, come in. And I said to him, I'm not making this up Ron. This is literally what I said to him.

[00:03:13] I'm not sure this is advice for anybody. Professor Grousbeck, I want to work for you. It's the only job I want out of business school. I don't care what I do. You don't even have to pay me. I'll wash your car. Just let me work for you. And he said, okay. We're looking at hiring the first case writer at Sanford University, and so maybe that offer was perfect.

[00:03:36] Not only do I get to work for him, but I'm going to get some money out of it. And then the first case he asked me to write was on this concept called a search fund, and it was on the first search fund. And Kirk Riedinger and Jamie Turner had been students of his and they went to 12 investors and raised $120,000.

[00:03:54] So $10,000 from each investor. Went out and hunted for over two years, found a company in Colorado and bought it, and we're running it. And I'm writing this case, Ron, and as I'm writing this case, I'm thinking, oh my gosh. This is what I want to do with my life. I don't want to start something. I don't have any great idea that I want to bring to market, but I would love to buy a company and run it and then maybe someday sell it.

[00:04:16] So then I raised the second search fund and that launched my career. So I had about five companies that I bought, ran, and sold. Then in between all that, you'd mentioned that I went to work for two of my classmates who started an investment bank, which ended up being one of the largest middle market investment banks in the United States.

[00:04:33] Went back to the operating side and then shifted completely over into the investor side because I feel like I'm too old to be an operator now. So now I have an investment fund and we do about 10 to 12 acquisitions a year and they're all backing people who are buying small to medium sized companies, who are running it for, 4 to 10 years and then generally selling it.

[00:04:58] The last thing is about a dozen years ago, the same guy, Irv Grousbeck called me and said, will you come teach a course at Stanford? At the time I was living in Boston. I would never say no to him. So I said, okay. I went and taught it and it was a class on, get this drum roll, how to buy a company to run it and eventually sell it. 

[00:05:18] And I love the classroom. There was just something about being with these students with all the energy. Well, one thing led to another. Now I've been teaching their full time and I teach two courses. One, this very same course Ron that I, that was the original course. And then another course called managing growing enterprises, which is very much along the lines of the book, the manager's handbook. Which we'll probably end up talking about at some point along the way.

[00:05:40] Which is about tactical implementation, because what I discovered as an operator, as an investor, and as a teacher, is that we, we talk a lot about strategy and all that, but really the most important thing, is your ability to execute, or I like the term, your ability to get things done. So I wrote a book about how the best people get things done.

[00:06:02] It's not a book about how I did it. It's the book I wish someone had handed me, when I was 30 years old and I bought my first company because it's how I wish I had managed companies, not necessarily how I managed companies. 

[00:06:13] Ronald Skelton: Wow. I have to admit when the, when your first time, I was reached out to see if you wanted to be on the show. I was kind of put back as like, okay, this is an operator side.

[00:06:23] If they had to led with this guy's the number two, he created the number two search fund and the, in the planet and wrote the first case study on one. You'd have been in schedule a long time ago. I hunted you down. I think you, what they call it, the hit that you hit the lead or whatever they call it.

[00:06:37] You hit the carrot there, man. This is cool. So you've got an extensive background in this space. There are a lot of people out there that are still just trying to, they're figuring it out. So you're still active teaching these courses at Stanford too?

[00:06:50] David Dodson: Oh yeah. So I teach the course on, it's called entrepreneurship through acquisition.

[00:06:55] So it's not for a deal guy who's buying and selling companies, but someone who's going to buy it, run it, build it up and sell it. So that's entrepreneurship through acquisition. So I teach two sections of that once in the fall, once in the spring. And then in the winter, I teach a class, a course called managing growing enterprises, which is what I was alluding to earlier.

[00:07:13] And it's the day to day execution. It's how you get things done. And that's especially important if you're buying a company, because if you're buying a company. You generally have an existing management team and you have a product and you have customers and where you're really going to add value is on the implementation side. But there aren't a lot of places you can go to, whether it's in the bookstore or the NBA program or online.

[00:07:37] Well, you can get really, really practical advice about how to do things, and that's what I wanted in the book. And when my wife was saying, why are you writing this book? First of all, by the way, I didn't intend to write a book. I just was asked the same question over and over again from people that I was backing as an investor or my former students. 

[00:07:55] So I thought, all right, rather than just answer the question, whatever was occurring to me at the time, for these common questions, I'm going to write out my answer with, very carefully with maybe where it applies, exhibits and so forth.

[00:08:07] So if somebody calls up and they said, I'm looking at hiring my first senior manager, how do I do it? I would then send them four or five pages and say, why don't you read this? And then let's have a richer conversation about, about the details of your particular situation. Worked really well.

[00:08:23] Then I started thinking, okay, I have now 15 or 20 of these, we'll call them white papers. What about the people that I'm associated with who aren't thinking to call me? So I put them all together in this self published book. I printed 300, 350 copies. I called it when the dog caught the car, because it's so many people that I dealt with.

[00:08:42] They were like, I want to buy a company and they're fighting, they're working so hard to buy the company. Then they buy the company. They caught the car. If you want, they're like, now what? 

[00:08:49] Ronald Skelton: Exactly. I bought it. Now what I do?

[00:08:50] David Dodson: So I, it was not a perfect book by any means. It was more of a compilation of these chapters. And I just handed them out and people said, wow, give me more. 

[00:09:01] So then, I've got it right here. Then I ended up writing this book because I realized that there was a full market for it. So that's the teaching and that's how the book came about.

[00:09:09] Ronald Skelton: That's very intriguing. One of the things I do on the show and if you listen to some of the episodes anytime in the future, you'll see this is, when we run into problems through acquisitions or I have friends that have acquired companies and we run into problems that teams would be, that seems to be the theme.

[00:09:24] Like somebody called you, go, how do I do X? So for a while there, we actually, I have a friend who just graduated law school. I think he missed the bar the first shot at it. He's getting ready to retake the bar. He's almost my age. He might be a a year young or two Younger than me, but he went to law school late in life, but he decided he was going. Anyway, he's doing acquisitions now.

[00:09:42] He bought a tow truck company and I helped him line it up. It was very looked really profitable. He had a contract with a little, the town that was in. So they had that. Looked really good. We picked a horrible operator and I helped pick the guy out. Like I, I found the guy and brought him to him. So I felt guilty.

[00:09:56] For a five or six shows, there's, how do you hire a great operator, right? That was the theme of it. So I get that. I can feel that in my heart. And so when you say people would come to you and go, okay, I bought this thing. Now what? In that case, we had gotten tow trucks for him and other stuff lined up and we had the operator picked out.

[00:10:12] I'm like, okay, this guy's horrible. Now what?

[00:10:14] David Dodson: So that the MBA programs, not just Stanford, butacross the board. When they have coursework around hiring, it's usually, how do you hire a CFO? Or how do you hire a VP of sales? But as you and I both know, Ron, a lot of your hiring are, frontline employees, and they're generally being the cut, they're customer facing.

[00:10:34] They're the ones that really matter, or I should say matter as much. And I was really happy that just last year, I wrote a case about, hiring frontline employees. It's actually a cannabis company in Colorado, but we focus on trimmers and we focus on people in the dispensary. It doesn't matter that it's cannabis.

[00:10:53] The point of it is, when you're hiring somebody like that, who's a frontline worker, it's a whole different process. But I got to tell you, I got to tell you an interesting story. You talk about a tow truck company. So the first investment I ever made when I finally had a little bit of money was this company that was a dispatch service for tow trucks.

[00:11:15] And they sold their service through your cell phone. It was kind of like similar to AAA. So you viewed your cell phone with Verizon and you paid a couple bucks. And then if your car was stuck or whatever, then you hit this button and it was included. It was called road rescue, eventually changed its name to Asurion.

[00:11:31] You may have heard of the company. Got into handset insurance. And their profit, their EBITDA is into the billions every year. So that was my first investment. Never had anything that good in the rest of my life. And I was on the board of that company when they went, now they have about 25, 000 employees, but I was on the board of that company when they had, I think, 25 employees.

[00:11:53] And I teach a course that, that the course that I was referring to earlier, I teach it with Jim Ellis. Who Jim Ellis and Kevin Taweel were the two founders of Asurion. In fact, I was just talking to Kevin this morning,just catching up. So that's 35 years ago, and it's an interesting story about tow trucks, but it's also an interesting story about an aspect of entrepreneurship.

[00:12:15] And sometimes people miss, which is the relationships that you get when you have the opportunity to work with other entrepreneurs and other operators, and they're helping you and you're helping them. And, while it's been financially successful, it's also just been really enriching for me to be able to be a teacher and also to be an investor and have been an operator.

[00:12:35] Ronald Skelton: That's cool. Yeah, I told you before the show, we live in a tiny home in the middle of the Redwood forest. What I didn't tell you is when you live in a tiny home, everybody gets in each other's space a little bit. I have a wife, a seven year old red hair, blue eyed fireball of a girl and a 12 year old son.

[00:12:50] So we all have our own personal entertainment systems, which are iPads. And so if you imagine, I've got a seven year old walking around with a 1, 500 iPad pro. Asurion is a part of our family.

[00:13:02] David Dodson: If I can tell you something that Kevin told me this morning. Kevin got a copy of my book and we were talking about something else. And then he said, Oh, I want to talk to you about your book and stuff.

[00:13:11] And so Kevin is a really, really skillful operator and he runs a huge company across multiple continents. And he said, but when I was reading the book, I kept coming across these things. I thought, oh man, I need to start doing that again. And the point of it is that even really experienced managers and operators sometimes lose sight of the best practices. They need a little bit of a reminder, and then he ended up buying copies for his whole management team, which he told me about this morning.

[00:13:39] I didn't realize he'd done it. But I was really happy to see that even a very experienced manager can pick up the book and discover things that either they not doing or that they had sort of stopped doing needed to be doing again. 

[00:13:55] Ronald Skelton: I'm going to go back to the search fund things.

[00:13:56] We have a lot of search funders that listen to the show. I'm active on search funder. com. So a lot of people on that. And I know it started at the Ivies, but it eventually made it to a lot of the other schools too. So does your investment firm do a lot of search funds too? Or you do a full spectrum of everything?

[00:14:12] David Dodson: It's the only thing we do.

[00:14:14] Ronald Skelton: So you do search funds. Awesome. 

[00:14:18] David Dodson: The only thing I do and, how the whole search fund started was Irv Grousbeck was teaching at Harvard and, a student of his, Jim Southern came to him and said, kind of similar to what I had said, except Jim he had a better sense of what he wanted to do and Irv said, why don't you just go buy a company?

[00:14:36] And Jim said, I don't know how to go buy a company. He said, well, look, I've got this friend, Paul Ferry, who runs a pretty good size venture capital firm. And I bet he'd let you use some office space. And why don't you just look around and try to buy a company? And so Jim said, okay, and I think Jim, Jim had made a little bit of money before he went to Harvard business school. Looked around, bought this company, uniform printing and supply, and it went well.

[00:14:57] That actually was not a search fund, but it was the seed of the search fund. So then Kirk Reidinger and Jamie Turner, who were also students of hers at Harvard, had kind of a similar thought, and the three of them don't agree on this. Okay. But Kirk and Jamie said that Irv came up with the idea, and Irv says Kirk and Jamie came up with the idea.

[00:15:16] I think it was Irv actually. About this, why don't you raise money from multiple investors? And so that's how it started. Then Irv decided to go teach for a year or so at Stanford, and he stayed there. So then that became institutionalized. So Kirk Reidinger and Jamie Turner, started it. Then I raised the second search fund out of Stanford.

[00:15:38] And then I think it was, I don't think anybody raised one the following year. And then Kevin Taweel was a case writer for Irv Grousbeck. And Jim Ellis was a case writer for Irv Grousbeck the next year. They teamed up and raised maybe the third search fund or the fourth search fund and then bought Asurion, which we were just talking about a minute ago.

[00:15:59] So I feel really lucky cause I got to be in the birthing room, and watch it all happen. And people say, tell me a little bit about the history of search for this. I'm one of like about five people that are still alive that actually can tell you every single thing that's happened along the way. Cause I've been there the whole way.

[00:16:13] Ronald Skelton: I'm looking through my other computer monitor here, It's spread. So the cool thing is what you've done is all around the world now. I interviewed another guy who's over in Europe now and they, they study what you guys did.

[00:16:22] They took it to the schools over there that he has a fund. He's funding search funds and he talked about the first one and the second one. And he had to be talking about you. And you talk about it coming out of Stanford and, on that show. I don't know if he named you by name, but, he named you by history.

[00:16:36] And, he might even have mentioned that he, like he said he worked with some of the other people that are still active in the space and teaching it. I'm trying to find his, I'll know him when I see him here. 

[00:16:46] So we already talked about the kind of the search fund, the history of search funds. What's the coolest and Asurion has to be the biggest investment you made. Is that the coolest one or do you have some stuff like they, they've really innovated something, made something different in the world or just?

[00:16:59] There's some really cool, a lot of people don't know, there's some really cool patents and technologies that came out of Stanford. But, what's one of the coolest things you've ever invested in? 

[00:17:07] David Dodson: Well, let me start with the general. The coolest thing is general. Which is you get to discover all of these crazy, amazing businesses that when they're described, you go, Oh yeah, that's right.

[00:17:20] Somebody needs to do that, but it never occurs to you. And I'll get something that's sent by someone who we've invested in and they'll say, I found a company and I want to buy the company. And what do you think? And I'm okay. So I open up the file. I look at it going, who would have thought that, that this was a whole business.

[00:17:35] Another company that I'm on the board of is a company that, manages the meters for homeowners association.

[00:17:42] So if you're a homeowner association, all the water's coming into the homeowners association and then it goes out to all the homes. And the utility just charges one charge for it for all the homes. But the homeowner's association has to figure out a way to allocate out the costs. So this company has a meter on every single home and they read the meters.

[00:17:59] That's a pretty good business. I mean, you're selling water basically. It doesn't get much better than that. And then there's some interesting businesses that, that are really fulfilling because, they do good for the world. 

[00:18:11] So we're really fulfilling about saying I'm helping someone become a good manager. Hopefully we'll all make some money along the way and we're doing good for the world. I could go on the rest of this program, cycling through cool companies. 

[00:18:24] Ronald Skelton: That's cool. That's cool. I mean, that's what we're here though.

[00:18:27] We're here and a lot of us are in the acquisition entrepreneurship space or, entrepreneurship through acquisition. And there's a dozen names people are calling it these days, search funders. We're here because, maybe we're better operators than we are, inventors, creators.

[00:18:42] Some of us like, like myself, I don't know if I want to go through 10 more tries to get, don't want to play the game of will this work,will this work and then get one. So we're looking for proven deals, but there's something about taking something that's doing good, doing well, providing a service to great customers and the community that the people it's employing and continuing its legacy to, to keep that going.

[00:19:05] Because if somebody doesn't, a lot of these things are going to have to shut down. There's a huge number of businesses out there that if they don't change hands, they've jokingly call on the silver, silver tsunami. They got these nicknames for what's going on. If these businesses don't change hands in the next 10 to 15 years, then, we've got operators out there in their sixties and seventies that are either going to be in their nineties and hundreds and trying to run businesses or they're going to, the business is going away.

[00:19:29] David Dodson: Points I make in class is that entrepreneurship through acquisition is really solving two problems for the entrepreneur who's selling, or the CEO is selling or the founder. Which is that it's giving 'em some liquidity or her some liquidity, which they're entitled to because they built up something that's valuable, but it's also giving them an exit so they can throw the keys over their shoulder and go to Boca Raton and hang out with their spouse and be with their grandkids. Which is one of the important rewards.

[00:19:56] Who wants to spend, but most people don't wanna spend 30, 40 years building up a company. So they've got to do it for 10 or 15 more years as their health starts to deteriorate and their grandkids are growing up and life is passing them by. What was the point of creating this wealth and this freedom if I don't get the freedom?

[00:20:12] And, we think about entrepreneurship through acquisition,most of the time through the eyes of the buyer, the search fund entrepreneur. And there's of course a lot of value in helping entrepreneurship and so forth in that respect. But to your point, Ron, sometimes we don't focus enough on what we're doing for the seller in the silver tsunami, which by the way, that's an expression I'd never heard before.

[00:20:32] I love that. I love that expression. But what we're doing for them and I have been blessed with the opportunity to get to know and meet so many people who've sold their company. The idea that they got to be, let's say, 65 years old and maybe, what I say is I say, their kids can give them an exit. Not any liquidity. And a typical, lower middle market venture, lower middle market private equity firm will give them some liquidity, but no exit. They'll say, look, we don't have anybody to run this company in Omaha or Austin, Texas, or Denver, Colorado.

[00:21:05] So you have to keep running it, but we'll give you 49%. But now we're going to control the company. And most people go like, I have a pretty good lifestyle. That doesn't work for me. Search fund entrepreneur comes along and says, I'm going to pay you a fair price and I'm gonna let you throw the keys over your shoulder. Or stay on the board or help advise, whatever you want.

[00:21:22] And they're okay. My last dream has come true. I have financial wealth. I have security. I have time. I still have some health. And I can enjoy life. It's wonderful. 

[00:21:33] Ronald Skelton: It's amazing that, you've had that opportunity to see all across the United States, all across different communities and stuff. The changing of hands of these companies.

[00:21:41] What do you tell? I've studied the search fund process. 'cause I was curious on it. And, I like that the fact that this, a lot of people think that it, that the search process takes two to three years because that's what it takes to find a great company. And I think there's more to it than that.

[00:21:56] I think it takes two to three years 'cause the search fund group is grooming that individual to be the CEO of a company. There's some lessons they learn. There's some thickness of skin that's gathered by having to go through multiple evaluations and see things from different angles, how to find flaws in other businesses.

[00:22:14] There's a process that, I'm saying all this because I want you to correct me if I'm wrong. But there's a process that I think it's a better suited that a search fund or find something after 20 months of digging through hundreds of companies, than landing the first company they see. I think they're better skilled at handling the things that pop up in a company having made all those reviews.

[00:22:34] Basically, they've got to see 100 case studies. 

[00:22:36] David Dodson: Yeah, I would agree with that, Ron. With an addition, not even a caveat. During that, I mean, some people find a company in six months, but most of them don't. People find a company in one to two years. A lot of the reason for it is it takes some time to figure out what makes a good company.

[00:22:53] And that's a learning process because as you figure out what makes a good company. It also starts to form your opinion on how I'm going to run my company when I have it. The other is that there's a, there's this level of maturity that's happening and I don't mean that in an age thing where I'm sort of looking, down being an old guy.

[00:23:10] Maturity and just in terms of professional growth about how to approach a seller, how to talk to a seller. Lose all your MBA ness and, one term that I just bristle at is when somebody will say, they'll talk about the person they're going to buy the company from and they'll refer them as unsophisticated.

[00:23:29] Unsophisticated? You're about to pay this guy $20 million for something and he built from nothing. Okay. What have you done? Okay. And so during that process, they start to realize, these people that we're buying companies from, I may have a fancy diploma and fancy degree and everything, but they've done what I want to do.

[00:23:47] They're who I want to be. And there's that sort of growth that happens during those first couple of years. But, and this is the point I was sort of, foreshadowed, you don't learn how to run things when you're searching. You'll learn a little bit about how to kind of manage your time, but then what you're being asked to do, and this is unique to the search fund world.

[00:24:08] Not exclusive, but unique. Meaning there's other, but you understand what I mean by that. Is you've got this galloping horse and the jockey is jumping off and you're jumping on. Now, Ron, if you and I decide to start a company together, we'd be picking out our first office space and going to Staples and buying the printer and all that.

[00:24:26] And we're building it brick by brick by brick by brick. That's its own skill on it itself, but if you jump into an existing company that has 50 or 100 employees and they're moving 80 miles an hour and you just got there and you've never run anything in your life. That's a learning curve that you have to get down quickly.

[00:24:44] And one of the things that, that experienced investors have learned is how to help the search fund entrepreneur get down that curve quickly. And, our investment firm is called Foodalafoo Partners, which is, I know that, I know the name's a mouthful. I can explain why. 

[00:24:59] It's a river in Chile. It does have a story behind it. But, is what we try to do is get people to the three year mark or the five year mark in 18 months. And we're not the only ones who do this, but we try to create a structure.

[00:25:12] So it's not just on the job training because those first, basically the first 18 months are really key to the success of someone being a leader as a first time CEO. Or even a second time CEO. But principally I'm just working with first time CEOs. And also it's so rewarding, Ron, to have someone who if they're going to buy a company, they're closing tomorrow and they're pretending not to be terrified, but I know they are because I know I was terrified the night before I closed on the first company that I bought us a company in Dallas, Texas. And they come to the first board meeting and they're also pretending to have everything under control and they don't.

[00:25:50] And I understand it. And then they start to relax a little bit and realize that this is an exciting journey that they're on. And you don't become, you're not an instant good CEO. You have to learn it. And the learning part is what's fun. And then they settle into the journey, which is exciting for me.

[00:26:07] And now all of a sudden it's five or six years later and I'm in a board meeting with them or I talk to them. I'm saying this person is really, really good at running a company. And I didn't do it for them, but the fact that I was either on the journey or an observer or maybe played a part in that success in their development, just gets me up in the morning.

[00:26:29] Ronald Skelton: One of the guys on this show said, buying a company's, it's really fun. Like you really learn a lot of stuff. And I was like, fun. Like you're on a roller coaster where one strap broke loose, you're going to make it, but you're holding on to the other strap and you're trying to figure out how you're going to get to the other end, right?

[00:26:44] You're doing loops and everything. And this one straps holding you on. Yeah, it's a different game. It totally is. There's something to the, I guess the word that the common phrase out there is imposter syndrome. Where you feel like, Oh, I'm going to be found out any day now they're going to figure out what the hell I'm doing.

[00:26:57] There's that concern, right? The cool thing about what those guys have, the search funders have is they have an investment firm like you backing them. They have strategic advisors in place. A lot of these guys are going out and getting SBA loans.

[00:27:09] If they're not doing it yet, the smartest thing YPO could ever do is just start, farming current SBA loans. Somebody takes a $5 million SBA loan and,young professionals organization ought to start sending them mailers. Cause they need people, right? A lot of people don't really run into business as a team sport.

[00:27:26] You're going to hire a team to help you. I mean, I've created businesses from scratch, right? That's just what I've done, but I'm getting old enough where, that's just not appealing to me anymore. And, we were looking at a pretty good size acquisition of, I don't really like going go into it too deep, but basically it was the biggest one I'd ever seen.

[00:27:43] We're gonna take on a couple million dollars worth of debt. Company was doing between 13 and $20 million a year in revenue, depending on how, what year it was. And they were running it really poorly. And I was like, I don't know anything about turnarounds. I had that imposter syndrome.

[00:27:56] First thing I started doing is hunting down advisors. Who do I know that's done this before? Cause I'm gonna need them. A lot of these guys, they get into this. They don't think that, I've run two business before I started two things and they don't, it doesn't click on their head that this is a new thing.

[00:28:11] A lot of these companies, even if they're not run extremely proficiently, I still look 'em as a time piece, like a great big, big bin time clock or whatever you wanna call it. There's gears starting and everything else, and you're the monkey wrench that just fell in the gears, if you don't watch it.

[00:28:23] When you build a business, it's yours to make and create and figure it out if you have product market fit and stuff. When you buy one, it's yours to screw up. 

[00:28:31] David Dodson: Interesting. It's very common for a company in the first year to do worse.

[00:28:37] By a company and let's say it's 20 million in revenue and making two and a half million dollars in the first year. Usually the revenue doesn't go down. Sometimes it does, but the earnings go down. And that's because, you just replaced a seasoned, experienced founder CEO with yourself. You're not going to outdo that person in the first six months or generally you're not.

[00:28:59] But over time you develop those skills and it was interesting, Ron, that you, that a couple of times you talked about getting advice because the whole origin of the book, The Manager's Handbook, was this curiosity I had about why some people are so much better at getting stuff done than others, managers.

[00:29:18] And I had the benefit of being at Stanford Business School where there is a culture of a little bit of research looking around investigation as opposed to just being a doer. It's an investigator or an operator or,operator, an investor. And what I did is I looked across people that were really, really effective at getting things done, which is everything from Kevin Taweel at Asurion.

[00:29:39] To someone who's running a lumberyard to Sam Walton, Steve Jobs, people like that. I wanted to look at the whole spectrum. What was interesting is I found five common skills that they had. Some of them were funny. Some of them were, graded a microphone.

[00:29:55] Some of them were boring, tall, short, whatever. I realized that, where your zip code and the attributes in the school you went to, that was not the common denominator. The common denominator was all of them. And by the way, Ron, there were no exceptions. All of them had these five skills that they had mastered, and one of them was the ability to seek and take advice.

[00:30:16] And as I thought about that, I thought, well, in and of itself, that's not really helpful. So how are the people that are really, really good at seeking and taking advice, how do they do that? How do they run a board meeting when they're calling someone for advice? How do they ask for advice?

[00:30:32] How do they seek information from their customers? And each one of those ended up being a separate chapter. So that by the time you read through part two, which is, seeking and taking advice, it's not just like an advice from grandpa. It's a how-to-manuals. So every part of the book is a how to manual. One is, ability to build a team.

[00:30:51] Well, okay, that's fine. Everybody knows you're supposed to have built a team, but how do you do it? Well, it's exit interviews. It's being able to give performance reviews. It's being able to let people go the right way. It's how you interview. You put all those subskills together and you're going to build a really, really good team.

[00:31:06] Ronald Skelton: So now you gotta give me the other four because that's going to drive me nuts if I don't get them. The one of them is taking and implementing great advice. And the thing that triggered in my head is, I either love or hate when people call me for advice. I've got a lot of experience in real estate investing. I got one season broker, one of the top brokers in Tulsa, Oklahoma called me last night and said, wanted advice about an investment deal and I think don't do it.

[00:31:28] She just rattled off what she was trying to do and I was like bad idea. But make that story short, trying to let somebody subject an, unseasoned investor subject to buy a house subject to the existing mortgage of a real estate property out of state and I was like that is a game that only seasoned investors should play.

[00:31:44] Seek and take that advice. The implementing of I think is the weak point a lot of people have. A lot of people will ask for other people's advice with the sole intent to validate their own idea. That's dangerous. 

[00:31:57] David Dodson: John Steinbeck said, the other John Steinbeck he said, most people don't want advice. They just want cooperation. And I think that's so true. But, I try with every chapter to make it as paint by numbers, how to, as you can, because I've always said I wanted a book not to be read, but a book to be reused.

[00:32:15] So to go to your point about when someone calls you for advice, a lot of times, I'll do a, like a walk and talk where you walk around with the student. Maybe they're seeking advice or a CEO would call me for advice. And maybe I'm on the phone or talking to them for 20 minutes. And about 15 of the minutes they're talking and the last five minutes, there's a little bit of give and take.

[00:32:36] And I realized at the end, I really only had a chance to talk for three or four or five minutes and they didn't get what they wanted. So, in that chapter, I lay out a subset of that chapter, which is how to structure the phone call. And I know that might sound very,very rudimentary.

[00:32:54] But it's the difference between being really good at it and not gonna, for example, if I could just give you an example, you need to open up right away with telling the person this is the problem I'm trying to solve. Or this is the opportunity I want to take advantage of. Because the person giving advice has to have in their head right away.

[00:33:11] What the problem is, that you're dealing with. And then I say the next step is, you decide what background information is, the only the essential background information for them to be able to help you because anything else, when you start telling stories and going on and on and repeating yourself, you're just eating up the time that they could be giving you advice. And then the third thing is do you ask them if they have any clarifying questions because if you miss something or they say, okay, that's fine.

[00:33:38] But how many people report to that person? Okay. So they have an opportunity to ask for clarifying questions. And then the next step is shut up because, that is now your time just to take notes until your hand hurts because, you want to be a sponge to get as much information as you can out of that person.

[00:33:55] And then the last thing is you summarize, you say, okay, what I think you told me, Ron is. You know, and then you say, that's not quite David. So you sync up and make sure that you got the advice right. That five point formula there is the difference between making, having a really effective phone call and a completely ineffective phone call.

[00:34:13] There's also a whole part of the book that's about how do you find mentors? A lot of times people look for mentors and advisors based on credentials. I think that's a poor thing to do. I think you want to find that there's other characteristics of mentors that will help you with your problem.

[00:34:27] And I use an example of. If you have a construction company, you might be better off with the general manager of a trucking company that's in your hometown, than the CEO of a media empire because they know your problems and they can understand your problems because part of good advisors is not that they're smarter than you.

[00:34:47] They're not smarter than you. It's that they have pattern recognition and they've got some muscle memory around it and they're bringing all of that pattern recognition to your problem. 

[00:34:56] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. They've been there. They've seen that. They've seen it manifest in their own company and they've tried three different avenues and found one that worked.

[00:35:03] And you get to gain that. Learn through experience, but not your own. I'm still going to circle back around cause I think I cut you off, right? Cause we dove back deeper into the taking advice and seeking advice, but what are the other four? Cause it's going to drive me nuts if I get off the show and I don't have them.

[00:35:17] You already sold the book. I'm downloading it. When we get done here, I'm going to do the audio version of it. 

[00:35:21] David Dodson: And by the way, I didn't come up with these five and then investigate them. I discovered them as I was watching these other leaders. So the first one is ability to build a team.

[00:35:31] Which we talked about. Ability to seek and take advice. Interesting one is a good custodian of your time. I learned that one in an interesting way. I was having coffee with a classmate of mine from business school, Tom Staggs, who at the time was COO of Disney. So he had about 250, 000 people in his organization.

[00:35:48] It was a huge organization. I was meeting Tom for coffee and got there, we were at Stanford and, his kid was going to school at Stanford. And I was a couple minutes late and there he is sitting there. Looking at the news on his phone, having a cup of coffee, and I'm the one who's behind in my email and a little bit late.

[00:36:07] And I'm like, Tom, explain it to me because you're running this enormous organization across six continents, and you're the ones calling was a cucumber. And he said, first of all, I surround myself with good people. We also talked about, what a good custodian of his time was. So that's the third one, which is being a good custodian of your time because it's your precious resource.

[00:36:28] And, Bill Gates has exactly the same number of hours as the day as Elon Musk, as you and me. You can get a few people that get your lawnmower or whatever, but basically you have the same amount of time. The fourth one is the ability to set and adhere to priorities.

[00:36:43] And probably everybody who's listening to this, this podcast and as a regular with your show has experienced kind of a dumpster fire, shiny object thing where I'm going to go chase this problem and I'm going to know this problem and I'm driving home and I have this great idea and then I go and I throw this great idea at my organization.

[00:36:58] And the ability to get past all that and say, this is what's important. This is what I'm going to work on and say no to everything else. The ability to adhere to priorities. By the way, the absolute master at that was Steve Jobs. And you look at apple computer, which is worth a trillion dollars.

[00:37:18] And everything that they've done, Steve Jobs was relentless at forcing people to focus on one thing or two things. And that's the only thing that they do. And I had the benefit of getting, one of my good friends was, has been on the Apple Board forever and that was Andrea Jung and I was talking to her about stuff.

[00:37:33] Look, I've been reading all this stuff and Johnny I, who was his chief designer and listening to him, was he really like this? And she said, and Andrea, by the way, has been on the board of General Motors. All right, should be General Electric, Apple, Dame Lear,Wayfair, the long list, and she was the CEO of Avon. And she said, out of all that experience that she said, there is no one I have ever worked with who is more relentless with priorities than Steve Jobs.

[00:38:03] And he got to a trillion dollars in terms of market value. And then the last one is an obsession with quality. That was the one that surprised me the most. And I'm really glad that I stumbled upon it because it's, and I say it's in a way my favorite chapter is the building of the team and obsession with quality, even though the three in the middle are essential.

[00:38:23] But what I realized is that all the people who are really, really masterful at building organizations, were obsessed with quality. And it's not because it was a culture, an ethic, that's the right thing to do. It's because it's really, really good business. I'll give you a couple of quick examples. First of all, I want to start with this one.

[00:38:45] If you ask anybody, which do you fear more, a competitor with a great marketing plan, fantastic website, good sales force? Or a competitor who has a better product than you? Of course, it's the latter. Focus so much on this piece of it. Instead of saying, I want to have the very, very best product offering.

[00:39:04] And so this obsession with quality, is what, okay. So let me just give you a specific sort of business case. And by the way, the whole section on quality is, I do it because I say effectively, you will make more money. Okay. Don't do quality because it's doing right by your customer.

[00:39:21] Do it because it's good business. So for example, acquiring customer is very, very hard. Keeping a customer is much easier. There's only one way you keep a customer. Good quality. Period. In today's world it was probably 200 years ago, you can't keep a customer unless you're satisfying their needs because you've got too many competitors out there who want your customer.

[00:39:41] The other thing is you have pricing power. So now imagine a company that can charge three or 4 percent more, which by the way, goes right to the bottom line. So three or 4 percent more in pricing. Usually, translates to about 25 percent more in earnings. And you don't have to bring as many customers in the front door because your existing customers want to buy more from you.

[00:40:03] It's just good business. But the only way you get there is by having high quality. Okay, so now, your listeners might go, okay, I buy it, but how do you do it? Why are these guys better? They're not better just because they believe in it. They have specific tools in place. So I talk about Tom Feeney whoused to run Safelight auto glass, pretty prosaic company.

[00:40:24] I mean, they've replaced chipped windshields. And one of the things that made Safe Flight Autoglass under his leadership so successful is he was the prophet of the power of verbatim. So instead of NPS scores and customer satisfaction scores and, things that fly up on your, in your email where you click one to five.

[00:40:43] How Safelight auto glass has grabbed so much market share, especially in the last decade or so, is because they go and they spend time with their customers really learning what matters to them. Because you first have to define quality through the eye of your customer. Not what, quality is not all the things that you can come up with in your head. Quality is what matters to my customer segment and then satisfying that. The other master is, the CEO cook Intuit.

[00:41:12] And, so different cook, not Apple. And they havean institutional process called, follow them home. They want to see users use their software. Now, Intuit has products like QuickBooks, TurboTax. They're not sending people to the moon. Okay. They're just like debits and credits and they haven't dominated.

[00:41:32] They've owned those markets for decade after decade. And it's worth sort of sitting back and going, how does one software company own such a basic market? I'm not saying a year, decade after decade. It's because they know exactly what the quality measures of their customers because they've institutionalized it.

[00:41:51] And then they have a process after they learn from their customers, how to go back and build that into the product. So nobody can catch up with them. 

[00:41:58] Ronald Skelton: I really picked up there that, you can build something you think is the best in the world, but if you don't know how the customer themselves quantify or qualify, what quality is, then you might have missed the boat. Right? 

[00:42:11] David Dodson: While we're talking about Apple, cause it's worth talking about for a minute, we, when you think about Apple, we talk about Steve Jobs a lot. Fair enough. Totally deserved. But of the five skills. There's probably nobody that I think is a better example of that, and one of them, which people don't always think about, is the ability to build a team.

[00:42:32] And when we think about the Apple, and obviously Tim Cook's been running it, but when we think about Apple, we tend to think about Steve Jobs. But in fact, Steve Jobs, his biggest contribution to Apple was that he built an incredible team that could do all these things. And the best evidence of that, is that when Steve Jobs passed away, that company did not skip a beat.

[00:42:55] Ronald Skelton: I had the opportunity to, I lived in the Bay area for a long time. I had an opportunity when he was alive to run into him. He shopped at the same whole foods and after, and we were there, all the time. I ran into him probably once a week and after the third or fourth time, I would like, Hey Steve, he stopped me one day and we chatted for about two minutes. And then I would say, Hey Steve, he'd say, Hey Ron, he'd know who I was and that's a skill.

[00:43:17] Cause this guy had thousands of employees by this point. And just to remember somebody's name off a casual conversation, and this is before I was using his products. He's like, Hey, are you a Mac user? I was like, no, I use Linux Unix. And I have, free BSD at my house and he's like, why?

[00:43:31] I said, mainly because I'm a cheapskate. But I tease him. Likemake cheaper products. He's I can't. and he would tell you, he's like, you can't do quality and cheap at the same time. But this is before iPhones came out. 

[00:43:39] But the fact that I could see that, I could just, I know that he was really good at just like, I've seen other people would walk by and go, Hey, Steve. Or something and he didn't stop and talk to him. He just had a thing.

[00:43:48] He knew I was in tech right off the bat. Probably because I think I was wearing a Lockheed Martin badge 1 day when I seen him. So he knew I worked for the fence contractor. I forgot to take my badge off. 

[00:43:56] David Dodson: But the important thing about Steve jobs is that. I read his biography, which a lot of people did, and it's fascinating.

[00:44:04] But then as a business person, as an owner, as an operator, the problem is you put that book down, not much you can do. Isaacson wrote a beautiful book on him, but it didn't change my behavior as a business person. But the point, that the important point of, what came out of my research and then the book, the manager's handbook, is that the things that Steve Jobs did.

[00:44:27] Our basic blocking and tackling that applied to the lumberyard, the bookstore, Asurion, Shandy Clinic, which we're talking about. These are universal skills that you have to know. Just like if I said,you and I've talked before and you mentioned that you're not a golfer or you're not much of a golfer as I'm not. But every golfer, knows how to hold the club.

[00:44:50] They know the difference between a putter and a driver. They understand how to read a green. They know where their toes are supposed to be faced. Those are all the basic elements. It doesn't mean that you're going to be Tiger Woods if you do all that, but it does mean that you're going to be a darn good golfer.

[00:45:05] The same thing is true with management is, if you come into my class at Stanford university, I can't turn you into Steve Jobs. If you read my book, I can't turn you into Steve Jobs, but I can help you to become a really, really good operator. Put another way, really good at getting things done.

[00:45:21] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I joke around all the time about it. We all have our things. I like to fish. They like to golf. Going back to one more time to Steve Jobs was, if you didn't know who he was, you wouldn't know who he was. Every time I ever seen him, he had a, worn out blue jeans, I guess I didn't see him coming from work.

[00:45:34] He was coming from home. He's wearing worn out blue jeans, often had holes in it. You can tell he walked through fresh cut grass. A lot of times his tennis shoes are grass stained. And he was just an average joe when you seen him on the street and he would treat you just like a normal human being. He wasn't like that, but I guarantee I never got to work for him.

[00:45:48] I never even tried. I didn't apply to apple or anything. They weren't on my radar. I was in defense contracting at the time. But, I imagine once you walk to that door, he's a different human being. He puts on that persona he needed to do to run that company. Probably still a nice guy so long as you're in your lane doing what you're supposed to be doing but i've heard otherwise. If you're a mediocre employee wasn't so fun to work for. 

[00:46:09] David Dodson: The things that people who are really good at getting things done understand is that, an essential aspect of building a team is that you're going to have to let people go and you're going to have to replace people.

[00:46:20] And Joel Peterson is an important mentor in my life. So, he's been an investor in companies. I've had, we've co invested together. Joel used to run the largest real estate company in the world. He teaches at Stanford. We've taught some courses together. And then I think more recently he's best noted for being the founding investor and chairman of the board of JetBlue, although he just stepped down from JetBlue. 

[00:46:45] And, one of the lessons I learned really early on from Joel was that if you're serious about building a team, nobody can hire at a hundred percent. You're going to make mistakes. And by the way, employees are going to make mistakes coming in and also companies change and evolve. So even if someone was perfect for the job today, that doesn't necessarily mean they're going to be perfect for the job as your company grows and evolves.

[00:47:08] If you're not willing to do that really unpleasant part of being a CEO, then you're never going to have a great team. You might have a pretty good team, But you'll never have a great team. And by the way, Ron, this sounds a little,insensitive, but it's really a reflection of how old I am.

[00:47:25] I couldn't possibly count how many people that I've been directly involved in having to let go and move on. Most of them can't say all of them, but by far and away, most of them ended up finding jobs that they were better suited for. There's very few people out there that I've found that just are unemployable that are, and that are bad people.

[00:47:44] I mean, some people I've let go because they were stealing or something, but most people are just in the wrong place. And they need help getting there. And by saying, look, this isn't the right bus or this isn't the right seat for you. And I'm going to now help you get there by two things.

[00:47:59] One thing is I'm going to ask you to leave, but also I can play a role in this transition. Whether it's helping to guide you on what to do next, giving you some feedback. Giving you severance. I mean, there's lots of things that a good, compassionate manager can do to help somebody. And then they get into the seat that they belong in and they start to thrive and they have self respect.

[00:48:20] And most people who are asked to let go know that things aren't working out and they go to work and they're not happy and they're because they know that they're not crushing it. And then they get into a job where they're going, Whoa, I'm doing a good job. I have self esteem. I go home and I'm proud of my work.

[00:48:36] And that's what managers can help people do in the process of letting them go. And I'm not trying to spin Ron and say that, that firing somebody, letting somebody go, however you want to word it is a pleasant thing. It is not a pleasant thing. Which is why a lot of people don't do it as much as they should. But it does have a happy ending in almost all cases. 

[00:48:55] Ronald Skelton: I've had to do quite a bit of, I've run some pretty good sized teams at tech companies, tech startups and stuff. And got brought in after acquisitions and stuff under contract to clean up teams that were, having problems, major problems and stuff.

[00:49:07] Most of them are better employed at a higher and better source, like you said. There's a few of them, you're like, I don't know, until he matures a little bit, I don't know where he's gonna end up or she's gonna end up.

[00:49:16] But 99 percent of the time, I agree with you. 99 percent of the time, you're doing them a favor. And it's unfortunate right now is, a lot of the people that come to the meetings I host and a lot of people I know that bought companies, they're afraid of letting people go. And I said, that's the problem. The last guy had to. 

[00:49:32] Three, four years ago, before I got into mergers and acquisitions, I started looking at companies. I thought everybody thought that way. Hire fast, fire faster if you have to.

[00:49:41] Make sure your team's right. There's a lot of good companies out there. It's not great ones, but there's a lot of good companies out there that have, bad eggs floating around because they, either have some sense of loyalty to them, or they think they can't fire them because they have some special skill. There's seven point, almost 8 billion people on this planet. Somebody has that skillset.

[00:49:59] David Dodson: A chapter in the book is how you coach under performers. And what I mean by an under performer is someone who, their job's at risk. And I talk about how you would coach, or how you would determine whether they're coachable or not. This was some specific tools around that.

[00:50:15] But then, and this is why I was thinking about this. Is, the no asshole rule. And I don't know if you've heard of this book by Robert Sutton, who's a colleague of mine at Stanford. And the book is called no assholes.

[00:50:26] It's a pretty provocative name for a book, but he makes the case through research. I'll just use his term, the cost of an asshole, I realize this is delicate to say, but this is Robert's terms, is much higher than people think. And I thought about it, and I talk it in the book about a manager that I had at McKinsey and company, who would have met those, would have made the, met the qualifications of what Robert Sutton's talking about.

[00:50:51] By the way. It's not just kind of like this sort of rambling, good people kind of thing. He describes characteristics of people like this and what their characters are. So you can identify what Robert Sutton is looking for. And I realized that those characteristics were this person that I worked for and his point, Sutton's point is that no matter how good a salesperson they are, no matter how good they are with, running the warehouse, they're not worth it. 

[00:51:18] And so in the book I talk about if someone meets these, this criteria, then you have to let them go no matter how well they did last quarter, or what their sales were because you're underestimating what they're doing to the whole fabric of the organization. 

[00:51:32] Ronald Skelton: I worked for Lockheed Martin. We had one engineer, when he walked in the room, we'd all cringe. I was a software test engineer for Lockheed, which meant I read code, found flaws in it, and my job was to break it. They would fix the computers.

[00:51:44] We built software and computer systems for the Department of Defense. They would build them and my job was to break them, break into them, hack them, until they couldn't do it anymore. Until I couldn't get in anymore. And I had a few people that worked with me. And, we would be reading code reviews like stacks of software, just reading code.

[00:52:00] I could read code and look at it and analyze problems in somebody else's code way better than I'd ever sit there and write it. And, I could get ahead a little ahead and just be watching and look at that code and be looking over at this guy, let's just call him George because that's pretty close to his name.

[00:52:12] I'd be watching George because I knew as soon as we get to that line of code, this guy's going to start throwing white out erasers, markers and stomping feets and drawing code on the wall, on the whiteboards and explaining why it's all wrong and just lose his stuff. We all knew that, there wasn't a better engineer.

[00:52:28] Then when it really broke, when things broke, when I was able to break into something, that was the guy they sent in to look at it, to why I could get into it and fix it. And usually I would dread him coming on to something. Cause that was my job, right? I would write the software tool.

[00:52:43] I mean, write the procedures to break into it. Show them that I could, they would go fix it. Whenever I couldn't get into it anymore, they'd give me a new project and I have to start over. I get it that sometimes you need those people around, but, and I don't know if I would ever have fired him just because he was absolutely brilliant on the software side of things.

[00:53:01] So let's talk about the book a little bit. And we're going to wrap this up. How do people find the book? We talked a lot about, those 5 points. And, is there any key components of the book you want people to know that we haven't covered? We talked about a bunch of cool stuff. What did we miss?

[00:53:13] David Dodson: The book is very, it's not long. When I wrote it, I took each skill area and subskill area. I want to describe this in a way that somebody can implement it the next day. And I want to do it in as few pages as possible. Some chapters are longer, some chapters are shorter.

[00:53:28] I did it with the minimal amount of words because the person who buys this book is a busy person and they're running an organization. And so that's how the book is written. As a result, I can't cover the whole book, obviously in a podcast, but the important thing is, to understand that being good at getting things done is within your control if you're willing to learn these five skill areas. And in terms of where you get the book, anywhere. Amazon, Barnes and Noble, those would be the two easiest places to get it online.

[00:54:00] One thing I know is that you don't make money as an author. If you will, encouraging people to buy the book, it's not because I want to sell copies of a book.

[00:54:08] It's because I really set out to try to help people be better managers and then help them to transform organizations. It's one thing for the CEO, let's say, to be good at hiring.

[00:54:20] Think about the power of when all of the managers are good at hiring. It's one thing if the CEO is good at running a meeting. Think about the power of when your whole organization runs a meeting. Think about the power of when all your managers are careful with their time. And so this book is not a book for one person to do sort of, it's not a self help book. 

[00:54:41] Take out the word self and put organization. It's an organization help book. And I would love to look back on it and feel like, yes, it's nice to help larger companies and so forth, but the idea of helping entrepreneurs and especially early leaders, become skillful at what they do is so rewarding. So that's why I want people to buy the book.

[00:55:00] Ronald Skelton: So who can take the course? You have to be a Stanford student or like a Harvard and some of the other schools. There's classes that are normal classes that are in certificate programs too. So you can actually, I could go take a Harvard course on negotiations over a certain period of time online. Is this class you teach in person?

[00:55:16] David Dodson: Yeah, it's in person. It's just for the MBA master's program, and there's a wait list on the course because it's a popular subject.

[00:55:23] Ronald Skelton: Read the book, definitely read the book. And, I do appreciate your time here. This is, I wasn't expecting this to be engaging and fun.

[00:55:30] And it's like, I've interviewed over 170 people at this point. I really want you to understand you brought a lot of value to the show. You brought a lot of value and story and history about search funds and stuff. By far, one of the favorite things I've done so far on the show. So thank you for being here today.

[00:55:45] David Dodson: Well, that means a lot to me, Ron. I mean, I thank you for telling me that. 

[00:55:48] Ronald Skelton: All right. We'll call that a show. Hang out for a few seconds afterwards.