E181: Robb Green on Wealth Creation, Business Acquisition, and E-Commerce Growth Strategies

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello and welcome to the How2Exit Podcast. Today I'm here with Robb Green and we are going to talk about everything. Wealth creation, e commerce, the state of, e commerce stores. And we're just gonna have a blast here. Thank you for being on the show today, Robb. [00:00:13] Robb Green: Oh, thanks for having me. I'm excited to talk about e commerce and actually buying and selling businesses. [00:00:17] Ronald Skelton: Buying and selling businesses. Cool. Let's start with your origin story, man. How did you get started? Who are you? Why are we talking to the guy who, has his own show called the, I am the, I'm the one. Who's Robb and why should the audience of buying and selling businessestake a, take an hour of their time today and listen to you. Cause I know they should, but they need to know it. [00:00:37] Robb Green: I appreciate that. So,I worked in corporate America for quite a while, and I think I'm a good example of somebody who's got a family, wife, kids, and they're ready to make a change.They always says, everybody always says, follow your passion. My passion, I realized I hated corporate America. And I didn't know how to get out of it, to be honest with you. So I found a way out. Started an e commerce business in 2011. And then actually started transitioning to building my own brands in 2015. I bought a brand, bought a partner out. I've sold a few brands. And so we create private label brands, which is creating our own brand from scratch. We are currently trying to acquire more brands. And then what we do is we exit when it makes sense, but we build them so that we have the ability to actually sell them if we want to. But I'm a great example, I think of somebody who works in corporate America, wants to get a way out. The best way out, honestly, buy a business. Don't start from zero. I tell all my friends that want to do this. Don't start from zero. Zero to one is really, really hard. Go from one to five. If you have a business experience or some skills that you can apply to a business, it's an absolute no brainer. [00:01:38] Ronald Skelton: I agree 100%. And, uh, I even tell people to come to me and they say, I got this product idea. Will you fund it? I was like, I got a better idea. Go find a company that matches that product idea that they can fund it. Acquire the company and bring that product idea. After you get some time in the company, bring that product idea in as additional product in their services, they can fund it. And I'll walk you through how to do that. I've done the statistics. I've done the math. Um, there's the scariest one is only 9 percent of all businesses that start ever hit the million dollar mark. Why go down to a 91 percent failure rate when you can step in to and acquire something that's already there. I completely agree. Absolutely. So you've, you've been this. You've done this, you've done on the Amazon stores. I'm sure you've done other stuff. I'm just looking at your profile and stuff to talk about a little bit about the Amazon stores. It says 17 brands. Talk about some of the brands that you, or the product types that you did. And your, what got you into that spacE. [00:02:34] Robb Green: Yeah, honestly, I let the data lead me, to be honest with you. So I had a dog brand. I didn't have a dog. I had a coffee product brand. I don't drink coffee. So to be honest with you, Ron, I didn't, it doesn't really matter to me. What it's a pretty, I wouldn't call it easy, but I'd call it simple. We'd find opportunities of products that we could actually penetrate the market. Whether that's, Amazon, Shopify, Walmart, whatever the market can dictate where we can penetrate. And then what we would do if we had enough of products that would make up a brand, we would start from scratch and we would build out a logo, a name, a branding, a design guide. Then we would buy the products. We'd co manufacture either in China or the U S. And then we would launch them typically on Amazon first, then Walmart second, and then Shopify third. And so we're really good at the Amazon side of things. Working with the algorithm, getting visibility and then getting conversions on the platform. And so that was, has been our process for the last eight years. And that's what we've been doing. And then when necessary, or when we want to, maybe we've tapped out a market where we can't build any more in that niche. We'll go ahead and sell that brand. We'll peel it off. We'll take the capital re reinvest into more brands. So that's been the process that we've been doing. But the reality now is the environment's changed quite a bit. So now, I've learned my lessons of going from zero to one and how hard that is. I'd rather take our skills that we have as a team and buy something that already exists. They've done all the hard work, the trademark, the branding, built it up, but they maybe miss something that we have a specialty on, that we can bring to the table immediately on day one. And we want to take it from where they are now to the next level. [00:04:11] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I think the biggest thing most business owners or entrepreneurs miss is, they automatically assume that everybody wants what they've got to sell. And the biggest market test for anything is product market fit. And when you acquire something, you know, like it's moving already, people are buying it, so now I know that there's a market for it. There's a lot of products out there that seem brilliant or maybe, and they, some of it's just timing, right? There's products that, you know, were introduced 15 years ago, but if they were to be reintroduced, would do really well right now. That happens quite often. So, uh, that's one of the reasons I think acquiring what you're doing now, acquiring something, you already kind of, you see what's working, you see that it's moving, you can see what you could, maybe improve upon as opposed to, does the market even want it, right? [00:04:56] Robb Green: I'd love to tap into that and just double click on what you just said. I think the mistakes I've made and the things that haven't worked, is improperly understanding demand. It almost always goes back to that root problem and you hear it a lot, it's almost like the inventor's dilemma. I've talked to a lot of people that everyone's got an idea. I got an idea for this product and they're trying to scratch their own itch or solve a problem. Well, if the market doesn't want to buy it, it doesn't really matter what it is. And I think that's the number one problem you hear is like, I got this great idea and I'm like, great, but does anyone actually want to give you money to solve that and buy that product or that service? And I think that's the number one problem. [00:05:36] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I had somebody actually make the argument the other day. We were having this conversation and he's like, well, somebody made a pet rock and sold rocks. So your logic doesn't follow. And I said, that's a one in a million shot. Your logic doesn't follow. Go buy a lottery ticket, right? And he got it. You know, it clicked in his head that he, the example he pulled out, he's like, I just have to tell you, his product was not getting product market fit. And I was like, maybe the market doesn't ready or not ready. He's like, I just got to tell a better story. I got to tell us, you know, better marketing. They need a different marketer. You spent $300, 000 on six different people, you know, in the last, year. Well, you know, hundreds of thousand dollars in last year and four or five different marketing people have tried to pitch this thing. The story is not the problem. The market doesn't want it. It would be different if he wasn't getting impressions and wasn't getting in front of people, but he's, people are seeing it. The ads are getting impressions that are just not getting clicked. So, um, let's do the next one here. Let's talk about, the question that popped up when you were talking about, choosing brands and stuff like that is, I always think of stuff in a box and like Amazon is being really lean on profit margin. Like you're squeaking out for pennies. What is a good, what's the, what are you looking for in a profit margin for a company before you buy it? And what's kind of the range? There's gotta be a low point and a, Hey, this is where we want them to be. [00:06:48] Robb Green: Yeah, I think I'm a little bit different than most people. I think a lot, so let me give you a little more background on especially the e commerce space last few years. A few billion dollars was raised by what we call aggregators, FBA aggregators, Amazon aggregators. And they came into this space and they typically had a finance background and maybe not an operational background. And they bought hundreds of brands out there. Okay. And they thought we're going to do the old rollup strategy and we're going to put them all together and we're going to get economies of scale. Well, a lot of these smaller, one to $10 million revenue businesses, you don't get economies of scale. Because they're so differentiated. You're not buying from the same factory. You're not shipping the same containers. You're not selling even the same category. You don't get the same economies of scale you would get if you rolled up, a hundred car washes, for example. It's a different industry. So a lot of them seem to be struggling. I mean, one of them filed for BK race-, recently. And so they haven't been able to really, uh, realize those gains or economies of scale that they hope to do. They wanted to buy brands that had like a review moat, they viewed it as a lot of them. So they just didn't really matter the product in some cases or the brand and had a review moat, which means it had a lot of reviews relative to the other categories. That doesn't, that's helpful, but that's not the end all be all, right. So they came in and some of them have operated them well, but a lot of them haven't done well. And so I view it as, I don't care as much about profit if I can fix the problem. You mentioned something really interesting just a few minutes ago about visibility. It's two problems. One, can I get eyeballs on it? And two, can I get it to convert? Will they buy? RiGht? And generally speaking, all businesses, especially online, have one of those two problems. Can we solve with our skills that they don't have? And some of those skills are, how do we write for the algorithm? How do we create listings for the consumer? How do we do better images? Simple things sometimes. How do we get visibility? And then how do we convert? If we have skills that they don't have, we can make a huge difference really fast in the sales of that opportunity. So I'm not as focused. I think you're right about the profit margin being, I'd say a well run business online, net 20 percent margin. You're probably in that 15 to 20 for a well run business. A lot of people are squeaking out single digits now because Amazon fees have gone up. Costs to advertise have gone up and then you've got a lot of overseas sellers bringing the average sales price down. So you've got your traditional market compression that happens every time in every industry as it matures. [00:09:26] Ronald Skelton: I had, one of the VPs from the Great Game of Business, which is a book that was written in a system for running businesses out there. Not everybody knows what it is, but it's called The Great Game of Business. I had him on here and he spouted off that the national average for profit margin for companies was like two point something, 2. 6%. And I thought it was wrong. I was like, yeah, that can't be right. So I just kind of nodded. And after the show, I went and looked it up. And because of manufacturing, and especially in his industry where they're, he buys a lot of, they buy out, they bought 60 something companies in the, in their life of their business, but their read, remanufacturing parts. Like they'll take a turbochargers for the diesels and that type of stuff and rebuild them to the real, the remanufactured parts. It's just a really in space. So, for a lot of people out there, they hear 20 percent profit margin, I think that's huge. And then you look at people like me who look at, newsletters, pot, uh, like email stuff those are 70, 80, you know. If somebody is running a newsletter, a profitable blog or something and they're Under 75% profit margin, they're probably doing something wrong. It's a very, very profitable business now. They usually hard to scale person, there's usually a kind of a cap, I wouldn't say a clap, but you know. You get them up to six figures pretty, not easy, but pretty decently. Get them above that, you know, it takes take something. Fairly unique to, to have the writers on staff and stuff to get a seven figure eight figure content business. But they're extremely profitable. So that's why, a lot of our listeners would have a knee jerk reaction, like, yeah, you know, 20 percent minimum. They think, oh, I'd love to have 20 percent because they're running, X, Y, Z manufacturing and they're, they're squeaking by on 9 percent profit margins, right? I have a pest control company. Reason I ended up owning that is, I stumbled across that the average pest control company does 30 to 45%, right? Industry average is 28%. I was like, and, I had a relative that trying to get me to buy his boss's one for two years. I kept telling him, no. I was like, I'm not interested in that. I don't want to be around chemicals. So now we're moving it over to the, it'll be theirs. Probably by the end of the year, I'll be out of it. So we're going to, we're going to structure that out. [00:11:20] Robb Green: I mean, I always think about it from a bottom line.I think about it in dollars, not as percentages, right. I'm at 10 percent on 10 million. That's a million dollar net. If I'm at 40 percent on a hundred grand, I'm not, you know what I mean? So it's 40, 40, 000 bucks. So I think about it from a dollar's perspective. It's easy to get caught up in the margin. Percentages, whether they're good or bad, but I think about it at the end of the day, I'm not buying things in percentages, I'm buying them in dollars. [00:11:45] Ronald Skelton: I get that. I also, uh I consider it, maybe it's my own, uh, confidence, but, the larger the profit margin, the larger margin of error I have. Like my, my, my joke is when you buy something that's yours to figure out, or when you build something that's yours to figure out, trying to make it work and all that, it's at, that's the game. When you acquire something that's yours to screw up, right? You can just leave it around and maintain it. And if it's chunked out, for the last 15 years, if it's chunked out 15, 20 percent profit margins for 20 years, you probably shouldn't touch anything and it would do the same. To some extent the employees would, you know, the, the people there were running it and made the changes they've made to keep it sustained at that profit margin for that long. Probably could make the same changes. You could back off and let it happen. You know, so it's yours to mess up. When you're running on, 8, 10 percent margins and all of a sudden, COVID hits and the cost of shipping triples, now what do you do? Let's talk about, we talked about before the show, we talked about on our pre show interview, the state of the economy and, um, kind of where you see it going. I'm really interested in your perspective of, like everything from, I know for about two years ago, the multiples or maybe a year and a half ago, the multiples for Amazon stores and stuff, when those aggregators are buying, we're crazy. Now they're probably a lot more sane. But yeah, where do you see it? Where do you see, where was it before? And where do you see it going? [00:13:07] Robb Green: Yeah, 2020 and 2021, they started increasing. You had that COVID bump. So you had some really big numbers and growth for a lot of these brands. Cause everybody was buying everything on, online. Right. And so as more aggregators raise more money, they also needed to allocate that money. So you saw more competition. So you started going from a two to three X profit, to four, five, six, seven. Maybe even eight. And a lot of these were, smaller brands. Uh, not really brands per se, but there were smaller brands, more of a collection of products. And they were getting four or five, six X profit, which to buy that with debt, is really hard to make that work. With not great mark with, you know, subpar margins. Right. So I think it got a little ahead of itself. I'd say the industry got a little ahead of itself. Nowadays, if you've got a great brand that's growing and it's just, let's just say it's just marketplace only Amazon only, you're lucky if you get three X, honestly. And most of the stuff that's not, it's got a few warts on it, let's call it, year one, one to two X. I mean, that's just the way the market is today. [00:14:15] Ronald Skelton: And so that's more aligned with brick and mortar and everything else. One, you know, three X, if you're perfectly run depending on, there's are some niche, just like anything, there's outliers. But your standard brick and mortar company, three X, if you're running really well. If you got any awards, like you said, one and a half, two X. If you got a business it's someone of the outliers, you got recurring revenue, you got some assets and stuff like that, you can get three X plus assets or three X plus. Maybe a little bit of bump on the recurring revenue. But, uh, that's industry average for brick mortar and boring businesses as they call them. So it sounds like it pulled back in line with everything else. I think the outlier right now is SaaS. SaaS is still getting decent multiples at this level. So, and, for the, you guys listening and go, I see online that they, my, my industry gets, you know, eight multiple. You're playing two different games. There's an arbitrage game inside of this realm. There's tiers. So if you get your EBITDA, your seller's discretionary earnings above a 2 million mark, then you get to play the game where private equity will buy in. They're the ones paying the higher multiples. But for most of guys like Robb, myself, and 99 percent of the people out there, they're going to buy the company. If you're below that $2 million EBITDA, $3 million EBITDA, you're probably going to get those industry three X, uh, averages. So anyway. [00:15:33] Robb Green: And that was, that was the whole game that a lot of the aggregators were trying to play, right? They were trying to buy it three and four. And then as they had an aggregation of a higher EBITDA, they get an 8, 8 to 9 and 10 multiple, and that's multiple arbitrage, right? And like everything else, it looks great in a PowerPoint, it's just got to be able to execute, right? [00:15:51] Ronald Skelton: And that's still the game a lot of the guys play, right? There's two different levels. There's a $4 million EBITDA level, which will get you on most brick and mortar, boring companies. You know your space, I know this space. And the boring company world if you get above a $4 million EBITDA, you probably get private equity to open their eyes. It's kind of the wake up the giants, low stage. And you can get six or seven for home services most of brick and mortar, pest control, uh, plumbing, heat and air, all those types of home services and similar manufacturing, that type of stuff. The next step up is $10 million in EBITDA and you can get between eight and 12 x. Then it's real hard to sell because you're at a eight to 10 x on a 10, $10 million ebitda, you're looking at a hundred million dollars purchase. So you have to, there's fewer and fewer people playing the PE game at that level. But, [00:16:38] Robb Green: And I've had a few friends sell at that level. I've had a few friends with a $10 million ebitda, and I've been able to sell for six to 10 x. And you know,at that point, when you get to that level, you're looking at private equity, strategic buyers. You're talking omni channel. You've got a brand at that point, right? Something that can go everywhere and anywhere. [00:16:58] Ronald Skelton: I actually called probably 150 of the private equity and, uh, family offices, stuff. Fifty acquirers of those and just ask questions. And, the two things they want, most of them want an acquisition price, they don't want to cut a check smaller than 25 million most of the time. For most of those guys. And, the other thing is I asked what's the minimum? If I, if I do a merger, I do a roll up, what's the minimum time? And they want to see it up and running together for at least 18 months. Uh, most of them are 24 or 36. So where do you see it going? What's the, let's look at the future. Like, let's look into. [00:17:31] Robb Green: Yeah. So my hypothesis is that, some number of these aggregators are going to fail. And really it's mainly due to their, a lot of them took debt, as opposed to equity from what I understand. And with that being said, debt service is expensive. And if they're on any type of variable rate that that's higher now than it was before. And so if you've got a lower margin business and it's not operating perfectly, and you've got a heavy debt load and debt service at some point, the math breaks down. And so I would expect some of those guys to be selling their brands. And or either, bankruptcy reorganization. So the, I think the investor of a lot of private equity guys are going to force them to do this. That's what I think is going to happen. That's my prediction. In addition to that, because it's gotten much more difficult since COVID, the 2021 was probably the peak for most of these brands. Now it's more difficult. I think there's a lot of individual sellers that are also like, Hey, I don't know what to do next. My revenue is down a little, my profits down. I don't know how to compete in this space because it's changing so fast, right? So I think there's gonna be a lot of opportunities for people like myself who can come into a brand. Buy it either from an aggregator or buy it from an individual seller and say, all right, you don't have the skills we have and we can actually take this. And I kind of think of it like, Hey, if you built, you tend to spend the time and energy to build a brand, you want to see it succeed. You don't want to just shut it down. We'd be happy to have a conversation with you. See if we can turn it around, see if we can, or if it's even doing well, grow it and then kind of like safe hands. It's like your baby. You're going to hand me your baby to watch. And you want to see your baby grow up. Most people don't want to just shut it down. So we're here to help and try to find partnerships where we can buy the brand and take it to the next level. [00:19:14] Ronald Skelton: A lot of people don't understand that private equity, introduces kind of an artificial, stressor also. One of the reasons I don't raise capital to do acquisitions through private equity, um, What if it's doing really, really well, I want to hold it. Most of the time when you do raise private equity, you're on a timetable. Three years, five years, there's a return on capital. The, uh, the investors want to know that when they get their money back. The number one question that people are going to ask is, uh, is my money say it's a second wins. When do I get it back? And then the third question, and a lot of people think what is always first, is how much I'm going to make. But they want, first and foremost, all the investors want to know how safe is my money. And the second and foremost, like, when do I get it back? When do I get my capital back? Or how do I get it back? And then the third one is how much we're going to make. And in the private equity world, there's some promises made. So, I think there's an artificial stressor and we're going to hit it pretty quickly here. That those aggregators promise three to five years. Most of the time that's the normal standard and that's coming up for a lot of those guys. And then now they have to do one, one of two things. They got to go back to all their institutional investors and rails and repitch and say, Hey, we need more time. Which is an ego eating thing, the hard to do. Like, Hey, we messed up. It's not going to happen in three years. The economy did XYZ. Give us another two. Or they have to do what you're saying. They have to take, the hit, sell it and, start over. Now, if you see how they, if you see how they behave what they've done to, to mitigate this is they've created a second fund and a third fund and they're raising money again. So sometimes they can, some, depending on how they wrote their own rules. Sometimes they can sell to their other funds, but most of the time they can't even do that. So I go like a lot of times these guys can't say one of your brands did something cool and they bought their own real estate. They own the warehouse. A lot of these private equity could buy the brand, buy the e commerce, but they can't own real estate. They've had different rules inside of the fund. They raise and promises they made to investors. So they can't touch the real estate side of it. [00:21:03] Robb Green: Well, I think of the e commerce world, at least these private equity guys, they invested in a lot of different aggregators. Like they, they were in on the space, you know, hundreds of millions of work. They spread it out a couple of aggregators. Well, if those acres are having challenges, let's say, and it's not going exactly as well as they'd like, they've got to come up with a solution. Do you mark that down to market? Do you market to market? Nobody likes to do that. So does that put pressure on those private equity guys? Like you said, to put a stressor that they need to have their wins. They need to have some wins to take care of some of those losses, right? Cause my understanding, the private equity game is so different than the VC game. You, you need a high probability success in private equity. VC one could pay for, for nine losers. You need to win at a very high rate in private equity. Cause you're not going to have that, 20 X return typically in private equity investments. [00:21:52] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. And they're historically they've bet on, more safe and secure bets. Like a company has been around for five to 10 years, got good management, got good team. Like they're putting their money on good bets and with, for a lower returns. Their risk tolerance is lower. What it sounds like the aggregators did is play a game of, play the VC game in the private equity world, right? Like the unicorn hunting is what I like to call it. They're hunting unicorns. I think that this thing's going to continue to grow and do something magical and, shoot rainbows out its butt and make money forever. Uh, and it just doesn't work that way. What, I do want to touch something else real quick, because we have a lot of listeners who are getting into this space, a lot of them call themselves search funders. Maybe they're straight out of MBA programs. A lot of them have been operators or business owners in past. A lot of them are, they're executives at companies. A lot of the people listen and now they're looking to go out on their own. You actually have your own podcast called I'm The One. And you talk about a wealth building and health and financial and relationships and stuff. What is some of the advice you give your listeners to are like, they're wanting to cut their teeth on entrepreneurship and they're wanting to, create wealth for generations for their family and do something more with their life.Find more fulfillment. Share some of your wisdom you've gained over the years, of your show, uh, with this audience as to what that looks like. [00:23:12] Robb Green: Yeah. I mean, I think a couple of different thoughts on that. One, I like to think of myself as an architect, right? So I'm designing my own life. So I've got two daughters, almost 15 and 13. And when they were born, I wanted to create my own life. I had a corporate job back then. And I said, all right, how do I design my life? I live in Phoenix, so we can leave in the summer. So we, the kids get out of school the next day, we're on a plane somewhere. We're out of the States too hot here, right? We come back a couple of days before school starts. So this last summer, we were in Hawaii for the whole summer. Last year, we were in Portugal and Greece for the whole summer. We get out of town and to do that, you need to be an entrepreneur. It's really difficult to do that with a job, right? So every, and I have a bunch of friends that are,we live near Intel. So a bunch of people work at Intel, right? They work at big companies and,and they are used to that. They're comfortable, but they want out. They hate it. They don't like it. They want to do something different. My best advice I can give to anybody is go find a business that you're interested in. That is lacking what you're great at. And that could be finance. That could be sales and marketing. It could be operations. Find a business that has a lack and that you can fill that lack, and reach out to those types of businesses and buy them. We are currently running our own outreach to Amazon businesses. So I scraped all the data from Amazon.Pulled all the brands down. I built a simple model and we modeled out we're mailing out, uh, gift packages. We're mailing out, lumpy mail, cards, mail. Yeah. Yeah. We're doing all that right now to just to, just to have conversations with people. So we've had a few dozen, conversations in the past month or two, and we're gonna continue to have these conversations to find the right fit for us. I think, um, it tends to be a numbers game. But if you, and don't settle. Don't just, if you go look at one business, you kind of feel that stress to buy one. Have a lot of conversations. Take on a business that you're good at. Believe in yourself that you can do that. And once you become a business owner, I mean, I'm unemployable. Like there's just no way I could work for anybody else ever again. I think that changes the dynamic and how you think about it. And then that frees you up to really take something that you, is yours and really put your time and energy to it and accelerate it to the future. Which we all know businesses are the best, best wealth creating opportunity in our lifetime in today's world. So, I think there's stat and I could be wrong about this stat, 85% of the money you make in a business is the day you sell it. For the lifetime of the business, right? [00:25:39] Ronald Skelton: I believe so. Yeah. [00:25:40] Robb Green: And so, yeah. You take that buy something. It's already running and then accelerate it because again starting from zero is hard. I did the hard thing many, many times. It's really, really difficult. This is a much higher probability and a better chance for success. And there's all these people that are retiring, that don't want their business. They don't have, their kids don't want it. They don't know what to do with it. They don't know how to sell it. There this opportunity, the next 10 to 15 years is going to be insane in my opinion, Ron. [00:26:08] Ronald Skelton: I've seen a post the other day that kind of struck a nerve with me because I look at businesses a lot. And, it said, don't buy a business that does $1, 000, 000 in EBIT because you think you're going to get $1, 000, 000 of your paycheck. Unless you look at the owner and he's got it, he was talking about golf and I don't play golf, but it's like a scratch golf game, right? You know, how off because you could buy something that does $1, 000, 000 in EBIT and never have the time to spend it because you bought something that's going to require 80 hour work weeks for you to do what the owner did. There's a lot more to this game than, does the numbers look impressive? It's like, what does the owner's lifestyle look like? What do they have to do on a day to day basis? And can I, either hire that out, if it's not me. Or can I, am I willing to live that life? [00:26:52] Robb Green: Don't buy a job. Don't buy a job. Right. So, I mean, I know a local guy here, he owns a couple of post net franchises, right? Him and his wife bought them. They got jobs. They're both there all the time. We got a virtual mailbox there. Every time I go there, they're working. They bought themselves mediocre paying jobs by buying a franchise. [00:27:13] Ronald Skelton: I see people pitching those all the time. And I'm thinking, I have to do the math because you need, they have to be open a certain number of hours. You need to cover, uh, absentees, people calling in and stuff like that. So does it make enough money to, that somebody else is going to be there operating in a day to day end basis? Unless it's got quite a few boxes and it's fully subscribed, but I don't see like it's like you're saying you're buying yourself a job. [00:27:35] Robb Green: Yeah. And just really understanding again, I think matching up, I play soccer with a bunch of guys and they, most of them have, white collar corporate jobs. And we talk about this all the time after soccer and a few of them own businesses already, but a few of them just haven't taken that leap yet. And, it's like, listen, go match up. You're an operations guy. Go find a business that's operations heavy. That is lacking that you can come in the first 30 days and make a difference either on the expenses side or on the revenue side from your operational expertise, it should be an obvious no brainer of what you're going to do to make that business better. [00:28:14] Ronald Skelton: I'll push back on that one a little bit. I would say that any business that you acquire, and this is from all these interviews and stuff and businesses that I've owned and stuff. To step in the first 30 days thinking you're gonna make changes right away, maybe in the e commerce space, but for most of these businesses,is a little bit, I even posted about it today. That's on your ego. Um, to step in and think you're going to improve it, change it overnight after it's been in business for 10, 20 or 30 years or more, is your ego talking to you. The best thing that anybody can do, and it's, and all the people I've talked to an interview that failed it's because they made changes right away. The best thing you can do is for 60, 90, 180 days, depending on the complexity of the business is own it, especially if it's profitable. Own it, watch it and see how it operates. And, then I would tell you, the next step is if you got changes in mind, interview every single employee and figure out what changes they've been wanting to make for a while. Look at your spreadsheet of changes you already knew you needed to make. Align with the ones that the employees think need to happen and do those first, because now you've got ownership vision and buy in from the, from the employees. So you don't get that resistance to change. The natural human instinct is they hate change. There's all kinds of books written on who moved my cheese and all that other stuff. You go in and change stuff. Their first couple of weeks of being an owner of a new business is, do you, can you keep your, can you keep the employees around? I interviewed a guy yesterday. It won't be out for a few weeks now, but he acquired a, multimillion dollar business, a good sized business within a few weeks every employee quit. [00:29:39] Robb Green: Great advice, great advice ron and I think in the brick and mortar world, that's very solid advice. In, in our world in e commerce we change a listing or advertising, there's no employee to get upset about it. So we're, we have an actual like step by step plan. Day one, we take over, we do this. Day two, this. Day three, this. It's all built out in monday. com. And we have a project based software to do that. So we can go in and make those changes without the, because my team is doing the changes, right? It's not, we're going to buy a business where we've got, you know, you make a great point about the ego and the person. It's a little different in e commerce for sure. In terms of we can make those changes really quick. And we also get the feedback loop a lot faster, because we can go make a change today and see results like in the next couple of hours, right? It's crazy. We can go make change advertising now, and within a day or two, we can know whether it made a difference or not. Positive or negative. [00:30:37] Ronald Skelton: You can do AB split testing, all the other stuff too, that doesn't happen in the brick mortar world. I changed it for this 50 percent of the customer and did that improve it or do you prove it? Okay. Now I'll check, I'll roll that change out. Or even I've done three way, ABC test where I take a third of the customer, but as I run it to online, I take a, I run a test on a third of that, you know, that list or whatever. And oh, wow, that was horrible. Nobody liked it. Okay. I'm not going to run it down the other two thirds. And hopefully the, the third that didn't like it will forgive me at some point, right? And you, you reverse it, you back it out. That's, yeah, you can't do that on the, on the brick and mortar company and a lot of the other businesses. What I'm referring to is like, anytime you got a lot of employees, um, the number one problem and, uh, in the merger and acquisition space after an acquisition is, is employee retention. What we call turnover, I keep, trying to quit using that word because everybody in Europe calls revenue turnover. So they use the word turnover for the revenue of the company. But we always call that our churn or turnover here is like how fast do we lose employees. How fast are we replacing employees. Um, more than one, I'd probably say from looking at everything, probably 60 to 70 percent of all, at merger and acquisition failures, have to do with, the employee's resistance to change after the acquisition, the integration process. Um, So that's where I was coming from. [00:31:52] Robb Green: No, I think you're right. I think you're spot on. I think it's two different worlds. [00:31:54] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, it is. and that's the interesting thing is it is two different worlds. You have a world, right where, in my, in our world, in world of brick and mortar and, and people run business and engineering, firm staff, anything that requires a human being to do the actions on a day to day basis. Um, you have human psychology in play. You have, changing systems and processes require people that do it, own it, you got to sell the vision, convince them to do it, change habits and stuff. Your, computers don't have habits. Computers don't have psychological barriers to making changes and stuff. So, uh, you can go in and test things and change things super fast on the computer side to where, there's a human element that has to be done, dealt with. On everything you do when you're dealing with employees that are, companies that run by the employees. [00:32:41] Robb Green: Yeah, I like what you call it stuff in a box. We think about it as stuff in a box, but really what, if you think about it the way I differentiate it is even though it is stuff in a box, I live in the bits and bytes world of business. And then there's The Adams world of the business, which is the physical products, which you know, physical brick and mortar, which you're dealing with people, right? They are two separate. And that's still why you see, I think the challenges of these, of the merging of the bits and bytes. That's why it's so difficult to, for some brick and mortar to become e commerce oriented and some e commerce businesses become more bricks and mortar or bricks and mortar oriented because they are two separate worlds and they're merging very quickly, but it's difficult to do. [00:33:21] Ronald Skelton: All right, I'm going to give you my number one, and I'm going to, you are being nice. I call it, S I B stands for shit in a box. I don't get into shit in a box businesses because you have to store shit, know where shit is. People have to put it on the shelves. People got hurt lifting shit off the shelves. Logistics, all the nightmares of like, and the people ship back to you when they don't want it anymore. Even if it's legit or not legit. So, uh, uh, you're being nice. It's S I B, but it is a shit in a box. That said, the number one reason, it's shit in a box isn't the reason why I'm a resistance to that, is the reason I'm resistant to go into the e commerce space, is I don't do anything where a single person has the power to be my disruptor, right? So sell me on e commerce and tell me how fast you move from just being an Amazon store to be in both Amazon, Spotify and on wall, walmart. com. So you're diversified in one, one player can't disrupt your world by deciding I'm going to sell batteries too. You're out of business. [00:34:17] Robb Green: Yeah, I think that's a great point. I think it is. It's very difficult. I think some people try to be great at everything right away, and I don't think that's the right play. I think you become great at one channel. Then the next channel. I'll give you a great example. Right now we are focused on getting great at TikTok shops. So I don't know how much time you spend on TikTok, but TikTok shops is a relatively new platform. And they are trying to engage customers on TikTok to buy directly on the platform. They don't want you to go into Amazon, from the TikTok video. And so they're subsidizing it. They're allowing this creator connections. I mean, nobody, nobody, very few people are talking about this right now. We are investing heavily. I was just at Amazon headquarters in Seattle for a, a small seller meeting. There was four of us and we met with directors and VPs about how we integrate and how we work with the platform. I brought this up during our lunch, we're chatting and talking to all the people. And everybody dismissed it. They're like, Oh no, it's just TikTok. It's just videos. It's no big deal. And I'm like, I don't think you guys understand what's happening. Like if the engagement rate and the number, the amount of time people are spending on TikTok, and now they can just click on it and buy. I heard a stat the other day, there's a couple of hashtags. One is like TikTok made me buy it. I think it's one of them. 75 billion views of that hashtag. I mean, this is changing now. E commerce is morphing in front of our eyes. With TikTok and Snapchat potentially. So I think that the idea is to be forward thinking. Be on the platforms that are emerging. Amazon is still going to be the gorilla. In the United States for quite some time. Walmart is growing, finally. They're starting to take it seriously. You're always going to have a place for your own platform or your own sales on Shopify. But then TikTok shops is this unbelievable, untapped. Then the number two product I looked at on TikTok shops last week did a million dollars in revenue. Only on the platform. It's a $15 product. [00:36:22] Ronald Skelton: So we've, my, myself, my family, we've probably bought at least a dozen things off of, from a TikTok. You know, somebody posted something like, Hey, that was really cool. And it's weird, cause I watch a lot of videos on cool gadgets and stuff. I, you were talking about earlier people like impressions and buyers. I look at, I watch a lot of those, Hey, the top 20 cool gadgets to have. I rarely buy a cool gadget. But there's been some cool stuff that, my wife or myself, uh, has seen on TikTok, like, Hey, we should try that. Unfortunately, I don't remember one satisfied purchase, right? And I think tiktok has to do what they're doing now. They have to have their own store. They need a feedback loop of some reviews, star rating or stuff like that. Because I bought that swirling shower head and it's plastic. You know, it looks great online and it sucks when you get it home. It's plastic. It doesn't you know, do what it says it's going to do. I bought some of the other, we bought some of the other gadgets like that looks really cool. And everybody you know, all these people are watching they've got a million views. It's got to be good. The feedback loop of, reviews and the things that are existing in most other stores, was missing. All right. So I think they did a smart thing. [00:37:23] Robb Green: I think you're correct. And here's what you're seeing now. So I'll use this example. The product that did a million dollars, actually two weeks ago, cause I did this research two weeks ago. I went to Amazon to look at the product on Amazon. And they were selling pretty well on Amazon before they got on TikTok shops. I mean, they were probably selling 50, 50 units a day. Okay. I can see that in their BSR, their bestseller rank. There's an inflection point in their BSR graph. Where when they got on TikTok shops, they're now in the top 100 BSR in their category on Amazon. They're now selling 2, 000 to 3, 000 a day on Amazon since they've been on TikTok shops, because I think what happens, my belief is that overflow. Do I trust this? Do I really want to buy this? They go to Amazon, maybe because they've already, they trust the platform more, but they also have reviews. So now they go look at it and go, Oh, is this legit or not? Oh, shoot. They got 2000 reviews. Yeah, this is legitimate. I'm just, Oh, I'm already here. I'll just buy it. So they're crushing it on TikTok shops, which is then overflowing into Amazon. And then they're getting more sales and billing, building that reputation on Amazon too. So it's a win win for that brand in this case. [00:38:36] Ronald Skelton: It's funny because we've done that too. Like I said, I told you earlier, we live in a tiny home. Our oven are a little, we don't actually, the tiny home doesn't have an actual oven. It's an air fryer, oven, toaster gadget that sits on the shelf, right? Because, it's a small space and that's all we really need. We've seen that on a TikTok, but it wasn't, they were selling it. They were doing a review of somebody else's recipe. And he's like bragging about, man, I love this thing. You know, it does X, Y, Z and stuff. And we just, I freezed it and I looked at it and I went on Amazon to verify like the reviews on it and stuff like that. And then I bought it from Amazon. So I know that happens. A lot of people will go there because of the reviews and because of the, like. The other thing is, I use a little gift card. Somebody gave me to buy the shower head because it was a third party website. I've never seen before that was selling it. Right. So the trust factors, am I going to put my ATM or a credit card, you know, that, has money in it on some site that, can cipher and siphon it off. [00:39:28] Robb Green: Yeah, one of my, one of my friends, Jay, came to our mastermind. He presented, uh, back in September and he, I liked what he, I'm going to borrow what he said. He said, our goal is to be everywhere and electric. He's like, we want to meet the consumer where they want to buy. So we want to be Amazon, Walmart, retail, sprouts, whole foods, wherever they want to buy us, we want them to buy us. I mean, I think that's the end goal. The challenge of some of these brands that I've talked to that have gone retail first, is they didn't get great terms with the retail because they were new. They were nobody, right? Their fill rates weren't great. So they had these challenges. I, the best I've seen is you go e com first and then retail, because you've got a better negotiating position with retail. And then now it starts to be synergistic between the two. Right. [00:40:19] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I like that because there is brand loyalty to, if you think like, here's a good example, Whole Foods and like, I don't know what rest, grocery stores are near you, but like Safeway or one of the, one of the other ones that are fairly common. There's a location here where they're probably within a quarter of mile each other. You can, my wife will walk into Whole Foods and she'll get stuff on our list. And a lot of it's convenience cause she's just there. But she'll buy stuff there that is at Safeway, same brand, same ounces, same number of sizes. And she's paying a dollar or two premium on it cause it's at Whole Foods. And then, she, Oh, they didn't have X, Y, and Z. I got to stop by Safeway and grab that on the way home. And I'm thinking, why didn't you just get all of this, these items are not Whole Foods. Man, like, oh, I don't know. It's just, I was at Whole Foods and I kind of trust them more. I know it's organic. It comes from them or I know it's this or that. So there is that. So there are people do want to buy from certain areas because there's a trust. There's a loyalty to it. Like I kind of, I kind of trust Amazon. I've been buying from them so long. Yeah. And I know that, you know, they're pretty good about taking stuff back. If I have to, I don't like doing it, but if I have to, we can ship something back to them. So I get that. How fast can you, I mean, you got a product, it's doing well on Amazon, Amazon makes a change. Is it fairly quick to get it up and running one of those other stuff? If you know those other product lines, or does it take time? Um, you know. [00:41:36] Robb Green: This is the problem with shit in a box though, to be honest with you. I mean, this is the problem. You've now got a logistics issue, right? So if I'm going to be in retail and I'm going to be, you know, now they've, we use Amazon FBA, fulfillment by Amazon. We use Walmart's fulfillment, right? So we've got to make sure we've got inventory at a 3PL warehouse. We've got to have inventory at FBA. We've got to have inventory at Walmart. Now TikTok's got their own fulfillment centers. You have to earn your way into them. That's going to be another place. We're going to have to carry fulfillment, right? So now you've just complicated your supply chain a little bit, right? So you add retail to it. Now you've got all, so that's where supply chain. I am not embarrassed to say this. I had very little respect for supply chain before I started doing shit in a box. And now, man, I've got a few friends of mine and they're both, uh, supply chain, uh, directors at big, large, large companies. And I now have a lot of respect for what they do. Because managing a supply chain is no joke. [00:42:38] Ronald Skelton: It's just an element of business I've never taken the time to learn and I know it's something you really have to know, right? The logistics and, okay, I want to be on Amazon, they're gonna, the best way to do that is to have inventory at their fulfillment center. Okay, cool. I got inventory at their fulfillment center. I want to be at Walmart. Well, Amazon selling, you know, a thousand units a month. What is Walmart going to say? And what's their minimum inventory? Cause some of these places have minimum inventory or all this different stuff. And now, okay, now we found a glitch in our product and it's no longer in my warehouse. I just don't have to switch it back. I can't grab it all at my warehouse and ship it back to the manufacturer and say, or whatever, and like, sell it, you know, actually now I've got all this stuff out there that is, I need to fix, repair or whatever. So that's the reasons I was like, eh, it's just not. I see it. I'm really blessed in the world that there are people like you that'll do it because I like to buy stuff. I'm a consumer. But I just, it's not for me just because the lifestyle I want to leave, live is if we don't like living here anymore, we can grab our stuff, put it on a truck and take it to the next location, right? I won't, I don't have to go look for my next warehouse or my next X, Y, Z, or whatever. Where are the products being shipped back to? Cause, uh, uh, does Amazon take the returns now? Cause, years ago when I looked at them, basically a lot of the returns came back to you when they first started. [00:43:52] Robb Green: No, they take them all. And then we have a choice of whether we want to get them back from Amazon or dispose of them. So it depends on the, on, on a product. Yeah. I see they'd sell those big pallets of, returns and stuff. I didn't know how they accumulated that stuff. They take it all back. We, uh, on the inventory side, we have two rules, right? Especially around Amazon FBA. Rule number one, never run out of stock at Amazon. Rule number two, see rule number one. [00:44:17] Ronald Skelton: They get upset? [00:44:18] Robb Green: Well, well, so what happens actually is it affects your ranking significantly. We can go as deep as you want here, but basically the Amazon algorithm is an exponential decay algorithm. Which means that they look back over time to see how well you've sold, right? So imagine you're selling 50 a day, 50 a day, 50 a day. Now you're out of stock. You're accumulating zeros. Each day that you're selling zeros. So now for that keyword or for that product category, you're accumulating zeros while your competitors are still selling 50 a day. You're now at a negative. So when you go on a stock for some period of time, it's almost like you've got to kind of relaunch the product on Amazon. So it's incredibly expensive and painful, to run out of stock. [00:44:59] Ronald Skelton: Not only are they continuing to sell 50 a day, we're an impulse nation. They're selling your 50 a day too. Somebody's like, I come on to Amazon I don't know if it's you selling them to the other guy. I don't know. I'd say that, you know, there are certain things I look for brands in, like, my shoes are gonna always be, you know, I like sketches cause I, they're higher, there's certain things I look for brands in. Or tennis shoes or whatever. But for most products, I go in there looking for batteries. I need batteries. Right. I don't care if you're selling them to me or another guy selling to me. As long as there's a good rating and they're, you know, not, you know, third party use saying, something weird. [00:45:31] Robb Green: And I think you're a common user honestly, Ron. I think that you're a common user of that. And that's our job, then, is I call myself a choice architect. I'm designing the situation and your visibility, so that you make the decision that I want you to make, which is to buy my product. So that's our entire objective, is how do we get in front of you? And make it easy for you to buy ours, versus continuing to scroll or pick somebody else's and buy theirs. That's how I think about it. [00:45:57] Ronald Skelton: It sounds like you guys and most e commerce guys that do Amazon, Walmart, or the, they have their own SEO world, right? It's instead of search, uh, search engine ranking or, optimization, it's, you know,AEO, Amazon engine optimization, Walmart engine optimization. You guys constantly have to watch their algorithm. What's changing in their algorithm. Eat and sleep that thing and understand, wake up in the morning and look at things and go, why are we ranked number three? Now, what did they change in their algorithm? We've got more sales than the other guy. What did they change? How do we get our spot back? So it's a, I would say you'd almost have to gamify it. Make a game of it and challenge yourself every week with like, okay, where are we at and where do we want to be? [00:46:39] Robb Green: Yeah. The amount of, it's now become much more data analytics heavy, than it was even a few years ago. And I've seen a gap between the people that don't really understand their data and the people that do. I mean, we track between let's say 50 and 200 keywords for each product. And we track it daily on where our rankings are. And then you've got to layer in your advertising to that. And then you've got to understand how do you perform on each of those keywords. It's a really, it's a very, very complex situation now. And it is search engine optimization. You don't show up on page one, you don't show up in the top 10 on Amazon, you don't exist. [00:47:14] Ronald Skelton: I don't ever remember hitting page two. And I'm looking for, if I'm scrolling around, just like I'm bored and I'm looking for like, a lot of times I'll do myself off the best sellers or something. Like, but it's, I call them my accidental purchases. I went in there to buy a particular book is usually what happens. I get on Amazon, I bought a book and I'm like, I've got 10 minutes to kill before I record a podcast or something. I'm already on Amazon. What's on the best seller list. Ooh, that's kind of cool. The next thing I know is like, that's only got four, four stars. Like, has anybody got a 4. 5 star? Or that's not heavy duty. Is there anybody make it, that looks like it would break. Anybody make a metal version of that? So I ended up buying, you know, a stainless steel version of something that somebody, the first one that popped up was plastic. So I get that. Um, you live in an interesting world. How do people, somebody listen to the show, how do they learn this world? How do they learn to acquire a brand and get something working? Is there a place they can go to, to figure this stuff out? [00:48:05] Robb Green: You know, when I think about learning something new or getting a deeper knowledge in any type of, industry, I go out and I go and I listen to all the podcasts like this one. And I try to, I just engulf, I just submerge myself into it, right? I'll sign up for five or six podcasts. I'd get on Twitter. I would find four or five people that you like. Look at the people that they're following and just get immersed in it, right? Just really live it. Sign up for sub stacks, just get inundated with information. And then I think you'll find a handful of people or podcasts or people that follow that really resonate with you and then just stack your knowledge. But the other thing is find somebody else who's already done it. Like get together with people. I know it's a digital world, but go belly to belly with somebody, who's already done it and have a conversation. Get together with a small group of people. Talk about this, learn from each other. I mean that the mastermind concept is probably one of the best ways to learn anything, is share what you know with other people and have them share with you. And then everybody gets better. [00:49:05] Ronald Skelton: You'd be surprised at how many high performers, top performers will actually JV with you because the number one resource they're running out of is time. So if you're willing to do what they ask you to do, be mentored by them and give your time, there, that's a limited finite resource for them. JV in with somebody and saying, Hey, I'll do all the work, I'll even bring brands to you. You say, yay or nay. Uh, we'll give you a piece of the equity. Help me get, help me get this thing up and running. You, I think people are underestimating how many people would take that on. How many successful professionals would go, yeah, I'll do that. I'll take a piece of the action and I'll make sure, if you'll listen to me, you'll do what I say, um, we'll get this done together. That's a brilliant way to do it. It's even, I think it's smarter than like hiring a mentor, taking a course or something like that, because then you've got somebody with a vested interest to see you succeed. I think that if every one of us look at a mentor that would have a veteran, just, you know, two types of mentor, mentors, one who would be totally on an assist because they have no gain or loss. They just want to see you succeed. If you can find somebody just want to see you succeed in the world, that's a great and they've already been there. That's a great mentor. And then find some group of people or somebody to jv with that has a stake in your game. They're, they've got a win or a loss, you know, if you succeed because, like I've taken on investor before when I didn't even need their money because I needed their advice, right? I like to tell people so if you want and I probably pulled this from a book or it's a quote from somebody else I'm sure. I don't often claim to have original ideas. I read too much. But when you want money ask for advice and when you want advice ask for money. I know that came, I don't know where it came from, but it came, it was not me. So don't quote me on it. But uh, you know a lot of times when I need advice, I'll just reach out for an investment, right? Or if I need an investment, I'd ask for advice and then they want to be part of it. I have people as part of investors just because I need them on my board. I need them to be a sounding board because they've been there, done that. But I think that's a brilliant idea when you said reach out to others. [00:51:04] Robb Green: Yeah, I think, by the way, I love that saying. I've used it a few times myself. I don't know where I got it either, but I do love that saying. I think about it, you know, I've had, quite a few people ask to mentor them. And this is the advice I give to people who are looking for someone, a mentor. Go find somebody that's living the life you want and find a way to add value to them, that they have no choice, but to mentor you. It's as simple as that. Find a way to add value to them where they go, man, this guy's always adding value to me. Always there. Always us, always just finding ways to make my life easier and better. Everybody, every good person wants to reciprocate. And so I think too many people go, I want to, everybody wants to learn. I talked to too many people that are like, I want to learn, I want to learn, I want to learn. But they're not bringing any value. [00:51:53] Ronald Skelton: And they don't want to, they don't want to do the work. Right. They say they do, but when it comes down to the brass tacks, they don't want to do the work. So I agree. Do the work. Take the work to somebody and say, here's what I've done. I need your help. You want to JV with somebody, go out and find a brand that's for sale. Find something that, Robb can't say no to. It's such a damn good deal that if he turns it away, it'd be silly. Say, I've got this thing negotiated. They're wanting to sell it. I just don't know how to run it when I get it. Will you help me here? And if it's something that if you, you listen to his show, you listen to, you know, other show he's done. If you know what he's looking for, I'm just using you as an example. Any mentor, any guy out there that you want to mentor, you bring them something so valuable. It's like, look, here's what I've got. But I need your help with it. Would you help me? And if they want it, it adds value to their life. They're going to, they're going to, they're going to be interested. If they can, all you can do is tell you no, right. [00:52:38] Robb Green: I'll give you one of my favorite, my other favorite saying that I don't claim to have created. I heard along the way. I read too much also. A lot of people want to do what I do. But they're unwilling to do what I did. [00:52:50] Ronald Skelton: Exactly. I get that. I like that one. So cool. Um, how do people reach out to you? What if somebody wants to work with you? If they want to sell you a e comm brand, or if they want to just like listen to your pod, what are the best ways people can reach out to you? And I'm going to put this in the show notes too. But for those listening, driving, can you verbally tell where people, where you want people to go? Can you tell everybody where to go? [00:53:11] Robb Green: Yeah. We've run uh, Spotify, we're on YouTube, we're on, uh, the podcast app. So, I'm the one.com if you're using the URL. And then, I'm on LinkedIn. I've been on LinkedIn forever, so it's Robb Green. It's ROBB, and then green, like the color on LinkedIn. So happy to interact and have conversations with people. I probably spent too much time helping people already but, I love to connect with people that are actually going to do the work and want to move on because I think being an entrepreneur is the recipe for having an extraordinary life. [00:53:41] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. Awesome. And one takeaway. If somebody can remember only one thing from this entire show, maybe two, what would be your takeaways? What would you want them to walk away from the show and remember you and remember the topic or remember, from the show? [00:53:54] Robb Green: Design the life you want, and then don't stop until you execute on it. [00:53:59] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. I love it. Well, we'll call that a show, man. I appreciate your time today. The hour went by really fast. Hang on for a few seconds and we'll call that a show. [00:54:07] Robb Green: All right. Thanks so much.