E196: Mike Moyer's Slicing Pie: A Fair and Logical Approach to Equity Distribution

[00:00:00] Ronald Skelton: Hello and welcome to the How2Exit Podcast. Today I'm here with Mike Moyer. He's the author of Slicing Pie and Woolwork for Pie and a few other books. He's a award winning speaker. And if you've watched our show much, you know that I recommend this book often. So I'm thrilled to learn from you today.

I'm thrilled to have you here. Thank you for being here. And, uh, we look forward to learning all about Slicing Pie and the other knowledge you have.

[00:00:24] Mike Moyer: Thanks for having me. I'm really happy to be on the show. 

[00:00:27] Ronald Skelton: Cool. Let'ss just start with your origin story. Kind of, who are you, what got you into this space? And then we'll talk about, lead into, uh, why Slicing Pie? What made you write such a book or what made you create such a platform?

[00:00:41] Mike Moyer: Well, my origin story is probably like most entrepreneurs. I did startup stuff when I was a kid. I sold rabbits and I, you know, things like that. And then I got to college and didn't do very well. And my parents said, why don't you come home and get a job instead of going to college? Cause you're not doing very well.

But I said, I don't want to do that. So I started a company in college, making t shirts for fraternities and sororities. And then I grew that and just in light manufacturing and finished college and ran that through graduate school. And I sold it after I graduated from graduate school. So it paid for my whole college and I kind of got the entrepreneurship bug from that.

And, uh, for the next 10 years, I went from startup job to real job, to startup job, to real job. I've worked in everything from vacuum cleaners to motorhome chassis to fine wine. I did some wine works in some wineries in California for a couple of years. I've worked in senior living communities and fishing tackle boxes.

I've just worked in a variety of different businesses. And every time I started a company, I started a company in the veterinary business, veterinary marketing business when I was in graduate school. And every time I started a company, even as a side hustle or a real company, I struggled with this equity split issue.

And I relied heavily on people who are more experienced than me because I figured they knew what it was. And I relied heavily on lawyers because I figured they knew what they're talking about. And I started a company in 2006. And we raised $5 million on a half written business plan and a PowerPoint deck.

And, that company grew and grew and I was there for a few years before I left and that triggered my stock options as, as per my contract. But there was one line in the operating agreement that said that if I left the company, even if I shares vested fully, they could buy and back at share per value at market value. At the time was zero 'cause they were underwater.

So he bought the shares back for next to nothing and sold them for millions. And it was perfectly legal. I had read it. I agreed to it, but I realized that just because it's legal, it doesn't make it fair. Fair and legal, aren't the same thing. And I started questioning, you know, what does fair mean? And I thought I had some ideas about it.

And I originally wrote Slicing Pie as kind of a hacker's guide to equitable deed or a fair deal, fair dealing with partners. And I wrote a white paper in 2009, 2008, and started distributing it to people, and they really liked the concept. And I wrote the first book in 2010, called Slicing Pie, and I did a couple of iterations on that.

And then I wrote Slicing Pie Handbook in 2015, which was a, basically started as a user guide to my software. Because people kept asking for software, and then I wrote Will Work for Pie a couple years ago. And what I've learned over time is, the books covered a lot of things about, kind of a hacker's guide, tweak this, change that, however you want.

But I realized that it's based on a universal foundation of logic. And so it doesn't need to be altered or changed from the, from the basic format of Slicing Pie. So, today I spent a lot of time on Slicing Pie, software and do a lot of talks. I'm going to University of Kansas next week.

I'm going to Barcelona, the weekend then next month. So I do a lot of seed, speaking events and I manage, a lot of consultations or equity splits. And I also run a company called Mosquito Aces. It makes mosquito net tents for Boy Scout camps. Which is a side hustle my son and I started when he was a Boy Scout. And I teach at Northwestern University and so I'm a typical scatterbrained entrepreneur.

[00:04:07] Ronald Skelton: Can you explain the concept of Slicing Pie model and how it difference from the equity distribution methods?

[00:04:13] Mike Moyer: So there's two ways of splitting equity in this world. There's the fair slicing pie way, and there's literally everything else. So, the best way to understand Slicing Pie is by thinking of an analogy of the game of, like a gambling of like, like Blackjack. Do you not know how to play Blackjack?

[00:04:29] Ronald Skelton: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

[00:04:30] Mike Moyer: Let's pretend that you and I are going to play Blackjack together as a team, not opponents, but as a team and playing on the same hand. And we're going to split the winnings 50 50 because we're friends. So we'll fist bump on it. We go to the table and we each put a dollar on the same hand of blackjack. We don't know if we're going to win. We don't know how much we're going to win or how long it's going to take to win. The future is unknown. We cannot predict the future. We know for certain though is that we each bet a dollar. So dealer deals two aces. So, in blackjack, you split the aces and double down.

But I'm out of cash and you're not, so you put two more dollars down. So you bet three dollars, and I've only bet one dollar. We still don't know if we're going to win, or how much we're going to win, or how long it's going to take to win. What we know for certain, though, is you bet three and I bet one. If we win, does our original deal for 50 50 sound fair?

[00:05:19] Ronald Skelton: Not really, right. Like not unless you do recoup your expenses first.

[00:05:23] Mike Moyer: It should be 75 percent for you and 25 percent for me. Your share of the winnings, logically, obviously, unambiguously, should reflect your share of the bets. And if you think about a startup, it's exactly the same thing. You're basically gambling your money and you contribute to startups. And you know, you've got, you're not paid.

You're essentially betting on the future outcome of the company. You bet time and money and facilities and supplies and relationships and equipment and ideas. Every time you bet and you're not paid, you're betting exactly the fair market value of that contribution. You can't bet more than that because you're not a magical leprechaun. Are you? 

[00:05:55] Ronald Skelton: No. Nothing I know of. I haven't figured that one out yet.

[00:05:59] Mike Moyer: Never know these days, but you're also not a slave. So all you can bet is what you're worth. You can't bet more or less than that. So one thing that people often overlook is that everything in business is quantifiable. The headphones on your head are quantifiable. The curtain behind you. The microphone, you paid for those things, didn't you? You didn't steal them.

[00:06:15] Ronald Skelton: Right?

[00:06:16] Mike Moyer: If you find a receipt, you can quantify it. Your time is quantifiable. Everything's quantifiable. So because we can know the amounts exactly, we can tell people to bet. And by based on the bets, you can tell what the equity splits should be. And with that, that's universal logic for fairness.

And the other way of doing it is just stick with our 50 50 deal. We had a deal for 50 50. I could sue you and probably win, but just because we agreed to it, it didn't make it fair. So every other method is about guessing the future, rules of thumb. It's not, it doesn't have discipline behind just using the bets on the table. It's like a blackjack. 

[00:06:47] Ronald Skelton: It's interesting because what appealed to me is i've been, in my lifetime, I've created multiple startups and most of them up until recently, until I found your book, was some form of, you know, split, right?

It wasn't always 50 50. Sometimes it was more than that, depending on who had more time and energy and stuff, but it never seemed fair when it got into the weeds of things. Because for one, I am a typical, at least in my youth, I was a big workaholic. So I would put in the extra hours and solve the problems and stay there.

And I felt, very often I felt like I was the guy pulling 60 hour weeks when the other guy would pull 20 or 30 and how is this working. Or, sometimes it was, you know, intellectual, right? You're the guy solving all the problems. You're a guy, bring in the majority of it and the other people end up taking worker be roles and like, how is this equal, right?

You owe, you overvalued their ability to complete task and their knowledge level. And, so I love the Slicing Pie model because it breaks everything down.

[00:07:48] Mike Moyer: Call it the, you have what's called a fix and fight method. Whatever your equity is expressed as a percentage, that's called a fixed split. It's sentenced. It's basically set on stone on paper. And the only way to change it when you realize it's wrong is to renegotiate, which is painful. No one wants to give it up.

And what you experienced was things didn't go as planned. We didn't predict the future properly. If you could predict the future, you wouldn't need a slicing pie because you wouldn't use equity because there's no, you wouldn't start and it was out of chance of failure. The only reason you use equity is you think it might fail.

So when it's, when you realize it's wrong, you have to find about it later on. And it causes a lot of turmoil.

[00:08:22] Ronald Skelton: And it, sometimes you end up giving people more equity because you just need the team around you. When, with the slicing pie model, they're earning their worth or basically there's a certain amount per hour. There's a certain amount per dollar they put in. And, uh, it just seems to work.

I haven't heard anybody that I've given the book that actually followed it. He comes back and says, this doesn't work. Why are we doing this? Right.

[00:08:46] Mike Moyer: Yeah. Me neither. In 10 years, hundreds of thousands of books and I've talked to thousands of startups I've never heard it backfire unless they change it. If they change it, it's not slicing pie anymore. It's just, it's a different way.

[00:08:57] Ronald Skelton: Right. What are some of the things you can do, like if a company is already up and running and they're at that negotiation table and they're like, they know it's not working the way I want it. They know it's not, so you got three guys, they know it's not 33, 33, 33 anymore. Is there a way to implement it after the fact?

Is there a way to say, Hey, we're already at the table here. We're already, this isn't working.

[00:09:17] Mike Moyer: Yeah, that's a good question. And that's very common. So it's very common that someone comes to me and says, I, we started the company, we're 50, 50 or a third, a third, a third, and it's not working. What do we do? And one of the worst things you could do is buy out the slacker player. it breaks my heart to hear, see buyouts of players that don't participate. But it's called a retrofit.

And basically you find a zen like place and you find a quiet and recreate the past. And usually start a firm more than a year or two old. So that's, that's fairly easy. And you just determine where you are, equity wise in terms of your bets. And then you just proceed from there. Now, if you find somebody who has an equity share and it's larger than they deserve, all they really have is a legal right to be a dick. It's not fair. So it's just, you might have more than you deserve. Just last week, I was working with a company who in a nutshell, the guy put a million dollars in cash up. And his partners were going to do all the work. And they did it just 50 50. And the partners were drawing a salary from the million dollars.

So here are these partners drawing his full salary and not taking any risk because they want to, they won't make any bets because they,re getting paid in full. And draining the million dollars down and yet they're 50, 50. And sooner or later, the guy with a million bucks is this is, this isn't right. These guys are dragging their feet on this project and they shouldn't have 50%.

And if you don't pay them, it's, they might have more or less. But if they're not, if you're not, if you're getting paid, you're not placing a bet. In fact, most of us work for a living. We get paid salaries and we're not getting any equity. That's because we're paying full, so, it goes south pretty quick.

Once you realize you've made a mistake, you, unwinding it is,is pretty easy with using Slicing Pie. Unless you have jerks on your team.

[00:10:56] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. It's been a little bit since I read it. I probably should have reviewed it this morning before I got in here. The way I remembered it was a certain multiple on cash and a certain multiple on time. And then you, with our team, anyway, the way we use it is you had to be able to prove what you're worth.

Like he had to show us that you charged X number of dollars per hour in the past. So you, you would show us like contracts or consulting things and you show us what your going rate is. And that's what we logged in as. Right. There was some negotiation on some of that and, people got a little bit of leeway, but that's kind of how we did it.

Is it, if I remember right, it's two X on your time and four X on the money, or did I get it backwards there?

[00:11:34] Mike Moyer: Yeah, so time and money aren't the same thing. So if I paid you 100 an hour to work for me, and you wanted to buy a thing that cost $100, it would take you more than an hour to earn enough money. Because when I paid you, I'd pay employment taxes and social security taxes. When you receive the money, you pay income taxes.

And when you bought the thing, you'd pay sales tax and VAT tax. So it might take you two hours to earn enough money. So for that reason, the buying power of cash is diminished actually after it goes through that process. So on a global basis, it's roughly 50 percent diminished over time. So there's some countries have no income tax, for instance. There's some countries have a bigger income tax, but on a global basis, it's about 50%.

So for that reason, if a dollar in non cash, non cash is like your salary, your commissions, your royalties, yourfacilities, for instance, as you already own. And cash is basically unreimbursed expenses cash out of pocket when it's consumed. So for that reason, I use a measurement called a slice, which is like a poker chip.

It marks the fact that that took place. So you have two slices for every dollar in non cash you put in, like time, and four slices for every dollar in cash you put in. And you could do one and two. What I like about two and four is it obscures the underlying value of the contributions, because I don't want people to think that the startup is worth what you contributed.

You could invest a million dollars in a startup and have it be worth nothing by obscuring it. But that way, when I take cash in the door, I think twice before I spend it because I give away four slices. So it smooths out the volatility, the difference between the cash and non cash.

It aligns incentives and just works better. Without those multipliers, then there's, then people are indifferent to cash, then people would eventually not put in cash. And that's, it's harder to attract without it. 

[00:13:11] Ronald Skelton: And I got to experience that when we, when we needed to contribute money into the, into like legal expenses and stuff like that.I think we were a lot more like, I guess the word would be, I want to use, I don't know if it's a great word, but frugal. We were a lot more cautious about who we hired, how much we paid them and stuff like that.

Cause we knew that, those of us who contributed cash to it, we're getting four slices for that cash, as opposed to, one slice or two slices, you know, for other stuff. So I like the fact that I like the four, two model. I like the fact that, uh,you have to think twice about wanting to spend somebody else's cash if it's not yours.

[00:13:46] Mike Moyer: As you should. You should be making decisions based on sound financial stuff instead of, guessing. So you mentioned the salary negotiation. People aren't going to work for free forever. They started a company. They don't get paid in the beginning. That's the way to find it.

You basically don't finance their company by not paying. But eventually they're going to want to get paid. And how much they get paid is their fair market value. So you want to know that front before you get into this relationship. Otherwise you're going to be stung later on. If you think you're worth $200, 000, I think you're worth $50, 000.

When it comes time to paying, we're going to have a big argument. But if you set that in advance and it's based on logic, people are used to negotiating market rates. You can figure out how much a mouse is worth, right? You figure out what your microphone is worth. I can figure out how much a video editor is worth.

But I can't figure out what the future value of my company is going to be worth.

[00:14:30] Ronald Skelton: So, that's one of the things there's a point in the process,I mess it up all the time. They would correct me in our group, we were using slicing pie. I'd say, you know, okay, we're going to hit this point where we're going to be making money. It's time to cook the pie.

Right. You're like, no, it's called, I guess you call it freezing it. You freeze the pie.

[00:14:45] Mike Moyer: It's like baking a pie.

[00:14:46] Ronald Skelton: But baking the pie. I'm like, why don't we, why don't we cook the thing and eat it? Cause we, we joked around cause we were doing a mergers and acquisitions, we were building something to sell.

So I was like, I can't wait till we eat this pie, right. But, uh, it was fun. It was a fun terminology too, the way you set it up. And, um, talk about the process of like, okay, it's a startup. It hits a certain point of cashflow. And then the pie is, is it frozen or baked or what do you call it in the book?

[00:15:10] Mike Moyer: Freezing or baking. So the slicing pie is for the bootstrap stage. From concept stage. I tell people when they start the company in earnest, they start putting time and energy into the business in earnest. That's when they start keeping track of what they're, what they're putting in. And the things you keep track of are the same things most companies track anyway.

Most companies track payroll and expenses. There's nothing new here to track. Um, but it works through breakeven or series of investment. And at that point over time, as you get more revenue, you can start paying people their salary, paying their expenses, and the pie naturally stops accumulating slices. At that point it freezes and you, you could, you issue,common shares or whatever, and you're going to your next round of funding.

So this is how there's a solution, or if you raise Series A dollars. So once I have enough cash on hand to pay everybody's salary, then the equity freezes at that point. If I pay you from day one, then you'll get no equity because you made no bets.

[00:15:59] Ronald Skelton: Right. And so I was gonna say, could it be tiered? Like, for example, in our case, we had, you know, six executives and a couple of us had assistance and stuff. We just paid the assistance. They didn't get slices, right? Yeah, I just paid them from the start and the money we paid was cash we contributed so we got four slices for that payment.

So I didn't know that I didn't, I don't remember like, who gets paid what, but I honestly think that, in this grand scheme of things, if you've got three founders and you're starting to hire people, it's not everybody, you don't have to wait until you're so profitable that everybody stops getting slices.

It could be, okay, we're going to, anybody under certain, this certain salary, we're not going to give them equity. Or maybe we give them a lot less equity and we're going to give them pay. Right. Can you do it in level?

[00:16:44] Mike Moyer: You have the choice. You either pay them in cash, you have the cash, or you can pay 'em in slices if you have, if you don't. That's the beauty of, I can hire whoever I want. I can acquire whoever I need, and I always just pay cash. If I can pay cash. If I can't pay cash, I can use slices. And that gives you basically an infinite amount of money acquire things you need. 

Now, if the cost of starting a business is exorbitantly expensive, you might be in the wrong business. But for bootstrap companies, tech companies, these don't require all that cash. If you're starting a pharmaceutical company, you're going to need some major investment upfront, but for the most part, during that bootstrap stage, slicing pie will fulfill the need. 

[00:17:18] Ronald Skelton: You know, maybe we were butchering it a little bit too much, but we were looking at cases where, okay, we're going to, this person would normally cost $80, 000 a year. We're going to bring them in. We're going to pay him, $35, 000 a year. We're going to give them the other, $45, 000 in slices until and they're going to, as a, as we increase revenue, as things start to increase, we'll switch them all the way over.

Is that normally done in the system? Or did we modify it?

[00:17:44] Mike Moyer: It's the unpaid portion of the fair market value. So if I, if you buy a plane ticket for a thousand dollars and the company reimburses you 500, then the remaining 500 is your bet. If you're worth 50 bucks an hour, and I pay you 20 bucks an hour, then you're only betting 30 bucks an hour. So it's all back to the blackjack game.

What are the bets on the table? I call it, what's not what the risk is? What's at risk of loss?

[00:18:02] Ronald Skelton: So is this getting traction? I like it. I promote it all the time or the venture capitalist world. Are they starting to pay attention to this? 

[00:18:09] Mike Moyer: Well, it doesn't really apply to VCs 'cause the time you get to the VCs, you're doing price round at that point. I've never heard a situation where a VC said, Oh gosh, you have a fair equity spend place, I'm not going to invest in you.It doesn't change. It changes nothing about equity deals.

But as far as traction goes, it's used by thousands of startups all over the world. The book's been translated into a dozen different languages. I'm launching it in Barcelona next month. And this new Spanish version is coming out.I have probably 60 or 70 lawyers I work with all over the world that, that implement Slicing Pie.

It's been, there's a company in Iran called SlicingPie. ir that's translated the book and does it in Iran. I can't, I can't dig any royalties out of Iran. I just tell them to donate it to charity. But it shows you that it works in literally any environment, any bootstrap company. It's a universal model because fairness is a universal construct.

If our, if we're brothers and our dad gives us a cookie, we split it at 50 50 because we're both paid exactly nothing to get it. So our only fair thing is to split it. Now, if it's your cookie, you can do whatever you want with it. You could steal my half, but that doesn't make it more fair. So fairness is a universal concept.

[00:19:14] Ronald Skelton: I have two kids and what I always do is like if one of them cuts it, the other one gets to choose, right?

[00:19:19] Mike Moyer: Careful how they cut it.

[00:19:21] Ronald Skelton: And they're real cautious at that point. Cause I, we're just getting to the age right now where we get to call shotgun. My daughter's old enough. She can ride a front. I still make her ride in the back most of the time.

[00:19:30] Mike Moyer: She's the younger of the two. But, uh, I don't like to hear the arguments. So like when we share anything, it's like you cut the pie and he gets to choose his slice or she gets to cut it and you get to choose your slice. And that puts a stop to that. It's his basic instincts of fairness. They've done studies on monkeys and monkeys can tell when things aren't being fair. 

[00:19:49] Ronald Skelton: So where do you go from this? I mean, you've got this out there. Are you expanding the model any, or have you changed anything since the initial concept or?

[00:19:58] Mike Moyer: Well, the things that I have changed, the initial concept is stripping out the tweaks.I had a concept for using it for profit sharing, which in hindsight doesn't work very well and how to treat contractors. Everyone needs to be treated the same way under the model. So what I've done is basically become more and more pure about how it is,is communicated.

I didn't, I did not invent fairness. Fairness has already existed. What I'm trying to do is interpret fairness for this part of our life, which is business, because we have the quantity, we can quantify business, we can quantify fairness.But you know, it's, it's taken out all over the world. Startups don't have a lot of money.

So I don't make a ton of money on this,this venture. But I love it because it's one of the things I've done in my life that really has an impact on people's, how people do things. The most common thing I get is, I wish I knew this five years ago before I started my last company. I wish I knew this 10 years ago.

That's very common. People wish they had it. And when they find it,it's really refreshing because you can go, once you have the model in place, you can go anywhere from there.

[00:20:53] Ronald Skelton: If you think about it, there's like, there's story after story after story where people wish they had this model. The one that keeps coming to my mind is Craig from Craigslist, right? He won't ever remember me, but I lived in San Francisco for a while. I actually went to one of his house parties. I won't describe the party.

It was a very awkward. But I went to one of his house parties. I think it was something held that he held. And, I don't even think he came out, but once or twice in the whole damn thing, but, uh, I got to meet him once. He had a founder that started with him and I think the guy owned like 20 something percent or 20 percent of the company. He had told, I think it was, let's say eBay or PayPal is, eBay, I believe with PayPal and eventually bought eBay. Or eBay eventually bought PayPal, but, it was one of the two.

He told them no over and over again. And they finally figured out that this guy owned 27 percent minority stake cause he was one of the founders. Like he helped Craig started it, but never, didn't hang around. Didn't do anything of it, but he held, he, he had a piece, right? That guy sold to eBay and there's huge stories about it made him so mad.

You know, had it been structured this way, I don't think the guy would have had it. Cause from the story, the guy didn't contribute to, he was supposed to. It was one of these handshake deals at the beginning. He got, he was in the room when the deal was made, he got 20%. And I think within the first year or two, he had left. And, way before it got big and now he's made millions because he sold his chunk of something that ended up huge to somebody that they, the founder didn't want it sold to. 

[00:22:12] Mike Moyer: It's It's a mythology around. This is legends, like, the movies that are about corporations are, this is the crux of the deal, the crux of the deal was the equity split. There's a movie that I share with my students every year, it's called Startup. com. It's a documentary about starting a company, have you seen it?

[00:22:28] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, I've seen it. Yeah.

[00:22:29] Mike Moyer: And the only person who makes any money in the whole deal is a guy who flaked out in the beginning and got bought out early on. So he came, he stopped coming, stopped showing up to work, stopped participating, and they had to buy him out for like $800, 000. With the slicing pie model, he would have gotten about $12, 000.

[00:22:43] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. So, um, yeah.it's simple. It's simple enough that anybody can implement it, but it's revolutionary. And the fact that nobody's done this, in the history of business, we've been doing it, the handshake model, fist bump model for so long, putting it on paper. And,I like to consider myself a fairly intelligent guy, you know, for the first 30 something, 40 something years of my life, I did equity splits. Like I, I partnered with people over and over again. And a lot of the time, I can't say that I ever been really burned, but I've sold or got rid of a couple of companies because I just couldn't deal with the partners anymore.

They own too much of it. It wasn't making sense. I felt like I was doing all the work and, we, the only thing that, I'd either have to buy them out, which didn't make sense or walk away and watch them crash and burn the damn thing. And I've walked away from more than one.

[00:23:29] Mike Moyer: Separation of partners is one of the most, traumatic things that can happen to a startup. And in slicing pie, there's a set of rules for that too. So the betting thing is called the allocation framework, but there's also the recovery framework. And there's four reasons why someone could leave the company.

They can be fired for good cause, which means they're grossly negligent or they've had a performance issue. And I always encourage people to do warning, warning, fired. If you're going to take someone's bet, you got to give them the opportunity to save it. They can be fired for no good reason. Which means they just got fired out of the blue.

They can resign for good reason, which implies that the company made promises that it couldn't keep. Somebody said, well, I might say to you, I'll pay you a salary in six months. In six months, no salary materializes. Now you have good reason to resign. Or you're in charge of our marketing. Now you're going to clean toilets.

That's something you signed up for and you have good reasons to resign. Or we're moving to Seattle, pack your bags. So startups are notorious for making promises they can't keep. If you do that, you're giving someone a good reason to resign. Or they can resign for no good reason means that it's up and quit one day.

If they're fired for no good reason, for good reason for performance or negligence, or they up and quit on you one day, resign for no good reason, they are basically walking away from their bet. So just like in blackjack, if I walk up and get up the table and walk away, the casino is not going to chase me down and give me my money back. The money's gone, the bet's gone. So I'm walking away, just like a solo founder. It's like, if they go walk away from the business, they lose everything. So you lose everything if you walk away. Except your cash contributions get paid back in later days. So you don't want to be, you don't want to imply you're stealing people's money because it causes extra problems.

But if you're resigned for good reason, or you're fired for no good reason, your bet stays on the table and converts equity to everybody else. So with those, so no matter what decisions people make or how they act and what decisions are, what they used to do. It's impossible to get screwed because even if you get fired in the middle, you're still, your bet is still represented on the table.

So whatever you contributed is reflected in your final share. So it's a screwproof model. it's, it always works.

[00:25:22] Ronald Skelton: It's brilliant in the fact that like, just say I come into a company and we all had to contribute some cash. You and I create a business, right? You put a hundred K and I put a hundred K, right? You've been 100 hours. I put in 100 hours and let's say we're both worth $200 an hour, right? We both put the same amount of time in. You think it's unfair when something happens and I've got a better idea and I got to leave. You and I aren't working out and we come to a mutual agreement that I'm leaving and it's for good.

You know, it's for, you want, we both want us to agree. You're going to let me, let me leave for good reason. Right. So my stuff freezes at that point and you continue to put in time and stuff. Your equity continues to grow. So when, when it comes time to sell, it's fair because my a hundred thousand, and I think I said a hundred hours is now only, after four years, it's probably only worth 10 percent of the total or some. 

It, you continue to grow, you continue to contribute. You continue to,to bring on other people. They continue to get slices. The pie starts to, you know, be sliced up more and more. And while the difference in value would be, if I had you buy me out that day at the current value would probably be less than it would when it grew.

It's not unfair, right? It's an investment. It's like I bought stock at that early stage and I get to see how far it goes.

[00:26:35] Mike Moyer: What you're doing. That's exactly, exactly what you're doing. People often confuse stock compensation for real compensation, but I always encourage you to think of those things as totally separate. You get paid a salary or you get equity. If you went to work for, if you owned Apple computer shares and you went to work for Apple computer they said, good news. 

We found out you own Apple computer shares. So we're not gonna pay your salary. That'd be ridiculous. People think they're getting,you basically free in a startup, you're forgoing current compensation for equity. In the real world you spend your current, you get paid and you spend it on stock in the stock market. 

So it's just a kind of investment. This is just determining what that is. As far as determining value of the shares for buyout, it's impossible. Cause the shared companies usually were zero. And people usually aren't qualified to value themselves. So this way it always makes sense. And also you don't want to put the company in a position that has to be forced to pay out money.

The money should be going to build the business, not people's pockets. So if I had to do a buyout, I to come with the cash to buy. So now he's not contributing anymore. That's just a huge waste of money. Should be going to marketing and product development.

[00:27:35] Ronald Skelton: So going back to the mergers and acquisitions world for me as a buyer, if I came to a company and I find out you've been running it for five years and you've been running under the slicing pie model. I'm more interested in the company because right now I'll tell you right now, if I come up to a company and I know I've interviewed 200 people.

I've, I meet with the two dozen people every two weeks, different ones all the time. So I've probably interacted with five or 600 people over the last two or three years. I'll tell you most of us, if there's more than three founders or more than three people, we don't,we don't proceed with the deal. Mainly because it gets an alignment and unfairness and all this stuff.

But if I think I would look further, if I find out like, look, oh, they've been running the whole thing for slight, with the slicing pie model. And mainly because now I know that the voting rights go with those slices, right? The guy who has the most skin in the game and the most, there's going to be somebody in dominant control. And, there's been a sense of equity and fairness from the start.

There's a lot of animosity in companies that, it's third, third, third. At the end, nobody, I've never seen one where everybody thinks everybody equally did equal, right. Maybe two people, but when you get three or four more, there's always somebody they just don't feel carried their way.

[00:28:45] Mike Moyer: It's tough. If both companies are using slicing pie and you want to merge, just add your pies together and you got a perfect split. Without any, there's no question. If the companies are not using slicing pie because their cash flow break even, then they're valuable in the sense that they can be valued. And you can measure the value of that company, through your valuations techniques.

But if they're both startups, they can just add the pies together.sometimes it works out. Sometimes people don't realize that it's not working out. They don't realize that they're getting burned, especially in the beginning.so one common mistake people make is they think that their equity equals our compensation.

So they'll split what's left over, but you got to get paid first. Before you can get your dividends paid.

[00:29:25] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. There's been times where I've had business partners that, at the beginning, it was great. We were both pulling 30, 40 hour weeks, 50 hour weeks, but over time, one of us, one or the other finds other interests or loses the fire for the game and there's still stuff to be done.

So now you bring in a third person because the other guy, he just can't keep up with his work and you start questioning, is he not keeping up because he's not keeping up or is there more work? Is there more, if you start looking at the logic of it, there's not more units of work, he's just less proficient at doing the units.

So there's just, there's this animosity that builds up. And, this solved that problem.

[00:30:01] Mike Moyer: You just give the person a warning and say, we expect you to do X, Y, Z. And then the warning looks like a discussion. It's like, what's, what is causing you the blockage? Well, I need a better, faster computer. All right. Well, that's reasonable. We can get you that. So a few more weeks goes by, the behavior persists and it's another conversation.

Well, I need better software. So we can, that's reasonable. We can get you that. Third time though, it's just, it's you, it's not the accommodation. People have plenty of warning that they're going to get fired and they get fired. So be it. They didn't care about the business anyway. So actually they care about having stock.

[00:30:31] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I'm a big fan of there's all employees are, uh, all employees are great employees. Just some of them would be better in place for other companies. Right here. you're like, I don't believe in bad employees. I believe in you're in the right seat in the wrong seat. And sometimes your seat somewhere else.

I'm sure you're a great employee for somebody else. I say that most of us entrepreneurs make, make horrible employees for somebody else. 

[00:30:52] Mike Moyer: One of my first experiences when I was promoting Slicing Pie back in the early days, about 10 years ago, I came across a guy whose CTO had been hit by a bus and subsequently died of his injuries. And his wife inherited his half of the company, but she had no skills whatsoever. she couldn't contribute.

She had no intention or interest in contributing. I don't blame her, but she didn't want to give her shares up. I don't blame her. Bye. With slicing pie, he was, without slicing pie, he was stuck giving her half the profits forever, even though he had to hire somebody else and give him a share out of his share.

It was a mess. They eventually went out of business. With slicing pie, that would be termination with good reason. Resignation for good, dying is a good reason to resign. So his wife would inherited his slices and they would have continued to dilute naturally as the person took it on to another partner.

So that company would have gone forward in the wake of that tragedy. But he, if he felt bad for anything else, and it's very sensitive, but slicing pie model gives you an answer to that question, what to do.

[00:31:45] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, even if you say they say, well, I want to hold on to the shares. I want to watch it go. Great. You understand that the company is going to go around at your part freezes. Right. And even if they're at the point where the company's. Given cash distributions on a quarterly basis to the shareholders that eventually would potentially if the company's growing and growing their monthly payment wouldn't be, wouldn't necessarily go lower, but it wouldn't be in percentage of the rest of the company, right? It wouldn't be 25%.

[00:32:13] Mike Moyer: They'd have it with a dessert. And I tell people, I charge 300 an hour for consulting. If they don't pay me that 300 bucks for that consult, then I'm betting 300 on their company. So that's my 600 slices. Now they might have 6 million slices. At the end of the, when they break even, so I get my 0.

001%. When you go public in 10 years, I get a check for 10, 000. That reflects my share of the risk at that moment in time. And it's perfectly clear because that's what it was. That's what, that's what I, that's what I earned.

[00:32:43] Ronald Skelton: How long did it take you to come over this? Cause like I said, it seems overly simple that it works, but it's also very well thought out. it's really, it really, you start to wonder why other people do other things other than this. Once you read it and look at it, look at the model you built. why does somebody do anything else?

How long did this take you? Like, what was the process for you to come up with this? Did it take months, a year?

[00:33:04] Mike Moyer: Well, the original white paper I sat down and wrote in a few days. It's kind of, it's kind of, I had some idea. And I had done versions of this before. I, I initially did it based on dollar amounts, time and cash is the same thing. And I had a rough agreement in place with the one of those companies I started.

And I actually had a guy sue me for back, back pay. He showed up for two weeks and didn't do any work and just stopped coming to work. Then he sent me a bill for 8, 000. I didn't have 8, 000 to give him. So he sued me and went to a mediation and.the media, I took one look at it and said, this is clear with this, what it says.

And I didn't have to pay him because he walked away. So that was cool. But the magic that makes it work is just two things. One is the normalizers, the multipliers that I use to normalize cash and non cash. The time I wasn't using cash, there's multipliers. So I'm just assuming I'd spend my money instead of their money.

So I use up all my life savings in order to fund the company. If I use the multipliers, if people would be more willing to put their cash in. The other thing that's changed, I've become better describing how it works. Okay. In the beginning, I wasn't very good at describing how it works. So that blackjack exam was actually from one of my readers who gave that to me on the phone one day.

He said, this is how I think of it. So it's sharpening my skills at describing the model.

[00:34:15] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. The, so what are some of the bigger, do you have any companies out there that you know are using this or created off this that you're able to talk about?

[00:34:23] Mike Moyer: See, that's, I used to try to track that, but people don't discuss their financing very often. And people don't call authors of the book and tell them, I hear anecdotally, there are some companies out there that, that did use Soxify in the beginning, that, there's a project management software out there, there's a big project management software out there.

There's, There's some, there's a lot of breweries use it. A lot of, a lot of companies use it. It's hard for me to pinpoint good case studies. There are some on my website, case studies from companies that use it were successful.

[00:34:51] Ronald Skelton: Give me a scale. Like, are you in the tens of thousands of books sold or is it like, that's been pretty popular?

[00:34:57] Mike Moyer: I've sold hundreds of thousands of books all over the world. For a while there, there's the Chinese version was outselling globally, all those other versions. Yeah, the book's still fairly steady pace for the past 10 years, but I'm always kind of trying to refresh it. I'm working on a hardcover version now.

[00:35:12] Ronald Skelton: It's awesome in the fact that I look at that there was a self serving reason I asked that because the more books you sell, the more commonplace this is. And the more times I, when I decided to start the next thing, or when I talk to somebody about this, the more likely they are to know what it is and be willing to implement it right away, right?

The better you're successful, the easier my path is in the future.

[00:35:32] Mike Moyer: Yeah. It hasn't gotten like wildfire yet. Hasn't gone mainstream yet. But I find when I talk to people at events and around, about 15 percent of people have heard about it in these circles. If you spend a lot of time in startup circles, you're bound to have heard about it at least on the surface. There's two kinds of, three kinds of people who don't like slicing pie.

The first kind of person doesn't get it. If somebody says they don't give, they don't like slicing pie, it's 'cause, cause they don't, it hasn't clicked with them yet. So I have games and books and, and spreadsheets and all kinds of things, an online course, that kind of stuff. The second kind of person is someone who's not willing to learn.

And I always suggest you avoid those people. So somebody's not willing to learn something new. It's just, just do it the old way. It's how I've always done it. That's the second kind of person doesn't like slicing pie. The third person who doesn't like slicing pie is someone who does get it, but it's their intention to take advantage of you.

And I see desperate entrepreneurs all the time that take money. They shouldn't get in partnerships. They shouldn't. I always tell people, if it's a good deal, you'll find the money. It's not a good deal. Then you probably shouldn't have the money in the first place. So as long as your deal is good, it'll be okay.

But besides those three reasons, there's no reason not to use slicing pie. 

[00:36:39] Ronald Skelton: Inside of the mergers and acquisition realm, what do you see, we talked a little bit about, okay, we implementing this after the fact. Is there a way to, to, and I guess once you're profitable, everything's frozen. So it's mostly just for startups. I love the concept of this, but A lot of my merger and acquisition guys, they don't get the realm that they're kind of a startup when they're doing roll ups and stuff like that, because they're putting together a team.

Maybe they're raising capital, but they technically may or may not depend on how they raise that capital should be paying themselves out of it. And if it's a search fund and they've negotiated inside of the search fund a salary for themselves and their staff, that's one thing. But a lot of times when we raise funds for acquisitions, unless you explicitly state i'm going to pay myself this and my team x, y and z, that's not normal. 

So, we're expected to bring some skin to the game and to kind of put this thing together, out of our, with, without a, a soft, cushy salary to go through. So that's one of the reasons I keep recommending this book. Like, look, you see, you're going to do a roll up.

You're going to pull it together a team of four or five people. Here's how you figure out what, and these are big projects. A lot of times these rollups are tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of dollars on the exit value. And you're buying profitable companies. So it's the less likely that it will fail if you can successfully pull it off. 

As far as like, as far as just like that was kind of counterintuitive statement, right? It's less likely to fail if you can pull it off, but you're buying profitable companies. So long as you get started, you have something profitable to sell on the other end.

[00:38:09] Mike Moyer: Right. So what I typically look at is, Slicing Pie is a financing tool. It's a financing tool like a loan is a financing tool. A credit card is a financing tool. A convertible note is a financing tool. A safe is a financing tool. A VC round is a financing tool. It's just ways of financing things. So it's for the team that's financing themselves by not paying themselves.

By not paying for their expenses. Not paying for something as a way to finance a business. So in mergers and acquisition, you may finance the capital to buy that business differently than you finance the team. So it finds the team needs a slice of pie, but the loan you take out or the equity around you raise for the acquisition, it could be a different form of financing.

So I can go out and raise, you know, raise, you can have a $10 million fund that the manager of that fund is his own entity, is its own pie. Deploying the fund is its own pie. So I can still use slicing pie for the,for the management of it. And the management will get a percentage of the deal, which would be shared among the slicing pie holders.

[00:39:04] Ronald Skelton: I love the software. We use your software too. So we put our time and our money in it. Like at least I think once a week at the minimum. I just did it as I used it. Right. Kind of as we went, but we put our time and stuff in. At any given time, at least for me, cause I was one of the executive, I could go in and see the size of the pie.

Like I could see what my, what the pie looked like, how many shares there were, what my percentage of it was. There was, there were reports in there that I could see. And it really kind of gave you. and I could see maybe because I was an executive in the company, but I could see other people's too.

And it gave me the ability to go, okay, well, we need to go talk to Steve, he's put in more, you know, what we had, we, I won't, I just made up a name, called it Steve, cause we didn't have a Steve on the team. I did that on purpose with, there wasn't a Steve on our team, but, there, we had a person on there that they were putting in.

We needed them to explain the hours they were putting in the software because it didn't match up with what we were seeing.

[00:39:54] Mike Moyer: Right. So that's the beauty of it. Due diligence is great. You know what? One thing that you keep in mind is slicing pie doesn't replace good management. You still have to be a good manager beyond the ball, but this, at least you have the information you need. And the software, software's kinda like accounting program for soft, for money you don't spend, or QuickBooks is accounting software money you do spend.About five years after writing the book, people said you should have an app for this. So that's how I created the app. There's actually a secret feature in that software you may not be aware of. If you go to the settings screen, you click on performance management. There's a whole set of features for setting goals and milestones for individuals that work in slicing pie.

So that's another topic that I talk about and will work for pies. How does it set up programs. People often think that equity is an incentive program. Equity doesn't cause motivation. It reflects motivation. The only reason you'd take equity in a company is if you believed in it. If you didn't believe in it, you wouldn't take equity.

So I can give you equity that will motivate you. But if you're motivated about the business and the vision anyway, you'll want equity. So giving it willy nilly doesn't work, but putting milestones in place, putting good management in place, people will take it because they believe in the business.

[00:40:59] Ronald Skelton: And I, I think he didn't charge it up. Be honest, at least when we were using it, the software was way too cheap. But when they told me about the software chart, like, what? That just doesn't make sense because the value it gave us was way more than the price. So I don't know if you've raised the price on the last two years, but, I was a little shocked at how affordable, I was a little shocked at how affordable.

[00:41:18] Mike Moyer: Entrepreneurs don't have a lot of money.

[00:41:19] Ronald Skelton: I guess we're in a little different realm because we're all seasoned entrepreneurs have done deals, sold businesses before we were contributing cash. We're doing acquisitions and mergers. We might be a different group of people. We're not straight out of college trying to create the next Apple, in our garage.

Right. A lot of us are even semi retired and doing this for fun. Like this is our monopoly. We're using our real money.

[00:41:41] Mike Moyer: I got users in China, in different countries that would, it's cost living is much different too.

[00:41:45] Ronald Skelton: Yeah, but I appreciate it. It was really cool and I was just like because I thought it was a typo because we had our own like little expense reports and we seen, when I seen the software cost because I didn't, that wasn't my, I was marketing and sales. When I seen the expensure thing that sort of software like that, that's where I go, right?

It's more than that, right? Like no, that's what it costs. I was like, okay.

[00:42:01] Mike Moyer: Right now it's like 20 bucks a month.

Yeah, that's what that's where I was, I didn't want to say because I know what you changed. I almost called you because we had that call. I almost said Like it should be, we, there was software we're using that was 195 a month or something. That would be, you know, with what we were doing and you're managing, you're pretty much, if you look at the VC world, you kind of, you created a cap table for like what a VC world or a startup world would call a cap table for the investors and the contributors, like, who owns what portion of it for people who didn't know what a cap table was. In the grand scheme of things that software could, could be 1. 95 a month. There's a lot of cap table software out there that works great when the stock has a price. The stock didn't have a price, it's a totally different ball game. So they, my software ends where theirs picks up.

There's probably a dozen different companies. I actually partnered with one called Revestor in, in the Netherlands. They have slicing pie tools built into their software. But that software requires a price in order to make it work. And without the price, it's just guessing. It's just share price.

[00:43:04] Ronald Skelton: Strike price. Yeah. Yeah. The strike price of the share price. So what do you want people to know about the book? What are the,give a, give us a couple of highlights to, to get people to go out and buy this thing.

[00:43:15] Mike Moyer: Well, the important thing to remember is that it works because it's based on facts. Fairness is not a matter of opinions, it's a matter of facts. And the facts are easily observable in the marketplace. We can see what things are worth. We can see what things are best. We can see what people's risk is. It's not ambiguous.

There's no way to game it. There's no way to cheat it. There's no way to break it if you use it properly. So if you're starting a business with a partner and you're not paying each other, you need to use the slicing pie model. Literally anything else you do is going to wind up backfiring because it's going to lead to an unfair split.

On the off chance you get it right by guessing, it's going to be wrong the minute something changes. So I don't feel intimidated by it or, think it's going to favor one person over the other. I deal with customers all the time. I've done thousands of phone calls with startups. And, people are always worried that it might not accommodate the thing.

It accommodates every eventuality your business might come into. And because it's a dynamic program, it self adjusts based on what the logic of fairness is. Not any external opinions or subjective thoughts. So it always works and, and there's lots of ways to use it for free if they want to, but of course you can buy the books and buy the software and that kind of stuff, but my big mission in life is make sure that this thing goes mainstream.

You can do all kinds of stuff with it if you,do it right. 

[00:44:28] Ronald Skelton: I like to say a lot of people don't get this, but I say, startups or partnerships of any kind in business or like marriage. You a lot of times you spend more time with your startup partner than you actually do with your spouse. And just like marriages, they're all going to start with love and fondness. I wouldn't start a business with you if I didn't think I liked you, could spend time with you and work with you, right. Just like Yeah,

[00:44:48] Mike Moyer: Slicing pie is a basis of a prenup once.

[00:44:51] Ronald Skelton: There you go. And then the um, the startups either end up in one or two ways. Either, you sell it, you're profitable or it ends up in a divorce. And I've never, I don't know too many divorcees that really like each other, right? I've started so many companies and most of them I just started with people I considered either very knowledgeable that were my friends, or I thought we were going to be great friends because they had knowledge and we got along.

I can tell you right now in my 52 years, I'm only probably friends with two or three people that I've been in business with that long enough that we sold the business or did something with, and we're no longer in business with each other anymore. Most of them ended up where we may still talk to each other, but we're nowhere near as close as we were.

It really stressed that friendship. But I think you, your book and what you're doing will change that. I honestly think that people will be able to, enter knowing it's equitable and fair and leave knowing it was, it was equitable and fair. And there's no, anything that was other than that was illogical. Meaning that they might feel that they're treated unfair, but it's not true. Right. A lot of times people feel things that aren't real.

[00:45:54] Mike Moyer: Yes, that's especially true in families. Two brothers are going together or a husband and wife team. And I say do the slicing pie. I know you're feeling generous, you don't want to use your brother, you know, nickel and dime, but get it in place because that way you'll stay friends.

[00:46:08] Ronald Skelton: Yeah. I think you're going to save a lot of relationships out there. You probably even save some marriages if you get married couples that are going to business together, a lot of times,

[00:46:15] Mike Moyer: partner. If there's a husband, wife, and a third partner, then it's a lot of conflict.

[00:46:19] Ronald Skelton: Yep,

[00:46:20] Mike Moyer: But if you use slicing pie, it's all transparent.

[00:46:22] Ronald Skelton: So I think you're going to save a lot of relationships in the future and you probably already have and you know,maybe there needs to be a mechanism for, maybe that's the call out. If you're out there and you've used his book and it's saved your relationship or you're really, you know really glad reach out and tell him.

Because I think authors need more of that I think authors need more of hey, I use what you've done what you've taught. I've really used it. It's really made a big difference in my business, in my life. And I just wanted you to know it. I get that from the podcast occasionally but it's not as common as you would expect. Out of the thousands and thousands of download, you know still, you know once a you know a week or something somebody will send me an email Hey, man, i'm really glad you're doing what you're doing.

It's teaching me a lot. I'm using it, but it's not, out of the thousands of people that you know, that's it's, it's working for and it's helping, you don't get that feedback. And we have mechanisms and podcasts for it to be there. The books just don't have that necessarily.

[00:47:12] Mike Moyer: Yeah, it's hard. People don't usually call authors of their books and tell them what happened.

[00:47:16] Ronald Skelton: I'll reach out to him. I love authors. I put, you're the probably the 40, I think we're at 48 or maybe even close to 50 authors have been on the show out of 200. Mainly because, you've got enough knowledge. You took the time to put it down and,I'm able to look through it and see what is there.

And I, you know, honestly, I know that you, if you wrote a book, you want the word out, so, it's kind of a fairly easy target to get authors on, on a show like this, because you got to get the word out about the book. But,I didn't realize I'd done so many authors. It wasn't intentional to be honest.

I did a thing called meet the author where I was like, we were promoting some of the older shows, like going back and promoting them. So we started creating graphics for meet the author. And when I got to my 47th, like, man, I've interviewed a lot of authors. I didn't realize all these, a lot of them, but I interviewed people.

They didn't realize they had two books out. Right. But, uh, I'm a big fan of, of authors. I love people who capture their knowledge, put it down, allow other people to use it. There's something, there's a contribution to the world you're giving. And I want to, if nobody's thinking, yeah, I do want to thank you.

It has made a difference in, in our businesses. I won't enter into, into business structures. It's not using something similar to it. They may not call it that, but you know, if I pitch them the book and they tell me no, I'll pitch it from another angle and they'll still use the methodology, right? Like, okay, maybe we don't use slicing pie, but let's just do a thing where if I put money in, it's worth X.

And if I put time in, it's worth the Y. Can we agree upon that? And now they lower that bar down that happen to read a book and follow somebody else's model. But,it's still the model.

[00:48:42] Mike Moyer: I have a 12 page guide you can give to someone who doesn't get it right away. 

[00:48:45] Ronald Skelton: So how does people reach out to you? How do people get that? And how people, I know that you can go to Amazon and, look for Slicing Pie and we'll work for pie and the other, you know, look up your name. You've got some other books out. But what would be your preferred method for people to reach out to you?

[00:48:57] Mike Moyer: I have about a dozen different books I've written. It's MikeMoyer. com is where I keep information about those. Books about trade shows and presentation skills and lacrosse and stuff like that. And then

[00:49:09] Ronald Skelton: Thought I'd see something. I looked across and I was like, is that a different guy? You know, it's no, it's you. Cool. Okay.

[00:49:13] Mike Moyer: COVID book I wrote with my son.

[00:49:16] Ronald Skelton: Okay.

[00:49:17] Mike Moyer: And, uh, slicingpie. com is where the slicing pie stuff is found. You can get it down in a free sample. And if you contact me through the contact link, I'll send you that free guide. It's called the Co Founder's Guide to Equity Splits.Like I said, if you find someone who's not, doesn't get it, then I'm there to teach it to them.

There's a course online, all kinds of stuff. If they don't want to use it because they want to take advantage of you, that's a different, that's a different issue.

[00:49:37] Ronald Skelton: Awesome. Well, I want to thank you for being here today. I think that, I think we covered this and,I'll continue to recommend your book on to when I get guests on the show and they're talking about starting something new. There's only, I'll be honest. It's not a wide variety for buying businesses.

I tell people to buy, to read.I've talked to all they draw like Buy, Then Build. And then for negotiations, I always tell them to never split the difference. When to outsource and when to do stuff, it's always Who, Not How. Dan Sullivan. And when they start talking about starting something new and they're like going to create a, like a startup or a roll up or whatever, I was like, you got to read Slicing Pie and you got to implement it.

It's what's going to keep, it's going to save that relationship. You want to be, you want to be friends with your brother in law and two years after this business is going, read this book, implement it. It'll save your first friendship or same relationship, and it'll save a lot of frustration.

So I promote your book constantly and I'll continue to do that.

[00:50:24] Mike Moyer: Thank you very much. I appreciate that.

[00:50:25] Ronald Skelton: All right. Thank you. We'll call that a show. Hang out for just a second.