HR as a Valuation Killer?
Matt Butler, PairPEO

[00:00:00] Today we’ve got a good friend of mine. Um, so, uh, Matt Butler with Pear PEO, and I’ve known Matt for three or four years now, maybe longer. Um, we have Pre-COVID, I guess, uh, six years ago. So, um, we have similar taste in music, which is always a good place for people to start off at. Um, and then he has a similar approach in the way he works with clients, um, in really making sure that he puts them first.

So that works out really well for us as well because that’s kinda how we like to operate too. So, um, I’ve known, um, known him the entire time in the PEO world. So Matt, thanks for joining us on stage today. I’m excited to talk about PEOs and small [00:01:00] businesses. You may be the only one. Are you excited to talk about PE- about PEOs and small businesses?

So am I. Oh, you got

There we go Are you blue or are you green? Are we both green? Green. Like Luke Skywalker? Green- Green, green pill. Yeah. So. All right, there we go. Like, you guys can hear me, but the people across the, the world on YouTube, they… I wanted m- to make sure they can hear me, too. So. They got you. They got me. So Matt, do me a favor.

Um, I still say the word PEO a lot, and you probably do as well. Mm-hmm. And, mm, a fair p- chunk of people that I say that to stare at me like I have two heads. So kind of bring us up to speed on what a PEO is. It, it’s, it’s, it’s a really broad brush, but first of all, thank you, and thank your team for bringing us all together.

Um, and can we just say welcome spring? [00:02:00] Finally. It’s been a long … It feels like it’s been cold since Thanksgiving. Go, go Hornets. Go Hornets. Hornets. Yeah, there we go. Okay. Uh, happy Saturday- Here’s, here’s to tripping. Huh? Here’s to tripping. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever you need to do to win, right? He, he- We all want to win

he fell on his foot. Yeah, he … Things happen. It happens. It’s a, it’s a happy accident. It’s better than … It’s flo- you flop one way- … you flop the other way. It, it’s … But, uh, but yeah, thank you William for, for having me. So, you know, my experience in PEO has been interesting. Um, I, I used a PEO as an administrator at one point in time, first half of my career, so you guys kind of get the context.

Was in the tech space. Uh, was running a managed service provider at one point in time here in Charlotte. PEO rep came and called on me. Used the PEO for several years. It helped me operationally and financially. It was, it was a good move. Um, sold that company in 2009. Ended up going to work with Insperity, [00:03:00] which was the original PEO, uh, to the marketplace, uh, in 2011.

Really thought it was gonna be a bridge job, get to meet a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of people like you guys, you know? Here we are 15 years later, I’m still in the space. Um, but it … The, the PEO industry has evolved. I would argue that when I first started using a PEO and when I first started working with Insperity, that it was a, a fully functioning outsourced HR department.

Um, that has changed over time, um, as well as the ICP for PEOs. I would say in 2011, the ICP was kind of the mom and pop 25 to 7,500 employee, um, privately held businesses. That’s changed a lot. Um, ICP is now five employee startups, 2,000 or 3,000 or 4,000 employee private equity-backed roll-ups and sort of everything in between.

Um, [00:04:00] but what, you know, what a PEO is today is a HR platform that, uh, should bring a lot of compliance factors and shift a lot of compliance off of, of a business. Um, it should help them contain costs in some ways that they can’t do on their own, specifically health insurance, a big math problem in small businesses.

And at the end of the day, it, it, the, a PEO ought to help a company increase and enhance enterprise value in an organization, which plays right into our, you know, relationship because y- you’re trying to help companies increase and improve their enterprise value of a small privately held businesses or a business.

And a PEO ought to be, you know, doing the same thing in it, it, its core function. But really, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a platform that includes compliance, benefits, cost containment, um, and, and multi-state compliance in a way that small businesses just can’t do on their own [00:05:00] Um, you used the, um… We do it all the time too, right?

You used ICP. Mm. Um, ICP stands for? Uh, ideal client profile. There you go. So that’s what I thought. Had to think about it. Yeah. Yeah. No, you’re fine. Um, so, um, so you mentioned a previous company that you were at, which was Insperity, which was a PEO. Yep. And you’ve got a new company that you’re with. Yep. Talk a little bit about the difference, if you don’t mind.

Yeah. So, you know, the PEO industry, you know, it’s changed a lot. Um, there are now 400 and something PEOs operating in the United States. Um, they all have their different nuances, their different insurance carriers, their different billing methodologies. It’s, it’s complicated and complex, right? So I was at Insperity for, like I said, almost 13 years.

Great run. Um, my wife still works there. Some of my best friends still work there. Um, but with so many different organizations that really pitched the same thing, it didn’t make a lot of sense for me [00:06:00] to work for one company anymore because, um, there was just too many clubs, and I felt like I was playing a, you know, 18 holes of golf with a seven iron.

Some holes, great club. Putting, not so much. Um, so I went to work with Pear PEO. Uh, we are a PEO broker. Uh, I had known my business partner now, Jeff Wanner, for almost 10 years when I left. Um, and on the broker side, you know, we’re different. Instead of trying to sell somebody a PEO product or any other product in the marketplace, companies come to us and they say, “Hey, look, we want to shop the PEO marketplace.

We just don’t really know how to do it. We don’t have the time to do it. We don’t have the expertise. We don’t have the team. Show us what’s out there.” So we build a needs-based RFP. We shop it out to a portfolio that we have of about 25 PEOs instead of, you know, 200 or 300 or 400, or however many there is out there today.

Um, and try to help a company find the best one for them, and we do all that for [00:07:00] free. So, you know, 400 PEOs in the marketplace, it’s a lot. There’s probably 2,000 independent PEO brokers that are in the marketplace. Um, there’s only a handful that are actually growing, scaling, investable businesses, so we kind of sit on, in that little quadrant.

Um, and then we help companies shop it out, and we do all that for free. So, uh, the, the difference really between, to answer your question specifically, between what I did before was try to bring people into the marketplace and help them understand the value of the company that I worked for. Now companies come to us.

They really understand the value of what a PEO could bring to the table. They just want help trying to find the right one. Um Industries, are there, um… So, um, are there industries that it works really well in? So, um, I [00:08:00] own a home construction business, or I own a technology company, or I own, um, a plumbing business.

Are there, are there things that it works… Or a oil and gas development. Um, you know, are there things it works well, things where it doesn’t work? It depends on who you ask. You know, at the, at the end of the day, PEOs solve a big math problem. The math problem being, you know, the cost of HR operational costs and how that impacts bottom line EBITDA and, uh, enterprise value in the company at the end of the day.

Um, it really becomes more of a mindset ICP than an industry ICP. Uh, if, if you went and looked at some study or you asked Claude or GPT, like, “What industries work really well?” It would give you the same thing that everybody else would say. But we’ve got clients in all 50 states. We’ve got clients that are really, really blue collar industrial.

Um, we’ve got clients that are SaaS and [00:09:00] tech and CPA firms and nonprofits and everything in between. Um, there, there’s really not an industry great fit. Or maybe there’s an… There, there are industries that are better fits, but there’s really not an industry that’s just, like, a terrible fit at this point in time.

It’s funny you say nonprofit. I didn’t really think about… I mean, but they have HR issues too, right? Everybody does, yeah. Yeah. So, um, so size, does it matter? Like, number of employees, is that a important component? Does size matter? Yeah. Is that what you’re asking? Yeah, does size matter? Just number of employees, yeah?

Who laughed first? Yeah. Who was it? Was it you? I see that. Like- Yeah … let’s see your biceps. Yeah. Are they matter? Yeah. The youngest guy in the room. No, don’t matter at all. You know, again, this has evolved. 10 years ago if you’d asked me this, I’d have said, like… And, and PEOs are different. They’re not revenue-based.

Like, a lot of times you talk to companies like, “Oh, we’re 5 to 50 million,” or, “We’re 10 to, like, 500 million,” or pick a number. You know, PEOs are headcount-based, so Instagram was a [00:10:00] 10-employee company that sold for a billion dollars, right? So, right? I know. Yeah, me too. Here I’m selling PEOs, could’ve just put pictures online and let teenagers- Yeah

click it. We got a good idea. Swipe left. What can we do that makes 10 employees, 10… Yeah, you know, that would’ve been nice. It’ll… It’s coming. Yeah. Where were you on that one for me, man? You know? That was before vibe coding. Yeah. Like, Claude didn’t even exist back then. So, you know, uh, but no, si- you know, size, employee headcount, um, you know, 10 years ago, 25 to 7,500 employees, something like that, was a really sweet spot and probably took up 90% of the PEO market space as far as, like, you know, size-wise.

But now we have clients that are three or four or five employees that are… And they don’t have to be three or four or five employees that are SaaS startups that are gonna grow to a couple hundred. We have small mom-and-pop businesses, uh, financial planning, you know, shops that just have three or four employees and that’s it.

And [00:11:00] we’ve got clients that are 3 or 4 or 5,000 employees. Um, which makes it a pretty unique industry to be in because there’s not a lot of industries that a company with five employees, a nonprofit with five employees that’s not gonna grow, would buy the exact same product that a company that’s 4,000 employees, multi-billion dollar private equity-backed growing acquisition roll-up type company that would buy the exact same product off the shelf.

Different buying reason, same product. So the industry doesn’t really matter, the size doesn’t really matter. It’s more about, you know, does the owner, the CFO, or the decision-makers really wanna go down this path of outsourcing? That’s more than… The, the psychographic profile matters, I think, more than things that you look at in normal business industries So the, the makeup of a business owner is, um, they’re an entrepreneur, right?

I mean, [00:12:00] most business owners are entrepreneurs. We started something because we wanted to create something, and we wanted to create something for ourselves. We wanted to create something for others. We wanted to… We thought we had an idea that was driving value to our end clients, right? Yep. Um, which ultimately means we’re control freaks.

Um, and so when I think of, and when we talk about this, right, we’ve had this conversation a couple of times. When I think of giving up some of that control, um, around the HR component of it, how much control are businesses actually giving up? Just kind of dive into that for a minute. Yeah. It’s a good, that’s a good question.

And, and, and we run into that frequently, and I can speak from experience. So first time somebody pitched PEO to me, I literally thought it may be illegal. It’s like, what is this co-employment thing? You mean, we both employ the employee? So kind of step back. The cornerstone of PEO is co-employment. So co-employment means, [00:13:00] you know, a business takes their employee pool of 20 or 200 or 220 or 2,000, and they put them into a big pool with the PEO’s clients, so they have buying power.

So it shares buying power, shares resources, uh, shares liability, right? So when I first heard that, I literally thought it was illegal. Like, how do you do this? I’m not giving you my employees. They’re my employees. I hired them. I don’t want to take them anywhere. I spent 10 years building all this risk.

Yeah. Why would I, like, give it to somebody else at this point? Yeah. Like, this is my business. It’s my baby. I’m always a control freak. Still, still a little bit of a control freak. Even though I was in outsource, right? I was outsourced IT, and my, our pitch was, you know, increased efficiencies, limited risk, and, you know, you know, improve operating efficiencies.

Same thing PEOs do, but I thought co-employment was kind of crazy. Um, but, you know, when you step back and look at it, you’re, you’re shifting a lot of liability off of [00:14:00] your plate as an owner, uh, or as a founder or as a CFO that stays up at night trying to figure out like multi-state compliance or, you know, whatever.

Um, but you know, to, to answer your question more specifically- I feel like in a lot of ways you get more control over your business when you outsource this to a PEO because it’s kind of the, you know, the, the E-myth approach, right? You get to move a lot of this, you know, administrative function, a lot of this HR function, a lot of this compliance function off of your plate or off of your CFO’s plate, or even off of your HR team’s plate, so that they can go focus on what drives revenue, right?

Or what really makes an impact in the business. Like, it doesn’t make you money, get it off your plate. Compliance doesn’t really make you money, so- No … move it. It doesn’t. Does not. Just, you know, it’s tax time. What’s today’s date, by the way? Happy April 15th. Should we cheers everybody? Should cheers to- Cheers

say later tax time? Yeah. 18- Um, or maybe [00:15:00] extend tax time to April 15th or October 15th, whatever day. How… Quick raise of hands. How many people filed an extension today? Okay … a month ago How many people are investors that got their K-1 on time?

Sorry, Chris This is not a cheers drink. This is like a- I don’t know. Me neither. So- Um, you know, but in, in, in the PEO space, the owner of the business, they retain full direction and control over their organization. Means they can hire, fire, manage the people the way they want to. They can pay them the way they want to.

They can acquire companies. They can carve out business units. Um, they can go into joint ventures. They can go public. You know, there’s, there- there’s really no limitation to it. It, it’s, it’s more of, you know, in the co-employment [00:16:00] model, the PEO becomes what’s known as the, the administrative employer of record.

So they’re responsible for federal compliance, multi-state compliance, um, uh, you know, anything the government says you have to do because you have employees, DOL, EEO, ACA. Pick a three-letter word, not a four-letter word. Um, that goes away, and reality business owners ought to be able to, like, free up their time and focus more on things that help them drive, you know, top-line revenue and, um, be more strategic in the organization, like the E-Myth versus stuck in administratio and compliance worlds.

You mean the letter I got from the NCDOR two days ago for underpayment penalty and interest on payroll taxes wouldn’t have come to me? Yeah, just that. Yeah. Exactly. And, like, Charlotte’s an interesting city too because, I mean, I, you know, lived in Atlanta. There, you know, it’s 120 miles anywhere you go outside of Atlanta to get to another state.

Charlotte sits [00:17:00] right on the border of South Carolina, so you have service industries, HVAC, pest control, construction, roofing, um, plumbing, like a lot of those services businesses that have employees that are doing services in both states. Well, the PEO becomes responsible for filing those payroll taxes in the state that the job is actually performed in.

Um, and we’ve seen that too where, you know, all of a sudden the payroll company or the, the State of South Carolina shows up and says, “Hey, this company’s on Westinghouse in Charlotte. They’ve done $7 million worth of work in South Carolina for the past couple of years, and no payroll taxes have been paid there.”

It’s been paid to North Carolina. Hadn’t been paid to South Carolina. So somebody’s got to come in. That’s, you know, that’s when they call you. That’s your phone ringing at 5:00 on a Friday on April 14th. Yeah. We got an email from the SEC at 3:50 this afternoon. It happened to be just an event notification, so it wasn’t, um…

But it scared the poop out of me. [00:18:00] Um, so Yeah. I hate compliance. Yeah. You know, I can guarantee you that compliance and health insurance is not what wakes me up every day to go be in the PEO industry. Yeah. It, it really is more that- Like me personally, I, you know, I’m, I’m a coach at heart, coach my kids’ sports.

I know you’ve done the same thing, that’s why we get along so well. But I like to see people develop. I like to see businesses develop. And benefits, and compliance, and payroll, and stuff like that, it kind of falls into PEO, does not wake me up in the morning. But it’s that end game. It’s, it’s watching this company exit.

It’s watch this company raise another round. It’s watch this company, like, risk everything and max out their credit cards, borrow money from their family, bet on themselves, and get to a point where, all right, we’re, we’re a growing company. And if I can be involved in that piece at just a little level and my little slice of the pie and the vertical they’re working in, I love that piece.

Just happens to be compliance driven, and [00:19:00] payroll, and benefits, and vendors that Yeah. So, um, we’ve talked about this a little bit too, but when we think about HR, we think about, like, payroll, um, uh, we think about, um, health insurance. We think about different aspects of a business, and one of the first things that popped into my mind was, wait a second, and this isn’t the case, but if it was the case, you know, my sister-in-law is in charge of payroll.

Like, I don’t want to have to fire my sister-in-law, so therefore we can never hire a PEO. Um, but y’all do payroll. So how do the services… Like, what can, can we turn on and off switches or, or do we go back to some PEOs are better at not having to handle payroll, or not having to do the 401, or not having to do this or not having to do that?

Like how easy is it for that 30, 40, 50 person landscape, plumbing, electrical company to continue to retain some aspect of [00:20:00] their operations internally? It’s a great question Not that it’s in their best interest. It might still be in their best interest for me to fire my sister-in-law, but it might not be good for the Thanksgiving dinner, but it might be better for the business.

Well, if she gets a bigger K-one on time at Thanksgiving, then maybe so. Who knows? Um, you know, it– PEOs aren’t really built to replace HR. They’re really built to work alongside HR and enhance HR. And if your sister-in-law is running payroll, and that’s what she loves to do, like, somebody’s still gotta press the button with a payroll company, like, “Hey, we process payroll.”

It’s just a function. I mean, most companies are either doing it through QuickBooks Payroll, they’re doing it through Paychex or Paycom or Paylocity or Pay something, whatever. So there’s still, like, that outsource component. It’s not like they’re calculating FICA and FUI and SUI and deductions and, like, all that stuff on their own.

So there’s some kind of function. It’s just saying, “All right, well, what if we just replace a pay with [00:21:00] a PEO that includes payroll and can help you be more strategic in, you know, in, in your role?” So, and we have clients that have, like, big, fully functioning HR departments, you know, ten or twelve or thirteen people in a big company that runs HR, but this still brings some value to it.

They don’t wanna have compliance. Um, you know, the health insurance component, you know, could save a big company, you know, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars. So they can take that and reallocate it in other, other areas of the business. I mean, it, it may make sense. They may or may not, and we get that question sometimes too, like, “Can I just fire my HR manager?”

Yeah, but you’re gonna have to do it. Like, somebody’s gonna have to do it. Like, w- the PEO really becomes, you know, the navigator, like the guardrails. We’re gonna, we’re gonna keep you from running any potholes, but somebody still has to drive the bus. Um- Sorry, what was the second part of the question?[00:22:00] 

That’s a, that’s a good question. All right. Yeah. Sorry, go ahead. Um, I mean, essentially it… Do they, um, can you flick on and off buttons with different PEOs? Yes. So, and again, that’s kind of why I left Insperity when I did, was because there’s so many different players that are out there. Some are, like, all-inclusive, it’s really hard to turn things off.

Some are not. Um, so it really just depends on a case-by-case basis, and that’s why companies come to us. They say, “Hey, look, this is what we’re trying to accomplish. These are the outcomes that we’re looking for. This is what we currently do. What could be improved?” And go find us the right fit. So some of them are tweaks.

I’m working on one right now that’s a company that ramps up from about 20 full-time employees 12 months out of the year, and over the summer months, they hire about 120 seasonal or part-time people. All right. Well, you know, if we’re just looking at this business, you know, case, at 19 full-time employees are there 12 months out of the [00:23:00] year, the math makes sense one way.

But if you bring in 100 people that are not benefits eligible, there’s no real, you know, math offsets in, like, what a PEO can bring, uh, it’s very expensive for them to do that, and, and this is a nonprofit. So, like, that’s not really a great PEO fit for more math problems than operational or functional problems.

They could use a PEO functionally. Operationally, it would probably improve it. But they can’t afford to spend another, you know, $75,000 a year on top of what they’re doing right now for this group of summertime people, and that’s really what they deliver. They work 12 months out of the year to deliver a product that’s four months old.

100%. So that’s how we can go in and say, “Let’s thread together the right deal.” So Um, I forget who I was talking to earlier. Somebody was talking about marriages and, um, I think, uh, uh, [00:24:00] maybe Gerald, I think we were talking about 54% of first marriages fail. Was it 40, 42% of second marriages? Two-thirds.

Two-thirds of second marriages and then- Three-fourths … three-fourths of, um, third. I have been married three times. Yeah. Gerald’s, Gerald’s been happily married for- All that sounds exper- Yeah … expensive. Very expensive. Yeah. Gerald’s been happily married for, um- Almost 50 years. I shouldn’t say almost 50, because at my age, Gerald…

Well, Gerald is very young. Um, but, um, so I mean, not all marriages work, right? Right. And you talk about co-employment. Yeah. I’m still wrapping my head around what co-employment means. Um, how does it break up, right? Like, how, how messy does it become if I say, “Look, uh, it makes a lot of sense. I’m gonna walk down this path,” and then, “Oh, gosh, I can’t get out of this.

I’m stuck in this thing forever”? I- it’s like any marriage. You don’t want to, like, go in with a prenup, right? Maybe [00:25:00] it’s smart, but, you know, you’re- Sometimes you do. Yeah. You know, that first… Not the first marriage. Not the first one. First marriage, you marry for love. Second marriage, you marry for money, so.

But, you know, it’s funny. Like, I do a lot of work on LinkedIn. If you guys go to our LinkedIn page, um, we do a lot of commercials. So we use Spherical Media as our, like, media company. They’re here in Charlotte. They’re freaking fantastic. If they can make me presentable, then they do a really good job. You should check them out.

They’ve got a good makeup artist? What’s that? They’ve got a good makeup artist. A really good makeup artist. Yeah. Um, but, but we did a, uh, a video not too long ago on the haircut versus the tattoo. My business partner, Jeff, by the way, does not have hair like me and you. He’s, like, completely bald, so it’s… So the fact that he’s talking about haircuts in the PEO industry is pretty rich.

I’m, I’m faking it. He’s real. He’s got no hair. We’re like half and half. We’re good. Yeah, yeah, there. Um, I’m back here. You’re up. Yes. But, you know, like, tattoo’s permanent, right? Um, you know, a haircut’s not permanent. It’s gonna grow back. Uh, so that’s kind of [00:26:00] our approach. Like, the PEO does not have to be lifelong, does not have to be a marriage.

Um, as a matter of fact, I think that if you’ve been with a PEO, the same PEO, and you haven’t benchmarked what the marketplace has out there every 24 to 36 months, you’re probably leaving a lot of money on the table. Um, th- the way that, you know, technology is changing things, and integrations, and the way companies need to be able to integrate with their operating systems, and their ERPs, and Fixer, and AI, and Claude, and all that stuff, like, there’s some that’s, like, really pushing the envelope, and there’s some that’s not so much.

So that, you know, tattoo, the permanent marriage piece may be, uh, fading faster in the next 24 months in the PEO industry than, you know, than it has in the past. But our particular approach is we need to constantly be benchmarking this. And, you know, in our world- You know, we do the project management. If you transition from one PEO to the other, [00:27:00] we help manage that whole process.

We own customer success, we own the renewals. So we’re really trying to take that whole, um, you know, project management, implementation, change management piece off of our clients too. So even if they come to us and say, “Hey, look, we’re gonna move to a PEO for the first time or the second time or whatever,” two or three years down the road, like, we want to constantly be in their back pocket saying, you know, “Let’s, let’s make sure that we have, you know, the right PEO in place for you right now at the right time with the right integrations, the right carriers, fits your demographics, fits your price points.”

Like, there’s a lot that goes into it. Um, but we’ve got the, you know, the expertise and the track record to prove it too. So, you know, Pear PEO, we just celebrated our seven-year anniversary. Um, thank you. Raise your hand if you were at our party. One, two. All right, saved a couple lives. All right, cool. Um, but, um, uh, you know, we, we, we’ve got some, some clients that came on board with [00:28:00] us with, you know…

One particular, it’s a software company here in Charlotte. Um, they came on board with Pear PEO with a, with a PEO for the first time in twenty nineteen. Had twenty-two employees. They’ve now got about two hundred and seventy employees. They are paying less for health insurance right now than they were in twenty nineteen for better plans.

They’ve grown. They’ve, you know, ten x-ed their growth, and we’ve probably saved them two, three million dollars in healthcare costs, which have helped them grow. Um, but we’ve also switched their PEO platforms two different times along the way too. So we’ve said, “Okay, three years in, this is where you’re at.

You kind of creep back up in like HR operational costs. Let’s go back to market. Let’s look at another one.” We manage the change management. You know, it stays low. I mean, what do you do when you’re a growing SaaS company in Charlotte selling enterprise software when you have two or three million dollars in your pocket every year that you wouldn’t [00:29:00] have had in the open market?

Makes you a more valuable organization. If they decide to exit, if they decide to raise a, a round, they, they’re probably … They’ve never raised a round at this point, but if they did, their multiple would be higher than it would’ve been if they just stayed open market, and they listened to our coaching all the way.

So most small business owners, um- End up transitioning their business in some way or another, right? So they’re either gonna, um, they’re gonna sell it to kids, they’re gonna sell it to, uh, an ESOP, they’re gonna sell it to a strategic, um, and in some cases they’re gonna sell it off to a private equity group, right?

Yep. Um, and I go back to control, right? Like, um, how do other people view the fact that I have a pair or that I have a PEO sitting underneath it? Is it, is it a positive? Is it a negative? Does it help? Does it hurt? Um, how is it seen in the acquisition marketplace? Good, good, good point. Um, everybody has a different opinion, right?

[00:30:00] It’s kind of like when you’re talking about HR. If we asked everybody in this room what HR meant to them, they’d probably have a different answer. Talk to a recruiter, HR means recruiting. Talk to workers’ comp and safety, they’re OSHA. You know, you talk to benefits, their participation and whatever. Um, but as far as like ac- you know, the strategic world is concerned, um, you know, private equity knows PEO, right?

ACG, you know, you guys know ACG, um, they use a PEO. They’ve been involved with PEOs forever. The National Venture Conference Association, they use a PEO as an organization. Um, you know, they recognize that these companies, you know, and they’re– what they’re trying to do is create enterprise value, and they recognize that companies that are using a PEO tend to be more valuable than don’t.

There’s some statistics I could throw out. You know, they grow twice as fast. They’re more profitable. They, you know, da, da, da, da, da. But at the end of the day, you know, [00:31:00] PEOs, they, they move a lot of compliance off, right? So you’re not like going back to the table in the deal room trying to figure out Nexus and the state that charges Nexus or cha- you know, sales tax.

There’s, you know, no crazy workers’ comp claims. A lot of these blue-collar roll-ups, you know, HVAC, um, uh, roofing, pick one, plumbing, electrical, like there’s some potential workers’ comp stuff there. They typically have less turn-turnover, so there’s some soft cost, cost there. So back up, big picture, you know, private equity and strategic investors, they look at a PEO client and they’re like, “All right, there’s less risk there.

I’m not gonna run into like some bee’s nest, and I’m gonna have to go back and like reevaluate or, you know, have a chargeback or add back or something like that in the deal room.” When there’s PEO, it tends to be kind of buttoned up because the PEO is taking on some of that risk along the wa- the way too.

Um, and I think they tend to look at it as a– this is a, this is a easier deal, better deal, less due [00:32:00] diligence up front. HR due diligence is done, compliance diligence is done. It’s a easier way for us to move this thing forward. And they tend to be more profitable. Yeah, so profit helps for the owner, right?

Yeah. So, um, if it’s priced off, um, you know, multiple, then a higher multiple or a higher value means higher exit. Or on the acquisition side, like there’s less risk. Yeah, that’s true too, yeah. You know, it’s like I don’t have to like do… My team doesn’t have to do as much diligence on this because I know that there are certain aspects of it that have to be buttoned up.

Yeah. So you move the needle from a four eight to a five two or whatever it might end up being, right? Yeah, one, one, one more multiple is a big, big difference. Yeah. So, um, so it’s funny, we were, um, we had a call a couple weeks ago, um, with a client of ours and we were talking about, um- How they offer health insurance, but the health insurance uptake that they have isn’t [00:33:00] really high.

And you walk through how one month the PEO might look at that negatively, and another month the PEO might look at that and say, “We don’t care.” Um, so how do you, um, um, how do you help the owner? How are you able to better negotiate than the owner can or understand that mechanism, right? We think about life insurance, right?

We’ve got a couple great life insurance folks here in town or in the room that, um, understand that marketplace really well, and they see the, um, the health questionnaire, the results or whatever from the doctor, and they instantaneously know we’re gonna go to this company rather than this company. How do y’all– how do you know that same thing?

That’s the art piece of it. You know, with so many PEOs that are out there, and y- the, the big number becomes health insurance, right? That’s the biggest math problem in small businesses in a lot of [00:34:00] ways. It’s the most inflationary line item in the United States next to maybe arguably college education, and I’ve got a sophomore at Tennessee and a senior in high school, so, like, that is something I’m really dialed into.

Um, and health insurance is really close to that, right? Um, but the way PEOs work too is kind of different too, and that’s where our world sits a little different because you got four hundred PEOs, and one thing they do for health insurance, they bundle health insurance, right? Um, well, when you bundle, you know, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen thousand small businesses onto one health insurance plan too, sometimes you’re gonna have somebody that gets really sick.

You know, you’re gonna have some people that are, you know, running claims up. So you might have priced a company low, all of a sudden the PEO’s master plan has jumbo claims that’s adding on to it. So it’s really s– you know, it, it goes in cycles. Like you’ll have some [00:35:00] PEOs that are operating really well and being really aggressively priced for one or two or three years, and all of a sudden they have some claims that, you know, catch up with them.

Um, and I think that goes back to our don’t marry your PEO approach. Let’s… If they’re being aggressive and we can help maintain, you know, price points for a, a, a period of time and then move a company to another PEO at some point in time down the road if that starts to change. And, and it could change quarter by quarter.

Like we’ll look at… We’ll, we’ll go run an RFP for a group, a hundred-employee CPA firm, white collar, you know, low risk. Um, we’ll run it in Q one. We’ll have one set of answers across ten or twelve or twenty different PEOs. We’ll run that exact same company with the exact same demographics and the exact same censuses six months later and have twenty, thirty percent difference in, in, in price point.

So, um, it’s our job on… You know, our job as a PEO broker is to [00:36:00] keep our thumb on the pulse of the industry, all the different PEOs that are kind of operating out there. A lot of times we’ll tell, you know, companies that come to us in Q one or Q two, “We need to push this off for a couple of quarters and just see what it looks like.”

So, um, again, most small businesses just don’t have the expertise or the time or the people to be able to do that, and that’s where we try to come in and take it off their hands. Um, so I read Matt my questions ahead of time, about 12 minutes before we started. I was supposed to send them to him a week ago so he could see what they were.

Tax time. Yes, Ta- I told him it’s not- I lo- I love William. It’s okay. It’s, it’s not my fault, it’s Tax’s fault. Um- It’s like the drum solo. It’s okay. It was a little long. Um, and so, uh, my question is, is, um, you know, I’m out there in Kansas, and Matt was like, “Why are we in Kansas?” And I was like, “I don’t know why we’re in Kansas.”

Just, just the middle of nowhere, right? But I’m out there in Kansas, I’m like a small business owner. I’m hearing you talk about health insurance as a cost and the inflationary aspect of it, and you can help manage [00:37:00] that, right? And so I’m, I’m like super excited. I’m like, “Ooh, I wanna manage my health insurance.

My health insurance costs suck.” Um, but then they pick up the phone, and they call you tomorrow, and they start talking, and three sentences in, they’re like, you say, “Whoa, this isn’t gonna work.” Are there big red flags for businesses that are, like, instantaneous? Like, don’t call me, um, call him

E- b- hmm. That’s a good question. Personally- Besides the jerk, right? We know nobody wants to deal with jerks. N- well, yeah, so you’ve heard me say this too. I think that all of us in this room, you get to a point in your career where you’re like, “You know, I don’t have to work with jerks anymore.” So, um, but there, there are some red flags, but i- it’s different for some people than it is to me personally because at our company, we do 99.9% of our business through referrals, personal introductions, somebody that trusts you, that you [00:38:00] transfer this trust over to me, and you say, “I want you to take care of them.”

Okay, great. Um, I’m going to. And if you’re a two-employee, three em- … Is that a great fit? Is that, like, a giant revenue mover for us? Nope. Not, not at all. But I’ll treat them the exact same way. I may tell them that the PEO is not the right fit for them, but I’m gonna go try to find them the right, you know, solution and thread something together for them, um, because you’ve transferred that trust to me, right?

If I do a good job, you never know. They may… Their wife or sister or mother may be the CFO of a frigging thousand-person company in, you know, Indiana, which I would never have uncovered. I’m not prospecting companies in… We don’t prospect. I’m not even prospecting anybody in Ind- Indiana. But if I did a really good job with your sister on this little small three-person group, it wasn’t a great PEO fit, then it, it helps everybody.

And I think a rising tide lifts all [00:39:00] ships, and that’s really been my approach as far as business is concerned. W- believe it or not, I’m really not, you know, comfortable sitting up here with a microphone. The beer, like, kind of matters, everything’s over. It helps, doesn’t it? Definitely. The beer helps. Yeah, it helps.

It definitely helps. Um, I’m way more introverted than most people would actually think. But at the end of the day, like, if you, if you believe in me and you trust me enough to introduce me to your sister or brother, and we get a lot of those kind of deals, then I wanna treat them like they’re, you know, the President of the United States, and I’m gonna treat them good.

And that tends to play out really well in our space. They both have really big skeletons in the closet. They’ll never make it to president. Yeah. I’m not running for office, I can tell you that much. Um, so wrap up, um, this came in, um, third party. Um, how do you respond to a CEO who says, “Our HR isn’t broken, it’s just expensive”?

I agree [00:40:00] So that’s HR. Yeah. You know, you go– E-everybody’s HR is expensive. People are expensive. You know, it also matters by geography. Like, we’re in Charlotte. Like, downtown Charlotte, go pick a company, it’s gonna cost you one thing. Exact same company, exact same footprint, exact same revenue in Statesville, wildly different HR costs.

So again, you know, our job is to try to find the right one. Um, PEOs are not designed to replace HR, so, you know, if it’s not broken, great. But nobody, no, no HR company or no– I’m sorry, no HR team is gonna wake up and be like, “We’ve got compliance completely buttoned up. We never have to worry about it. It never has to be touched again.”

Done. Goes away. Um, if there’s a way– It’s like pooling. It’s economies of scale. You have a– that same thirty-person company, whatever they’re doing in South End, you know, they’ve got thirty units of buying power. [00:41:00] That’s their economies of scale. Plug into a PEO, you got three hundred thousand units of buying, you know.

So, like, you don’t have to really make any changes to your HR processes or, or procedures or anything, but you can shift a lot of this over and save, you know, twenty-five percent on your HR operational costs. It makes you a more valuable organization just signing the documents. You don’t have to change anything.

Ooh, one more. Sorry. All right. Let’s keep going. Um, how long does it– So I say yes, how long does it take to start? Start what? Yeah. You know, it, it depends. Like, you wanna evaluate a PEO, it’s probably gonna take you four to six weeks. Yep. Right? And if you look at four or five PEOs, that’s probably gonna take you 40 to 60 hours, you know.

So our value proposition upfront is let’s take that down to 30 minutes, let’s understand what you’re really trying to accomplish, let’s build a needs-based RFP, let’s shop it out for you. One set of data, one, you know, and then we come back and we [00:42:00] kind of back into the math problem. You know, you’re a 100-person group looking at what we’re looking at based off what you’re currently doing, it’s a $400,000 savings.

Right? That, that, that we, we, we’ve taken that four to six week process just to get the price point to, you know, a two-hour period of time, and it’s a huge number. And then, you know, you still need to demo their, you know, their, their platform. That’s an hour. Finalize your proposal, that’s an hour. So you’re talking about two and a half, three, four hours, something like that, to get to a point where you’re ready to sign a CSA.

Um, and then the implementation is 30, 45 days. So not a huge time, but it’s worth the money. So I don’t have to wait for my health insurance to end- No renewal dates. No … there’s none of that. It’s just, um, pricing, understand it, sign, 30 to 60 days to be on the new platform. Yep. Yep. And that would be whether you

The, the [00:43:00] implementation piece would be whether you did it on your own or used us to, you know, PM it. Um, but yeah, that’s, that’s pretty accurate. Awesome. Okay. And there’s n- there’s, there’s no real reason … There is a misconception. They’re like, I, I, I see people, and this, this happens all the time, where a company is gonna say, you know, “We wanna look at this, but we wanna wait until our renewal hits, our insur- our health insurance renewal hits.”

Well, the way PEOs work is kind of interesting, too. So if, if you’re within a certain window of when your health insurance renews, then the PEO is gonna wanna see the health insurance renewal and base all their pricing off of that. Because they wanna see how your exposure was in the last 12 months. Yep.

Okay. And it’s not uncommon to see 40, 50, 60, 70, 100 plus percent increases in health insurance. And every single year we have somebody that [00:44:00] says that, “We’re gonna wait until our renewal hits.” And they get a renewal that’s a million dollar increase Well, the new PEO doesn’t want to touch that, or they’re gonna reprice it, you know, and where you may have had a half a million dollar reduction in HR oper-operational costs, all of a sudden you’ve got a million dollar increase in operational cost.

And out of those four hundred PEOs, three hundred and ninety-five of them are gonna say no, they don’t want you to jump on their, their book of business. And the other five are gonna say yes, but it’s gonna be a lot more expensive. And all right, so your insurance just went up by a million dollars Big deal, big not deal?

Well, if you’re a venture-backed company with a 4X multiple, that’s actually a $4 million increase. And if you’re looking at it as enterprise value, it’s actually 4 million in, you know, you know, depreciated or, or like cut enterprise value versus 4 million in positive enterprise value. You’re talking about an $8 million [00:45:00] swing next time you raise, you know, a round, or the next time, or if you decide to exit, if you’re, you know, shopping this out.

I mean, it can be huge, huge numbers and, I mean, those are… I, I say that that’s 100-person group. It could be a four, five, six, eight, $10 million swing in value. Um, and that impacts everybody. I mean, picking on the front row guy up here, Kenny, like he just exited at his… He was with a company that, that just exited.

They did really well. But if they’d taken a 4 million or $8 million swing in enterprise value when they exited, you might not be sitting on the front row right now. So it, it, it, it’s impactful. Yeah. But I wouldn’t wait, I would not wait until your health insurance is getting ready to renew, your workers’ comp’s getting ready, your current PEO’s not getting ready to renew.

Look at it four, five, six months out. Okay. Yeah, I mean, y- uh, you used the venture-backed example, which is great because numbers are big, right? And we all, um, the larger the numbers [00:46:00] are, the more impactful it is. But when you go back to, you know, blue collar, you know, business out there and, um, you know, we’re talking about a 50 or 75 or $100,000 increase in, in health insurance premiums that you end up saving, that’s $100,000 in their back pocket.

They’re going to sell their business in three years. That’s three, four, $500,000 in enterprise value that they picked up on a three, four, five year, or three, four, five times multiple. Um, I mean, that’s real money in somebody’s back pocket, too. Yeah. That, that’s your family. Yeah. That’s what you did it for.

Yeah. I mean, I, I, I know how you work. You know how I work. I mean, for me, it’s all about our family. Like, we’re trying to- Do you work? Huh? Do you work? I do a… You see this belly? Yeah. This is breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Good. It’s called heads. It’s called working for me. But no, I mean, and think about to, to that, that person, too.

I mean, they risked everything to be able to create a life of significance for their family. Whether it’s blue collar or white collar, you don’t have to be sass to, like, risk everything for your family. The same amount of risk, you know? [00:47:00] And if that, that risk is blue collar in Salisbury or Harrisburg or, you know, Richburg, South Carolina, it’s the same amount of risk when it comes down to it.

Like, you can’t sleep at night. Your family can’t live the life that you have not necessarily promised them, but, like, you’re working like a dog in a lot of cases. And I mean, you, you, you, you’ve done this entrepreneurial thing to be able to do something a little bit better, not just to buy yourself a job.

Yeah. Right? And, um- I, I think that that’s what it’s really all about is, you know, these, these risk takers, these entrepreneurs, these small, medium size, whether it’s, um, middle market SaaS company that’s raised a couple of rounds. Like there’s a lot of people with their livelihoods on, on the line here. And, um, if they can sleep better at night and create a more, uh, significant life for their family at some point in time down the road, [00:48:00] that’s really what this whole thing’s all about.

It’s what you do. It’s what I do too. So I, like says up in the morning. Yeah. No. So any, um, so we’ll open it up for questions. I don’t know if there’s any questions from, um, we always joke that we have a global corporate headquarters, um, despite the fact we only have one office with four people in it. Um, but so any questions from our global corporate audience, Caitlin?

Any questions come in? Yeah. Did any come in from Rootville, Georgia? Yeah. Root- All right, let’s, let’s hear it. Yeah. Oh, no? All right. That’s where I grew up, so… Oh. Anyways. Any– I mean, um- You have, you have twenty-five that you’re working with. At some point it kind of can seem a little bit commoditized around just numbers and how do you help establish other value points within other PEOs that you’re, “Hey, this one may be a few thousand dollars more expensive, but there’s X, Y, and Z values.”

Are [00:49:00] there other value levers that you’re helping as well evaluate during the process? As opposed to just like straight, I get it, the numbers are big in some cases, but you may be willing to spend a little bit more because they’re giving you this service or they have this, whatever. Yeah. Uh, there’s a lot of nuances to it.

There’s so many levers. I mean, real-really the, the PEO combines about thirty different industries into one package, right? They all build differently. So, like the one that I mentioned earlier with the seasonal employees, there’s probably ten different PEOs that can categorize those ninety or a hundred employees in a different way that impact the money.

Some PEOs literally bill by the day. So you have like six employ… You know, it by pay period. So you may have somebody that just works like six days in a biweekly pay period, they’re only getting billed for those six days. You may have some that are only, you [00:50:00] know, per employee per month, so that same employee that worked for six days gets billed at like a full rack rate of an full-time, forty-hour employee that worked for thirty-one days.

Um, so, so… And, and that shifts the narratives, you know, retail, hospitality, um, construction, um, the restaurants, there’s a lot of different ways. So, you know, again, like if you went to just like one particular PEO as a restaurant with thirty-five full-time employees that are kind of corporate, and two hundred part-time employees that are working night shifts and day shifts and opening and sh-sous chefs or whatever, um, it, it could becomes really complicated.

And I think that’s where, you know, CFOs or owners, they just get bound, you know, or, you know, uh, overwhelmed with it. And they’re like, “Ah, I don’t know, like somebody came and pitched me this, it sounds good, l-like cost savings.” And all of a sudden, two years later, um, doesn’t integrate with my ERP, doesn’t deliver the services I want.

It’s [00:51:00] more expensive than I actually thought it was. Well, that’s when you need somebody on your side that says– sits down with you like life insurance or, uh, you know, in a lot of other services, it’s like, all right, there’s fifteen different fintechs that are out there that does this particular one, but there’s only two that integrate with what we’re trying to…

You know, Okta. Right? Or Sage Intacct 2. Not Sage Intacct, but Sage Intacct 2, right? And you need to find the right one, and the… Unfortunately, the PEO rep or payroll rep or benefits rep, like, they don’t really know the difference between Sage and Sage Intacct 2 either. So your CFO does, your accounting manager does, your, your wife does.

I know she does, you know. You, you gotta find the right one at the right time, and that’s really where we sit on the client side. The buy side makes a big difference. Like, all right, well, let’s, let’s help you buy this, you know, better. Um, the kindergarten analogy, like, kindergartners can’t drive, but I’m like, all right, your, [00:52:00] your, your spouse wants to buy a brand-new 2026 full-sized black SUV.

All right, you’ve got, like, the Expedition, you’ve got the Tahoe, you’ve got the Escalade, you got the Sequoia. What else is there? There’s probably, like, three or four more, right? Yeah, I’m at a loss there. Right. Yeah. You did a good job, though. But the, but the analogy is- They got the Infiniti, the QX80. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. You, you, you can spend every Saturday for the next couple of months going to the Chevy dealership and the Ford dealership and, like, test driving all these things. And they’re like, “All right, which one do you like best, honey?” She forgot. And they’re like, “All right, we’re back to the Ford and the Tahoe.”

It’s like, all right, fine. And then you have to go through finance and all that stuff. Like, what we do on the PEO broker side is your spouse comes to you and says, “I want this, you know, full-sized black PEO.” We show up in your driveway with all six options and their finance manager and their sales manager, and they’re like, “Here’s the car,” solid thunk of the doors, all the value, [00:53:00] and negotiate the best price in your driveway.

They take your, you know, trade-in and drive off in it, and you’ve got a brand-new Tahoe. Spouse is happy, you’re happy. Easier to do, made a lot of money. Everybody likes the Tahoe, right? So- I’d drive a Suburban. Huh? You’d like the Sequoia? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Sequoia’s a good car. So Gerald

Great, great question. Um, and I’ll tell you this, that health insurance premiums have been big, especially over the past, like, ten or fifteen years. Ancillary benefits over the past five or six years have been just as important. You know, there are companies that are leaving their insurance brokers, and not the…

And I’m talking, like, the big ones, the NFPs, the [00:54:00] USIs, you know their partners or whatever, I’m not throwing anyone under the bus, because they don’t have pet insurance or cyber insurance or, you know, Geico type stuff. Like, these, these employee discounts that really impact the day-to-day living and the, you know, the, the money that it- your employees keep in y- your pocket.

And I think that these days the talent market has shaped up to the point where a, a, an employee will switch from one employer to another if it just feels like it’s making their life easier, and a lot of times that goes into the life locks. And I mean, I’m not kidding, I had a, a, say, very, um, profitable, growing, venture-backed med tech company here in Charlotte, and they switched from one PEO to the other because 95% of their employees was asking for pet insurance they couldn’t get through w- I, I, I know.

Uh, I mean, they made a [00:55:00] entire HRIS and benefits platform switch over pet insurance. I’ve had other ones that, you know, some, some PEOs will not allow you to run expenses through their platform without, like, processing it through, like, payroll taxes and stuff like that. Some will. We use a… We do a lot of travel and expenses too, breakfast, lunch and dinner, like I mentioned.

So, like, the PEO that we use internally lets us process expenses and pay subcontractors, which we do all our business through subs, through the platform. Other PEOs don’t. So it’s, there’s a lot of, like, those little small ancillary benefits that get, you know, factored into the employee experience, which helps companies attract and retain talent, which is one of the primary reasons these days that, you know, people are using PEOs to start with.

You can get Fortune 500 employee experience at a small business price. John[00:56:00] 

Sacred area where they would

Do it in a way that co-employer just fumbled the ball Yeah, that, that happens, too. And, you know, again, there’s four hundred operating right now. There’s disruptive technology that’s popping up all the time. I mean, we’re building an AI platform internally. We just raised a friends and family round that closed today.

Um, there’s companies… There’s at least three other companies in Charlotte that’s kind of in that same space, like disruptive space, that [00:57:00] will eventually either sell to a PEO or have more data than a PEO has on their own. And like, you know, data’s expensive and data’s valuable these days. So, um, there, there’s a, there, there’s a lot of change that’s happening so fast.

And again, when I was sitting be- at Insperity, that was a great organization, great run. My wife still works there. They’re a great partner of ours. But there’s dozens of PEOs that are popping up that are just tech plays. There’s not a, a pure AI PEO yet, but it’ll probably happen sooner rather than later. I mean, there’s not a pure law firm yet, pure exit planner yet.

Yeah. But, like, being able to be nimble enough to stay in front of all that stuff has been very helpful for us, and our clients lean into it to us. Um, so we’re gonna wrap up. And you’ve got a question? Yep, Lisa has a [00:58:00] question. Long, longtime viewer, first-time questioner. Dave Ramsey. Thank you.

Gr-great, great question. So as far as liability is concern-concerned with a PEO, there’s really kind of three stages, right? There’s like completely m-shared, you know, you’ve, you’ve shifted the compliance piece to the PEO. ACA happens to be one of those, right? So the way that federal compliance works for most PEOs is they are literally filing all of your payroll taxes, all your compliance, DOL, ACL, everything on their EIN, right?[00:59:00] 

So it, it– there’s a firewall at the federal level for a company, a, a PEO that’s, you know, certified with the IRS that, that goes away, right? Um, you still… A lot of companies still get the flexibility, depends on the PEO they’re working with to… And HR works a lot of times in the fine print of the gray area, right?

So there’s like this rule, right? But there’s a little bit of way to like m-massage it, right? Then you have another area of compliance that’s more shared, right? And it’s w- the, the local compliance, like it’s different in San Francisco and Austin than it is in Charlotte a-and Atlanta, right? Um, and then it’s kind of like the, the middle road.

As far as like ACA is concerned, most of the PEOs, they’re putting you on their master health insurance plan, whether it’s UHC or Aetna or Blue Cross or whatever. So they are literally [01:00:00] com-compliant for making sure that you’re compliant. So that includes, um, you know, what you contribute to the minimum requirement plans, to the types of plans.

Um, you know, none of the, none of the insurance plans that you’re going to get from an Insperity, an ADP, a TriNet, an Oasis, a Paychex, these big like companies are gonna be non-compliant for any company. The real challenge I think comes sometimes, not real challenge, but one of the, one of the things that comes up is, are you contributing enough as an employer to hit that minimum threshold?

And they’ve got a spreadsheet that goes in, it’s like, “All right, you need to bump it up by three percent.” But why would you do it? You know, it’s– it, it is compliant and it’s probably going to be twenty or thirty percent off of top line premiums for what a small business is doing on their own right now.

Comes a significant number

[01:01:00] उह।

Correct. Yep. So PEOs are gonna say, you know, let, let’s say ADP Total Source, they have five hundred thousand companies that are using their, their, their platform. Um, you know, of those are about a million and a half employees with a eighty percent participation rate, right? So you’re talking one point two million, something like that.

That’s their buying power for health insurance. A company with fifty people that has eighty percent insurance, so like forty. It’s just a math problem. It’s economies of scale. It’s like, you know, you own a printing company, you go to a, a organization that like buys paper and toner in bulk because as that buying group, you get a discount, makes you a more profitable company.

Health insurance is the same way. Go to PEO, they’re buying a million units of something, you’re gonna get better unit economics and economies of scale that you can’t get on your own [01:02:00] Good question. Um, you can come across the street and ask more good questions if you’d want to, Lisa. Um, so, uh, thanks Matt.

Um, greatly appreciate it. Great con- great conversation, right? I mean, it’s still… I mean, the idea here is to unpack topics for business owners. I think Matt did a fantastic job, so thanks for coming out, sharing your expertise and knowledge with us