Purposeful Business Exit Strategy with Integrity: The Branding Laboratory Podcast

All right, welcome to the Branding Laboratory, where we’re going to uncover the humanity behind the brand. Who you are is how you lead, and how you lead is how you grow, and I firmly believe in that in everything I have ever done.

And today, I launched this podcast five years ago because I like to explore stories and stories of leaders and CEOs and entrepreneurs like myself and understand the humanity behind their brand and what they bring to the table and the problems they solve and how do they view the world and how do they view themselves and their philosophies.

And most importantly, I want to talk about their superpowers that define what they do and how they’re giving back to the community that they live or their ecosystem in which they thrive. And that’s really the kind of the whole point of the show. And if you glean something from this show, then we’ve done our job.

So welcome to the Branding Laboratory. I’m Deevo. I’m your host.

I’ll be here with you for the next 60 minutes, and we’re going to explore this intersection of humanity and leadership and philosophies and struggles and superpowers that make extraordinary leaders who they are.

And today we’re speaking with Andrew Galpin. He is the founder and CEO of Tree and Leaf Partners, and they are a company dedicated to, and I’m just going to borrow some words from their website, and then I’m going to tell you what I really interpret them as.

They value people and long term vision over short term goals, and that’s all good and great. But basically what they do is they look to partner with organizations or small businesses and entrepreneurs. And I hope I’m not butchering this, Andrew.

When you come on, you can let me know. But they’re looking to help them overcome the status quo that they have established for themselves. And maybe they’re in a holding pattern or maybe they’re trying to expand their business.

Maybe you’re trying to increase revenue, a broader reach, whatever it is. And they introspectively come in and take a look at that company and help you non-sabotage and grow your brand a little bit better. I hope I said that right.

Andrew, thank you for joining us on the show. Did I get that sort of right? Did I mess that up?

Yeah, Deevo, that’s roughly it. And I love how you put that and summarized it in almost two words, which is wonderful. But we do that in the context of an acquisition.

So often at the time where an entrepreneur like ourselves has reached the limit of what they can do with their organization, whether that’s because it’s time to step down and do something different, whether that’s retirement or a new venture that they want to pursue or do something differently. But they really value what they’ve built and they want to see that grow and flourish even when they’re not part of it. So that’s where we often come in.

We’ll partner with them, help them transition out of the business and us into the business to help continue growing and building that brand into the future.

Okay. So I did not realize this was a post-mortem exercise. So you are exit strategy wizards is basically what I’m hearing.

You say, got it. Okay. I should have done some better research on that.

I saw the Niggle reference to Lord of the Rings. I saw some other things on there, by the way, your website’s really cool. I love how you took me through that interactive journey up front.

So you are an exit strategy wizard. So when I’m ready to sell the brand and laboratory, I’m going to holler at you and say, bro, here’s what I want to do. Here’s what I’ve built.

Help me get out of this in a strategic and insightful. And hopefully profiteering way that everyone’s comfortable with. Okay, cool.

All right. And if you’re cool with it, during this episode today, we’re going to dive into your journey. I want to learn a little bit more about your philosophies.

I want to talk about your origin story and how you built this company. I see you’re a married man. Congratulations on that.

I want to really understand how you make decisions as a leader and who you work with and by the end, my hope is, and I don’t think you got this email because I saw in my onboarding form, Mariel didn’t get a chance to send it to you yet. Forgive her. She’s new.

But I always want to know what people’s superpowers are and achieve that through this show. And so we’ll get into that, but I’d like to know by the end of this show, what your superpower is and reveal that to my audience and really understand what sets you apart as a leader, not only in your field, but just in general, right? Because I see you have a faith-based background.

That’s always interesting to uncover with people because I always find people of faith and while I’m not necessarily a Christian Orthodox in terms of subscribing to a particular type of a denomination, I do believe in the concept of spirituality and something bigger than we are. And so I subscribe to that. So I always love talking to people of faith who have this unique sort of disposition about them.

Always. You guys are always very calm and like just cheery, which is, I’m not sure if it’s just because you’re drinking the Kool-Aid or what, but I always find that with the Christians. So maybe we’ll uncover that today on the show, drinking the Kool-Aid.

So anyway, my brother, welcome to the show. Are you ready to get real with me?

Let’s get real.

All right, let’s do it. So the thing that I really always like to start with is the humanity behind the brand and who is the person we’re talking to on the other side of this microphone. And are you in the UK or are you somewhere else?

I’m in the great state of Texas, despite my English accent.

Okay. Sorry. I actually knew that.

Forgive me. I did see that. And you’ve spent some time in a bunch of different countries, which we’re going to talk about, but.

Let’s go back to a moment in time, if you will, and just look at the trajectory of your journey. And is there a single memory that you hold or a single experience that you hold that has shaped who you are today? If you were looking at yourself 20 years ago or 15 years ago, or even when you were five and you say, this was an experience that happened to me, that sort of put me on the path of where I am.

Is there anything around that space that you’d like to share with me?

Yeah. There’s one story that comes to mind, Deevo. It was during high school and me and a friend really wanted to go on one of those international trips that they tend to do towards the end of your time at high school, that’s very forming and very exciting when you haven’t been outside of the country, sounds very appealing to us, but we weren’t.

And very costly. I’d like to add, because my daughter just was, is a senior as a freshman in college now, and she was hit up with all those and she’s dead. She’s dead.

It’s the best deal ever. I’m like, yeah, it’s $15,000 for two days in Honduras. I’m pretty sure it’s a good deal for them.

Not us. So anyway, yeah.

That’s exactly it. I was going to say we weren’t from a wealthy background, so it’s not like we had 15 grand lying around for us to go on these exotic trips, but we were both really keen to do it and explore it. So we asked ourselves the question, how can we raise that money and get to a place where we could make that possible?

And we were both very technical. We enjoyed using technology to solve problems. And that’s a consistent theme that I’ve seen throughout the stages of my career so far, that I’ve always continued that theme of using technology to solve problems.

So we were not quite pre-internet days, but pre the days where all your local high street shops had a web presence and had a website online. So we thought we know how to build websites. We know how to do graphics design.

We can solve that problem for our local community. So we formed what we originally called Schoolboy Media, which we thought was a great name at the time. We were schoolboys and we were forming a media company.

What we realized quite quickly is a lot of people don’t want schoolboys designing their websites, however good they are. So branding it like that upfront caused us a few challenges. So we pivoted around the name Get Simple eventually, and did some work with some wonderful nonprofits, did some work with one Fortune 500 company and that we did a bit of branding with and built quite a few websites for local businesses, and we loved doing that.

We eventually decided that we didn’t want to spend the money going on one of those trips. But we ran that business for about kind of three years in our days leading up to graduating to university. And I really loved collaborating with him, using his skills and using my skills together to unlock value for people that couldn’t otherwise do it themselves.

And so, I’m sorry, you’re in college when you’re doing this?

This was high school. High school.

Wow. Even better. So you’ve been an entrepreneur from a very early age and then you transitioned into something directly after that.

You got, you went to the university or did you get a degree, go into the corporate world? What kind of, what’s that journey look like?

Exactly. I went down the typical university path. I didn’t know quite what I wanted to do as no one ever does.

In the UK, we’re a bit more narrow in how we focus degrees. So I went in becoming a computer engineer and pivoted a little bit to come out as more of a broader electronic engineer, but it carried on that theme of using technology to solve problems and spending that time really understanding how technology works and how it fits within the world. And I spent a year working in industry as part of that as an engineer.

And I realized about myself that I really didn’t want to be an engineer. And part of that was around engineers are often very narrowly focused. So even though I was in computer engineering, that can be quite broad while you’re at university.

But as soon as you graduate, you narrow in onto a subsector of that, that then becomes your career for the next maybe five years until you transition into management and I get itchy feet. I really enjoy solving lots of different problems, not solving the same problem over and over again. So I worked that out quite quickly about myself.

I was really glad I spent a year in industry doing that. So when I graduated, I then pivoted a little bit and went into the consulting route. I loved how consulting used technology to solve problems.

And I ended up at IBM, one of the largest technology firms doing that.

Are you still in the UK at this time or have you moved over the States?

I was still in the UK. Yeah. Spent almost six years working for IBM in London, traveling around the UK and Europe, solving lots of different client problems and designing more meaningful experiences for their customers and employees.

And how many years did you spend doing this at six years doing that?

Six years. Yeah.

And then after that you jumped into the entrepreneurial world.

After that, my pivot was to come to the States and do a graduate program. So I did my MBA at Kellogg School of Management in Northwestern University up in Chicago. And for me, there were lots of things I loved about the consulting world.

I got to solve all these different problems. I got to learn a lot every single day and I got to do it in and with and through people. And that’s what I really was passionate about.

There were lots of things I didn’t like, but one thing that really started to bug me after a while is as an advisor, and maybe you can relate to this Deevo. You can give advice until you’re blue in the face and the client can either ignore it at their own peril, or they can agree with it and still not do anything about it, or they can agree with it and then actually implement change and see the value that you’ve been able to see in their business.

So I wanted more ownership over that decision and I knew I couldn’t get that in the consulting kind of career path.

So that was my transition across the pond to do my MBA and try and work at how to, how can I have my cake and eat it? Keep the things I like about consulting, but bring in this element of ownership and accountability that would allow me to shape an organization.

So before we talk about what you’re doing now, I want to learn a little bit more about that space. You mentioned you got your MBA over here in the States. Looking back, I get asked this all the time.

I started my MBA program, then I did not finish it. And I have a lot of different opinions about it, and I think everyone probably has a different answer. Looking back at what you got from the MBA, do you feel like entrepreneurs, it’s a necessary thing that they must go through?

Or do you feel like it’s like, it solves some problems, but it wasn’t really an end all?

Yeah, not at all. The marketers of MBA programs would want to tell you that it solves all your problems and they can find a way of fixing that. I think I have a bit of a bias in the UK and I know for Europe as well, the MBA is less part of our culture.

So I know what I’m going for an MBA. When I was applying for MBA programs, I knew very few people at IBM. None of our senior leadership in the UK had an MBA.

It just wasn’t a big part of our culture. So I think I came into it knowing it wasn’t a be all and end all of solving the problem. But for me, I had a very specific goal for that MBA.

And it was to get a good foundation of how to lead an organization. I come from an engineering background. So I’ve got that kind of engineering thinking mindset.

I’d spent six years at IBM helping our clients design more meaningful experiences. So I had that more design led customer experience and thinking, but I didn’t have that kind of financial business accounting thinking that I felt was important to round out that skillset. And you can get that in a number of ways.

I just felt the MBA was a way of accelerating that. And at the same time, exposing me to lots of different career paths that would really help me find what that match was for what I was really interested in doing. And I can say, if I hadn’t done that, I probably wouldn’t have found the path that I’m on now.

So from my perspective, it was worthwhile for that value. But I do encourage people to think through what do they really want to get out of the experience to make sure it’s worth investing both the time, because it takes a long time to get an MBA and the money, because it’s not a cheap process to go through.

And if your, if your alumni is listening, he vouched for it. So he didn’t say not to get it. I I’m actually going back to school in January, which I’m really excited about not school, but I’m going back to get some life coaching credentials that I’ve really been focusing on for a while.

So the idea of perpetually learning has always been front and center. You said something about the financial piece. I definitely have heard that from other people who have said, echo the same sentiment, one of the biggest factors of success that they got out of going to MBA schools, understanding the economy of things and just being able to financially take a purview of their business and understand that.

So critical, not to say you can’t do it outside of an MBA, but if your wife is listening, I think one of the biggest benefits of you going to MBA is I believe it sounds like you met your future wife there. Is that right?

It is. I don’t like to advertise that too strongly because I can’t promise that will be your outcome. I was surprised how many people came to MBAs with that as one of their goals.

For me, it was an added bonus and worth every penny of the degree to come out with a wife that I now cherish.

They didn’t promise you that in the credentialing. MBA and a wife.

The one thing they avoid saying in the marketing, it’s a possibility, but they don’t promise anything.

And now you and your wife work together in, in Tree and Leaf. Is that what I understand?

She works for a nonprofit called Central Commons.

Got it, okay. Okay.

They buy old church buildings and diversify the revenue streams to make themselves sufficient when the church can’t maintain that building. And it helps fill them up during the week.

So many church buildings are empty kind of Monday to Saturday and only full on Sunday. So it’s great to turn them into more of a community resource that can be leveraged by everyone in the community during the week.

You advertise very clearly on your website and in several spots, how important your faith is to you. And I’m always fascinated. I was talking to you in the outset of the show of people of faith and what that brings to them for on a personal and a professional level, you don’t need to go too deeply into it because I’m not questioning or asking in that space.

But I’m always curious. What does faith do for you? And I don’t necessarily mean faith in general for just the belief in a God and whatever it is, but just faith in general, the idea of people congregating together and believing in something bigger than themselves, how has that helped shape the trajectory of not only your personal life, but now your business?

I think it’s very easy for us to get lost in our own worlds and focus on ourself entirely, particularly when the world around us is narrowing us in on being contributors and generating income and revenue from our work, and then spending all that money in order to grow the economy and do something bigger. So I think it’s great to have some form of external connection. The world is bigger than just me.

I remember one of the things I really appreciated during my MBA program was my church community, because when you’re in an MBA program, the most important thing in the world is getting a job at one of the big consulting firms. That’s what everyone is really caring about. And then I walk into a church setting, which is multigenerational as people from different socioeconomic groups.

And I say, Oh, I’m really stressed because I haven’t got an interview with X, Y, Z, big, big firm. And they’re like, who are they? And it’s just a great reminder that inside that bubble, something that’s really important isn’t actually as important as it seems when we take ourselves out of that context.

And I think we don’t have many other opportunities if we just look at religion from a social context to take ourselves out of our socioeconomic context that is often reflected in our jobs and our works or our kind of environments and the places that we live in and really interact with people at different stages of life and learn from their wisdom and get a bit more grounded into the reality of the world and what’s important.

And for me, my faith helps guide that sense of what is important and keep those things in balance.

And just for you, those of you who are listening, he, Andrew did not get these questions in advance. So even though that might’ve sounded like a rehearse answer, it was not, it was very well eloquently stated. There’s a couple of things you said in there guide you into the things that matter and what don’t.

And I always think about the idea of humans, where we are right now in our collective trajectory and this idea that we are all competing against each other for space and for resources and for jobs and for whatever these things that we just constantly fighting against each other, whether it’s globally or even in our own town, or I just had a guy in the last podcast who’s running for city council in his local town, putting this campaign together and just the whole different thing. And we’re not, we were not, and this is my opinion. So take it for what it’s worth.

I don’t think we were ever meant to be a divided group of a species in terms of creatures that lived in silos and competed against each other. And one of the things you said was when you go to church, you get this sense of community, this sense of support, this sense of people believing in you and having your back should you need it. And I’m always fascinated by that.

And I don’t think you have to be in a religion to get that, but for whatever reason, that sort of is the vehicle at our disposal right now. But it’s wonderful when people find that because everyone says the same thing that you did.

And I’m curious, that leads me to my next question in a sense of your community and leadership and just you as a human, if I were to, if I were to candidly interview some of the people that are closest to you, that know you, what would some of the following people say?

What would your wife say about you? Who is, who is Andrew? And if I ask your wife, what’s your wife’s name?

Jenna.

What is it?

Jenna.

Jenna. So Jenna, tell me about Andrew. If you had to embody who Andrew is in a few words, what is he, what would she say about you?

I think she would say I care deeply. I feel very strongly kind of other people’s emotions and my effect on them and want to manage that carefully. And that has its positive sides and its negative sides that we’ve all got to manage as with any strength.

But I think she would say that both about how, hopefully how I treat her and how I think about and interact with others.

And your parents are still around?

My parents are, yeah.

What would they say about you?

That’s a good question. I want to pick a different word other than that. Hopefully they’d say I care as well, but I think he’s, I think they would say he’s gracefully ambitious, shall we say.

I’ve probably done more things than they would expect me to have done in, in slightly different things. And I’ve persevered when they haven’t always worked out and come across to me in an easy fashion and say great gracefully, yeah. Great gracefully focused on, on achieving.

What about your collaborative partners? The people that you work with and help out in your day-to-day business professional world. What would they say about you?

I think they would hopefully say that I am focused on helping them. I like to ask the question, how can I help to people to really understand how I can help solve a problem for them and be useful to them? Because I think if we’re more outward focused, then everything that we need will come to us through reciprocity.

And if we just focus on meeting other people’s needs and helping them get to where they want to be, they will help us get to where we need to be. And I think it was Zig Ziglar who coined that phrase.

Yeah, Zig Ziglar and every other enlightened person before him going back thousands of years. In terms of that sort of principle that you just talked about serving other people and the karmic reaction from that, in terms of a central belief or a principle that you hold, do you have any sort of mantras or principles that you have held from a very early age that you’re still implementing, utilizing, believing in today?

I have my mission statement.

I saw that. It was very well written, by the way.

Yeah. Yeah. So I took myself away for a weekend during my university days to really think about what my values were, how I wanted to live my life and how do I encompass that within my mission statement.

So my mission statement is to walk by faith through life with integrity, solving real world problems and inspiring others to do the same. And that’s linked to my three values of love, growth, and challenge. And I settled in on them because those are what really drive me and what are really important to me and help keep me in check when I’m making a decision.

Growth, love, and integrity. Sorry, that’s the third one. So when I’m making a decision and I’m struggling and wrestling with a decision, I try and use those three values as a lens.

If I was to act only with integrity, what decision would I make in this circumstance? If I was to act only with love in this circumstance, what would I do that? If I was trying to maximize mine or others’ growth in this situation, what would that look like?

And that’s really helpful for me in helping me make those difficult decisions. Cause often those difficult decisions that we’re trying to make actually have very simple answers and we’re just wrestling with our ego to actually do the thing we know we should do. So it’s really helpful for cutting through that and challenging myself.

And that’s something I share with others to give me that public accountability that someone can come to me and go, Andy, you made this decision and it doesn’t feel like it was the most loving decision. Why did you make that? And I’m accountable to that.

And even if no one ever comes back and challenges me on that decision, just the fact that someone could, and they have the option to do that helps me make the right decision in that moment.

Have you ever made decisions in your life that were not necessarily the most optimal at the time that you learned something from them and grew from them? And if so, can you share something that really bit you in the ass at the time? And you’re like, how am I going to get out of this?

Cause we all have that one story, right? What’s that one story for you that you were able to introspectively look at it now and be like, I actually learned this and this from that experience.

I worked on one of IBM’s most troubled projects globally. The status reports were sent to Ginni Rometty every month and the company was losing a vast amount of money on it. The big challenge with working on a project like that is there is always more work to do.

And a lot of the work is more urgent than necessarily important. A constant stream of information is needed.

So when you work in the corporate world, everything is urgent, isn’t it? But nobody has any sense of urgency, which I always found to be quite hyp-. Like everyone is, everything has to be done yesterday, but yet it takes two and a half weeks just to get a meeting together with the project team to get this started.

So sorry to interrupt. I just had that thought.

A hundred percent. Yeah. So it’s very, it can be a very stressful environment and not an easy one to do.

This was reasonably early in my career at IBM. So we’re a bit more orientated to say yes and to do what we’re told to do rather than really thinking through, should we be doing this and is this the right way to do it and even asking how important this is and when it needs to be done rather than just saying yes and spending countless hours getting it done. So I’d got into a rather unhealthy rhythm where I’d arrive at the office on the client’s site at 7am.

And I’d be lucky if I left at 7pm, which is a long working day where you’re often walking, working through your lunch and just doing back-to-back meetings to get things done.

And I had one evening where I’d been given something to do by the delivery manager to write a report on something or analyze some data, and I was there until about 11 o’clock with a colleague of mine, we went home, slept for five hours, came back at 7am and at eight o’clock he came in and told me that we didn’t need it anymore. And that was a real key moment for me to really go, did it need to be done?

Because I spent all that time and effort doing something. I’ve burnt myself out working too hard on it. And really the output is the same as if I’d gone home at half past four and just had a good evening at home.

So I became much, much more intentional about evaluating why we needed things done and what the outcome we were trying to achieve from that was, and also creating some accountability around me with colleagues to make sure we were running a sustainable race. We were making sure we were running a marathon and not trying to run a sprint for a marathon to make sure we could be healthy in that in the long time.

I appreciate you saying that, but one of the lessons that you imparted there, some of those things were out of your control. So that leads me to my next question in terms of instilling or putting in accountability around this and being more pragmatic about the idea in the corporate world, sometimes you don’t have that autonomy and luxury to do that. You have to learn to collaborate and you have to learn to navigate through the politics and all the like minutiae of a large corporation.

So how, as a, as a central takeaway, if you were charged with that same exercise today, all things being equal, you don’t run the company, you’re not the CEO. You’re not the position of ultimate leadership. How differently would you have taken the lesson that you’ve claimed that you’ve learned and instilled that so you would have had a different outcome?

I think within your locus of control, I have to throw. I’ve yeah.

Yeah. The advice I give to people going into consulting is ask when things need to be done and ask the person giving you that work to prioritize how important it is versus all the other tasks you’ve got to do. I think a lot of people are particularly early in their careers, try and do all that themselves.

So they assume that everything is important and everything needs to be done tonight, but often if we ask people, something can be done tomorrow. As long as it’s done by the end of the day tomorrow, that’s fine. Or I’ve given you three things and you think they’re all equally important.

Actually, there’s one thing is the most important thing. If you can get that done and done first, then that will enable me to do my job and get on with that. So those two questions I think are really important.

And particularly earlier on in our careers, we don’t have the confidence to ask that we feel the need to just do work and get things done. So those were the two things I would change to make sure this was really critical. Maybe they learned something in the eight o’clock meeting that changed how important this was.

And maybe he knew there was an outstanding decision. He just wanted to have the report ready. And if I’d asked for that context, maybe I could have gone home for the evening and done it in the morning and then we would have had it ready for 12 o’clock rather than 8 AM.

And then we would have not needed to do it if it in the meeting. So just making sure you ask those clarifying questions, I think is really important and getting them to prioritize helps them and helps you and helps them work out what a sustainable amount of work is because they don’t want you to burn out either. That’s not in anyone’s best interest.

So how do we make this sustainable? It doesn’t mean we don’t have nights that we work till 11 PM, but it shouldn’t be the norm. It should be the abnormal.

What you’re describing sounds like the Pareto principle to me, which is the critical, really the criticality and the importance of identifying and focusing on these impactful factors. And I always tell people in this space that I’m working with, because I’m consulting people as well. Does this push the needle of where you’re ultimately trying to go?

And if it’s not pushing the needle, it’s like in my journal exercise that somebody taught me many years ago, just, I don’t know if I read it in a book or something, but every morning, what are the top three things that have to happen today? And those top three things have to be fully in alignment with whatever it is, your goal that you set around it or the vision that you’re trying to accomplish or whatever it is that might happen. What’s the top three things and come hell or high water have to happen.

So I love that you said that. This idea of, I love to talk about this whole idea of the intersection of the personal lives and our professional lives, because you’ve talked about values. You’ve talked about unlocking value for other people.

You’ve talked about these things that, that you believe in and you espouse all your life without giving too much away, because I really want to get some deeper, meaningful questions around that. What do you think that you do differently as a leader that has made the most significant impact on your brand, your person, your professional, your life in and of itself?

I think what I did early in my career was try and separate my work and personal life and this concept of work-life balance that we try and sell ourselves on and doesn’t really work, I think a better way of thinking about it is work-life integration and obviously in an ideal world, you’d be doing a job that reflects what you’re passionate about, what you love, the skills that you have, and you’ll also get paid for it.

I’m a realist. So I know most of us are not in the luxurious situation where we’re being able to do that. Maybe our passion is not something we can get paid for, or maybe the skills that we have are underappreciated in the work that we do.

So we can’t always find alignment with that, but that should always be the goal that we’re heading towards. And we should find a way to, to coin a phrase, bring your whole self to work.

And that includes your beliefs and the way you approach things, because where we get the best decisions in the workplace is where we have that diversity of thought and not conformity around one answer that we think is the right answer, that everyone is able to bring their different perspectives and different ways of looking at things, because we all have different strengths in different areas.

And we may not go with the decision that I want to make every single time and my view on the world. But if I can contribute that into the discussion, then I know we’re making the best decision in that context with the information that we have.

All right. So in a few words, cause that was a lot, dumb that down for me. What’s the, in a few words, the one thing that has made you who you are today, would you say?

Authenticity.

Authenticity. You talked about this work-life balance.

Interestingly enough, you and I are on the exact same trajectory with that philosophy. I don’t believe in the idea of a work-life balance. I never have.

And in fact, the first time I ever heard the term was many years ago. I was, I have a photography and videography agency. So I used to do, I do a lot of content and I was working with the local coach down in Atlanta, Georgia.

And she, her entire business keynotes, which by the way, she got paid $25,000 a workshop to do these was centered around this idea of creating this work-life balance. And I just remember sitting here filming her one day and listening to this and very gifted woman, very talented, had a motor car of success and doing what she’s doing.

But I just didn’t agree with the philosophy because for me, this idea of work-life balance is flawed because it implies like this rigid separation between your work, your personal, your professional life.

And it’s really just, it’s unrealistic in today’s interconnected world. And so I’ve never really bought into that, which is why we do the podcast, because I believe in this intersection of personal and professional and who you are is really who your business is, especially if you’re an entrepreneur or a solopreneur, like your values are what matter most.

So in that vein, when you think about the values that you hold near and dear to your heart, and you don’t have to go too long winded in this, but in a few words, what are some of the things that you truly believe in as a CEO, as a faith-based individual, as a leader, as somebody guiding other people’s future trajectory of their business, what’s some of the values that you really aspire to?

I think the one that people will be most familiar with is the concept of servant leadership, that the role of the leader is to serve the people below them. So my job is to help them do their job better. If I can help them do their job in the best possible way, the company will function in the best possible way.

And part of that is being there in the moment and helping them where they’re at, but also setting the precedent and the expectation of where we’re going and where we’re moving towards. So I, as a leader, have got to be healthy in how I’m leading people. That means I need to both work, but I also need to rest.

I need to look after my family and make sure I’m investing in those relationships because we’re social beings and isolating ourself entirely in the workplace is not a good thing. So I need to make sure I’m keeping those things in balance and being healthy, and therefore modeling that well for my people, that I’m taking holidays to show that rest is important and that work doesn’t depend entirely on me, that I’m delegating stuff out to people and empowering them to use the skills that they have.

I think a lot of people overlook that self-care space, especially if you’re an early entrepreneur, you’re a really busy entrepreneur, or maybe you’re even a startup. You forget to take time for yourself. You forget to take time off so that you can reset and restore.

And an unhealthy you is an unhealthy ripple to everything else you touch, whether you’re a father, like I am, are you a father?

Not yet.

Not yet? So whether you’re a father, I’ve always, the whole idea, I grew up, I was divorced about 10 years ago and so I’ve raised my two daughters by and large by myself. And truly it was the greatest thing that ever happened to me, like learning to become a better human.

If that, I asked you a question, was there anything that ever occurred that sort of shaped the trajectory? For me, it was getting divorced. And that’s not a knock on my former wife, she’s a wonderful human.

It’s just that it forced me to step into a different role and really forced me to flex who I was and become introspective about what do I bring to the table? What value do I bring in? How do I wanna show up as a father?

And that’s when it started to dawn on me who you are as an individual shapes who you are in your professional life as well because that ripples out into your relationships, that ripples out into your partnerships, that ripples out into your collaborations, like how you treat your customers, how you treat your clients, everything.

It was really, for me, it was really a renaissance moment to be like, who am I actually and how do I wanna show up in the world? And so I’m always curious to ask this question of other individuals and other leaders.

When you think about who you are as an individual and the power that you bring to the table and this intersection of the personal and professional life, with that comes a shadow side of things, like you have judgments, you have observations, you may have jealousies, you have tendencies that are purely human.

Have you ever seen in your professional life some of those shadows of yourself that you may not really enjoy the most and you need some work on them and I’m not saying you have or don’t, maybe you’re perfect, I have many of them. How do you see, have you ever seen them show themselves in your business world and how have you handled that?

Whoa, I see something coming out that I don’t really dig here, let me pull that back.

When me and my wife, now wife, we’re going through kind of our premarital counseling and thinking through what are the possible kind of things that could come up that would cause arguments or cause problems. And the one that I landed on is the most important one was I don’t voice what I actually feel. And part of this is connected with what I said earlier that I spend too much time observing how other people are interacting at the room and I reshape what I’m saying to align with where the room’s at.

And that doesn’t always accurately reflect where I’m at and it means I’m not always sharing my actual perspective that hasn’t been filtered through a certain lens. So that’s also a challenge in a working environment that I’m, it can be an asset. If I’m in a workshop with a client and I see they’re struggling with something, I’m gonna change what I’m doing and adapt that workshop to make sure we’re meeting the needs of the client and actually addressing what we’re trying to do.

But that can also be a downside when I see problems and we don’t get a chance to address them because I don’t feel everyone in the room is ready to have that conversation. So how do I manage that and voice the things that are important even if it’s difficult for people to hear because it’s at the root of it is that people pleasing kind of idea that we want to be liked and we want people to respect us.

And sometimes we need to tell people things that they’re not going to like and that’s in their best interest.

And that can be the most loving thing to do even though it feels like it’s not loving in the moment.

It is a very precarious line, isn’t it? Telling the truth, but telling it from a position that isn’t necessarily gonna be harmful or pernicious to somebody, but just still being able to tell your truth. It’s a very, if you ever do become a father, you’ll find that’s gonna be your greatest attribute by the way, is being able to take a step back, introspectively look at yourself and your role and your children’s role and then understand what those nuances are and then deliver a message to them that isn’t demeaning, for example.

But it’s still, it’s filtered to the extent that you’re not hurting them, but you’re trying to guide them. That was one of the biggest things I had to learn because I grew up in a very staunchly strict environment. My dad was just, it was his way or the highway, like there was no other ways to it.

And I was just like, is that really how the parent, that’s the only way that we could do this?

Was there a time when you held a belief that was really tied to like your values and things that you deep down believe and you had to make a decision to either walk away from something that may have added value, let’s say financial value to you or relationship-wise or something, that your values and the things that you hold dearest and nearest to you were questions and you had to make a critical decision to walk away from that?

There was a nonprofit I used to work for called Street Pastors in the UK. They would go out on the streets of cities and help drunk people who were coming out of clubs and had a little too much. So it was my Saturday night till 4 a.m. once a month that I’d go out and do that. And that really connected with both growth. It was something new, something different that I hadn’t done before and a little bit challenging. And also that love aspect of my values that I really enjoy.

But I felt it was becoming more of a burden, a kind of pleasure. But that love value was what was overriding me. I was like, this organization needs volunteers.

It needs people to be doing this. And there are people who need help within that. And that was a real struggle point that I wrestled with a lot.

And eventually I made the decision to step back and I had a mentor that spoke to me and helped me make that decision. And part of it was around growth for other people. Because oftentimes we fill a gap and that’s a good reason for someone else not to fill that.

It’s an excuse for someone else not to step up. So actually by being willing to step back from something I enjoyed, it was hard work, but something I enjoyed in the way I enjoyed serving, it opened up the opportunity for other people to step forward because there was now a felt need that people felt they could respond to.

And that’s something I’ve seen in my life when I’ve moved around churches, I’ve always looked for what is that need that I can help meet?

How can I help solve that problem? And I often don’t feel connected to an organization if I can’t see how I can help them further their journey or do something in a better way.

Yeah, that’s another precarious line, isn’t it? Understanding how you can serve and help other people, but at the same time, your ability to serve is directly correlated with your resource bank. Like your resources are like a bank account and the more you use them, the more they become depleted.

So if you’re depleted, you’re not able to serve in an optimal capacity. So being able to have some self-awareness around that is really important. It’s interesting that you said the way you did, I appreciate that.

In terms of guiding principles that kind of direct everything you do, we’ve talked about your faith, we’ve talked about serving first. Is there anything in particular that you look at now and who you are as a leader, as a CEO, as a collaborative partner, as a husband, that you’d never had any of these skills and it only became self-aware to you somewhere down late in your life where you are now where you look back and you’re like, wow, I am actually pretty good at that. I never realized I could do that before.

I actually am pretty good at managing relationships or I am pretty good at showing up in that capacity. And then you look back and you’re like, wait, when did all those things happen? Was that just an accumulation of a bunch of experiences or is there like this one thing that taught me something?

Do you ever think about that? I was not struggling, but I was like ruminating on that idea.

It is hard sometimes reflecting back on that. So as a child, we used to do drama lessons in high school and primary school. I would be the child that sits two thirds from the back because if I was all the way at the back, I was too noticeable and more likely to be picked on.

If I was near the front, I was more likely to be picked on. And I tried to avoid participating in any possible way because I didn’t like standing up in front of people and doing things in front of people. I had almost a fear of it that I just really didn’t enjoy it.

I have now spoken in front of audiences of over a thousand people in rural Pakistan. And part of that came from a mentor of mine in a church setting, seeing that gift within me when I couldn’t even see it in myself. So they felt I had the potential to be able to teach and preach in that kind of setting.

And they invested in me and gave me the opportunity to try and work through that in a way that I hadn’t had a safe space to do that. And as I alluded to, I spent three months in Uganda. I spent two weeks in Pakistan where I was speaking and preaching to audiences from 800 to a thousand people at any one time.

And if you told my little drama student self in at 15 years old or 14 years old that I would be doing that, I think I would have been petrified.

You’re very calm and articulate and very well delivered. So whether it came to you over time or just a natural thing that you uncovered, you do have a very nice articulate disposition. So well played.

I wanna talk a little bit about the work you do in the company for, is it Tree and Leaf? Did I get that right, Tree and Leaf?

Tree and Leaf Partners.

Yeah, so when you’re helping other companies with this exit strategy, as we coined you the exit strategy wizard, when you think about the work that you do, is there a guiding North Star or a guiding principle that you return to again and again when you’re guiding people through these exit strategies?

I like people to think about what they value. And I think it’s a really important question because we often mistake-

Let me stop you.

What they value or what their values are. And are they the same thing?

I would say they’re different. Sometimes they overlap and one should inform the other, but they aren’t necessarily the same. I think people make the mistake of money is a way of quantifying and exchanging value, but it’s not valuable in and of itself. It’s what we can use money for.

Okay, so what do they value?

What do they value? So what are you gonna use that money for? What outcome are you looking to achieve?

Because the mistake a lot of business owners make when they sell their company is they only focus on how many zeros are on the check. And they don’t actually think about what’s really important to them in this transition. So for example, a lot of Christian owners I speak to have been very intentional about how they’ve built the organization, how they’ve led the values, the culture they’ve created.

Now, if they focus entirely on how many zeros are on that check, they’re gonna sell to someone who is gonna reshape that organization and that culture. They could see the business as purely assets that they want to merge into their existing business. So they don’t actually care about the people or the culture that they’ve built.

As soon as the transaction closes, they all go away. Everyone loses their job and they get the assets they like. Now, most owners don’t want that to happen if they really care about their people.

Some people don’t mind, and that’s not a values judgment, but what they value and what’s important is different. And if they haven’t taken the time to really think through, do I value whether Steve in accounting has a job after this transaction or not? Do I value whether this company exists in 10 years time?

Is it important to me that I can sit in retirement and see this business grow and flourish? Or is that not important to me? And I don’t know what’s important to you.

Maybe Deevo, when you retire eventually and step out of your business, you may say, it’s not important to me whether this continues in its current form. I’m quite happy for someone to take what we’ve done and do whatever they want with that. And that’s okay, as long as you’ve thought through that and you’ve been intentional about that.

Do you have an exercise, sorry to interrupt, do you have an exercise that you take people through that to understand what their values are? And by the way, we’re talking with Andrew Galpin, he’s the founder and CEO of Tree and Leaf Partners, and they are exit strategy wizards who consult and guide with you if you’re ready to sell your business or step out of it into retirement or whatever your next big enterprise is. Andrew’s firm helps you do that.

Sorry, I just like to fill it in and let people know who we’re talking to. So in terms of defining what do I value as an owner, is there an exercise you go through? Is that just conversational?

Like, how does that process unfold for you?

It is conversational, but we follow a kind of process. So it does start with kind of what are your values? Why did you form this company in the first place?

And what are you looking to do next? The other thing that owners often forget to do is what am I gonna do when I’m not running this company anymore? Because our whole identity is wrapped up in being the owner and CEO of ABC Business.

And the day after it closes, if you’re unlucky, probably the week before in general perspectives, suddenly it’ll occur to you that on Monday next week, you’re not gonna be that anymore and you have a bit of an identity crisis. So we like to make sure people have thought through both, what do I value? Why did I start this?

And where am I going next? To really help format an accurate picture of where we want to take things. And then from that, we can extrapolate what do you value?

If you still wanna be involved in the company after you’re finished, then that’s something you’re gonna value being part of the offer package. But if you want to go off and sail around the world, then as long as you’ve had that conversation with your wife and she’s on board with it, then we can think about how that feeds into how you value things.

Because there was a story someone else told me also in a similar space where an owner had their vision of sailing around the world when they sold this business, but they’d never shared that with their spouse.

They shared this with their spouse two weeks before they were gonna close the sale. And their spouse said, no way, I am not doing that. And suddenly they were trying to find ways to kibosh the sale because now their vision of the future had been completely destroyed.

They no longer wanted to go through with it because they had nothing to set themselves in and ground themselves in in terms of what came next.

And you suddenly had to pick up a new skill set of mediation divorce counselor.

Yes.

What’s the percentage, real quickly, if you have, and you don’t have to be precise, but just anecdotally, the number of CEOs that sell their company or retire out of it that wanna stay involved in some way, shape or form or versus the people who just sell off into the sunset.

Is there, do you have a number around that? I’m just curious.

Depends how involved. So I’d probably say 25% of the time they want to be somewhat involved, maybe 75% of the time. After a year, they don’t really wanna be involved completely.

And a lot of that time, that depends what stage of life people are at or what they want to do next. If they wanna retire and spend more time with the grandkids, then often they’re quite happy to slowly remove themselves from the business. And that might be over a year.

It might be over five years. They just don’t wanna be the one carrying the shoulder and the, shouldering the burden of that business for the next five years. They wanna be able to leave the office at 5:30 and go spend time with their grandkids rather than the weight of running a company still be on their shoulders.

All right, I’m gonna ask you to help me run through a bunch of other questions that I wanna get through. So try to give me a high level because I have a bunch of stuff I still wanna learn about you in a short amount of time. You talked about something really near and dear to my heart, which is storytelling and this idea of using narrative to stand out in an industry.

In a sea of sameness, and I don’t know how many people do what you do, there’s a bazillion people that do what I do, especially photography and that sort of stuff. How do you figure that storytelling has not only shaped the way you do business, but helped you stand out? Because when I go to your website, there’s a nice interactive storyline.

It’s like flows through. You give some example of your personality. There’s a story about how you met your wife and all those things.

And it really draws me into, okay, I like the humanity of this guy. He’s actually coming out and sharing some stuff that’s important. Where does storytelling play a role in what you do for other businesses and helping them sort of shape the next chapter in their lives?

Human beings are narrative beings. We understand and see the world and store information through stories. And a lot of the times we fall over in a business context because we focus too much on hard facts and we don’t take people on that emotional journey to really buy into the problem you’re solving and why you’re the right person to solve that.

So we’re quite intentional about doing it in how we present ourselves, as you’ve highlighted Deevo. But we encourage companies that are on that journey to sale to really be thinking through what problem am I solving? How am I solving that for customers?

And what’s the journey I’m taking people onto? Because when people are buying a business, they are buying that story and they need to believe that story is true. And if you don’t tell them a story, they will make up their own story, which might not be as good as they think.

Yeah, I love that piece. In terms of, I would imagine if I was selling my company, because I’ve been doing this for over 20 years now, if I were to sell it to somebody, I would wanna know that it’s going into somebody who is going to treat it with kid gloves, I would hope. So how do you just, again, high level, you don’t have to go take me through your whole process.

How do you ensure that my values and what I value, which is treating my company like one of my kids, maybe I shouldn’t be feeling that way, maybe I should just ride off into the sunset, but I’m gonna probably imagine that I would be a little bit sad and at the same time excited.

How do you make sure that whomever is feeling my shoes understands the intricacies and the empathy involved in taking on someone else’s company that has that as one of their core values?

It starts with that person really understanding that and understanding what it means to them and what’s important about that. So it could be the kind of, you’ve always invested in the best healthcare plan for your employees. So that’s one of the ways we can communicate to people buying businesses, that this is really important, that this is maintained going forward.

And then really understanding from the buyer’s perspective what their plan is with the company. And often when we’re looking at buying a company, we don’t have a specific plan in mind. Because we wanna spend the time working with you Deevo to really understand what is your vision for this organization going forward when you step away and how can we help achieve that and help complement that?

Because you’re also the expert on your business. You know it better than anyone else. So I wanna lean on that expertise even if you’re not gonna be part of that in the long term to really understand what’s best for this organization.

And that helps you filter through the types of buyers that you might be interested in receiving offers from as well.

I like that response. There’s a lot of compassion and empathy involved in what you do, I would imagine. So it’s really important that you have this sort of even keeled approach that you have to think.

We’ll play it on that. In our last few minutes together, I’d love to talk about the legacy you wanna leave. And I have this kind of standard question that I ask a lot of people.

So if you’ve heard it before, you’ll be prepared for it. If your life were to end today, and I’m not saying in a negative capacity, but the mothership has landed outside in your front yard, it’s bro, you’ve done all you can do here now, it’s time to go home. And, but before you leave, you have to leave humanity with a gift.

If you think about the legacy of Andrew Galpin and the legacy of Tree and Leaf Partners, and you could put into a nice cute boutique wrapped up jar with that gift, that legacy that you’re going to give to us before you get on the ship and right off into the sunset of your own, what is that?

Be redemptive in how you think about the world. So I describe myself sometimes as a redemptive acquisition entrepreneur. We’ve talked about the other two words a little bit, but this idea of redemptive is about shaping and molding the world into a better place and leaving it better than where we leave it.

So I like to see business as the center of an ecosystem that interacts with your customers, your employees, your suppliers, the community around you. How do we make that ecosystem flourish rather than just run business as normal? Or exploit and extract value from those other areas of the world around us?

So how do we think redemptively and be intentional about doing that?

When I think about the word, that’s not what the definition I would have come up with. I think about the idea of deliverance, correcting something wrong or offensive, I think of that space. So reframe that for me so that I can better understand it.

Yeah, so I would connect it to my faith then. So how do we make the world and align the world into the way it was originally designed to be? So we, as a Christian, I believe we live in a fallen world.

The world is broken. There’s bad things in the world that none of us like. So our job is to co-create with God and make that world into a better place.

Recreate it into the image that it was originally designed to be.

I struggle with that actually, just if I may be transparent and honest with you for a minute. I struggle with my role in this redemptive aspect, if you will, we’ll just use your vernacular. What is my role to help shape, forge, define, enlighten, whatever it is, other people’s perspective?

Or is it my job to just stay in my lane and do the things that I can do in my locus of control? And I struggled with that if I may be candid and I’m very candid all the time during COVID and the nonsensical stuff that went on during COVID and trying to wake people up and showing them a completely different perspective or a narrative that they weren’t being told. And people got so mad at me.

I had people that were like sending me hate messages on Instagram because of the things that I would share. And I was like, is it really my job to try to convert people? Is it really my job to be a redemptive light for people who just aren’t ready or don’t want or don’t need whatever?

I always struggle with that. And you don’t have to go too deep in that. But what is our role as humans on this planet?

Whether it’s running our business, whether it’s living our personal lives, as it pertains to seeing the lens of someone else’s jar and reading that there’s something that maybe didn’t align with your perspective or that was inherently wrong. Is it our job to call them out? Is it our job to guide them?

I wouldn’t say we need to necessarily call them out, but I would say we need to live consistently to our vision of the world and the way that reflects in our life. So I would say by running your business, Deevo, you are helping people think about how they show up in the world and the messages that they are putting out into the world, which in turn shape the culture around them, the types of customers that are attracted to them, the type of impact that has in the world.

So I’d say you are being either redemptive in how you’re doing it, if it’s heading in a positive direction, or the opposite of redemptive, whatever that word is, if you’re encouraging more negative messaging from that side of things, which I don’t think you would do.

So I would say our work has a role in shaping the world and the narratives that we buy into, and we should be intentional about how we’re shaping the world around us through our interactions.

Yeah, I’d put the opposite of redemptive. Destructive?

Destructive, yeah.

Damaging. So answer the question, do we have a moral obligation to not necessarily actively redeem somebody, but do we have a moral obligation to at least have an impact on other people’s lives? Or should we just selfishly focus on our own?

From a Christian perspective, I would say yes. Not everyone’s a Christian, so I don’t think that moral imperative necessarily sits on everyone unless they follow that same kind of belief mindset. But I would say connecting our work to a bigger purpose, something that is bigger than ourselves, is something incredibly important to our own motivation.

If you look at a lot of the literature around kind of purpose and motivation, if we can’t connect our work to something bigger, we can really struggle in what we’re doing. And that’s why a lot of people don’t find purpose in their work, because we’ve segmented work so much that I am just putting this cog on this wheel rather than building a car. I can’t see the purpose of the work that I do because I’m too far away from it.

And we need that as human beings because we exist for a reason, we were made for a reason, and I think that’s embedded in our very, very being.

I like your answer. A couple more questions and I’ll let you run. I appreciate you take the time, Andrew, to come on the show and entertain my questions.

In terms of you versus you, this whole idea we talked about, like understanding who we are as individuals and how we show up in the world, if you were giving yourself advice on life, what would you say to yourself if you were standing across from yourself right now?

I think we all wrestle with that tension of being ourselves and not feeling like we have to do certain things in order to conform to whatever part of the world we’re working in or the way everything is done.

So I would try and encourage myself to be more confident in being myself and using the skills that God has given me and the gifts that I have and applying that to solving the problems I’m looking to solve rather than looking at how everyone else is doing it and trying to conform to what everyone else is doing because I know I’m not the best version of Deevo. If you asked me to take photos, I’d be awful.

My wife is a photographer. She’s very good at taking photos, but I am not. So trying to be Deevo and trying to approach that in that way is never gonna work, but being Andy Galpin and the best version of Andy Galpin is gonna be how I’m successful in that.

Reminding myself of that is something I need to do more.

I tell everybody, you do you, I’ll do me, and I’m just gonna focus on me right now. It’s been a really cool conversation. What’s next for Tree and Leaf Partners?

What do you have on the horizon? When you get ready to sell your company, who takes you through the process?

Yeah, so I will, once I found a business that we like, if there’s a fit with me, then there’s a strong possibility that I would then move into that organization. So one of the businesses that we work with may end up being the future of Tree and Leaf Partners and will, but for me, there are lots of people in the world that kind of do similar things around exit planning and help people do what I do.

I’ve got a really good sense of what’s important to me and therefore what would be important to who takes over my business and what that transition looks like.

So it’s just trying to find that right person, which is really important and really difficult at the same time.

Andrew, it has been a privilege to dive into your story and your values and your philosophies and the way you lead Tree and Leaf Partners and just hearing your story. It’s been fun to listen to you. And it’s become clear to me, and we talked about your superpower, that your ability to connect deeply with people and the business that you work with and the compassion that you lead and this whole purview you have around this humanity of things.

I hereby bequeath your title of your superpower as the legacy architect. And that’s what I give you. So you should be honored.

You are knighted the legacy architect. Any closing thoughts for my listeners and where’s the best place people can find you if they are interested in utilizing your superpowers?

Yeah, a hundred percent. You can find us at treeleafpartners.com or I also talk about a lot of the subjects we’ve been talking about Deevo on LinkedIn. So if you’re interested in storytelling, culture building or that transition at the end of your journey to someone else, then feel free to follow me on LinkedIn.

I’m Andy D. Galpin. You can find me on LinkedIn.

Brilliant.

I’m gonna end the show on saying I’ve had a pleasure of getting to know you and I’ve learned a few things about you that I didn’t know about you in your profile. So thank you for taking the time. I’m gonna go ahead and ask you if you can just wait for me.

I have a few things I wanna say about you behind the scenes that might embarrass you on camera, which we’re all not just joking. If you don’t mind, just wait for me. I’m gonna put you in the green room for a second, then I’ll bring you right back in.

If you could just give me like two minutes.

Man, that was another good show on the Branding Laboratory. And I really appreciate you joining us today and listening in on the show.

For you listeners, this episode is a reminder that business isn’t just about growth. It’s about meaning, it’s about legacy and it’s about staying true to your values like Andrew has shared with us so adeptly.

And if you’re listening and thinking, I wanna uncover my own branding blueprint, my own story, my own unique value proposition, I’d love to have you on the Branding Laboratory and talk a little bit about the things that you’re doing and the things that you’re sharing with the world to make it a better place or to live your best life, as Andy put it.

So if you’re interested, you can go to thebrandstoryteller.com and navigate over to the podcast. You’ll see big, bold 400 font apply to be a guest on the show and my team will take it from there. And as a frame of reference, just say, hey, I’m a listener and Deevo invited me to be on the show and we’ll fast track you through.

And you and I will have another deep and meaningful conversation like Andrew and I just had. If you are a purpose-driven CEO, and this is my shameless plug, and you’re ready to unlock your full potential or you’re trying to figure out how to do that, my brand discovery process that is a patented and scientific process will help you align your personal values with your professional vision.

And it’s a transformative blend of spirituality and science and psychology and strategy that has literally helped thousands of business leaders, purpose-driven CEOs create brands that truly resonate and it’ll be my honor and my privilege to help you do that.

You can visit thebrandstoryteller.com to learn more about what I do and how I do it in my superpowers, which are helping you figure out your superpowers, incidentally, and that’s on thebrandstoryteller.com. I’ll see you on this side, thank you.