Executive Summary
When building a financial planning firm (or any business), there is a tension between personalization and optimization. On the one hand, as a business owner, one ostensibly has the right to create their own rules and only do the work that is most fulfilling to them. Yet at the same time, the reality is that planners, like anyone else, need to earn a sustainable living – which usually requires some level of systems, processes, specialization, and optimization to ensure that there is reliable income. Without optimization, it is challenging for firm owners to do what they're passionate about… and with that optimization, advisors can feel as though they've built a business for someone else's life.
In this 192nd episode of Kitces & Carl, Michael Kitces and client communication expert Carl Richards discuss how creative advisors can build a business that is both fulfilling and successful. For example, for many advisors, financial planning is more creative than technical, as it is centered on relationships and individual needs, not 'optimal' decisions. Similarly, many clients choose advisors not only due to their perceived competency, but also their unique personality. So, advisors may want to consider how they can further imbed their unique interests and strengths into the advisory firm offerings, trusting that it may be something which attracts clients, regardless of how 'optimal' it is. For example, many advisors integrate their interests into client experiences, from fishing to sharing meals, which can increase the personal meaning of the work for the advisor and the client experience.
Another part of building a fulfilling firm owner experience is to outsource. For example, many advisors dislike administrative and compliance tasks. Even if that work 'only' takes up a few hours, delegating or outsourcing it can create huge dividends in the advisor's day-to-day fulfillment. Alternatively, technology solutions may be able to produce the same benefit.
At the same time, these decisions come with a trade-off: advisors can build a business designed for humans that is still profitable, but it may be less profitable than a purely optimized business. There is, thankfully, room for nuance between a solely optimized business and wholly creative acts, and advisors who build indfully may reap the benefits of both models. And alternatively, advisors may choose to optimize their business in order to fund their more creative pursuits in their own time!
Ultimately, building a human-centered firm experience does not have to come at the sacrifice of profitability. Highly creative advisors can give themselves permission to do what is most fulfilling, leveraging their unique strengths, interests and approaches. This can ultimately create a better client experience… and a more fulfilling workplace for the advisor themselves!
Authors:
***Editor's Note: Can't get enough of Kitces & Carl? Neither can we, which is why we've released it as a podcast as well! Check it out on all the usual podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts (iTunes), Spotify, and YouTube Music.
Show Notes
- 50 Fires: "Chasing The Muse with Lukas Nelson" with Carl Richards
- #FASuccess Ep 217: Creating Value For Next-Generation Clients By Focusing On Actions Over Projections, With Sophia Bera
- Kitces Report On How Financial Planners Actually Do Financial Planning
- #FA Success Ep 260: Breaking Bread Together To Build New Client Relationships As Their Financial Chef, With David Ortiz
Kitces & Carl Transcript
Carl: Greetings, Michael.
Michael: Hello, Carl. How are you doing today?
Carl: I am good. Yeah, things are really, really good.
Michael: That sounded a little uncertain.
Carl: No. Sometimes I chuckle about it because sometimes it's... Anyway, things are... Sometimes you feel like you don't deserve, you know what I mean? Things are... The kids are awesome. The business is great. I'm doing work that I really enjoy. I get to chat with you. I don't have to go to my financial planning meetings, listen to the last episode. It's all good.
Michael: I know. But as you said that, I literally watched you turn your head and look out the window.
Carl: I know, because, partially, I was like, "Look at our lovely grass."
Michael: Probably because your mission is time with your family, mostly outdoors, and the recording studio is indoors, so.
Carl: That's right. That's right. Well, speaking, sort of, of that...
The Tension Between Optimization And Creativity In Business [01:06]
Michael: Okay. Where would you like to go today?
Carl: I've had a recent experience.
Michael: Okay.
Carl: There's been threads of it for more than two decades. If you... Yeah, in fact, let me tell you the story. So we were in the mountains, in the Alps, in France, so Chamonix. And we were there. Chamonix is climbing and skiing world headquarters of a client, extreme mountaineering. We were there to spend some time in the mountains. And we came down one day, and we were a little late for breakfast. And my wife loves going on big adventures with me, but she always jokes because we always miss the right time to eat. So I was really trying to make up for it. We go to this breakfast place, and it's 15 minutes after the breakfast menus ended and the lunch menu started. But my wife had told me, she was like, "I really would like some eggs."
So we go to this place, and the breakfast menu is no longer there. I'm like, "Hey, is there any chance we could just get some scrambled eggs?" France, mind you? And they're like, "No, the breakfast menu has ended." I said, "Okay." And I was kind of being a little annoying. I was trying to be playful about it, but I was still being annoying. I was like, "Hey, do you have any eggs back there?" "Yeah, we do." I was like, "Do you have a pan? Could you just crack some and scramble them out? I'll pay." "No, the breakfast menu has ended." And I noticed on the lunch menu that there was a...
Michael: You realize this is why they don't like us in France.
Carl: I know, I know, I know. Completely, I deserve every bit of judgment. I deserve every email I'll get about this. And I noticed, on the burger, you could add an egg. So I was like, "Hey, is there any chance we could get the burger with the egg, but without the burger? And I'll pay."
Michael: You actually did one of those.
Carl: Yeah. And he's like, "No, no, we don't do that." And I was like, "Look, I'll pay double or triple." And the guy looks at me and says, "Oh, now I understand. You think this is about money." He's like, "It's not. This is about food." And I remember thinking...
Michael: Wow.
Carl: This is a little thread to...
Michael: Wow.
Carl: Here's another story. On the "50 Fires" episode with Lukas Nelson, so Willie Nelson's son, imagine growing up and your mentors are your dad, Willie Nelson, his buddy, Neil Young, and his other buddy, Bob Dylan. So, as a musician, your mentors are Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and Willie Nelson. Lukas tells the story about how, from the youngest age, Neil was telling Lukas, "Make sure to set your whole life up so you don't have to ever make it rain," is the analogy they were using. He's like, "A good song is like rain. You can't make it happen." You got to be looking over the horizon, actively waiting and all ready in case it does rain. But you can't make it rain. And so many musicians have been forced into making it rain. And Lukas said, "Can you imagine asking Neil Young to write something a little bit more like Taylor Swift because that's what sells?" And Lukas was sort of, "I wouldn't even want to be in the same state as that conversation."
And those two stories have been working on me around, "Wait, what if...?" Sorry, a third one. I have a friend who's always asking me about how to scale my business, how to grow my business, how to get more clients, "Why don't you do this? You could grow a business, you could raise money, and you could do..." And I'm always just...
Michael: About why you don't?
Carl: Why I don't, yeah. Yeah, why I don't.
Michael: Why you don't do it.
Carl: And I finally was...one day, I was like, "Hey, I'm just not interested in that." And those three stories have led to a recent realization for me. And I've noticed, in our retreats we do, a lot of advisors facing the same thing. What if I just don't think of myself as a business person? What if I identify more as a creative, more as an artist? As an advisor, what if I'm like, "You know what, yes, of course, we need to be responsible and operate somebody in operations, or maybe I can even outsource a CFO, or whatever." But what I care about and the conversation that I want to have with you that's come up a bunch in the retreats we've done here, and it's come up for years before that, is advisors coming to me, saying, "I feel a little trapped. I'm not an analytical business person. I care about humans, and I'm creative."
In fact, I remember one of them who...maybe just to be careful because of the conversation, one of them who got his master's in taxation was... He couldn't even fathom. He sat in my living room, emotional about the idea, "How did I force myself through a master's in taxation? All I really care about is art. And I see my clients as a canvas."
Michael: That's an interesting framing.
Carl: Yeah. So...
Michael: Can we give him a name? Todd?
Carl: Todd's good.
Michael: So Todd's art is the financial plan he creates for his clients, something in that vein.
Carl: Yeah. The reason I cared about this is most of those conversations in the hallways of FPA chapter meetings or at a retreat, most of those conversations are, "How do I get out of... I'm leaving the industry. I can't do this anymore. I've got to get out."
Michael: Right.
Carl: And I loved reframing, because this is how I thought about it. I remember early on thinking... I'd go to an artist's website, a photographer, let's say, and there's always that button in the menu bar that says either work or portfolio. And you click on it. If it's a photographer, it's got a picture of his favorite pictures, or whatever, his or her favorite pictures. If it's an architect or an interior designer... You know exactly the button, and what would be there is these beautiful pictures.
Michael: Right.
Carl: I remember thinking early on, back when I was at Merrill, so this was 20 years ago, I remember thinking, man, if I had a website like that and it said work or portfolio and you clicked on it, it would be a picture of...it would be clients' lives.
Michael: Right. Here's a client's life I could help influence and shape with the work that we did in our financial planning process.
Carl: That's right.
Michael: Here's the amazing places they went, figuratively and literally.
Carl: That's exactly right. And it wouldn't be, "Here's how I'm..." There's a difference between a creative financial planning business and a finance business that does financial planning. Meaning, "I'm just trying to run a business that's really optimized for making the most money, getting a private equity deal and selling out," which, again, there may not be anything wrong with that. I just want to make sure there's room in those conversations I've had with advisors, "Man, what if you thought of the financial plan as a piece of art, an act of creativity? What if you thought of the client's lives as one creative project that you get to work on for 20 years?"
Michael: But it sounds like the downstream impact or implication of this is, if this is how I'm approaching what I offer and the way I serve clients, I might make non-ideal business decisions.
Carl: Non-optimized.
Michael: Non-optimized business decisions. Why would you not make an egg for the customer that's willing to pay three times the price of a burger to just make a fricking scrambled egg?
Carl: Yeah, yeah. No, I think, I guess I don't... This is one that I wanted to have this conversation because I'm really trying to process and get framing around this, but I just love the idea of, for my brothers and sisters who feel this way in our profession, there's room for you. And I think we're starting to see some of these. I just saw Sophia Bera, who I hadn't seen in a long time. Sophia has created, I think, 20 years, I'm hesitant to make her that old, but as old as me, art project that also happens to be a very successful business. She is no slouch in terms of running a business. She's built it her way, right? It's crafted intentionally. I look at it and say, "She has designed a life in a creative, interesting way." And I think that we need to somehow... It was really a relief to me, and I only did this a couple of days ago, where I was like, "I'm not a business person. I have no interest in being a business person."
Michael: And yet the things you do have been financially successful and allowed you to live a life and put your kids through college...
Carl: Well, not yet. We're not done with that.
Michael: ...and have a team member or two. Oh, yes, they're still going.
Carl: Med school is getting expensive. We're not paying for a dime of med school. Our daughter is figuring that all out. And we just had a daughter who got into one of the most expensive business schools in the country. So she just got into Wharton. So we're not... There's no joke about school.
Michael: I feel like, if you can get into Wharton, you should be able to figure out how to pay for Wharton, as a general principle of getting into Wharton.
Carl: That's a good point. That's a good...that's the entire... And she is. And she is. But, yeah, yeah. So that's interesting to me because I only see... I care deeply about, and I remember I wrote a column about this. I care deeply about profit when I started understanding that profit was permission to keep doing the stuff I love. Right. Profit equals permission. All I really want out of the current project is permission to do the next one. And it would be great someday to give myself tenure in terms of permission for the rest of my life.
Michael: So running a profitable advisory firm gives me permission to serve clients who aren't profitable.
Carl: I don't even know if that's the right way to think about it, because I'm not saying that being an artist or being creative with the way that you're thinking of yourself as a creative who happens to run a financial planning business. That's the way. That's the terminology I like. I'm an artist who happens to run a financial planning business.
Michael: Okay.
Carl: That does not mean... Some of those businesses are probably some of the most profitable of any in your study.
Creating A Viable, Creative Advisory Firm [12:01]
Michael: Well, yeah. There has been a long-standing phenomenon that we see in our research that, notwithstanding all of the industry hubbub, you have to be huge and have an aggregator support you to scale and have all this back-office infrastructure support. Some of the most ludicrously profitable practices we've seen are highly leveraged solo practices with maybe one or two team members, just serving an awesome client base really effectively, charging the value of what they're worth, and not dealing with all the rest of the complexity, because it turns out, there's a lot of really cost-effective software that solves a lot of problems that you used to need to have a big back office for 5, 10, 15 years ago.
Carl: And even that could be seen as a really creative exercise.
Michael: Yeah.
Carl: Right. It's an interesting problem to solve. And I could identify that way of, it's not that profit doesn't matter, it's that I just don't really identify as a business owner. I love how Yvon Chouinard of Patagonia said, he's like, "I didn't want to be a businessman." He often calls himself a reluctant businessman who built a billion-dollar company. He's often like, "What 11-year-old kid wants to be a businessman or a business person, right?" Businessman, businesswoman, business person. We grew up wanting to be artists or sports heroes or fire people or pilots.
Michael: Astronauts. Astronauts.
Carl: Astronauts, yeah. So all I'm saying is I'm not saying there's anything wrong with entrepreneurship or business. I think it's amazing. But I just want to make sure that those of us who don't really... The last episode we talked about, if you find yourself disengaged with all the industry talk around raising money or private equity or optimizing, guess what, that's okay. And there's still a way. Instead of having the conversation of, "I'm creative. I'm just an artist. I need to get out", I love the conversation of, "What if you were an artist who saw this work you're doing as deeply creative as it is?" Financial planning is a creative act. It's something that doesn't exist in the future. Building a business could be seen as a creative act. That's problem-solving. It's incredibly creative. There's room for that, is all I'm saying.
Michael: So take this further to me, though. I guess I'm trying to visualize. Okay. So if I'm an advisor... Again, I love the quote from the restaurant, "Oh, you think this is about money? No, no, this is about food." Oh, you think this is about money? No, no, this is about helping clients. This is about serving clients.
Carl: Yeah.
Michael: So if that's me, that's my model, what am I changing? What am I doing differently? What new direction are you putting me down and...?
Carl: Yeah, let's think about...
Michael: ...giving me permission to do? Because I know you love... I'm sure, for this episode, you brought your permission wand. There it is.
Carl: Yeah. For sure. For sure.
Michael: Let the audio record show, he picked up the permission wand and waved it in front of the camera. It's actually a pen, but we're calling it a permission wand.
Carl: I’ll just let this cat out of the bag. It's actually just a Pilot G2 pen. Let's use Todd. Let's just use Todd's conversation. I think that's okay. So Todd's literally thinking about leaving because he identifies so much as an artist, and he feels trapped. What side of the brain? What's the rational...what side of the brain do you use? Left side or right side?
Michael: The whole left brain/right brain phenomenon, which, yes, for the record, if somebody's going to reach out, that is largely disproven. But the left brain is the nerdy side, the right brain is the creative side.
Carl: Okay. So it was... I think Todd may have even said this, "I'm a right-brain person stuck in a left-brain job."
Michael: Okay.
Carl: "I think I need to leave." Okay. So if we set that up as the...so then we're like, "Okay, leave, and do what?" "Go start an artist studio, start an art business. I'll buy a studio. I'll create art." Wow, that's a long road, you know what I mean? Getting paid to... That's tough. I was like, "Well, is there a world in which... And that might be the right road, by the way, Todd. You might want to go do that. But is there a world in which we could get rid of all the stuff?" Oh, boy, this sounds like interesting executive assistance and outsourcing, which is now even more possible than the conversation I had with Todd. "Is there a world in which you could get rid of all this stuff that you don't like, and you could recraft your client relationships in a way that was deeply meaningful and fulfilling and creative and artistic for you? For instance, what if all your relationships were...all your meetings were done while hiking on a trail?" Todd happened to live in a really beautiful place with lots of trails. "What if all your client meetings were done on a trail? What if...?"
Oh, I remember a guy who...his client meetings were actual physical performances. It was unbelievable. He had a ceiling-to-floor, entire wall whiteboard, and there was no printouts. And he would just... You know those explainer videos that you see that grow?
Michael: Yeah.
Carl: That's kind of what he would do on this entire whiteboard. And then they'd take a picture of it.
Michael: Wow.
Carl: So he was standing up the whole time. His clients had stools so they could stand up or sit down. And they would get up and write stuff on the board, too. And he'd be like, "Okay, here you are down here. We're going to do this. And then we're going to do this, and you're going to attend the education, and then we'll do this." It was a physical performance, right? He's up moving around, kneeling down, had to get down to the bottom of the board, had to get to the top of the board. So, okay, now, that's one way to recraft the entire relationship.
Michael: Right.
Carl: So I just think, opening up, "What if," and especially if you're in one of these businesses where you're like, "I built a successful business. I feel trapped because it's not creative enough. So, therefore, I'm going to leave and start over." Well, man, what if instead of leaving and starting over, you were very intentional about getting rid of all the stuff that feels non-creative and non-art that drags you down and sucks your energy, and you just focused on repackaging the way you communicate and deal with clients this way?"
One more, another guy who...his entire offering essentially hinges around...well, there's two more. One is he gives the clients a day every year, a full day. It starts with breakfast, ends with dinner, "All I need is 15, 20 minutes here and there to talk. Other than that, we can do whatever you want." So some clients are like, "Come to my business that I own and hang out with me for a couple of hours. I want you just to see what I'm doing." Some clients say, "Hey, let's go fly fishing." Some clients are like, "You know, man, let's just have breakfast and go get our meeting over with, and that's all we need. You don't have to take it, but I've set aside a day for you. And we can be as creative as we want." Fascinating. And then one last one, I know that...
Michael: And he does this because he likes deeper relationships and hanging out with his clients. So, is that the...?
Carl: That's exactly right. He's like, "I want a practice... I like deep relationships with fewer people." And I think he had 75 to 100 clients, right? And there was no other real meetings.
Michael: What we got, that's...okay. So one or two days a week, all year, he just does client hangout day.
Carl: Deep. And by the way, they got all their planning done. There was deep work. But who was doing all that? Outsourced paraplanner, right, who he trained really well to deliver exactly what he needed to know. So he knew everything he needed to know going into the meeting, knew that he would bring it up at different times. And then the last one was a person I knew that did all of his meetings from the spring, so non-winter. He'd spend a couple of months up at a fly fishing ranch that he had bought, and it wasn't inexpensive. It's a cabin, and he had a guest cabin. And all of his clients would come up there and spend a day fishing. It was about an hour-and-a-half drive from where he lives. Come up there, spend a day fishing. All of his clients were doctors. Spend a day fishing, dinner, get the planning work done, right?
So all I'm saying is what if you said, "You don't have to do it the way anybody else does it. Make this a creative act. Stop trying to be..." Can you imagine saying to Neil Young, "Hey, Neil, I think you should write some songs like Taylor Swift because that's what sells right now?" What if he was just like, "No, I'm Neil Young. I want to do it this way. I don't really care what the industry tells me I should do or what I say, or optimizing. I'm not optimizing." This isn't about money. This is about food.
Using Profitability To ‘Earn’ Long-Term Flexibility [21:20]
Michael: So I guess there are a few things, to me, that strike here. One is giving yourself permission. I'm going to keep coming back to that, I think. Right. Giving yourself permission to make it about food and not about the money, right? So just make it what you want it to be and stop worrying about what everybody else thinks, some version of that.
Carl: Yeah. And it could literally be... It's really hard because, like we talked about, profit equals permission. It's really hard to get all the way to the point where you're... I was just having this conversation with an actual artist friend of mine, who's built a really great career. He's an artist. If you even ask, "Well, how are you going to monetize that?" Imagine asking David Whyte, my favorite poet, "How are you going to monetize that poem?" David doesn't give it...you know what I mean? He's not... My friend, David's not a friend of mine, but my friend is an artist. I asked him, "How are you going to make money off it?" He's like, "I'm just making a thing."
Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Carl: And competing truth, yeah, profit equals permission. And I don't think these are mutually exclusive, by the way. Maybe for some of us, the closer you get to doing your creative work, the more you'll get paid.
Michael: Yeah. I think maybe that's part of what I'm struggling with here, because there's a version of this that feels like the sort of colloquial wisdom to young people, "Forget the jobby-job thing, follow your passion," which I get in principle. But there's all the interesting debates about whether you follow your passion or you do a thing and get good at it and find that you have a passion for the thing that you're good at.
Carl: Right, love that.
Michael: And dare I say, there's a certain privilege, financial privilege, some other privilege of being able to pursue the thing that you are passionate and creative about and not have to worry about the very real-world money part, which...
Carl: Those tensions are very real, undoubtedly.
Michael: Which is part of what makes profit is permission. So fascinating, to me, in this context. For better or worse, it means I don't necessarily get to start in my most creative business. I start with the one that gets me enough clients, put food on my table, so I can keep this job and keep building a career and a profession and survive and get to the good stage where I have the wonderful first-world problems of, "I have a successful advisory firm that's very financially remunerative. And I hate it. I'm miserable, and I feel trapped, so I think I want to leave", which is very real for Todd and others, that there's still a journey of getting there. But if you can at least do that with reasonable profitability, by whatever path you took to get there, the profit is the permission to do more of what you love. The profit now becomes the permission to say, "Okay, now that you did some of the grindy things", and hey, maybe you would have turned out to like it, but it turns out you didn't, right?
All right. Todd's thinking about reinventing practice, but apparently, the dude got all the way through a master's in tax. So he's done some work and put in the time and paid the proverbial dues and all the things that now he's at a position with the profitability to say, "I could rearrange this in a way that is..." I guess, as you said it, non-optimized or at least it's not optimizing for the financial outcomes anymore. It's optimizing for something else. It's optimizing for life enjoyment and creative energy.
Carl: Yeah. Let me... There's a couple of things I want to say, but I want to get this before I lose it, which is, it's not that those things...it's not that optimizing and profit aren't important. It's just not where we start. There's something about... I don't identify as a profit maximizer. I identify as a creative person making a difference in the world. And yes, profit matters. I think there's something... And the other thing that's really interesting to me, I was having this conversation around everybody listening to this, everybody we're talking to, chose a business that is profitable. And there's a path to profitable business painted out over a two/three-year period. And so this isn't like... This is why I always wonder, if you want to be a creative, if you want to be an author, if you want to be an author, one of the best ways to possibly be an author is run a financial planning business. Because it gives you...
Michael: It's much easier to publish a book and get clients than it is to sell fricking books for a couple of dollars.
Carl: You want to be a public speaker... You want to be a comedian? Go to stand-up mics for ten years, right, and hope that you...and keep your job as the bartender and whatever else. Build a financial planning firm around... Who is that guy, I think we both know him, that has the...it's like a Sprinter van? Oh, man, this guy was incredible. Where did I meet him? It was an FPA chapter meeting. He has a Sprinter van. He's a chef.
Michael: Oh, David Ortiz.
Carl: His client meetings, he drives to the client's house.
Michael: Yeah. He was a chef for 20 years. He has a Sprinter van fitted out with a kitchen. He drives to the client's house and makes food for them and then does the financial planning meeting while they break bread together.
Carl: Come on. You want to be a chef? I know somebody really close to me who has recently decided to drop out of school and become a chef. Well, okay, now that's going to be a hard slog.
Michael: Yep.
Carl: Start a financial planning firm, retrofit a Sprinter van. Now, I'm just simply saying, man as raw material for creativity, financial planning firms are pretty cool.
Michael: Well, again, that's why I... You said it right at the beginning, but my brain is really fixated on it. Profit is permission. It does matter. You have to get there. This isn't necessarily a "Just go make whatever you want, and hopefully, the world will show up and buy it." There are, unfortunately, versions of things that creatives create that nobody buys and gives money to. So some people choose to be starving artists and creatives and hope that they're, one day, discovered or get their breakthrough. For better or worse, at least to me, there is something embedded in profit is permission, which is you don't necessarily have to build the starving artist/creative version, or at least we're not advising it.
But if you built the other way and you did the optimizing things for some period of time, and you have profits, you don't have to use the profits to do the business-optimized thing to grow 7.7% more to get to the next. You can say, "Profits are permission now for where I am today with this thing I've created from my past to the present moment. Now my profit is my permission that I do get to change the plan or the rules of the game or what I'm doing and turn it into something that is more rewarding or fulfilling or scratches my itch.
Carl: Yeah. And to the early or young planners, if you're the chef guy, you don't have to have the Sprinter van. You could build your specialization around some version of that. You could do most of your client meetings over a meal without ever saying, "Hey, someday I'm going to build a Sprinter van." You like fishing? You could do that earlier on. You could blend it in earlier on. I'm just simply saying, you could do... I know a couple. I know a really, really well-paid sculptor who got to be a really, really well-paid sculptor by being an anesthesiologist and only working a couple of shifts a month. Do you know what I mean?
Michael: Yeah, profit is permission.
Carl: There are other places you could do this. We just happen to be in one of them, and I just want to make sure... I think we finally got to where this is really helpful because I think that chef example is the perfect example.
Michael: Yeah.
Carl: So I think that's right. Earn. This business can allow you to earn the privilege – you used that word earlier – earn the privilege to make profit permission. By the way, once you make proper permission to do creative stuff, you can do creative stuff earlier. Just do it in different ways. And when you make that decision, I don't think people like the chef and other examples we've given are trading profit for something else. They're not mutually exclusive. It may actually make the business better. Who knows? But it's just not where you're starting at that point.
Michael: All right. I love it. Thank you.
Carl: Hey, Michael, thanks for letting me work through that. That was great.
Michael: Cheers.
Carl: Yep.
