Private Equity Spotlight: The Role of Digital in Reshaping Business with Darren Herman

I'm super, super excited to be here today with Darren Herman. Darren, thanks for joining us today.

I'm looking forward to digging into the conversation. The way we love to kick these things off is to get a little bit of your backstory. One of the most interesting things about the industry that we primarily cover, the private equity industry, is that it's now one that has all sorts of on-ramps, and it has people from coming in all these different directions, and almost, in some ways, serendipitously, finding their way there as business builders. So, I would love to hear your story, Darren. How did you come up?

How did you get into this industry?

I started to talk to a whole bunch of private equity firms and some family offices. After one meeting with Bain Capital, they asked me to come back, and I came back. I came back a third time, came back a fourth time, and one of them followed me out to the elevator one day and said, have you ever thought about a career in private equity? I looked at them, and I was like, that's not what I'm pitching. I'm pitching for you to fund my advertising, technology, and marketing roll-up.

They smiled and said, well, maybe you could do it here, but we think you'd be great on the inside if you were to consider a position as part of the fund. That never crossed my mind whatsoever, and that gave me a lot to think about on my Amtrak back from Boston to New York, where I was living at the time. As you can imagine, a lot of thoughts through the head, and fast forward. eight years later, I'm still here.

I was fortunate to see the evolution of marketing and advertising and all the technology that was coming to be part of that, thus giving it leverage. For those 10 years, we had bought lots of agencies and we had invested in lots of technologies. I had started a bunch of businesses, and I had a good grasp of the ecosystem at the time. It was also at a time where your competitive set wasn't just Madison Avenue. A lot of times, if you're running a large advertising agency, you think your competitive set are other large agencies.

These days, that's not true. You have large management consulting companies coming in for those dollars as well. You have large systems integrators coming in for those dollars too. Everyone wants to penetrate the chief marketing officer office. We saw that writing on the wall, and we're building for that.

For me, the roll-up actually was, I wanted to create a holding company of the future, an advertising holding company of the future, but I believe that that advertising holding company doesn't look like the advertising holding companies of yesterday. They look very different. I'd say. the key thing is, how do we improve our margins from an advertising and marketing business and not just think of the typical agency margins of 18%, or plus or minus 15%, 18%, and how do we double those? That gets into a whole bunch of different ways of leveraging technology in order to do that.

That was the business, and that was what we were trying to do. Clearly, something resonated here with them to get excited about me and bring me on board.

That's creating the alpha in every investment. I can see that when you're sharing this, I said, oh, that's your mindset. That's how you look at the world. Let's play chestnut checkers and think three, four, five moves ahead.

We as an organization have competitive advantages, increase our leverage, and are able to create value even more effectively. That's the through line to what I do here at Bain Capital today.

Hopefully, our business builder listeners start really turning their ears on on this part coming up. Before we do that, I always love to ask another question, and really just to get you to know you a little deeper. Darren, one of the things I love to ask is, we'd know you better if we knew this about you. What's one of those things we'd know you better if that's not on your LinkedIn page?

Then also, do good. In this world, it's not hard to do good. Seventeen years ago, we created this group called Silicon Alley Sports, which is a bunch of tech executives, agency supporters, and the digital ecosystem of Silicon Alley in New York coming together to play sports and raise money for charity. That's been going on for 17 years. If you see any of our shirts, or any of our hats, or you go to our website, you'll see play well, do good.

We have a great time and we donate all monies to charity. after all of our events. That's been 17 years and running. We've got golf, we've got tennis, we've got pickleball, we've had paddle tennis. There's a lot.

Unfortunately, I'm not a full-time sports programmer. I have a day job. We can't expand to all the sports that we want to get to. But our board of advisors has been super helpful in expanding out over the years. All of us have real jobs, so this is all night and weekend fun.

That's been great. On the other side of do good, I sit on the board of trustees at the Tremont School here in Massachusetts, which is both a neurotypical and neurodivergent group of children. The school caters to all of any of the above. That's been a big learning for myself. I don't know much about education as it pertains to running a school, but I've learned a lot.

This will be my second year on that board. I have a son who's neurodivergent. I've spent the last 16 years learning all about him and what gets him going. It's fascinating and he's brilliant in so many ways. How do we get the magic of the school out to the world?

That's what really gets me excited.

It truly is an amazing organization.

Here, the only way to come is you sign up as a single and we pair you at the event and you have no idea who you're going to be paired with before the event. The secret rule of Fight Club, or as Silicon Alley Sports as we call it, is. you don't talk about it. You send us an email saying, hey, I hear X and Y is coming to the event on whenever. We make sure that you're not paired with that person, because our goal is for people to meet new folks and have a great time.

We try and make all of our teams equal, both from a networking perspective, but also from a scoring perspective. Everyone has a chance to win the trophy. at the end of the day. It keeps people coming back. As long as we are able to create value for folks by keeping a solid level of participants that people want to network with, and also making it fun and not taking yourself too seriously on the tennis courts or on the golf course or wherever, we keep having people come back.

For 17 years, we've been pretty much sold out. It brings new folks in each year. The only thing that keeps people from not coming back is maybe the date there's a board meeting or maybe they've got vacation travel or something like that. But we keep filling it up, and we have a great time doing it. We love that Blue Wave has participated with us this year and really come and put your brand behind it.

It's been fantastic for us, so thank you.

We've been able to partner with Jay and Team Daya, and we're super excited because he's participated in many Silicon Valley sports events over the years and comes alongside many other organizations that we've backed each year, such as Code.

org, the Mozilla Foundation, Charity Water, Robinhood. The list has gone on for so many years. We like to pick one impact partner for each year, and this year is Team Daya.

net to learn more and start a project today.

with that in mind, how do you think about and go about addressing challenges and finding a path through and beyond? There's no lack of challenges in the.

We ended up buying this business and this core piece of technology supported significant EBITDA of the business. Just before I had come to Bain Capital, I spent a few years out in Silicon Valley as an executive at a tech company called Mozilla. Many of you listeners may know our product, which is Firefox. I had just literally spent two years trying to kill Flash. Not only myself, but working with Google and Apple and the other browsers that exist in the world, Flash has a lot of positives, but also has a ton of negatives.

Most importantly, Adobe, who's the current owner of Flash, stopped supporting it. When you stop supporting a technology, there's lots of vulnerabilities that can come up that can create security issues. Flash is no longer as secure as it once was back, when it was being supported by major technology. I came in and I saw this new portfolio company of ours where, oh my goodness, we paid quite the entry price for the business and quite a bit of EBITDA is flowing through this piece of software, but it's 100% Flash-based. Knowing what I knew, we need to get this piece of software off Flash as fast as we possibly can, because it's about to be unsupported within the ecosystem.

That poses a significant threat. I spoke to the team and I learned that they tried six times. They had seen this, but they had tried remediating it six times and changing platforms. They did the same thing over and over again and expected different results. They just couldn't get there.

This is where I spent a lot of my time. This is probably one of my first big challenges while I was here at Bain Capital. I was taking over this project and then finding a way to change platforms off of Flash onto something else. We had to change a lot. Working with this said portfolio company, getting management re-excited and oriented around, Darren is going to come in and help.

Bain Capital is here to come in and help get us from what we've tried to do and failed a bunch of times over to where we need to be. That started with governance, which is putting the right governance layer in place for us to truly understand the problems, understand the data that comes with those problems, then be able to make decisions and move swiftly. once we make those decisions. That governance layer plays all the way down into the execution team. The second is talent, with the same team doing the same problem six times.

We had to give our talent that was on the ground superpowers. Many private equity firms have key partners that they bring in to help drive. Even BlueWave is founded on this, which is help us find those key partners to go execute what we need. We called in two of our best partners, one of which to project manage this and two of which to change over the engineering component of this from where it currently was staying to somewhere new. We brought those two partners in.

They partnered with me and the team, and we drove forward. This was a 12- to 16-month process. When we came out of this, we looked much different than when we came into this. What I mean by this is, we were playing defense. We had a software that our B2C users were using, but it wasn't like a software anybody got excited about.

From a B2B perspective, it ranked really high from functionality and usability, etc.

, but we weren't winning awards with it. It wasn't the key thing. This was purely built to keep the EBITDA flowing through the business. When we came out of this project, we went from defense to offense. We didn't just build what we had historically.

We built what we needed for the future. That's actually a big question that operators ask themselves when they're thinking about software and thinking about product. Do I build feature for feature, just switch platforms? Or do I take this moment in time and think about, what do I need four years from now and start building that in so that you can accomplish that? The latter is where we went.

We built some partnerships. We partnered with one of the world's leading image creation companies. We built that exclusively into our software. We put a huge light on this piece of software that looked, felt, smelled, acted differently than what it did when we came in. We took something that we played defense with.

Now we're playing offense. It's won all sorts of awards. It's something that is a reason for our customers now to select us as a business. That was a super hard project. just based upon the initial failures.

This was an area that wasn't a sexy part of the business. We were able to flip and turn that and shine the beautiful light on it. Now it's a reason why we win business with this organization. I really, really appreciate it. For people.

Then turn it into a goal and a weapon and all those types of things. But then also so often when I think people are trying to solve the big challenges, they look through the lens of, or we're going to do this or that. What you're articulating here is the word and. We're going to bring in the right talent. We're going to bring in partners.

We're going to have partnerships. We're going to have governance. We're going to intensely focus on this thing, because the easy thing to do is quit. That's what probably 80% of companies would do. It's like, well, and candidly, we get lots of calls from other private equity firms for tech migration.

in a pretty meaningful percentage of the time. They're just like, yeah, we're going to let the next person do it. And that's the easy thing to do. But the right thing to do is intensely overcome this mountain. And on your Pareto chart, it was probably really big on it, but it was like, in terms of ease of execution versus outcome, you're like, uh, but the outcome is.

your articulating was huge, but it's hard.

You're taking something that exists on a, and you're moving it to be like for like, and that like for like is good for this moment in time. But what I'd love to see, and love to see the industry do is, if you're pairing a CIO or CTO up trying to figure out how to transform something, we'll maybe put like two in a box, with like a little bit of a visionary there to say, okay, this is what we need today. But where do we need to go for tomorrow? Do a bunch of customer-centric work, understanding where the customers want to be, understanding the competitive set, where the competitors are, understanding where the markets are, and then build a roadmap that isn't like for like, but builds towards what you're getting from that information, so that you set yourself up for the next five to 10 years. And what's important for us as private equity firms is we're not in this for a year or two.

Here at Bain Capital, we like to say, we're not even in it for our hold. We're in it for the next hold, whoever that may be, because that's where we have to exit the business to. So we have to show that there's value to create down the road, not just for us. And that's that opportunity, which is you build for tomorrow,

But now I'm building a company. You can see the value of doing things now that aren't going to have an impact for three to four years. When they hit, and you know, three to four years, they're going to be impactful. It just supercharges you ahead of the pack, because everyone else is kind of tactically in like one move ahead, but you're saying like, think three, four, five moves ahead. And then the world comes to you.

And by the time they get to where you were,

And that's how we're founded. And even to this day, that sort of consulting mentality is embedded in everything we do. Now, today, we look a little bit different than what we looked like 40 years ago. But with that said, the principles of being super strategic, thinking about the forest of the trees, asking a ton of questions, being data, curious, grounding everything in data, those principles still exist. Now, what we've done with that is the evolution of what the market has needed over the last 40 years.

So we like to say, we like to raise the bar and keep ourselves continually pushing our game even further. And so way back when we established the first portfolio group in private equity as main capital, and what is that? Historically, in private equity, we've seen our investors, people that are hunting and fishing and looking for great investment archetypes and opportunities, and partnering with CEOs and founders and management teams and finding a way to invest in those businesses. And the way the portfolio group has come, and other firms call this by different names, but they come in really at the tail end of the investment process, and then taking that investment once it's become an investment, and then helping to create as much of that value that they anticipate as they can, and partnering with the management team and everybody surrounding that investment to really do whatever it takes to get that investment to be successful. And so here at Bain Capital, we like to say we're one team, the investment team in the portfolio group.

And how we do that is we call ourselves two in a box. And so there's always an investment professional and a portfolio professional together leading all of our investments. We all sit amongst each other. In the office, I have, actually on both sides of my walls, I've got one wall is an investment professional, the other wall is an investment professional and I'm portfolio. And so we're completely one team throughout the office on Slack and email and everything else.

And every one of our investments have surrounded by both investment and portfolio resources. Another thing we've done to continually raise the bar is we've added subject matter experts. And so we have phenomenal experts that understand operations and talent and that go to market and IT and infrastructure, and pretty much all functions of an organization, we have subject matter experts that are here within our walls, where historically, we may have relied on consultants or agencies or other types of boutiques or etc. We're now able to just walk down the hall into someone's office, such as myself on digital, and just ask a question. Or, hey, Darren, I need you to go spend some time with this portfolio company, I need to get what you're thinking, or hey, the management team has some questions, you mind sitting in the next ELP meeting and just answering some questions and sort of giving them the lay of the land?

We do that all the time. We always say one of the things that inhibits value creation is friction. What causes friction? Time. By having these folks here, myself included, you're literally a water cooler conversation away from deploying into a portfolio company and really help triage something or just answer some questions to the CEO or other board members, you know, we're able to do that.

And the last part about all of this is we're all aligned the same way. Bancapital is well known for having, if not the largest, but in the top tier of the amount of alignment between its partners and its companies. We are some of our largest investors in our own funds. And so we as investment professionals, portfolio group members, we are all as incented and as aligned with our management teams, and, to be honest, our LPs as well, that we all want the same thing. We take great pride that we are one of the top shops around alignment, because when we all row in the same direction, it's a lot easier to get.

You're doing multiple things to achieve a greater goal that are in kind of synchronous harmony with each other. I always internally hear, I'll call it, it's a symphony of motion and private equity. In the late 90s, when I first started in PE, it was like you had one guitar kind of thing. Now it's the whole orchestra. And for alignment, you all have to be playing together for this thing to sound good and sell tickets, if you will.

And over time, you go see them today and it's like eight band members. And the question is, is how do you go from three to eight?

And it's how do you continually raise the bar of the band so that they're constantly putting out fantastic music, if that's the music you like? And I'm sure half the podcast is saying, no, we don't like the Dave Matthews Band. But it's the same as us, which is what gets you here is not necessarily what gets you there, especially when you're underwriting something. You got to remember. the past is the past.

It may predict the future, but it may not predict the future. And so how do you think about what we always need in this next three, five, seven year cycle? And band capital has been really good about resourcing that and pushing us hard as a firm, as an institution, to do that across all of our funds. That's definitely differentiating.

And what you all are already doing is that kind of forward plan. How do you get to where you're going? Having hypothesis, maybe not chapter and verse, based on history, but having a hypothesis informed by history, but having the audacity to peer into where the world's going. And so what you're articulating, I think, is exactly where PE has to be, but it's where you guys already are. And so, at the risk of overly flattering you all, it's good.

I like it. And so, Darren, I think, maybe, as we think about turning the page here, I'm curious, what are some of the top kind of value creation themes that you're thinking about engaging with right now that other business leaders?

We're good. The beauty of digital is that we're never actually done. And changing the experience is all but changing a few lines of code. And the opportunity that we have in a digital world is to consistently tweak the experience to both do two things. One, give great satisfaction to our audience, be it customers, prospects, et cetera.

Two, give such great satisfaction that it drives some type of goal. And the goal could be a lead, a sale, some kind of conversion, whatever the goal happens to be. A lot of times we use the word key, performance indicators that tie into that. So what we get is usually, hey, we built it. We're good.

And I was like, no, no, no, the game just started. And so the game's just started. We're on the field. Now we're playing with the ball. How do we get that ball down the field?

And what I love to do with our portfolio companies, et cetera, is truly understanding the funnel. If we've got a site or an app or some digital component, how many folks are coming to it? And then how many folks are completing that goal? And then where are all the drop-off points? And then let's go talk about those drop-off points and see how to fix it.

It's almost like a leaky bucket. If we're putting water into a bucket at the top, how do we get as much water to go through it at the bottom? And let's make sure that we have the right tooling and infrastructure so that we can understand and ask those questions. And then two, how do we have the right team in place that can not run from the data, but embrace the data and not feel like they built something that failed, but feel like they built something that they're going to make better. And then three, have potentially the right partners in place to go execute whatever that leaky bucket is and go fix whatever it is it happens to be.

And are they even asking the question to themselves? And so the first part is to understand, does the data exist? Does the talent exist? Does the problem exist within the organization? And I've never seen a website be perfect where 100 visitors come in and 100 visitors convert.

In typical e-commerce, we can see anywhere between like a 1% to 5% conversion rate. That means that the best 95 people that started the bucket are not converting. in that moment in time. There's always upside. And so asking that question upfront and then building a team or working with a partner that could then look at that, flow, the data and say, maybe we should start A-B testing something.

Or maybe we see a lot of drop-off on the conversion page. Should we stop asking so many questions on the conversion page, take that off and just have just the credit card information or whatever it happens to be? And so having a super curious team that's not afraid to ask the questions and really driving that sort of motion of continuous conversion rate optimization, then building out sprints or cycles of, we're going to do two conversion optimization techniques. This sprint, we're going to try then another two, then kind of prioritizing those against what we think has the biggest impact is feasible and take the shortest time to go, kind of execute.

But, to your point, there's also a lot of things you can just do yourself to get started. Think what the journey is, follow them through their website, look at the data. When are they breaking off? Just be curious. Why is that?

What if we tried this instead of that? I think that might help. And then just see how it does. So there's so much that you can do yourself that every business builder can do right now. Absolutely.

I mean,

But we're spending a lot of time now with generative artificial intelligence and AI and machine learning and a bunch of other areas, not just because it's a hot topic, but because it's a topic that actually, in the right functions, works. We started talking about the evolution of marketing, advertising, and technology. For me, that was 10, 15 years ago. Here it's back. And I've never seen such innovation in the marketing organization as much as AI.

today. I can put programmatic advertising there. I can put customer data platforms there. I can put a few other things, but no, no, no. The application of AI should profoundly affect the marketing organization.

And today, there are use cases that drive value, even in the early days, but I don't believe they are the use cases that ultimately will drive value a few years from now when we see a bit more maturity to the space. And so for us, the marketing department, customer service, sales and engineering or technology are three or four areas that we see prime, ripe use cases today, day one, that aren't the most transformative business use cases, but they are evolutionary. And in some cases, potentially transformative that do drive both growth and value. We get excited about those.

And the other thing too is we've got Gen AI based agents and bots on the front end of many customer experiences at some of our portfolio companies. What I mean by that is you go to their website, you go to their app and you can interact with what looks like a chatbot. Well, chatbots historically were linear and basically were question answer trees. Those still exist today, but the more advanced ones are AI based and they're using some small language model that's been derived on their back end to learn some dictionary, and that's what they spit back out. And what we've seen is on the sales side, when people interact with these bots, we have higher average order values.

On the service side, when people interact with these bots, they have higher net promoter scores. And what I liken to this is a digital commerce experience. historically, I'm talking 1990s, 2000s, was kind of a lonely experience, because it's you in a store on your screen, doing your own checkouts and browsing and doing stuff. Here, when you have your bot next to you, it's like being in a real store and being able to ask questions to a personal shopper. That personal shopper is going to follow you around the website and ask you questions and help you find things and make recommendations.

So for those super high end shoppers that may have a real life personal shopper at Nordstrom's or Neiman's or something like that, imagine that now at scale, for everybody on the web and with more product information than any one single personal shopper could have. I get excited about that. I've seen some early, not just proof of concepts, but seen some early rollouts of this. The data is pretty incredible, and so I get excited about what AI can do for all different portfolio companies. These aren't just consumer companies.

These are industrial technology and healthcare companies. There's just so much opportunity. We're just scratching the surface from where we are today.

I'm like, all right, I'll do this at night after work. Sure enough, this thing solved my problem in 40 seconds. I was thrilled. I was like, this is great. Normally, this has been 30 minutes waiting on the phone and me getting frustrated for a whole host of other reasons, and it just solved it.

The future is bright on these things. Derek. Maybe, as we bring our conversation home, the last couple of things I'd love to get your perspective on is a life hack and a book.

I'm curious. if you think about almost like a business life hack, what are one of the things that you would think about that would make the operating executive, the operating partners, which is standard operating procedure now and required in private equity, something that would make them just a little more effective at their job and give them the ability to have greater impact?

But I think all of that actually makes you better. What I mean by that is, I had a blog early in my business career that really meant nothing other than to me. I was just sharing my commentary on all the digital media news that was going on in the ecosystem. When I joined Bain Capital, I turned that blog into a newsletter. It's not indexed in Google, but it's purely a newsletter that anyone can subscribe to, called The Operating Partner.

What I love about that, what I love about it is, I put hypotheses out to the market, and people agree with them, and they don't. It makes my hypotheses so much better. I learn from thousands of subscribers why I'm right or why I'm wrong. If I'm wrong, that's where I learn a ton about, which is like, Hey, Darren, have you thought about something this way? Or, Hey, Darren, have you thought about something that I read what you wrote?

I think you're shortchanging it. Have you thought about this factor? To be honest, it makes me better. It allows me to think openly and share. The other thing, too, is in this world where people want to share ideas with like-minded individuals, or we're in the business of working with founders, CEOs, and boards, and they want to work with people who share a common interest, vision, or the way they see the world, that allows people to find me.

When people read my newsletter, they know what I'm interested in. It helps self-select the right inbound to me, because people know if I'm interested or not. I would say the operating partner today, or whatever it was called before, I just met so many amazing people at all levels. I'm talking about students in high school that are looking to like, What do we do next? Looking for career advice, all the way up to Fortune 100 CEOs that somehow got my newsletter and they're like, Hey, thanks for writing about us.

I'd love to break bread. Let's go chat. That's been a life hack for me, or a business hack for me, because one, opens communication. Two, it helps me refine my ideas. And three, I just never know what comes in my inbox next from it.

So it keeps me on my toes and it's been fun.

And I'd go, No, you're right. Or, No, that's a good idea. And she's like, Why do you say yes with no? And I was trapped in this level of thinking, which then extended to like this stealth thinking, like I got to always be undercover, because if they know, then it's not gonna be one in 200, it'll be one in 300.. And I was trapped in that vicious circle.

And one of the most liberating things that helped me evolve, and Lord knows I've got a long way to go. It was one of those things where you're like, I was freed from that. And I'd learned to do things like my What I Wish I Knew newsletter that I'll send out just because someone said, Hey, why don't you send this to us? Okay, but I would never dare do that when I was in PE. Or things like these podcasts, where more equals more, you can kind of free yourself from that zero-sum mentality.

I love that you're sharing that. And I think it's extremely important, really for anyone, but also the future of the PE industry. The next thing I'd love is we kind of bring it home here, Darren, is what's one of your favorite business or personal books that you've read over time? And what are?

This is a CEO going through building a pen computing company. And every single day, he's checking and writing in his diary. And what's amazing to me is the amount of business lessons that this gentleman's learning along the way. He's the CEO, you'd think CEOs know every business lesson there is. No, they don't.

You're just humbled by what he's learning as he goes through building this company. You learn about, this is a company that goes from zero to 100 really fast. It's playing into macro trends that are on the right side of history. At the time, not anymore today. You learn about scale, because you're playing into that.

The third, and I won't give it away too much, but you learn about failure. You put all three of those together. And there's a lot of business lessons in that. I guess the book that I always loved growing up in the grade school was Catcher in the Rye. The way that J.D.

Salinger wrote that book, to me, in almost a conversational-like tone, that use of English in that book would never stand up at Oxford or any other literary school. But it was written in a literary tone that I actually have adopted ever since I read that book. That's my style. When I read Startup by Jerry Kaplan, it was very similar. It just hit me.

I was like, wow, I haven't bonded with a book since I read Catcher in the Rye like this. Just the conversation and reading this diary and understanding what's going through a CEO's mind was just fascinating. I haven't gone back to read it in the last 15 years, but I did read it in the mid-2000s as I was starting another business. It's a bunch of humble pie, and you learn a lot from it. So I always recommend it to anyone starting a business or thinking about starting a business.

There are a lot of lessons in that book that you can learn from and hopefully not make the.

The thing, particularly in people who are listening to this and come on a private course, is that you're never allowed to fail. It's the most daunting thing, because you can't take chances. It turned me, at least, I felt like in this pressure pot. I've got to evolve, but I'm not allowed to fail. I've got to do all these other things.

It's just like this vicious circle you get caught in, in this kind of washing machine. What you're articulating is exactly what I felt like. I went through. The biggest mind shift I had to go through in starting. Blue Wave was being comfortable with failure.

The flip side of that coin was asking for help. Once I figured that out, then it became something that was so liberating, freeing, and fun. People have always asked me, I think particularly peers of mine from other P firms back in the day, they're like, what's it like doing a startup and doing your own thing? And I was like, well, it's the highest highs and the lowest lows seven times a day, but I wouldn't trade it for anything else.

What you shared just brought me back, not only to the eight years ago, but to the current exhilaration of doing these things. That is a really great recommendation and will be at the top of my book pile on the side of my table here. Well, Darren, this has been a phenomenal conversation. here. I've learned all sorts of things I wish I knew before, and I'm much better for it now.

So thank you, thank you, thank you so much for taking some time out of your day and sharing some of the insights that you've gleaned, no doubt over some hard-earned lessons.

If you enjoy the Karma School of Business, a free way to support the show is to follow in five-star rate. It really helps us when you do this, so thank you in advance. In the meantime, if you need to be connected with the world's best in class, private equity grade, professional service providers, independent consultants, interim executives that are deployed by the best business builders in the world, give us a call or visit our website at bluewave.net. That's B-L-U-W-A-V-E, and we'll support your success. Onward.