Welcome And Meet Zook

SPEAKER_01 0:01

Welcome to another episode of the Leadership Insight Podcast with your sponsor, Cofinancial Group. I'm your host, Chad Coe. Success in leadership isn't just about the decisions we make today, it's about the legacy we build for tomorrow. On this show, we talk to the leaders from around the country who are open to sharing their wisdom, insights to help us become better. Mark Zucker, today, as we call him Zook, is an entrepreneur who founded Zookbinders, a high-quality wedding album manufacturer in 1995. And when the wedding photography industry was disrupted by technology in the 2000s, he reduced cost by hiring back office talent from the Philippines. Today, Zook and his partner Sherry to launch their own outsourcing company in 2017, MCVO Talent, which helped companies reduce costs by providing office talent from, you guessed it, the Philippines. They typically save companies $20,000 to $30,000 per employee. Zook is a mentor to young entrepreneurs and a frequent speaker on topics such as innovation, finding your niche, and helping small businesses improve profits. Mark is a longtime friend. We like to call him Zook here on the show. So please, how are you doing today?

SPEAKER_00 1:32

Doing great, Chad, and thanks for uh pronouncing my nickname properly.

SPEAKER_01 1:37

It's been taking me years of practice, but I'm here and I do it. And you know, when we talk about leadership, I've never been a nickname person, even though my name is Charles, and everybody calls me Chad. I've never really called people by their nickname, but you I've made a conscious effort to do that.

SPEAKER_00 1:56

I appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah. Well, it matters to you, and that's

Early Hustles And Learning Rejection

SPEAKER_01 2:00

what I care about. Going back to the Zookbinder days, was that the first entrepreneurial experience you've had? Or did you do stuff before that?

SPEAKER_00 2:09

I mean, there was always a lot of side businesses growing up. I think my first job was delivering newspapers when I was nine or ten. And I kind of like the idea of being my own boss and having my own hours and doing a good job and getting a Christmas tip at the end of the year. So it's a good thing.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

So I want to start, I want to hold on. I want to start with the fact that you delivered newspapers because I think that people in their 30s have no idea that we used to be hired help in our in our 10 to 15-year-old getting on a bicycle and delivering newspapers to your local doors. I mean, to think about that today, I don't even know that people even read paper newspapers anymore.

SPEAKER_00 2:54

It was it was a great start. I have a brother who's a year older than me, so I pretty much followed in his footsteps. He had the paper route. We grew up in New York and we delivered the New York Post. And we'd come home from school, and there was about a bundle of 60 newspapers, and my route was four buildings. And I dropped them off at everybody's door. And on every Friday I would knock on the door and say, Paperboy collection, and I would get my nickel or dime tip, which was a big deal back in the day.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

So that's the start. And you know what's interesting for me, similar to that, is I used to do Boy Scouts, and I wanted to win the bicycle. And I went door to door and sold popcorn, and of course, everybody said yes. You had very little rejection then. I won the bicycle and it felt so good, but I made it a habit of walking door to door and being okay with that because I had a goal in mind, and that started when I was what, 11 or 12 years old. And I think that that's a really good way to you know enter into the next phase is as entrepreneurs, what did you do after that?

SPEAKER_00 4:05

Just a lot of odd, you know, just a lot of odd jobs through high school. You know, I just felt like we were always doing entrepreneurial things, even if they weren't actual businesses. I I didn't do so well working for other companies. I, you know, worked for a pizzeria one summer delivering pizzas and a bunch of other jobs that lasted about a week or two. So as I kind of rewind, I realized that my career path was always pointing towards something entrepreneur. My dad was an entrepreneur, I worked with him for many years, and I think it's in the family genes.

SPEAKER_01 4:39

Okay, I do love that. So share with us then how did you get into the Zookfinder photo album business?

Launching Zookbinders With A Plan

SPEAKER_01 4:45

And what was the catalyst to being able to build that?

SPEAKER_00 4:49

So my dad had a so my dad had a wedding album manufacturing company in New York, worked there for seven years, got married, had a had a kid, decided I don't want to spend the rest of my life in New York. Great place to be from, just didn't want to be there anymore. So my wife, who's now my ex-wife, was from Chicago, so we figured let's try Chicago and signed a six-month lease, figured we'd take a pit stop and figure out what we were gonna do. And before I know it, I was starting my own business in Deerfield, Chicago suburb, and had it for 29 years. You know, I had a lot of industry knowledge, I knew the space, and it just seemed like the right thing to do.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

So, so share with me, if you will. I understand having a business, but I I get I I find it that when you start having employees, call it five through a hundred employees, that now you're becoming a manager, now you're becoming a leader, you have to start to manage payroll, you have to start managing taxes, you have to start managing rent for a warehouse, you have to buy manufacturing equipment. Take me through the process a little bit, if you will, of the early years of what that looked like.

SPEAKER_00 6:03

So I was always a really good numbers guy, spreadsheets. I put together before I even started the company because we needed SVA financing to help jumpstart it. So I put together a 10-year plan of how much money we'd lose in the first two years that we would break even by year three, and by year four, we'd start to make a little bit and it would get better from there. And what's eerie is we actually hit those numbers almost to a month, like the amounts that I said we were going to lose in year one and year two, which were honestly terrifying. I mean, there was a time where our cash flow was really bad, both personally and professionally. We were all in on it. And then after year two, things started turning, and by year three and four, we were doing okay and paying off the loan. So it's really just a lot of financial discipline. I feel like a lot of entrepreneurs that don't make it don't really have the finance gene or the numbers gene. And that's so important. So I was always, you know, you talk about managing people, never been my strength. You know, I'm just not great at it, but I've always been able to hire people who were much better at that skill than me. I was always a front-of-the-house guy, sales, marketing, and then finance, keeping an eye on the money. And I always look for partners who had the other, those other skill sets that I didn't have and still don't have many years later.

Scaling Up Then Digital Disruption

SPEAKER_01 7:25

So as we talk about the photo album business, which we'll talk about how you exited in a little bit, how many square feet did you have? How many employees did you have? And what did that look like in the way of revenue as you were building it? What did that how did that look and how did that feel?

SPEAKER_00 7:44

So we started off in a multi-tenant warehouse building with 4,500 square feet and four employees. At our peak, we took over six units. We literally just moved laterally. Every time a business neighbor moved out, I took their space, whether we needed it or not, because I was always paranoid. What if we do need it? The thought of moving was not something I wanted to deal with. At peak, we were close to 30,000 square feet. We had a lot of automated equipment, we had just over 100 employees, eight low eight-figure revenue, and business was great until it wasn't when it got disrupted by digital technology. It's an interesting business. We made wedding albums and we sold B2B to professional photographers. And before the digital photography days, there were three photographers in every town. Everybody had enough business. All the high-end studios or those that valued quality came to us and we grew 20, 30 percent every year until about 07, 08, things got disrupted. All of a sudden, there was a lot of different types of photographers. You didn't need to be a, you know, you could get a digital camera and you didn't have to be as good. And the prices were lower and just the whole industry collapsed.

SPEAKER_01 9:00

If you could do it over again in 08, 9, and 10, is there anything that you could have changed that could have helped you succeed looking back?

SPEAKER_00 9:13

We probably could have offshored some of our labor sooner. We were always focused on automation. You know, today companies are all focused on automation and AI and how to simplify. Because we were a manufacturing company, everything was built around how we can improve. You know, it's kind of like the Henry Ford model with the stopwatch. How can we improve this process? How can we improve quality? There wasn't really much we could have done in terms of the industry. We saw that professional photographers as an industry were less interested in buying albums. And we sought some partnerships. We worked with companies like Shutterfly and some of the other big consumer businesses. That was really our strategy to offset the decline. And it worked for a while, but at the end of the day, there just wasn't enough demand for, and we also acquired a few of our competitors that went out of business before we did. But I think the big thing would probably have been to offshore back office labor. We had at one point four or five people in our IT team, very expensive. And that was actually our first hire overseas to the Philippines. I wish we had done it about three, four years earlier.

Selling While Building A New Company

SPEAKER_01 10:20

So when you decided to sell, what was that process like? Because at some point you're beating your head against the wall, the revenue is not coming in. I ran out of ideas to be able to help you, and you're like, I'm gonna sell it one day.

SPEAKER_00 10:36

So part it was part of it was watching the business decline, which you know, for any entrepreneur, a friend of mine described it as he said, Zucker, your business is like a melting ice cube, and at some point it's just gonna evaporate. So the thought was always to exit while it was still viable and and and sell it to somebody who was looking to build up their album business. And as it turned out, we found a company that they're that was in the same space that had a small wedding album team, and they were able to increase their business pretty significantly by acquiring us. They got all the manufacturing and all the know-how. But it was it was really also about when we started the outsourcing business, it was 2017. We just wanted to make sure that that was in a good place before we unloaded the wedding album. It was really hard managing two businesses at once.

SPEAKER_01 11:28

Hold on, wait a second. Time out. Let's hear this. So before you decide to sell, you start another business with your partner, you figure out that that's gonna work, you're making a living with the new business outsourcing, MVCO, MCVO, and now you found a buyer strategic for the wedding album business. Correct. It might have not been, it might, there might not be a more perfect story to you getting out of that business.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

Yeah, I mean, it's it's something we we could have sold years prior, but I really just wanted to make sure the new business, even though I was very optimistic, I just wanted to wait for it where it had a certain amount of momentum, where I felt it was sustainable. It's hard to make that decision when your business is three, four years old. But once we got to five, six years, we felt like, okay, this is a really solid business. Our clients are happy, we're doing a good job, we have pretty steady growth, and it just felt like the right time. I also felt like because we had one business that was growing and one that was declining, we were really cheating both businesses by not giving them our full attention.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

So it's really almost just amazing that you were able to do that the way you did, and that Sherry was able to run the MCVO outsourcing while you were building this. What is your day like? Are you putting in 14, 18 hours a day?

SPEAKER_00 12:58

Yeah, not quite, but a lot of hours. I mean, you know, the joke with the entrepreneur is we only work a half a day, 12 hours a day. And you know, because the offshoring business, there's our our staff is overseas in the Philippines, where it's 13 hours ahead of Chicago, it's just nonstop. I mean, we're just always in touch. There's business hours where we're talking to our clients that are mostly in the US, and then there's all the staff, which happens before and after business hours. So it's a lot, and it is definitely made things more manageable once we reliable part ways with the album company.

SPEAKER_01 13:35

So looking back, and now that you're in this business, is there anything about this business that you would be doing different?

SPEAKER_00 13:46

So for the outsourcing business?

SPEAKER_01 13:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:49

You know, part of the fun of starting a business, and and I'm really going to take a page out of software development. You know, there's the three stages. You come up with an idea, you put it out to the marketplace, you let them tell you what you got right and what you got wrong, and then you go back and iterate. And it's just this constant, you know, reinventing. I tell the team all the time, even though we're nine years into it, we have to always remember we're a startup. And I'll be saying this in 10 and 20 years. Because when you have a startup mentality, you never tell clients, well, we do this this way because this is the way it's always been done. I mean, that's the worst thing that anybody wants to hear. So we iterate. I mean, opportunities, you know, there were certain things that were in our original business plan that came true. And then there were other opportunities that just kind of, you know, blew onto our desk, and we took those. And so we're just constantly, you know, it's hard to be critical of what we would have done differently because we're just constantly iterating things that we thought were great three, four years ago. We might look at today and say, you know what, it's not as great as it was. The world has changed, or, you know, whether it's due to AI, environment, conditions, state of the economy, things are just constantly in flux.

SPEAKER_01 15:02

So,

What MCVO Talent Actually Does

SPEAKER_01 15:03

so your whole business now is finding people to work at companies, typically in the United States, that want, I'm guessing, accounting, graphic design, marketing, sales. You'll tell me if I'm right or wrong. What are some other things that are highlighted in the business that you're providing?

SPEAKER_00 15:25

We have a lot of executive assistants. You know, most of our clients are small, privately owned businesses. They could be 1 million to 200 million. And a common theme is the owner is just way over taxed and doing so many things. So I hired my first executive assistant three and a half years ago. It's been a godsend. And that's really become one of our key positions, just hiring either an executive assistant for the CEO or owner or a right-hand slash admin for C levels, just to give them some bandwidth and some of their freedom back. We also do a lot of work in healthcare. That's a big part of our business. We work with a lot of medical practices, handling medical billing and patient intake and scheduling. A lot of the back, you know, the Philippines has an enormous talent pool of medical. I mean, you go to, at least here in Chicago, if you go to a hospital, there's probably a one in four chance that a nurse that's taking care of you is Filipina. I mean, they're there just, you know, there's a lot of Philippines in nursing. So healthcare has been a really good area for us, too.

SPEAKER_01 16:34

And so, do you have accounting practices in your area? Like, give me maybe your three or four top areas that people are hiring for, and then I want to talk about how we get onboarded with the right people for the personalities.

SPEAKER_00 16:50

So, accounting and bookkeeping is our number one service. It's about a third of all positions. And within that, we have two basic categories. We help companies that might have an accounting staff of one, two, or three. It could be the owner is effectively serving as the CFO and owner. And they hire a bookkeeper from us to handle all the month-end bookkeeping and all the clothes and all the higher level stuff. We also get hired for accounts payable, payroll processing, pretty much any accounting position that's not a strategic position. We don't provide CFOs, but we start at the controller level and go down to accountant, bookkeeper, clerk, et cetera. The other half of the of that group is CPA firms. There's a small niche of maybe 3 to 5% of all CPA firms that offer bookkeeping as a service to small businesses. And we do a lot of work for them. So they'll come to us, you know, some company, and in many cases, they're new to offshore, they've never done it. They might have four bookkeepers onshore, they try it with us, it works out great. Three months later, if somebody leaves or there's transition, they'll call us up and add a second or a third. But CPAs are really a it's a really good vertical for us because the work is very similar. I mean, it's I mean, I think we have close to 100 bookkeepers and accountants that are supporting CPA firms right now.

SPEAKER_01 18:17

Of the 300. So we're gonna get to that. So it's not for cost cutting that they're hiring, they're hiring because they're finding really good quality people. And the cost cutting is a natural benefit to working with someone in the Philippines?

SPEAKER_00 18:33

So, yeah, mostly yes. So when we first started the company, which was pre-COVID, the number one reason why companies called us was they were looking to reduce their cost. Either they're under financial pressure or they're growing and they don't want to take on debt. But since the pandemic, I'd say there are more calls for I just need to fill a hole. I don't have talent in my area that has the skill set that I need, whether it's healthcare or an accountant. And yes, it's nice that you could save me some money, but I just need somebody really good. So that model has really flipped. And now it's just become more common. I mean, nine years ago, offshoring for small businesses was still kind of new. Now it's a lot more common, especially with COVID. I mean, you know, the the number one objective objection used to be I love my staff. I'm just concerned about culturally how that would look, where we can call these spontaneous meetings now, all of a sudden we have somebody offshore that we'll never see. That's probably really nice and really qualified, but we can't interact face to face. Well, fast forward today with all the hybrid and and a lot of virtual companies, that's no longer an issue.

Managing 300 People Without Chaos

SPEAKER_01 19:46

So you're working with over 300 employees, you have different levels of communication and leadership. I find this to be impressive as a small businessman yourself. Share with me what are some of the headaches to getting to 300 and how many people are managing the employees to make sure they show up, they do their work, and that you don't have pushback from the companies that hire you.

SPEAKER_00 20:13

It was harder when we were smaller, because when we were smaller, it was hard to have a department head or an accounting supervisor when we had four accountants. And now that we're a little bit bigger, each department. So, for example, accounting and bookkeeping has three full-time supervisors that are not tied to a client. They help out with recruiting, with performance evals, they're there for escalations if there's a problem. And we have the same thing with healthcare. Uh, we also have a photo editing team and a and a video editing team. Most of our teams have two leaders. We have a manager and a team lead, so that we have contingency. And we just always make sure that we, you know, we stay ahead of the curve there. We promote a lot from within. So the headaches are less today than when we were smaller

Why Clients Should Start Small

SPEAKER_00 21:00

and more vulnerable.

SPEAKER_01 21:02

And and so, what would a headache be to you? Like if I were to call you up and say, I need 25 employees to manage the different departments of my company, how quickly can you get us onboarded? And how do we make sure that they're the right fit for our company?

SPEAKER_00 21:17

25 is generally a big number for us. I mean, I would say our average client has between one and six staff. We have a couple that are in double digits, but typically companies will hire, they'll start with one. And, you know, I take all the discovery calls, all the initial staffing assessments. And a lot of time, like if you called me up as much as I love you, Chad, and if you said to me, I need 25 people, I would say, let's pump the brakes. This is all new. Let's start with one really good one, give you a great experience, and then we can hire two, three, and four. And then after that, we can hire you know five through ten. But we really need to take baby steps and get them integrated properly.

SPEAKER_01 21:59

So most People that are running a business, they want to grow, they want to have a thousand employees, they want two thousand. Are there any systems in your future that you could think about where you could onboard 10 at a time and go to 20? Like, are you working behind the scenes as a leader who's been an entrepreneur for many years to be able to do that? Or do we really want to start small like that ongoing?

SPEAKER_00 22:25

You know, that's really more of a bigger company. Like if, you know, for example, if United Airlines wants to stand up 100 new reps, we're probably not the right company. We're really dialed into small businesses. If the positions are all the same, like if a company wanted to hire 10 bookkeepers because they have a very large business, as long as they're all the same, it's a whole lot easier than hiring 10 separate positions. Right. I mean, we've done some bulk recruiting before. We have one client that has 20 something of the same position, and we have a standing order with them of one to three every month. And they said just keep recruiting, and we want to always have talent available. So when we have when we get a new client, we can just press the button and have you onboard somebody in two weeks. But I think you know, starting up with a staff of 25, it's not so easy. And I'm not sure that's the best thing for a small business, anyway.

SPEAKER_01 23:24

I love it. So it sounds to me like you have a niche and you love the Philippines, you love the process and how it's working. How often are you going there? And how many of the employees have you met

Working With Filipino Culture Well

SPEAKER_01 23:35

personally?

SPEAKER_00 23:37

So a little backstory. My wife Cherry, who's also my business partner, was born and raised in the Philippines, which is how we got involved in this business. She joined me at Zookbinder's the Wedding Album Company, was our COO and ran all operations. And it was her idea back in 2010 to hire some offshore staff from the Philippines as a way to reduce costs. So we were we were actively high working with Filipinos for six, seven years before we started the business. So we really understood it. Filipino culture is very different than American culture. It took me a little bit while you know a while to get used to it. On the first phone calls, everybody was calling me Sir Mark and Sir Zook. And I was like, Sir Zook, I'm don't think I'm worthy of that kind of respect. But you know, the culture is very respectful. Cherry and I go there twice a year to visit. You know, she also has family there, so that's an executive assistant. They're supporting the owner. If it's a bookkeeper or an accountant, they're probably reporting to head of finance. It depends. It's it just depends on the size of the organization. A lot of times they're doing customer service or what's called a virtual assistant where they're providing general admin help. So oftentimes they're client-facing. And so they'll usually meet, I'm sorry, they'll they'll usually meet the owner of the company during when we present candidates because we really like them to put a face together.

SPEAKER_01 25:04

And so I believe then we're also doing leadership training and skill building so they could become better at communicating and working in the states. And then what kind of training do you have? Because I would imagine that if they become excellent in Excel, that they end up making more money, they get promoted, and they have better opportunities.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

Right. So we we have a division called Classroom Cafe. It's our internal training, it's kind of like McDonald's hamburger you. And we do a lot of internal training. It could be it could be on advanced Excel. Right now, there's been a lot, a lot of push on AI. If I look at our schedule for the last six months, it's probably two-thirds AI-related training. We've had most of our companies certified on that. But we also do a lot of training on how to speak like an American. That was actually my favorite one. We did that a little over a year ago. And, you know, teaching Filipinos who would say accountant, and we would say, no, it's not an accountant, it's an accountant. Because that's how we say here in the States. We had everybody go through and say, accountant. So it's also just how to speak, how to how to better react to an American when an American says this, this is what they mean, and just understanding, you know, direction and tempo and culture.

Training, AI, And Startup Mentality

SPEAKER_01 26:20

So, so looking out five or 10 years, what is your business goals for five or 10 years from now as you continue to build? I think you have such a presence in Chicagoland that people are kind of knocking your door down to work with you, right? You're and we'll talk about some of our stuff that we do together, but what's maybe the goals that you have?

SPEAKER_00 26:41

It's really to help as many companies as we can. You know, there were there were like in every industry, there's the early adapters. A lot of our initial clients came to us. They were from the wedding photography space. They were high-volume wedding photographers that I had, you know, Cherry and I have had relationships for many years. So when we started this and said, hey, do you need help with photo editing and video editing? It was a no-brainer because there was already trust. But as we've grown, it's, you know, it's just a lot of new relationships. I'd say half our business today comes from referrals, people that know us, which is always good. But you also have those that were really stuck on, I'm having lunch tomorrow with a CPA firm in Milwaukee who is pushing back against offshore. And then we had a conversation a month ago and said, you know what, I really need to revisit this. You said you were gonna come up and take me out to lunch, let's have that meeting. So it just depends. Sometimes it takes a little longer until somebody's in the right mindset.

SPEAKER_01 27:39

So for yourself, as we get older, are you thinking about selling this business one day? Are you gonna continue to do it until eternity? Like, what are your thoughts around the next step for this business?

SPEAKER_00 27:50

I love this business. I tell my wife at least once a week how much I enjoy it because I get to talk to owners all day long. That's who I'm interacting with. I talk to other people who have the same problems as you and I and other entrepreneurs that are on the podcast. We're all trying to figure out how to hire the best people and come up with the best products and services and have the best vendor partners. So if we can be part of that ecosystem, it really feels good.

SPEAKER_01 28:17

Excellent.

Entrepreneur Groups And 10X Thinking

SPEAKER_01 28:18

So I want to transition. You and I have an entrepreneurial dinner that we do maybe five times a year with about 25 guys or 30 guys in the group. What's your highlight from those kind of meetings? And why would you encourage other people around the country to create and have entrepreneurial entrepreneurial groups?

SPEAKER_00 28:37

You know, there's a really small part of the population that are entrepreneurs. And we're really misfits. You know, we think differently. I listened to a lot of podcasts, and I heard one recently. They said, you can always tell who's going to be an entrepreneur. Those are the ones who were the C and B students in school. They weren't paying attention because they didn't think that the structure setup worked and they wanted to change things. And I feel like, well, that was validation for my not so impressive GPA throughout my academic career. But I really believe that it's a little bit lonely. You know, if in your circle of friend, everybody has jobs and they work for companies, whether they're, you know, high up or not, it's just different being an entrepreneur. You know, until you've sweated making payroll at least once or twice in your life, it's just a different world. So I feel like when you get a bunch of entrepreneurs together, there's just an automatic you can relate on different things. You can also relate to the to the to the work-life balance. We all have those same issues. Because we're entrepreneurs, we can do personal things during the business day, but we also spend time when it's quote, personal time to do business. Not everybody understands that, but another entrepreneur understands that. And especially if you're in it with your partner, I feel like that makes it a lot easier.

SPEAKER_01 29:55

Or, you know, it could even be harder because it depends on the relationship. But I know that you and your partner have a great relationship and that you take the time to listen and talk. And part of this is because you're in the strategic coach, which is a Dan Sullivan model group, which helps you learn about family and balance and free time and focus days.

SPEAKER_00 30:15

Right, right. They force you to put together, you know, how long you're going to live and then work backwards, okay, X years old. I have another 30, 40 years. What do I want to accomplish? Which is great.

SPEAKER_01 30:26

What's your highlight? You've been part of the Strategic Coach now for a while, and you and I both recommend it for entrepreneurs that want to grow and have freedom. What they what's your highlight from the strategic coach?

SPEAKER_00 30:39

I I would say the the book that they gave us, which is called 10X is easier than 2X. And when I first saw the title of that book, I'm like, how can growing a company 10 times the size be easier than two times the size? But what they explain in the book, it's really a mind shift. You know, in order to have a larger company, you have to have a self-managing company. You, you know, Chad, you, me, we can't be doing all the things that we did when we started the business. We just have to hire great people and give them the direction. It's still our vision and our direction and our and our motivation, because usually we're the guys who are pretty type A and pushing things, but we can't accomplish things unless we have great people around us. And that that's been a just a lot of really good reinforcing.

SPEAKER_01 31:29

I really I love the idea around that, and I love the books that they put out with Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan and and Joe Polish and many others because for me it's about thinking big, it's thinking abundant. And Mark and Zook, you know this as well as anyone. I have the Abundant Life Roadmap, which takes people through their goals, their values, and helps them align with what their future life looks like. And again, I'm happy to do that with people. And you also know that on cofinancial.com, I have your financial dream house. And for anybody that wants it, they can go on and download it for free. And again, it's something that's there for you to be able to have a blueprint for your future.

Hobbies, Contact Info, And Closing

SPEAKER_01 32:08

Before we wrap up, I know that you're a little bit of a non-workaholic. What do you love to do when you're not working?

SPEAKER_00 32:16

So I I have I can talk to anybody about business, sports, or music 24-7. And it could literally be if you and I went on vacation chat and you want to talk about business for nine days in a row, I'm happy. If you want to talk about sports, I can have that conversation or music. So I'm a basketball guy, I'm a big NBA fan. I still play in a Sunday morning game. We have guys in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, which is always interesting. When I'm not doing that, I play drums in a funk band, which I started about three and a half years ago, which is a lot of fun. And they're good hobbies. They're really good hobbies. That said, I don't know that, you know, I talk to a lot of people like, oh, do you have a time in mind when you're going to retire? Like, I don't have hobbies that are sustainable or or interesting enough that I would ever want to retire. I really enjoy working. I enjoy, I enjoy business.

SPEAKER_01 33:10

I love all of that. And I love the funk band, and I love the fact that you're good as a drummer. I've been able to watch you now a few times, and you really get people moving and shaking.

SPEAKER_00 33:21

I appreciate that. You've been one of our earliest fans.

SPEAKER_01 33:24

Yeah. And with that, what's the best way for people to find you if they want to start getting and knowing more about this whole outplacement world?

SPEAKER_00 33:33

So we have a web, we have a website. Our company is mcvotalent.com, four letters talent.com. You can find me on there. I handle all the discovery calls, or as we're now calling them, staffing assessment calls. And I'm happy to talk to anybody who's thinking about it, exploring it, just wants a lay of the land, even if they're working with somebody else, they just want another opinion. I'm happy to jump in. And like you, Chad, I'm a giver. I don't look for anything in return. So if I can help somebody point them in the right direction, I'm happy to. And if we end up working together, wonderful. If not, I'm happy just to help.

SPEAKER_01 34:12

Fantastic. On that note, Chad Coe, co-financial group, we're going to keep doing these podcasts. If you like it, please subscribe, please share, and please go to my website, cofinancial.com, and download my free book, Your Financial Dream House. Zook, thank you so much for being on the podcast, and I look forward to seeing you very soon.