How Entrepreneurs Can Build Scalable Companies That Last

Intro 0:06  

Welcome to the Growth + Exit podcast, where owners of privately held middle market companies talk about founding, scaling, and exiting their businesses successfully. Learn how to maximize and monetize your business on your own terms. Let’s get started.

Susan Kearney  0:31  

Hi, I’m Susan Kearney, and I’m the host of the Growth + Exit podcast, where owners and CEOs of private companies share their compelling stories about founding and scaling their businesses. The episode is brought to you by Newport LLC, a cadre of business founders, owners, C-suite executives, and investment bankers who help owners of privately owned companies build value in the company and frequently transition them to another family member or sell them in the market. Life-changing experiences for them, of course. Today, I’m talking with Todd Girvin. Todd is a serial entrepreneur. He’s been involved in a number of startups over the course of his career. Importantly, a co-founder and a CEO of a firm called Improving, and we’re going to learn more about that in just a second. He had a very successful exit from that organization. We’re going to learn how he did it. Since his exit, now he is a founder of Futuremakers and also a Vistage Chair. And we’ll learn toward the end of this interview about his vision for the future of leadership in businesses and how these two things come together. So, Todd, welcome. We’re really pleased to have you with us today.

Todd Girvin  1:41  

Thanks. It’s great to be here.

Susan Kearney  1:42  

Perfect. So, let’s start a little bit on the professional side, Todd, and just tell us a little bit about your professional background. How did you get started in in your career? What led you to become an entrepreneur?

Todd Girvin  1:57  

I didn’t really do it by choice. Not not too intentionally. I was a software developer. Went to school for that. Got involved in a work study program where there was some paperwork mix up, and they didn’t invite me back, and I didn’t have school plans. So I went and found a job, and I got a contract job doing some software testing and eventually software development, but I did the math and it didn’t make sense to go back to school. But then I started looking for permanent employment, and they wouldn’t hire me without a degree. So I kept doing contracting until I met up with a consulting firm that I really hit it off with, joined forces with them, worked there for a few years, and then just kind of my restless nature, entrepreneurial spirit. I started looking around for other things and got involved in a handful of different startups and was kind of a serial entrepreneur. One of which was a social networking thing right before Facebook launched. So you know, was great idea and would have been wonderful if the timing had been different. But when Facebook launched and kind of dashed our hopes of becoming a great social network, my buddy and I he reached out to me and said, “Hey, you want to go start a company together? And I said, “Yeah. What are we going to do? And he said, “I don’t know, but I have the perfect name. It’s called Improving. And of course, we both kind of knew what we wanted to do, which was software development consulting and the agile movement. If you’re familiar with that, was really just taking off, and we knew we wanted improving to teach and coach people on agile software development, and so yeah, that’s how we started improving together.

Susan Kearney  3:54  

Wow, that’s very interesting. You know, it’s funny. I had a startup once called Voxen, which was an online video syndication startup about the time YouTube starts, and I’m not a multi millionaire either. I didn’t time it quite unfortunately.

Todd Girvin  4:09  

Yeah, things that could have been.

Susan Kearney  4:12  

Yeah, well, I think you’ve done all right anyway. So, going through those years, is there a common thread or a purpose that runs through this career of yours, this professional time.

Todd Girvin  4:23  

No, there really wasn’t. It was I don’t know maybe the the young entrepreneurial desire to do something cool and different, and you know try to be leading edge, cutting edge. We found out that it was almost always the bleeding edge, right? We you would sometimes get funding, and sometimes it would be cut off. I think I was in the middle of another startup when 911 happened here in the D.C. area, and that dried up all investment and entrepreneurial activity. I moved back to Texas, where I grew up, and that’s when I started doing this. Social networking thing,

Susan Kearney  5:01  

neat, very neat. And so, let’s talk a little bit more about improving. Tell me about that business. What was it about, and why do you think it was successful?

Todd Girvin  5:12  

Partly, it was just really good timing. That Jeff’s intuition was absolutely right. You know, go start a consultancy around agile. The open source world was fully bought into the agile stuff, but the blue chip Microsoft, you know, large enterprises hadn’t yet figured out how important it was, and we adopted the Microsoft technology platform and taught agile, and we ended up being one of the only Microsoft partners, at least in the central district, that specialized in the agile movement. And so Microsoft would just bring us these deals where a customer wanted to learn or take a workshop or engage in some consultants. The customer would pay part, and the Microsoft would pay part, and we would discount our services and get an introduction to them. And almost every one of those opportunities turned into a long-term engagement. So we slowly grew our business from there.

Susan Kearney  6:17  

Yeah, that’s cool. And it’s in my experience, it’s you watch CEOs when you when you are at the helm of a business. It’s different than you might have thought. Tell me a little bit about the transition from yeah yeah you know employee consultant to CEO of a startup and growing it in a new area of the market.

Todd Girvin  6:39  

Yeah, there’s a term I like to call the entrepreneurial naivete, which is this assumption that things are going to be simple. You know, you’ll just pursue your vision and everything will work out. And it always turns out to be way more complex. That opportunities can drag you in the wrong direction. You have to be disciplined. Everything is more complex. There’s employees issues and and availability and I don’t know. It’s just always you know more intense and harder work than you thought it would be to get started. So I led the company as CEO and really partners with my co-founder for a few years. When I started to get frustrated, kind of burned out, and felt like I’m not the right person to run the company. And it just so happened that a good friend of mine was let go of his services firm, doing very similar stuff, agile development, but in the open source world. And I invited him to come in and lead the company, and he brought some fellows that we knew from another consulting firm, and ended up making a team of five that with Curtis at the helm instead of me, and we continued to grow from there. So I guess back to your question about that that transition, you know, you start off as maybe almost a solopreneur, or you know, a couple of guys in a startup, or whatever. We had a handful of people, maybe eight, with some contract consultants, and you know, at the time, I just felt like I wasn’t prepared to do all the marketing and the sales and the accounting and HR management and all of that stuff to grow the company because it was my first time, and I really welcomed Curtis to come in with that experience, and his team, and our other friends Barry and Rick, and then Jeff and I were there as the the original founders. So we kind of formed a new organization and considered all five of us co-founders in this new company moving ahead, and it transitioned, you know, into a much bigger company where we started hiring employees left and right, bringing in consulting opportunities, contract work through Curtis’s connections. We continued to work the Microsoft angle, and so we diversified so that we had more than one channel for business development and for hiring. We were hiring known people. We didn’t have to go through a lot of you know recruiting and selection because it was just people that wanted to work with us, and we wanted to work with them. And so I think we grew to 25 people pretty quickly after that,

Susan Kearney  9:42  

yeah, it takes a good deal of self awareness to step back from a position that you initiated and decide you’re not the right guy.

Todd Girvin  9:52  

Yeah, it helps if you’re not a egocentric, you know, super driver who wants to be all things to all people and has to prove himself. For me, that it was kind of natural to step back and say, you know, other people have done this before and they’re better at it than me. And so the story gets even more interesting from there. Actually, in that, you know, a few years down the road, we’re all working together, and Curtis realizes that he’s not prepared to take it to the next level, and he reached out and got coaching and joined a peer advisory board, and it transformed him completely. He loved it so much that he turned around and created a peer advisory group inside the company of the senior management, of which I was one of them. Yeah, and so we had curriculum and you know peer discussions and sharing like you would in an open peer advisory board, and it just was really transformative for me. I felt like I got an MBA on the job, and then we also bought our first branch company in Houston. So this was all in Dallas that we formed the company, and then we had an opportunity to buy a training company in Houston that was a good Microsoft partner, but didn’t have any consulting services. And so when we did that, I went to Houston to run that for a couple of years and work the Microsoft angle and transform it into a full services training and consulting and project work.

Susan Kearney  11:25  

Yeah, so I’m really intrigued by the notion of the five of you really be kind of leading the company and working together over the course of years. Were there any particular processes or guidelines or rules of the road that you put in place so that five of you could continue to work collectively, but also focus individually. How did that? How did that work?

Todd Girvin  11:48  

Yeah, we started board meetings inside the company. That was really senior leadership team, but you know wasn’t all the VPs in the company. It was the founders, and then if we you know when we acquired other branches, we would select maybe the president of that branch that we acquired to to be on the board. So we had an internal board and a regular cadence of meeting early on. It was every month, and then eventually we transitioned to quarterly meetings. So, but it was multi dimensional. That was kind of the top leadership thing. We did cultural stuff like having game night or movie day or talent shows or things to engage the employees and their families and really create a tight cultural environment that really kept people engaged. And we had a growth program that that we would reward people for taking courses or volunteering or teaching each other things or whatever that just kind of kept them engaged and kept them growing. And again, a lot of this came from Curtis and his advisory board bringing in ideas from the outside, but between the leadership and then the kind of systematic records of people’s performance and promotions, we got really systematic about recruiting, making sure we had good job descriptions and assessments, and then had you know small teams on the hiring review board and stuff like that. That that kept it very selective and proud of the quality of the people that we had on board, and looked at them for more things than just their coding skills. For example, if they were technical, or or their accounting skills, if they were an accounting firm or whatever, it was also personality fit and engagement with the rest of the company, so that we built the culture that we wanted.

Susan Kearney  13:57  

Yeah. Well, you know, people say culture is important, but yet many people don’t pay any attention to it, right?

Todd Girvin  14:02  

Yeah, it’s hard to translate from this is important to how am I actually going to do it. So again, I feel super-I don’t know-fortunate to have experienced that, right? That Curtis was bringing in these ideas from the outside, and we had great people that owned HR and kind of the cultural part of it, and accounting, and all of the different facets of the business. We managed to scale, delegate, and you know just have great engagement all through that.

Susan Kearney  14:39  

Yeah, tell me a little bit about you. Just said one of my magic words, which is delegate, and of course the the mirror to that is accountability. Tell me a little bit about how you how you invested delegation and accountability in your culture, because this is a challenge that a lot of first time entrepreneurs face. Right is holding knowing how to delegate appropriately and then holding people accountable. Tell me, what would you learn about that? Share your wisdom.

Todd Girvin  15:10  

Yeah, I think it’s kind of the biggest aspect of growing and scaling is that you constantly have to redesign the organization. So you’re writing new job descriptions or saying, okay, it’s time to turn this role into a full time role instead of you know part of the COO’s job. We’re going to hire a VP of HR or a VP of projects or something like that. And so we would continuously look for when is the right time to create a new role, write a job description, and set out a growth path. You know, a success path for that person when we hire them, so that we set expectations and had regular reviews, like quarterly personnel reviews, to check on their performance for our technical staff, our consultants that were out in the field. We would do a quarterly business review with each client and kind of run down the list of who, which consultants are engaged on your team. Give us quick feedback on what’s going on, what can they improve on, and you know, not just asking, do you have any issues, but you know, do a real retrospective. What’s going well? What could we do better? What do you absolutely hate? You know, what what do you love about us that we should never stop doing? Kind of a a conversation, and we would do that every quarter with every client, and that you know is why became important to have a a VP of projects or somebody who’s you know client relations who could move around and have those senior level conversations without it being the CEO’s job or the the COO’s job. So we had to learn when it was time to instill those practices, and then delegate it to people, and you know make it part of their their job description and their compensation model. Really, so we would always make part of you know majority of the compensation was fixed, but some small part of it was variable based on behavior and meeting goals.

Susan Kearney  17:23  

Yeah, it takes um a great deal of confidence to meet with your client on a quarterly basis and ask hard questions, not just the easy things, right? Not just you know back slapping over lunch and saying things are going great. So I really I love the fact that you guys did that. That’ll be that. That insight will be a big help, I think, to some of our listeners who have a you know a difficult time asking those hard questions and understanding you know maybe why they should.

Todd Girvin  17:50  

Yeah, you can have the the softer relationship building conversations first, but then you say, okay, I need to get down to business. I have some specific questions to ask you about this project or these people, and walk through that. And yeah, the clients usually really appreciate that. You, it’s something you can’t really do on the golf course. You need to, you know, sit down and and have you know your your tablet and you know write some answers so that they know they’re being heard and that you’re going to take that back to the group and affect some change to make things better. And our name of our company was improving, so you know it wasn just agile software development, continuous improvement of software, but it was continuous improvement of our people and our leadership and our teams and our practices for project management and all of that. So we considered continuous improvement a core competency that we had to continuously improve on,

Susan Kearney  18:49  

or change your name. Yeah, yeah. And so you, I mentioned another um hot word for me, which is leadership. And tell me through all of this at improving, founding it, being the CEO, becoming an SVP, acquiring all of that. How did your leadership evolve?

Todd Girvin  19:11  

It it was interesting and ad hoc. You know, it wasn’t. I don’t know if the entire time I was there, we had to explicitly hire somebody for a leadership role. We tended to grow that internally, or when we did an acquisition, there was leadership or people with leadership potential in place already, and we’d work with that and refine it. It evolved in part intentionally because we would write those job descriptions and start deploying our best practices for leadership management and reviews and holding people accountable and all of those you know keywords were kind of part of our. Mantra that we would roll out. It was part of the homogenization. If we acquired a company, we would set expectations before acquisition. This is how we do it, and they would often get excited. Oh, great! We’ve been struggling with that. We don’t have these practices in place. That’s part of our growth challenge. So they would welcome in those changes. We had one acquisition that didn’t do that. They wanted to continue running their own organization with just the little tagline of an improving company underneath. But we didn’t roll out our practices. We didn’t bring our conference that we ran to to do business development and other things, because they didn’t embrace the improving brand and mantra and and way to run things, and they stagnated for years on end until the founders of that branch finally let go and retired, and the next level of leadership stepped up and set and really embraced our best practices, and we’re ready for the transformation.

Susan Kearney  21:05  

Yeah, you mentioned acquisition as a growth strategy for you. A lot of owners of private companies think that sounds interesting and fun, or could be successful. How did you? How did you and your partners think about acquisition versus organic growth? What led you down that path, and what would you learn that you think would be super helpful for other people who are thinking about that?

Todd Girvin  21:34  

Because of our consulting services and the type of work that we did, and then you know also all of those things around culture and other things that we were doing, we became known as a great place to work within the Dallas area where we started, and eventually we did that with the other areas that we acquired into. So we looked at acquisition as a geographic expansion opportunity. We knew we didn’t want to start from scratch with two or three people or five people in a new city when we could just acquire a company, maybe get a collection of 2025, 50 consultants in that area, and have a you know geographic presence. We would roll out the brand name change and start employing our practices, like you know our movie night where we invited our clients, or our Agile.net conference where we would invite our own customers and prospective customers, and anybody from the industry could come be a part of it and hear the thought leadership. So we treated acquisition as a geographic expansion strategy, and then once we had a geography, we would grow organically. You know, just through good sales and delivery, and you know, satisfying customers, and again, building a great place to work that our people love to be at and wanted to be a part of.

Susan Kearney  23:08  

And it seems so many acquisitions don’t work, right? For sure, they don’t achieve the success, the metrics that people hope for. What was the special sauce you think that you folks develop that helps you do it successfully. Was it the geographic focus? Was it the culture you were so thoughtful about that you expanded? You know what was the key to your success there? Our

Todd Girvin  23:32  

very first acquisition was in Houston, as I mentioned. That was just a training company. It didn’t have the the consulting staff and the the project work that we was kind of our bread and butter, so we used that to acquire the Microsoft relationship in that region and buying a customer base of all the people that they had done training for. We knew we could reach out to them with consulting services, so that was extremely effective, just as an intentional strategy. And then, because I went down there to be president of that branch, I brought our intentional, you know, systematic approach to how we ran Dallas into Houston and kind of grew it from scratch. With all of the other branches, we really looked for cultural fit. In almost all cases, we were acquiring existing consulting firms and maybe introducing training as a new offering. But you know, 80% sometimes 90% of the revenue was consulting and project work, and so training became almost a lead generator. You know, we would do it as a loss to begin with until it became self-sustaining. But it would connect with far more customers that we could then go pursue and convert into project work. So. Combination of strategy and yes, absolute cultural fit. Really, the leadership there, and we made a mistake in our first, probably our fourth acquisition, that we didn’t realize until after the fact that the leadership didn’t want to change brand, didn’t want to change their strategy and approach. They didn’t want to adopt the improving way, and they just wanted the financial backing and to put the tagline that we’re an improving company. And so we learned our mistake, you know, our lesson from that mistake that we needed to be even tighter on our selection criteria moving forward.

Susan Kearney  25:39  

Yeah, yeah, it’s um, it’s interesting to me that it wasn’t until your fourth one that you had that experience. So you were doing a lot of things just naturally from muscle memory or whatever. That’s great. Um, that’s that’s neat to think about. So you exited from that company. What was the experience of exiting like For you,

Todd Girvin  26:02  

for me personally, it was. I guess I started getting the entrepreneurial itch again to go do something else. I had friends who were investors and entrepreneurs that were starting new opportunities, and as I was exploring those, or maybe soon after, I jumped to go do one of those activities. Of course, I was fully vested. I didn’t have golden handcuffs or anything, so I jumped to go do another startup. And so I kind of exited without a plan, other than I trusted that eventually Improving would, you know, its stock would be worth something. And not too long after that, a PE firm came in. I can’t remember exactly how they met. I think it was a almost a social kind of introduction. But when Curtis at Improving shared his goals and that they were doing growth through acquisitions, the PE firm was interested in backing that and helping them acquire new branches. And there was an opportunity there for them to buy out my equity, give me a true financial exit. They could take on more equity without diluting the company and promise to back these acquisitions. So it just kind of turned out great for everybody. And my co-founder Jeff, he did basically the same thing that he took a financial exit and went on to start a nonprofit and a public benefit company.

Susan Kearney  27:43  

Oh, neat! I love that. All right, let’s talk a little bit more about you personally, if you don’t mind. Where were you raised, and what was it like growing up? My

Todd Girvin  27:54  

dad was in the Air Force and moved around a bit. I think the three of us kids were all born in different states because of that, and we finally settled when I was eight years old in the Dallas area. So I consider myself a Texan for the most part. I don’t have the Texas accent of most people who grew up in Dallas, but that’s home. That’s where my my family still lives, and I was interested in software from a young age. Really, just dabbling on the computer. My dad was an engineer and bought us a PC early on. I taught myself to program, learning through magazine code and stuff like that. And then I would write programs to do my homework and stuff like that. That just you know gave me a reason. I probably worked five times as hard writing the program as if I had just done the homework. But I learned my homework really well because I had to test everything, and I learned how to program along the way. And eventually, I I built my mom a genealogy database, so because she was doing genealogical research on our family, and I built a database to do that. You know, long before the those things were available on the web. So, but in high school, my interest was in architecture, physical architecture of houses and buildings and stuff like that. I took vocational training there, and I heard that there was an advanced programming class, an AP class that would give you advanced placement credit for software development, so that you could go into college with credit already in programming, and I asked to take that test, and the teacher said, “No, no, no! Nobody who’s taken the course could possibly pass the test. And so told my parents; they were friends with the principal. He convinced her to let me take the test, and I did mod. Well, but probably wouldn’t have passed it. So she said, “Okay, I’ll let you take the test if you go through all this curriculum and learn on your own, which I did. Stud like crazy, got all prepared to take the sample test that she had collected for the last few years, and then I went in and took the test with everybody else, and that year, the test changed dramatically from the kind of data processing algorithms that she had taught to like graphic fill and recursive algorithms, like I had used in my genealogy program and other stuff that I knew by heart, and none of the people who had taken the class had ever learned from the curriculum because it was just completely different. So it turned out that I scored really well, possibly best in the high school, and had never taken a programming class. And so, when it came time to go to school to college. I started thinking: should I be a physical architect or should I be a software architect? And the path to be an architect was like six years of college and and then apprenticeship and all of that. It felt like a very long time to make serious money as an architect, and I could already do software development. So I decided to switch my degrees and go study computer science. And then, as I shared before, I got distracted with my work study program and never completed my degree and didn’t finish school.

Susan Kearney  31:37  

Yeah, well, I think you made the right decision. I’m married to an architect, and not only a long time and a lot of school and exams, but very few make much money. So, you know, I think technology was was good for you. And listening to you, I can see how you became an entrepreneur in business because of just listening to your path of picking things up and learning them yourself, and being curious, and you know that kind of thing. Those are all attributes of successful entrepreneurs, right?

Todd Girvin  32:09  

Yeah, I love solving problems, right? The architect kind of recognizing patterns and problems, and then learning how to solve the problems and do it with software. Just I got lucky that you know that was my skill and interest, and that was a growing field in the economy.

Susan Kearney  32:28  

Yeah, that’s great. Well, it turned out well for you. Congratulations! I know life is chaos for entrepreneurs because they’ve got a lot of plates at the office and community and family and whatever else, are there some daily rituals you’ve developed? Some life hacks that you think contribute to your ability to manage life and be successful.

Todd Girvin  32:51  

I definitely think physical fitness, you know, working out and exercising regularly is one of the three foundational things. Right, it’s a workout, healthy diet, and sleep well, and those all play off of each other. If you if you eat well, have a healthy diet, you know, don’t abuse caffeine or alcohol or other things that can make it so you don’t sleep well, then you can get into a virtuous cycle where you have high energy and focus, and you know can keep your wits about you, and you know don’t get too emotional when things crash because they certainly do sometimes. And so, I think for me, physical fitness was a big deal since I was in high school. I was a martial artist, and continue doing that for 20 years, and just being around good people that I really enjoyed having conversations with and talking about issues and opportunities and stuff with made me feel not alone. Right, that I had friends and colleagues, and it really felt almost like it was family of the company that I was building. And so, even when I wasn’t at the helm of the company, it just still felt like family and something that I wanted to be a part of. Until you know, I got the itch to go do something else, but I’m still friends with those people. They’re lifelong friends. They came to my wedding, and you know I reconnect with them regularly. So I think you know having that social environment and healthy psychology is really based on those three fundamentals of of eat well, sleep well, and exercise.

Susan Kearney  34:45  

Yeah, thank you for sharing that. How do you stay relevant in your professional knowledge? Are there people you talk to, websites, podcasts you listen to? How do you keep up with things?

Todd Girvin  34:57  

Yeah, so. When I left, I did a startup, and then my wife got an opportunity to move to D.C. to work for the government, and I came here and decided to do another startup on my own. Kind of failed to launch with that, and about then Vistage reached out to me and said, “You’ve done the executive thing and you’ve done the coaching thing. How about being an executive coach? And I was already dabbling with a friend of mine who worked at North Grumman had engaged me to coach his executive team on the agile mindset and how to employ agile practices in their leadership. And so I already had a taste of executive coaching and thought, yes, this could be a second career. I could do this. So when Vistage offered that opportunity, I gave it some serious thought, investigated, and decided, yeah, that’s what I want my second career to be. Well, then I did as I always do, which is immerse myself in the the opportunity, understand it as completely as I can. I started reading books and listening to podcasts, and I soak up all the information I can about you know leadership wisdom and techniques and financial things and cultural things and you know all the facets that that leaders need to work with today, and I feel like that helps me be a better Vistage chair and executive coach because that’s really the the domain where I want to be an expert now. And so, yeah, podcasts like Work Life with Adam Grant. I I know he’s moved on. He’s doing something else now. Your podcast on growth and exit. I absolutely love. I listen to a philosopher named Sam Harris who just has a very intentional and kind of rational approach to everything. He’s super curious about a lot of things, and you know has a mind approach to how to deal with stresses and challenges without being you know reactive and emotional and getting carried away with the extremes.

Susan Kearney  37:22  

Yeah, thank you. It’s been so much fun talking with you. Here’s my last question, which is, what is what would you like to share with your peers, other owners of private companies who are trying to figure out how to grow, how to scale, what they want to do, where they want to head. What do you want to save them? What are there potholes you want to help them avoid?

Todd Girvin  37:46  

I think the biggest thing is maybe losing your focus or drive or you know whatever you want to call it, your north star of where you’re going and why. And I think I suffered that a little bit, or more than a little bit, in my entrepreneurial journey, I have addressed that recently, where I’ve done some serious soul searching. I’ve heard you talk on previous episodes about your childhood and the things that you know affect you. I look back at my childhood and and my strengths and weaknesses and my passions and what I really wanted to do, and you know, like the company improving of continuous improvement, I decided I want to help entrepreneurs who are building a better future for generations to come. And so that means people who are intentional-they’re doing innovative things. They’re looking at what world do we want to live in and building that. So, you know, to answer your question, find a north star and a purpose. And I can share that mine is to help people that I call future makers intentionally build our future, so that you know it’s the place that we want to live in instead of something that we’re suffering.

Susan Kearney  39:05  

Right. Create your future. Don’t accept it.

Todd Girvin  39:08  

Yeah, absolutely.

Susan Kearney  39:10  

That’s terrific. All right. Thanks so much, Todd. Where can people learn more about what you’re up to this day and more about you?

Todd Girvin  39:17  

Well, I have an organization I call the Futuremakers Leadership Forge, and you can find me at futuremakerslf.com, and email me todd@futuremakerslf.com. And as I mentioned, I’m a Vistage chair. If you’re in the DC area and you’re a future maker, I would love to chat and see how I can help you out.

Susan Kearney  39:42  

All right. Well, I hope to talk to you again soon, Todd. I wish you all the best in this phase of your professional career, and really respect what you’ve been through so far.

Todd Girvin  39:52  

Thanks, Susan. Thanks for having me.

Outro 40:00  

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