Episode 91

Jim Barnish is the Founding Managing Partner of Orchid Black and the host of The Dirt podcast. Orchid Black is a consulting firm that focuses exclusively on revenue-positive start-ups looking to make an exit within three years. This conversation discusses the nuances of Orchid Black's unique business model, the hurdles and opportunities facing companies looking to scale, and how to balance working with multiple start-ups. You can learn more about Orchid Black at orchid.black, and The Dirt podcast is streaming on all podcast platforms.

PRESS THE PLAY TRIANGLE ABOVE TO LISTEN.

 

Joe Hamilton 

Joining me on SPX is the co founder of Orchid Black and the host of The Dirt podcast, Jim Barnish. Welcome.

Jim Barnish 

Joe. Thanks for having me.

Joe Hamilton 

It’s good to see you. You’ve been, man, rolling hot for a number of years now. How’s life in the fast lane?

Jim Barnish 

Life is, on the personal side, going pretty awesome. I just got married about six months ago and I just got an announcement that my wife is pregnant. So we’re going to be delivering the beautiful baby boy in October, which is awesome. And on the professional side, things with Orchid Black have been going pretty amazing. I mean, I know we’ll get into some of that in a minute. But even in some of these turbulent macro times we’ve got going on, it’s good to see a lot of companies out there building and growing, and our team’s ability to help them grow faster and reach liquidity events.

Joe Hamilton 

So Orchid Black is really interesting. And there’s a lot of resources out there for startups right when they’re starting off. But there are a lot fewer resources when you get over that first hump, and you got your first few years under your belt and you got some revenue, ideally, by that point, you know, five years or so in. So how did you… Well, first, let’s–just so we understand what we’re working with–what general engagements do you typically do with Orchid Black? And then we’ll we’ll kind of figure out how we got there.

Yeah, so my background and my team’s background is all in building, growing, and exiting technology companies or tech-enabled in some cases. And so our team focuses on companies that have gotten past product-market fit. So you know, they’ve got some demand in the market, they’ve got some great customers under the belt, let’s say that they’re 5 million, 10 million, 20 million in revenue, right? And profitable, which is part of the name Orchid Black, where that comes from: in the black. But they hit some sort of roadblocks along the way. Well, maybe that’s that they desire this event called an exit or liquidity event in the next couple of years. Maybe they aren’t growing as fast as their competition for a number of reasons. But essentially, they aren’t scaling as fast as they’d like to and aren’t reaching that eclipse that they had hoped to achieve quite yet or aren’t getting the offers that they had hoped to get when they went out to the bargain.

Joe Hamilton 

I was gonna make the joke that you wait till all the hard stuff’s done, and then you jump in, but you’re telling me that there’s roadblocks even after you get past the profitability?

Yeah, just a couple. It’s just different problems.

Joe Hamilton 

So you know, what are what are some of the main hurdles? You help companies that are profitable and have found product-market fit. What are those sort of most common hurdles?

So some are opportunistic, new verticals, you know, new products, conversion from existing legacy, non-tech businesses into more recurring revenue, tech forward businesses, some are more problem centric, such as, you know, the techniques that companies that used to grow to date just aren’t working anymore, maybe they’re not as predictable. You know, maybe they got lucky with some early customers and some big enterprise customers that the founder might have closed on their own. Bringing in a sales team has been a difficult path for them to find the right salesperson, they might have gone through four VPs of sales and are not really figuring out why none of them stick. But ultimately, you know, what we do when we come in is we identify where a company is at from its current value perspective. And then where a company can get to from a future value perspective, within the time constraints of what the founder wants to achieve, and when they want to exit. And if we can foresee a path towards putting together a plan where we can at the very least triple the value of that business over the next two to three years, we will put together the plan and inject our growth experts which are all ex-CEOs, CXOs, but also former entrepreneurs ourselves and do so for a fraction of what typical costs would be by taking most of our fees in upside. And that upside could be percentage of sales, it could be percentage equity, it could be some other form of upside. But essentially what we try to focus it on is something that aligns with the goals of whatever that exit event is. So basically something between the exit value and where the company’s value is today. That’s our goal.

Joe Hamilton 

And obviously, that’s ideal for the companies, because now you’re all rowing in the same direction. Is that unusual? Do you find that most people in your space, just try to get a consulting fee, and that is a differentiator for you?

We’ve got a few competitors or alternatives. All, whether they’re firms or individuals, all take cash only fees, nobody’s willing to put their money where their mouth is, and risk it on behalf of the company. And that’s what we’re willing to do. It kind of changed the game of the way people are compensated in the industry.

Joe Hamilton 

Really impressive. And how often, you know, the old adage is that sometimes the right people to start the company aren’t the right people to get into the day to day leading. How often are there tough conversations with founders in that in that sort of genre?

Quite often. Yeah, quite often, there’s tough conversations. Most of those tough conversations are with non-clients, with folks that we have to turn away, since, as you can imagine, we’ve got to have a strong belief that the team is already in place, and when augmented with ours, we’re going to reach success, not we’re gonna have to go hire 100 people. And so the teams that we turn away largely are due to not having the right pieces in place where we know we can have that triple-the-value effect that we would be able to have in the clients that we actually serve. That doesn’t always mean that everything works out in those couple of year periods. So there are still tough conversations that need to be had with founders, and with business owners around. Maybe it’s them, maybe it’s their executive team, but bringing in different version for, whether that’s just pre-exit, or whereas the company is growing and scaling beyond their capabilities. And we found that it’s actually typically an easier conversation than one might imagine.

Joe Hamilton 

Because they probably been suffering for a while

Jim Barnish 

And they’re coachable. And because not everyone is coachable, Let me get that on the air. But the clients that we choose, are purposefully chosen because they are coachable.

Joe Hamilton 

So to understand the concept, I’d love to get into the nuts and bolts of that a little bit. So, you know, I would assume there’s, you know, what are the elements when you hit that scale wall? Or again, you know, I’m sure, it’s never the same thing for, you know, for any two companies, it’s not gonna be the same thing. But what typically are the roles you have to come in and sort of bolster? And then as the team, these folks that you have on team, are they almost full time in with with with the companies, and more often than not what’s the bulk of the actual work you have to do?

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, so let’s just say we’re kicking off a new engagement, or a new partnership, with with a client. And that first phase is usually a couple of weeks long. That value creation lends around where the company is at compared to where its full potential can reach. And in a couple of weeks, we’ll have that plan. That plan is done by a mixture of a couple of people coming in as part time strategy consultants. That’s like true strategy consulting right there. If we are to engage beyond that first phase of the value creation assessment, we will put in usually somewhere between two to four operators, somewhere between three and five days a week, depending on the company’s need. So, for instance, a company that we just did a value creation assessment for, the answer was to put in a Chief Product Officer for three days a week, put in a Chief Revenue Officer full time, and to provide some associate research and data analyst support on an ongoing basis for the next year. That engagement will eventually become just us being a advisor, and on the board within a year As we replace ourselves with full time talent. So it’s really a true partnership of injecting resources at the right time for the right need, and eventually trying to sell ourselves out of a job or hire ourselves out of a job. Because come exit, those roles are going to need to be full time resources within the company.

Joe Hamilton 

Yes. And you mentioned, so if you go back, you said there’s the equity component, and then you talk about the board components. So there’s another line you have to walk because essentially, by devoting your resources, you are now an investor and you’re on the cap table. So how do you define that dynamic? How do you walk that line? Because you have your traditional people put the money and you sit on the board, but now you’re in it and on the board. A: does that cause as that caused any issues with existing board members, fear of having that kind of control in the company and influence over the founder, and does having both sides of those concerns, protecting your investment through the work that you do… All those are some interesting lines to walk.

Jim Barnish 

They are. I’m gonna answer that through a couple lens. So first, from a governance perspective, we obviously have to have different folks in these different roles. The person on the board cannot be the person that’s driving day to day operations. And typically, most of the companies that we’ll take on don’t have strong board governance, so we’re creating all of that from scratch. And so it’s especially important that we have lines in the sand of, you know, people that are reporting to the CEO or founder, versus those that are helping to manage the CEO or founder. So typically, that’s done by being really upfront about the cadence of both board reporting and operational reporting, and meeting those in the middle, since both are typically fairly new for the companies we’re working with. Like, there’s not a lot of operational or strategic planning cadence prior to us getting engaged, which is part of the reason that we are engaged. So from a governance perspective, clear lines in the sand, from as it comes time to exit perspective, we have to be really careful around our lines in the sand from the way that we’re compensated as well. So because we’re equity holders, we cannot be the broker on record. And we’re not a broker dealer. So we’re not gonna be the ones that are driving a selling process when it comes time to exit. So you know, if the exit is to a strategic partner that we’ve already engaged from a partnership perspective, that’s an interesting path that can leverage both board and operational resources. If it’s more of a financial partner, we have to bring in a broker to drive part of that sale. So there’s a few different lenses that we have to look at that from, but hopefully that answers.

Joe Hamilton 

Yeah, so I guess then  one scenario I had in mind was sort of the Steve Jobs scenario where the board wants to replace the person. That’s less common for you, where they come to you as a board and say, we need you instead of our founders.

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, that’s less common. Most of the companies we engage are bootstrapped and don’t have much institutional capital, if they do have funding behind them. They’ve gotten to profitability on their own. Which is, we can come back to that, because that’s a whole interesting evolution in terms of how we had to pivot from where we started off to where we are today. But generally, the founder has full control from an operational and investment perspective, because they haven’t raised external capital. We’re usually the only other ones on the cap table. Other than employees. Makes things a little easier.

Joe Hamilton 

Yeah, well, I was actually going to transition a little bit into the business model, because I’m thinking, you know, if you’ve got, if you’re saying three to five days a week, that’s practically full-time. So, A: how scalable can you be? I mean, I guess that comes down to you can be choosy about who you work with, because you have a limited number of players on the bench. And if they get engaged three to five days a week for a year or two, then I mean, there’s only so many companies you can fit in the pipeline. And I would also assume that introduces some load balancing challenges as well, as people come in and out of different gigs and are ready for new gigs, which probably speaks to how you’ve set up your engagements with those folks. So how do you keep that puzzle?

Jim Barnish 

It’s a great question. I mean, the short answer is we can only take on six to eight of our growth services engagements where we’re coming on as operators, whether that’s for six months, a year or longer. So, you know, we need to select the choices, six to eight to work with, that we know we can impact the most. And I mentioned that triple-the-value concept; that’s kind of the bare minimum of where we engage, is can we force between our team and the existing team, can we forge a path that triples the value of that business or more, which means that there’s got to be doing a lot of things that are not driving value, and enhancing revenue, and ultimately packaging it to the right buyer at the end of the day. So in order to get to those six to eight, we do about 25 of those phase-one value creation assessments that I mentioned, those couple of weeks of identifying what the company needs, in order to find a path to reach that value milestone. In about 18 of those, we have to say, this is a great plan. And you guys, here’s how you can execute this without us, we have to find a path towards them being able to do it without us. The other 68 we will engage with to get to those 25. We’ve talked to 100 times that many companies. So you know, first phase of filtering is more of like a venture capital firm or a private equity firm with a true due diligence before we even engage in one of those value creation assessments to make sure that it’s going to be the right fit or that there’s a chance it’ll be the right fit, which means are they coachable? It means do they meet the right criteria for where we can have the biggest impact things along those lines. So that way we have enough planning to get to we know we’re going to get six to eight a year and build a team of around 30 operators that can augment and drive that successfully.

Joe Hamilton 

So then, top of the funnel, because you’re not out there, I mean, there’s plenty of folks out there saying we want to invest, but you’re not that. You’re a unique value prop. So how big is the education hurdle? Because every company says, I need money, I’ll go look for money. But not everybody says, I’m stuck. I’m gonna go look for someone to help unstick me. That’s a, you know, probably searched  less on Google.

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, the data is not pretty heavy there.

Joe Hamilton 

So you know, how is the bizdev lift, as far as you know, finding the–again, this is thin tranche of companies in general that have made it that far–getting to them, because they could be anywhere and everywhere. And then educating them and getting to the point of them saying yes to that assessment seems hard.

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, it is hard. And it’s getting easier. I mean, you know, in our early days–and I’ll go back to kind of the origin story here–in our early days, the target demographic of who we’re trying to serve was very different. I was at Florida Funders, which is a local venture capital firm. And I was driving the investment process. At the time that was, you know, one of my gigs and the amount of companies that I saw that I would call them kind of like the B or B plus companies that were not getting funded due to X, Y, or Z was insanely high. And I couldn’t believe the gap in funding and what was happening in terms of the companies we were funding, versus the ones that were just close enough where if they had a few minor tweaks, they could be potentially even more successful than some of the other ones. But it’s not a VC’s job to tell you how to operate your business; not a VC’s job to tell you who to hire and how to how to put those pieces together. And so I started a firm called Startup Solutions at the time, this was about six years ago, that was focused on only doing things for equity, no cash, and helping companies get VC ready. So we did that with about 20 companies. It was a good experience, not the best business model. I’m just now starting to see some of the results from some of those. So as the company then evolved, I brought on a co founder, Steven Horowitz, who has been with me the last 10 years working together, but last five years at Orchid Black, and a bunch of other operators and we evolved the business into not serving the pre-VC businesses, but serving private equity. And we did a lot of great work for private equity, kind of their operators as a service, if you will. But the upside ended up being rendered pretty meaningless, because they’re very good at financial engineering of anyone other than themselves at times, and I’m not going to drop any names, but there are quite a few deals that ended up driving towards an exit where we did not probably reach the compensation goals that we had outlined from a phantom stock perspective, because that’s typically how they they’re willing to compensate upside. And so we moved back into the founder led market, but we moved upstream. And we moved the business model from just equity to a mix of a little bit of cash to help keep the lights on, but mostly upside as part of our as part of our expertise and driving.

Joe Hamilton 

So I guess then the assessments are some cash flow plugins. But so you’re saying actually, then, the biggest hassle in your previous model was the way people, if you didn’t have these founder-led, pure environments, that you could easily… It’s just too hard to protect your upside, because they can engineer it away in how they did their subsequent deals.

Jim Barnish 

That’s exactly right. Yeah. And and it’s not even just just the engineering part of it. It’s also competing priorities and motivations at the table, right? I mean, every VC on the planet, every private equity firm, they’ve all got their holding period and their commitments to their LP shareholders, right. So they’ve got their job to do and their exits to meet. And those might not align with the goals and the drive of the founder. And so what we try to do is get anything out of the way that would not be the right motivation towards being founder friendly and driving the goals that the founder expressed initially.

Joe Hamilton 

Yeah, so that leads me to a couple thoughts. I was gonna ask, you said things are getting easier. And I thought, well, at some point, your reputation gets to the point where you might have, you know, potential whomever referring the business back to you because you’re a value add. Now they say, well, we might fund you or we might buy you but you’ve got this and that, maybe Orchid Black can help you, and then the second part of that would be what is your relationship with funding in that have you found it better to just stay clean and out of it, or does having relationships with funders a value add so that when you say, Hey, if you work with us, this is just another value we can bring you, which is our network of funders. So how have you played that?

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s more of a value add than than it is anything else. So it’s, you know, we’ve got a strong network of funders that we can help deploy as needed. At some point, we hope to say we’re gonna deploy our fund into those. So once we get a few more exits under our belt, that’ll be kind of a mission that we’ve got alongside of the work that we’re doing is our own capital vehicle. But for now, it’s more of a value add once we’re engaged. Now, I would say only about a third of the deals that we do require capital since they’re profitable, and some have a pretty hefty balance sheet. In fact, if anything, it’s the opposite problem that they have not been investing in growth enough. And they’ve been so focused on profitability that there’s plenty to work from on the balance sheet. But at the end of the day, it’s still a value add. And the network of acquirers, whether private equity on the financial side or on the strategic buyer side is also something that’s more of a value add for us.

Joe Hamilton 

Cool. So no taboos with talking about it and bringing it to the table.

Jim Barnish 

No taboos. I’m pretty vocal about this stuff with private equity and VC. I’m member of several funds, I love the communities, it’s just when their motivations get in the way of the job that I’m doing, that’s tough.

Joe Hamilton 

Tampa Bay. So you were with Florida Funders, most of your clients now, in our previous discussions, aren’t local. So how are you feeling about coming through the Florida funders environment to being located in St. Pete? And I think it’s natural, there probably just aren’t enough companies here locally to support the business. But you know, you’re at a point where you’re seeing very few of them. So how are you feeling about our environment for growing companies?

Jim Barnish 

So our focus on national coverage has nothing to do with the the the way that Florida and the Tampa Bay and St. Pete ecosystem are growing. It’s more so opportunistic based on the deals that we have. So I want to first start there, that it isn’t a purposeful to focus outside of Florida. However,  when we started this thing, we had no Florida clients, because what we found was the market just wasn’t ready for what we were offering. There were very few companies that were between kind of the five and 25 million revenue range where we focus that were ready and coachable. Those that had made it we’re typically okay on their own. And they were going to plug in resources as needed. And if they succeeded, great, if they didn’t, at least it was on them. That’s now started to evolve. That mindset, I believe, has evolved. And there’s a lot more companies in that range than there were five years ago. Like it’s pretty incredible the growth of the ecosystem here actually. And so, in answer to your question, the general feedback I’ve got is I am meeting a lot more Florida companies. I’m meeting a lot more Tampa and St. Pete companies. And we have a couple, including one of our exits, That was a Tampa business. Well, Brooksville, but it’s basically the same, basically, Tampa, and we’re excited to do more and more work.

Joe Hamilton 

That’s great. And you mentioned exits, you know, as much as you’re comfortable sharing, can you can you kind of talk about your percentages? We don’t need any hard numbers, but do you have the expectation that there’s going to be some exit for the vast majority of the people you work with, if not all? Or is it more the, you know, these are startups still, and some are going to fail? And how does that play into your business forecasting equation?

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, we intentionally only work with business owners that have a desire to exit within the next three years. So that’s, you know, from day one in our conversations, that’s part of our criteria is does the founder have a desire to exit within the next three years? Now, that doesn’t mean that in macro environment times, like we have today, where multiples are down, in some cases, and especially in certain sectors, we’re not going to push it for another year or two, to make sure that everyone gets the biggest win. But the goal should be a three year exit. And so, you know, that’s on the table. And in terms of, let me just take the general focus of our upside is, can we get at least 10% of the net between where the company is at today and where they exit? So in the example I gave you in the Brooksville company. It was worth about 23 million when we engaged and exited for about 36 million, so it was a gap of 13 million. So our goal was 1.3. So we think that’s fair, 10% of the gap, not 10% of the company, 10% of the gap, since we’re doing a lot of the heavy lifting for a company there.

Joe Hamilton 

It makes a lot of sense. You Talk about tech, being the world that I’m playing in now, blockchain and those topics, are those now in your stable of companies or waiting and seeing still?

Jim Barnish 

You know, it’s interesting. When we first started engaging with two web3 businesses, it was more experimental because they weren’t technically in the revenue range that we tried to focus on. But trying to see, you know, what our ability to serve them would be. One of the companies unfortunately had some fraud issues internally that we’re dealing with, which is not a great one out of two 50% hit rate. But the other one we did some really great work for. They’re still growing in this turbulent market. They’re connected to Pokedex. Which isn’t, you know, as big of an ecosystem and some of the other ones out there, but it’s been a strong growth for them over the last year and a half. We’ve done some work for DAOs, decentralized autonomous organizations, but it’s really a team of two that can focus on those companies that we’ve got. So it’s very limited ability to help them. My hope is that that begins to grow as web2 starts to meet where web3 is, and some of those companies mature, because I know that they’re going to have a lot more headaches coming their way as they grow. And so we’re excited to serve more or less of those.

Joe Hamilton 

Cool. Success begets success. This is why Andreessen Horowitz attracts the best startups, because they’ve got the best the best pedigree, and some of that is actual pedigree, and then there’s obviously a branding element to that as well. There’s probably some amazing investment firms that nobody’s ever heard of, but the ones that people have heard of attract the best talent, and then are the best companies and then help those companies attract the best talent, and then, you know, make those companies do better because people pay attention to them because of who invested in them, and there’s definitely a game in there to be played. And so you’re starting to build your brand in some different ways. The main one that I’m familiar with is The Dirt, your podcast. So let’s dig into why you started that and how that plays into any larger strategy to build your brand.

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, so as Orchid Black evolved into only being able to serve six to eight businesses a year, which is still significant that we’re able to serve that many, but still, it’s only six to eight. And as we got to a team that was well suited to serve them, and I got all the right pieces in place there, I’ve been lucky enough to take a little bit of a step back and think about serving more than those six to eight companies. So how can I, as the team takes care of the six to eight, and I, you know, obviously I’m involved, but have the right pieces in place, the right team members in place? How can I serve other businesses? And a big part of that answer was The Dirt podcast, which is all about the dirt that you have to grind through in order to get to that aspirational liquidity event. It focuses on companies that are having trouble scaling, they’ve made it past the first few years of hard labor and are experiencing challenges as they start to scale and exit. And I’ve got people on the podcast that have made it past some of those milestones. They’ve all had either an exit, or been attached to an exit in some way, shape, or form, they’ve all made it past a few million in revenue. Plus, you know, yours truly as the host, are looking to educate on how companies can get past the things that they’ll run into, and ultimately get beyond kind of the high level, surface level educational pieces and more to the deep detailed examples of growing a business and the times that we got.

Joe Hamilton 

So you know, the way I look at it, you had a a sort of a singular job. And then you saw an opportunity and moved into this new business serving all these companies. But now you basically have had a masterclass in all these different companies. You could start your own company that’s a little more singular, right? I guess Orchid Black is singular. But the fact that it’s not like the classic widget factory, and something that would be completely your exit versus going to be in a piece of somebody else’s exit. So is that sort of in the cards for you?

Jim Barnish 

Potentially. Yeah, there’s a few things that have piqued my interest recently that folks are doing that I’ve started my toes in, if you will, and certainly a lot of ideas I’ve got on things that I might be able to bring to this world, but right now pretty relentless focus on on growing Orchid Black and helping other founders do it themselves.

Joe Hamilton 

And to that end, I mean, just in our communications over the last few weeks as we’ve been talking about a couple of things, you seem busy, and so startups in and of themselves are 100 hours a week. And you’re probably getting folks who aren’t quite that that frenetic still, but you’ve also got six to eight of them. So, you know, how do you absorb all of that big energy and parse it down and live a balanced life, especially with a first child on the way?

Jim Barnish 

Yeah, yeah. Well, I’m asking myself that question in terms of how to be the best dad I can be with everything else I’ve got going on, for sure. And I’ll have to let you know whenever I find that out. But in terms of fuel in the fire, logs in the fire, from a work perspective, I mean, it definitely takes balance, there’s been a lot of time, trying to be more efficient in in what I do. But overall, I mean, I’m lucky enough after five years to have gotten such a great team around me at Orchid Black that I feel safe in terms of general delivery of projects in terms of general effectiveness of our services. And everyone’s doing a terrific job. So my role has been more of providing a board level or advisory level Council and just making sure that we’re on track. And there’s nothing bette, when you can finally step into that role to feel like things are going well. Now, that doesn’t mean it’ll always be going that well. But it’s been great to be able to step into things like The Dirt to serve more founders, and we’ll see how I can mix in being a dad.

Joe Hamilton 

The Ultimate Startup,

Jim Barnish 

the Ultimate Startup. Yeah, that’s what I’m told.

Joe Hamilton 

Wonderful. Well, I’ve appreciated your time. It’s a really cool business model. It’s very valuable business model. And I hope whatever our reach is with this, that if there are people who have companies in that phase that are just like, I mean, I know the end of the rainbow is just over there, but I’m just seeing not sure how to get there, then I think you bring a really unique value prop and love the idea of aligning of incentives and all that too. That’s the way it should be.

Jim Barnish 

That’s the way everything should be. Yeah, if you can do your job. Yeah, but that’s why sorry, one lesson, though. That’s why that whole term consultant is so looked down on in many ways in the industry, because it’s, you know, for fees service, that whether you do a good job or a bad job, you got paid and that’s just not something I want to do with my life.

Joe Hamilton 

Yeah. And I see that, you know, in media, whenever we work on things, that we operate a few groups here where we have panels and gather people and the biggest thing in my whole existence is just not people restating the problem all the time, and actually trying to work on solutions. And not that consultants aren’t that–they are. But it’s just so easy to say you need to do this and this and this and then walk away. And it’s so hard to actually do it. And I think the the more activators and the more doers we can do in all things. And, you know, not everybody has the capacity to do that. But you can have the mindset to want to do that. And you’d be surprised what might come out the other side, if you aren’t wasting your resources, restating the problem, but actually, you know, bringing out some reasonable solutions.

Jim Barnish 

and helping get it done. And, you know, just one last thing on the business model part, that’s what I love about what I’m seeing in kind of the evolution of the investment banking landscape, like the compensation model, from my perspective was kind of effed up from day one. And nobody did anything about it. I mean, the layman model works and it’s worked and a lot of people have gotten great results. But at the end of the day, the model isn’t incentivized to get the best sale for the founder, or to drive it to the best possible exit.

Joe Hamilton 

And a lot of that is power dynamics, because before that, you don’t have a choice, but now you have a choice. The world’s opened up so that those those people in those roles who are the gatekeepers aren’t the gatekeepers anymore. And that’s the magic time that we’re living in.

Jim Barnish 

Decentralized, man.

Joe Hamilton 

Decentralized. Infinite access, infinite information.

Jim Barnish 

Infinite information. That’s right. All right. Well, thanks for having me. This has been a blast. If anyone wants to get in contact with me, I’m pretty active on LinkedIn. Also, JB at orchid dot black if you want to email me direct, and The Dirt podcast available everywhere, podcasts available on all platforms. Thanks, Joe.