MAC HARMAN: Giving Back with Balsam Hill

did you know right now it's Christmas in July? That According to mc harmon, founder of Balsom Hill, the company you hear a lot about if you listen to my radio program or follow me on social media, Mac has had an entrepreneurial mind since he was a little kid. If the stories are true, he started selling old tennis balls as doggy chew toys to his neighbors when he was only three years old. We're gonna get to the bottom of that. But it's his realistic folk Christmas trees

he's known for these days. And it's all because Mac, who grew up with the real deal with real Christmas trees, saw his first artificial tree up close and personal when he visited his in laws during the holidays. By all accounts, it was anything but realistic looking, but it was necessary because his brother in law's allergies made a real tree impossible. Mac was inspired and the rest is history. Well, no,

we're not going to leave it there. In fact, Mac is joining me today to talk about Christmas trees, to talk about being an entrepreneur, to talk about when you have been fortunate and life has gone well for you, how vitally important it is that you give back. That is the real reason I wanted to have this conversation because a lot of people don't know just how generous this man is or how many projects he has paid it forward into, if you will, how many projects he

is blessed. I'm looking forward to today's chat, but first let me catch you up on another one of my favorite podcast sponsors. With the arrival of Warmer Weather, I want to welcome back one of my favorite podcast sponsors, Laura Geller Beauty. They have the perfect summer essentials that include three of my favorites. For a little shimmer and sparkled, the Champagne Glows Speckles skin perfecting primer can't be beat.

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addition to your summer beach bag. Welcoming Mac Harmon today to Love Someone with the Lilah. A lot of times on this podcast, Mac, we have you know, artists or authors and the woman that you just met off the air, who is our podcast director. She she asked me, She said, is there anything you would like to see or you would like me to be doing when we line up these interviews. I said, you know, I don't care who

it is. I just want to talk to people who are passionate about changing the world, making the world a better place, especially right now when everybody seems to be about dividing the world and making everybody angry. I said, I just I want this podcast to be a place, a safe place people can come and get inspired. And whether you're you know, on stage singing songs or writing books or whatever, if you are using your talents and gifts and skills and you're in. Goal is let's make

this world a better place. Not just let's make money, but let's make this world a better place than I want to. I want to talk about that. And she, you know, called me back and she said, how about mac Harmon? And I said, who's that? And she said, you know Balsom Hill. And I'm like, I know Balsom Hill. They've been part of my show for almost a decade now. And she said, well, he's the guy who started it.

And I already knew about your generous spirit because you have blessed Point Hope, the charity I started almost twenty years ago, so much. And and then she started giving me more information about all the different different ways that you connect with people and do good things. And so here we are. It's great to be here. It's Christmas in July. We're gonna talk about trees. We're going to talk about how you became the King of Christmas trees. By the way, I happen to like your florals as

much as your trees. But and then we're going to talk about how you have used your success to be a blessing and make the world a better place. Sounds great. Let's get started. Okay, so you're young, you are really young, but you've been an entrepreneur. You've had that entrepreneurial spirit. It sounds like your whole life. Yeah. My first so I don't remember, but my first entrepreneurial activity when I was three years old. My dad used to play tennis

on Wednesday nights. And I guess, after you hit a tennis ball enough times, it's considered unfit for tennis, and but it's a great dog toy. And so I loaded up my trusty radio Flyer wagon with some of his old tennis balls and sold them to neighbors to use as fetch toys with her dogs. So my parents tell me about this. That one I don't remember, but that was at age three. But my my second venture, as

a side note, was at a birthday party. I received a packet of gourd seeds, which I planted and grew gourds. And anyone who's grown zucchini or gourds knows those things grow like weeds. I mean, you can't feel a lot of zucchini plants. You can't give those things away. I try, I try. I like I give them to people. I leave them on the hood of their car. If the car's unlocked and it's somebody I know, I'll open the door and just load up the driver's seat with zucchini.

You know I try. Well, I'll tell you my most the most recent time I moved. I can't get zucchini to grow in my garden. And that's when I realized I must have a problem with the soil, because if you can't get zucchini to grow, you've got real problems. But yeah, if you can't grow zucchini, that soil needs to be just ripped out and replaced with compost. That's that's how we learned. But anyway, with these gourds, I mean, they're even more useless things are They even harder to

give away than zucchini. But I did try to sell them on a little stand I built in my front yard. I learned a lot of business lessons from that. One it's really hard to sell something no one wants. And two, when you're when you're selling something on a dead ends called a sack that has mostly folks that that leave their house once a week, it's really really hard to generate traffic. So those were two of my earliest lessons

in business. At age four, well, I would say you applied that well to Balsom Hill because you guys create something everybody almost everybody wants, and you figured out really clever marketing way so you don't actually need foot traffic into a store. It's it's worked out really well for us. You know, we've been so blessed to build this business. I think part of it was right time, right place

coming along. We started in two thousand six when people were turning to the Internet, and you know, it seemed crazy to me and I actually started the company as a side project. Um, it wasn't. It didn't intend for it to become what it did. And I really think if I had thought it was going to be something I did for the next now almost twenty years, I maybe wouldn't have started it because there are all these

reasons that maybe it didn't make sense. How do you sell something that's more expensive and looks more realistic online when people can't touch and feel it. Why do you sell a product that last twenty years? Um, and most people have one or two of them. Um, it's you know, there's a bunch of reasons. I think it wasn't a great business, but um I started anyway, and we've been so blasted how it's been able to bring joy to

so many people's lives. Okay, so backstory. You're an only child who grew up in a family that always had real trees. That's right, that's right. I don't think in all the times I've talked to folks over this, I've ever told this story, Tolila, So your your listeners are gonna get the real story. Um, I grew up with real trees. We'd go to a nursery where they were precut, and we'd go to the tree lot and pick them out. These trees were on display. We did it every year.

It was a great tradition. But one year my parents thought that we should have the experience of going to the you know, wonderful family tree farm where you do kind of the sleigh ride and the hot chocolate and the candy cane, which is awesome. And I love this, by the way, people of this misconception, because I'm at Balsom Hill. I don't love real trees. I love real trees,

and that experience is the best. And I think every every kid who celebrates Christmas, I hope gets a chance to go out and and cut down a tree on a tree farm. By the way, they should come back and decorate it with Balsom hill things. But so here's here's the real story. I grew up in northeastern Ohio, so Cleveland, Ohio. We went out way past the suburbs to a tree farm and we cut the tree down.

And I remember it was a really cold day. It was snowing, and I remember my dad and I being on the ground with the with the band saw underneath the tree cutting it. We got all all cold and wet and everything, and it was a great experience. I remember thinking afterwards, like, I'm really glad we did this, and I hope we go back to the nursery and pick the tree out next year. That's the true story. I've never shared before that that it was a great experience.

Now I have replicated that experien it's with my kids. I live in California now, and how do you replicate that in California you can't get snow. There's no snow, there's no cold, there's no lying on the ground and getting cold and wet exactly. Well. The other challenge we have in California is, in all honesty, the only species of Christmas tree that grows well in California is a Douglas fur and the Douglas for many people love it, so I don't want to belittle it. They're amazing trees

from a Christmas tree standpoint. They have poor needle retention, so they're they're the less expensive tree on the West Coast and the one that the needles come off the soonest. But that that's what we have here in California. And and we went to this farm, and in California is a lot of people and not a lot of Christmas tree farms, and so they get picked over pretty quickly. And so we ended up going to this incredibly steep slope to cut our tree down because that's where there

were still some good looking trees. And we got at home and set it up and realized that because it had grown on a super steep slope, all the branches were really lopsided, and one side of the tree had branches two ft lower than the other side of the tree. So that was that was a good there's a good experience for me as a tree designer to know how nature compensates with things. Well, did you just turn it against a wall? So that yeah, the lopsided limbs go down.

Absolutely all the tricks. We got all the tricks here, We got all the tricks. Well. I have been a die hard, I mean die hard live tree person. And then probably twenty years ago, discovered that my daughter was allergic to real Christmas trees. So we discovered flocked trees, because when you get a good flocked tree, it locks in all the allergens and she wouldn't have such a bad reaction. And so we discovered a guy named Tony.

Tony had a fruit stand during the summer and then in the winter he would open up and had a Christmas tree stand, and Tony would save like the best tree and flock it for us, and we would you know, drive to Tony's, but we would also go out and cut a tree and then just put it out in the front yards because the kids love the hot coco and the you know, dogs and the the whole experience.

But we started working with you guys, and my podcast producer was taking pictures of me decorating the Balsom Hill tree a couple of years ago, and I said, oh my god, this is so beautiful. I'm putting it in the house and I'm not I'm I'm proud to say I'm not going back. I'll take him out, we'll cut a tree, we'll put it in the front yard. But one of my favorite parts of my job is hearing the stories and and a lot of the touching ones

are from parents who got a Balesome hill tree. They always had a real tree, and they got a Balsom Hill tree the year their youngest went to college. And they write and they're like, we wanted to do this because it just was easier for us, but they really wanted to get the tree, and we got your tree, and they've now gone back to school and they never noticed the whole time. I always get a few of

those notes every year. Um and and it's you know, if we can if we can provide some joy and convenience to folks and let them spend more time decorating the tree in less time with some of the other aspects of cutting the trunk off or whatever it might be, watering the tree, that's great. But at the end of the day, I love I'm an equal opportunity tree person, so I love all kinds of Christmas trees and just hope people celebrate Christmas with Christmas trees. So how did

you start? How did you go from the business that you were in, your father's business, where you're running your family business when you decided I'm going to become the Christmas tree guy. Yeah, So my story as I ended up running my dad's small family business because he unfortunately passed away when I was in early twenties and it was my mom's main asset, and so I ended up running that business. Um I thought for just a few months or a year, but it took seven years before

we were able to transition it to new ownership. And so while I was running that, I attended business school And it was interesting you mentioned changing the world because the business school attended Stanford the motto has changed the world, and really it's a collection of people who want to go out and make the world a better place and in so many different facets. But I never thought that my way to change the world would be through through

Christmas trees. But I did decide, I did rediscover my interest in being an entrepreneur and ended up starting Balsom Hill to two solid official Christmas trees. Because I had married into my wife's family and my brother in law

had an allergy as well just like your daughter. And so they had always had an artificial tree, and my in law has had one, I think from probably ninety five or something from from Kmart or something like that, and it in, you know, two th and in five, a thirty year old artificial Christmas tree was not really needle retention. Probably wasn't the best that you know, what do you wish I have? Though? My grandparents had one

of those silver and blue Christmas trees. I love their little and they had it on a tabletop because ground was like, yeah, we're not dragging a tree in and out. But that silver and blue Christmas tree pretty pretty epically sixties cool. Did you have the light, the rotating light as well that reflected the colors off of it? I'm sure they did. At one time she had one of those thin clear fibers fiber optic tree. One time she had the fiber optic like Lily and the fiber optic tree,

but the silver one I loved. I love both of those, and we actually have a fiber optic tree at Balstom Hill just because because I love them so. But but yes, I do remember that, so that that's that's how I got started, as I just said, you know, how come we have to have an artificial tree, but why can't we have one that looks real? And I remember thinking, we've got c g I, We've got all these things today that are good at being foe, like, why can't

we have Christmas trees? And so that kind of inspired the start of Balstom Hill. It was it was years later that I came across a great manufacturer that produced trees that that I partnered with, and I, you know, kind of on a whim, went over to China and designed our first set of Christmas trees. And I think I ended up being kind of the first person who really knew what Christmas trees look like that actually went and designed them with the intention of the whole tree

looking as much like a real tree as possible. In the past, some people had worked on making just the needles look like the like a real tree, or maybe the shape of the tree, but no one had kind of put it all together in a package. And I had been a geoscience as major environmental studies minor in college.

I spent a lot of time out in the woods, even took a class on tree identification, and so I just happened to be the right person in the right place at the right time to put it all together and with some great branding, that's what started Balsom Hill. And why the name, Where does Balsom Hill come from? Well, and so here's another real story that the original name

of the company was was a terrible name. It was Ideal Tree because I was trying to have a name that described the characteristics of the tree and I had to quickly come up with a name because the boxes were being printed. So it was Ideal Tream And I remember thinking, I'm not sure this is the best name,

but it is what it is at this point. And then I was driving with my wife from her hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania north and I believe it's Interstate seventy six, and we're going through this beautiful country of just rolling hills and Beaver County, Pennsylvania, and got married there and it's a great place. It is breathtakingly beautiful. It's it's

something out of a dream. It's something you know, like when when you close your eyes and you imagine what heaven is going to look like, like that's one of the places that's burned in my brain that I think heaven. I think God just took a little piece of heaven and put it in those rolling hills, giving me goose bumps right now because it's exactly exactly the feeling I had, and I just I remember thinking, Wow, this is what the brand should be like. This, this feeling, this environment

is what the brand should be like. And I was like, well, maybe it should be like Oak Hill, but Oak doesn't make any sense. Christmas each other companies and the I'm like, well, then maybe it could be Frasier Hill because Frasier is the most popular Christmas tree. But I'm like that sounds almost too contrived and too cheesy, and I'm like, oh, what about Balsom Hill. That's the other really popular East Coast Christmas tree, and and Balsom Hill it just had

that ring to it and that feeling to it. So I was like, Oh, that would be such a great name, but it's too bad. I already started printing the boxes and it's kind of too late. And then what happened was there was a trademark concern with the ideal Tree, and it wasn't a big concern, but to be safe, we decided to switch the name and then the last thing that had to come together was we had to

find the website. And there was a real estate developer that already made a little real estate development called Balsom Hill near Grand Rapids, Michigan. And it turned out that they had just sold their last unit, and I called them up and they sold me the name the website Balsom Hill, and the rest is history how it all happened. So tell me about you. We touched on this in the beginning. Mac all the good because you have been a sponsor of Point Hope for I think almost a

decade now. You've been helping us out, and you help us out in a number of ways. I don't know if you personally know this, but you help us out financially. Uh. We do things on the internet around Christmas time where for every person that clicks on your ad that we post on our website, you guys bless us with you know, a couple of bucks in it turns out to be

like ten thousand dollars or something amazing. But we also have a fundraiser we did until COVID hit, and we hope to start again called farm to Feast every year that we have at my farm where I cook food and then fabulous artists come and put on a small

private concert for the people who attend. And from the decorations to the cost of printing up the programs and the menus, Balsom Hill has sponsored all of that for the last empteen years and we have been able to complete almost complete Point Hope Village and Point Hope Village is a village for especially children, but women and children who are marginalized. There's a lot of kids that end

up in orphanages that aren't technically orphans. They have family, their families just don't have the resources to provide for them, and so they end up in these institutions. And so we come alongside, whether it's a grammar or an aunt or a mom or whoever, and say, let us help you, let us help you. Let's build a strong network around you so you can take care of your children, so that you will have the resources and the know how and everything we do, we we do not ever give

a hand out. We always want to give a hand up. It has to be sustainable. We take resources in, we find experts in the area there and we say, okay, how can we help you fix this problem? And then how can we back out and leave it to you?

So like our our our water program we started twenty years ago UM Living Water Balsom Hill has been a sponsor of and there's a community of over a hundred thousand, almost two hundred thousand people that had no access to fresh water, and Point Hope worked with the Ghana Water Board and put in pipe so that there are now more than twenty fetching stations fresh clean water. And in the first six months of living Water is the name

of the program. The first six months of living Water being in the area, the mortality rate for infants went down n the mortality rate for the entire area of the first six months went down se and then it went down to So that simple little thing fresh water saved the lives of tens of thousands of people and UM Balsom Hill has been a part of that. So thank you are so grateful to do that. It's just

speaking of water. It is so amazing the number of people, millions of tens of millions of people who don't have access to clean water and the impact that that has. I actually just finished a couple of days ago reading Scott Harrison from charity Water's book first that talks about that. Isn't that such a good book, such a great book. Everyone should read that book. It just it just helps us realize how blessed we are in places like the United States to be able to go turn on, turn

on the tap and have safe drinking water. It's I'd encourage anyone listening read that book first by Scott Harrison. It'll change your perspective on on how we can make a difference in the world. So, how many projects, off the top of your head does Balsom Hill get behind and help out? I know you've helped Point Hope tremendously. But and why tell me? I mean I know why, but tell tell our listeners. Tell why that. Like people

can't see you, I can see you. And the minute we start talking about charity work, your whole face Mac lit up, your cheeks lit up, your eyes sparkled even more than talking about you know, the Gord's that you were trying to sell yours. Yours did also. You know, it's funny, I think you know, everything from Balstom comes from our company purpose, which is to create joy together. And you know when people hear that, they say, Okay, yeah,

we get it. You sold Christmas products or holiday to core products and you want, you know, people to create joy together. That's all true. We absolutely we want people to have a smile on their face when they open our products. We want people to decorate with them and create amazing memories with other people and have joy filled times. But it's much deeper than that, and and our our purpose ties to we want to create joy together with our partners like you. We want to create joy together

on our team. We want to create joy together with our families, and we want to create joy together in our communities. And our giving really comes back to creating joy in our communities. And you know, we don't keep track of exactly how many things we support UM. A lot of what we do is organic, and a lot of what we do are things that that people don't see.

And so I'll start by talking about an organization we support in the Philippines, which I think it might be somewhere buried on our website, but we don't do it because it's of some kind of partnership that gets us

publicity or anything like that. We do it because we have a lot of our Balstoon Hill team that lives in the Philippines, and in two thousand and twelve there was typhoon Ulanda that came through there and was was really devastating, and UM we were fortunate that we only had one of our team members who was impacted, and we have kind of a company story about how we actually UM realized that we could do something to help their family ended up chartering a helicopter to search them

out because they hadn't been heard from from for days, and we ended up getting a message from that team member on text message the night before we had the helicopter reserved that they were okay and they needed food,

but they had enough food for a few days. So we're able to divert the helicopter we had chartered to go take food to parts of the Philippines that no aid had reached yet through our team on the ground, and then we we went and got a boat and got food to our colleague UM a couple of days later. It's it's a neat story, but it started our commitment to the Philippines. Because one of the things I've realized is so often you have these events that happened and

then there's a charity concert and all these things. But then six months later, twelve months later, everybody happening, Nothing's happening. And I saw that with with some of the response in Haiti, it seemed like things went away. And so I talked to our team and I said, look, we've got to find a charity in the Philippines. It's going to continue the work through the many, many years of difficult rebuilding and not just for the six months that the Red Cross or whomever is going to be on

the ground. And so we partner with it. We've been partnering for a decade with a charity there that's a local grassroots organization called n Grancy Volunteers for Change. Um. You know, when when Americans and others from around the world are out helping in their armored SUVs and staying at the hotels, are our colleagues that this organization are out there on bicycles and and getting stuff done on

a really low budget. But they're so effective and so we have a huge partnership with them and have done a lot of work. UM some really cool things. One of the things along the lines of what you just shared about how Point Hope operates, UM, they did a program called the Peter project where people would sponsor a boat and the idea was to train fisherman assistance with their own boat, but they trained them with sustainable fishing

practices which weren't typically used there. The facility that made the boats was all volunteer. It was. It was set up as a business that they ultimately turned over to citizens to run the business instead of doing it themselves. And then the fisherman actually leased the boat and paid for it over time, not because the charity was trying to make money, but because they were trying to have the speed. It's truly sustainable and something that continued to

work after they walked away. And so that program was so successful they had to stop it because they were afraid of over fishing um in the village. Because four thousand boats were donated, it became a really wonderful success. And then it turned it into something called Project Joseph, which was providing rules for people to do other building crafts and trades, and people would get tricycles to sell

coconuts and all sorts of neat things. But anyway, my point in all this is that we want to work in our local communities in supporting the needs there, even if it's not some flashy thing that we do. Um. One of the other things we always try and think about at Balstom Hill is what way are we uniquely positioned to help? And so um when Covid started, you know, we were we were really uniquely positioned as a business.

And it's it's even hard to imagine now what March was like, but I know myself and other business leaders are all kind of what do we do? What does this mean for a business? What does this mean for payroll? And how do we support our teams? And we were really fortunate because as a mostly seasonal business, we had just come through our peak season and in March one the world closed. We weren't worried about what that meant for us immediately because we were six months away from

our peak season. So plus we're e commerce, which was you know a good place to be going into covid versus brick and mortar retail. And so we said, hey, what can we do? And and I had this kind of crazy idea on a Saturday morning. I was sitting there thinking about all the restaurants and schools that had closed, and how there was all this food that is in the food supply chain to the commercial places, and that there was no way to get that food to people

who might need food. And I was thinking about all the people who were afraid to go outside and go to the grocery store because they might get COVID, And I said, jeez, what if we could connect this commercial food supply with people who need food at home that are afraid or it's unsafe for them to go out because they're you know, compromised. And sure there's services like insta cart and door dash, but those aren't available over

the country. And so I said, you know, in Balstom, we have all these warehouses and we're really good at shipping big heavy things. So what if we got ahold of the big heavy, you know, fifty pound bags of flour and food supplies that weren't being used because you know, schools and restaurants they closed. And what if we used our website to sell these items to people at cost and then use our facilities to ship them. And so that was Saturday morning's crazy idea. On Monday we decided

to do it. On Friday night of that same week, we launched Balsam Provisions, which was basically instead of going to our site and buying a wreath through your front door, a Christmas tree. You could go buy flower, mandarin, orange segments, spaghetti, sauce,

all sorts of all sorts of food items. And we were able to stand that up very quickly, partnered with US Food, which is one of the major kind of restaurant and commercial food suppliers, and it was it was really it was really kind of a neat effort to see how we could do something to help out that you never would have expected, but that we're able to help over folks across across the country purchasing food. That's

that entrepreneurial spirit. That's that what can I do with this old tennis ball episode after episode, season after season. I am so grateful to my podcast sponsors. I live for a great summer day time with my little ones, outside time in the garden picking veggies that are ripe and ready for dinner each night. And that's before I tend to my animals. But all that only happens because I am pain free. Thanks to Omega Excel. Years ago, I discovered a simple but fabulous product, Omega Excel. This

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many trees? Like? How many trees will you? How many trees did you ship? Last year? We we saw hundreds of thousands of them. I don't know the exact number. Um. We're more about blessing people in their lives than you know keeping stats on exactly how many we shift. I think we shift the million packages. And I promise you someone knows exactly how many trees we sold last year. I just you just don't keeping score. But you know, we we we really want to take care of our customers.

And I think that's part of what differentiates us from others is that we do know that, and we do track that, and and part of the part of the answer is great great databases, and there's you know, the beautiful art of designing our trees, and there's the science of running a running a well well built business that

can track all that. Because we want to take care of people, and we know that when someone pulls their tree out and they set it up and they're having people over, and they need it to work and it needs to needs to be perfect, and so we understand that and do our very best. It's so much easier. It takes so much stress out of my life. I

have to thank you for that. Well. Well, we hope that it gives you joy and that it provides more time for you to spend with the kids, the family and um do all the great work that you do. Thank you well. Thank you for your time, thank you for all the projects you're involved with, thank you for blessing Point Hope, and thank you for making Christmas trees

that look more real than if nobody has seen. If you're listening to me and you haven't seen a Balsom Hill Christmas tree, you probably have and didn't know it, because you will swear they are real like they look so lifelike and so beautiful. So thank you for that. Well, thank you and thanks for thanks for this program that's highlighting people changing the world. And can't wait to watch and hear all the other stories that come out of it. Alright,

have a great day Christmas in July. Um the blog, there's a place people can go and read about all the things you guys are involved with. Tell me the address again, it's like blog dot Balsom Hill dot com. Is that right? Yep? That sounds right, And they can see some of the wonderful projects Mac, that you guys are are involved with, including Point Hope. But there's there's so many, So thank you, welcome and Merry Christmas in July. Merry Christmas, all right, Mac, thank you, thank you, thank you.

Do what began as a search by a young entrepreneur for a more realistic artificial Christmas tree for a family member evolved into Balsom Hill. Founded in two thousand and six. The brand now designs and produces almost six hundred different tree styles year round, hand crafted seasonal decor, tabletop entertaining pieces, and stunning lighting options for inside and outside your home.

But more impressive is that mac Harmon and Balsom Hill have long been committed to supporting communities on a local and a global scale, and they continue to work directly with organizations that provide services to those most in need or A long time sponsor of my radio program, and they've partnered with and supported Point Hope, helping to be a voice for forgotten children for many years now, and I'm so grateful to have them on our team. It's

never too early to start thinking about Christmas. I never stopped thinking about it since it's our busiest time of the area. At the radio show. During the month of July, you can visit balsam Hill dot com and get fifty per cent off their expertly crafted Christmas trees and home decor that aims to inspire meaningful moments and to create joy. You'll find every style from small, too tall, narrow to wide, frosted and flip trees to fit any space in any home.

They offer the widest selection of high quality, realistic folk Christmas trees on the market. You can also visit blog dot balsom hill dot com to learn more about Balsom Hill's initiatives to give back. I have so much fun with these conversations. I love doing these podcasts. I'm so glad you take the time to join me. Let's do it again in a couple of weeks. You never know

who will pop in to say hello. Stay cool, my friends, and don't ever be too busy to give energy to your passions and remember to slow down and love someone