The First Customer - Why Picking a Niche Early Can Make or Break Your Agency with CEO James Griffin

[00:00:28] Jay: Hi everyone. Welcome to The First Customer Podcast. My name's Jay Aigner. Today I am lucky enough to be joined by James Griffin. He's the CEO of Invene. Please tell me about it, James,and tell me it is what you guys do.

[00:00:38] James: Yeah, so what we do is we help a lot of mid-market and fast growing healthcare companies, really do their software initiatives in months instead of years. So what we'll do is we'll provide a cross platform team of experts, think about tiger teams of product designers, software architect, business analysts, SMEs, clinicians on a group.

To go help them accomplish it. And most of our clients end up being in the mid-market or enterprise, multiple acquisitions under their belt, and they're trying to scale much faster to increase their enterprise value.

[00:01:06] Jay: So my friend Alex Tuck, who's a really good friend of mine, told me, oh, you gotta meet this guy James. And then we met and we were talking, and I'm like, this guy's cool. And then like you started going into business and I go, oh, this is why Tuck wants me to talk to him. One of the coolest, just like dialed in business owners.

I know. where do you get the, focus and the attention, the drive? Like what are you driving towards? What is making you such a good business owner?

[00:01:30] James: I think really what it comes down to is that. We're very good about like narrowing in on like what are the key things we need to do to actually drive value and increase outcomes? Because as an owner, you get distracted by all the shiny things. Hey, I could partner with this, I could do this, I could add this new service line.

But the problem is like, does it actually drive value and does it get where you wanna go at end of the day? Because I see too many people, especially in the startup and new business, is they wanna be everyone to everyone. But if you try to be everything to everyone, you're nothing. And so

[00:01:57] Jay: Yep.

[00:01:57] James: I started out, I wanted to be very clear around, okay, we're gonna do one thing.

We're gonna do it very well, and we're not gonna get distract.

[00:02:04] Jay: I love that. And where did you grow up and did that have an impact on you being such a great entrepreneur?

[00:02:09] James: So I grew up in McKinney, Texas. It's about 45 minutes north of Dallas. It's where we're headquartered now. And really, I grew up via engineers. So my father has, four degrees. He has a. Master's, a PhD in nuclear engineering. My mother has a undergrad in electrical, master's in nuclear engineering. So I grew up in a very engineering focused household, not necessarily entrepreneurial.

So actually there was a lot of friction initially when I wanted to actually go out and start my own companies.

[00:02:37] Jay: What was that friction?

[00:02:39] James: I think what it is that when you grow up in a strategy, high household is like, Hey, let's go stay at the same company. Let's do a de-risked approach. Let's go and do the traditional corporate route, rather than betting on yourself and trying to really grow your business.

[00:02:52] Jay: How long did it take you to convince them that it was the right path?

[00:02:55] James: Oh, I didn't ask their permission. I just went and did it

[00:02:57] Jay: Well, but I mean, afterward, how long did it take, you know, for them to buy in? They're like, oh, he's doing something that's gonna be a real thing for him.

[00:03:04] James: So how I really look at it is that it took us for about three years for me to start making real money, but they really believed in me. Started six months in because what we did, my product company before this, we actually did a capstone project and I brought my father and his mentor and once he actually saw me in different light, he saw how I actually ran things.

'cause he always knew I had top grades, but it was different when he saw how I led a team and how I interacted with my peers, that he then had complete belief. So they actually believed initially. It was just, I'd say they were always worried until about year three.

[00:03:35] Jay: Okay. All right. Fair enough. what was the first business you started?

[00:03:40] James: Yeah. So it depends whether you consider official business or if you consider it, you know, on the side to make money.

[00:03:46] Jay: I love both of them. Just tell me what was the first one?

[00:03:49] James: yeah. Yeah. The first, first one was I would think in middle school and high school. I got paid a lot of money to help other kids do their homework, so that was kind of my first pass at it.

I didn't do it in college. It was too high risk, but middle school and high school, it felt like a good return on investment. So that's what I would do and that's how I made my first ever money. I.

[00:04:09] Jay: Okay. I love that. what about your first real quote unquote business? Although I would say that. That probably qualifies as well as, you know, taking advantage of your surroundings and starting, I think it's a bit, it's a real business. You know, you're doing your thing and you get clients and you got your thing.

What was your first company, I guess you would say, you.

[00:04:26] James: so I had multiple companies in college. I went to school and a full ride scholarship got paid. And so what I used is I used that money to actually go and create companies, but I was a wannabe for a long time. So I think I had a couple that I don't really even mention that was like, oh, hey, I wanted to go create a new version of the Kindle where you could tactilely feel the book or you know, I wanted to go create a better version of Microsoft Word or. Google, drive. I wanted to like, create better version of that. All failures, but, and so I was a wannabe, but I think my real like first business, I'm gonna put in quotation marks, was really around automating college advising with AI to help students graduate quick with less debt. So I actually created a product company, won a national award for it, got, and got some grant funding from it.

So there was all sorts of options that came in it, and it eventually actually spun 10 v.

[00:05:12] Jay: How did it spin into Invene?

[00:05:15] James: So it was very interesting. I had an option when I started out my company was that I, there's three things I could do. I could go race from local angel investors. I don't have the network. I do right now. I could two partner with a big time ed tech entrepreneur who just sold his last business. He'd run business, I'd run tech, or number three, I could figure something else out. was very naive at the time. I was like, man, this is gonna be a billion dollar plus opportunity. So I had to figure something else out. actually had a mentor at the time who every day told me, this company is not gonna work out. Go get a real job. And so this was a guy who actually successfully sold a company to IBM. he's done very well and he liked giving back to local university students. And I was a senior at the time. I ignored him, but eventually one day he was like, Hey James, let's actually go and meet this company that I'm thinking of investing in. They need some technology help. I met that company and within that day I actually closed my first ever consulting client for 10 k.

[00:06:11] Jay: What was your degree in college?

[00:06:13] James: It was, so I started out in biomedical engineering 'cause I was like, Hey, I wanted to actually go create artificial limbs and organs and. What I eventually realized was that wasn't a good fit for me, and so I switched to computer science, and so, as you can tell by the glasses, very nerdy I'd actually taught myself how to code years before, so it was a perfect fit.

The classes were easy 'cause I already knew lots of stuff, and so I just used all the time to found my businesses.

[00:06:39] Jay: So we kind of covered the first customer, I think, at Inve, but we, when we talked previously, you know, obviously. You're very much a believer in laser focusing, itching down, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And you said something I thought was interesting was like you kind of just pick something. Your first client was healthcare and you were like, well, that's what I'm gonna be as a healthcare software company, or however you wanted to phrase it.

Talk to me a little bit about that time, like what was next? I mean, so you got this Consultanting client through a referral, which isn't, not everybody has access obviously, to like some guy who's gonna like walk you into an office and get you a $10,000 contract. But the question is, you know, how did you take that kind of seed and go, all right, we're gonna lean into this full time.

Like what were the actual steps after that to go? We're a healthcare,

you know, software company. 

[00:07:26] James: I still had my product company, by the way. This was just 'cause I needed the cash. So what I did was, at literally all he did was he was like, go meet the guy. And I met the guy and then we started whiteboarding and I figured, and I was like, okay, I'm gonna build V two of your hardware platform and a web app and a mobile app.

So by the way, I didn't know at the time outta scope at all, but I need the money. So I ended up sleeping a lot in my office as I was trying to run my product company. And I run my services company and I never sold before in my product company 'cause the sales cycle was so long and I was getting money. And one thing that I actually did is that I was kind of forced to be like, I need more money. Because when you don't have, you know, you graduate college, not coming from merch family, it was like, okay, I need to support myself somehow. How do I get more money? So I kept upselling this company on the work, but more than that, like, okay, if I'm getting money here, maybe I could get more money to go fund my product company. And so what I did was I talked to some CEOs of services firms. In the DFW area. 'cause we have a large corporate Fortune 100 companies, so there's a lot of great firms that got found here. So I met a couple of CEOs 'cause they were willing to give a device. I'd be like, what are the two biggest mistake?

What are the biggest mistakes you made? They'd always give me two. Number one, founding a product company. waste so much of their e DDA on it and they had so many downturns because of it. So they'd always tell me that number two was not specializing early. They feel they got trapped in the generalist trapped.

They got trapped at around 20 million in revenue and they couldn't break to the next stage because they went everywhere. So the thing is I was like, okay, I'm gonna be one thing and one thing only. So when I got my first ever client, I looked at four industries. I looked at ed tech government, look at iot and healthcare with IT ed tech. They'd say they wanna do things, but they wouldn't do anything. So I threw that out. I. Iot, they needed too much experience and knowledge with the underlying hardware. So for example, if they're really into wireless protocols and they really want PCB boarding, and I was more focused, mid aware and above, so that was not a fit. Government was very interested. Problem was those things never led to deal, so it wasn't relevant. Healthcare was literally the only industry that there was a. What we could do and what we could offer. So what I then started to do was I started reaching out to lots of random people on LinkedIn that have healthcare companies, and I was just like, I'm just gonna go grab coffee and meet everyone at healthcare I can in DFW.

[00:09:42] Jay: And what were the results?

[00:09:44] James: Yeah. So it's crazy to think that it actually worked. But what ended up happening was because of that, I then met the largest EMS biller in Texas, which we got a client with. I got a contract with Children's Health System of Texas. Go build them a mobile app. I got, well, we become one of the ambient clinical listening providers. What those guys do is basically what they do, and it wasn't, didn't exist back then, but we actually created the technology taking a encounter from a doctor's office, transcribing it into text, and then automatically entering it into their EMR. 

things like that. We built that with NLP technology, so we start getting all these clients. It was making me real money and so I was making money in my services company and my product company was Mo losing me a lot of money. So it was a lot of very, very sad, nights, but ultimately at the end of the day, I was like, okay, let's close down my product company, move over those employees to my services company and let's go all in all one thing, because it was too much to do.

Both the best decision I ever made.

[00:10:41] Jay: I would say the vast majority of agency owners I know, and like you said, 20 million and below probably, have the generalist trap problem. how does somebody, or how does a business. That spent 5, 10, 15 years building a book of business that's very generic and all over the place. And you say, well, how, you know, pick one of your, you know, your verticals, which everybody tells everybody to do.

And they go, well, we have companies in everything. we work for everybody. And you know, obviously you're everything to everybody. Comment earlier, how do they get outta that? How do they actually, in a meaningful way, pick the right. Thing to lean into. if you are kind of stuck in that generalist trap, but you're successful and you're kind of bumping your head up against not being specialized, how do you get out of it as a business?

[00:11:30] James: Can we curse on this?

[00:11:32] Jay: Fuck yeah, we can,

[00:11:33] James: Stop being a bitch. That's what I would tell them because they know what they need to do.

[00:11:38] Jay: right.

[00:11:39] James: thing where they made the leap of business faith to go start a business. They gotta specialize and they gotta focus. And the thing is choose one that you really like working with either a region or a vertical.

Choose it, specialize in it. your current clients are gonna leave you. They don't check your website, they don't check your brand. You're not gonna lose any current clients.

[00:11:55] Jay: Right.

[00:11:55] James: And then your start getting clients you want to, and by the way, your existing referral sources will still reach out to you to still come in. Like that's the thing that people don't get. If you focus people start referring you even more deals. 'cause here's the thing, everyone knows me as a healthcare guy, you don't think I randomly get manufacturing deals. And if it's a really good deal, you then have a choice. Do you take it or you don't? And that's really what you do.

So that's what I really tell people is. Stop getting in your own head. Do it. Make the leap of faith similar to what you do. You're not gonna lose any current clients, you're not gonna lose any current employees. You're not actually losing any opportunity. You're gaining opportunity by doing it.

[00:12:31] Jay: I totally agree, and I guess the only other question I have to that is I think you're a million percent right? 90% of it is probably in people's head, but the 10% is lack of. Clarity on what to pick, right. Or not having something in their current portfolio that they want to work on. Right? Like, I don't like healthcare.

I mean, I don't know if I should say that on this show or not, but I don't love the healthcare space. Do we have clients in healthcare space? Absolutely. We have experience. Absolutely. I don't love it. But what do you, I totally agree with you. I'm just wondering, how do you actually pick if you know nothing in your portfolio speaks to your passions or what you wanna do?

[00:13:14] James: So if you're, if you've been in the agency world for five or 10 years and nothing in your portfolio speaks to you and you wanna be that firm, I'd tell that guy just to shut down. Like, what are you doing with your time? Like, go do something that can actually drive real time because

[00:13:27] Jay: Right.

[00:13:28] James: five, 10 years.

It's not like your year one, year two,

[00:13:30] Jay: Yeah.

[00:13:31] James: I, what I would do is I'd look at all your past clients, all your case studies, ask yourself what. Not only I look at it two vectors. Well, three. Number one, what do you get energized by? Like what if you get excited, like you're excited, man, I wanna work with these people.

Number two, what does your team get energized by? Because if you just get energized and your team doesn't, there'll always be that friction there. Number three, what do you make a lot of profit on? Because it's not revenue that matters, it's profit. You can do a million dollar deal, but if it costs you 1 million and a hundred thousand to service it, their terrible clients don't do it.

So I'd really do it upon those three vectors. Just choose it that way.

[00:14:07] Jay: I.

[00:14:07] James: thing is like, who do you have access to? Because so many people try to build businesses that they don't have access to. So you need to look at their, like for example, we have a very heavy regional focus. And then figuring out how do you get access to those decision makers?

And do you have a right, because let's say that you're in an area that has a big healthcare place like Minneapolis, or it has big manufacturing or FinTech, but let's say it has really bad retail. Don't choose retail, so you gotta understand where you live and also maximize your business for it.

[00:14:35] Jay: I love that, and I guess just to. End this thought. My question would be, if somebody's trying to pick a region or a vertical market, research is like the boogeyman, right? There's a couple things in business and market research is one of them that like the term itself is scary, but the work is not that bad, right?

Because you hear market research and you go, oh my God, I'm have to do surveys and I'm have these people, I talk, how do. In a non-car way, or like you said, I mean some of it's getting over yourself and stop being a bitch and et cetera. I totally agree with all that. But from a tactical nuts and bolts perspective, how would you say if you're in, you know, Minneapolis and you're looking at the right, like, is it as simple as going to Apollo or LinkedIn or to whatever, and like kind of doing some tam homework to figure out, hey, there's a thousand companies in this area that could be a fit for us, so that's what we're gonna go after.

How would you suggest somebody figures out their total addressable market in a place where they wanna apply?

[00:15:31] James: What I'd do is I'd spend $20 on chat, GPT, click the deep research button, type it in. If it was five years ago, it's a different response, but now it is so easy that within 20 minutes to an hour you can have all the research at your fingertips. the way, I hate research. I hate it in depth. But now it is so easy to do.

You just throw it in and be like, okay, what are the lists? And by the way, a thousand is too many. You just need 30 good targets in your region. That's it. And actually really 20. So like if you have 20 good targets, go after that. Spend your time on that. Like you will have so much work if you just kind of narrow it in rather than being like, oh, you need a thousand. you don't. You can build a work class firm on 20 clients.

[00:16:15] Jay: that's a Clippable comment right there. I like that a lot. You need 20 to build a world class agency, which again, I'm not disagreeing with anything you have said so far. I think that's, I think I. It's a whole separate conversation problem, but people try to scale beyond where they need to, which ends up causing more problems and put you in this like mired, mucky place where you're just like spinning your wheels trying to talk to 500,000 people.

When really, like you said, that volume is almost a problem. Like you need to really just focus on the ones that are direct fits for you and your business.

Love that.

[00:16:52] James: out if you're in the rabbit business, the zebra business or the elephant business.

[00:16:56] Jay: Okay, let's hear this. I'm, I want hear whatever the end of this story is. 'cause I.

[00:17:00] James: so the problem is with too many consulting firms is they try to go and they try to be, don't understand that their offerings and their sales go to mo. Motion has to match what they go. So if you're Rabbit, you're gonna be low volume. So think about clients. That spend less than 10 to 20 KA year with you, that's gonna be rabbits.

And then the, mid-market, which are the zebras, they're gonna spend maybe a hundred K to 500 K on you. So you're gonna have less of those because there's less zebras than rabbits. And then elephants are gonna be the multimillion dollar deal. So large enterprises, and you really have to understand what market you're going after and then tailor your service offering ship, because what is compelling to a rabbit is not to a zebra and not to an elephant.

And you really have to understand it. So one of the mistakes we did is that. Elephants. I didn't build enough relationships with the elephants, and that's what I'm having to do now, is I'm having to build relationships with those large enterprise clients so we can move up market. But that's really the thing.

So when you talk about the 500,000, yeah, if you're in a rabbit business, go for it. But I promise you, if you're a boutique professional services firm, you're probably zebra business or you're in the elephant business, the only time you're gonna be in the rabbit business is if you have a low cost offering that is easy to buy and that is self-service.

[00:18:12] Jay: Yep.

[00:18:13] James: that is not most agencies.

[00:18:16] Jay: Yeah. Yeah, and I think getting some of those rabbits early will. Could and should probably guide you out of that space because it you, you feel it and you start to go. I don't wanna educate my customer why they need me anymore. Right? Which is a lot in that rabbit space. There's a lot of education, sales.

You have to explain to the CO why they need your service, why they should pay for it, why? That's exhausting. And like once you get to a certain point, you kind of migrate, you know, to use,the animal terminology to zebras. And then you're like, oh, this is much, they know why they need me, but their current service offering or whoever's doing it, or their internal people, they suck and they need somebody like us, which is a different, like you said, different sale, right?

It's a different style of sale, it's different conversations, different collateral. It's all different sorts of sales stuff. So I love, I love the, the rabbit, zebra, elephant. All right. Let's switch gears a little bit. How much stock do you take in a personal brand or are you just the healthcare guy, you're the inve guy, or is there anything outside of that for you on social media or LinkedIn or whatever?

Like how do you kind of match personal brand with the brand of Ive.

[00:19:21] James: So. That is a very interesting question because we have, we suck at marketing. We're traditionally very good about building relationships, closing those, delivering values to our clients, and then scaling this. However, we have not really built our top of funnel or how we actually scout the brands.

We're constantly iterating it. How I really look at it is that. really think, how do we play to our strengths as a founder? So me as a founder, it's like, well, I work all the time. I'm pretty nerdy and I really like business and I like healthcare. So I'm just gonna talk all about healthcare and healthcare data and helping entrepreneurs.

'cause I also mentor at a couple of healthcare accelerators, so I do not have an answer. What about you, Jay? How do you approach that specific problem? Because you have a much more, I'd say, defined personality, who you are. You can even look at the background. Got some fun stuff up there versus me where my background completely blank wall.

I like it that way. We have company logos. We look very professional. It's kind of.

[00:20:17] Jay: it's a, I love the reverse questions on the podcast because I'm not prepared to answer questions. I'm just prepared to ask them. I don't think that qa, I. Is very exciting. As far as like an industry or a service goes, it's boring, right? So like building a podcast or a personal brand or even like social media content around something that's pretty boring, I just doesn't excite me.

So, we kind of talked about it a little bit before the show. I. I still want to use this podcast to drive relationships, right? For, you know, for partnerships, for people I like, for people that I wanna work with, et cetera. So, you know, we've kind of used this as our outlet for that. So you'll see it on the J-D-A-Q-A LinkedIn page, and you'll see it on our first customer podcast page.

You'll see it on my page. So to some degree, I am the first customer guy. I'm the QA guy. That's what I like to be. I don't put a lot of stock into, separating them out. I think a lot of people try to have like their own persona and the business persona, but like people like us who like are the agency, I think you just kind of have to live, eat, and breathe that stuff.

I haven't cracked the code yet. I don't post a lot on LinkedIn anymore because I. I think QA stuff is boring, like I said, and I don't wanna put out stuff just to put it out. And I don't want to be like, just putting infographics up and just, you know, there's something to be said about that, where you're just top of mind, you're constantly putting shit out, and it's fine.

but I do wanna be very intentional about the stuff that we put out there, and I want it to be interesting. I want people to, you know, to, to want to talk to me. So the way that I've done that, for the most part is through the podcast. but yeah, qe, boring, dude.

[00:21:45] James: boring though? Like I'd really push you on that because to me, yeah, it sounds boring. You know what? You know what's not boring? Losing, you know, a 20 million or a hundred million. Dollars of revenue because you really screwed up your

[00:21:56] Jay: That's fair. That's fair.

[00:21:57] James: You lost contracts.

Like to me

[00:21:59] Jay: Is that exciting though? Is it fun? Like, I don't know. I just feel like it's, we're the last line of defense. You know, QA is not supposed to be sexy. QA is supposed to do its job. QA is supposed to be, it's one of those services where I feel like if you hear about it. There's probably a problem, right?

if I hear anything from our clients about the latest release, it's not that, oh my God, you guys did such a great job and you didn't miss anything. Right? So from a, just from, you know, for, we don't build, I mean, sorry, I take this back. There are some areas of QA that are exciting to specific people, but from the general consensus, people who build things like software products that you can see and touch and feel and get experiences from, I think are more exciting.

And they're much more content friendly, right? Like stuff for us is gonna be very procedural and it's gonna speak to some people and there's absolutely a, an avenue where we should be doing that, that we're not. I just don't get as excited about that stuff as I do. Helping people kind of solve bigger problems.

So yeah, I mean, we also, by the way, a lot of times people, our clients don't want us trumpeting the fact that they had QA problems before we got there. Right? It's the same thing as a conference. Like if I go to meet 50 people at a conference, I. Most of them are not gonna tell me that their QA sucks.

They're just not like, it's not a thing they're proud of. Right? If I get to know them a little bit and I start to hear some of their problems, I can go, oh, you're only releasing once every quarter. Like, why is that? And like, oh, we, you know, we have all these men. And then you start to get into the things, but it's not a very public facing thing.

So I think we just like to be the partners. that kind of deliver the value under the radar, but there is something to be said about how we need to kind of do a better job at that as well. So, I love to ask questions I don't have the answer to if you haven't noticed already. I do have one other question for you before we stop because I feel like we could talk all day and I would love to have you on again, just to talk more in business because I love picking your business brain.

What would you do if you had to start over tomorrow? Same market. Same everything. Same every, like if you, if James had to go tomorrow and restart inve, what would be step one?

[00:23:57] James: Am I also 22 again or am

[00:23:59] Jay: Nope. You're today. Today. This is James today.

[00:24:02] James: my relationships? I have

[00:24:03] Jay: you got it all.

I mean, yeah. I mean, well, I mean, all right. that's a good point. Why don't we, why don't we rewind? let's do James 22. If you had to start over again, if you didn't have the relationships you did, but you had the business idea, you had thi what would be step one for you?

Which may be the same thing, but what would you do?

[00:24:17] James: what I actually do is, what I would've done is now understanding what I do know and how moving up market is important. I would've built out my same six months. A year would've been the same. What would've followed that is I would've actually started forming enterprise relationships immediately because had a holdback as a CEO here.

A personal shortcoming that I believed I couldn't sound the enterprise. So the largest client for a long time was a $500 million AR company, but then I sold a billion, then I sold 5 billion, and I realized that, oh wait, these larger enterprise companies do need my services. So what I would've done is I would've built out. much larger relationships in DFW with these large enterprise companies. That'd be number one. And I, now I'd have, if I did that, there's about 40 of them that are in my target market here. I'd probably already have 20 of them just straight up if I just built those relationships. Number two is I would've realized that I was spending too much money on conferences and time. I was attending 12 to 18 national conferences a year, flying out everywhere, constantly on a plane. But when I did my analysis of my actual sales. 80% of my deals originated from a connection DFW. It might be a national company, it might be contentiously related. It might have been a brother, an investor, a friend, a executive chairman, a vp, a C-suite like someone was here that led to it because it is so much harder to build and maintain relationships when they're far away from you versus when they're close and you can grab coffee and you feel like a personal part of their community.

[00:25:42] Jay: Own your backyard baby. Own your backyard. I love that. to finish that thought, and probably the last, I do have one question after this, but how would you go about building those relationships with somebody in a space that, and again back then, you know, 22-year-old James was maybe afraid or didn't know, or was, you know, didn't have the insight.

How would you forge those relationships with somebody in a space that you think is maybe beyond where you are today?

[00:26:14] James: Ask. It's a numbers game. Ultimately, at the end of the day, you're gonna get a lot of nos. You have to get a really tough, thick skin and it can be very hard. 'cause me, I was always a straight A student. I always followed the process. It's very weird where you have to just put yourself out there constantly. Constant rejection. By the way, most rejection isn't people telling you no, it's people just not responding. So you just have to ask. Ask on LinkedIn. Ask on email, and show up at the local industry events. And just be a part of it and then try and iterate and try to add value and eventually things will happen, but it takes time.

There's no substitute for time and market.

[00:26:53] Jay: Let's in it there. That's, there's so many clips from this that I think we could just, you know, we have like a week's worth of, golden knowledge from James Griffin. All right, James, last question. Not about, ive not about healthcare, not about work. Just about James being James, what would you do if you could do anything on Earth and he knew you wouldn't fail?

[00:27:16] James: So if you'll know me better, basically that is the worst question to ask me because I'm so focused. I literally do not think if, so, when you ask, Hey James, if you did a retry, would you have the same business? Yes. So that's always been about me. I love consulting. I love what I do in services. I enjoy it so, so much.

So when you ask, Hey, what would you do?

[00:27:37] Jay: Not for a profession, just anything on earth. If is there any,

[00:27:41] James: on earth,

[00:27:41] Jay: anything on earth and you knew you couldn't fail something, you've always wanted to do something, you're scared to do something that, what would you do?

[00:27:48] James: I've already done it.

[00:27:50] Jay: Oh,

you're gonna be

[00:27:51] James: fine. I'll give you, I'll give you an answer

[00:27:53] Jay: something.

[00:27:53] James: need to date. So right now I haven't dated

[00:27:57] Jay: There it is.

[00:27:58] James: date because you know, I'm 27. I do want five plus kids, and so I actually need to go out. Start, you know, putting myself out there, do it. It's just a very different sales cycle.

It's the same idea. It's a CRM, it's a top, okay, let's fill

[00:28:11] Jay: it's an outbound effort. Yes.

[00:28:13] James: But the problem is like it's a different firm of outbound and plus I'm very checklist driven. So I have a feeling that a lot of women are gonna be very confused when I have like my little checklist and I'll

[00:28:22] Jay: No, you'll be fine.

All right.

My, goal for this year may be to get you married, so we'll see. I'll see if I can send some people your way over in DFW. That's it. Yeah, we can do it. We can make it. I mean, we can make a baby in nine months. You can make a marriage, right. James, you're awesome dude. I love the drive.

God, I hope you just spend. More time documenting your thoughts like you did today. our first call, the pre-show call, I thought was, just very enlightening and I think a lot of people are stuck in the trap that you brute forced your way through and said, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna focus on something.

So I really do hope, you know, people get something out of this episode. I hope they reach out to you and kind of say, dude, that was awesome. if people do wanna reach out, what's the best way to do that?

[00:29:07] James: Basically, you'll find our contact form on our website, or you can ping me at [email protected] either, and I'm always active on LinkedIn obsessively, so.

[00:29:18] Jay: Obsessively. So. All right, James. Well, you're fantastic. I hope people check you out and, we will definitely stay in touch and I'll talk to you soon. All right. Be good buddy. Thanks for being on. I'll talk to you, man.

See you, James later. 

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