#397 - Wiley Curran - Co-Founder @ CPC - Building A Perpetual Holding Company Of Lower Middle Market Businesses

Wiley Curran: It's always good to run a search to just get aligned on like what we're looking for. Cause if you run a search, that means you got to put together the job description. It means you got to get everybody on the same page of like what we're looking for that's going to get us from point A to point B. And I mean, we had some really interesting candidates, I remember, but at the end of the day, the business needed a leader focused on customer centricity. And it was just, yeah, it was a no brainer. And it was fun. I mean, there were some dark moments. When you're restructuring like that, you're pitching a fundamentally different playbook than you've run. The business was growing very rapidly, but the profitability was going down. That's not supposed to happen. And so everyone's like, why is this happening? It's like, well, it's pretty simple. You are adding more GNA than you are margin. And so your percentages are getting all jacked up. And it's because that- look, had I not spent three or four years in Dallas and like absorbed Southwest Airlines, this is when the culture was driving huge profits. 

Chris Powers: Were you at Southwest? 

Wiley Curran: No, I was just living in Dallas and through SMU, we'd go see, you'd go on like a visit to Southwest and listen to people speak, and you could just absorb it. And it's right when I got back.

Chris Powers:  So, did you see it immediately, or did it take a few board meetings, a few quarters, or was it pretty obvious as soon as you started looking at Airshare? And by the way, we're rolling. 

Wiley Curran: It was not obvious. It was we knew we had operational complexities when we invested in the company. And we knew that we had- but we knew we had a set of customers, plus 40 on an NPS is really good. 

Chris Powers: Is it? 

Wiley Curran: Yeah. NPS goes plus a hundred to minus a hundred. And so, if you're at plus 40, like that's pretty strong, especially for a business that hadn't really measured it and hustle equaled satisfaction. And there was a lot of happy customers because the fundamental value proposition aligned with what the customer needed so well that it allowed you a lot of grace. Now, carry that forward to like, okay, if we're going to move the needle and a plus 75, plus 65 customer renews at 2X the rate, well, how are we going to get there? And it's like turn downs, when you call Airshare and you can't get an airplane, that's disappointing. That customer pays a lot of money for that access. If you can't deliver it, that hurts. I don't care how great your pilots are. I don't care how great the the the scheduling is. If you don't have access, that hurts. And so, we started to see a lot of airplane availability on Thursdays. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, busy days at Airshare, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, dead. You got a bunch of airplanes sitting in cities. It's like, what's going on? It's like, well, we've got crew scheduling, at one point they were- we weren't to an eight and six, eight on, six off environment yet. We had a lot of different schedules, a lot of different fleet types, a lot of complexity. So, to schedule a trip, you needed to figure out like this Rubik's Cube for a simple trip, I want to roll from Fort Worth to Denver and back for a game on Saturday. Number one reason is crew combinations. 

Chris Powers: What's that? 

Wiley Curran: Means that you're a pilot and I'm a co-pilot. We're both available, ready to go in Fort Worth, ready to fly their trip. And because we know the airplanes are available, but it's the crew combinations because you need two pilots to fly, type rated in the right airplane. So if you go attack that issue, that is the leading indicator of customer success is pilots. We're in the pilot game. High, high, high safety standards, high personality standards. These are the forefront of customer service for us. They get the most airtime with the customer, more than John, more than any salesperson, more than any scheduling representative, anything like that. These are the tip of the spear. And so, when you increase their satisfaction, they perform better, then you increase their availability. So it was a big unlock. It took a little while to figure out, but once we kind of laid it out, it was clear as day that it was like, that this is going to be the route to success for the business. And by the way, you make a lot more money doing it because you can fill more trips, you can make the customer happier, effectively on a leaner balance sheet. You take that, invest it in marketing and keep growing. And that's what we did. That's what John did. 

Chris Powers: Airshare has been a phenomenal story. 

Wiley Curran: Yeah. It's been amazing to watch. 

Chris Powers: Okay, we dived right into it. So now we're going to pause for a second. So a lot of today's conversation- I love talking business with you. You have a very unique lens of how you think about things. So, I think the best way to start would be, what is CPC today? But to understand what CPC is today, I would like you to give us a little bit of the story of how we got here. 

Wiley Curran: Yeah. It's an amazing story. And just a little bit of an ode to you guys, thank you for having me on. This is amazing. Love Powers, the predecessor in the Fort, love it all, big listener. So, thank you for that. So, legacy CPC, we got to- the family got started really in the chemicals business. And my late father, Pat, he did like an old school KKR style LBO in the mid 70s before LBOs were even a real thing and bought this business, and it was not always up and to the right. And he just had this dedicated, clear, clear vision of what the gel coat market was going to be. And he gutted it out, perseverance to the max, and they eventually combined the business that he bought. He sold off a few divisions, bought a few other small businesses to create the capacity, and then they formed a JV with Total, and the business took off. And eventually, Total bought us out. And we, over time, had established, he and his partners had established C3 Capital, which would provide junior capital, mezzanine capital to lower middle market buyouts. And think of a very transactional model. They had three SBIC funds. But in effect, this capital base was designed to fill the void between what the bank would lend you and what equity would provide you. And it was a success. They invested in 80 or 90 businesses over 20 years. And then along the way, the family started collecting a variety of different investment assets, interest in funds, interest in businesses, interest in real estate. I mean, if you had intellect and energy and passion for what you're doing, odds are we were going to dive in with you. And I'll tell you, the array of stuff that we had when I came back from living in Texas, it was wide and vast, and we were coming off the sale of the chemicals business, so effectively we had a collection of business assets at Curran Companies, this is before Curran Companies really got started, and C3 Capital. And we, my three sisters and I, basically got together, and we wanted to go out and buy one business a year for 10 years and with the idea of we want to create a stable of earnings generating businesses for the benefit of the family, capitalize them really strongly and ask management teams to think long term. There's a wonderful bottled water story that I won't name the brand, but it's a colored bottle. And there's a private equity group that had bought it. They had put a bunch of money into enhancing the technology. This is a hundred year old brand that people love. And they came in with this beautiful fund book that's like, hey, we're raising our next fund. We bought this business. We sold it. We got one and a half turns of multiple ARB. And the question was like, guys, why would you ever sell that business? People are going to drink that water into eternity. It is an amazing brand with a better team and better technology and an even longer and wider runway than when you started. And it's just, it was a light bulb moment for us in the sense that like a great business, an exit should be market driven, not timing driven. And in that case, it was all about raising money, et cetera. And so we further doubled down on this strategy of buying businesses for a truly indefinite time. Like we buy them to keep them. I love the saying, have you ever washed a rental car? Because when you own something, you vacuum it, you wash it, you wax it, your kids will do what they're going to do to it. But you'll treat it like it's yours. And if it's a rental, we've all been to Disney, and we know what happens. And so, it was very clear that we wanted to buy businesses and hold them. And then we started, over time, we went out, we bought businesses at Curran Companies. We bought businesses in the automotive aftermarket, we bought a marketing agency with another family, an education business, a telematics business, precision manufacturing a few different ways, telecom infrastructure maintenance and repair, aviation, all different types of things. And we like to think of ourselves as generalists where we can understand the microeconomics of a business and then the fixed assets and fixed costs and personnel needed to support those microeconomics. And being a generalist leads you to acquire simple businesses. You can't get into ponds that are so complex that you need unbelievably tenured domain expertise to survive. And so, fast forward 10 years, we had bought 14 businesses. We have had some exits. 

Chris Powers: What year did this start? 

Wiley Curran: 2010. 

Chris Powers: So you got back to Kansas in 2010 after two fun years in Dallas. 

Wiley Curran: Yeah, two plus. And so, it was great. It was unbelievable. But we went... basically, we didn't put any debt on our businesses. We would effectively borrow debt at the holding company. Every once in a while, certain circumstances, we would borrow money at the individual operating businesses. We would simply say, look, management teams, we've given you a lot of capital, and we want you to go deploy it into growing this business in the right long-term way. And this is before we'd really formalized a unique strategy across everybody. And we saw some really great results with that. And when you are focused on the customer and just have this flexibility to really think like an owner, our incentive system really emphasizes profits from the business and distributing those profits and redeploying them when there's an opportunity, not add-on acquisition obsessed. And so we go down the road here. We come up for air in 2010, which was always the plan as a family, and we had achieved a really nice financial result. But more importantly, the family took to this idea of creating, of supporting, and it wasn't us creating, it was our management creating them, but we had backed and supported and owned some really, some businesses that were unbelievable places to work and to develop personally, financially, and professionally for these, for all different contributors in these businesses, a little over 3,000 employees at that point. And we saw some really interesting characteristics of this long-term philosophy. And it's not rocket science, by the way. I mean, coming from Kansas City, you have the shadow of Koch Industries, you have the shadow of Berkshire Hathaway, and it's like, okay, buy businesses, ask the management team to think with long term in mind around the fundamentals of the business. That's not rocket science. 

Chris Powers: And one quick question. When you're looking at a business and you're underwriting it, is part of what you're underwriting also asking the current team in place, what would you do under this structure? Or do you all come in kind of with what you want to see happen? Or do you- let's just say you love the business, but you talk to the leadership team, and they were like, we don't really have much more ideas for how to grow this thing. Does that make this a non-qualified business to buy? 

Wiley Curran: No, a business that is going to have a hard time growing can still be a great cash business. I mean, just you have to be disciplined. And honestly, you have to have realistic expectations coming in. A lot of people get in trouble when management thinks they can't grow, yet ownership does or vice versa. Alignment is super critical. So, we come up for air in 2020. And we start to realize that we want to employ as many people under this long-term investment horizon mentality as we possibly can and create great places to work. Because if you love what you do every day, you're a better soccer coach, you're a better spouse, you're a better parent, you're a better friend and neighbor and co-worker if you love what you do when you go to work. And so we think that that's super important to our society in general. No matter where you fit politically, if you love what you do every day, you're going to be a better human being. And so, we also understood that in 2020, we had a pretty, this is before COVID, we had a pretty big strategic decision to make, like we needed to ramp our holding company capabilities. There's definitely a need for some internal resources. We would be better off buying slightly bigger businesses because if we had an internal resource set, we could support them in a better way. Not earth shatteringly big, but there is a reason to go a little bit upmarket. And so we got together with the C3 Capital team. And they had had a really good track record in this mezzanine market. But their DNA was built as business owners. I mean, these are sister groups, all share an office. When we buy a business, those people are so smart over there, we'd say, hey, do you want to invest a little bit? We're not taking a fee or a carry or anything, but just come in and be a partner. And so, we did that quite a lot. And we realized that we all have the same mentality. And so, we actually ended up combining the two groups, the Curran Companies team, the C3 capital team, and that is what CPC is. And as we were doing that, we had sort of the Apollo 13 moment where you pour it all out on the table and you're like, okay, what does this do? And what does that do? And looked at all of our investment data points and started to think about our experiences and what went well and what didn't go well and think of it as like the top quartile of financial outcomes and the bottom quartile of financial outcomes. What were the patterns? And it just jumped off the page, which is when teams were able to consistently win the various challenges that they would get in these five areas, then the financials would- you don't even need to look at the financials. You knew you were going to get a great outcome. And that was people, systems, processes, execution, product leadership, customer intimacy. So, people, systems and process, execution, product leadership, customer intimacy. And when you do those well, and those are never fully won and never fully lost. It applies to Apple, and it applies to an apple orchard. Big business and small business, you will face those no matter what. And so when you think about what businesses we're looking for and what we ask our teams to do and deploy our capital, we're asking them to do those things well. And so, we don't start with a financial target on the page. We start with a set of available resources to invest coming out of a business. Our businesses are unlevered. So, you have a lot of flexibility. Sometimes a company needs to invest in its own moat, and we're not going to grow profit, but we're going to grow the durability of it. Sometimes we know that, like in the case of Airshare, enhanced customer intimacy is going to lead to a happier customer and it's going to lead to financial growth because less people are going to leave. And so, we built CPC around the five key battles. We brought in a set of internal resources to help our businesses be excellent in those areas. And today, just in CPC alone, we buy one business a year. 

Chris Powers: Is it still one business a year?

Wiley Curran: It’s still one business a year. We'll support add-ons as we need to, but we're not add on obsessed. Add-ons are hard. They're really hard. And so, we want add-ons to be-

Chris Powers: Why?

Wiley Curran: Well, because you're merging people's brains and you're asking two cultures to have an arranged marriage. Some people didn't have upside in it. Some people have been competing in this world against this, Company A is purchased by Company B, and they've been competing in the market for a while, and they're still upset. And it's not simple. And you're asking this arranged marriage to happen. So there's personnel risk. There's market risk. There's financial risk.  We found that when an acquisition like our headwear business, Imperial, purchased Pukka, the industrial logic was very, very sound because Pukka has excellent market share in areas where Imperial doesn't. And they have capabilities that Imperial doesn't. And Imperial has vice versa. And so in general, the brands fit together really, really nicely. And I think that the teams have really embraced each other because of that logic. But yeah, we buy one business a year at CPC, 80 to 120 million of purchase price. And we buy businesses to keep them and to make them better in the five key battles. And we believe that if you do that, the financial results are going to occur. But also you are going to attract better and better and better talent. If you're going to own a business forever, you better be darn confident that you can attract better people over time because people retire, people move on, people move, and all those things. People are messy, but that's okay. We love it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, we're going to start breaking this down a little bit. Let's take customer intimacy because it would be easy for me to sit here and go, of course, you want to make your customers happy. Doesn't every business want to do that? So one, maybe let's just dig a little deeper in how y'all think about it maybe different from the market, but then maybe also through your framework of if we could only own these businesses for five years, it makes us incapable of achieving X. But because we have an infinite horizon, we can do these things. 

Wiley Curran: Yeah, I mean, let's start with kind of how we think about customer intimacy. And so it is in a measured way. And it is knowledge of end market. And then it's knowledge of why people arrive to take your value proposition and why they stay. And then also why they don't choose to come to you. It's just as important to understand why someone says no as it is why someone says- or why somebody says yes, I’ll come buy a hat from you or select your brand. And there's an amazing Harvard case on California Closets that goes into this, and they map this journey. And I love this analogy because everybody has a closet. And everybody thinks they can organize it. But California Closets, they're selling an organizational experience where they arrive, they take you through the different ways they could do it, the process they're going to take you through, all of these things. And they map the journey very, very tightly from the second you see a California Closets advertisement to the first time you call to the first time a rep comes out to your house, the installation process, the big unveiling, the follow up. Like they are in the business of keeping your closet clean after they leave. And it's super powerful, but it's only measured or it only occurs because of this tight, tight measurement of the journey and satisfaction along the journey, net promoter score at these different forks in the road. And most importantly, when someone drops out of the journey, they like triple down and understand why someone dropped out. And when you have that knowledge, which, by the way, a lot of our businesses, they know the customer through gut. They know the customers because they've been doing business with these people for 20 years. And by the way, it's super valuable, a customer that will give you the honest feedback and that 20 year customer will generally do that. But they'll also give you breaks in a lot of ways because they've been doing business with you for 20 years and they can call Chris and get what they need or they can call Wiley or they can call John or whatever. But I'll tell you, like that intimacy piece, really breaking it down in a measured way in the important forks in the road is the start. And then understanding what your end market looks like in a data driven way and establishing these personas. Let's take somebody that comes to Imperial, that goes in a pro shop or buys an Imperial hat online. There's different types of Imperial users. There's people that love the brand. There's people that love the sizing. There's people that love maybe the color selection. There's people that this is just what they're given at their pro shop. But they're all a little different. And so, understanding what those different personas are in a data-driven way so that we can take this set of information and then invest resources into the product leadership side to make each of those personas happy. By the way, there's a couple of personas that very distinctly don't buy from us, like my wife. My wife has a hard time wearing an Imperial hat because of sizing. She loves the brand. Who doesn't love a hundred year old wholesome brand. 

Chris Powers: Imperial is such a great brand. 

Wiley Curran: It's the best. And it has the best team in the business. And the Pukka team's the same way. But it's like there are personas that don't select from us. So we lay all these out and then we can react to them and we can invest resource into them. And it's only when you have a long-term vision, you have the resources available to you, that you can go attack this in a very front-footed manner. And so, sort of think about customer intimacy. You have your end markets and your personas. And then you have the customer journey, and those two big angles bring you enough to really have a data-driven approach to customer intimacy, that it's not about like moving satisfaction one point up on the NPS, but at the end of the day, it kind of is. Because you have to measure intimacy and satisfaction. If you have a happy customer, odds are you're not going to fail. You can stub your toe in a lot of different ways, but it is really core to what we do. And we put a lot of emphasis on understanding that. Normally buy a business, it's that knowing the customer through gut, and that's perfect- It's a great place to start. But we can expand on that, and we challenge our teams to do it. We have our chief information officer at CPC, Dennis. Dennis comes from a customer experience background, specifically in restaurants, which is a hard place to delineate yourself. And he is a lot of the tip of the spear in terms of measuring our customer satisfaction at our businesses. We typically outsource the measurement. There's people that do it on an a la carte basis. But I'm really proud of like our from to in terms of how we think about the customer over time. And what's really amazing is if you deliver that data set of customer intimacy to a great team, the ideas as to how to improve it are significantly needle moving. And usually they're not as expensive as you think because they get right to the point of customer satisfaction. There's less guesswork. So, it's a simpler solve. 

Chris Powers: And does CPC do the work, or do you push that down at the company level and say, we want you all to figure out the data? Or is that kind of y’all’s specialty?

Wiley Curran: Hot topic. But I would say... 

Chris Powers: I had a microphone in your boardroom.

 Wiley Curran: I would say that it's a little of both. It depends on the distinct capabilities of the business and where they are on their journey. There are businesses that have a full-time customer experience personnel. We have a customer experience leader at Airshare. We don't have that at Imperial. So, it's done a little bit by committee. And so CPC is there. The holding company resources are there to help lead that initiative, deliver it back to the management team and say, guys, where do you want to go with it? Okay, how does this play into the strategy? Business makes X amount of money per year. We have this amount to reinvest into the business. That could be a really high priority. If we're at a plus 85 NPS, but a plus 10 employee net promoter score, maybe that's the answer. So, we help bring the data to the teams and then collectively make a decision. A lot of times they say, well, what do you think? But a lot of times, they have great ideas and they're ready to go. 

Chris Powers: Okay. So you have 14 different companies, 14 different CEOs. How is CPC structured? So what is the business of CPC? We'll get into buying new deals, but you got 14 that you got. 

Wiley Curran: So, 14 is between CPC, which is new, and it has four, Curran Companies has 10. CPC is a compliant business, all of that. And so, we have our collection of businesses over here. Different CEOs, different- I just wanted to clarify that.

Chris Powers: Okay. But what does it look like even at Curran or CPC? We can take CPC. What's happening at CPC day to day? 

Wiley Curran: At the holding company? Well, so our business, we have basically three legs to the stool that support CPC. We have our firm operations team. They go out and execute and deliver results in all things compliance, credit, capital in and out of the business, all things that you need to make the business flourish from a support perspective. You should think of the important plumbing that comes into the business as firm ops. We have our investment team, which is searching for new businesses to buy, and a set of associates that support the investment team. And then the bulk of the payroll is in the excellence group, which is there to support our management teams in the five key battles. And so, generally, mid-summer, our businesses meet, not together, but everybody has a board meeting. And we understand where we're trying to get to in each of the five key battles and also what resources might be available to invest into either making our business more defensible, growing it, and all the five key battles are always accretive to either of those things. And so, coming out of that meeting, there's a set of action items, of what we want to do strategically. And normally that's when the excellence team is starting to get pulled in. And so, you can think of our calendar as like summer to summer. And they're saying, look, we're going to go on a big customer journey exercise, like we were just talking about, or they're going to go on a big value stream mapping exercise. Like Imperial’s sales have increased dramatically on generally the same amount of inventory. And it's because of some excellent work we've done with systems and information, but also in an operational way and mapping operational processes through value stream mapping and trying to get less people to have their hands in certain processes for speed. We can turn inventory faster. And so coming out of that meeting, there's usually a set of action items. Teams are pulling the excellence group in, or the excellence group is saying, hey, we heard this. This is something that we could do. And then we go to work, go to work and kind of deploy the team on a schedule of projects. But the most important thing to understand about the excellence group is that they are project based in nature. We don't charge for it, like, hey, I'm going to charge this much. 

Chris Powers: You're not looking for projects to bill for. 

Wiley Curran: Yeah, I'm not looking for billable hours. But what I am looking for is an open mind saying, hey, we have this team here and we're all on the same side. We're all owned by CPC, like there's a- whether you need analytical support, whether you need somebody to help you map a process or select an ERP system or choose an employee satisfaction vendor to collect the data, like the excellence group will help with that. 

Chris Powers: Okay, I want to pick on one title that you had on CPC's website, and maybe they're part of the excellence group, I had never seen that title on another company's website, engagement manager. And then there was a senior engagement. What is an engagement manager? 

Wiley Curran: No, it's a great question. So when you pull the team off the shelf, that's an engagement. Our team is going to engage with you and you're going to engage with us, and we're going to- we have a project charter. And we have a set of things that we want to get done. Because then the excellence group is going to depart. And that team is responsible for whatever change or whatever transformational thing that we may have helped you install in your business, it's the teams to run with it, not CPC. We're not going to stay there forever. And so, an engagement, there's a person who is QBing, let's use selecting a vendor for an EMPS project. That person is going to drive and QB this so that we're not having it be somebody's like side hustle at the business. And so, you get a temporary resource. And so, we have a set of unbelievable domain expertises in terms of leadership at CPC Holding Company. And then we have a support staff that supports them. Those engagement leaders are inside the support staff and they're helping drive these project initiatives. I would say that our initiatives and engagements that we do are just as much for defense in terms of improving the employee experience, improving the cash flow of the business in terms of we need less capital employed, like it's just as much as defense as it is for growth. 

Chris Powers: You hold perpetually or indefinitely, which comes with its own set of incentives, especially at the CEO level, executive suit level. In the private equity model, we all get our B units or C units, whatever they're called. We're going to...

Wiley Curran: Or D units. Or D2-5 units. 

Chris Powers: And we're out in five years. We kind of have a clear path for how to get rich in five years. When you're holding something forever, it's different. So, I can back into this question a few different ways. Maybe we'll just start here as like, when typically you're buying a company, you're probably buying a family owned operation already. Do you buy from private equity? 

Wiley Curran: We have. Yeah, absolutely. 

Chris Powers: Are you typically having to redo all incentive day one, or do the incentives in place kind of work? How do you think about that? 

Wiley Curran: So, we look at wealth creation as a stream of cash, not buy for one and sell for two. And so in general, we want to find leaders that share that mentality. But we also understand that life is expensive and there are certain times in life where you may want to take some capital off the table. So fundamentally, we want to establish programs where people have the right balance of cash versus equity accumulation. And generally, you're making a choice to keep your equity if you want. And so, let's just assume we start with a business where no one wanted to roll anything and management started with no equity in the business. 

Chris Powers: You would do a deal like that? 

Wiley Curran: Yeah. We're comfortable buying 100% of the business. It doesn't... We would write a term sheet to buy a 100% of a business and tell the selling family, why don't you wait 30 days into diligence, understand who we are, understand where we may want to go, and then you tell us if you want to roll or not. And there's probably a max to that just for a variety of reasons. But if you want to stay on the train, great. And if not, that's okay, too. Like we're going to get comfortable as if you're departing. And that's important to us. And so, we would design a plan for management... where they effectively earn into a performance-based unit that is issued at kind of, we issue them every year, little chunks of units, then at three years from now, they're projected to be worth this much. And so, it's very similar to like a public company, but just simplified greatly. But we start issuing these units, they have a three year time vest and a minimum performance to them, which is generally at plan. Everybody is- these are not unrealistic goals. And at the end of that three years, they own the shares. We make sure there's enough cash to pay any tax, et cetera. But you start accumulating ownership in the business. And the business has a yield to it, because remember, there's no debt on the business. So, you start to feel the power of these distributions very quickly. And across our businesses, we have many, many executives that have earned into ownership stakes in the business, elected to- we play the bank. So if you want to cash out, people have a wedding, people have college, people have reasons that they need liquidity in their life, and it's totally understandable. But there's also executives that have built equity in our businesses that has a real yield. And when they retire, sometimes it's a sensitive conversation because we need that equity back for the next executive team member. And they want to keep it. There's no better feeling and no more measurable kind of demonstration that the system has worked and that the business is headed in a great trajectory than when an executive is retiring and they're like, I want to keep 100% of my stock because I love where this business is going and I know that the team is better today than it was yesterday. 

Chris Powers: Okay, well let's just go a step further. What has to happen? Is it usually, how do you structure that? Like you have to buy it out the day of departure, we'll buy it out over a timeline, or is it case by case? 

Wiley Curran: It's case by case. And it probably varies by level and... In general, I think that you always want that optionality because you do, you need those equity shares back for the next teammate. 

Chris Powers: And they probably understand that going into it. 

Wiley Curran: Totally. Totally. And also, there could be... like, our CEO at Imperial retired this year, and Todd did an absolutely masterful job building the culture of that business around the five KBs, and the thing that he and we are most proud of is we went from a minus 22 employee net promoter score to a plus 30 pretty darn quick. And it was amazing to see. And Todd, in general, wants to stay an owner of the business. And so, how it works mechanically is he will become an owner and have the same minority rights as any of our partners do. So, the selling family of Imperial kept a small piece. They also rolled a little equity up into the mothership. And so they have liquidity rights along the way as well. And it's every couple of years, you have the opportunity to sell your shares. We have all of our businesses valued every year. And that sort of multiple of trailing EBITDA carries through the year, and then it's revalued at the end of the following year. So there is a really good mechanism to achieve fair value. But at the end of the day, like you're not earning into shares that only are worth something if we decide we’re going to sell. They're worth something if you decide you want to sell. It sounds complicated, but it is relatively simple. You earn into ownership. And generally, like when you depart, we're probably going to buy back shares for the next person. But dependent on certain circumstances, we want people to be an owner for as long as they want to be. 

Chris Powers: And earning into ownership, even across 14 businesses, is typically measured by increasing cash flow?

Wiley Curran: Yeah, I mean, so equity... So this is a great question. We think of return with two very important dynamics. There is the appreciation of the stock, and then there is the current return of cash coming out of the business. And those two combined to equate to what we call an equity performance target. If I have a business worth $10, it distributes $1 a year for five years and grows from $10 to $12. Well, I got $5 of distributions, and I had $2 of appreciation. So, I had a seven. So, I got back $1.07 or $17 on my $10 investment. 

Chris Powers: All right. One of the most impressive things you've said that you've stuck to since 2010 is like we just buy one business a year. You didn't buy 10 and then go, let's start buying 10 a year. We didn't buy two a year. You've like- since we talked about this a year ago, you're like, we just buy one business a year. One, why? You have a lot of scale now. You're growing. You've got probably a lot more capacity. Is that a forever thing, or is that just like that's where we're at right now? Or is there more science to this? 

Wiley Curran: Well, so the early science was that when we started Curran Co and we understood like we had some capital coming in and then we're going to buy a business and there's going to be certain cash coming out of those businesses, basically we need to invest 7% of the balance sheet a year into our businesses or a new business to keep the compounding effect going. Owning businesses is a wonderful way to compound wealth over time. And so, this 7% rule has guided an investment kind of size allocation. And it basically comes down to what the balance sheet can afford, the earnings coming into the business. And what we have targeted is buy one business, but now we're buying slightly larger businesses. We used to buy 20 and 30 and 40 million dollar businesses. Now we're buying 80 million dollar businesses and up. And so we love the idea of diversity. And so, buying one business a year, seeking diversity is a goal of ours. But we also, I would say like we don't want to buy so many businesses that it just diversifies us into smithereens and we can't support them the right way. It's hard to own and speak a bunch of different languages. That's why everybody- it's the language of the five KBs when it comes down to it. 

Chris Powers: Okay, so now we'll go a step further. So, we're going to buy one business a year. There's 365 days in a year. Are the majority, maybe it's a sourcing question, but are a lot of these like businesses you've been talking to for five years already that it's finally time? Is this a sim that just happens to be the lucky- CPC is lucky? How do you find the one business a year? 

Wiley Curran: So, another hot topic, but we...

Chris Powers: I told you I had a microphone. 

Wiley Curran: No, it's good. We have made the decision that if you have a business that big, you are likely going to have some type of intermediary involved. And we love- We'll talk to anybody that wants to talk about the five KBs. And it's great to get alignment early. But we actually think an I-banker is super healthy. It helps you mentally prepare for the emotional decision that is coming with selling a business. And so we tend not to really put a lot of resource into like a proprietary search. It's a completely different sourcing model. We focus on small and medium sized investment banks where a differentiated buyer, like a CPC, that is perpetual in nature, that is buying it to keep it, that wants management teams to truly own it beside them and collect the same type of dividends that we collect, is different. And so we do work through intermediaries primarily. We drop out of auction processes that we know are- we're just another abbreviated firm title and an IOI and this and that. And it's really simple, when a SMIB, when a small or medium-sized investment bank, we call them a SMIB, that universe, when they'll go to the CPC website and kind of see what we're about, and I'll say, hey, like we're super interested in this business. Would you mind if we just had a cup of coffee with the ownership group or the CEO? I just want to tell them about CPC because it's going to look a lot different when we inevitably put an offer in. When somebody will give us that access, and we promise not to talk about the business, truly. When someone will give us that access, it is normally somebody that we want to work with and a business that we're going to be super aligned with out of the gate. If they're just running a process for highest price, and highest price, highest cash, we pay all cash for our businesses, so we don't borrow any money, it's very simple, and apply it directly on the business. So, I don't know, from a sourcing perspective, we see about 300 opportunities a year. I would say we get serious about four to five times a year about a business. And then for one reason or the other, our interest wanes because what was sort of marketed wasn't true. And we end up buying one. 

Chris Powers: Have you bought one this year? 

Wiley Curran: We haven't. 

Chris Powers: You haven't? So we got three months. 

Wiley Curran: And it's probably not going to happen to be dead honest with you... It happens.

Chris Powers: So would that mean you could do two next year or it's one next year? 

Wiley Curran: It could. I mean, it could be like beginning- Honestly, it takes a lot to onboard a group into our system. It's very important that we have and we follow this mechanism, which we call foundations, and foundations is CPC foundations is all about building trust and all about establishing this rolling takeoff between CPC and the operating company. They're not a portfolio company. They're an operating business, and they have real needs. They could be seasonal. They could be going through management transition. They just got this bizarre new owner who doesn't have a fund. And it's very kind of out there. So everyone just needs to chill for a little bit and learn each other, but in a deliberate way, work to establish trust, that working relationship. So we wouldn't buy two businesses on top of each other. We would wait four, five, six months before we did another one. And so, yeah, I hope to buy another business maybe in the first quarter next year and then maybe in the fourth quarter. But we've supported a few add-ons this year. But we have not bought a new operating business in ’25, which is okay. 

Chris Powers: Is there a reason, market, just didn't get it this year? 

Wiley Curran: I think, I mean, coming out of the tariffs, the tariff situation, I mean, our- And April was dark. I mean, our opening tariff bill was...

Chris Powers:  This is right as we were in Canada together, so I remember this vividly... 

Wiley Curran: Our tariff bill was 30, 40 million dollars, like the opening big headline percentages. Obviously, everything changed. And then we just want to see... like we've been pretty conservative this year. And I just want to make sure that like the economy is as stable as we're all hoping it is and as all the seemingly statistics are coming out that largely like, left pocket, right pocket, we're all feeling good. And so, we took a pretty hard pause in the middle of the year in terms of our seriousness on to buying new businesses. We've missed a couple kind of in the beginning of the year and then later on in the year. But I'm super proud of our team as to how disciplined we've been this year. 

Chris Powers: Well, you obviously also have a culture where obviously you're not a fund, so you don't have a clock to deploy capital. You're probably hiring people that obviously want to get a deal done, but they're happy whether they got one done or not, which is a unique cultural aspect. Is there anything you could share there of how do you build a culture when not getting deals done is still acceptable? Do they have dual roles? Are there people that are just buying?

Wiley Curran:  Generally, the investment team, a part of their organizational goals for the year, we wanted to buy a business. Like, we have built CPC to be a deployment engine for our shareholders. And it is designed to go search and find businesses. Would it be... like if we went three years without buying a company, would we be happy? No, that'd be a failure. But everyone understands how important it is to make the right decision when buying a business. It's a very vulnerable time for CPC. You're shelling out a lot of money. You're taking risk on a brand new set of people. And so, for us, I think that the organization will understand that, yes, we didn't accomplish our objective, but we also needed to make the right decision for the business, and that happens in life. So, we wanted to buy a new business. We will probably not this year. There's a few things. There's always a few things kind of percolating, but in calendar 2025, probably not. And that's okay. People understand. 

Chris Powers: If you're listening to this and you need a deal done by the end of the year, I've got your guy. You said one thing. You said our offer is going to look different from most of the offers you're going to get. Generally speaking, what is your offer going to look like that is so much different from what's out there in the market? And I know it's different per deal. 

Wiley Curran: Yeah, I mean, first of all, it won't include any roll. Very odd... 

Chris Powers: So you start with no roll?

Wiley Curran: We start with, hey, we're willing to buy 100% of your business, wait a little while. And then if you want to roll because of the industrial logic of your roll, you should do it. Forcing people to roll, that's just not going to end well. It's going to be a unique package for management where they will earn into real ownership in the business. We've worked a lot on our management incentive systems over the last year, and we think we've really honed in on structuring them to optimize communication, simplicity. There is a cash heavier piece of it and which we think aligns with certain portions of management better. It'll be all cash, there'll be no financing contingency, and it'll be a relatively simple transaction. I mean, again, it's not rocket science. And so many transactions get over-structured. And sometimes the letters are so short, the investment bankers are like, what's going on here? It's like, yeah, no, we're serious about that. So anyway, it does look a little different because of its simplicity. 

Chris Powers: Okay, then you talked about maybe we'll call it the first 90 or 100 days. Again, you said there's different situations. It could be seasonal. There could be a management change. Maybe more the question is like, what are the not to dos that you've learned over 14 businesses in the first hundred days? 

Wiley Curran: The first not to do is don't come with a hundred day plan. 

Chris Powers: Okay, throw it out the window.

Wiley Curran: I mean, like this management team has just gone through a hard process, like our diligence process, like we're shelling out real money. And we need to trust but verify certain things. And so it's a process. It's quick. It's tried to measure a few times, cut once type of diligence process. But in general, selling any business is tiring. It's tiring on both sides. And so, we think that coming at a management team with a 100-day plan of all the changes we think they should make is a mistake. That happens a lot of time when the vest-wearing Oxfords come in, and they're like, hey, we think you ought to pursue this. It's like, no, no, no, no. Let’s pursue trust and relationship first. We do do it in a deliberate way. We like for our management teams to meet some of our other businesses. We like for our teams to understand exactly what the excellence group is capable of. We like for them to feel, and this is a little touchy feely, but we like for them to understand that you're out of the sale process now. The checks have cleared. There's no going back. And it's okay to be vulnerable, and it's okay to show your blemishes, and it's okay. And that's super important to working together. Don't... we're not dressing anything up anymore. It's over. And our excellence team and primarily Dennis, David and Caitlin, our chief people officer, our chief operations officer, and our chief information officer, coined this process called foundations and it is designed to optimize around a really good rolling first call it four to six months of your interaction with CPC. And actually like, as you know, I'm a customer intimacy guru and our customers at CPC are our management teams when you really think about it. And we got the feedback that, our CEOs are like, look, working with CPC can be magical, but it takes a little while to really figure out like the capabilities, the expectations, et cetera. And we don't want to be a black box. And so, what the feedback was is build an all-encompassing manual, build a document, build a document that helps us understand the expectations. What does a board meeting look like? Our board meetings are different. What does tax season look like? More about the five key battles. What are the excellence group capabilities? What are my financial reporting expectations? How do I work with the chairman? Like all these different things in one place, one singular place. And it's a long and thick document. It's not meant for a quick cup of coffee on Saturday morning, but it's meant to parcel out. You can delegate it to different parts of the management team. And it's just meant to help on board. And we're putting the finishing touches on that right now. So, when op co 5 arrives, there will be a... we know what foundations looks like. But we also have the CPC guidelines document that is going to help set expectations and map the relationship a little bit. 

Chris Powers: Then the inverse question would be prior to close, so we're throwing out the 100 day plan, love that answer, besides like Q of E and having good financials, during DD, what can't you miss? Like you've bought 14 companies. Clearly DD on company 15 is going to be a lot sharper, the questions to ask, than one. What are the most important things you need to figure out in that window besides the financials being what they say they are and it being a great business? 

Wiley Curran: Yeah, I think, so we see diligence on two huge streams. There's the confirmatory side and there's all the things that you would do in a normal process. And then our diligence process is as much about us learning the language in the lens of a management team and how they think about certain issues, and so we could have a valuable meeting on day one of ownership. And so, we have this channel that we call the business diligence sessions. Think of them as like a little mini series, maybe four or five virtual discussions. And we ask a member from CPC to pair up with a member of management and for them to walk the group through how management approaches a certain dynamic in a business. It could be terms of customer contracts. How are we doing it? It could be all of our managerial feedback practices. It could be things that are specific to that business and industry that we need to understand through management's eyes and mouths. And then there are things that come out of those that we should just verify and make sure that the business is where management thinks it is because a stumble out of the gate in the core assumptions of the business that are the core of the thesis is not good for anybody. It's not good for management. It’s not good for shareholders. It's not good for the customer. So, really, we have all the confirmatory side and then there's like four or five major, major thesis items that we need to go verify that are right. A lot of it comes down to your value proposition to the customer. Are you solving the need that is on the piece of paper in reality? Is your part as complex as you're billing it to be? Are your delivery standards as good as you claim they are? Does the customer see you in the same way that you're laying out on a piece of paper? And that is an important thing to really have your arms around in diligence. 

Chris Powers: I don't know if this is too niche of a question. Again, I think everybody at face value that runs a business will say, of course, we're meeting the customer expectations. We're profitable and like we've been around 20 years. What would be an example of they think they're doing it great, but after meeting CPC and going through your process, they realize like, damn, the fact we've been profitable and we haven't really touched the customer at all in the ways we could. What's one where maybe you pick on a company individual or an example where like a CEO is so confident that they're meeting customers, and you quickly are like, yeah, you're just scratching the surface? 

Wiley Curran: Well, let's keep it generic, and then we can dive in if you want. But I think that it's super important for management teams to understand what true customer lifetime expectations are from a length of time perspective and then also from a profit perspective. And a lot of times when you get into this exercise, teams really haven't understood what the customer lifetime expectancy really is.

Chris Powers: Which is what? 

Wiley Curran: Well, let's say that you have a- let's say a customer has an expected lifetime of nine years, meaning that churn is 11% or something like that. But the mistake would be that all profits are equal, or all customers are equally as profitable. And a lot of times when we help a business, we help them, getting back to intimacy, say you have four different types of customers. Generally, if you understand the margin created from delivery and then the friction needed and the fixed costs needed to truly deliver to that customer and the assets needed to support that relationship, all four of those are going to have a different profit by customer. And there is a totally correct school of thought that you should never allocate fixed costs. But there's also, it's an important operational CFO type of mindset, which is understanding the different frictions and the different needs that a customer might demand. So let's take Airshare for an example. At Airshare, if you have a customer that has a really complex billing process where every single trip, they have to- it's complex to schedule it and it's complex to bill it. And it requires a full-time job to bill that customer, and that's customer A. And customer B flies the same exact trip 90 times a year. And the billing is so simple, like it's totally automated. Those have a completely different customer lifetime value. And so, a lot of times, management teams are like, wow, okay, I've been pushing on this type of customer over here because the margin dollars are slightly higher than customer B. But customer B is simpler, simpler to deliver. They have a higher customer satisfaction rating. They actually deliver more profit to the bottom than A versus B. I'm not saying that A is a bad customer, but understanding it in a holistic way like that is something that our management teams can actually activate on. They then in turn pinpoint deploying resources to a certain type of customer and then get more segmented and more just accurate with how they're going about acquiring new business. Let's say that in our component sourcing business, we have really done a lot of key account management practices. We brought in a new leader a little over a year ago now, and he has tied key account management to cultural success. And everybody knows exactly how they are contributing in to the satisfaction of that account. And really, Jay's done an unbelievable job. But also what he's realized is that certain customers don't fit the power alley of what our supply network can deliver. And by making appropriate selections on new business, we can then turn around and have better strategic supply relationships on the flip side coming into the business that are just mutually beneficial everywhere. Does that make sense? And so, our way of thinking about the resources needed to deliver to the customer, they tie to all the five key battles, really. And then management teams go out and act on that. 

Chris Powers: And the five key battles, just to confirm, this is something that y'all just saw patterns, went into maybe an offsite or it was done over a while and said... we got to get this into messaging that we can use over and over and over. 

Wiley Curran: And I can't give enough credit to my dad for getting me to where I am. But he always was like, you need to write things down. You're not good enough just to like spit it out. And so we start writing this down. And when we started to think about CPC, I started, I collected everybody's notes, cocktail napkins, random emails, all this stuff into the different examples of where we saw successes. And then it was pretty dark. It's like, okay, let's talk about where we've gotten our butts kicked. And those are painful, but probably more valuable. And we've collected all this data, all this data on our successes and our failures. And when you really stacked it up, you just would see the patterns. You would see, we had an investment in C3 Capital in a fast-food franchise that was not in the fast-food business. They were in the people development business, KBP Foods, just one of the most incredible HR stories you'll ever be around. And they didn't sell chicken or tacos. They sell an employee experience that delivers every day for that employee. And oh, by the way, they just happen to to make chicken or or make tacos and they go to work. And it's an unbelievable story. It's a business that you'd like to own forever. It was in one of our funds, and it needed to be sold per what we had agreed to with our owners. But yeah, that's a little on that. 

Chris Powers: Okay, two things. You can either pick one of the two or you can explain both. You did mention we do our board meetings different. To some, board meetings can just be three hours of just staring at the ceiling. What do you do differently that makes them great? And then I was reading ahead of here and you have 14 companies, you do a CEO summit. I don't know if that's every year. 

Wiley Curran: It's not every year. Our CEO summit is designed to, A, bring everybody together because there's just a lot of value in that. But B, get you thinking about your business, asking the hard questions, but also surfacing wins and losses that others have had in the five KBs that might be able to help you. And we don't do it every year. We typically bring in a resource. I'm a huge fan of the Harvard Business School. And we've brought in a professor. We've brought in speakers of different types to talk with management, all of our teams. We're thinking about redesigning it a little bit more on topic versus more generic. And so it may look a little different in the future, but we do it periodically. We think every year is a lot. The board meeting topic, it's a great one. We think that results are important and accountability is important. But we also think it's hard to have your mind in the same room at the same time think in terms of looking in the windshield but also looking in the rearview mirror. So in general, our board meetings are structured as a virtual session, usually a day or two before the board meeting, where the different area leaders within the businesses talk about their results, kind of year to date or per that period, and then headwinds or tailwinds to achieving their plan. It's a wonderful opportunity for the non-CEO to have the microphone and talk about what's going on in your part of the business, get accolade, get a little heat. Like it's okay. That's part of maturing professionally is to get that microphone. And it's an important facet of our board process. Basically talk about how the business is doing from a results perspective. And then one or two days later, the board meets typically with the CEO and maybe one or two other members of management. Sometimes that other member of management is on a rotating basis. Sometimes they join for different parts of the meeting. But this is an opportunity to where the CEO has this kind of surrounding of brainpower next to them that is going to help them attack certain areas in the five key battles. And so that second day is in person, and it is thematic in nature. So the first day, sorry, the first board meeting of the year, which is a little backward, but it's in the middle of the year. It's in July. And we have a decent look of where the business is going to end up for the year, let's say a range of outcomes. And so we understand kind of what we're starting with from a resource and investment perspective. We do a pretty big strategic diagnosis and understand where we are in the five KBs and where there are opportunities to invest. We're not asking for the plan yet. We're asking for what do we need and what do we want to invest into. And coming out of that meeting, hopefully we're not like deeply course correcting on strategy, but sometimes you are. You're affirming your strategy and you're saying, okay, we're going to invest this resource into that initiative or engagement next year or in the years to come. And in the fall, board meeting two, again first day, how are we doing? And the second day is what's the plan for next year? Let's take that strategy affirmation that we put in place at board meeting one and let's talk about what your PD matrix looks like, what your execution framework looks like next year as to what we want to get done strategically that's going to leave us in a great place at the end of that year. And we do have a virtual budget meeting in the end of the year virtually. But board meeting two is in the later fall, lays out the plan. Each of the team members are talking about how they can contribute into the plan. And then swing back to the beginning of the calendar year, let's call it February-ish time zone or time frame, and we're talking about people, we're talking about results, and we're talking about all things comp and making sure that our team is in a great place and what do we need to invest there. So, there's kind of a- it's a three-pronged year, four board meetings where you just talk about the results, you end up talking about the same things and the same initiatives. We find it can get stale and things don't get done. We like that theme and moving and having a rhythm. And so this is the first year we've actually nudged the businesses all into that same theme. So everybody's on the same theme. 

Chris Powers: All right. We're going to end on one theme. You own 14 different companies. If you're a business owner and you're being told that you're not using AI, you're falling behind. As a reality, and we don't have to talk about how it's being used, but maybe more just paint a picture, as somebody that really owns 14 businesses, what is the reality of what you read in the paper versus what's going on? Is AI infiltrated every company and margins are better than they've ever been? Are there businesses that you have that haven't even touched AI yet? Like, what is the general... I just think what we read is very different from where we're at for most companies. 

Wiley Curran: I agree. I would... So our businesses had the challenge this year of just running five experiments. I don't care what experiment it was. It could be booking airline tickets. It doesn't matter. Just let's do some experiments. And I think culturally that has really helped get over some fears that it's not likely to replace and it doesn't create the ability necessarily to shrink your employee footprint from 100 to 80. It may let you grow 10% on the same 100 people, so it will help and support growth in a really great way. But I think if you run experiments, and I think what's happening now is businesses are learning how to run experiments and play with it, and it soothes the fears a little bit. Big businesses are certainly better at using it than small... Examples of how it's being used, we are trying to augment the design process at Imperial. So, if you think about the number of touches between a design representative and a sales rep to get the Shady Oaks hat created, there's like 10 or 12 touches on average, and we can use AI to reduce that. We're not getting rid of a sales representative. That's not happening. 

Chris Powers: They're just going to be able to sell more. 

Wiley Curran: Well, I'm sorry. I'm talking about the design representative. We're not... That's not going to replace a design representative. It's going to help make them more accurate and please the customer because speed is real in that business. There's a ton of opportunities for it, but it requires experimentation. So what I think you read in the papers now is big businesses have figured out how they're going to use it. And it is going to augment profit because generally you can hold fixed costs the same. And you can layer on margin. In the smaller end of the market, where our businesses generally are, we're having a processing journey right now, and it's turning on a lot of light bulbs. I see CPC in the future having a distinct AI capability as a dream, no plans tomorrow, but I'd love to have somebody, an internal resource that when that CEO comes to us and says, I got to admit, I don't know how to use AI, it's perfectly okay. And it's most of them. And our chief information officer can help them deeply right now. But what’s going on in the papers is these earth shattering breakthroughs. But in small businesses right now, you're seeing a lot of experimentation. You're doing it with things that may move the needle in terms of growth, but aren't going to replace the design representative. They're not going to close the books for you. AI is 100% only as good as the prompt that you put into it. So it's a lot of work to get it to work well. And I would just encourage everybody to play with it. It's going to leave you behind if you don't play with it, but it's not something to be scared of. It just really isn't. 

Chris Powers: All right, my final question. You came in 2010 with what appears, maybe looking back, it was a little more thought through than it was, or maybe it was just a plan. If we sat back here in, it’s 2025, so you've been doing it 15 years, 2040 and we were sitting here doing an NPS on Wiley, what will have happened over the next 15 years? Because you run a unique business on behalf of your family and other partners. You have a legacy of your father that's deeply embedded. You have a unique capital structure. You have all these kind of unique things that make up Wiley. Maybe you've been asked this. Maybe you haven't. How would you know that you did well 15 years from now? 

Wiley Curran: Well, personally, I want to be the best husband, dad and brother and son that I possibly can be. And that's super important to me. And there's a lot of ways to do that, but it requires engagement and being present in all facets. So you got to find capacity. And I have a set of support in that part of my life that is unparalleled. I'm the luckiest person in the history of the world in that regard. Professionally, I would say that in 2040, I'd love to have, across all the businesses, across 10,000 employees where we're crushing the five key battles and we have a lot of confidence in our ability to bring in better and better and better talent across the businesses. If you do it well, the financials will take care of themselves. So the shareholders of CPC and [Crancos?] will be happy. And more importantly, in 2040, the model won't be new anymore. More people are going to look like this. But we will have an engine that can find the next great business to buy. And that's what we want to create. We want to create something that can keep growing and where it's like, I'm not going to sell to a strategic, and I'm not going to sell to private equity who's going to flip it. We're buying businesses to keep them. Go back to the original statement. Have you ever washed a rental car? 

Chris Powers: I think that's the key line. 

Wiley Curran: It is. And it's so true because everybody gets it. And it's like we want to create these environments where teams can go out and pursue market share and pursue technology investment and pursue customer satisfaction in this really, really like fundamentally sound and long-term way, and the only way you can do it is if you really plan to own the business forever. You can't put lipstick on a pig with poor customer satisfaction. Sometimes it takes the long route. But it's a great cash flowing business and in what'd be 15 years, hopefully in 15 years, we have a team at the hold co that can take it another hundred years. And for me, that's the signal of success. 

Chris Powers: Wiley, I've learned a lot from you. I don't know if I'll ever have a business to sell you one day, but I hope maybe I'll have an introduction to make to you. You think about it. Great. And I really appreciate it. 

Wiley Curran: Chris, thank you, man. Appreciate it.