The Business of Laravel

Matt Stauffer:
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Business of Laravel podcast, where I talked to business leaders who are working in and within Laravel. My guest today is David Watson, Founder of Risk Advisor. So, you know, David, the first thing I want to do is just make sure that people will know who you are. So could you kind of say hi to the people and tell them who are you and kind of what's your business and what does it have to do with Laravel.

David Watson:
Yeah, absolutely. So I'm the founder of Risk Advisor, as you mentioned. We are a SaaS platform for independent insurance agents. I am not a developer. I do not have any experience with that. I always joke about that when that does come up that I would love to be a developer and have tried to teach myself how to code. But every time that I would push something up, it would break. And so now I'm not allowed to do that.

But my background is the independent insurance agent. I was an independent insurance agent and was looking to solve a need. So built something on a no code platform that has turned into what our product is today.

Matt Stauffer:
So, I'm so excited to get to talk to you because usually in this show that's been folks who are at the edge between tech and leadership and entrepreneurship, but everybody's got a little bit of a bias. They're a little bit more on the tech side, a little bit more. And so you are technical and technically capable, but you're choosing not to be the technical person of your project. And so I'm really fascinated to hear how someone, because I feel like a lot of people have the perception that if you're doing that, then you're going to end up in no code, low code JavaScript. That's the world for the non-technical, and again, you're not non-technical, but that's the general kind of consensus people have come up with where you land. So can you tell a little bit about what was your story from going from like, I have an idea to I have a profitable Laravel app running in production today?

David Watson:
Yes, so it really started out as in our business, we had fillable PDFs and we had a process of you got to send it here for if you're wanting this type of quote or you got to send it over here, you got all these different systems that you have to mainly double entry into. And so really what it started out is, hey, how do I solve this for myself? And also how do I solve and fix this for my team? And so it just kind of started out testing out different form builders. I had a little bit of development or coding, very minimal coding skills from high school when I took a couple of classes. I always joke that my senior year of high school, I tried to sign up for AP computer science and my counselor said, no, you're gonna be in AP environmental science instead. And so if I ever run across across her, I'll be like how many of those people that you put in over me own a SaaS company now?

It was about a year and a half of this initial, it was built on JotForm, initial JotForm that saw significant improvements for our team. And every single one of our team members who were using it saw an increase in the amount of business that they were writing. They saw personal increase in their take home pay. And they also saw a large improvement in their quality of life. I had one of our producers who told us, our sales team members who told us that before this, she was waking up at 5 a.m. in the morning to get all her work done. And afterwards, when she was writing more and making more money, she didn't have to do that anymore.

Matt Stauffer:
Wow.

David Watson:
So it started out, never intended it for it be a situation where I grew into a business. But once I started to show it to some of my peers, they're like, Hey, this is awesome. How do I get this? And so that's where kind of transformed into, let's, build something that's scalable.

Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool. So once you decide you're gonna do that, you said, hey, this current no-code solution I have is not gonna do it. What told you that? Because we've talked to a lot of people who say, hey, I just wanna get a proof of concept or an MVP. Where do I start? Do I start with a no-code or a low-code or real code? Do you remember what the constraint was or what the thought was that you had? This is the moment I need to move to a real kind of like actual program.

David Watson:
Yeah, so I mentioned I landed on Jot Form, but before that I probably tested out 30 to 40 different form builders. And so there was already limitations based on knowing that there's these other other form builders that just didn't didn't make it happen. And then we had gotten to the point where the Jot Form was starting to break because we were trying to do too much with it. I remember there was this one set of conditional logic that I'd set up to where I couldn't get it all the way to where I needed it. So I broke it down into the three steps. And with each one having conditional logic that changed the answer to something that the second one looked at, that the third one looked at. And so it was very, very clear that to do a lot of the things that we were wanting to do, that building it from the ground up was the answer.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, okay. So you hit a level of technical complexity and the limitations of not only your current tooling, but honestly the best tooling you could find. You weren't just on some random tool. You're like, we did the research. This is the best there is and it's just not cutting it. Yeah.

David Watson:
Yeah. Yep.

Matt Stauffer:
So as you decided that you were gonna go for code, then you have to figure out, what is my next step gonna be, you know, in terms of am I gonna bring in a technical co-founder? Am I gonna learn to code myself? Am I gonna bring an agency? Am gonna bring in freelancers? Kind of what was that process for you? Did it feel like you knew what to do or was it kind of overwhelming of figuring out what your next step was there?

David Watson:
Yeah, it very much was, hey, yes, I'm going to figure out this is a business. I'll figure it out. Or I know I want to turn this into a business. But there were a lot of what the heck do I do next? Because I don't know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

David Watson:
And so I had someone that was able to point me in a couple of different directions. One of them was a firm that was a couple hours away from me that I went and did an all day intensive, like, hey, what's your vision? And then basically a brainstorming session, like, what's your vision? And then let's break it down to the MVP. And then they actually were the ones that introduced us to Tighten. We had a couple of engagements with y'all and was able to use what we came up with the first place to be able to hand off and make that process easier and less that we had to do during that engagement. So definitely got some guidance on where to kind of get started with going down the agency route.

Matt Stauffer:
So your life today, I mean you mentioned you had this advisor who said, oh go take environmental science. Are you surprised to be someone running a SaaS person? Are you surprised that your life is so much software when you weren't exactly a software guy 10 years ago? Or is this like, no I kind of saw this was coming?

David Watson:
No, I think I've never really thought of that question. But like looking back in my life, I don't think it's really a surprise because like I was yes, I never really I never was a capable developer or even got close to that. But there have been several times where it very much like I remember I got laid off from a job and I was trying to figure out what I was going to do next, whether I was going to stay in insurance or whatever, whatever I was going to do. And I remember I think it's Treehouse. I was taking some courses on Treehouse because the two classes I took in high school and a couple that took in college, it always interested me. But I guess if there were a surprise on that side of things, it would be the fact that I still ended up in the SaaS world without founding a company, without building it and literally coding it is what I mean by that.

So I guess if anything that would be the surprise part of that equation.

Matt Stauffer:
Yep, now that totally makes sense.

So there's a lot of people out there who want to be in the position that you're in right now. You are a successful entrepreneur who has created, who took an idea, you were in a context. And one of the things I always tell people is I'm like, you're in context where no other programmers are, so bring your programming brain to that context. And you did that, you have a programming brain. That's why I kept saying, you're not non-technical. You said, I understand how to solve things with computers, and I'm now in this other non-computer world, and I'm gonna be the one who crosses that bridge.

What, I mean just like so many people want to be there. So I just gave my little piece of advice, right? Which is like, you know, try to take your programming brain somewhere else. But like, if somebody was like, I want to be where David Watson is. I want to have a successful thing. I'm tired of being a freelancer. I'm tired of being an employee. I'm tired of even just being an accountant who knows some programming stuff. Like, what do you think their best next step is? Is it a book?

Is there a video that you watched? Is there a practice that you had? Is there something that you would say, you know what you all should do? It's this right here. That's your next thing.

David Watson:
I know the audience is probably going to hate this, engulf yourself in marketing and sales conversation.

Matt Stauffer:
Really? Yeah.

David Watson:
Being a non-technical, technical founder, one of the things that I'm constantly having conversations with my team about is, even though my background is sales, I do all the sales, I do most of the marketing and things like that.
It's, still get engulfed on trying to chase, let's build this feature. It'll help us sell better. or, like I'm literally thinking of next week where I, okay, I need to, I need to go back to blocking out time for putting marketing material together for outbound or, like I can point point to a, if I'm active on LinkedIn, if I'm, if I set up the time to put out a post a day.

It leads to more demos, which leads to more sales, but I constantly drift away from that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

David Watson:
And so it's very cliche, but like, especially if you already have, if you already have the skills on the technical side, building those skills on the marketing and sales side, where you look at these people on Twitter, X, I guess, or whoever who are the ones who are able to take that next step, that next step in scale are the ones who do a good job on that marketing and sales.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

David Watson:
And I feel like it's an easier step to be proficient at that. And if you're the one that's able to push out a new feature at night and then spend time the next day putting out the marketing content around that, if you're able to do both, that's a huge thing.

Matt Stauffer:
I love that answer because you say it might be cliche but honestly in our world very few people talk about it. And so that people will see the success of someone and they'll say, oh well I want to do what they do and they'll build something and it's this angels, what are angels in the outfield or whatever the thing is, not angels in outfield, the one where the guy built the cornfield. Y

David Watson:
Yeah, the Iowa cornfield building. Yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that thing. If you build it, they will come.
Yeah, that's what our world assumes the world is, and it is not, and the number of people who just have this deeply disappointed experience when you've built this brilliant thing, and maybe even you've done all the validation, but you don't know how to get other people to know about it. So I'm gonna, I'm sorry I keep pressing you on this, if somebody does not understand, if somebody's not a salesperson, they don't have marketing as their background, is that something that can be learned, and if so, how?

David Watson:
It definitely can be learned. I think a good book is How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's an older one, but it really is good. I think honestly, if I'm thinking from that point of view, call my...

Matt Stauffer:
so good. That's so good.

David Watson:
Call insurance companies and I know I'm from insurance, but call like direct insurance companies and figure out who has the best language. And what I mean by that is like, you get like purposely go into that conversation that yeah, you can quote my insurance or whatever, like come up with objections and figure out those who, what they're doing consistently to overcome those objections. I think, yeah, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, so basically watch salespeople doing their job. Huh, that's a really cool idea.

David Watson:
Yeah. And same thing with like, especially in the SaaS world, like scheduled demos. Like if you see some of the most successful companies out there, book demos with them. And like one thing, if you're in a spot to do it, like you might say, I feel bad for wasting somebody's time if I'm not going to buy something. Well, if you're in a spot to do it, say like right at the end of the call, tell the person like, Hey, I appreciate your time. Like this is what's going on.

What's your email? Let me send you a hundred dollar Amazon gift card and I'll send you my thoughts on what you might be able to do better or what kind of stood out as a negative to me, but also what stood out as a positive. So that way, like, yes, you, they may not be getting a sale from, from you, but that way it kind of combats the guilt of just wasting somebody's time.

Matt Stauffer:
I mean, one thing I've done in this, not for this purpose, so I love that you're saying this, but one thing I've done when I have that guilt is I go and I say, hey, it is your job to sell to people like me. I'm your ideal client. I don't intend to purchase your thing right now, but for X and Y reason, I want to be on this call with you. And sometimes it's a favor to a friend or whatever else it ends up being. But I have a reason to be in this call and I don't expect to buy their thing. And I'm like, I don't want to waste your time, but also you know that I am your target market. So if you do your job really well, you might just change my mind. Are you willing to give your pitch to me on a call knowing that I don't intend to buy the thing right now? And every single time they've been like, yep, you're telling me that I can give a sales pitch to my ideal client who thinks he's gonna say no? Great, challenge me to get him to say yes, you know.

David Watson:
I was about to say, yeah, I meanthe great, I love that because the great thing with that is you're gonna get their best shot.

Matt Stauffer:
Yes. Yeah.

David Watson:
Like the way I said, it might be their fourth back to back demo that day, but if you tell them that you're in, most people in sales are competitive, you just open yourself up to their best shot. So it's gonna be, yeah, I love that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, that's really cool. I like that. Okay, that's I really appreciate you talking about marketing because again, it's just not something we tend to be good at and it's not something we tend to talk about very much. So when we talk on this podcast, a lot of the questions are usually about like, are the exciting things you're doing technically and what's the biggest challenge ahead of you technically, but I don't really care because it's about business in the world of Laravel. So what is the most interesting challenge that you overcame this year? In any way, shape or form, doesn't have to be Laravel specific.

David Watson:
Yeah, no, it's, I mean, the biggest thing is I stepped out of my very cush job in February last year to go full time and went six months without a paycheck.

Matt Stauffer:
Congratulations.

David Watson:
And even with during that time, like I was still like we have a team of three developers, two in South America, one in the UK and they all are phenomenal, but when it comes to up until December 1st of last year, customer support, sales, demos, marketing, product management, I was doing all of that.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah.

David Watson:
And so it's probably gonna segue into your next question about when it comes down to like one of the things I'm most excited about going into this year is we were able to hire a head of customer success.

We hired an outbound business development rep. our growth up to this point had all been referral. And one of the things that

Matt Stauffer:
Oh nice.

David Watson:
The fact that I'm in the industry, so people know who I am and that sounds conceited or whatever, just being in these groups and things like that.

Matt Stauffer:
No, not at all.

David Watson:
And then also we just hired a director of product that started this Monday as well. So like all three of those things are things that I get to hand off.

Matt Stauffer:
That's incredible.

David Watson:
I made the decision was retaining demos because my story is still part of the product, but then also dedicating time to getting back to doing marketing, which to help with the inbound versus our outbound who's doing obviously the outbound side of things. So yeah, last 45 days onboarding three employees is a lot when you're setting up all these processes, but I know that within the next couple of weeks those dividends will start paying on themselves.

Matt Stauffer:
Oh, that's incredible. I love that. I mean, so again, one of my normal questions is what's your experience been like in hiring Laravel developers? And I do want to answer that as a question in a second, but let's just talk about hiring. Hiring is a skill that not a lot of people have. You don't just come out of high school ready to hire people. Have you hired before these three? And either way, I guess you hired the programmers, but like, what's your experience been like? What do you like and dislike about hiring?

David Watson:
Yes, prior to Risk Advisor, my only hires had been on the sales side of things. I'm one of those that I have to force myself when it comes down to the hire slow, fire fast. I do have to try to not necessarily draw things out on purpose, but I'm very much because of my personality, I tend to figure people out pretty quick.

Matt Stauffer:
Let's go.

David Watson:
Yeah, I'm very much like, if I do three interviews, I know pretty much the person who's going to make it to the end. And that served me well. Like on the sales side of things, it is little bit different getting into other departments, but so far so good.

And so for the non-technical or for the non-developer positions, that's kind of the approach. The person with the best resume on two didn't necessarily win the job, but the person who instilled the most confidence in myself quickly won the job type of situation.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, yeah, totally. So I will kind of go to my normal question because one of the things I want to make sure is that people know that if they choose to invest in Laravel's primary technology that they are not going to regret it later. And hiring is one of those questions. So you said you got three team members. What has your experience been like in bringing on those team members?

David Watson:
Yeah, so all of our developer hires have come from Larajobs.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice.

David Watson:
So yeah, that's been a great resource, especially leading with Laravel. And that's one of the things on my end with not writing code, but I still have grown to love the Laravel community and getting to know, like just seeing all the enhancements that are coming out, but also how easy it is to scale and how really that community is there. when getting on on X and like just naturally the algorithms figured out who I need to be in touch with and things like that has been really cool. But yeah, so when it comes to hiring developers, we start out with a just a regular interview, get to know them a little bit.

And then I do like give them a take home assignment. We don't really overthink it. We just kind of look at who does the best job and also who follows the instructions the best. And so that's that's done well for us.

Matt Stauffer:
That's awesome. So let's talk about kind of going forward for you. What is, I mean we talked about what your biggest challenge was last year and you just mentioned you have three new team members. So kind of what's your big challenge going on right now? What are you excited about? What are you nervous about?

David Watson:
Yeah, no, it's like really just knowing that there are just three more people who are counting on me and counting on this business to have a long term position. And it's one thing like I feel the same way when it comes to our developers who I mentioned earlier are overseas.

But all those are contract positions and they all think like contractors. There's a certain piece of that. Again, I don't think of them that way. I think of them as employees, as team members, and I feel like that's paid dividends. But for these W-2 employees, like all of them left a job that was pretty secure. they all have, you can tell that the being a part of a smaller startup is something that drives them. So being in that atmosphere, it's very exciting for them, exciting for us. But there are always those moments where I'm like, what the heck am I doing? Like not only did last year, not only last year did I, leave a job that I was very comfortable in, but now I've got other people doing the same thing. Like, what am I doing?

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah. Got three people, yeah. Yeah.

David Watson:
And so, not allowing myself to stay in those moments where those thoughts creep in too long. I'm not saying not having them, because I think it's not... It's not fair to yourself to not let yourself have those moments because those are real emotions, but not letting yourself stay in it is the key.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, no, that's really good. I mean, I've said this often on podcasts, but getting to the point, you know, having freelanced in the past, I was like, oh, I need to come up with whatever, however many tens of thousands of dollars every year to be able to take care of my family. And now I'm like, I have to come up with however many tens of thousands of dollars a year every or however many tens of thousands of dollars every other week to cover payroll. And I'm like, that that is a transformationally terrifying difference between the two, you know, nearing $100,000 every other week.

David Watson:
Yeah. Yep.

Matt Stauffer:
Are you joking? That's a lot of responsibility. And one thing I was really grateful for is that when I was growing up, interned at this company and the owner had to do layoff. He just was like, he's like, at some point he's like, I've just been feeling so awful about this. And he's like, at some point I can't make everybody else be my responsibility. And so he was trying to balance between this whole like, I want to care for everybody. I don't want to make sure that, you know, like I'm giving ready good jobs, but like,
just because I own the company doesn't mean I now have taken on responsibility for each person's family. So I appreciate what you're saying. Like you gotta live in that space, you gotta feel those feelings, and also sometimes you're like, okay, cool, I felt it, I've gone there, and now we need to go back and do great work.

Okay, so are you guys gonna be hiring any other roles for the rest of this year, or do you think you're kinda hired up?

David Watson:
I won't say no. A lot of that depends on our growth and hitting those growth goals. I could definitely see us bringing on another developer towards the end of the year. But at some point this year, the next step for me will be to bring on someone to do demos with me because hopefully at that point, not hopefully, the plan is that at that point that we're producing enough opportunities that we need that. But then eventually the next step will be to fully hand that off to have someone who, even though my story is part of it and I feel like that benefits, I also realized that I'm not that great at demos because I had my director of product sitting in on one yesterday and I shot a message afterwards apologizing because I think like three or four times I said, we don't have that feature yet, but we have plans to. And I know that's gotten me into a lot of trouble because of over promising, but also knowing that it's like, if it's coming soon, I'll just wait. And it's like, no, no, jump on board now.

And there's other things where, I know that someone who is a great account executive can, could take the opportunities I'm going with right now and run circles around me. But yeah, no, it's with front loading going into the year 2025. We probably, I doubt we'll meet the number of hires at three. If you count myself, I guess four counting myself last year, but you never know.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, okay. So if somebody's listening to this and they're like, know what, I'm actually kind of curious about Risk Advisor. I work in the insurance industry. Give me the pitch. Give me the 30 second or the two minute, whatever you want pitch for someone who was listening and knows somebody or works in that industry and is curious to learn more.

David Watson:
Yes, so Risk Advisor will help through what we call conversational, not conditional, conversational logic to help someone guide their prospect through the conversation to collect the data that they need to accurately and efficiently quote that person's insurance. So we help with personalized, so your home, auto umbrella, things like that. So our goal is to help you bring that data in, in a structure that makes it easy to use it.

And so what we mean by that is on the back end, what we'll do is we'll help you send it to your CRMs, what's called purse lines, raiders, where you distribute the data to multiple carriers, underwriters, all these different systems. And one of the things I joke about is that being an independent insurance agency, I originally started out with State Farm, so I only had one carrier.

Well, when I was with State Farm, only having one carrier to this, like, man, life's so easy for these independent agents because they have all these different carriers. They'll never lose. And then when I became an independent agent and I had all these carriers, I was like, it's great. But also, man, State Farm also has it so easy because not only do you, yes, you have all these different carriers, but each carrier looks at business differently. You might be eligible with one carrier, but not the other carrier. And so.

Matt Stauffer:
That's a lot.

David Watson:
A lot of the things that we're going to be going towards this year is helping through the conversational logic make decisions for you of, hey, this is a fit for this carrier, this is a fit for that carrier to help with that efficiency as well.

Matt Stauffer:
That's cool.

Got it. So when I hear somebody say what you just said, I expect them to say, we're going to use AI for that. But I think you and I both know that AI is sometimes the answer and sometimes you can just build a conditional. You can just build a switch somewhere. So has it been tempting to slap AI onto everything because that's what's hot and sexy right now?

David Watson:
Yeah, I definitely think that was actually the director of product. We gave that to that feature that we're going to be working on here soon. We gave it to him to pitch us on it. And one of the things he did was is he broke it down to where the logical first step is to conditionally build it. Like build a form for each one of your carriers, check this box, yes, no miles, all that stuff.

And that is 100%. That's the first step. Now, when we do that, when we launch that feature, it's going to be called underwriting AI. it, like we will definitely take advantage of the, the AI craze.

Matt Stauffer:
The hype, yeah, exactly.

David Watson:
And I think there's plenty of ways to, okay, instead of you manually having to do it, upload the document and use AI to ingest it. But then the next step of that is making it to where.

Okay, it's not just underwriting decisions. It's prompts that based on how this conversation is going, based on tapping into the live recording of the call to understand sentiment, hey, you should also ask about X, Y, and Z, cross sell this additional lines of business. Yes, it's very tempting to, especially when you look at like, some of the accelerators we've been a part of when you look at who's raising money when you're trying to do that. they all the common theme is the AI allow allows those people to look over some of the maybe the other like, ourincome our revenues 10 times what there is there. There's is but they raise what we're trying to raise in two weeks type of thing. So there's definitely definitely times where it's like, man, just Risk Advisor AI, nothing to do with AI, but let's just name it Risk Advisor AI.

Matt Stauffer:
Let the money rain down.

David Watson:
I think doing it the right way with anything, especially when you're talking about insurance data, which is consumer data, it makes it very, important not to cut corners and to do it the right way.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, and I think that was really insightful the way you talked about AI because a lot of people think AI replaces the need for us to build conditional knowledge into our applications. But that knowledge has to be somewhere and programming languages are actually very good at logic, you know. But you said it's going to be listening to conversations and offering ideas. And that's a really fascinating way to think about it is like, yeah, we are building tools that allow human conversation and context to be translated into data. And then we're like, it's really hard to get the AI to know what to do with the data. But you're like, no, no, no.
Keep the app handling the data, but give the AI the full conversation and see what it can do to almost be like an advisor to the person who's using the application. That's really clever. I had not heard anybody talk about that delineation that way. I really appreciate that.

David Watson:
Yeah, absolutely. And I think the big thing, especially in just in my industry, the insurance industry, I think a big thing is one of the easiest things to do when you hire a salesperson is hire someone with a good personality. If someone's got confidence and they have a good personality, if they can make it through the first stages of the job of understanding, they traditionally will do well.

One of my, when it comes to sales, I always enjoyed hiring people who played college or professional sports or mainly just because one, they had the work ethic to get there. But two, they very naturally with their ideal prospect, they very naturally have a conversation point. And so to kind of wrap that back into what I was originally starting with there...
One of the things that we tell people, especially with our product as it is today, is you can give this to someone who has a good personality and doesn't have the insurance knowledge, but they're not going to get done with that conversation and realize that they forgot to ask 10 questions because as long as they have the personality and they can follow the conversational prompts, they're going to end in a spot where, okay, now I can hand this off to someone who can teach me how to write the insurance the right way.

Matt Stauffer:
Interesting.

You're building the tooling in order to enable this company to be able to put specific people in there. And if you hire just for those skills without this tool, you're stuck. So you have to then hire this much broader swath of people, which means you're less able to hire for charisma and whatever. But if you're like, look, look, hire charismatic people. I'm going to cover the basics. That is really clever. I feel like there's an entire conference talk or book there for you to write about how to, how to build tools with that specific angle that's really cool. I appreciate that a lot.

David Watson:
Love it.

Matt Stauffer:
Well, I want to talk forever as always and I'm supposed to wrap it up. So I have one last question, but before I ask my one last question, is there anything that you hope we were going to cover today that we didn't get to?

David Watson:
Oh, that's a good question on a podcast.

No, one thing I appreciate about, I mean, I'm looking at the time, it's like barely over 30 minutes. Like I feel like you've done a really good job of covering multiple subjects without it feeling like it's jumping around.

Matt Stauffer:
I appreciate that.

David Watson:
I think, yeah, I think there's nothing in my mind where I'm like, we need to talk about that. So I think you're good, yeah.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, great. I mean, I'm going back and taking notes on this one. So I appreciate that how much you've shared here.

David Watson:
Love it. I appreciate that.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, well, then my last question for you is if you made 100 somebody came along and offer you $100 million for Risk Advisor today and said all you got to do is take your $100 million and walk away. What do you do tomorrow?

David Watson:
So it's funny enough when I, so I've had this conversation with my financial advisor and he works a lot with insurance agents, but he also works with others. His name's Eric Garcia. He does a fantastic job. And one of the things that, we've had this conversation, not at the $100 million number yet, but he'll tell me, hey, let's have this conversation. And I was like, well, this could always change. It's like, that's fine. Your answer could literally change tomorrow what the number needs to be. So to get into that, coming from an independent insurance agency, one of the things that I kind of have earmarked for when that day comes is getting back into, I don't want to sell insurance again. I don't want to build a book of business from scratch again, like I've done in the past, but I would love to the processes that I've learned over the years in my agency, the processes I'm learning throughout Risk Advisor, I would love to go buy another agency and apply those without having, being a leader without having to sell.

Matt Stauffer:
Yeah, optimize them. Yeah.

David Watson:
And I don't mean that as a situation where like some of the best agents I know to this day, they never get out of the process of selling and they make it work for them. But when you look at, when I look at my friends and I look at those that I look up to, the ones who most of the time, the majority, the ones who are able to take that next step in their business is when they learn to step out of their business and work on their business. And so what I would love to do in that situation is find an agency, purchase that agency and be able to, from day one, work on the business.

Matt Stauffer:
That's cool. And I, no, go ahead.

David Watson:
And play golf in a lot of really cool spots and take some really nice vacations. I joked with Eric that I was like, in day one, I'd be like, all right, half and half, half you get to do whatever you say to do. The other half, that's when I'll start breaking up into some goes to purchasing this, some to this, a good bit of that's going to have some fun with.

Matt Stauffer:
Nice. Yep.

I appreciate what you said there because I have quite a few friends who have found the level of financial success at their companies that their company or they personally now make a lot of their money by buying other companies and then kind of incorporate rolling them up into their big thing. And so they're always asking these questions about people that are buying. Like, well, do they have something we don't have? Do we have something they don't have? And they're always trying to say like, okay, so let's say they do all the same things we do, but we are 50 % more efficient at X, Y, and Z. And if we buy them out of this valuation, we can instantly skyrocket there, blah, blah, blah, because we know all these things. So it sounds very similar to what you're saying here. You're like, know how to find one where it's got a book of business, it's got its processes, but I can make it this much more efficient and instantly kind of like see what that does. That makes sense.

David Watson:
Yep. Yep. Love that.

Matt Stauffer:
That's very cool. Well, I really, no, you can say something.

David Watson:
I was just agreeing with what you said.

Matt Stauffer:
Okay, cool. I really appreciate you coming on and sharing today, man. This was really, really insightful. And I really, I said this at the beginning, but I knew this was going to go a different direction. And honestly, it's the direction I need to hear. You know, I've been CTO of my company for the first 11 years of the company. I'm CEO, sales, business marketing guy. So this is a reason why I'm just like, tell me more, my friend, you know? So this is really great stuff. And I know I'm not the only person in situation. So thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for sharing with us.

David Watson:
Absolutely, thanks for reaching out, with me not being on the technical side of things. But no, I appreciate you having me on.

Matt Stauffer:
And for the rest of you, thank you all so much for hanging out with us. We'll see you next time.