The People Behind Modern CTO

(Josh at 00:00:00) Today, we're doing a special episode recapping 2022 and looking ahead into 2023. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:14) Hosted by Josh. You're the host.

(Josh at 00:00:16) I'm the host. Oh, man.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:17) Yeah. You're always behind the curtains. Now you're the host.

(Josh at 00:00:20) Well, I think we could start off today by taking a quick peek at the last year. 2022 was an exciting year, to say the least. And while I wasn't here the whole time on the Modern CTO ProSeries Media team, it was a fantastic year. Joel, I know that you had a lot of change happen on your end of things. We both actually ended up in Tennessee right around the same time without knowing it. We eventually crossed paths. But what was the beginning of the year like for you, Joel? You got here in what? January, February?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:53) Yeah. I got here in the middle of January. We had just gotten off of our ten months of living in an RV, traveling around the United States. So that was a lot of fun. And we've been here just about a year now. So that's super exciting. And now we've got two new dogs, a new child, Atlas, our new son, and a little farm just outside of Nashville.

(Josh at 00:01:17) That's exciting. So, yeah, that's super cool. And just taking a peek at the past year, we put out a lot of content. We put out around 150 episodes, and I feel like it was probably the widest variety of different guests and topics, perhaps, in the show's history. I mean, before this year, there was less of a focus on anything outside of technology leadership. And this year, we kind of blew the doors down with talking to different scientists, researchers, people who are making wild new technology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:48) Well, that was intentional too. Yeah. So if you listen to the recap episode of last year, we said that we are going to start doing these newer episodes that weren't just leadership, that were about emerging technologies as a way to just keep it interesting. I mean, we're 600 plus episodes into this thing. And what we've noticed is that people have started to gravitate to the leadership episodes or to the sciency episodes. So this year, we've actually broken them out into two other podcasts. So the first one is Joel Beasley Tech and Science, and that one will have all of the best episodes that are really cool, such as, you know, contact lenses with AR, using bacteria to edit blood types to help people with organ transplants, all sorts of really interesting technologies, building floating cities, things like that. So very excited. And then that way, you could follow just those episodes. And then on the other side of things, which is leadership, we have the best episodes that we've ever had in leadership cut down from an hour to about ten minutes or so. So that way, it's really condensed and easy to consume, and people can follow that podcast, which is called Joel Beasley Tech Titans, so that they can just get those leadership. And then, of course, on the main channel, Modern CTO is everything. The full length version of everything. So they're not really separate podcasts. They're just a way for you to follow, like, a playlist, essentially. But, you know, podcasting doesn't have playlist technology as a whole, so we have to do it that way.

(Josh at 00:03:34) Yeah. That's pretty cool. Check out Tech Titans and Joel Beasley's Tech and Science. It's gonna be super cool. So maybe we can kind of start by looking at a couple of those episodes.

(Chloe at 00:03:45) I do want to know because I know we did an episode with molecular beverage machines.

(Josh at 00:03:50) Mhmm.

(Chloe at 00:03:50) Try to say that ten times fast. You pre-ordered one. Right? Did you get it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:54) I did. I have not got—no. I have not gotten it.

(Chloe at 00:03:57) Okay. When's it supposed to be here?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:00) I think it's supposed to ship in March or April of this year. I don't think they've missed their deadline yet, but, yeah, I remember it being about a year. All right. Let's go with this one. Colossal Biosciences. They're resurrecting a woolly mammoth. They're taking woolly mammoth DNA and recreating it, and they're actually having success with it.

(Josh at 00:04:20) I mean, that's just so exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:22) Yeah. They're gonna bring back the first thing they have to do, step one is arctic elephant. Step two is woolly mammoth. So a woolly mammoth is two steps from an elephant. So you need the elephant, the arctic elephant, and then the woolly mammoth. So hugely cool episode. And to prepare for that interview, I watched Jurassic Park.

(Chloe at 00:04:41) Uh, I was gonna say, did you watch Ice Age?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:45) Yes. I could recite Ice Age. Yeah.

(Josh at 00:04:49) I would say too if anyone out there is curious to listen to this episode or maybe any of the others, I can definitely vouch for this Colossal Biosciences one. Ariana was a fantastic guest. I mean, it is clear that she is the head of biological sciences at this company, and she went in-depth on everything there is to know about this project. So I just thought it was so fascinating.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:08) The list is just great. Napster was really cool. They exist. That was real fun. And then the guy ended up, you know, living in Florida, and he's really into woodworking. So we've been texting pictures back and forth of the different woodworking projects we're doing. So that was cool. That was Brandon at Napster. On this list, Chloe, did you listen to any of these?

(Chloe at 00:05:28) Well, I know we worked with Jeremy King before. Now he's at Pinterest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:33) Yeah. From Walmart to Pinterest. Yep.

(Chloe at 00:05:35) And I love Pinterest.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:37) And we talked about their algorithms, what they're doing. We had a good amount of product talk and what's actually happening at Pinterest on the show. So that was a good one.

(Josh at 00:05:46) Yes. One thing that I really—that Jeremy talked about was the AR try-ons. I thought that was really interesting. Kind of taking a new spin in AR, which is kind of a technology that I feel hasn't taken off in the way that maybe you thought it might when it first started rolling out, but they're really doing a lot with AR. So I thought that was really cool.

(Chloe at 00:06:03) I want to talk about this SpaceX Dragon.

(Josh at 00:06:06) Yeah. So Tom Marshburn, the astronaut we had on from NASA.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:09) Oh my goodness.

(Josh at 00:06:10) Incredible episode. I mean, he was one of the first astronauts to go to and from space.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:16) He was the. Yeah.

(Josh at 00:06:18) The first. Right. On the SpaceX Dragon. So nuts. That's so cool.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:24) All right. So the best advice I got from that guy, he said to handle trauma, and this guy had been a surgeon, an emergency surgeon. They would helicopter into different areas and deal with incredibly difficult situations and just horrible, horrible scenes. And he said to handle trauma, what he does, whether it's the space trauma or the surgery trauma, whatever he's dealing with, you just make your world really, really small and just focus on the exact next item that you need to do. And this is special to me. I'm glad you put this on the list, Josh, because this is one of the few times where someone said something to me, and it stays that one piece of advice just stays in my head. I use it a lot. When things get really, really difficult and traumatic, I just remind myself, okay, I have the solution here. I've talked to some of the smartest people on the planet, and this is what you do in this situation. And it's been incredibly helpful. I haven't ever had the situation where I needed to resurrect a woolly mammoth, but I have had traumatic situations. In all fairness, though, if she does resurrect woolly mammoths and they go crazy and take over the world, that would be a traumatic situation, in which case this would be useful knowledge.

(Chloe at 00:07:40) It's valid.

(Josh at 00:07:41) While we're on the topic of episodes this year, Joel, I have to say, I was just sitting here grinning the whole time when Cal Fussman interviewed you. I love that episode. I had heard bits and pieces of your story through phone calls and episodes and just team meetings here and there, but to hear it fleshed out step by step, bit by bit, it was just really fun to hear. And I felt like I got to know you super well through that episode. So, yeah, if anyone wants to check that one out, Cal Fussman interviewing Joel. He tells his life story, and it is a wild ride, to say the least. So check it out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:18) I'm not sure this experiment that I'm running over the past six years, if it's gonna work out or not, ultimately, I'll know at the end of, you know, thirty year plus career. But I'm trying to do things where when I did the interview with Cal, where I tell it as accurately as I can, and I don't withhold stuff that others would withhold because it's embarrassing. And I think that, ultimately, that recipe will work. I'm hoping it will. So it's also really easy because you don't have to remember any things or deviations. You just always tell the story how it happened, and that makes life very easy versus trying to tell a story where you're editing out the embarrassing moments. That's much harder. I tried to do that before in my past, and it doesn't work very well. So when we did talk last year, I think when we recorded the episode last year, we had one or maybe two podcasts signed in late December. I think we got one in November and one in December. So it was brand new. We figured out so many things in the past year, and we grew it. It's easily the fastest growing line of business that I've done at any of my companies because it went from zero to about $800,000 a year in recurring revenue in twelve months. So that was really exciting because that allows us to have a future at the company where we can expand beyond just the episodes that we can record with me. You know?

(Chloe at 00:09:51) Yeah. So that completely exploded. I mean, we really launched it, beginning of January of last year, 2022. So now it's been one full year, and that has been just an awesome project to be a part of and see it launch off the ground to now being really successful. I think, what, we have 16 clients under our belt at this time?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:12) Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not sure if we mentioned ProSeries Media in last year's recap episode, but what was happening was we were selling to our past customers that had done sponsorship with Modern CTO, and our first six deals or so were sold that way. And then we got referrals from their friends, and people started coming to moderncto.io and would be very confused because it just looks like a tech leadership and science type podcast, really interesting podcast. It didn't look like a production company. So we created a brand called ProSeries, proseries.media.com. So when we pitch it to people, we say, hey. We're ProSeries Media. We make these 16 shows. One of the shows we make is Modern CTO, and it's the largest leadership tech podcast in the world. And that gives us a lot of credibility as far as being able to make a podcast. And it also positions me as a customer of my own podcasting services. So I am not the easiest person in the world to work with, but it sets the standard really high.

(Josh at 00:11:26) Yeah. One thing I was thinking of a minute ago is, obviously, we came into this podcast production game with some experience under our belt. You guys have been making Modern CTO for, what, four years before ProSeries launched, so there was a lot of just trial and error and just education that I'm sure you gained along the way. But all that said, you still went from zero to, you said, $800,000 in the course of a year. I don't know. I think that kind of points to podcasting as a whole being a special type of media. Some advantages I see to it is people can be roughly anywhere, talk to really great people, and make an hour long interesting conversation or however long you want to. And you can consume the media while you're just doing the dishes or driving to work on your commute. You know? I don't know. Those are some of the things that I think makes podcasting a more accessible form of media. Do you guys have any insights on what would allow something like that to explode so quickly?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:23) Yeah. Chloe, why do people buy podcasting?

(Chloe at 00:12:26) So why do people buy or why do people listen? Because I guess I'll hit on both. I guess for listening's sake, because I love podcasts in my free time, it kind of just so happens I started working for a podcast that came secondary. I love it. Like Josh said, you can really dive into a very specific topic. For me, I love listening to people that I follow on social media, so previous bachelorettes, dog trainers that are famous, things like that, you know, for entertainment purposes. And I think why are people sponsoring podcasts, buying into podcasts? That's definitely because they want to reach a very niche market. So, you know, people that are selling, let's say, I don't know, wine or sweatpants, they're advertising on podcasts that I'm listening to. They're reaching the right market.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:14) I like your bachelorette example because we'll try to tie it back. What you're doing is you're meeting these people through the TV and through the Bachelorette show, and then you want to continue to follow them outside of that. And that's one of the great things that podcasting does. If you meet a company and you want to know more about them, you can follow the content outside. If you're in the industry and you know that there's a topic happening and you want to follow that topic, you can through, you know, podcasting. So for me, it's really a great way to keep the relationship going. So when I go and give talks, and I haven't done them since COVID, but people will come up to me after I get off of the stage and bring up—ask me how my daughter is. They'll say, hey. How's Aria? And so podcasting is really an interesting medium because it allows a large number of people to know about the companies that we work with, what's going on in my life, and I kind of like it.

(Josh at 00:14:13) Yeah. Joel, when's your next talk, man? When are you getting back out there to give a talk? Is there anything on the horizon, anything you want to go speak at?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:22) I don't know. I don't know. My focus right now is getting ProSeries Media to produce 100 podcasts, which would allow me to sell that line of business and continue to do the podcast. I would never sell Modern CTO or the podcast or stop doing interviews. That's why we track them. It's separate revenue in our P&L. Right? So we see that the business of producing content as a very scalable business. We could have hundreds of clients, you know, thousands of clients. We could sell to a media company. It's a really—we have this production and marketing and PR engine that's in the production company. So I want to grow that and be able to sell that off and then continue to do the podcast. So things like this morning, somebody offered me a very interesting good deal, but I said no, not related to speaking, but I said no because I have to focus on this. It's really, really hard. So if you listen to Warren Buffett and you listen to Bill Gates, if you listen to these people that have achieved a lot in life, the thing that they'll say is the most difficult thing is focus. It's just being able to continue to focus because you would think that it would be easier to accomplish the goal when you have money, more money. Right? You keep growing in your wealth, and you think it'd be easier to accomplish the goal. But almost the opposite happens. When you have the freedom and you have the money, you have so many things that you could do. And after you've had some amount of success, like Chloe. Right? You're successful with your dog rescue. You're successful at work. You have a lot of options, but being able to focus on just those two things is your superpower. Right? If you joined a dog food line and then people wanted you to do all these other things, right, it would dilute what you're able to accomplish. And so being able to say no is something that I'm learning for 2023. So I will most likely say no to the speaking engagements simply because I'm trying to scale this. Last year was figuring it out, and this year is scaling it up.

(Chloe at 00:16:43) Awesome. I think, like you're saying, I agree with that because when I first came to the company—so I hit four years in November, which was really cool—we were trying a lot of different things, so a lot of balls in the air. So we were trying different products, projects, you know, speaking engagements, you getting on other people's podcasts. And it did feel very like, alright, what's gonna work? What's gonna stick? How do we do this?

(Chloe at 00:17:04) And so then I think once you decided Modern CTO was, like, your baby, like, that wasn't going anywhere, we were able to hone in and really see how can we leverage this to be successful. Like, now look at us five years later, you know, four years with me on the team. And so I think that's kinda where we're at right now with Pro Series. We're kinda in the same boat.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:27) Yeah.

(Chloe at 00:17:28) But we're doing it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:29) We're doing it. It's working.

(Chloe at 00:17:30) Doing it.

(Josh at 00:17:31) Look at us. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:32) Look at us now.

(Josh at 00:17:32) Yeah. No. One thing I'll say too on the focus thing is I think there are a lot of ideas out there, whether they be, like, really tried and true businesses or just like a completely off-the-wall new idea that you think has potential. Like, it does come down to focus. I think back to I used to freelance, and when COVID happened, I was in live audio. And then in March 2020, I was suddenly not in live audio very quickly because there was no live events happening. So I doubled down on other freelancing endeavors. It didn't make sense at the time. But to make a very long story short, here I am now doing podcasting still. Being consistent and staying focused, that's just gonna lead to your most surefire results.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:17) Some people call it shiny object syndrome. I hear that a lot.

(Josh at 00:18:21) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:22) Because it—it's so cool. Look, if you even look at the biology of yourself, the neurons and everything that fire and the chemicals that get released into your body as far as dopamine—and there's, I think, six of them related to that—the new ideas spark that. Right? And so you get real excited and real charged, and you wanna go run off and do it, and it's something new and shiny and exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:46) And then to help balance that, I heard one of the Shark Tank guys—he said something that stuck with me. He said business is boring. And I thought about it, and I was like, I guess he's right. Business is being able to wake up and do the same thing over and over. You would not like it if the food that you ate from a restaurant was horribly inconsistent or their hours just changed at the whim of the owner. You know, you don't want that to happen. You don't want the products that you like to change, like, you know, incredible amounts away from what you want them to be. So obviously there's good change, but it's boring.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:13) And when I took that philosophy to it, I realized, oh, I don't have to—not everything has to be so exciting. And then that forced me to figure out where I want my variety and how to be intentional about it, which is why we started the variety in the content. I said, okay, I'll have variety there versus, as Chloe mentioned, starting, you know, speaking gigs or workshops or a membership where people can join. Shout out to elevate150.com.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:42) Here's a question I have. I wonder if anybody's noticed—on any of the listeners have noticed—on the podcast app that we have changed it from Modern CTO with Joel Beasley to Joel Beasley pipe, the pipe symbol, and then Modern CTO. So if you have, reach out to me on Twitter. Well, I'm not on Twitter. Reach out to me on LinkedIn. I think we have a Twitter, and we post clips. I don't spend much time there. But yeah, reach out to me on LinkedIn, and we will mail you a lollipop. We will not do this. But we do have swag, though. We just got our first time. Check this out. I got a little Modern CTO hat.

(Josh at 00:20:38) Look at that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:38) Which—it only took four years. And we had a beanie, a hat, stickers, and mugs. And we will put a link to that in the show notes. So Josh will have to get with Andrea to get the link to the store. But I ordered one of each just to see if they were good enough quality to start telling people about it and actually use that store, and they were. They were good quality.

(Josh at 00:21:00) What's the mug like? I'd be interested in the mug.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:03) The mug is not in here, but it just has logo on it. It looks good. It's a good mug.

(Josh at 00:21:09) Nice. I'm a big fan of a good mug. Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:12) Big fan.

(Josh at 00:21:12) Yes. Big fan.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:13) So, Chloe, how many times over four years have I tried to get the merch stuff going?

(Chloe at 00:21:18) Do you really want me to answer this?

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:20) No. No. It's been too many.

(Chloe at 00:21:23) It's been—okay. We've had a lot of potential that we've talked about having merch, but now we actually have someone to execute, so that's exciting. But I will say my very first sale that I made before I was even on the sales team—we didn't have a sales team. This was a while ago—my incentive to make a sale was Joel got me a Snuggie embroidered with Modern CTO on it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:48) Custom Snuggie. Wow.

(Chloe at 00:21:49) I still have it. It has a hood and everything. It's great. I just look at it and I'm like, oh, how far we've come. I love it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:56) Wow. I know. I know. And then—I'm excited about what's to come. I'm specifically excited about the questions you two have written down for me.

(Chloe at 00:22:05) Alright. Are we diving in?

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:06) Yeah. We're diving in.

(Josh at 00:22:07) Let's dive in.

(Chloe at 00:22:09) So you got two new dogs, which was very exciting for me. That's, like, the highlight of my year was that you got dogs. Will you guys be getting any more dogs or any more animals? Because you're on property now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:23) Yes. Let's talk about the two dogs. So we had two dogs previously, and they both passed around the same time. So that was—you know, we had had them for nine, ten years. So then the day my wife came home from having our third child, Atlas, we got a German shepherd puppy. So we had found that German shepherd a month earlier while walking through Home Depot. This lady walked up and—the kids are playing with it—and she goes, well, you know, she's for sale. And we said, okay. Well, if you can keep her until the baby comes, because we were running to the emergency room so many times for false alarms that the baby was coming—like, I can't just have this puppy and leave at three in the morning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:10) So I said, if you can keep this for a month, then we'll take her. And she said, okay. And so they kept Nova—that's her name. They kept her for a month, and then she came home when my wife came home. So we brought, you know, one real baby and one fur baby home. And that was a lot, you know? And it was definitely maximum level of difficulty.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:23) And then three months later, we got a Bernese mountain dog puppy, and that one's named Luna. And we name most of our dogs through our team Slack, team Slack message threads. And yeah. So the answer is no more dogs. That's an easy one. Chickens, for sure. We've got a thing called the Yolk Factory. It's a large chicken coop. Yeah. And the last one, Michelle wants a Great Pyrenees, but that would be an outside dog.

(Chloe at 00:24:01) I was gonna say they're a guardian breed. They would be perfect for protecting chickens.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:06) Yes. Our neighbor has one. Amazing dogs. They look like giant labs. But yeah, they will wreck some coyotes, for sure.

(Josh at 00:24:15) Yeah. I think you need to get one more dog there, Joel.

(Chloe at 00:24:19) Yeah. The Great Pyrenees.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:21) You wanna contribute to the fund? Chloe, can you tell people that don't know—because I talk about you a lot on the show—how many dogs that you have or how many animals are in your house? Let's start with that.

(Chloe at 00:24:36) I—I honestly, I forget if it was someone on the team or somebody outside, like, in my life, but somebody said the way I should answer this question is under 50.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:45) Under 50?

(Chloe at 00:24:46) Yeah. Because I think I'll be counting on my hands, and I'm like, ah, shoot. No. But for real, we do dog rescue in this home, and we foster fail a lot, but that's okay. I think I've earned it because I've had over 200 dog fosters. So we have 11 dogs here in the house that are forever members, five cats now. That's new. We just added a new cat. And two house pigs.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:15) Oh, there's two pigs now.

(Chloe at 00:25:17) Yeah. There's two pigs. We have Quigley and Petunia.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:20) Oh, I didn't know about Petunia. That's a new one for me.

(Josh at 00:25:24) So, Joel, you mentioned earlier—and I almost asked you this earlier today, but I withheld it until now—you mentioned that you're taking some speaking and writing classes. I'm just curious about that. Can you tell us about, like, what the classes are like? Whether you have any specific goals, things you want to take away from those classes. What's going on there?

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:45) Yeah. So the idea is for me to improve and grow as a speaker and a writer so that the interviews are more interesting, so that I can get my ideas out in a clearer way, and so I don't say, like, and, um, a whole lot. Right? So I found a couple things. The first thing I found was this thing called Storyteller Tactics. It's like Pip Decks or something. But it just has different ways to craft stories, essentially, like outlines or frameworks. So I'm working with that, and they have video content and classes on their website. So I'm going to be going through those for the storytellers, like, the writing aspect of it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:26:40) And for the speaker aspect of it, I found this really cool guy on YouTube who I can't pronounce his name, but he's awesome. And he talks a lot about the psychology of speaking and different exercises he has for how to improve at speaking. And so I said, well, for the new year, I've really wanted to improve, and so I put time into my calendar four days a week to spend an hour improving and taking classes with either speaking or writing.

(Josh at 00:27:04) Nice. Nice.

(Chloe at 00:27:06) Alright. So kind of recapping this year, who was the newest team member to join that you are most excited about?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:15) I can't answer that.

(Chloe at 00:27:16) Well, that could be individual or, like, filling a role. Like, which—I guess, which role were you most excited about?

(Josh at 00:27:22) Tell us who your favorite employee is. Yeah. We need to know.

(Chloe at 00:27:26) Who is it?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:27) No. This will turn into a management episode. Things not to do.

(Chloe at 00:27:31) HR.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:34) HR. That is one—I'm alright. I'll talk about the role that I'm looking forward to. One of those is a full-time accounting and payments person so that the sales team can spend less time collecting payments and more time continuing to sell, making them more efficient. So that would be something that I'm looking forward to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:54) This year, I think we filled several key roles. We have Jesse now in production who isn't actively managing any shows, but he coaches all the producers that manage all the shows. And getting him to go from individual contributor being the producer on a show to him coaching people to do it was a big transition for us that went really, really well. So he's very competent. That was really exciting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:20) Shannon, that role of specific person to do booking for the shows that we have, that was a really good hire. And the reason it was a good hire was because it was the most time-consuming thing that the producers were doing, and it was the least enjoyable thing. Right? So we wanna retain them. So we want them to have a job that they really enjoy doing. And so by bringing in Shannon who loves that, everything was amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:47) Andrea played that role until we could find Shannon. Andrea's great. She is like a wizard in her workshop. Just she does cool things and comes and shows me, and I'm like, that's awesome. So that was a good one because we haven't had a role like that that was just marketing and content from a marketing standpoint. So now we have clip people too that are just making clips. We have writers, people that are just writing headlines and things of that nature. So just all in all, I would say all the positions I'm really excited for. I'm excited for all of the growth that happened as a whole last year.

(Chloe at 00:29:27) Yeah. We brought—we onboarded a lot of really great team members, and we definitely have a culture here of finding amazing people, which is why it's so fun to work here, I think.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:38) Yeah. So November of last year, we were, I think, five people. And November of this year, we're 15 people. So there was some growth that happened there. And I wanna—I wanna at least double the size of the company again this year. You can only do that if you have the revenue and the customers. So a lot of my time is being spent on marketing and sales and growing that engine.

(Chloe at 00:30:06) We're gonna need a bigger table when we do our quarterly meetups for dinners.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:10) That was so fun. Yeah. We just did that. Like, two weeks, three weeks ago, we flew everyone into Nashville, and we had a giant team dinner. And it was amazing. It was so good to see everybody. I think I had met in person only half the people, so it was great to meet a bunch of the new team members in person. It was really great. The food was good. Guess what? We just had lunch there this weekend.

(Chloe at 00:30:34) Oh, really? Yay.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:35) Yeah. We went to the museum. There's a Country Music Hall of Fame Museum downtown, and we were looking for food. And I said, oh, look. Two blocks away is Merchants. Let's go over there. And we did. We had a little lunch there. We sat right by the elevator, and it was great. The kids loved it too. They had amazing chicken nuggets, and that's all you need to make the kids happy.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:01) Chloe, anything else to add? Wait. If people are interested in buying sponsorship, where should they go?

(Chloe at 00:31:04) They can find my mugshot on our website. Just kidding. The information's on the—you can find my lovely face and photo and my email, which is [email protected]. And that's a wrap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:23) And we're good.

(Josh at 00:31:24) Wait. I wanted to say one thing. Chloe, Joel, we made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:29) I feel good. Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.