How to Build Your Business Credit

#81. Find out about how Duns & Bradstreet came about and learn how to build your business credit score on today's episode with Sevana and Tiffany.

Topics in today's episode includes:

- Why your business credit score matters

- How to build your business credit score

- The origin story about Duns & Bradstreet

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Our podcast is originally a video podcast, so see us on YouTube or Spotify too.

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Got questions or have a topic you want Sevana and Tiffany to cover? Email us at thebusinessbehindsmallbusiness@gmail.com and see your question answers or topic of interest discussed on a future episode!

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About BBSB - We are two business owners with two very different perspectives on building business, and the business behind that in order to achieve your goals. One of us built to sell, and will continue on the serial entrepreneur path, which means your focus and drive should include very particular tools and tips in order to achieve your goal. The other, is building a generational business, one that can go on long after she’s let go of the wheel. This type of business also requires very specific tools and platforms to achieve this goal. Both women have been successful in their own right, but in honesty - haven’t scratched the surface! 

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Disclaimer - Details of today’s story was inspired by true events but are not based on proven facts. Also, we are NOT licensed financial experts, nor do we give financial advice. Anything we share with you here on our podcast, whether it be a personal experience or submission, or advice/tips that have worked for us, or that we believe would work for you should not be viewed as either financial, business, or tax advice. We ask for you to do your research, have open and honest conversations with your company’s own support providers and make decisions based upon that. Throughout this broadcast we will share our knowledge and give suggestions and hope you will receive them as part of your overall research to better your own company.

#smallbusinessadvice #entrepreneurship #referralpartners #businesspodcast #businessreferrals #howtogrowabusiness

References & Resources Used For This Episode:

1. https://www.nav.com/resource/how-to-establish-business-credit/
2. Dun & Bradstreet. How to Get a D-U-N-S Number.
3. Internal Revenue Service. Obtaining a DUNS Number: A Guide for Federal Grant and Cooperative Agreement Applicants.
4. https://www.forbes.com/advisor/credit-cards/history-of-credit-cards/
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diners_Club_International#:~:text=Carte%20Blanche%20began%20in%201958,Blanche%20to%20Avco%20in%201968.
6. https://www.cnbc.com/select/when-did-credit-scores-start/
7. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Tappas
8. https://hbr.org/2015/01/vision-statement-the-birth-of-modern-commercial-credit
9. https://www.altares.nl/en/organization/history/
   

Alternative Titles:

What is business credit

How to build your business credit

Bad Credit

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

We've come a long way from the cardboard credit cards of yesteryear, from cardboard to plastic to metal, intangible numbers that belong to the cloud, chips that we tap and wave and enter into the intersphere. Credit and credit cards are not a new concept. We've been doing it for thousands of years. But why is building credit for your business still such a murky subject? And why is it so different to build business credit over personal credit? We're going to dive into the world of credit and credit cards. You'll learn how to build credit for your company and how it differs from building your own FICO score. Welcome to our show, The Business Behind Small Business. In every episode, we dive into one area of what you need to build a lasting business. We start our show by peeking behind the curtains of someone else's success, and then drill down to how you can apply it to your own business. We are your hosts, Savannah Stone and Tiffany K.O. No one gets to a million without getting a little dirty. There's a lot of business behind small business, so let's get to it. The idea of credit cards, owning them, collecting them, and the overall idea of credit is really just a fancy IOU that, as I mentioned, began thousands of years ago in ancient Mesopotamia. There have been clay tablets found with inscriptions on them from that time period that show transactions between neighboring merchants from Harappa and Mesopotamians as agreements for buying things and then repaying them later. Fast forward to the days of the Old West and the United States, merchants would issue goods to farmers and ranchers and use metal coins or small plates as a receipt of the loan for the supplies. Crops were harvested and livestock were sold, and these loans would then be repaid by the merchants. Lewis Tappan and his brother Benjamin Tappan, along with their father, were one of these many merchants. Once Lewis was old enough to work, he began helping out in his father's dry goods store. By the age of 16 in 1804, he had begun to explore other areas of commerce. At the age of 38, he entered into a silk partnership with his brother Arthur. The panic of 1837 led to a six-year depression and the failure of several businesses. Lewis Tappan believed something had to be done, so he worked on establishing the first credit agency. Tappin was a New York abolitionist who had dedicated his life to freeing enslaved Africans aboard the Amistad. He and his brother were also the founders, or two of the founders, of the American Missionary Association in 1846, which established over 100 anti-slavery churches through the Midwest. The men were constant targets of hatred for what they did, but the two of them secured legal assistance and acquittal for Africans in cases that were reaching the United States Supreme Court. Both men were fascinating, along with their father, who is also an abolitionist, and there's a lot of great articles on them, but I digress. There's so much to say about them, but that's not the point of today's today's show. Point of today's show. Yes, the way it functioned was a bit like today's credit reporting agencies, where they would collect information that was entered into a ledger system that was centralized in New York City. Now these ledgers would rate the company's ability to pay their debts and were published for the public in a series of guides. So basically, if you were known for not paying your debts, these guides would call you out publicly so you couldn't just go to the town next door and do the same to the people there. According to a timeline published on Altaires.com, quote, Douglas took advantage of the improved transportation and communication of his day by expanding his network of offices, which allowed the agency to offer both new clients and excellent information. Some of those correspondents, fun fact of the day, some of those correspondents even went on to become presidents. One of those was Abraham Lincoln, another was Ulysses S. Grant, another was Grover Cleveland and William McKinley. Pretty cool, huh? In 1859, Douglas turned the agency over to his brother-in-law, Robert Graham Dunn. Dunn was a financier and in 1861 he opened a credit rating firm, R. G. Dunn and Company, with many branches across the nation. His company was one of the first to use office machinery, including the new Fandangle typewriter, according to an article published on all tears.com. On this machine, he wrote his weekly Duns Review assessing the international business conditions. At this time, a rival John M. Bradstreet had entered the game and was expanding as quickly as Dun and Company. Before long, the two were the largest credit reporting agencies in the country. And by 1933, the two companies knew it would be in their best interest to merge. And so they formed Dunham Bradstreet. So if you like me have wondered if these humongous companies actually go all the way down to a real person, Dunham Bradstreet do. By the 1950s to issue credit to customers, charge plates were being popularized by department stores. These dog tag style metal plates were being used between the 30s and the 50s to issue credit to customers, but they were still individual or individualized to each store. There was no way to centralize that. Frank McNamara was dining with clients at the Major's Cabin Grill Restaurant in New York City in 1949 when he realized he had left his wallet in another suit jacket. In a panic, he called his wife to come down to the restaurant to pay the bill. This sparked an idea and McNamara and he got to working. He thought there should be a way to avoid this kind of situation, so he discussed his idea with the restaurant owner, and then he had a conversation with his lawyer and then his friend, Alfred Bloomingdale. I'm just name tossing all over the place today. Yes. A few months later, he returned to the restaurant with a cardboard charge card and a signature. And that meal infamously was to be known as the First Supper and is credited as the beginning of the contemporary credit. Contemporary credit and contemporary credit card. Credit reporting, however, did take a little longer to consolidate. It wasn't until the night where there were more than 2,000 credit bureaus across the US, and over the course of the next 20 years, that number would eventually scale down to five, and then eventually to the three major credit bureaus we have today. Credit scores had a little bit of a more nuanced journey. FICO was founded in 1956 and originally worked with business clients to build credit scoring models specific to that company. So like you, your company could build a credit score specific to the to the clients that you had. Customer files were used to produce an individualized model, and that would be used to calculate the risk level of its customers according to an article in cnbc.com. It wasn't until 1989, like we were alive then, when FICO worked with the National Credit Bureau to create a model that could be used to evaluate all consumers in a generalized way. And this is where the score was born. By the mid-90s, the FICO scores were becoming a huge part of the financial decision-making process as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mack started re requiring mortgage applicants to begin submitting them. And one more tidbit, it used to be that they would judge you on your character as much as they would judge you on what you had to offer on paper, meaning your uh how much money you made, how much debt you had. They also judged you by how many times had you been married, how many homes had you lived in. Oh my god. How many people, how many people had you smited? It was it was how do you how does somebody do that objectively? It's not really an objective thing because if we go back, if we go all the way back to where I mentioned Abraham Lincoln and all of them, what they did were was that they did field research. So they would go out, uh they would go, you know, on the rail railway to wherever it was, uh say Utah, and go to the local uh town and ask those people, hey, you know, how many patrons do you have? Okay, give me the list of patrons you have. Okay, out of these patrons, which ones come all the most? Which ones patronize your business the most? Okay, so these 10 people patronize your company the most, which ones do you like? Which ones do you not like? Which ones are the ones that give you the hardest time? Which ones are the ones that try to nickel and dime you? So, yeah. And then those names would end up in those uh books, those ledgers, those research guides, those ones that got got distributed, published and distributed by Dunn. And so if you were somebody that was hard to work with, your name was on that list. And let's say you're not the Google reviews of today. Google reviewing people, not companies. Basically, yeah, it's like the Google reviews of today. It really is, it really is. And so, like if you if you had um not a great reputation, you had a reputation of say nickel and diming and then taking a long time to pay, and you go to some uh some place in Texas that happens to have that book and they see your name in there, they may refuse you service.

SPEAKER_01 10:02

FICO is individually well, actually, it sounds like right now in the story um or in history, they are also business based as well as person like um individually based. Right. So it's personal and business credit they were dealing with, yeah. Which is not the same as today.

SPEAKER_00 10:18

No, not at all. And you are going to tell us all about it Yeah, there's no FICO.

SPEAKER_01 10:23

Not on a business credit, there isn't. It would make things simpler though if the uh if the business credit and personal credit were done somewhat similar to one another, but well, why why make things simple?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Simple. I laugh in your face. Yeah, so that's my story. I'm sticking to it, and now it's your turn to tell us the the the truth behind credit scores.

SPEAKER_01 10:43

Well, I think the idea is, you know, we wanted to share the history of credit scores because it is kind of amazing how it came about. And the purpose of why you originated is pretty much the same purpose as today, even though the functionality and the mechanisms in which it's used to measure you as a business is different. Um, today there is a separation between business and personal credit. So it sounds like back in the day, they kind of intertwined all of it as far as even judging your character. Oh gosh, I can't imagine if they did that today. Like your business credit is based on your business as well as your character, how far that's gonna go. But now there is a separation, meaning that uh most people who are much more familiar with their personal credit just know that when we talk about business credit, it is not the same. The same uh rules do not apply in this game. So, that being said, the biggest first difference is that when we think about personal credit, we always think about the three major credit bureaus. We have TransUnion, we have Equifax, and we have Experian. In the business world, the three big credit bureaus for the business credit is Duns and Bradstreet, which now we understand are real humans at one point, named after real humans. Duns and Bradstreet, Equifax, and then Experience. So now how you earn credit for each of those credit bureaus is also not like your personal credit. So in a personal credit, you know, we go out and we take out debt and we have credit cards, all this automatically reports to your personal credit school. In a business credit, not every vendor reports to your business credit bureau, which means that if you have a business and you go out and take a credit card, most credit cards don't report to the credit bureau unless you miss a payment. If you miss a payment, they'll definitely tell the credit bureau that you're a delinquent. But if you don't miss a payment, you actually don't get points, essentially, for making your payments on time to most of these major credit cards. So, you know, that approach of building your credit while it works for the individual side doesn't work at all for the business credit uh scores. Now, what does work is being able to find the vendors and working with vendors that will one extend you a trade line, meaning that they'll be willing to extend you some kind of account, some kind of credit account, so you don't have to pay things back until another 20 to 30 days in after you make the purchase. You have to find one of those vendors that actually report to one of those three main credit bureaus we just named. Now, the tricky part is not every, not every vendor advertises the fact that they report to the credit bureauers. Yeah. And they don't report to every single one.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Yeah, this was the most surprising to me as to who does and who doesn't, because I've clearly been buying my things from the wrong one.

SPEAKER_01 13:25

And you think you're oh, building all this credit and you're really not building anything. I called Duns and Bradstreet and I kind of questioned the rep I was talking to just to understand how all this works. And funny enough, when I said, Well, I mean, wouldn't Duns and Bradstreet just know like the list of vendors that report to it? I mean, isn't that something that you would want to share? And they're like, no, we actually can't share that information. I'm like, so you can't tell me who reports to you, but they won't tell me either. So am I just guessing? Like, how do I build my business credit if I don't even know who's involved and who are the players of this game? Now, unlike your personal credit, where you can just go online to each of the TransUnion Experience Equifax and you log in and you have a free account and you can constantly see your credit score, you can't with any of these business bureaus. In fact, you have to pay in order to actually see your credit score. And period. There is no exception to that. There is no free peak to it. You actually have to pay to see where you currently stand. And so, you know, I'll let you determine how you feel about that. So basically, you almost have to pay to play, right? So if you're on a track where you're intentionally trying to build your business credit, you already have to put in some money in order to see the credit score so you can actually monitor. Why does it even matter at the end of the day? Like, why does it matter that you have a credit score? Now, for a lot of businesses, like for me, for many years, I never knew about this concept of a business credit score. I just thought that if I've been in business for some time, I'm making good profit, I'm filing my taxes. I mean, I must have good business credit. In fact, I had zero business credit. I didn't have good or bad, I just had none because I had nothing reporting to any of these credit bureaus. Um when you want to go and get a loan from the bank or you want to get a vendor to be able to extend you credit, especially if you're in an industry where you have to buy inventory, these kind of vendors all look at your business credit score. And if you have zero credit and you have no credit or bad credit, so no credit or bad credit, obviously they're not going to extend to you. So that's why it's so important for you to be aware of what your business credit is, even in the beginning, just so that you have that built up. So if and when you need credit extended to you, you're not scrambling because the one thing is the credit score builds up over time. This is not something you can do overnight. You have to take at least six months to be able to build up your credit score. A lot of times um the trade lines won't even report to your business credit bureau until you've been buying from them for like three months.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

Well, you're you'll get to it. And if you don't get to it, then I'll bring it up. But yeah, okay. Like who reports?

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Okay. Who reports, right? Okay, so um, so I'll tell you what I did to be able to build up the credit in my business. And I will say it did take six solid months, and that's with intentional reviewing and trying to make sure I'm tracking where where things are being reported and how well. Uh, there are services out there that allows you to track all your business credit for a fee. So uh for a fee, uh, so uh one of the one of the well-known, more well-known um services that does that is called NAV, so nav.com. Um they extend to you a uh check-in account as well as a credit card account. And there's a monthly fee of, I believe now is approximately $50 a month. And so to buy that uh fee in, you get um basically a monthly reporting to all three of the major credit bureaus. And so that fee itself generates what they call like one trade line that reports to the credit bureaus. And then as you have your credit card usage, the credit card also reports. So one I hate to use the word trick, but one strategy that um I ended up using is that I went to another vendor that also reports, which is Bill from Bill.com. So Bill has a credit card as well for all your expenses and things like that. There, you know, they're known for like your expense report and how easy it is, and you can get a business credit card with Bill. And Bill reports to two credit bureaus. Um, I believe it's Duns and Bradstreet and Equifax, I want to say. So they report to two credit bureaus, and then so what you do is you put the NAV monthly fee on your bill credit card, and that way you get an automatic expense that generates credit reporting to the bureaus. Oh, that's a good idea. And then the rest of the way to do it is to find vendors that have openly said that, hey, we report to these credit bureaus. Now, I will say that I've looked at all the vendors and most of them require some kind of fee. Or some of them require you to be in business for a certain amount of time. But some of the vendors also require you to have personal guarantees. And when you apply for credit, you know, they sometimes will do pulls, if not hard pulls, on your personal credit. So you just want to be careful of that too, because every pool kind of dings your personal credit. You might want to not do too many of those. But there are some vendors, like I've used Home Depot, which is a great one. Um, assuming that you're in that line of work, right? I mean, if you're not gonna be able to use Home Depot for your business, it may not actually make sense. But Home Depot is one of them. There's a couple um office supply stores um that also reports to the credit bureaus, uh, Staples being one of them, Office Depot also does that. There is uh Granger, which is another large, you know, uh supply uh store. And then there's this one called uh the Creatives, which again just sells like miscellaneous stuff that I think requires an actual minimum, if not a monthly fee, in order to be part of that vendor reporting your expenses. I know, fun, right? There is um a vendor called Shertsey that does swag, business swag. So, you know, again, if it's something that your business can already utilize, obviously that's the best way to go. There is a monthly membership fee, of course, in order to participate. Yes. But you know, if you're gonna spend what you're gonna spend and you can get it to report to the credit bureaus and build your credit, it may be very much worthwhile in that case. So, you know, if you if you go ahead and Google, those are probably the vendors that come up the most and are most well known for being able to actually report to the credit bureaus, but mind the fees, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

And then and I thought it was fascinating that Amazon is not one of them, right? No, yeah, isn't that that's so crazy to not Amazon business either? So no, um and I buy like nearly all of my supplies from Amazon business, so that was that was shocking.

SPEAKER_01 19:51

Yeah. So I think the hard part is also just kind of balancing it all because you almost need to remember to, you know, buy things from a certain store and trade line and do it often enough, right? It's not a once and you're done. It's you kind of have to buy continuously. So, you know, you're building up this credibility in with these credit bureaus so that somebody goes and pulls your credit, they see that you're consistent, you're paying things back on time. Because all three credit bureaus kind of measures things a slightly different in kind of their own way. But at the end of the day, is are you credible enough to be able to extend any kind of credit to? You know, are you paying your bills on dime? Are you gonna be able to pay your bills on dime? I don't know about your character, but you know, certainly I feel like it speaks to the business character. Right as a business, you know, have you filed for bankruptcy? Have you, you know, made uh late payments to your supplier once or twice? And you get dinged really fast if you're late to your supplier, especially if your supplier reports, assuming you know that they report. And and there are little things too that's um different too. Like in in the uh in the business uh credit building world, you think that paying your bill on time is a good thing? It's not a bad thing, but paying your bill 10 days prior to your due date is actually a better thing.

SPEAKER_00 21:04

Better thing.

SPEAKER_01 21:04

Isn't that crazy? Yeah. So if you're one of those people who like me are a set in a forget it, typically I have things on auto pay because I I you know hate being late and things like that. In this case, I have to be cognizant to always go in and try to pay the bill early to make sure that you know we get that extra brownie point for doing it right. So, anyways, there's business credit in a nutshell.

SPEAKER_00 21:25

I never, I never ever would. So, what are your recommendations for a company, say, like mine, where I have no overhead? I I don't have things to buy, um, where service-based and all that service is, you know. Yeah. So what what are your suggestions for a company like mine that has zero overhead?

SPEAKER_01 21:46

Yeah, so there's a couple things, right? You can you can do some office supplies, right, if you can to do to do that. Uh, the other thing you can think about is uh vendors like the business swag and things like that, because hey, you know, maybe. Don't do it today, but if you feel like that credit is worthy enough to build, maybe you do start getting some swag to hand out to your clients, and that's some way to build it in. The third way is that um I believe it's Duns and Bradstreet actually gives you some credit for um uploading your financial uh statements in there to show them that you're a viable business.

SPEAKER_00 22:21

Well, that's interesting.

SPEAKER_01 22:22

So that's one way to do it as well. Now, Duns and Brad Street, I feel like, yeah, like has a lot of it behind a paywall. So um as long as you're willing to pay the uh fees that Dundan Bradstreet has, you'll be able to. And then they'll also tell you kind of like what's the best way to build credit with them. As long as you're willing to pay to play, they'll definitely tell you kind of how to do it over time. But uh Financial Report is one of them.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

So uh interesting how they have this pay-to-play for your business, but not for you as a on a on a personal note. Like if you're one person who owns a business and personal, like your personal is being done this way, but your business is being done that way, like it can be so confusing, it's almost built to make you fail.

SPEAKER_01 23:05

Well, we would like to be optimistic.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

I'm gonna be optimistic, but on the other hand, it's like good heavens, like how can you ever keep that track of that?

SPEAKER_01 23:13

Yeah, and you know, and that stuff comes into play too. Like, I know that most recently I was uh working with a client who was looking to acquire a business and was a business in trade. And one of the things that they looked at was what is the business credit of the company they're acquiring? Because if they have good credit and good standing, then they know that they have more flexibility with the vendors for inventory, which is, you know, something that is a real cost to the business.

SPEAKER_00 23:41

Wouldn't it be great to hear the sound of us promoting your business for you right here on our show? Of course it would. You can have that and more by producing a show or multiple shows. All you have to do is email us at the businessbehindsmallbusiness at gmail.com to express your interest and we will share with you what you will receive with your investment. You'll have the opportunity to have your name and the name of your business mentioned multiple times on our show, having your company logo on our social media along with details on how to get in touch with you and other marketing opportunities as well. Please support us so that we can continue supporting you. There's a saying that goes, put your money where your mouth is. And we're drilling down a bit further here to connect what we've discussed at a granular level to tangible sources you can take to get you to that next level. Got anything for us, Stephanie? Oh my gosh. Yeah, so much.

SPEAKER_01 24:40

No, you know what? I think um as somebody who never really thought about business credit until like the past 12 months, I was dumbfounded by the amount of information there is out there. And rightfully so, because now that you know, if you listen to the episode, you realize wow, this is nothing like your personal credit, and it is quite tricky to build your business credit, and it takes an amount of time. Maybe uh maybe I've been living under a rock.

SPEAKER_00 25:06

I have something to win. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 25:09

Yeah, exactly. So um, a couple things. Uh so like I said, if you Google, if you YouTube it, there is quite a bit out there about people building business credit. Um the best Google search I've ever used is uh what what vendors report to Equifax, what vendors report to Experian, what vendors report to DMB uh Duns and Bradstreet, and you'll get a list. And I would all the only thing I would say is with some of these lists, you know, sometimes vendors stop reporting. Um thing I learned from uh Duns and Bradstreet when I was speaking to them was the fact that some vendors kind of completely drop off because they get overwhelmed by and inundated by the amount of people applying to to basically have a trade line with them because they advertise the fact that they report to Duns and Bradstreet. And they also get a lot of customer service uh negative feedback because people confuse with the fact that they're just reporting, they're not the ones in charge of how the credit is compiled. So if they feel like their credit is negative, they actually get mad at the vendor. Interesting. Yes, and so Duns and Brass Street said, you know, for that reason, a lot of people just either just don't advertise anymore or they stop reporting for whatever reason. Now, the reason not every vendor can report is because you actually have to have a certain volume in order for you to even qualify to report to any, and then you have to apply for it. And I'm sure there's fees and things that go with it, which is why they also charge you a fee for working with them. Um, but anyways, long story short is that you just want to make sure that the vendor still reports. So don't assume that if you go Google search it and it says, you know, vendors as of 2023, that still reports to each of these credit bureaus. I would always do another search within that website or call that vendor just to make sure it does, because you don't want to you don't want to miss out on the chance and you know spend time, uh uh spend time and spend money with that vendor, and then it's not going to build your credit for you.

SPEAKER_00 27:01

Right.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

So plenty of lists out there like that. Uh, we can put a few in the show notes just to get you started. And then as far as um books, uh, there was a couple books I read, uh, which I I cannot find on Amazon right now for whatever reason. But there is, I did end up finding um other ones that were on um Kindle um Unlimited. It's unlimited Kendall, so which is zero free if you were actually part of that membership. Um so there's the credit game. So the credit game is essentially you know how to build credit without using your personal liability, without um personal live building and using your EIN. So essentially how to build your business credit. Um, and then there's also the insider's guide to business credit using an EIN only. I think you guys see the uh pattern I'm going with here, right? Yeah. Uh-huh, uh-huh. Yep. So plenty of books like that. Uh The Bible to uh business credit, that's also another book that's out there, also well rated. So you'll see that there is just a plethora of uh items out there for somebody who is willing to dive in and understand how this business credit world works. And the last thing I would say about recommendations is again, like I said, this thing takes time. There's no way you can hurry that timeline. You will need a minimum of three to six months. So if you feel like you need something like that in the near future, start today and start building your credit.

SPEAKER_00 28:25

Right. Yeah. I mean, hopefully you've begun to make goals for your company. And if any of those goals require you to make a large purchase, then start now. Yeah, exactly. As always, the resources I used are linked in the show notes. Uh, I also have a couple of other links I recommend to take our advice a few steps further. Uh, I've listed a link from Dunn and Bradstreet and from the IRS on Dunn's numbers. Uh, I highly recommend you take the time to review those. I've also got a couple of books. Uh, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery by Bertram Wyatt Brown. Uh, although Lewis Tappen was a small part of our story, he and his uh whole family are so fascinating. Do yourself a favor of reading about him. Uh History of Credit and Power in the Western World by Scott B. McDonald examines the evolution of credit in the Western world and its relationship to power. And lastly, The Engine of Enterprise, Credit in America by Rowenna Oligario. It traces the story of credit from colonial times to the present, highlighting its productive role in building national prosperity. Um, I personally am a huge fan of looking at things and their butterfly effect, or looking at things from what it is in a very small view and how how it is affecting us in a much larger view. Universal. Yeah, and those three books are fantastic books to get started with. And every resource I used for my stories, those will also be linked. Excellent. Yes. And last but not least, uh please hit the like buttons and the follow buttons and tell all of your friends about us. Our show is on all of your preferred social media and podcast platforms and YouTube. We'd love for you to also share our episodes. All of our links are posted below. And until next time, mind the business behind your business because all great successes start small.