The End of Financial Engineering and Why AI Won’t Save You - Lee McCabe, Claymore Partners

Most private equity returns over the last decade were not driven by operators. They were driven by cheap debt and multiple expansion. That playbook is breaking.

In this episode, Lee McCabe, partner at Claymore Partners, explains what actually drives value creation now and why most lower middle market businesses are far less prepared than they think. At Claymore, Lee works directly with private equity firms and their portfolio companies to drive value creation across marketing, data, and technology.

Before that, Lee led digital and growth initiatives at companies like eBay, Expedia, Facebook, and Alibaba, giving him a unique perspective on how digital and now AI actually show up inside real businesses, not just pitch decks.

We cover:

•  Why most businesses do not actually understand how they make money 
•  How KPI laundering and broken data lead to bad decisions 
•  Why AI is mostly a distraction for unprepared companies 
•  The real value creation playbook: data, systems, marketing, then AI 
•  How to think about CAC, conversion, and net profit per lead 
•  Why CEOs, not tech, are usually the biggest bottleneck 
•  How searchers and independent sponsors should adapt in a post multiple expansion world 

Find us on Apple, Spotify, Amazon, and YouTube. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Search Funded, the Entrepreneurship to Acquisition Podcast. I'm your host, Nick Lumell, and I'm here today with Lee McCabe of Claymore Partners. Claymore Partners works with private equity firms and their portfolio companies to drive real value creation across marketing data and technology. Lee is also a contributor at Nama Very Private Equity, where he's built a following for his very direct and authentic takes on what's really happening inside PE bank businesses, whether that's KPI laundering roll-up stalling because leadership can't actually see the business or operating partners being asked to drive change without real authority. So the reason I'm really excited to have you on this is I think it's become clear to pretty much everyone in the space, whether it's in the lower middle market where this podcast typically sits for larger cap private equity that value creation is what's going to be essential going forward. You've read a lot about this on your LinkedIn, that financial engineering is not going to cut it anymore. Interest rates are going to remain high. There's a tough macro environment out there, and AI is shaking everything up. And so I'm really interested in the insights you have. You posted a lot of really interesting stuff on LinkedIn. But before we get into all that, I'd love just to learn a little bit more about you and how you got it into what you are doing now.

SPEAKER_02 1:08

Yeah, so look, my background was all digital for most of my career. I started on I started off early at eBay in the UK, and while we were trying to figure out how we get this new auction model to work, and that worked out okay. And then I carried on through digital, uh doing stinted Expedia, uh running Asia Pacific and North America. Then I joined Facebook to run a couple of global verticals, and then I joined Alibar to run North America. And it was really at Alibar that opened my eyes to private equity because one of my one of my jobs was to get all the major US brands selling into China on Timor, which at that time was the the easiest entry to start selling whatever product you were selling uh into that market. And the more brands I spoke to, I was also pitching to their boards, and I started meeting more and more PE guys, and I started realizing P's got a bigger grasp than I thought across a lot of companies and a lot of brands. And the more I got to know the PE guys who I was pitching to, the more I started to realize that they just weren't digital. And that struck me as being crazy, especially coming from a digital background. I thought crazy would be not the number one driver because people is always the number one driver by far for value creation. But I would at least thought digital would have been two or three in their kind of playbook on what to unleash on a business and start to drive value pretty quickly, especially looking at the types of business they were buying. Typical PE businesses, look, they buy businesses with good bones and good fundamentals with hopefully good management teams, but they're not really, on the whole, not buying tech businesses, they're buying old, boring businesses that spin off a lot of cash. Home services, manufacturing, distribution. So old businesses just ripe uh for digital. So that drew my interest in PE. And I was looking lucky enough to join a firm in New York, and I worked as an operating partner in charge of digital value creation for five years. And the opportunity just increased over those five years. So I launched Claymore Partners, and now I work with several PE firms at the moment across several portfolio companies, helping them uh drive and realize digital value creation uh across their portfolio.

SPEAKER_00 3:37

Yeah, that's clearly one of the ways that a lot of these more traditional businesses could add value or create more value than they currently have, in addition to the human side, as you mentioned already. Um, I guess I'd I'd love to learn a little bit more about what that looks like in practice. What happens when you go in and talk to a company? What are some of the things that you do to help them grow?

SPEAKER_02 3:55

Yeah, so look, uh the gap that I saw was working in PE, PE, when they think about digital value creation, really had two routes. One was they'd go to a Ban or McKinsey or BCG or a similar big consultant, and they would pay way too much money for a strategy deck. And the strategy deck, look, would would be good, but it would be expensive. And then the consultant would say, Good luck. Here's what you have to do. Good luck finding people, and good luck finding vendors and partners to actually get this done. And that's tough because a lot of these industries are not sexy industries, they're going to find it really hard to attract digital talent, and finding the right vendor and agency is just it's just a minefield. 99% are terrible. So they would have done that, or they might have gone straight to a digital agency. And again, I think 99% are terrible. And the digital agency wouldn't have taken the time to understand the business. They would have jumped straight to, well, we've analyzed Google, we've analyzed Meta, and we think it's inefficient, and we think we can spend more. So let's start spending more, and we'll we'll take, we'll mark up the media, and we'll have a great business. Let's start spending. And that just didn't work. It was crazy because you can't jump straight to digital marketing unless you understand the business and the customer journey. And the tech stack is usually broken every time, and the business is not collecting enough data. So the opportunity I saw, and this was the playbook I built when I was with the my previous firm, was this. First of all, we look at the we look at how the business makes money. We put that on one page and understand, okay, here's how you make money. And a lot of people might think, well, that's pretty obvious. I mean, shouldn't they know how they make money? But it never fails to surprise me when I speak to the leadership team and say, like, what's your LTV? Uh what's your cancellation rate? Like, help me understand what's you, what's the margin? Help me understand how this business makes money. And they can't. And every agency I've meeting I've been in is the same. They don't take the time to understand that. I've been on an account where the agency's been with this business for two years, and I've asked them, do you understand the business? Because you're still asking me about LTV two years in. Like, this is crazy. How can you be effective if you don't understand the business? So we've knocked that out, and then we map out the customer journey, which is equally as important, to say, right, from the first point of customer contact, what happens to that customer when you push them through your business to when you actually realize revenue from them? Because that's important to understand. There may be fixed touch points, there may be handoffs to different people, there's different conversion rates in that. So I help me understand the customer journey. So we do that first, which is fundamental. And then we say, right, let's look at the tech stack. The tech stack is usually always broken when we work for companies. And the tech stack should do two things. It should make that customer journey very efficient, and it should give you a business built on data. You should make sure everything is tagged and tracked so you can measure everything. You should take gut feel out of your business. You should be able to measure everything that's going on, and if you do that, you'll be able to run your company way better than you've ever been done before. So then we fix the tech stack. And then on top of that, we say, right, now you're collecting all the data you need to, and everything's tagged and tracked. We can build BI on top of that, so we can give you all the dashboards you need to run this business, and then we can now we can drop AI on top of that to give you even more insights. Then we look at the website to say, right, is the website working for you? You're probably spending a lot of money bringing people to the website, but you're converting them as effectively as you should be. So we look at the website and the user experience and the conversion rate optimization of the website. And then the very last point we get to digital marketing. And we look at what they've been spending, but by this time we've got all the data. And so digital marketing becomes easy at that point, it's just math. So we can see all the competitive data, we can see what they've been spending, we can put a forecast together to say, okay, let's do this properly, and let's drop a competent team on who know what they're doing in terms of digital marketing, and we're gonna be very successful. So that that's the model.

SPEAKER_00 8:13

Definitely. And I think it is what a lot of these businesses really need is uh that type of approach. And something that stood out to me in that was that AI was maybe the fourth or fifth step. It wasn't the first step. Like you needed to understand the business first, then you need good data, and then eventually then you go to AI, and then it can, I'm sure, do a lot. My question would be maybe looking at some of these smaller businesses that you know, search fund entrepreneurs might be targeting, what should they be diligencing when they look to acquire a business? A lot of these are probably baby boomer-owned, small, you know, mom and pop businesses. Yeah. You're probably gonna assume that they're not optimized the way they could be with digital, but what is the red flag in terms of whether you should even go forward and buy a business like that or not?

SPEAKER_02 8:57

Always the CEO. Because the model I just outlined is not hard to put in place if the CEO wants it to happen. So the CEO is always the biggest hurdle. And that also never fails to surprise me. Because you would think a forward-thinking CEO would say, absolutely, I want my business to be run on data, because I'm going to be more successful. And if you say that, that takes a that that takes a green box, right? You go, awesome. Well, let me come in and help you do it. But a lot of the time you get pushback because the CEOs and founders are probably not digital guys. And congrats to them, they've built a good business. They've probably built off brand and media and relationships, and they've built a good business that they're going to be able to sell and make a lot of money. But they're probably not the person to take it to the next level. So you might get pushed back by the because they don't understand it. And that's fine if they're honest and say, look, it this is definitely a thing, and I see value, but I don't understand it, that's fine. Because you can say, Okay, I'll help you understand it. Let's figure this out together, let's get this built. But you will get a cohort who are defensive. Because if you give them a business built on data, it exposes them. And it exposes to things that they don't know, and it exposes all the metrics. And there may be some metrics they're not proud of and they don't want exposing. So the CEO's always the biggest hurdle in this.

SPEAKER_00 10:29

Yeah, I think that definitely makes a lot of sense. And hesitancy probably is it could be a sign, I guess, that they're covering something up, and so that does tell you something in itself. Maybe a follow-on to that. Let's say you're in a situation where the CEO's been replaced, new owner, but the employees don't want to change the way they do things. They're guys who go out and are hands-on blue-collar guys, they don't want to have someone tracking everything they do. How would you handle that sort of situation?

SPEAKER_02 10:55

You have to start putting discipline in that team. And you look, usually there's a there's a lot of churn. Because if you if you look at this from the view is look, this is an investment. We're not buying this company for the fun of it, this is investment. And at the end of the day, we're we're not gonna be but we don't want to dispose of people and we're not gonna be heavy-handed and brutal in this, but at the end of the day, we want to create a great business with this. And like I said earlier, people is always the biggest business driver and always the biggest hurdle when it comes to business. So I would start by making sure I've got superstars in the leadership team. So I would absolutely and pay over market right to get them because a lot of these industries and companies, they're not sexy companies, right? So they're not gonna be naturally attractive to the best talent. But it's always worth overpaying for. Make sure you've got a solid CMO who is data-driven and knows performance marketing and is intellectually curious. They're gonna test every new channel. They're gonna have a hunger for data and a hunger for learning and a hunger for test and learn, and they're gonna do you a great job. Equally as important to have a superstar to run the sales team. Because that's where it can break down a lot. If you have a dysfunctional sales team, you can have the best marketing engine in the world. It's not gonna convert, the sales team are not gonna convert it. So I've seen this, I've seen this turnaround a lot. It starts by leadership. You put leadership in place that's gonna put discipline and put data in that sales team because you you need the sales team to be entering the data and keeping on top of their pipelines and the funnels and feeding those metrics back to marketing. And you need a sales team that's gonna convert sales. So I don't think it's uh not a quick change to make, but you start putting that discipline in place, some people will step up to the bat and make a difference because they'll start to realize my job just got easier. Because I'm not called calling every day. Marketing is sending me great leads, so this is awesome. And you're giving me all the tools that I can succeed, and if I succeed, I'm gonna make more money. So you'll have people step up to the bat, you'll have people that say, I don't like it. I've I've done this job for 20 years and I'm not changing. That's a problem. And I think over time, slowly they they they're gonna churn out. It's like everything. What got you here the past 20 years is not gonna get you through the next 20 years. Things are changing fast, AI is changing things a lot uh fast. But I think it's not unreasonable to say, look, we want a business built on data. There's no more good feel, there's no more guesswork in this business. Like everything has to be built on data. So I'm afraid that's gonna be a a big ask from the management team. We're gonna drive this.

SPEAKER_00 13:48

Definitely. I think that has to be the way you approach it now. And I totally agree with that point that one of the best investments you can make is in good leadership, and that is how you can really grow a business. To the last point on lead generation, I know that you've said multiple times that businesses are really lead generation businesses rather than whatever the product they're selling is. It seems that as AI improves, it's getting really good at lead generation. I even use an AI lead generation tool myself. It's cheap. Seems like a lot of businesses could utilize something like that. When we're faced with a world where the future may be just AI agents doing lead generation for you, how do business is different shape?

SPEAKER_02 14:28

So a few ways, and there are multiple touch points, right? So I'm yeah, AI is changing things now. I'm getting spammed like crazy from people selling me everything from lead generation companies wanting to do my lead generation. So it's getting louder and louder, and there's more noise than ever out there right now. So the cut to is you need multiple channels that that customer sees, and brand is the best one. If I get an email and I've heard of the brand, then I'm more likely to open the email. So I think branding is still hugely important. It's a it's a long-term game, but I think any company that invests in building a brand for themselves, there's value there. And then there's multiple things I'm gonna look at as backup, right? So let's let's say it is home services. One, if it's a good home service business and they're good at lead generation, they're gonna get me in a period of intent, right? So if they sell windows, they're gonna target me when I've given them some signal that I'm in the market for Windows. So that works. If I'm familiar with their brand, if they've been hitting me with direct mail for the past two years, and the brand is top of mind for me, even though I've been bidding that direct mail, it's still good branding. I'll go, okay, I've heard of them. And then reputation. Like everyone, I'll look at their reviews and say, okay, your reputation is still here. You've got a 4.8 and 20,000 reviews. Okay. I will I will take your call or I will call you or fill out the web form. You've got me. So just being good at lead generation is not the only thing. Because that's actually gonna get harder. Because people are gonna get spammed more and more with bots and more companies that that do this. You've got to back that up with a good brand and other proof points that you are a good business. That's how you get the first point of contact.

SPEAKER_00 16:29

That's really interesting. Should signal a change in the way business is done, possibly going forward. I guess taking a step back and talking about why we're discussing all this and why value creation is so important now. For search funds, there was always kind of the playbook of you buy a two million EBITDA business at 4x and then you triple it, and then you can sell for eight to 10x. And I think that may not be the case going forward. So how does that strategy change? What would you recommend a searcher does now, given that that may not be possible anymore?

SPEAKER_02 16:59

Well, it's important to look what what what happened and why it's hard now. So if you look at search and private equity as an industry, it's been like shooting fish in a barrel for a long time. Because the market was very kind. And what I mean by that is you could depend on multiples increasing every four years. And you can see that trajectory in the data. The assets re-rated themselves every four to five years. So more than likely, you could buy a company for 6x and do nothing with it and sell it for 8x four years later. Interest rates. We were living in times of free money. That's beautiful for private equity and the private equity model. And also access to capital, you look at the SP as a bellwether, the SP has been on fire for a long time. That gives you more bullish investors, more investors with more money, more investors that are willing to take risk on other asset classes and take risk on higher multiples. So SP was built on that and has done very well. And the issue is they haven't that be because it was that easy, they're not built for what's going to come, and they're not built for this environment now. Because growing those businesses, all you needed, the only levers they used really most of the time was pricing. And pricing is a good lever, but you need a couple of adults on a spreadsheet to do pricing, procurement, and governance. As long as they met that company once a month and had a board meeting once a quarter, and then an annual meeting, more often than not, they made money out of that business. Now it's like you said, it's way harder. You can't do that. The environment is not as friendly anymore. And we're seeing that in news every day, what's happening. So searches and PE firms have got to be operations first. So there's two things I would say. One, operations first means have a clear operational path and do it from day one. You can't cross your fingers and hope the CEO is going to get it. Because more often than not, they don't. So you've got to have a clear plan, and that you should uncover that in the diligence. Digital is always one of the biggest letters. Digital and data and digitize the business. And then the other thing that doesn't hurt for searches and PE firms, start building a brand for yourself. So I'll talk about PE firms first. If you look at the average PE firm website, it's a pitch book for LPs. You see, you see the team, you see the current portfolio, and then you get a lot of success metrics about previous funds. Pretty much every private equity website looks like that. And they're missing out a big opportunity. If they take a leaf out of some VC firms like Andreessen and 20 VC, those guys will say, look, we're we're half investment firm, half media firm. Because we know the importance of building a brand and they do a great job. Because if you build a brand in this industry, that makes everything easier. If you get caught in an auction and the founder's actually heard of you, I think that breaks a tie. If the founder actually likes you, it breaks a tie. If the founder's already listened to three of your podcasts and been your website and seen you interview three founders and heard you tell success stories, but also heard you being transparent, which is probably more important and say, well, this one didn't work out. And look, let's we'll tell you, we'll be honest, this is why this investment didn't work out. But that's fine, because eight out of ten times our investments do work out. This is an anomaly, but we're going to be transparent. And if you're transparent, that builds trust. So I think PE firms need to lean more into the kind of that VC model and change their websites and start building brands for themselves. Because you'll win, you'll you'll start to win deal flow that way and get an originate deal flow that way. You should get founders coming to you or CEOs coming to you. Because right now, if you ask the average firm, if you say, look, you want to get bought by PE, who do you hope's gonna buy you? And they'll likely only be able to name 5P firms. They'll probably say Blackstone, KKR, Apollo, Carlisle. And of course, it's exceptionally unlikely they're gonna get bought by those big firms. So they get put in an auction with three firms they've never heard of, and it's a dance, and they try to figure out whether they like them or not. If you've already been building a brand for yourself for the past 10 years, it makes that much easier. And I think for independent searches, it's the same deal. It's never been easier to build a profile for yourself. Go on LinkedIn, try the other channels, start building platforms for yourself to drive awareness. Because people will start coming to you, and it creates a lot of serendipity. You'll be surprised. People and opportunities will come to you that you didn't realize just by being authentic, by being transparent, and just not by by building an audience. So I think that's the direction they need to go.

SPEAKER_00 22:15

Yeah, definitely really like the comparison of Andries and Horowits and VC startups are excited to work with Andries and Horwoods, so where's the Endries and Horwoods of the search funder PE world? It's a good question. From what you're describing, it seems like a lot of lead generation now, whether that's deal sourcing or sales for the companies you're talking about, it is more about attraction rather than reaching out as creating a brand, having people drawn to you. It's something you've clearly done well. You have over 50,000 LinkedIn subscribers. But given that you are also a digital guy, marketing guy, you've talked about how marketing is really a capital allocation problem than a creative exercise. How should operators be thinking about marketing now? And clearly it is something where you still need to pay attention to the data and allocate capital accordingly. So just be curious how your surgery, you've come in, you've acquired a company now, a$30 million revenue services business. How would you spend the first hundred days or the first 12 months from a value creation perspective?

SPEAKER_02 23:12

Fixing the foundation, building a business built on data, fixing the tech stack, fixing all the piping, fixing the plumbing, fixing the BI, so you can measure everything. If you can measure everything, it makes your business, like I said earlier, a lot easier to run. That makes your digital marketing a lot easier to run. That makes kind of market mix modeling a lot easier. Still not that easy, right? Marketing mix is still the biggest issue in marketing. It's still hard. The digital piece is easy. It becomes harder when you pull branding into that. And the unfortunate thing is it's important. You still do need branding. So if I if I look at big home service firms, they're still spending 30% of their budget top of funnel on TV and radio. Super hard to measure, but it matters. And you might not see an immediate uh effect from that, but over time you're doing the right thing building a brand. And you can see that because whenever these companies pull top a funnel, it impacts every other channel straight away. So marketing mixes hard, but you need to figure it out, and it all becomes much easier if you've got all the data.

SPEAKER_00 24:19

What are some of the top metrics you look at? CAC, ROAS, any that you would say is the most important to look at?

SPEAKER_02 24:25

Well, ultimately, if I if you think about a home services business, it's net profit per lead, is the ultimate measure. But there's a kind of a revenue tree of measures to get there to figure out how much am I paying for each channel. So the the first measure would be cost per lead. What am I paying cost per lead to get in here? And then you've got your different conversion paths, like how well does my call center convert that lead to an appointment? That's all about speed to lead and effectiveness in your call center. Super important. Once that appointment gets scheduled, what are the cancellation rates that are important in that appointment? And that usually correlates with how fast you get it scheduled. If you schedule that appointment in the next three days, they're not likely to cancel. So there's a science, and again, back to the data on how fast you get these appointments scheduled. Then you send the sales team into the home, and you can see how effective the sales team are because they either sell the job or they don't sell the job. And if they sell the job, that's great. You track your conversion rate, your sales conversion rate. And then speed is also important. You don't want to give that person a chance to cancel again. So you want to make sure the installation happens within the next week and get that done. So there's like there's a revenue tree that you look down, and then once the job gets sold, you look at the the salespersonal effectiveness. How well have they been able to upsell that customer? They might they might have came come in wanting to buy four windows, but my sales team's that good. They sold them eight windows. Great, that's double, it's just doubled the average order value. So you look at metrics like that, and then it carries on. You you you do the business, you sell. I want to see every successful customer leave a positive Google review. So you look at the percentage of reviews left from transactions, and you're trying to push that percentage up over time because volume and quality reviews absolutely helps. Then you also want referrals from that customer, so you want to look at referral rate. If they're a very happy customer, how do I get them to tell five of their friends? It's been a great job. So you look at referral metrics in that. So there's a lot of metrics that you look at, and every one you can you can improve. It's all incremental, right? But it all leads to net profit per lead, or net profit per job, or your margin.

SPEAKER_00 26:47

Yeah, this is all really super helpful, and it's how businesses actually grow, and it'd be not something that searches a P necessarily think of as the first thing to do. Maybe those starting businesses they should be thinking about things, but I think anyone who is running a business from any level should be focused on these things, which are really the most important things, or how the business actually works and how do you make it do that better. Maybe one last question around this would be at what point do you put AI in? Where does AI actually help and where does it not help?

SPEAKER_02 27:14

Right now it's a distraction. You don't put it in unless you built the foundation and you're ready for it. Most companies are not ready for it. Right? But it's a distraction because these people are getting hit 10 emails a day by AI firms. And there's a lot of bullshit out there right now. They're promising the world in AI. And the typical founder doesn't know any better.

unknown 27:37

Right?

SPEAKER_02 27:37

They're listening to news stories, they're listening to AI is going to be the future, which it will be. But you have to be realistic about one, what it what can it do today? And I've actually I've actually built a foundation where it can be effective. So I had a lot of conversations with companies come to me saying, What can we do in AI? And I would say, absolutely nothing. You don't have a CRM. Like what like seriously, you've built no foundation in this business. What do you expect AI to do? Or you might have a CRM, nobody's using it. There's no data in your business. AI is not a magic wand. What what what do you expect it to do? So there's a trajectory, and one, it's build a good business built on data first. And that will be way more effective than anything you can do with AI. Just get the basics right of your business, and then you'll be able to get incremental improvements in the call center and your sales team and the website. If you've done all that and you've got a business built on data, sure, then AI becomes useful because the insights you can glean from AI and the automations you can set up with AI now are super helpful. And there's new products coming to market, new companies that are very specific. Like voice AI in the call center is effective. That should save you costs in the call center. So you should think about that. Content creation in marketing, absolutely. You don't need a team of content creators anymore. You can create a ton of content with AI and you can deploy that. AI will schedule it, it will test and learn from that content and get better over time. So there are there are things emerging you should be doing. But yeah, you need a solid foundation of a business built on data before you get there. You should also be giving your team access to ChatGPT and Claude and let them play around with it. And let them discover what works. And let them find new things. Because the speed it's moving is is crazy. I started testing OpenClaw, which is super useful. I'm currently on Cloud Core work, which I'm finding new utility for every day. So in terms of automation, incredible. But don't miss the fundamentals. A business that gets the basics right will be mar far more successful than any company that jumps straight to AI and doesn't have the basic fundamentals.

SPEAKER_00 30:02

Sure. Yeah, I think there's a lot of fear missing out there, but at the same time, it is incredibly helpful. And that suggestion to enable the employees to use it might be one of the smartest ways to go about it because they're actually more involved in the day-to-day tasks that it could be helpful with, and they'll probably understand more quickly where it actually is helpful. So that's really good advice. Before we close up, I was wondering if there's anything else that you would like to talk about or any other advice that you might have for those in the lower middle market that could be relevant to them.

SPEAKER_02 30:28

No, look, I I I I think we covered it. I mean, I'm like you introduced me, I'm a I'm a digital guy. You go into private equity because I sold the opportunity. That opportunity is bigger than ever. And you come across very few companies who get it and have realized their full opportunity. And in today's world, digital is not that hard anymore. You don't have to hire engineers, you don't have to create new products. You can buy everything off the shelf. You can buy everything off the shelf, you can link them together, that gets easier every day. So it's really getting the fundamentals right. If you do one thing and you say, I'm gonna make sure this business is built on data, it's not hard to get there, and that will pay dividends. The things you can build on top of that, everything becomes easier. So get the basics right, build it on data, and then obviously make sure you've got good people internally. Because halfway back to begin the conversation, people is always the biggest driver of failure or success in business. So pay whatever you need to to bring superstars in, give them a business built on data, give them the tools, and you should see success.

SPEAKER_00 31:43

Amazing, very helpful advice. Thank you so much for joining Lee.

SPEAKER_01 31:47

Pleasure, thank you.