Transform Your Future with Eddie Isin

From Setback to Success: Reinvent Your Career at Any Age Ep 50

• Eddie Isin • Season 1 • Episode 50

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In this milestone episode of Transform Your Future, Edward Isin sits down with Tom Fox, a lawyer-turned-compliance expert, prolific author, and podcasting powerhouse. Tom's story is a testament to the power of resilience, reinvention, and embracing new opportunities at any stage of life. From recovering from a devastating cycling accident to becoming a leader in the compliance industry, Tom shares how setbacks can be the catalyst for profound success.

Key Discussion Points:

  1. Reinvention After Setback:
     Tom shares how a life-changing accident redirected his career path, inspiring him to embrace compliance and content creation as his calling.


  2. The Power of Storytelling in Business:
     Learn why personal storytelling is key to connecting with clients and building trust in today’s competitive landscape.


  3. Consistency in Content Creation:
     Discover Tom’s method for writing daily, turning blog posts into books, and repurposing content across multiple channels.


  4. Why Compliance Matters for Entrepreneurs:
     Tom explains why compliance programs are essential for businesses of all sizes and how they can open doors to new opportunities.


  5. Corporate Culture and Accountability:
     Explore the role of corporate culture in fostering ethical practices and avoiding regulatory pitfalls.


  6. The Impact of Global Events on Business:
     Gain insights into how events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine reshaped compliance, governance, and business practices.


  7. Lessons from a Content Creator’s Journey:
     Hear how Tom leverages podcasts, social media, and storytelling to build a global audience and maintain industry relevance.


What You’ll Learn:

  • How to turn setbacks into opportunities for personal and professional growth.
  • The importance of documenting processes for compliance and attracting investors.
  • Strategies for creating consistent content to build your personal brand.
  • Why every entrepreneur should consider writing a book or starting a podcast.



Resources

Don’t Miss This Episode!
 Whether you’re looking to pivot your career, grow your business, or simply find inspiration, Tom Fox’s story offers invaluable lessons on resilience, reinvention, and achieving success at any age. Tune in now to uncover actionable insights to transform your future!

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Tom Fox, welcome to Transform Your Future Podcast. How are you today, my friend? I'm great, Eddie. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here with you. Today. Excellent, excellent. I'm looking forward to this. We've been chatting back and forth and I want to talk about the compliance podcast network and about your book about compliance and your whole author journey and what does it mean for a business who has to work with government regulations to be right kind of culture. So perhaps we could just start by you telling us a little bit about yourself and how you ended up authoring all these books. I am a lawyer by professional training. I'm a recovering trial lawyer. Did that for 25 years. Then I went into the corporate world and I did international contracts. I got to live all over the world doing contracts for an oil field service company. Then I became a general counsel for another oil field service company who had violated a US law that prevents US companies from engaging in BRI and corruption outside the United States. And from that experience, I learned about compliance. That company got sold, so my job went away and I decided what I really wanted to do with my life was race bicycles. I was then 50 I could race in the senior division, and I went off from this great journey to race bicycles till about a year into that journey, I was taken out by a Hummer on a training ride. Then that ended my cycling career. And so after I convalesced for a few months, when I got the strength to get on my walker and toddle into my office at home, this was 2010, I realized I was going to have to go back to work and I had no clients and I had no work. And the only thing I had on my hands was time. I decided that I really enjoyed building out compliance programs inside of corporations. So that's what I focused on, and at that point in my life, I knew nothing about social media and I learned about Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, et cetera, and that's what started my journey. And I had always written a lot as a lawyer. And so I started blogging and the blogging led to a book and the book led to our books and the books led to, or the blogging led to podcasting. I started podcasting in 2012 and next month my 30th book comes out and I have 50 or 60 podcasts in two networks right now. So I fully embrace communications. I fully embrace getting your message out, personal branding. I think every entrepreneur has a lot, not simply to sell, but a story to tell. And if you tell that story That'ss, when people will connect with you, it's not a standing on the street corner saying, Hey, look at me. It's standing on the street corner and a bunch of people saying, that's a really interesting story. I want to meet this guy. I want to talk to him. Maybe there's a way we can do some business together. If not, he's the kind of person I want to do business with. And so that's really served me incredibly well over the last 15 years. That is fantastic. Tom. I just want to say for a moment here, we just got to take a step back and just say, it is so amazing how the universe works. The way that we met and this whole process of how we ended up here today feel, it's like serendipitous. You were talking about so many things that I'm excited about. The whole idea of at 50 life handing you lemons and you trying to figure out what are you going to do and how are you going to make lemonade to keep moving forward, have a life worth living, and have some purpose to what you're doing. And I think that's fantastic. I think it's great because so many people have the mindset that once you're 50, 60 years old, it's over, you've done it, and whatever you are, that's it. Now you just coast the rest of your life. And that's not the truth. Especially not today, not in the times we live in today. And you're out there and you're crushing it and you're doing these, when you said 50 or 60 podcasts, I just want to make sure that I understand correctly. You mean like 50 or 60 different actual podcasts that are running, right? Yeah. That's awesome. It's like you have a. Lemme say a couple of words about the universe because you're absolutely right and the universe actually talks to all of us. It just took me a long, long time to learn to listen and here. So when I got hit by that Hummer, the lesson, the biggest lesson I got out of that was when the universe closes one door, it opens another one. I always knew that. What I didn't know was you have to have the courage to walk through it. That's what I got out of that experience was the courage to walk through it. And I won't tell you that it was absolute courage. It was more I had nothing to lose, but whatever it was, I walked through that door and here we are now. I had another one of those lessons during the pandemic that we can get to. But your point is absolutely taken as well. Sometimes serendipity happens and you just need to let it happen and go with it. And maybe if there's one lesson I wish I had learned earlier, that would be it, but I did learn it eventually. Sometimes when you're in the middle of things, it seems overwhelming. It seems like an insurmountable task. Or in my case, I know a lot of times I'm just like resistant. I'm just resistant. I'm like, well, why does it have to be that way? Why do I have to change? There was a long part of my life where everything, every question I asked of myself and every situation that I wanted to improve all meant that immediately I needed to work on myself and I needed to change me. And I went through this time for a few years where I was just like, again, I have to do more work on myself. I have to change again. But after a while, I got over it. But yeah, I mean, it would be wonderful if life didn't happen, but life happens. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. It would be great if you could just do something, set a goal, get there, and don't ever have to worry about obstacles or failures or the economy closing or somebody dying. But this is the world we live in, the real world that we have to deal with those things. So I think that's great. Going back to your thing about the podcast 50 or 60 podcast, so I'm just going to use some terms to make it easy. So it's like you're a podcast network that has multiple shows, right? That's what we're talking about, right? Yeah. I have two networks. Do you do all the shows yourself or you have teams or partners? So in the Business of Business Network, which is the compliance podcast network, I have about 50 shows there, and those are called Tom Fox shows, and then there's 10, and that means I host or produce them. There's about 10 that somebody else hosts and or produces. Those are called non Tom Fox podcast. And then I have another network where I have about eight to 10 shows. It's a rural network based upon the rural part of West Texas I live in. Interesting. So just out of curiosity, this is all available on the podcast channels like Apple Podcasts, Spotify, et cetera. Right? All the usual suspects. Spotify megaphone hosting platform is megaphone, and from there everything goes out to iTunes, Spotify, iHeartRadio, formerly Google, Amazon, et cetera. Excellent, excellent. So Tom, I know I took a sidestep there. I want to go back to your stories. How did you end up writing your first book about this? What was the thing that got you thinking, not only do I want to talk about this and write about it in my blog, but this would be a great topic for a actual book. What got you into doing that? Because I mean, it's a big goal. It's not an easy feat. It's something that requires a lot of focus. And. So I was the third blogger in my space of legal and regulatory compliance, and the first guy started in 2007 and I started, before I started my own blog, I submitted some blogs to him. And in 2010 I started, I guess I started in two oh before the accident. And then in 2010 I decided that I had nothing else to do, so I would just blog every day. And at the end of the year, I emailed him this guy, and I said, look at me. I did a year's worth of blogging. And he emailed me back and said, that's great, Tom. When's your first book coming out? And that was it. And I thought, well, he's right. I got all this material. So I reworked it into a book and he published it. He had a publishing company back then, and that's literally how it started. But Eddie, the lesson I got from that was, it can be overwhelming, but if you have a process of writing every day, I don't know if you know the author Dave Robes show, but he writes every day and he writes one page and he says, at the end of the year, I have 300 pages. Well, I blogged every day. And at the end of the year I had 200 blocks. And so everything I do now is geared towards my next book. So I'm still the nuts and bolts guy. I write about current events. I write about things kind of cutting edge, ai, data analytics, those sorts of things that are important to the compliance profession culture. I just did a series on culture at Boeing and how to start to fix the culture at Boeing. But though I write a blog, five blogs become a white paper, four white papers is a chapter of a book. And every year I update, my biggest book is I have a manual, a compliance handbook manual, and every year I'm actually obligated to add 20 to 30% new material, but by the end of the year I have it. And if there's a kind of a noteworthy legal or regulatory enforcement action, I write about that. And all of that material forms the basis of illegal and regulatory compliance update for the year. So at the end of the year, I actually have three or four books if you count the update. And now that I've got podcasts, I can take the podcast transcript and that can be the basis of a blog post. So it's all about the production process for me that it's all moving towards some form of a book. Very good. I like the way you think, Tom. I like the way you break it down like that. Mathematically five bog post, a white paper, four white papers is a chapter. I'm impressed by the way that you think. So let's talk about your compliance work. Let's talk about that. Let's talk about what that means to businesses and why it's important. Sure. So I grew up in the energy industry. I lived in for 40 years and practiced law there. And Houston was unfortunately the capital of the world for violating this law. I mentioned the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. So there was a lot of knowledge about that law. And what I saw happen in Houston was a business response to a legal thing or a legal requirement. So you have the regulators, the US Department of Justice, but the business response was the following. There are three major oil companies who are the production companies, Exxon, Chevron, shell. Then below that are what's called the service companies. And they're four service companies, and they do all the work. Exxon owns the oil or leases the oil, the service companies do all the work. And if you want to work in the energy industry, you generally have to be a employee of or a contractor to one of those service companies. So it's just straight down chain. And if you want to do any work for any of the service companies, you have to have a compliance program. And I saw that because I had a client that they had one piece of software that did something, and they were so small, they didn't have their own sales team. And I kept telling them, you're going to have to have a compliance program. You're going to have to have a compliance program if you want any contracts. And finally, I talked them into letting'em put a compliance program in place, and two weeks later, one of those service companies came along and wanted to make a big investment in them. And the second thing they asked for after the financials was the compliance program. So the lesson I learned from that is, yes, it's important to follow the law. I'm a lawyer, so of course I'm going to say that, but from a business perspective, it's even more important. And so now it's typical to see in an oil fill contract, a requirement for a compliance program, and the company you're contracting with is probably going to come audit your program at some point. Now expand that out to export control. Now expand that out to anti-money laundering. Now expand that out to ESG. Now expand that out to trade sanctions. All of those are compliance programs in one way, shape, or form. And so what I tell people is, once again, it's important to follow the law, but it's more important if you want to do business. And that's not just the energy industry, it's pharma, it's tech, it's financial services, it's computers, it's software, it's hardware, you name the business. The Department of Justice just did a big run through oil trading companies, and they called them industry sweeps. It's where they go through and sweep through an industry and have a bunch of enforcement actions. So if you want to do business, if you want to get a bank loan, if you want to get private equity money, if you want to raise stock or raise money through stock issuance, you have to have a compliance program. So you have to have it to do business. And what I tell entrepreneurs is they say, well, at what point should I have a compliance program Now, because a compliance program is essentially financial controls, maybe 5% different, but it's just good financial controls. And if you have good financial controls, what's going to attract investors? Interesting. So your book, the Compliance Handbook, that book, who's now what in the third edition? Fourth edition. Fifth Edition coming out this month. And this is the comprehensive everything you need to know for business of all types of businesses. Yes. Wow. Okay. So that sounds like a lot of work. That sounds like, well. It was, but remember I had written it all over the years, So when I decided, I think it was 2017 maybe, I just decided now was the time to do it. And of course it revolved around a podcast. So what I decided to do was do a daily podcast on a, I can't remember what I called it. Anyway, it was a daily podcast on a compliance tip of the day. And what it was was 10 minutes of me reading something that was going in the book because I have trouble editing by just reading, but if I read it out loud, I can hear the mistakes. So the podcast was actually my editing process. I sat there with a red pen and every time I would see a misspelling or a wrong tense or something, I would just circle it and then go back and fix it. So the podcast was actually a part of, I think it was called 31 Days to a Better Compliance Program. And so I incorporated all of these social media strategies literally into not simply writing the book, but editing it as well. And at the end of the year, I had a 500 page book. You mentioned social media a few times, and getting introduced to that social media world in 2010 and learning how to use it, I haven't looked you up your social media. It's not something that I usually do, but I'm very interested in doing that now to see what you're doing. Can you speak a little bit about what you've been doing in social media and what kind of results you got and what you've learned? Sure. So I hammer social media, and you asked me a little bit earlier, did I have any help doing all the podcasts? The answer is yes. I have a guy who does video grams who creates the social media assets, and I have somebody else who posts them. So I have help in that arena. But what happened was during the pandemic, I had no work at all. So I just started hammering social media and five to 10 tweets, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, things a day per podcast because in the compliance world, almost all marketing pre pandemic was done at trade shows, conferences, breakfast round tables, something live and in person. And of course, that wasn't available at least in 2020. That, and then all the social media work I was doing caused my network to just explode and growth. And so I developed the largest social media presence in compliance, and I've continued that to the point where I get about 500,000 downloads a year across my entire network. And my total social media engagement is over 7 million across the network. So I don't know what percent that is. 50 downloads are 15% of my entire engagement across all social media. Those are very impressive numbers. When you say videogram, by the way, you mean creating the sound bites from one of the podcasts with some artwork? Is that what we're talking about? Yes, But with a video, you and I are recording on video and I use Riverside. That's why I knew a little bit about it. And Riverside actually will create your own if you want to go that direction. So that's easy. I create my own in D script because I like to figure out specific topics to discuss. I create now four for every podcast, three at 60 seconds or less, the limit on Twitter, Facebook reels, YouTube shorts, and then one at two minutes or less for LinkedIn. And then I write out all of the social media shares for all the content that goes into each one of those social media postings. That's great. Again, I love the way you think about it and you break it down standard operating procedures that you do. It's like you have these SOPs. I love it. Once you get the process going, it almost runs itself. I mean, you have to do what we're doing, you have to record, but once you record, like I said, with Riverside, they'll create the video grams for you if you want to go that direction. Yeah, I mean, I've only been doing this for a short time. I definitely need to continue to work on penetrating the marketplace, getting more eyeballs. So anything that can help doing that is something that I'm interested in figuring out and learning how to add it to my already very busy process of my work life, but to figure out how to incorporate that in there or get somebody else to do it, which is realistically what I'm going to end up doing, because I can't do everything and I don't want to spend my time doing social media. I'd rather have somebody else do it. Well, there are fortunately tools that will do that for you now. So what I can't have not been able to figure out what to do is to take the video I get from Riverside and put it on cover art and all of that. That's a step beyond me. But I have somebody who knows how to do that, and he's very good at it, and he loves doing it. Yeah, and I think the idea inherently is I love people. I love doing the show. I love talking about reinvention and identity and personal growth and self change and strategies and tactics. I just want to get the word out there and engage with my audience. Now, I'm also working on a book right now. I kind of like some of the parts of your process there, which actually I feel like it's beneficial almost like you are workshopping the book, right? It's like you're talking about the book and you're talking about a topic in the book, and then maybe there's some feedback that comes because you talked about it on a podcast or you released it in the blog post, and then each thing builds upon each other, and I really Right? You're absolutely right. I take all of that in, and particularly with the podcast, I get to talk to the top experts in compliance, what I do all day, I interview people, and so I'm able to get kind of cutting edge thought leadership. If there's a new product, if there's a new tool, I can incorporate that in and maybe I could have figured all that out reading, but it's so much more efficient for me in this sort of audio format. Yeah, that's excellent. So I'm just curious, I don't know exactly how to ask this question, but I'm just curious, what's your workflow really, like you just meant you spend all day doing interviews. So is that eight hours a day, five days a week, six hours, 10 hours? I'm just curious. What about. Average day I would say is three to four. A bad day is six to eight, because if it's a bad day, that means I got to stay up that night to get the next day's work done. So if I can have a couple hours, I can usually get everything done. I don't work with much of a lead time because I have 1, 2, 3, 4 daily shows and three of 'em are current events shows. So this is just for my own edification. How do you segment these different shows? You have, you just mentioned you have four daily shows. What is the difference between those four shows? One is I literally started a podcast called Compliance Tip of the Day, and that's just, that one is Daily compliance news where I take four stories that caught my interest and put that up as the stories starting June one, I run a summer series called Trekking through Compliance, compliance lessons, star Trek, the original series, all 79 episodes. I'm a huge Star Trek fan, and as my wife says, it's just an excuse for you to rewatch every episode, isn't it? I'm like, yeah, pretty much. But it's work, honey. I have to. Do it. But I love it. I love it because I have a similar practice of things. I mean, I love movies and TV shows, and I've actually written, produced and directed a lot of television shows and sports television, music videos and work with a lot of celebrities over the years. And I find myself, I like to watch it. I like to watch stuff. I like to investigate it, I like to research it. I like to find out the hidden facts. And so to take that and be able to use it for some other purpose, that's look great, right? It's like this other interest in your life and you're able to incorporate that into your work life. That's fantastic. I've got two movie podcasts. They of course revolve around compliance. One is general movies, one is science fiction, MCU, star Trek, star Wars, all of that jazz. So yeah, anytime I can have an excuse the strength and my weakness is the same thing, which is I have one switch on or off. I don't have a dimmer. And if I think of something, I have to start a new podcast. So we have Shakespeare in compliance, we have Sherlock Holmes in compliance, we have the Marvel Cinematic Universe in compliance and everything. But sports and compliance, I mean you name it. But in terms of how I segment everything, it's really by days. That's how I keep it straight. Every podcast is released on a specific day, and in my head, that's how I can keep it all straight. But one thing I'm just curious about, so let's just take the MCU show. So this is a show where you're talking about the MC, excuse me, the MCU, and then leading it to compliance. That's the theory. It's a lot more fun than that because I met this woman who was a huge MCU fan, and we started with the movies and we did every MCU movie. Then we did all of the little series they did on Disney Loki, and she Huk and all of that stuff. And then we decided, well, that was too limiting. So now we're doing our top 15 Star Trek Deep Space nine episodes, and I'm sure she's a huge Star Trek discovery fan, so I'm sure we'll do that at some point. Interesting, interesting. I mean, it's like educational, entertaining and educational. It's like edutainment. It's just storytelling exactly what you're doing from a I'm consuming what you create. Yes, yes, yes. That's fantastic. So tell me a little bit about your journey as an author and releasing these books. Did you self-publish? Oh, I know you told me that the gentleman that you spoke with who encouraged you to just take your blog and put it into a book, had a publishing company. What kind of publishing company was that? So what I learned pretty quickly was the publishing world is filled with trepidation because that little entity went bankrupt. So I had a long fight to get the rights to my book back from the bankrupt entity. A large majority were self-published. Incredibly easy to do that on Amazon or Kindle. I've had a couple of publishers publish my books over the years. And then my handbook, I was contacted by a company called LexiNexis, who is the biggest publisher in the legal realm. And somehow they got my name and they called me and said, look, we want to start a compliance function or group or subset. Would you be interested in writing for us? And as it happened, I was just near the end of finishing up the draft of that handbook and I said, well, yeah, I've got a draft. If I had you something in 30 days, would that work? And they just said yes. So I signed a contract with LexiNexis, and they're the ones that require, they want a new edition every year and they want 20, 30% news. So that's the reason I'm doing that, and that's coming out this month is the fifth edition. So the others are either small publishers or self-published. It's interesting. Again, it's so wonderful. You get this idea and you get inspired and you're like, okay, I'm thinking about these things, so that means I have to do something. So now how am I going to do it? What is going to be my process? And you start working it. Then suddenly somebody contacts you and says, Hey, we'd like to work with you. And you say, great, I just happened to finish my draft. Would you like to see it? And it just happens, right? You're doing this and the opportunities come to you. And I just love to point that out because so many times I think individually we want to make a plan and a structure, and then when things don't exactly work the way we planned and structured it, then we think that there's something wrong. When in reality, when we're in the zone and we're just doing that thing, we are doing, working in that area that we have our talent and skill in doing what we enjoy, it all works out. It'll just all work out. You just got to keep doing it. That's the other big lesson I've learned from the universe, which is one of my favorite phrases is when preparation and opportunity meet, luck occurs. And that's what's happened to me several times. Like you said, I'd written the book, I was in pretty good shape because of the whole podcast process I used for, and then out of the blue, the top legal publisher contacts me and says, Hey, you got anything? I'm like, well, yeah, I do. Yeah, it's fantastic. When you were talking about the legal battle that you had to go through to get ownership back of your first book there, I was just curious, was that because he had an ISBN number and it was registered under that publishing ISBN number instead of your own. Right? Yeah. So I learned that lesson. Yeah. I mean, I've talked to a lot of individuals who are self-publishing companies to help writers launch their book, and several of them talk about using their ISPN number, and I didn't even think about it at the time when it happened. I didn't think about it. I thought, oh, that's cool because you need an ISPN number. It wasn't until later that I talked to some other people that they told me, you need to have your own ISPN number, otherwise that person is going to be kind of in control of your book. So yeah, very good. Lesson learned, I say. Yes. So Tom, we've talked about a lot of stuff. One of the things that I'm curious about is when we're talking to small to medium sized businesses, what different categories of business need to really seriously look at compliance right now? Or is your recommendation that all businesses and everybody needs to have a compliance program? Every business needs a compliance program because every business has some legal regulations they have to follow, whether it's selling ice cream, whether it's selling blue jeans, whether it's selling a $500,000 software product that makes you more business efficient, whatever it is, there are laws and regulations you have to comply with. And the key is, I've given a lot of speeches over the years, and I inevitably say the following, what are the three most important things about any compliance program? They're the following document, document, document, whatever you do, document, because no one's going to fault you if you make a wrong decision. Well, people will fault you if you make no decision, meaning you have no process. And the regulators don't penalize people either criminal penalties or civil penalties for making wrong business decisions. They penalize people for not having a process or having a process and not following it. So whatever you do, document it. Like I said, whether it's selling ice cream, whether it's selling BlueJeans, selling hardware, software inside the United States or outside the United States. I mean, there's a lot that we need to be compliant for, especially if we have employees. You got all the labor laws and things like that and rights for your workers and HR and all these things. So there is a lot actually. Is there any advice that you can give to a small to medium sized businesses who are looking to make sure that they are compliant besides just actually keeping track of everything and writing up what they're doing? So advice number one would be to have strong financial controls. 95 to 98% of a compliance program is strong financial controls. And by that I mean do you have delegations of authority? Do you have segregation of duties? Do you have a written financial statement? Do you have an audited financial statement? All of these are expensive or will cost you some amount of money, but the dividends you'll reap from them will pay out in spades going forward. Because once again, if somebody is looking at you, whether it's an investor, whether it's a potential buyer, whether it's somebody who wants to buy your product or whether it's a regulator who comes knocking, then if you have that documentation, you can show them. I'm a one person, my podcast network is a one person corporation in the LLCI get a letter last year from the state of Texas saying, we want to audit you for workers' compensation purposes of all your employees. And so what that required was for me to send them all my corporate documents and my corporate tax returns showing I had no employees. Now I have independent contractors, and they're paid how you pay independent contractors. That wasn't what the state was looking for. But my little podcast network, the state of Texas tax department came and audited it. And once I understood what they wanted, I had all those documents ready and I could just email 'em to them. And two weeks later I got a letter and said, thank you very much. Everything's fine. So it really doesn't matter how big or small you are, you're subject to being audited by somebody. Interesting. Yeah. So I like where we're going with this. And so I think this also falls under the category of, in my experience personally, in my personal experience in my life, when I started out in business, these were all went into the file of things that I would do sometime in the future when I had more time and wasn't going to let that anything take away from my focus of selling selling. But many times it caused a lot of problems. I mean, one time I didn't file taxes for four years and then had to go through so much work and research and figuring it out and working with a CPA and an accountant to figure everything out. It was a big pain in the ass. So yeah, so much easier to start with that in mind and develop some processes around that and be compliant to all that and be ready for somebody to ask you, Hey, I don't think you paid enough sales tax. We need to audit you right now. What are you doing? Yes, absolutely. So Tom, in terms of compliance and everything, I know one other thing you like to talk about is about culture and business. Culture. Yes. And I definitely want to make sure to remind you, I want to talk about how everything changed with the Russian invasion of the Ukraine. Sure. So culture. Now, let me speak from the regulatory perspective, meaning the Department of Justice in 21, I think they woke up to the fact that, yeah, we have laws, but it's really about corporate culture. If your corporate culture is we will follow whatever are our values, you're going to be in pretty good shape. And yes, you may make a mistake because corporations are made up fallible. But if you have a good culture, the DOJ will reward that. Conversely, they'll punish you if you have a bad culture as meaning you have multiple violations. And the best example I can point you to right now is Boeing. They have a terrible culture. And we've read the reports of numerous whistleblowers have come forward saying, well, I tried. I tried. Here's the five emails I sent to my boss, et cetera. But not to pick on Boeing, because before that, it was Wells Fargo. Before that it was Volkswagen. Before that was, you name the company. Having a positive culture and a culture of accountability is a critical element for every business, and it will keep you out of trouble. And what's the cost of having a culture of accountability? Zero, no cost. It's talking about doing the right thing. It's leaders not just talking. It's leaders leading and walking the walk, not just talking the talk. So that's part of it as well. And the Russian invasion, we really had in my mind three things in a right row. Of course, we had the pandemic, then we had the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Now we have maybe four things. Now, the just deterioration in the relationship between the United States and China, and now we've got the war in the Middle East, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine changed business forever, in my mind, in five critical areas. Number one, there were a whole lot of sanctions put on Russians, individual and Russian companies. And basically, you cannot do business with Russia. A lot of US companies did business with Russia, or they did business with intermediaries who You can't do that anymore. And so you have to look at not simply your supply chain to make sure you're not getting any products out of Russia, but are you selling products that go to Russia, number one. Number two is it made the early part of the war. The biggest pictures were yachts sailing away. And that's because it was Russian oligarchs who had their half a billion dollar yachts subject to seizure by the United States. They were trying to sail to ports where they couldn't be seized. Well, the effect of that was it made whistle blowing, not only profitable but patriotic because they changed the law, which said that if you help us get those ships, you'll get a piece of the action. So a financial incentive for whistle blowing. Number three is cyber attacks. There obviously were cyber attacks long before the Russian invasion, but now it's a national policy of Russia. So you need to harden up whatever your protections are, even as a small business, because if you get locked out, that might put you out of business. Next was in the realm of ESG. It is your supply chain. Where do you know where you're sourcing everything, number one. But equally important is what happens if you're getting product out of one region, geographic regions is no longer available to you, like overnight. It's no longer available to you. How are you going to shift now, that part of that started during the pandemic because it was the same concept, but it became even more important, I think, during or made more important by the Russian invasion. And the last one was good governance. And good governance is what we just talked about in terms of culture. But the good governance part is the process. Governance in my mind, is a process and all the processes is in your company, which allows you to make sure you're not violating any of these laws. So that's why I try to articulate that how Russia invasion of Ukraine changed American business forever. And we're still feeling the effects of that. Today. Yes, yes, yes. Crazy. Crazy how the wheels keep turning. Yes. So Tom, I know we've talked about a lot of stuff, and I'm going to drop in the show notes, links to your podcast network and the link to your book. I'm just curious, is there anything we haven't talked about yet that you want to talk about or something we talked about that you want to revisit? So I would say, you didn't ask me the question of why you should write a book. Here's why you should write a book. It is the best business card you ever have. There is nothing more impressive than when you meet a new client or potential client or potential customer and say, Hey, can I give you a copy of my book? And one, it's impressive because as you said, it means you did the work. It's kind of like a college degree. It's a stupid piece of paper, but it does mean you did the work. One. Two is it shows you as a subject matter expert, and it demonstrates real thought leadership. Now you have to still convert the sale and you still have to deliver. But it shows that in your area, whatever that area is, you have thought about it and you've written about it. And that I think is pretty impressive. And three, in terms of personal branding, I think it makes you stand out because Eddie, you said several times, look, this is hard. And if you don't write every day, if you don't have a process every day, if you don't sit down for three months out of the year and write whatever your writing style is, if you don't have that, I struggled with that forever. Well, my daughter was seven. She wrote her first book and I said, honey, how did you write a book? And she said, dad, it's simple. You just sit down and write it. Well, it took me a few years to incorporate that into my repertoire, but is a personal branding statement. And I think your personal brand is your promise. And if a book is part of that promise, I think that improve your personal brand. So I'm a huge advocate of everyone should write a book. I'm a huge advocate of everyone should have a podcast. Yeah. Yeah. That's what I'm doing, boss. I love it. I love the encouragement and enthusiasm really. And I've had such a great time with you. I love the way you do things. I love the way you think. I want to talk more to you and delve a little bit deeper into some of your thinking strategies and outcomes. Absolutely. Well, I'd love to continue the conversation. Yes, sir. Absolutely. For today, I will say Tata, and we'll be in touch. Thanks so much.