Why Optimism Is a Founder’s Greatest Advantage – Dick Pfister | S7 E4

Most entrepreneurs spend years building wealth, but very few spend the same amount of time learning how to protect it.

In this episode of A Founder’s Life, Leo Gestetner sits down with Dick Pfister, Founder and CEO of AlphaCore Wealth Advisory, to discuss entrepreneurship, investing, wealth management, and the mindset required to build lasting financial success.

Dick shares how his entrepreneurial journey began at just 13 years old, starting small businesses in rural Wisconsin before eventually working on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange alongside some of the world’s greatest investors. Those experiences ultimately led him to co-found Altegris, pioneer alternative investments for independent advisors, and later launch AlphaCore after realizing traditional wealth management wasn’t serving entrepreneurs well enough.

But this conversation goes far beyond investing.

Dick explains why optimism has become one of his greatest competitive advantages, how his wife gave him the confidence to start over after a successful exit, and why measuring your health is just as important as measuring your finances.

Throughout the conversation, we explore entrepreneurship, wealth management, investing, leadership, family, health, resilience, and the habits that help founders build successful businesses while living meaningful lives.

Whether you’re growing your first company or preparing for a major liquidity event, Dick shares practical lessons every entrepreneur can apply.

In this episode you’ll learn:

- Why traditional investing may no longer be enough for entrepreneurs
• How alternative investments can improve portfolio diversification
• Why optimism is a founder’s greatest competitive advantage
• The importance of measuring your health as carefully as your finances
• How daily habits compound into long-term success
• Why having the right life partner changes everything
• How setbacks create stronger entrepreneurs
• Why continuous learning never stops
• How trust becomes the foundation of every successful business

Dick also shares how launching businesses as a teenager shaped his entrepreneurial mindset, why endurance sports became part of his daily routine, and how AlphaCore was born from challenging conventional wisdom about wealth management.

If you enjoy conversations about entrepreneurship, founder mindset, investing, wealth management, business leadership, resilience, personal development, and building meaningful businesses, you’ll enjoy this episode.

This episode of A Founder’s Life is brought to you by Thankz, helping founders scale with reliable remote talent.

Email founders@thankz.com with the subject A Founder’s Life for preferred pricing.

Connect with Today’s Guest – Dick Pfister

- AlphaCore Website: https://alphacore.com/
- AlphaCore YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@AlphaCoreWealthAdvisory
Upside Capture Podcast:
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/67pBO2WB5qXlV7MEwQ48Kg?si=de3d6fdb84714cb6
- Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/upside-capture/id1888226015
- Dick’s LinkedIn Account: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dickpfister/
- AlphaCore LinkedIn Account: https://www.linkedin.com/company/alphacorewealthadvisory/

LinkedIn

linkedin.com/in/leogestetner

Website

leogestetner.com/leo

Subscribe Now!

youtube.com/@afounderslife?sub_confirmation=1

Transcript

0:00

operate from the assumption that people are good, fair, and honest. That means you're approaching something with optimism. Are you coming at me to diabolically change what I think about the business or my my idea? Or are you operating that you're both trying to do the right thing? And that is an optimistic value that we have. And to me, that's how we hire people, that's how we manage people. And ~ to me, that's really critical for entrepreneurs. Welcome to A Founder's Life. I'm your host, Leo Gestetner. On this show, we dive into the real stories behind the highs and lows of entrepreneurship and how we pursue a more integrated and meaningful life along the way. This podcast is sponsored by Thankz, helping founders like us scale with reliable remote talent. Now today I'm excited to be joined by Dick Fister. Dick, thanks for joining us. Would you like to introduce yourself to the Course. Well first, thanks for having me, Leo. I am a listener to your podcast and it's excellent. I am the founder and CEO of AlphaCore Wealth Advisory. I am a husband and a father of three children. we are a national US wealth advisory firm with offices across the entire country, and we work with business owners and entrepreneurs with everything that touches their financial life. Excellent. And talk a little bit about the journey that brought you to where you are today. And then just a little more about the business, about how you're helping your clients. it's interesting, as as preparing for this podcast, I went back and thought about when did I first become a founder? And I grew up in northern Wisconsin. So I grew up north of Green Bay. If anybody even knows where that is who's listening, it's north of Lambeau Field, north of where the Packers play, it's on the border of Upper Mi Upper Michigan and Wisconsin. and I was the youngest of five children. So what really happened for me was starting businesses when I was a kid was innate taught by my older sisters and brothers Because my oldest brother started his own business. My next oldest brother started his own business. My father started his own business. So when I was 13, I started a business with a friend of mine called Fisters which was an ice cream delivery group that we started, which was the two of us. We'd go around in an old mail truck and we deliver ice cream on the weekends. And in Wisconsin, back in the 80s, you could actually have you could actually work when you were 13 years old. that was one of the first businesses I started. we had to make money so that I could have money to spend over the course of a summer. And then my brother and I started another business where we'd go blacktop people's driveways in the Midwest, and we'd just show up at somebody's house and we'd actually offer to reseal their their asphalt on their on their driveway. we then did before there was things like Uber Eats, my brother started a company that would go deliver groceries to elder elderly people and elderly homes, and I took over that business when he went to college. so when I look back At when I became a founder, it really started early, early days when I was young. I ended up going to school at the University of San Diego. So I got out of the cold and I went to the warm weather out here in San Diego and got a business degree. When I graduated, I was fortunate to get an opportunity to work on the floor of the exchange in Chicago, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange at Dean Whitter, and got hooked on the world of finance. I was in the currencies pits in the early. Early 90s. So I was in the Japanese yen pit, I was in the British pound pit, I was in the Deutsche Mark, this is before the Euro, and learned everything about what I thought was great risk management from money managers at the time that weren't necessarily well known then, but became legendary. These are names like Paul Tudor Jones, George Soros, Ken Griffin. They all used to trade their hedging and futures through Dean Witter in the early 90s. And I realized and recognized there. There was a lot of great money managers that were managing endowments, institutions, and foundations, their money for them in a really good, risk-adjusted fashion, which means they were trying to participate in the upside but protect on the downside. And at the same time, I was realizing, well, I'm back in Chicago. I'm cold again. I'd really like to get back to some warm weather. I moved back for good to San Diego in 1998. And that was really a pivotal moment for me. I was fortunate enough to meet my other business partners, but more importantly, I met my future wife when I moved back. And and she had been going to law school in San Diego. We turned it turned out we met each other. We were neighbors next door. she bought a condo right next to mine. And she was my next door neighbor and we hit it off very well and we got married, you know, a couple of years after she moved into the condo next to me and changed trajectory of my life. What happened at the time was when I was here, we my met my former business partners, we launched a firm that was to democratize access to best of breed money managers. So taking those names like Ken Griffin or Tudor Jones, and who would have really high minimums to get access to them, let's say $20 million to actually get access to those managers, we would pool investors together, create a fund structure that would have$50,000 minimum or $25,000 minimum, pool it up to $25,000. million and then get access to those those great money managers. That firm was named Altegris, which stood for Alternatives, Integrity, and Risk Management. And we became the first independent alternatives platform in the entire in the early 2000s. So from the if you were an advisor at say a large bank and you left that bank to join an independent advisor, but you still wanted access to some of those great money managers that were those banks, you Would use Altegris as your source and your access point. and eventually we grew that firm quite dramatically. we had over 160 people on team and over six billion in assets, and we ended up selling that. and so I had a liquidity event myself, and I was still working full-time. So I met with what I would consider kind of the who's who of wealth advisors at the time, and this is 2013 and 14. I met with the names you would all know, kind of the the national brands and and kind of the biggest advisors in those brands, sat down with and said, I'm still working, I'm married, I've got three children. what would you do with the assets that I have? And they were all decent at doing what I consider financial planning 101, gathering information, you know, kind of running simulations with that, and understanding your expenses, asking if you have a trust, if you had an IRA, do you have a 529 plan? and so kind of rudimentary financial planning. And they all came back and said, well, if you can make anywhere between 8 to 12% per year, you won't run out of money given your spending habits. And so my natural question was, how do you make eight to twelve percent? What's your what's gonna be your investment philosophy to make eight to twelve percent? And they all came back with a very vanilla simple answer, which is we're gonna put 60% of your money in stocks and we're gonna put 40% of your money in bonds. And as you get older, we'll give you more bonds and less equities. And to me, I felt like that was such a rudimentary, outdated answer, considering I came from the world of alternatives and private markets. and I said, guys, I understand that might be what you've done or learned from the 80s and the 90s, but this was 2014. And there's ways to get access to private equity, to private credit, to private real estate, to hedge funds. And I think that you're taking too much risk by having a 60-40 model. Because if you have 40% of your money in interest rate of fixed income and r rates rise, you're gonna have a problem with that 40% of your money. If you have what I would consider 60% of beta long-only equities, every five to seven years you're gonna have a pullback of thirty to fifty So you have these two big asset classes that both had issues back in the 13 and 14 area that I was what I was asking them about. So I said, you know what, there needs to be a third leg of the stool. And let's call those alternatives or alpha generators. So I sat down with my wife and I said, honey, this is what we're gonna do. she obviously knows the world, she's a lawyer too, she understands the space. And I drew a picture on a notebook page, and I still have this notebook page, by the way. and I drew a circle in the center. I said, okay, what we're gonna do is we're gonna allocate to diversified alternative strategies, which includes private equity, private credit, private real estate, long short equity, global macro, and multi-strat. So we'll pick multiple managers, multiple styles, and that'll be the core asset allocation. That we give. And that might be anywhere between 10 and 30% of our portfolio. Then around that core, we'll put traditional long only stocks and bonds or And so when I drew that out, my wife said, Well, if you're going to launch a firm, you should call it Alpha Core because you have alpha generators at the core. And I said, That's a great name. I love it. It starts with an A, it's got some pizzazz to it. So we named the firm, launched the firm in March of 2015. We were the first clients of Alpha Core. Core. And I said, so as a high net worth investor, what do we want as a client? And I said, Well, not only do we want the best of the best is in asset allocation, we also want the best in customer service, operations, research, marketing. I want the best of everything. So it's not just the asset allocation part that's important. It's everything else that goes along with it. And that's the white glove service. So today, we know we launched in 2015. We're 11 years in, we have over 12 billion in assets that we over. oversee most of our clients are business owners and founders and entrepreneurs that have had life-changing liquidity events and we help the planning side of getting ready for that exit with everything from taxes to charitable giving to family governance and then everything on the investment side to help match what they're looking to do and their goals and objectives. Wow, that sounds like a great structure. I've met number of wealth managers over the years and never been super impressed with them. sounds like you've found a different spot to the way lot of people are doing it. Yeah, it's it's a passion of mine as you can ha you probably hopefully hear my voice, but it's you know, we eat our own cooking. every senior advisor at Alpha Core has their assets managed by Alpha Core. So when you have that alignment with the clients and families you're working with, it's really powerful because you're not only looking out for their best interests, it's you're aligned with them as well. and you're building the services and the tools and everything around that to serve not only them, but then you yourself, your family as well. Makes a lot of sense, I love that. Talk to us a little bit about how family looks for you. You mentioned your wife, but talk to us about family. Yeah. I would say f people look at my Day to day with regard to what I do every morning and what I do during the day, what I do at night. My family comes comes first, right? So my wife and I have been married now. It's gonna be we've gotten married in 02. So we've known each other since 2000, so we've been together 26 years. We've got three children. two are in college, one's gonna be a senior this year, one's gonna be a sophomore. then I've got a senior in high school, so two girls and a boy, and they they take up most of my time outside of the office and that's some of the most fun that I ever have is dealing with they all played sports my son's a big football player going to their games you know being a part of their day to day and and helping them find out where they where they want to be in life what what kind of job do they want to do what kind of people are they hanging out with who's gonna be their eventual spouse those types of things are really important to me and my wife and then the other times I'm spending alone with my wife which is she's my best friend so it's just it's It's great to have your best friend as your wife. And you get to hang out, you get to strategize, you get to talk about everything from the family to work to you know the fun stuff that we do, the vacations we go on. and the other part is I work out every day and and I became addicted. I think I know you are a runner, Leo. So I became I got a Garmin watch years ago when I started running for marathons and triathlons. So I literally wear it, you can see it but I wear a garment every day of my life. I never take it off, I wear it. 24 hours a day. So I literally got addicted to all the tracking that it does, which tracks my sleep, it tracks my breathing, it tracks everything and all my steps, right? So I I got addicted to that probably 20 years ago. And it really does start my day. I usually run in the morning, I usually jump in a cold plunge that I got a few years ago, and it really starts my day off right. So that's the fun part. It's a great start to a day. always love an early morning run. a gym. Weight lifting is also important. True, true. Strength training. Very, very much important. Yeah. Yep, especially as we get a little bit older, but all ages. Yeah, I run four times a week and weight lift three times a week. It's good to have a mix. I'm not very good with the take days off, which you're meant to do, but hey. Yeah, there's a there's a crew of mine that I talk about, we work out with each other and they they've gotten into the peptides world. I haven't done that yet, but I I'm sure at some point there'll be a place where, you know, it helps your joints, it helps a lot of things. So I as soon as the FDA gets fully on board, I'd probably be a partake in some of that too. There are some really interesting peptides. I'm in some biohacking groups that a lot of people take quite a lot of peptides and there's definitely some really interesting ones out there both out there now and coming. So yeah, I think that's quite an interesting space. The Totally agree. other thing I've actually been looking at recently is stem cells. So there's been some interesting stuff that someone I've been talking to in particular is quite a big stem clinic and what they've... scene achieved is really interesting so I've been looking at that one as well. Yeah, it's funny you mentioned that and I use this analogy. So we As we've grown AlphaCore, we've gone and we've done what I'll call organic growth, which is clients that come to us from client referrals and different centers of influence that we're a part of. But we also do inorganic growth where we've acquired other advisors across the country in different cities. and some of those advisors will join us because we can take away some of the operational burden of what they do. So the HR, the technology spend, maybe the marketing, and they join us. and I use a stem cell peptide, analogy. This you might find this funny, Leo. So let's imagine you're in your 50s, late 50s, or early 60s and you're an advisor and you've been doing this for 25, 30 years. and you start your own firm, you become an independent advisor, and you love it, and you want to be you you love growing that, but what happens eventually as an as an advisor that got you into what interests you in becoming advisor is helping clients. But when you start your own independent firm, as you know as a founder, you then start to deal with the HR, you start to deal with the hiring, the firing, you deal with all the complex legal issues that come about. And a lot of these advisors get away from what they really got in the business for and they become accidental CEOs. And so what we do is if they join us, if they become if they merge with AlphaCore, is we take away a lot of that clutter from their day, and they can go back to doing what they love most,

right? And I equate that to: 13:39

okay, you're 58, your knees hurt, your hips hurt, you know, maybe you you got an injury of some sort. We come in, we shoot you up with stem cells, we give you some peptides, and all of a sudden you're acting like you're You're 35 again as an advisor and doing what you love the most again. And I've been using that analogy because if you're if you're running like ER Leo and and and work out a lot, you know, you want to kind of rejuvenate yourself. And that's the what we do when somebody joins us. That's a great analogy. What I really want is the nanobots, but I'm reckoning that's probably my grandkids generation. But that's what I really want, someone to inject some nanobots and they just go around fixing all the issues that over-abusing my body puts on it. Well there is that one guy who's trying to live forever too. I've I don't know if you've seen him before or Leo, but he's doing all the right things. Yeah, I actually have no interest in living forever. I'm more into healthspan than longevity. honestly, I have no interest in living forever. I want to be healthy until I die. That, me, is what it's all about. that's, you know, it's what do need to do to make sure there isn't a slow decline? Yeah, I don't want to live to 150. I totally agree. You know, I know. Let's say I live to 100. I'm absolutely happy with that as long as I'm healthy until I go. Yeah, once I thought maybe I read this in the book, Leo, but you probably heard this too, is that you wanna be able to when you're eighty years old, put your carry on luggage above your head in the airplane. So that would be you're healthy enough to lift your luggage and put it in when you're over eighty years old. And and I think that's kind of a you know, kind of a moniker of you'd want to have health span is be able to do those things and and still be able to take walks and ride your bikes and stuff like that with your wife. You know? like that you know I was actually on the plane must be recently I don't know in the last month and there was a lady who was in front of me although in front of me on the plane although she was actually sitting in the row in front anyway so she Yeah. was had her carry on I said do you me to help you put it up top it's an older lady I don't know in her probably 70s and and she said it's really heavy I'm like If I can't carry it, if I can't lift it, then I'm not convinced you can. Anyway, I put it up top Exactly. for her and it was really heavy. I was thinking there Yeah. was no way she could have done that on her own. Can you put your own luggage or somebody else's luggage above your head? That's key. talking about the health side, so talk to us about how health looks for you. you know, for me, that's the mental health, physical health, nutrition, sleep, however it looks for you. How do you make sure you stay healthy? Yeah, I think one of the key things for me when I started just tracking I think the first step is just understanding where you are, you know. When I turned 40, I was for whatever reason that number to me was like a shocking number. Right. Now I'm I'm 55. But when I turned 40, that was like I gotta get everything together. I gotta make sure I'm doing all the right things. And and so I started to do workouts, and I don't know if you remember this whole craze that came around, was one called P90X. Then there was insanity, and I did those things and I really got in some of the best shape of my life. I had done A marathon before that. One of my buddies had done an Iron Man. And so we had the kind of this competitive spirit going back and forth. And I Okay, I'm gonna just stay in shape now forever. And that's kind of that there's something that clicked when I turned 40. and what really was instilled in me is I have to measure these things, and once you measure them, you can kind of get things. So, what so for me? There's an adage that says, What gets measured gets done, and you can apply that in your life, you can apply it in work, you can apply it anywhere. But if you don't measure it, what do you? Really striving for, and that's the way I approach it. If you want to lose weight, well, then start tracking your calories. Let's let's look at it every single day. And if you have a goal weight, well, then you can start measuring every single day, and hopefully you'll reach that goal weight, whether that's up or down or whatever you want to do, right? So sleep became something that I thought, okay, once I get the steps down, once I get the calories down, the other main thing I want to make sure I focus on is getting good sleep. And so I try to sleep eight hours a day or eight hours. a night and and get a sleep score above eighty or higher. and it truly does change my day. It really does. And and I've heard people that try to sleep I sleep four hours or five hours and I really don't function well unless I get an 80% sleep score. It's so ironic though, because if I try I track it every day, every morning I look at it, and I could feel really good. This is the reverse psychology that happens. I could feel amazing, like I had a great night's sleep. And if it says like a 65 on my sleep score, I'm like, wait a minute, I'm gonna have a horrible day. And I'm like, even though I might have slept really well. So it does it does start my day off really well when I have that kind of sleep score, feel really good, and then again I go into go run, then I do a cold plunge after that. My wife, luckily for me, is an incredible cook. She's a very healthy eater herself. She does a lot of yoga. She'll convince me to do yoga every once in a while, which I know I should do more of. And so that's very helpful to have somebody in the house who's actually healthy too. So that's that's part of my day. And my kids are they all they kind of all been raised that way, so they all work out in a way. One of my one of my daughters is a very avid runner. And she's she's at Boston College, and she's bought joy. the Boston College running club, which is you can imagine a pretty intense running club. So she runs everywhere she goes and I've kind of instilled in all my kids is you're gonna visit a lot of cities as you grow up and one of the best ways to go see that city is just go on a run and go watch and that to me that's that's how I do it. So it's hopefully what they've been instilled That's great. I've never got either of my kids really into running. They're both healthy. My son's really into weightlifting. So he's, you know, been really sort of looking great in terms of bodybuilding. Problem is bodybuilding and running don't really go well together. So, Good point. but yeah, he's really enjoying that. It's funny how you learn this stuff from your kids. Like I'd never heard of bulking and then cutting and like... these terms that like, I'm like, now I know what they are, but I don't know when my son first mentioned to me he was on a cut. And I'm like, okay, what the hell is that? But you know, Yeah, no, it's a very when we were kids, the knowledge just wasn't there. Like there was no way for us to get that knowledge. Not at all. So my my son plays football. And he's most likely gonna play football in college. And he is like your son. He's just so ripped right now. He knows exactly what to eat, what protein, what carbs, all of that. And you know, I grew up in the eighties in in Wisconsin, so it's a whole different animal of of custard and cheese curds and just bratwurst and all kinds of horrible foods. but we never even really talked about it. It was, you know, these four food groups, eat breakfast, eat lunch, eat dinner, all you know, and then I played football as well. And it was the opposite of what he's taught. It's like our coaches was saying, you don't get any water. That's water's for wimps. You know, they they had a hose on the sidelines that had kind of holes in it, and you were lucky to run over there and just get a glimpse of water. it was just the opposite. Now they they make sure they take water breaks, they get enough water, they're hydrated. It's literally a 180 of what we were taught when I was growing up in the 80s. And I'm very happy for it because it obviously is the intelligent thing to do, but you're right. From when we grew up Leo, it's a totally different animal. definitely. So talk a little bit about what you like to do for fun. I you know, fun to me is is literally barbecuing I usually grill most nights. We live in San Diego fortunate enough to be outside, so I grill our dinners, have you know, have a glass of wine with my wife and kids, and then I go visit with all my all my kids' sports were a part of that too. I do play a little golf. it is a love-hate relationship I have with it. a lot of my friends play it. I used to play a lot more before I launched Alpha but it is something I try to do. I try to do at least a couple of times. times a month. And it is consistently frustrating. But then you get one of those good shots and you feel like you gotta come back again. So someday I'll get better again. But right now as I'm growing and building the business, I have more fun at the office. I really love building teams. And part of the fun part of my day is I've brought around me people that are smarter and better at certain things than I am. And having that team structure really kind of satiates that need for me to be a on a basketball team or a soccer team or a football team. This is this is our team and and our team is extremely strong and and that is fun for me. That's great, I think that's a great analogy. And if you look at the different aspects we've talked about, how do you make sure that you've got sort of integrated life across those different areas? you know it's The balance between family and work is important, but I also I'm Catholic. We go to church every Sunday and a lot of people will use meditation, a lot of people will use yoga. There's all sorts of ways to get that fulfillment. For me, it's my meditation is going to church and use that time very well. If you if you know you're gonna go once a week, sometimes even more than once a week, you're gonna get that fill of of spiritual balance and and to Me, that's been really important. It's helped with a lot of things in my life. and I know a lot of people fulfill that in different ways, and meditation can be one of those things too. But I do my meditation in church, and it really does help me kind of balance and really understand what's important as I'm thinking through my day, my week, my life, and that's hopefully what my kids have have learned from my wife and I. So I've learned a lot from my wife. My wife is kind of the rock in my day to day and she really kind of keeps me on the straight and narrow and helps me kind of you know form the path of where I want to go strategically and those are parts of the work life balance. That's really important. think it sounds like you've found a great balance. Now, quick request to the audience. If you're enjoying these conversations, please click subscribe. And then Dick, back to the next thing. Really, I always love this one, which is what's been a pivotal moment in your life? I think there's been a few, you know, that when I look back and say, What's changed the trajectory? unfortunately my father got sick when I was young, and and you know, died ver fairly young and when I was young in in my life. but that did spur me to want to go to college in a different area than the rest of my family. Most of my family members went to college in Wisconsin. I took the leap of going out far away from home and going to San Diego. That was one big change that most people in my family didn't take. and so it turned something that was kind of tragic in my life into something good. And that was a definite trajectory change. the other one was is when we sold our old our business and I had that event, I could have stayed with that firm for a long time and and kind of run its course and maybe been there for another decade. but at the time I thought, okay, there's something more I could do. and it was a risk. There's no question about it. Starting something from scratch is as you know, Leo, and a lot of your guests have espoused, it's not easy. at the time we had three young children and taking that risk was something not only just a you know psychological risk, it was a financial risk. And I had somebody in my corner that said you should do it. And that sort of person in your life that gives you the confidence really changed my view on what I could accomplish. And that was again, I'll I mentioned her multiple times. My wife, you know, was a big part of that. gave me the kind of approval and the confidence to go launch Alpha Core. and when I did that, you know, it was nothing's easy, right? This is not a simple thing. As much as it looks like it was, you know, a decade ago. you know, there was a lot of trials, tribulations, you know, setbacks that happened over the course of the first kind of five or six years. that just kind of you know, helped build who we are today and build the thick skin that you have to have to be an entrepreneur. and that was a big change for me and that and the kind of things that I had to continuously learn along the way. so I'm always trying to to continually grow and I have an executive coach I work with. I read a lot of books. I listen to a lot of podcasts, Leo. So one of yours and yours in particular. And so to me those are those are things you have to continually want to do and continue to grow from. There is one book that I would just recommend, Leo, that I give out. It's the probably the book that I've purchased the most and have handed out probably a hundred copies of this. It's called The Obstacle is the way. is by Ryan Holliday. And it basically the premise is it's premise starts with stoicism, but it's you know, if something bad happens in your life, you take that as an opportunity to grow and learn from it and turn it into something good. And that's the mentality I think you have to have as an entrepreneur. It's great I haven't come across that book, I'll have to look it up. But I often do say to people that you learn more from failure than success. So I think that's sort of a similar kind of lesson. That's important. Very true. And what's one piece of advice you'd give to an aspiring entrepreneur? I'd say maintain a positive attitude. Now it sounds kind of trite, but you know, when you're launching a business or potentially thinking about launching a you have to have optimism around it. And and if you come into it with a lot of skepticism, you might be doomed for failure. I call myself a realistic optimist. And that means I'm not you know, living in you know, fantasy land, but I am saying that we can do things that maybe other firms haven't done. And maybe we can do it faster than other firms haven't done it, have done it, and and we can do it more efficiently than other firms have done it. So that really comes from an optim optimistic mindset. that means that yes, there are other smart competitors out there, there are other smart business models. but if you're optimistic about who you are and what your firm can do, You can probably do as good as or better than your competition. And that takes a consistent optimistic mindset. and that that is not easy. Every day something comes at you as an entrepreneur, and that might be everything from you know, regulatory world, competitive landscape, internal HR issues, and you have to keep maintaining optimism, even if other people around you are bringing pessimism to you, you've got to change that and turn it around. So it's a challenge every day. And I wrote down values for Alpha Core about seven ago, but they're values you can use in a business life or in a personal setting. the first value is do what's best for our clients, right? That's in I'm in our mind in our business and a lot of businesses, that should be the the kind of North Star. And then the other six values or seven of them are how we treat each other, they're more of an optimistic mindset. It's basically one is, hey, check your ego at the door, right? You're you might be brilliant, you might be smart, but other people are brilliant and smart too. Let's let's kind of come together to have a meritocracy to choose the best idea. the other another one would be operate from the assumption that people are good, fair, and honest. That means you're approaching something with optimism. Are you coming at me to diabolically change what I think about the business or my my idea? Or are you operating that you're both trying to do the right thing? And that is an optimistic value that we have. And to me, that's how we hire people, that's how we manage people. And to me, that's really critical for entrepreneurs. Well, thank you for sharing your nuggets of wisdom today. Thanks for it was really, really great to hear. And how can people find you? AlphaCore.com, if you go there, you can find me also on LinkedIn. Just go to Dick Fister. It's a pretty unique name. you'll find me there as well on social. and we also have a YouTube page. So if you go to AlphaCore's YouTube page, you can subscribe there as well. Perfect, well thank you very much. Thanks a Leo. Appreciate it.