#43 - The Podcast I Was Hesitant To Record - When Accusations Escalate Faster Than Reality

This episode wasn’t recorded lightly. We talk about the words that show up when business relationships break down—and how those words often carry more weight than the facts behind them. From “hijacked” to “held hostage,” we unpack where these phrases come from, when they’re legitimate, and when they do more harm than good.

Transcript

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You're listening to Over the Bull, where we cut through marketing noise. Here's your host, Ken Carroll.

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The podcast I really don't want to do on this episode of Over the Bull. Thanks so much for joining me. You know, I'm not so excited to talk about this this week because frankly, there are certain things that are tough to talk about. But you know what? If I don't talk about them, no one else talks about these things. We all know they exist. And so let's just get it out in the open. Plus, I'm honoring the Over the Bull theme, which is to share real-world events as they happen, and they fuel what we talk about on each episode of Over the Bull. So let me do this. I got a little bit of it pre-scripted here because I wanted to do the introduction and not miss it. Typically, I don't work from a script, and so if it sounds like I'm reading, well, maybe I'm reading part of this thing, but I do add lib a little bit. Once we get through the beginning, I want to dive into uh each one of the specifics, and then we'll just kind of uh spit uh what do you call it? Spitball the rest of it. So uh kind of see where it goes from there. All right, so I want to start with today's episode. This is this is different, okay? Again, it's something that I'm just hesitant to even put out there because of the implications and the energy and the emotion associated with it. Uh now, it's this isn't controversial because it does involve a real situation in our business. And you know, when it's something still fresh, you know, the goal here isn't to win an argument. It's uh really to get clear. Now, I know I'm building this up, right? Now, I'm not going to name names or I'm not going to dig into specifics. Okay, now you know I don't do that. Even with the spammers that send me those cold emails, and you'd better not be responding to those cold emails anymore. You know, uh make sure to block them or mark them as phishing. Now, this is also not me gonna, I'm not gonna be airing grievances. Okay. Honestly, I'm I've been in business for so long and I've been doing this stuff, and I've dealt with some real characters over the years that there is no personal side to this anymore, other than just having some real good, genuine uh friends that we've developed in the company for years and years. Now, what this is, is I want to walk with you through how relationships are supposed to work between a marketing agency, a design agency, and the owner of a business in which they serve, and where this often breaks down. Now, let's get real here. In any professional service relationship, there are some basic transactions that have to stay intact on both sides. Okay, there's an agreement. At least there should be an agreement. Now, if you don't have a written agreement with a defined project scope, and you're just paying someone money for something called SEO or domain or website, you're already going the wrong direction because it is so nebulous that it's going to lend itself to confusion. It needs to be spelled out and then invoiced. The invoice obviously wouldn't contain the details of the proposal because it would be a super lengthy invoice, but you can refer back to the original. Anyway, there's usually an agreement, written terms that define the scope, access, and responsibility of each person or each business or whatever may have you. Now, there should be transparency. Um, you know, things like shared platforms, you know, where invoices can be viewed, reviewed, or even questioned. Uh, there should be communication. Now, ideally, it should be direct, factual, and timely. And of course, there's accountability. If services are requested to pause, guess what? They should be paused. If you don't know what you're pausing, but it's being paused, you've requested that. If billing is unresolved, work doesn't continue indefinitely. Uh, none of it's punishment, it's just simply structure. I mean, in in my world, we are real good friends with I mean, I can't think of one client we have that we're not friends with or talk to pretty much how I'm talking to you, very much openly. But there is a transactional component to it. You know, if if you don't pay your bill, then, you know, and you still want to have that same relationship, some people can feel betrayed by that. But there is a component to where it is business, and there has to be the business separation. So even if there is someone that you genuinely like as an agency and you generally enjoy their time and all those things, but they're not paying and they expect that to be free and part of it to continue, well, that creates a problem. And similar, if you're the agency and you're, you know, you've got certain obligations that you've got to maintain too. So where things tend to go sideways in this whole relationship between agency and owner or freelancer and owner, uh, freelancer, if you're a serious business, I I don't know what to think about about that anymore, to be honest with you, just with the way the the internet's shifted. Um they go sideways is when frustration enters this picture. And then the language can escalate faster than the facts. Now, I don't know if you use it as an owner. Now, this may be fresh for you. This this may be one of those things you're like, I don't know if I want to hear this or not, but but just stay with me here. So these words are words like hijacked, betrayed, held hostage. These words imply intent, they imply wrongdoing. And once these words are used, they change the entire tone of the conversation and can change the tone of the entire relationship. Even when the underlying issue is procedural and not malicious. Now, I want to be clear here, okay? Real abuse of access and assets, it does happen in this industry. There are bad actors, make no mistake. But there are also situations where access was granted appropriately, invoices were visible, communication existed, and the conflict wasn't about control at all. It was about unmet expectations or unresolved obligations. Because we do have a relationship between two parties that are just like if you pay your cable bill, you know, you expect to have to be able to watch what you want to watch on television, and in exchange you pay them for the service. And as long as you pay for the service and they deliver the service, well, then everything goes great. But the moment that one of those two sides goes sideways, then that's where things start to rise up. And then if you have poor customer service and all these other things, that just fuels the fire and gets things frustrated. And unfortunately, the poor people on the front end who answer those phone calls are sometimes the ones that have to deal with those things, which is extremely unfortunate side note in society today. So today is not about defending one side or blaming the other. It's truly not. I mean, I really do consider myself a hybrid between the two. I run a business, I'm friends with our clients, I see their struggles, I see what they go through in order to try to grow a business. And trying to grow a small business in today's world is extremely difficult. And I know that personally. And I see the plight of the people that I work with, and I take that very seriously. And on the other side, I am the agency. And so looking at it from an agency perspective, I've had situations where everything is perfectly legitimate. The owner handles it very neutrally. We have a uh, you know, a working document to work from, and we work through things 99% of the time. Um, so it's this is what this is more about is just laying out this framework. What each party is responsible for, where the lines should be, and how emotionally charged language can distort situations that are, at their core, contractual and operational, not personal. Now, again, that's hard, right? Because we want to have personal relationships and we want to engage and we want to have fun and we want to joke and we want to do all those things. But at the end of the day, there is this contractual component to it. And sometimes I do feel that because we are so open with our clients, I think sometimes um liberties have historically been taken that maybe shouldn't have been taken. But we're who we are, we're a very personable company, and uh that's just how we believe you should be. Now, because clarity, especially when things get tense, is what keeps professional relationships from turning into public accusations. Now, before I get moving on on this part, I do want to say that there's something about escalation. Okay, we are in a bit of a a powder keg world today. I mean, I I acknowledge that. We are in this uh this situation where we're we're constantly confronted with what I would consider injustice, unethical behavior. For example, uh I use the the example of insurance companies, you know, and I know you know this, if you've had any kind of dealing with an insurance, a car insurance company, you know, the premiums are due, you have to do it, you're you're obligated to do it, but then when you need to use those services, then all of a sudden um it's not quite as fun as how they say it's going to be, is it? I'm sure you run into this a lot. You get software, they promise you the moon, and you get nothing. You know, this is the world we live in, and so it's a powder keg. And so when these relationships can get out of hand, then a lot of times the uh to to dump more onto this, onto uh a problem, to uh throw a little fuel onto the fire, so to speak, can be easy, especially in context of maybe previous situations and and things like that. And ultimately when you do something like that, you can destroy a really good relationship with your um uh with the people that you're working with if they're good. Now, again, there's a whole other side to this. All right, so what I want to do is I want to break into some of the terminology um that I believe um can can put a little fuel on things, right? So the first one is they hijacked my domain. Now, what this can mean is loss of access or confusion over where it's registered. Now, actual hijacking is when ownership is transferred or withheld maliciously. Common mishews. Client is a delinquent and the agency is still a registrar. Now, this is just the facts. I mean, if if you didn't pay your bill and you're running behind and you're paying someone to manage your domain and manage your assets, and you're running way behind and you want them to perform additional tasks for you, well, you broke in your side of the obligation. However, if you're good on your side of the obligation and they're using it in a malicious way to gain leverage and cause problems with you, well, that that's a whole other issue. And so you see there's a symbiotic relationship. It's not one-sided. Just because you paid somebody to do it and you were behind does not mean, does not give you the right to uh ask them to continue to do work for you even when you haven't paid. Now, that's a tough thing to uh to uh bring up in this case. Now, the other side is there are bad actors, man. There are bad actors. And when you deal with these bad actors, they will absolutely, if they can do something to get something on you, uh, they're gonna do it. And it becomes a weapon. And honestly, it can be very tough, especially to get it back, to get communication, to to get all these uh different things going. And so the recommendation with uh your domain name is one, if you're working with a reputable company, we we manage tons of these things. I mean, when uh where we register domains at, I mean, we have people come to us and uh or the the provider comes to us, they they can't believe how many of these things we manage now. I I can't believe how many of these things we manage. And uh so so our clients feel really good about it and they trust us because we renew it, we manage it, we change records when they need to be changed, we help assist with different things, and they can just kind of put it on autopilot. Um, if you're working with a group and you don't trust them, the best thing to do is to keep it in your own account and share limited access to just what needs to be done. Now, that'll protect you for this for the most part, as long as it's in your own account and your own name and you limit access. Now, if you give admin access to something, well, then you're you're starting to dance a line there a little bit. Now, if you are the registered uh registrar, what they would call contact owner, you know, technical owner, all those things, then you know, you should get notifications. But, you know, bad guys do bad things. Uh but if you've approved it and you've not paid your bill, then guess what? That's probably you're not going to get a lot of help from anyone until you get your bill called up and it's just going to sit there. It's not being taken. It's not nothing malicious is going on. It's just like not paying your cable bill. They're not going to flip the switch until you get called back up. So let's talk about the next one. They are holding my website hostage. Now, well, what it can mean is the site access is restricted. Again, the devil's in the details on website, uh, you're holding my website hostage. Uh, for example, let's talk about WordPress a little bit. Now, WordPress, um, if people do it on the cheap, and to be perfectly honest with you, most of the websites we evaluate are designed using free software, uh, very cheap themes, and they're built in a way that's haphazard to not benefit the client, but to benefit maximum return on investment for the agency. Let's be very clear about that. That does happen the majority of the time. However, high-end developers, people that have been around a while, they have proprietary processes, they have restricted licenses, they have obligations that they need to keep in order to remain uh legally sound with the stuff that they use. And so therefore, they may restrict access to certain parts of the site. Now, we do that uh because our recipe that we've developed over the last 20 years is, I think, one of the best ones around. Now, this doesn't mean I'm holding their website hostage. All this simply means is that, you know, just as uh you got the 11 or how many herbs and the KFC herbs and spices secret, I don't know how many ingredients are in that thing. But just as though you know they don't release that, then a lot of times the proprietary processes are the things that build value for that agency. And so of course they're going to limit access to that. And that goes into something called service as a software. And typically what you would have is if it's WordPress, then you would have the ability to export that and then put it in the hands of someone competent who can rebuild it without those proprietary parts. So actually, the proprietary stuff is actually a benefit to you because that means that it's being well maintained and updated, and you're using premium plugins that are much less likely to be hacked versus the free stuff because free stuff hackers can download and they can learn how to hack it and they get a way to break into your website. So you see, there's there's a um a problem with owning all the code or using free stuff or or or uh even trying to manage it can can be somewhat of a hassle. So when you're hearing about holding a website hostage, it it can be definitely a loaded question. Now, now it also could mean that access to the actual website is restricted, meaning you can't log into it. Now, if in your agreement you're supposed to have access to the admin of the website and that's been restricted and you're in good standing and you've made your payments and everything's going according to contract, well, there's a problem because the agreement's not being met, and then if both parties are ethical, you refer to the agreement and the terms and say, here it is, and please give me access back, and everything should be good. And maybe it was just a problem with the software. It doesn't mean it was malicious, but there are different things that could happen. Now, it could also mean that we have some clients that it's a lot of work to maintain the work that they do. And sometimes we restrict it intentionally because it saves time, effort, and energy, and we can move quicker, but we spell that out initially in the agreement. Now, if you're using do-it-yourself builders, you've got a whole other series of problems. I mean, you you don't want to use do-it-yourself builders. 2025 should have killed any hope of those things ever being worth anything. But you know, the herd mentality, you know, they say a bazillion people use them, they advertise on the Super Bowl, and the mentality is as well, if the herd's going that way, then everything's gonna work. Well, until you do the math and realize that most of the websites that are on the internet today underperform and don't do the job they're supposed to because shortcuts are taken and they don't work, and the people that win are the ones who put the work into it. So it's kind of a little bit of a complex issue, and having the details of that is critically important as you go through uh the different aspects of the website. And if this hasn't been spelled out and you're working with the web provider, you should get those details. Now, the other thing comes down to hosting. Um we use what I would argue is probably one of the most premium uh solutions available for the way we build sites. I would argue it's been the best in a long time. Um now, when it comes to hosting, uh we manage that as part of our bundled services. And so again, we may limit access to that because we're trying to protect our proprietary stuff and all these other factors go into it. And so the common response to This, by the way, is not the right response. And this is now going away for the most part, but there's still people who attempt this. They go, I want the website on my hosting. I want to pay for the hosting. I want you to build it on my platform. I want you to put all the plugins in my name. I want you to put this in my name, that in my name, this, and have it where it's mine. And I want you to put a rubber stamp on it to say that's mine. Now, the problem is that websites evolve all the time. The best websites are all websites should be updated all the time. There are so many with all the mainstream ways to build a website, there's so many little things that go into it that there's just a lot of complexities in that entire process. So what's good is if you're working from an agreement, that should be the gold standard. But managing your own situation in today's world with a realistic way to survive and grow your business, I mean, it's just not reasonable. Otherwise, you're getting into the web development world. And then you think, well, I'll take it in-house, but then the people you take in-house aren't as competent as what you can get from legitimate agencies. And so you hurt your business by trying to get into something you shouldn't be into to begin with. Now, I saw this in the plumbing industry. I saw this with um, they brought a whole team in-house and they started like holding these little meetings and all these things together, and I would attend a few of those. And uh this little company in the mid big company in the Midwest that brought all their marketing and stuff in-house. It wasn't good. There were a lot of holes in what they do. And so the answer is really you you need a good relationship and you do need to have the best tools, the best hosting, the best everything, because if you do what 99% do, you're going to do what 99% of the websites in the market do today, and that is fail or underperform. Period. Uh, next one up, they locked me out of my own site. So you can kind of see like how the language is very, you know, is very emotionally charged. And so, you know, what this means basically is they they could have just lost their admin credentials and they can't get into it and get a hold of their person. They're frustrated and need to make a change because prices are wrong and people are ordering on those prices, and you need to get it done, and you lock me out of my site. You know, now you may have lost the admin credentials, or there could be something else going on technical. Um, could even be down to your own ISP or your own firewall for that matter. Now, when you look at being locked out of your website, again, this all circles back around to the initial agreement. Do you have an agreement with it? Is there something technical going on? How do I get access back to it as soon as possible? Can you log in and make these changes since I don't have access? There are logical, reasonable ways to work through it, and then there's other ways where you can't. Now, again, um the there are times where different bad actors in this world of marketing and design will do that. If you choose the wrong horse, um, those bad things can definitely happen. Oh, um, they broke my SEO. This is interesting. They broke my SEO. So the idea is, by the way, uh SEO, gosh, go check out my previous podcast on SEO. That is such a loaded term that absolutely is abused in today's world of the uh the internet. Uh now, what it usually means is that your the rankings dropped. You're you're not where you were, you're tracking your positioning, and you don't know what's going on. Now, to tell you the truth, I I've seen several clients recently, and spammy AI tactics are the word of the day. AI blog articles, oh my gosh, they are destroying SEO rankings right now. We're seeing that all the time where these uh these agencies are going out and using AI to create these articles, and uh they're ignoring the real work, which lies into a term, uh, an acronym EEAT. Uh you can find that uh on another podcast we have, or you can just jump on the internet and search for it. But uh just look at EEAT and then answer the question: are you involved enough to make sure that happens? If you're getting blog articles posted on your website, my guess is no. Now, what it could be, in all honesty, are algorithm updates, uh, could be content changes, or it could just be a mismatch in the expectation. I mean, if you're changing certain things to go after a different market and then negatively impact what's already there, the ripples do occur. Now, when you make those changes, a good marketing or SEO person is going to err on the side of caution. They usually will see the storm coming and say, okay, we can change this, but just so you know, as we're moving in this direction, where we've been could be negatively affected by the new course of action. Now, that's normal. Now, a good SEO person is going to point that in your direction, but remember, we're also in a world of people, people pleasers and people who are trying to do the right thing. So some of it could just be just doing what you say to do, but not being very good at communication as to the negative implications. So again, it all comes down to communication and that agreement that I hope you got with your agency. Um they broke my website. Now, here's the thing: this is a legitimate complaint if it's poor deployment, no backups, bad code, free plugins, free themes, you name it, because guess what? Those themes are all developed by different people and organizations. They trade hands and they stop making them all the time. And when that happens, guess what? Those updates don't happen. And when that happens, your website will break. 100%. This kind of goes back to using premium plugins. You pay for those plugins, and since you pay for them, they're developed on a regular basis, and those people are incentivized to keep it going. If it's someone building pretty themes because it's a side hustle, and they get a different job and they decide not to do it, then those don't get updated anymore, and your website will break and it's got to be reinvented. And all those pretty themes, just so you know, they use a lot of free stuff on the back end that breaks all the time. Now, is that being communicated to you how that's being developed? Do you know those chances are being taken? If so, that's on you, that's the business owner. If it's not being done, then it's kind of on the agency. Now, I've seen some weird stuff on this. I had one uh client, she wanted to go with a uh a different agency for a while, and it was mainly because they sold her a bill of goods and sold a lot of hopium. And I remember telling her, I said, hey, it may be great, but if not, and we left on great terms. And I said, give it a shot. I'm not gonna go with you down this road, but if it doesn't work out, I'll hold on to everything you got and you can come back, and it'll be six months. And for some reason, it typically is six months. Uh, within six months, she had literally spent over fifty thousand dollars, still didn't have her website, but here's the kicker. They used stuff to build that website that was no longer being updated. And so the parts that they got done, they couldn't be updated, which means the website was breaking. It was on it was a time bomb. And and so you do see these things happen. And by the way, this was someone who claimed to be a pretty big agency out of Charlotte, North Carolina. And um anyway, uh she came back and you know, we're still working together and all that stuff. But you know, sometimes you just got to kick the tires and see if the grass is greener in other places. And I I don't hold anyone uh, you know, no harm on anybody like that because sometimes you just want to know. Um now, here's the thing: hosting, plug-in conflicts, third-party outages, there's a ton of things that can that can legitimately be out of the hand. So let me give you a good example. In 2025, I think it was March or April, you you we posted this on social at one point. There was a cascading event that transcended uh through Google and Cloudflare. And I'm not sure if AWS got affected or not, just trying to recall, but it was a major outage. Uh, banks, institutions, small business, big business, all of them went down because of this. Now that's out of the hands of your developer. That's a much bigger infrastructure issue. There's no way your developer can supersede those kind of events and make them not happen. Uh plug-in conflicts, they do happen. Now, if you if you're working with an agency that works with a consistent system, those things are less likely to happen. And what you call third-party outages are just the just think of it like um the uh whatever connects point A to point B breaks down somewhere in the middle. Nothing can be done about it. So the next one. They deleted my data. They deleted my data. Now, what this can mean is contents or files are just simply missing. Now, if there are no backups or they they perform destructive actions, well, that that complaint is legitimate, no doubt about it. However, there are times where we've seen clients delete things. Now we keep a lot of records and we kind of can see what's going on with some of that stuff. Uh now when it comes to websites, we do we do 90 days of backups. So no matter and and and so we can we can go way back to restore websites and all that. Um, 90 days is all we got. And so, you know, if if the client wanted to go back 160 days or something, well, you think about it, if you're restoring from 160 days ago, you're going to lose all the data you had at that point to 160 days, and then prior to is what you would have again. And so sometimes it is pick your poison. Now, with our system, I can't even think of the last time we've had a problem with that. Um, but but it can happen. Oh, here's a big one. They shut my business down. Now, what this can mean is your website or ads are paused or the things that are being managed. Now, if it's retaliatory, it's absolutely legitimate. If you've requested that your your um your plan be paused or suspended, well, that's what you requested. Um you know, if you didn't pay make payments, you know, if you if you violate a policy or you don't have a valid credit card on file or or whatever may have you, those are things that are not the agency's fault. But if you're caught up, everything's up to date. If you if it's if it seems arbitrary or retaliatory in nature, then it can be. But if on the other side you lack payment or you've requested something be paused or you've uh you've committed some policy violation, then you know that's on you. Um this is another reason we restrict certain access to web development, because there are certain things that you the person can do, the client, business owner can do uh that can absolutely uh cause problems. So that's another reason. You know, we want to be able to make sure it's a smooth process from beginning to end, which goes back to the others. So you can kind of see that a proper setup does have bumpers and they should have bumpers. Uh the worst ones, the scariest ones, are the ones without bumpers. Uh the scariest of the scary are the do-it-yourself builders uh that are sitting out there. Um I mean, that that's just that that's beyond scary at that point. And there there's a ton of reasons beyond um beyond the scope of this session uh of why you shouldn't be using those things. Oh man, here's another one. They betrayed my trust. Now, this is an emotional response to loss of control. I trusted this person. Now, it's legitimate if they're hidden actions, if there's deception, you're caught up, everything is great, the agreement's being followed on both ends, payments are being made, you're engaging, all that stuff's going on. Uh, but then we have some deception involved, then yes, absolutely they've betrayed your trust. Now, the common misuse of it is enforcement of written terms. Uh, again, if you've got the source document to go by, then that should be the truth between the relationship. That's the prenuptial agreement for the whole anchor for the word trust. Trust doesn't mean you could hold someone accountable to a certain level beyond the scope of what they do or expect them to maintain a certain level if you don't uphold your obligation. That's not the bridge of trust. And trust, honestly, is is is one of those things that we take extremely serious here at uh Integris and Over the Bull. And that's why we do this podcast. We want you to know these things. All right, so let's kind of wrap this up because you know, this is kind of a this is a big one. I gotta admit, this is an emotionally draining podcast for me because just the negativity that sometimes comes with this kind of thing. And I'm not really good at emotions anyway. I don't like emotions and uh the heavily charged stuff. I like to kind of keep things factual and and try to keep it as middle of the road as I can keep it, and just kind of navigate the storms through um emotion and all these other things. But when you when you bring it home, it's a it should be a very simple premise in the end. There is an agreement, you have an obligation, they have an obligation. You have the terms of that obligation, how long is it to be carried out? If you're not happy with the results, then you should you should move on and find somebody else. If you're happy with the results and you're maintaining your end than good. If you're seeing any of these things that are happening, then you've got to be able to trust that person. Remember, your marketing person online is going to be more influential if they're good. Now, if they're no good, it's going to make zero difference to you anyway. But if they're good at what they do, they're going to influence more about your brand than probably anything else today. I mean, that's how serious of a relationship that needs to be. So you need to treat it as such. And of course, you want to work with somebody you can work with and do all those things, but you know, you as a business owner, you don't want to override those bounds. And as someone who's serving your business, they they need to be able to bring things to your attention, but at the same time, you can acknowledge and go a different direction. That person should be able to bend with that. You know, I still remember a client in Kansas, she went with a specialist in her field to create a certain design piece years ago. Man, it was uh I remember calling me up and she's like, I need you to do it. She said, I'm sorry, we didn't mean to go this person. And uh, you know, I know her and her family. We've served generations of her family at this point. And I was like, Well, what happened? And she's like, Well, I wanted to do this design piece because this person was this and this. And she goes, but ask for a change. And he started like commenting on her politics, just started firing at her and hitting all this stuff. And he, it was all because she just wanted to change it the way she wanted it. Now, when you're hiring people to do things, just like you're the captain of a ship, I see a storm coming, I don't think we should go. You can say acknowledge, but proceed. You accept uh the uh the repercussions for the course change, it's documented and everything is good. It may be great, it may not be great, but as as the owner of a business, you can look at all those uh things and make those decisions. And uh that's what's fun about it. When you work with the business owner and you kind of dive into that, that gets exciting actually. When the business owner uh really engages with us and works with us and helps us understand their business, and then we we kind of do this. You know, one of the one of the things I love to say when I'm meeting the owner of a business is I want to be proven wrong. I can't wait to be proven wrong. Let's do an A-B test. Let's see which one works and which one doesn't. And you know what? I've lost that a couple times. Uh I'll give you one of the biggest examples where I've lost it was we were doing um polished ads on uh social media, like really high-end uh ads. And the client was shooting ads very low tech. Well, as you may know, sometimes the low tech stuff looks more legitimate and outperforms the other stuff. I would have never guessed it in this case. It worked out. So, of course, you know, I uh I sang her praises, um, you know, and I still do because she made the right move. The A-B test we lost, but we did do A B. We just didn't pick one path or the other. Um But anyway, that those are those are really fun when you get to work with a client like that. And uh luckily our processes have kept us out of this bandwidth, and this is once in a blue moon stuff. Now, the culmination of this is something we do want to talk about. When you go beyond neutral language, and if you're the owner of a business and you start buzzing phones off the hook, or you start using inflammatory language, then borders are typically put up with that organization. Any good organization is going to try to handle it and just handle it as neutrally as possible. And the more you push emotion, a lot of times you can absolutely destroy that relationship. And if it's a good if it's a good relationship, you obviously don't want to destroy it by just using the wrong words at the wrong time. Uh keeping things grounded and focused on the original agreement, and then even because I know what it feels like. You need something done and you can't get a hold of that person or you can't, you know, something's going on, and you just you just feel that this is going on. Everything in you, all the fiber in your being is telling you this is going on. Um it's sometimes hard not to do that because we are humans. Uh, however, you know, those things, they there are a point to where you cross the Rubicon and you destroy that relationship because at some point, like um, you know, you just go, well, hey, I'm I'm uh life's too short, and you need to go find somewhere where you're happy, and that may not be the outcome that you're ultimately looking for. So uh tough, tough conversation today, but I think it's good and I think it's very relevant to over the bull. And I do think that uh this can help you navigate the seas and become a stronger business. And, you know, the take home at the end of the day is get that agreement, lock it down, understand it 100%. Have it in words that you both understand, get it as granular as you can get it, and then refer to that document without emotion and just neutral and let that be the arbitrator of the conversation, and that'll keep all your relationships happy, just like a good prenup. Okay. I won't go into prenups. All right, guys. Thank you so much for listening to Over the Bull this week. Until next time, I'm your host, Kent.

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