The Rungs You Can Reach on the Ladder of Lead Generation
Blair and David discuss three tiers of inbound and outbound marketing that firms should be using for new business development.
Links
Perennial Seller by Ryan Holiday
2Bobs episode 8: “Why Advertising Agencies Don’t Advertise”
Transcript
David C. Baker: Blair, today, we're going to talk about inbound and outbound. Then you mentioned the Ladder of Lead Generation and that brought back memories for me because we used to do this event called the New Business Summit. We did it for 10 years, and I remember so many discussions at the front of the room. I still use that image when I talk to my clients and I divide it into three, the low-level stuff you don't usually do. Mid-level stuff is the price of entry. Then the high-level stuff is what you can reach for as you get better and better at this stuff. I didn't come up with that phrase. You came up with that phrase, right?
Blair Enns: I believe so, but so many of my own inventions, they may have been stolen from other people. I think I can safely claim this. The phrase being the Ladder of Lead Generation. It's a visual way of plotting all of the different lead generation activities that you might consider and ranking them on various dimensions.
David: One of the things that helped me think through this many years ago is that you climb as far up the ladder as you can at the moment, and then when you can reach one of the higher rungs, you go there and you should leave the lower rungs, otherwise you'll be awkwardly stretched out like you're being tortured because it's too overwhelming to try to do too much. It's better and this is something that we've talked about in an earlier podcast. You pick something to do, and then you just completely nail it rather than dabbling around in four or five or six things. This episode comes out at a time when people are a little bit nervous about the amount of work that's either not coming in or is slower or whatever. It comes at a good time, right?
Blair: I think so, yes. As you talk about the Ladder of Lead Generation, my studio is also, there's one wall that's also the storerooms. All the technology books and some other like merchandise stuff up there, and there's a step ladder. The top step on any step ladder says, "This is not a step."
[laughter]
There's probably a metaphor there for lead generation activities. The idea is you climb this ladder over time in the activities of selling or at the bottom of marketing or in the middle, and the activities of educating are at the top. I want to push back on the idea that once you get to the top, you never have to employ the ones at the bottom, particularly outbound. I think we'll get to that shortly, but you want to strive to build a marketing mechanism or a lead generation machine that operates as high on the ladder of lead generation as possible employing these activities of educating. I still believe that there's always a time and a place for outbound.
You want to get to the point where you're not having to rely on outbound when you think of new business lead generation activities. You're not thinking of smiling and dialing, but you still are employing that approach or variations of it from time to time where it makes sense to do so.
David: Let's define the outbound. When I think of outbound, I think of something that you initiate before the prospect has necessarily indicated specific interest or given you permission to sell, is that the same definition you're using?
Blair: Yes, back in the good old days, it would be a cold call. These days, it's more likely to be an email solicitation, or if listeners experience anything like mine, it's accepting a connection request on LinkedIn and then bam, immediately getting hit with this, "Hey, why don't you hire us?" Then I immediately move to remove connection. There are variations of it, but yes.
David: Because when somebody signs up to receive your email, so that they'll get your insight or maybe an announcement for an event you're doing or something, that's an inbound, they've made a decision and then you are sending them emails regularly. That's different than sending somebody a cold email that hasn't asked to receive it.
Blair: Yes, I think that's a good impetus to talk about another framework that I like, which is this idea of types of leads. Win without pitching, we category leads into three tiers. Tier three moving we've inverted it, I guess but tier three at the bottom would be outbound. A tier three lead is just a name on a list, and you reach out to those people. A tier one lead at the top, the highest level of tier-- Again, I'm conscious of the fact that I've inverted them. Tiers do build on each other. I'm starting at the top. The highest level of lead would be an inbound inquiry, where somebody reaches out to you and says, "Hey, I want to talk to you about this project or about working with us in some other capacity."
It's a complete inbound lead. Again, at the bottom, of your hierarchy of leads is an outbound where it's just a name on a list and you're reaching out. In the middle is this really valuable category that we call tier-two leads. The tier-two leads are people who've essentially opted-in, who are engaging with your content. Opt-in is still just a behavioral clue, but it's really just a low-level behavioral clue. A tier-two lead, the ones that you should be looking for and proactively reaching out to, would be somebody who has opted-in, has made themselves visible to you, and then at some point, their engagement level with your content spikes up. That's a warm lead. That's inviting a warm outbound introduction, or call, or email. Even when we're talking about outbound, we want to make the distinction between outreach to people who don't know you and have never heard of you versus outreach to people who know who you are, who the firm is, and is engaging with your content.
David: Right. Do you want to give us an example of some of these tier-one, tier-two, tier-three, just so that as we talk about this, people will have this, and we'll put this in the show notes as well, but this would be a good time to just illustrate those different categories?
Blair: I want to move away from this model a little bit. A tier-three lead, again, is just a name on a list. You buy a list of something, you attend an event, you get the participants lists, you collect some business cards, et cetera. It's just largely demographic data. That's a tier-three lead that you would reach out to. Tier-one is inbound. Tier-two is that combination of somebody you would reach out to, who's engaging with your content. If we move back to this model that we started with, this Ladder of Lead Generation, and this correlates somewhat but not exactly, the top and bottom tiers correlate, middle one is a little bit murky. On the bottom rungs, you have the activities of selling. Telephone introduction, email inquiry, old school door-to-door salespeople that don't really exist anymore. Makes you wonder if there might be a comeback for that one day.
David: Probably not. [laughs] They quite selling horses, I think, so they're not going to have anything to drive.
Blair: Fuller Brushes, my grandfather was a Fuller Brush salesman.
David: My grandfather was too.
Blair: Really?
David: He was the top salesperson in Michigan, and he was the friendliest guy you'd ever met. He was the first guy in all of Michigan to have a phone answering device so that he could serve people who needed something. It was crazy. Well, I had no idea.
Blair: It's incredible when you share that story. My grandfather was a Fuller Brush salesperson. It's incredible how many other people respond just like you did. I guess it was a big job back then. These are the activities on the selling rung at the very bottom of the Ladder of Lead Generation. Let's just talk about some of the domains that come with this. I have three different domains that I relate all these activities to.
The form or the level of validation of your expertise, the power that you have in the sale, and the immediacy of the activities. With these items at the bottom, like requested introductions, trade shows, floor visits, personal visits, email inquiries, and telephone introductions. Your expression of expertise, or validation. It's not really validated expertise. It's a private claim of expertise.
I pick up the phone, and I call you, David, because your name on my list, and I say, "Hi, Blair Enns here from Win Without Pitching. I'm an expert at blank." I used to do this when I did agency business development work back in my very first job. It was in the pre-web days. I could make a private claim of expertise, and the person on the other end of the phone had no real way of validating that, whether or not that claim was true or not. That's one of the things about you're claiming expertise in these selling interactions, this outbound lead generation, but you have no real proof for it. The first domain is expertise validation. You're just making a private claim, and we can all make any claim.
The second domain is the power. What I mean by that is how much power you have in the buy-sell relationship. These items at the bottom of the Ladder of Lead Generation, you have little power because you don't have this validated or publicly acknowledged expertise, but the benefit of these activities is in this last domain of immediacy. Let's say, just hypothetically, the world is struck by this pandemic, and your business grinds to a halt, and you need new business. Now, what you don't do is you don't sit down and start writing that book on your area of expertise, which is very high up on the Ladder of Lead Generation because those activities high up on the ladder of lead generation have low immediacy. The benefits of these ones lower down is high immediacy, if you need business now, you employ these outreach mechanisms of selling.
David: Yes. The other thing I've heard you say, and it was a new thought to me, when you are calling people and talking to them, it's one of the only times you've learned from the notes that you receive. If somebody decides not to pick up your book, you're not going to know that, and much less will you know why they didn't pick it up but when you're talking on the phone, you're more likely to pick up a clue like that was an interesting concept.
Blair: There's so much market research wrapped up in those personal conversations. I think we've talked about this before. Not every salesperson or every new business person or even agency principle has the maybe it's emotional intelligence or their ability to pick up on the information coming back in the notes in the rejections.
David: Reading those social signals and so on the words, the pauses all that.
Blair: Let me ask you a question about these items on the bottom rung of the ladder of lead generation. Have you ever employed them in your life as a consultant and then previously, as an owner of an agency? Did you ever operate down here? Because the world thinks of you as the expert's expert, and surely David Baker would never do an unsolicited outreach.
David: Oh, I'm so screwed at the world bombing figures out who I really am.
Blair: [laughs] I'm here to help the world.
David: Oh, I certainly have. I had a trade show booth back when I was starting the publication. It was called persuading and I would pop up at ad agency conventions and public relations conventions.
Blair: I had no idea.
David: It was effective too but I felt so stupid. I'd just be standing there waiting for somebody to be friendly to me and then I didn't really know what to talk about ended up reading most of the time back then I wish I'd had an iPad probably.
Blair: If I were running your business and I decided-
David: Wait, we can stop right there. You're not running my business.
Blair: -and I decided that a trade show booth was a good idea. The last person I would ask to staff that booth would be you.
David: I know. That is fair.
Blair: Let me guess at some point, you realized, I'm here on the floor, lonely in my booth. It would be far better if I were the person up at the podium talking.
David: Yes, and sometimes I was doing both and that felt even weirder. I've certainly sent out email requests to people to see if they're interested in speaking and not much of that has been all that effective. I'll tell you the most outbound, most obvious, most obnoxious thing I've ever done in that regard was when somebody accepts the biggest package that I have my consulting package, it requires a lot of paperwork and so on that, I generate for them. There was this person at a seminar, and I just kept getting the sense that they should hire me and they worked in Toronto and at the last day of the event, I handed them a USB thumb drive, I don't know if we still use those anymore, and all of the documents were completed in there, they had not asked to work together yet. I handed this to them and I said, "When you get back to the office, I want you to look at this, and then I want you to sign this and send it back to me." That's all I said.
Blair: Did they do it?
David: They did do. They did.
Blair: Do you know that I don't know if this is universal, but there's something known as the Canadian clothes in sales, which is just tell them what to do. I just stumbled into it by mistake. Oh, goodness. I don't see in your list here. Oh, I see it up at another category. I've certainly used not recently, but in the early days, certainly use a lot of direct mail.
David: Hey, since we're confessing to things we've done early in the business, okay remember, nobody's listening, anything you say it's safe.
Blair: I remember I had a client who is a friend. He owned independent agencies. He said we've hired this outsourced cold calling company and we're getting fantastic results. He said you should try them. I was running an event. I had an event coming up. I thought, okay, I'll try them for this event. I handed this list over to this outsourced cold calling company and I knew it about like, 50 people down on the list was a client of mine, a former client of mine, they got going and then I waited for a few hours. Then I picked up the phone and I called my client and I said, "Hey, did you hear from anybody calling from my organization about this event I have coming up?" He said, "Yeah," I said, "Can you tell me about your experience?" He said, "Well, she sounded like she was 17 and she couldn't wait to get off the phone she could get it knocked up by her boyfriend."
David: Did you pull the plug?
Blair: I said, "Okay, that's all I need. Thanks." Yes, and I stopped it right there. That's not-- I don't mean to paint all of those organizations with such a broad brush, I just want to point out its not language that I would use.
David: You're doing a lot of pointing out at the moment.
Blair: That was a bit of a disaster but I've tried everything on this list I have tried. Let's move up the list from selling to the next rung the middle rungs of marketing.
David: Yes. Let me just add one thing. There are still a few industries. There are a few places where a creative firm, digital firm would actually exhibit at a trade show. It's rare, but it still happens, like some places in manufacturing, some places in higher ed, you wouldn't think that that would be true, but there's still are. There is a place for that in some cases.
Blair: I have seen firms do that well. I've seen a small number of firms kill it doing that. I worked for an agency back in the day that did this. The first year somebody in the firm attended this trade show and what realized there are no agencies here and it was in a vertical that we did a lot of work in. She put in a booth the next year and was overwhelmed with business, went back the next year to do it again and there were three or four other agencies who had seen that it was such a good idea and decided to copy it. I don't universally dismiss any of these ideas at all. There's a time and a place for all of them.
David: Okay, so the mid-level, which you're terming marketing, again, with each of these, I'll ask you to list some of the activities that fall in this in a second but with each of these, they represent a certain expertise validation type, and the power and the immediacy and the one we just looked at in the selling category. There's not a lot of power, because it's a private claim of expertise but there's a high degree of immediacy, so it's very useful. Talk to us about this middle level.
Blair: In the middle level of marketing, it's a public declaration of expertise, which is quite different from a private claim. I can make a private claim to you on the phone and you have no real way of validating, well you do in the internet age, but as soon as I make a public declaration of my expertise, that says something entirely different. If I make a private claim to you on the phone about, I'm a specialist in x, and you go to my website, and it says full-service marketing communications and the SEO is all about, like my regional market Dallas advertising agency, you know that private claim has been a lie but when I put that articulation of my specialization of my expertise on my website, or in a paid advertisement, that's something else entirely.
The power begins to shift, at least a little bit. The immediacy drops a little bit though. Typically, in this middle rung, you're spending money now, that's one of the trade-offs. There is some validation of your expertise because it's publicly declared, and you have more power than you do at the low end, but it's still not at the highest level.
David: Okay. I'm guessing that a lot of listeners would be doing quite a few things, at least many of the things in this middle area would be good candidates for where they are at this point.
Blair: Yes, and they include advertising of any kind online and off, sponsorship of events, direct mail in any form online and off, seminars I would put in there, seminars are high up, that starts to cross over into the next realm of educating. Also purchased platforms, it's pay to play where you might pay to speak at an event, I'm not a big fan, I usually take a lot of delight in calling out organizations and events that put their sponsors on stage and it's okay to put your sponsors on stage but do so in disguise them as speakers, but from a marketing point of view, if you can do that, I've seen it be very effective. I know there are also all kinds of publications where you can essentially buy a column in those publications.
Most of the readers don't know that you've paid to be this expert platform. Those purchase platforms can be really effective. Again, I think I've listed the other sponsorship, direct mail, advertising, and all forms.
David: How does the firm who's looking at these options? How do they decide what's right? Would it have something to do with their positioning, with maybe their personality with how much money they have versus how much time and then are you urging them to pick one or two of these things or doubling a lot of them.
Blair: I think again you climb the ladder over time. You want to start working on some of the activities that are high up on the educating runs that we'll talk about next, but when you're launching your business there's a whole lot of outbound that has to happen in the early days and then you look for these opportunities, so the most specialized you are and particularly when you're vertically specialized, the more these pay to play like advertising or marketing platforms or opportunities kind of present themselves to you and start to make sense because as you've talked about many times before when you're positioned based on a vertical market, you've got all of your clients essentially in the same places, right? They're all lumped together, they all read the same websites or publications and attend the same events, so that's when it makes sense to consider these marketing activities
David: Okay, we're ready to talk about the upper level now which you're terming as educated, so the middle was marketing, the bottom was selling and here the power is very high because you're being validated by other people versus self-validated or public decorations of expertise. It takes a long time to spin them up. What are the things in this category?
Blair: Let me ask you, what would you place at the very top of the Ladder of Lead Generation? That activity that basically validates your expertise and puts you in the power position, this expert practitioner position in your relationships with your prospective clients even from the moment they reach out to you, they already see you as the expert.
David: I think about that quite a bit. I sit back and I imagine a firm that doesn't have much time and doesn't reach out a whole lot. What would the simplest most powerful marketing plan look like, and to me it would be a book that's really well received every three years and by well-received I mean a lot of people buy it and read it because that's going to lead to so many other things, for instance, you don't get good speaking engagements unless you're a former public official or you've written a book that a lot of people have heard of. To me, that would be the simplest, and if you could write a killer book every three years, that's pretty much all you need to do. I don't even think you need to collect email addresses although that certainly wouldn't hurt.
Blair: Yes, I agree with you. It's that book drives everything else and if you imagine your own business and you took your books out of it, what are the implications?
David: It would be much harder to climb the ladder but it would also be even more stupid because I wouldn't have done the thinking that I don't mean to imply you're not smart if you haven't written a book, I don't mean that at all, I just mean that just in terms of my own personal thinking it's just forced me to wrestle with things that I just would have given up before, so absolutely if you pull those out it's really a different picture.
It's interesting to see how different speaking platforms change like having-- They don't call the keynote but a big presentation at TED, not TEDx, four, five years ago would have been possibly a life-changing thing. It would have vaulted you to the top of some list and you probably could have lived off of that for a decade. I think that's kind of behind us now and I keep getting this wrong too, I keep thinking, "The books are going to be-- there's just too many books out there, it's too easy to write them." I just can't see that that they'll continue to have a big impact but it just hasn't happened, they still do have an impact.
Blair: I've gone through that same thought process as you and I just recently finished Ryan Holiday's book Perennial Seller. I think of your recommendation. It's a really good book and he talks about how to create content that lasts, and one of his key messages is, I'll paraphrase him here but the work really has to be a labor of love. You have to be so dedicated to making it a great product. Well, I too have been worried that, " Uh, I think the power of books is diminishing because there're so many books out there." There're a lot of books out there that just-- most of them don't really reach that many people, they're not really read. They're books that are published under people's names who were written by other people and in the business world that's fairly routine, and I'm not saying that's not a way to publish a book, but if you want to publish a book that has that big impact that leads to all of these other follow on lead generation mechanisms that's just kind of fall out of publishing a book naturally. You want to take the time to invest in writing a really good book and I think that's the challenge. It's like content marketing in general, some people say, "Well, everybody is doing it now, everybody is publishing all kinds of content, so is there any point?" Well, the answer is, there's a point if it's good.
David: Yes, otherwise you're definitely not a point, right? Just to- touch on this book thing as well. One of the things that has definitely changed in the publishing industry is that the promotion of your book, whether you self-publish it, or it's a hybrid publisher, or whether it's a traditional publisher, you are responsible for promoting your book. There is a connection between having access to people who want to read something you've written, whether it's a book or it could be a blog entry or something like that. There's a connection between that and having an email list or a massive social media following so that you can tell people about it and breakthrough that noise. I think it's a very rare thing for somebody to write a really good book, who isn't known to some extent or who can't promote it on their own channels. These things all are woven together. If you just try to reach for that high thing, I don't know that anybody's going to hit it. There are some really valuable things about what we've called lower-level things, like having an email list is really powerful. Even when it comes to a podcast, how many people are you going to get to listen to your podcast, unless you can tell a bunch of people about it?
Blair: Books naturally drive speaking engagements in it. Some speaking engagements where you won't even be considered as a speaker unless you've published a book. I can see some math that says bang out a book quickly. I own lots of those books, some written by clients of mine, where I refer to it as an oversized business card. It's not a great book. It wasn't a labor of love, but it checks the box that this person has published a book and it gets them invited to speaking engagements, which helps them to build their audience. They build their content from there. Then I would hope that down the road, there's a more impactful book or some other channel that we should be talking about in addition to just books and speaking engagements, and this top rung of educating. If you were just to write a book and do speaking engagements in support of the book, that would probably drive a lot of your lead generation. As you point out, you probably have to publish a book every few years, but it's really hard to go from outbound inquiries all the way up to a book and speaking engagements.
David: Right. It's not just because those opportunities aren't there for you. It's just more how we all learn. You're just gathering things. In my own mind, anyway, I may get through a whole year and I may be smart enough to write five or six or 15 articles or something, or I have some idea that seems like a book, and the more I think about it, it's really just a long article. It takes a while. It's just an incubation period for some of this stuff.
Blair: Let's check out the list of what are some of these other things other than books and speaking engagements on this top rung.
David Blog, which it's an unfortunate term, but I just still think there's such a place for great written content you've got on here being quoted or featured. In other words, somebody who writes an article and include something that you've done. Branded research studies, I’ve probably got a half dozen clients doing those. They're fantastic. They take a lot of time, a lot of money, and they usually require some partnership with either another nonprofit or a Higher ed institution or something. Branded events, goodness. You just went to one of those a few weeks ago. That was pretty amazing, right? When you think that behind that is what otherwise would have been a typical firm that now puts on this event. Amazing.
Blair: The event is the gathering and it's put on by founders of Cult, which is an agency in Calgary, Canada. I think there's 1500 people attend. This year, Ryan Gill, one of the founders, told the story. He has this introduction to the event and he's told this story. He said, “We launched this as a new business, a way to get conversations with these brand managers and brand owners of Cult brands.” Then he said, “We realized that the end of the first event, that this thing is actually too good.” He said, “We put a moratorium on selling to any of these people.” Now, I know him and I know this to be true, but I also know that just being seen as the organizers of the event and taking the main stage, et cetera, and playing a leadership role in this has been very, very good for business. It's a fantastic example of a branded event that just turned into something big and massive, and has had all of the spillover effects. There's also video channels and podcasts, right?
David: Yes. All very, very powerful. This leads me to refer to something that a colleague of mine, her name is Gini Dietrich. She developed-- I think it was 10 years ago, what she calls the PESO model. It looks at the different means of influence and breaks them up into four areas. There's paid media, earned media, shared media, and owned media, thus PESO, which is a combination of those four letters. She just released it in version two. You can look up Gini Dietrich, PESO model. It's a really good way to think about all of this and how to put together programs that- incorporate different elements of this at different point in your career. It's another good thing to look at.
Blair: I want to come back to a question you posed a little bit earlier and I dodged. You said, "How do you decide which of these to use?"
David: Right. I noticed you didn't answer it.
Blair: I answered it, but I wanted to come back to it at this point.
David: Okay.
Blair: I think especially when it comes to these activities in the highest rung of educating. You think, write a book, do speaking engagements, have a blog, be quoted, do a branded research study, branded event, video channel, podcast, one of the answers to the question of which channels should you focus on should be in the nature of your firm. Many years ago, I wrote an article called-- I think we did a podcast on it back in the early days, Why Ad Agencies Don't Advertise.
David: We did. Yes, we did.
Blair: There are some legitimate answers to that question of why it might not make sense for an ad agency to advertise, but I think if you run an ad agency, you should endorse the medium and you should look for opportunities to advertise. I think if you run a public relations firm, you should do a great job, you should focus on getting quoted, getting featured. I think if your discipline is in any way in the video production business, you should embrace video as a channel.
If it's audio, you should embrace podcast net. That's not universal. I think it's just the first place that you should look. You should lead by example to a certain extent and demonstrate to your prospective clients and adept use of that medium or that channel. This is the point where we all think of the joke that we've all heard 1000 times about the cobbler's son who has no shoes and it's become not funny to me anymore because it's really hard to be talking to your clients about how they need to be disciplined and spend money and do this even when things aren't. That should not be the first thing you cut.
It just rings hollow when it's not something that you do and as the industry around the world faces a slowdown. This is a great time to just step back and think about what you could be doing to articulate your point of view and to build those muscles and climbing that ladder as far as you can reach at this point. That's really what we're talking about, right?
David: We are and I was going to ask you, "Why is it that agencies generally struggle with their own marketing plans in their marketing efforts?
Blair: I think mainly, they don't know what to say and they don't know what to say because they don't have a strong positioning.
David: Yes, [chuckles] like in every other topic, it always comes back to positioning.
Blair: Yes.
David: Out of positioning often falls this point of view. When you're well-positioned and you have a point of view or multiple points of view, strong points of view on either your discipline or the markets you serve, then it's easier to create content. Your content becomes more compelling and more impactful.
Blair: Yes. I think that's true. People start to panic when things slow down and it's a little bit too late to do that, but there's just such a sense of satisfaction when you can't control how well your business is doing, you can't control how many leads, how many quality leads are coming your way. You can sleep better at night knowing you have done the right thing and leave the results a little bit up to other things, but not because you haven't been disciplined.
David: Yes. We'll wrap up here, but while we're confessing to things that we've done in previous versions of our business when I think of all of our training programs that win without pitching, we have a term on lead generation. I've been so guilty for a few years of saying essentially, "Here's the Ladder of Lead Generation. Pick as many of these things as possible. Work really hard and some of it's bound to work." We may have talked about this before, but I favor this idea of making bets. Make two bets, especially on the ones at the top.
You employ the ones at the bottom and then the middle, you work your way up, you build some audience, you work out some muscles, you get some feedback from the market and then you invest heavily in a couple of these activities on the highest rung. You don't go and do all of these things at once. I suggest you pick a major and then a minor. Pick these two and a book backed up by speaking, that's a great one, a book backed up by podcast or a podcast that's backed up by a book, that's another one.
Podcasts and a branded event, that's another great combination. This idea of pick a major, now I would rather see a firm put all of their lead generation chips or the vast majority of them, certainly not all of them, the majority of their chips on one bet and I know when the firm does that and says, "We're going to focus on our video channel or our podcast, whatever, to the exclusion of everything else then the likelihood that the work is going to get done increases significantly because I see firms just get paralyzed. They come up with this marketing plan that's pages long and it paralyzes them. They get such a small percentage of it done, but they feel like they're hedging their bets by doing all these different things.
Blair: Yes, absolutely. We touched on that at the beginning. Just pick a couple of things and do them really well, just kill those things. I found that to be true for myself as well as for my client. This has been a good discussion.
David: Yes.
Blair: You really mean it like yes or--
David: [laughs]
Blair: I think it's been a great discussion.
David: We're both so mellow today.
Blair: I don't know what it is.
David: You know what is. We're talking earlier about how with the coronavirus thing neither of us are doing any travel, and it's really nice, isn't it?
Blair: It is.
David: I know it's creating all kinds of economic hardship for other people even some people listening to this but it's kind of nice to be self-isolated in Kaslo or in rural Tennessee.
Blair: At some point, our businesses might fall down around us and then we'll be doing a different sort of a podcast. Well, actually we'll be listening to this one wishing we done some of this stuff.
David: [chuckles] Thank you, Blair.
Blair: Thanks, David.