One day I was brought into the president's office and the president and said, Jeff, we love what your team's bringing to the table.

We have one issue.

We believe in a quote, fear based management structure.

So we'd really like you to align with our core values as a company.

We think people work harder if they think they might lose their job.

And I said, here's my two week notice.

I found out early that I wasn't going to be in a fear based management structure, that I was always going to be somebody who wants to lean in and invest in the team.

And this idea that you're going to be able to attract and retain the best talent and be able to do that with a fear based management approach, this is not something that's gonna work in this world.

And I think those types of messages are gonna hurt companies to retain that kind of talent.

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Welcome back to lead the team with number one best selling author and in.

Demand corporate trainer, Ben Fanning.

On this podcast, the world's most innovative.

Senior leaders share their top success strategies to motivate your direct reports, cultivate your top leaders and accelerate your career.

Let's get started.

Here's Ben.

Hey there everybody.

Welcome back to LE the Team.

I've got a treat coming your way today.

Get ready to meet a true trailblazer in the world of AI.

Jeff Mills, the President of iMerit is revolutionizing the AI data space with their innovative software delivered solutions.

They prepare the quote food for AI or the or they structure the data to feed and train AI and to deliver exceptional results.

Not only does Jeff lead a global team of about 5,000 employees across sales, marketing solutions and delivery operations, but he's also been an integral part of some of the biggest names in tech.

From his day, his early days at yahoo back in 1998 to his roles in successful exits like Critio and Kayak, Jeff's journey is a testament to his visionary leadership and entrepreneurial spirit.

Let's rock and roll.

Welcome to Lead the Team Jeff.

Thanks A lot.

Ben, great to be here.

Thanks for inviting me today.

Oh yeah, we're going to have a good one.

So let's start with what type of leadership style are you most known for?

Early in my career, found out what leadership style I wasn't somewhat early on, probably a decade or so into my career, I was part of a company acquisition.

I went and worked for fast moving, fast growing company that our team started basically running sales for and delivering revenue for.

And one day I was brought into the president's office, sat down and the president leaned into me and said, Jeff, you know, we love what your team's bringing to the table.

You guys are killing it.

Revenues are up.

All of that's great.

We have one issue.

You're a high fiving, rah rah, get everybody charged up and go kind of guy.

And we believe in a quote, fear based management structure and so we'd really like you to align with our core values as, as a company.

Align us?

Align with fear?

Yeah, yeah.

Fear based.

We think people work harder if they think they might lose their job.

And I said, cool, here's my two week notice.

And you know, I, I think you know, in literally that meeting I, I put in my, I put in my notice, I, so I found out kind of at that point, you know, what I'm, what I'm never going to allow myself to become now over the years, you know, I would love for people to basically say that, you know, I'm a player coach who wears his heart on his sleeve, you know, invests into the business, invest into the people, is somebody who will be around forever.

I help a lot of people get their next jobs when they're still currently working for me.

I've had the pleasure right now where I'm working with some of the brightest minds in the AI tech business who just joined our team within the last month, mixed in with people I've been working with for 25 plus years who've worked with me at you know, five, six different companies.

I, I think I found out early that I wasn't going to be in a fear based management structure, that I was always going to be somebody who wants to lean in and invest in the team.

And you know, I think some of that comes from growing up in the Bay Area, working in the Bay Area early on where some of these companies that we started to work for, you know, later on who were based out of kind of smaller markets to get away with this kind of quote, fear based management structure, this fear based approach, call it managing with A stick instead of the carrot.

In the Bay Area though, we've always had other opportunities for another job sometimes without even leaving the business park our cars currently parked in.

And so, you know, I always agreed, yes, they will start working harder, but that's me working harder to find another job.

And they'll find one pretty quick without, without moving.

And I think that where things have changed a lot in this last decade, especially since COVID now people are able to get jobs from South Carolina or out here in the Midwest where I'm located now, and work for a high tech company that's based in the west coast.

And so you know, this idea that you're going to be able to attract and retain the best track the best talent and be able to, to do that with a kind of fear based management approach I think is, I think is this is not something that's going to work in, in this world.

But you know, Meta's I think today laying off a bunch of people with kind of a similar message, right.

They're going out today and saying we're, we're laying off the bottom what, 10% or 5% or something like that based on performance.

And I think those types of messages are going to hurt companies to retain that kind of talent right now.

And especially with where AI is going, the war for the right talent is, is going to be, it's going to be steep.

Yeah.

It really seems when you talk about fear based, it seems very short term, leadership focused.

Yes.

You can get results today by striking fear into the hearts of people like oh my gosh, I don't perform, I'm out of here immediately.

But like you say it's, you know, they, they're going to start looking or they're going to, even, even if they're thinking about looking for a new job or they might have to or they should, you're immediately losing their engagement.

And that slice of their minds, that discretionary thinking that they could be thinking about their job there, they're gonna be thinking about something else.

And it's, that's the piece that we all want for our teams is man, can we get that discretionary thinking to focus on their job.

And I'm curious, from your standpoint, what are your, what are your favorite.

So I'm thinking about like carrot versus stick.

What have you seen to be the most effective carrots?

Or I'll say maybe positive incentives because it seems like sometimes a carrot becomes wasteful maybe when it comes to money because like you're, you, you, you're, you're putting these things out, and they're really not moving the needle that much as a motivator or.

Or a leadership style.

So just curious, what have you seen?

And maybe one's a time where you tried a new version of the carrot and it surprised you how much it worked.

Yeah, I think what does the carrot even mean to somebody is.

Is probably right.

You know, pretty vast.

Right.

So, you know, my wife reminds me a lot that there's multiple love languages in the world.

You know, they're not.

It's not just one love language.

Right.

And so I think understanding and finding the love language for the people who directly report to you, I think is really important for you to understand even what the carrot even means to them.

Is it words of affirmation that's really going to make them feel different, or is it a reward system where it's just monetary, you know, is it, you know, something else?

And there was a Super bowl played here recently, and if you heard those teams coming out and talking and whatnot, and this is less about the sport, it's more about the team.

Each of those teams were talking about how much they love the group they're playing with today.

They didn't say, I love being in this game because I'm going to lose my job if I wasn't, or because, you know, the stats or because of any of these types of things.

They said, I want to go to play with.

With this group that.

That has been formed.

And.

And I think that's the best carrot.

The best carrot is the group, the team.

You know, I've dared to say the word family before, which is.

Which has bitten me before because not everyone comes from a great family.

Right.

So, you know, team seems to be the right word.

But, you know, I, again, I wear my heart on my sleeve and I try to make sure that we're all doing something together.

So when I'm interviewing people, one of the things I talk a lot about is at our organization, no one manages the shovel department.

We're.

We're all.

We're all on the.

The hole with a shovel, and we're all digging together.

And so if you're looking for me or you're looking for my CEO, and you're looking up at the top of the.

At the top of the hole and going like, oh, where are they?

What do you guys want me to do next?

You're looking the wrong direction.

Like, we're deeper.

We're deeper in the hole with a lantern hanging from our.

From our teeth, trying to.

Trying to Help push us through to.

To the other side of wherever we're going.

And I think when you're in it with people and they really feel like you're in it with them and you're part of that team, that's actually more carrot than.

Than probably the monetary piece or the words of affirmation.

All those pieces matter, of course, but.

But, like, you have to feel like you're in it.

So the number one carrot is the team that, that you, the leader, are creating.

And the other carrot is, which I find interesting, is your leadership style.

Hey, the.

The carrot around here is you've got a top executive who's in the hole with you.

You're not being managed from someone in the Ivory tower five levels up.

And you only hear from me during our quarterly earnings call.

I, I mean, I, I say which can be done.

But that's not your style.

It's not.

That's not my leadership style.

My leadership style is we're all in it to win it, and we're gonna.

We're gonna push through this thing together.

Can you, can you give us an example of a time where you know what a lot of leaders, or maybe you felt.

Maybe you felt against your nature to be sort of in the Ivory Tower, but you decided to get in the weeds.

You were digging, and I like this image of you holding the lantern in your.

In your mouth while you're digging, and you took that approach and you got a different response or a surprising response from the team.

There's been plenty of times in my career where I've been surrounded by people who are looking at the status of what they do.

They're flexing power, they're flexing status, they're flexing, you know, these types of things.

And you can.

There's a call to stay strategic.

Like, they would say some, Some people might say, jeff, well, you know, you're the top executive.

You should be strategic.

And they say that because, like, if you get in the details, you're.

You're not going to be able to be strategic.

Or they're like, I don't know.

Like, I've heard that at least in my career a lot.

So I'll tell you.

I'll tell you a story.

This is back to early in my Yahoo career.

I remember interviewing somebody who was.

Who had just graduated from Harvard, was coming in, you know, Harvard Business School guy, which I have no problem with, with.

With Harvard at all.

My brother, actually is the headwater pool coach at Harvard University.

So I, I'm.

I'm a I'm a fan.

Sorry, bro, but talking about at Thanksgiving.

But that interview where you talked about Harvard.

But when I interview this guy, he comes in and he goes, you know, I want to be innovative.

I want to be strategic.

I want to be.

And he said, says all the buzzwords.

You were kind of starting to throw out.

I said, that's awesome.

And we need that here, and we want that here.

Okay.

I still want that everywhere I work.

The first day we come back from New Year's, we're going to pull out all the colored pens, Ben, the ones that smell really good.

We're going to go to the whiteboard.

We're going to draw spheres, right?

We're going to draw triangles, we're going to draw funnels.

This is a triangle turning the other way.

We're going to draw all kinds of great things that show strategy and innovation to the, to the fullest.

Then for the next 360 odd days, we have to implement and execute those things.

Tommy, how are you at Excel?

When's the last time you've done a PowerPoint?

When's the last time you pick up the phone and called somebody?

When's the last time?

Like, like the, the reality is execution is 99% of what we do.

It's, it's not, it's not the idea.

Ideas come every day.

Ideas are great, that's fine.

But ultimately we have to execute on these ideas.

Can you execute?

Because if you can't execute, I don't really care about the rest.

And what happened?

Did he leave?

No, I didn't hire that guy.

But.

Okay, you'll know what happened, because that was it.

Yeah, I mean, I, I just.

Because he want, he just wants to go be strategic.

I don't know, like, I don't know what that even really means.

Like, I know what it means to, to come up with big, big business plans and big ideas.

And I do that.

I do that every year.

But then we have to go execute those ideas, and you have to go out and you have to go do the work to make that happen.

And so at some point, somebody in that boardroom needs to know how to go in and motivate a lot of people on doing the actual work that needs to be done to make that happen.

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What do you do as an executive?

Because you're, from what I know about your space, you do spend a lot of time helping companies with strategy because there's a lot of data for sure, there's a lot of, I'm saying Excel, but you need a lot more robust tools in Excel.

So what are you doing as a leader to go back and forth all day as I'm imagining?

Okay, we have to execute but you've got to go in and talk high level vision for companies from healthcare to cars, right, Self driving cars and you're, you're spanning industries, you're staying high level, you're speaking with executives to strategize but then you've got to get very, very detailed.

So are you like the executive who's in the, in the boardroom and then you get on the plane and you're, and you're like on Excel and the data or how are you going back and forth there?

Yeah, so my right brain, left brain, like I have a pretty, I'm pretty lucky from the perspective that I, I can tap into both very quickly and I can switch topics very fast and, and move from talking about, you know, 3D lidar, dense lidar models that are going to go into power ADAs, vehicles, self driving car technology, type stuff and then flip right over and start talking about something like maybe ambient scribe technology within the medical profession which is completely different.

It's text based, it's LLM based.

It's like a completely different, different world of stuff.

I can jump between the two pretty quick and then I can jump down and get into the details.

One of the things I do is I surround myself with thought leaders within those space, within each of those spaces.

So I have a doctor, Dr.

Sina Bari who works on my team, who is a Stanford trained surgeon, you know and he, he, he's a full time member of, of, of the IMERIT healthcare team, runs the healthcare team here.

And then I have a PhD in linguistics and Teresa O'Neill who works for me who can jump in and get deep into, you know, syntax of languages and all kinds of different stuff that matters within the LLM space.

And so part of it I think is being able to surround yourself with people that can help enable you to be able to jump from those things.

So I can take kind of high level thought and whatnot but then get down into kind of the minutia with thought leaders, industry experts at that level.

Now I kind of go back to the motivation thing before and the retention and why retention is so important is as AI as these different types of technologies continue to advance, one trick ponies are going to run into a lot of problems and that's probably been lucky.

That my kind of career was based on startups a lot in the, in the very beginning is because it made it so that I understood that you had to have a love for learning and learn different things very fast and then be able to pivot in the space very fast.

And so I surround myself with thought leaders who understand industries who have a love for learning and can pivot and move, move through those areas quickly.

That to me is kind of the, the kind of formula that you need with people you hire and that goes back to those people aren't going to work with someone who isn't in there, who they respect.

Right.

And so how do you earn respect if you're not with the team on the front lines doing those things?

I'm not saying I don't spend a lot of time, you know, unplugging and just thinking about strategy.

I definitely do.

But then you have to show up on these other, in these other areas.

So you're, you have a team that's remote around the globe and you're traveling all the time.

You're about to go to India from the US You've got big trips.

What are you doing to stay that close?

Like how manage your, this lifestyle that you've got to traveling, meeting with customers, meeting their employees to, to get into the weeds with because it seems like there's so many demands on your time.

It's, it'd be, it's just hard to manage that.

So how are you approaching it?

So no doubt everything you're saying is a thousand percent true.

I work a lot of hours a day and first of all I don't have a work life balance.

I just have life.

And so you know, I, I make it to most of my kids games when I'm not traveling.

I, I'll go to every basketball game and, and water pole game and music concert and whatever.

You know, I have three, three boys so I'm, I'm very busy doing those things and I'm on calls till two in the morning most nights, you know.

So you have a global team and time zones are really an issue probably.

I go to, I try to go to my team's time zone, not my team come to my time zone as much as I can.

And so that's hard, you know, and, and, and it's a thing.

Again, leadership on my team is super important.

I trust the people who are in place in each of, like, my vertical leads.

So, you know, I have a high tech lead, I have a health care lead, I have a mobility lead.

You know, I have, I have people who are managing kind of the different departments, but then I'm getting in with them deep, you know, daily, weekly basis.

And so I'm also, I would say, somebody who.

You can put time on my calendar at any minute, but I'm probably not going to come tackle you either.

So I trust that my team is going to pull me in when they need something.

Right.

I'm not going to come knock on the door every day.

So you're setting expectations with your team around communication and when, when to pull you in, when not.

So they're not sitting there.

Well, should I pull Jeff in?

Should I not?

Is he gonna get mad at me if I.

He's not included.

Do they?

No.

So I, they know this.

They understand.

So I check my ego and I have implicit trust that they're going to deliver on the things that need to be done.

The biggest trust I have is they're going to pull me in as they need to.

That.

That is something that's built over time because I, I also have to trust that they won't burn themselves out and that they will come grab me when they need it and that they will be honest with.

If they're not, then that, you know, that's going to hurt us both eventually.

So.

Good.

And thank you for being so open about that.

I think a lot of leaders don't have that sense of clarity with their team around the globe when they have their different cultures involved and you hire someone new if you haven't worked with them before.

Getting that clarity up front can help everybody in terms of how the communication is going to go.

So that's a big part of my interview process.

Right.

Is, is that, I mean, is specifically on what we just kind of said, you know, if I string them together, right, we're all going to be in the pit, we're all going to be managing our own shovels, we're all going to be digging together.

But if you need me, I need you to yell, right?

If, if you don't call me over, I, I.

Because I'm just going to trust you.

Got it?

You know, and, and when you call me over, though, I will, I will be there.

And I won't be upset that you call me.

I will be there.

Let's dive into AI just a little bit.

I know it's like a whole different podcast to talk about just, just aips.

But really curious since you're in, you're, you're at a critical nexus of AI across so many industries.

How are you n conversation on how it's going to affect the employees of the people that work with you?

Because it, it, I think the vibe in 2025 is cost cutting.

Cost cutting.

Cost cutting initially seems to be the, I guess, initial step for a lot of companies and that starts to freak people out and how they do that.

So, so when they're coming to you, how are you shaping the conversation on what all AI can do for them?

Yeah, so I, I, first of all, I don't think they're all cutting costs.

I think they're investing their, their dollars differently.

And so first things first, I would say.

Yeah, I think there's to be a lot of renegotiations of software.

I think there'll be a lot of renegotiations of services companies.

I think there's gonna be a lot of renegotiations of things as investments move more into AI powered solutions.

That's not cost cutting, that's cost reallocation.

Okay, so that's a big thing.

What are they reallocating it from?

A lot?

Yeah.

No, so software, software and services both, but independently are going to be impacted significantly over the next year.

Two years.

I mean, honestly, it's, it's happening as, as we speak.

So services that they're paying for, they can re, they can get their data and do a lot of this through AI tools versus using the, a third party that might not be as tightly integrated.

Yeah, but not just.

Yeah.

So services is the big multi trillion dollar business that, that you know, has the opportunity to be impacted significantly, but don't think software is not as well.

SaaS companies are about to get a very different type of business case that's coming in.

So as you're ingraining AI into your processes, you're not going to continue to pay for software subscriptions that are feature based.

They're going to all become outcome based.

Right.

And so really what's going to happen right now is you're going to start using solutions whether they're mostly they're going to become combinations of software and services.

That's why we say we're software delivered services is because our software has AI.

We're an AI company first and foremost.

We're a expert company as well as we have all this expertise internally around the work we're doing.

So when you merge those things together, it can become outcome driven on the type of solutions that you're actually building.

This is going to start happening everywhere.

You're not going to just say, oh, I'm going to spin up call center tomorrow and pay for a software license from one company where call centers are managed through the software for call it telephony in the cloud and all this stuff and then go hire thousands of people to sit on that software.

You're going to go pay for a solution where it's based on calls rendered or like high quality calls.

And that's going to have the software, the services, everything ingrained into it.

And AI will be the backend of it.

Whether it's agentic AI, whether it's just algorithm based, it doesn't matter.

At the end of the day it's going to be outcome driven.

So this idea of paying a SaaS license plus an FTE model, those days are about to be disrupted significantly very fast.

My advice on this stuff is think of the digital transformation that we've gone over the last 20 years.

Everyone's talking about digital transformation, digital transformation.

Imagine somebody 20 years ago, 25 years ago who said I don't believe in email and I don't really believe in the Internet, right?

I'm going to go ahead and still write my letters and I'm going to send my letters that way and I'm going to continue to not worry about being a digital first company.

Like could you imagine that today?

Like your mind would be like what?

Like, like that doesn't even make sense.

Same things about to happen right now.

Going from this digital transformation to AI transformation is going to happen.

It's going to happen fast.

And so again, what skills are you looking for in people?

You're looking for people who are, have a love for learning.

It's going to change fast.

Do the people on your team, are they already playing with this stuff, right?

Or are they going like, oh, I'm in procurement, I use a procurement tool and I don't want my job to be, to be impacted by this.

If that's the case, you're, you're like falling way behind really fast.

Yeah, I love that.

And it's really kind of a wake up call.

You're like, well wait a minute.

It's the being more human and be humanly curious becomes more important in an AI world than just for sure technical skills where a lot of people might think, well, I need technical skills in AI world but really that's where AI is coming in and delivering the value.

We need the humanity behind it.

That, that's right.

So, so the people I, you know, again, the people that I have on my team are experts in things, Stanford trained surgeons, PhDs and linguistics.

Like they, they have these expertises but they're also have a love for learning.

They're in there playing with agents, they're in there figuring out how are we going to tie this together, how do we disrupt this business, but ultimately how do we create outcome driven products that solve a problem?

I mean this is, this is like again, Startup 101 type stuff, right?

Like what is your addressable market?

What problem are you solving?

This is going to now happen in every single function within a company.

What problem are you solving?

How are you solving it?

And then how are you leveraging tools that exist to do it now?

Do you know how many hammers exist?

Should I ask ChatGPT this question?

I mean you could definitely do that and it would tell you, but like a construction worker doesn't have one hammer.

They don't just show up with one.

There's framing hammers, there's mallets, there's, you know, there's, you know, fine tuning, there's like a hundred different types of hammers for different project.

AI is no different.

You have to learn what these different hammers can do so that you have the tools in your tool belt to be able to be successful in your trade.

Your trade though, understand, will have AI equivalent hammers that you're going to have to learn how to use very quickly.

I don't care what you're in.

Yeah, the way you talk about it, you're talking about AI with excitement and as an opportunity, not as a fear, fearful thing to be afraid of.

And I believe that the leaders who can instill that mindset in their teams and help them maintain it are going to be the ones that win at the end of the day and having partners that take that approach and it sounds like you guys are in that boat too, 100%.

You know, we're helping our clients figure out outcome driven processes to solve the problems that they, that they have generally in what's considered now the multi modal kind of AI data space.

And so, you know, yeah, I, I believe that I am lucky to have a front row seat on kind of how all these different companies are playing with AI and built within their, within the verticals that they're in.

I think that people need to be less Scared, they need to lean in and they just need to understand that this is no different than the digital transformation.

People started learning Excel, they started learning PowerPoint, they started learning email.

Same thing's going to happen here.

You're going to start learning how to use an agent, you're going to start learning how to, you know, prompt, you're going to start learning how to do these different things.

And to your point, the human skills, those are going to be insanely important.

And how we, how the companies who are successful leverage it.

And talking about outcome based approaches with AI, what, what's one that's really excited you or surprised you the most in terms of applying AI and getting a, an outcome maybe you didn't expect or.

That seemed to really move the needle.

Yeah.

So I, I think there's, it's, it's funny, you know, I think the biggest thing right now is that it's going to impact FTE models too.

But, but what people don't always understand is that doesn't necessarily mean the work you're investing into it, the margins or the revenue goes down.

If you are implementing the right processes, you actually can increase your revenue and increase your margins.

Because companies are more comfortable spending on outcomes, right.

They'll say, I remember they're adding more.

Value than what you were doing before.

Same thing about happening in the advertising industry over the last kind of 20 years, right.

People paid for CPM, cost per thousand impressions, then they moved to CPC, cost per click, then they moved to CPA, cost per acquisition.

You know, they kept moving into these different models.

And AI, if you really think about it, is what's powered a lot of what's happened in the, in the, in the transformation of, of advertising, especially digital advertising.

And they're actually spending a ton of money on that stuff.

It's not like they dropped their budgets, they actually increased their budgets.

Once you could basically tie it to success output, it just changed the model.

Right.

And that same kind of thing is going to happen in every industry.

So dig digging a little bit on a personal level, when's a time you had a twist or failure in your career and had to lead to your success or growth on down the road?

How when I had a failure of success in my career and what a.

A twist or a failure in your career and how did it lead to your success or growth on down the road?

Yeah, I have to be careful about some of it.

There was a company I worked at where we did some really great work.

We had a really great idea and there was some really good people working there, smart people.

And the product just didn't quite get there.

And there was a chance for this to become a really big, really exciting company.

The product just wasn't able to quite hit the numbers it needed to hit to become kind of an industry disrupted disruption in this space and what I think it did for me, to be honest, is it reset some of my values on what it is that I wanted to be able to bring to a company.

When I met Imerit, where I work now, and I met Radha Basu, our CEO when she was launching Imer, she was launching it to create jobs for under resourced communities around the world.

For me it kind of changed the value that every deal we did I knew was going to create jobs for other people around the world.

Not just for the product, not just for investors, not just for kind of the business side, but also for the people side.

And so the irony here is we're a big time AI company creating data that's powering these algorithms around the world and we're creating jobs for people who actually need those jobs.

And so that failure in, you know, at least one, maybe two startups where I think that it could have gotten much further if the product kind of had enhanced and stuff actually got me to reset my view a little bit into how can I have a little bit more sense of purpose with what I'm doing that's beyond just kind of the dollars and cents myself.

And that's how I found the company.

I've been spending the last eight, almost nine years now.

I'm building something that yeah, ends up being super high tech, super product driven, scaling, all of that kind of stuff.

But it was built on the idea that we could create jobs for thousands of people around the world who needed them.

And so ironically ended up getting somewhere much more technical, much more high growth.

But doing it on the, on the premise of we can actually affect a lot of people's lives by creating opportunity for them and that's where that kind of has, has, has been heading out.

So in some ways to me that's, that's kind of like counterintuitive that, that, that that would have happened.

Yeah, it, that is so cool.

And then what I hear in there is your willingness to look in the mirror when it didn't work out at the other companies like, like you'd hoped because it's so easy to just get angry at the other people that weren't doing what you saw or they weren't on board and you're like, wait, A minute.

I'm going to start with me and maybe I need to buy something that aligns with my values and then whammo.

It sounds like when you got timeer it, it's all come together.

But go back to strategy versus execution.

The strategy in those companies was great, is the execution that, that fell short.

Right.

Like, and so I think again, that's where a lot of this.

Every time I've been successful in my career, it's because we rolled up our sleeves.

We got in there and we did the work.

Having this premise that we were going to go into this company I Merit was about 300 people when I started.

You know, we're now more like 5,000 people and we're creating a livelihood for each of those people.

That happened because we rolled our sleeves and we got in and we, and we solved real problems.

Cool.

Well, just real companies that needed them.

I mean, this has been such a fun episode today and a great interview.

A lot of inspiring nuggets along the way.

What's your parting thought for our listeners?

You can take it anyway or anywhere you'd like to go with it.

Yeah, look, guys, don't be scared of AI.

You know, lean in, learn it.

Just a tool, just like any other tool.

It's a tool that's going to affect a lot of things and then, you know, yeah, be a learner.

You know, have a love for learning.

Have fun with it.

You know, people have fun with this stuff.

And yeah, don't get scared of it.

Lean into it, learn from it.

They have a chance of helping build the next wave of, of what's to come.

And a lot is coming.

And so, you know, there's a whole, a whole big market that's about to explode in this space right now.

I have, I, you know, I have plenty of.

We talked about Aunt Mary's and stuff before we got on this call and plenty of people during the digital transformation that said, oh, like, I'll never put my credit card online or I'll never do these things.

You hear that today?

It's like, that makes no sense.

You know, don't be, don't be one of those people that is scared of where this is going.

And so you, and so you miss out on what's going to be an exciting, exciting time in business, but also for, for people.

Thanks so good.

My pleasure, Ben.

Thanks a lot for having me.

And appreciate what you guys are doing.

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