April 23, 2025 • 50 mins
In this special episode, we sit down with members of the Sacramento Executives Network Group—Scott Leslie, Dave Spencer, Eric Graves, and Andrew Tagg—for a candid and inspiring conversation. Each guest shares a glimpse into their professional world, personal journeys, and the causes close to their hearts. From business insights to community advocacy, this episode shines a light on the power of connection, collaboration, and leadership in Sacramento.
Visit www.sacexec.net to learn more about the group and it's members.
Visit www.sacexec.net to learn more about the group and it's members.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good morning everybody. This is Jeff Turner, your host for
(00:03):
another podcast with Benefits and Brief and I've got some
special guests on the show today. Before I get to
introducing them, there's a couple of housekeep keeping items I
wanted to take care of. We're going to be highlighting
the Sacramento Executives Network today. This is a new network
here in Sacramentos, and we'll talk about that in a second,
(00:24):
and their mission and how involved they are in the
business community. My name, as I mentioned, is Jeff Turner.
I am the senior partner for the Allura Group here
in Sacramento. The Allua Group is an insurance company created
twenty seventeen. We are a national firm over a billion
(00:46):
dollars in revenue. We handle all of the business insurance
needs for the business and running your business, everything from
employee benefits to workers comp and all the boxes are
checked there. I want to give each of these gentlemen
that are on the call right now an opportunity to
talk a little bit about themselves, but I'm gonna try
(01:10):
to do my best not to embarrass them. So I've
got a little I've got something here I'm going to
bring up and I'm gonna give them an opportunity to
talk about themselves. But I've got the Sacramento Executives Network
website up right now, and the guests that we have
on the call today, these are three of the members.
(01:32):
The Sacramento Executives Network was created for businesses to help
them in these hard times. It's difficult to build a business,
grow that business and keep it profitable, and you need
good experts and professionals to do that. So we created this,
as I mentioned three years ago, with that intent. You
(01:53):
can go to sackexec dot net to look at our
website and get in for more information about out the
members of the network, and we'll put that in in
the chat here in a minute. But uh, you know,
the tagline for Sacramon Executive Executive Network is experience, insight
and leadership, and I would I would concur with that
(02:15):
these these gentlemen on the call today certainly bring that
to the table. So with that, I'm go go ahead
and just say hi to uh. So the three members
are on the call now, We've got mister Andrew tag here.
He's he's our he's our banking professional. Dave Spencer, he's
our website, slash I T expert Scott Leslie, he's our
(02:41):
our investment advisor, works for Edward Jones and mister Eric Graves,
attorney elect select an elect Right. Yeah, yeah, thanks for
showing up, Budd. I appreciate it. Know you had a
court appearance earlier this morning, so ready hopefully that went well. So,
(03:04):
as I mentioned SECONDMENTSIC Network was created three years ago
to serve the business community, and I feel we've done
a pretty good job of that so far. We've got
some events that are coming up and I'll talk about
that at the end of the podcast. That's on May
twenty first at a local business called Pride Industries. Many
of you might know and are familiar with Pride Industries.
(03:28):
We're excited to co host that with them, and Jeff
Dern will be our keynote speaker for that event. So
what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give each of
these gentlemen to a time to talk a little bit
about themselves and what they do. This will be interactive,
you know, I'm going to throw it out there if
any of the members want to try to stump the
(03:50):
guests as they're speaking, I'm okay with that.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
So we'll go.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
We'll start with mister Andrew. Tag so Andrew, and looking
at your background and your profile, you've been in the
banking business quite a while, about thirty years if I
remember right, it's right.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Jeff.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
First of all, I'm thrilled to be on your podcast.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I couldn't sleep last night thinking about appearing on this
esteemed show that you run and host.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
And you know you're you know, you're.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Such an influential member of the region and what you do,
and so very excited and so kind.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Buddy, I'm sorry that we interrupted your sweep pattern last night.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
He did go to see the other Sacramento Executive Network
members on this call, and yeah, Eric Graves, you looked
like a new man there.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
You know, hopefully the court case went really well today.
I like it. The white shirt and jacket.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
He looks start, buddy, he's well represented.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
It looks like you got a haircut an it's close shave.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Today too, so I needed so there you go.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But no, I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And Jeff, when you started this three years ago, I
thought it was a great idea that Sacramento Executives Network.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
We've grown it. You know, my banking career matches perfectly.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
With what your vision was in terms of being customer centric,
helping clients achieve their goals, being part of their team.
Really is what my goal as a banker is is
to really have them look at me as you know,
an extension of their senior management team and for all
things banking, not only all things banking, but you know,
(05:40):
a referral source for other things, whether it be a
you know, a commercial broker, assurance agent, you know, an
it individual investments, a business attorney, and how you put
this group together, you've kind of made it nice to
to include those those referral sources, those COIs to introduce
(06:06):
to clients as as they as they need additional services,
and they may not know they need additional services until
you introduce somebody that gives them a different perspective, analyzes
what they're currently engaged in, and proposes maybe other ways
of doing things, new services, new opportunities, looking at the
(06:27):
cash flow, you know, expenses that maybe can be trimmed down.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
And so that's what I really love doing. I love
helping clients. I love seeing them.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Grow and and from you know, from a.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Beginning to to to a mid sized.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Company and currently with River Valley Community Bank. As you know,
I just joined.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Them about.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
Three weeks ago, and it's a community bank based out
of youb City in Marysville, but we have locations in
Grass Valley and Auburn, and I'm the market manager for
Roseville and South Plasters, so I'm really building out this
unit here in the South Plaster region. I have clients
throughout Sacramento those so we're also you know, helping those clients.
(07:17):
And it's a real exciting opportunity, new chapter in my
banking career of thirty years, and as I.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Told my new employer, this is my last stop.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
But my background really is a combination of lending and
depository slash treasury management products and really just helping clients
achieve their goals and be a source, a problem solver
and help them get to where they need to be
and where they want to be in their individual business
cycles and personal safe And I enjoy doing this and
(07:55):
it's been a great career and I love connecting with
folks in branding the organization and being active in the
community serving on various boards and as you know, I'm
also an elected school board member, which I've done here
in Plaster County for the last eight plus years, and
I enjoy serving education and that's, you know, the backbone,
(08:19):
that's the great equalizer of course, education for all individuals
throughout the state, the country is education. And so I'm
a big proponent make sure everybody's getting that opportunity to
learn and to strive for goals and have that opportunity.
Is that only makes our economy that much better. So
(08:41):
I'm excited and I appreciate the UJEF hosting this and
being part of this.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yeah. Absolutely. But Andrew, there were a couple of things
that you mentioned that I feel it's important maybe to
just kind of bring to the forefront. You talked about
helping a business, not just in the lending aspect or
making deposits to your bank, but it sounds like you're
more interestingly involved in actually looking at you know, the
p and ls, the spreadsheets and helping them to maybe
(09:10):
look at some areas where they can trim the fat,
so to speak, or do better. Would that be fair
to say that you're you're more involved in just you know,
a lending institution or individual consultant.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah, No, I was just medi I'm at a client
and just this week and he may not be.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
He has some financing needs, but basically he.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Gave he gave me his P and L and balance
sheet to review, and so my job in this case
will be to analyze those numbers and give him feedback
on where I think he needs to go.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
And he understands this that he may be.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
A few months away from, you know, qualifying for a
line of credit, but it's an opportunity to to really
dive into it and.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Keep some feed.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
One of the questions I had is maybe you can
help explain to the audience what what is the advantage
or a difference between a community bank and let's say,
you know, a Bank of America using as an example.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
The community banks.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
Really, I think it's more invested in the actual local
community involved in you know, local decision making helps make
a difference versus a bigger bank where it's all centralized
and maybe it's located in North Carolina or Minnesota. You actually,
you know, can have conversations with the chief credit officer
(10:29):
at a bank. At a community bank, you can take
the chief credit officer out on calls. You can take
the CEO president out on calls. You can't do that
at bigger banks, So you really get to know the
business owners, get to know our decision makers. The people
that the board of directors are local, so they get
to know the board of directors.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
They're engaged in the process of developing the business as well.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
And I just think there's much a closer connection with
a community bank than you're going to get with.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
The bigger banks. I've worked for the bigger banks. They
do a lot of things well.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
I just think for small and medium sized businesses, the
community bank really is much more positioned to engage the process,
be more nimble with the process, be more commutative with
the process, and be more.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Of a consultative entity with those businesses then the bigger
banks can. Not to say, the.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Bigger banks has some really good people there that can
do this stuff, but you've got a collection from the
top down that's located in in the community engaged with
these businesses.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, that's helpful. I think that it's important to understand
those differences, you know. I mean, the bigger banks have
a bigger budget, so they're they're more front of you know,
of their audiences, you know, on TV, et cetera, radio,
So I think that, you know, it's important to understand
(12:03):
what those differences are and certainly involve the community in
the discussion.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I might come back to you. There was a couple
other things I kind of wanted to highlight, you know,
kind of your passion for education, as you mentioned, you've
served on in a couple of boards, and I'd like
to come back to that, but I think, you know,
I'll kind of I'll segue over to Scott right now,
because I think that what he does, you know, is
(12:33):
kind of what you say, a partner to what you
doing in the banking industry. He's on the financial side,
and you might have might have some input there in
terms of, you know, how he works with his clients
and maybe there's some commonalities there and where you guys
share on that. But Scott, Ima, go ahead, turn the
(12:53):
time over to you and give you an opportunity to
talk about a little about yourself. And there's a couple
items and that I want to highlight. Okay, great, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
So yeah, So, like.
Speaker 6 (13:05):
Andrew, we do take a very client focused approach to
how we do do our business. I make sure I
take enough time to get to know my clients and
businesses really well in order to make sure that we
can have a plan that's really tailored to them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
I did.
Speaker 6 (13:28):
I did pursue three different professional certifications, and I'm going
to highlight those just because it kind of gives you
a well rounded picture of what what I can do
to help businesses and individuals with their you know, grow
and protect their wealth. And so the first one's an
asset management specialist, and that's kind of what you typically
(13:51):
think of in terms of a financial advisor, making sure
that that we manage your assets really well. And I
like to always make the distinction between investments and speculation.
So so I like to to take care of people's
long term assets for their long term goals. So typically
(14:15):
that's you know, retirement plans, whether it's a four one
K plan or accept irah or somebody's just personal IRA
and so, you know, so there's good, tried and true principles.
If you implement them, you're gonna you're gonna grow your wealth,
and so you don't have We were just talking earlier
(14:36):
before we started the podcast about you know, all the
different issues that come across with the economy, whether it's
tariffs or interest rates, or what the Fed's doing or
lots of different things. And if you have a really
good long term plan, we really don't need to get
(14:57):
so worried about the short term hiccup with the economy.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
So I do.
Speaker 6 (15:03):
I love to help businesses, but I'm really I tend to
really focus in on the business owner. They have some
unique demands on them because they're trying to manage their business,
manage their family, take care of their employees. And so
I really if I can provide really good service to
the business owner, I'm going to have really good impact
(15:24):
on both their personal life, on their on their professional life,
and also on the employees that they that they have
and that they serve. The other certification certified Exit Planning
Advisor kind of fits in with when I'm talking about
business owners, you know, and so exit planning you think
(15:46):
of succession planning. You know, you're putting your your your blood,
sweat and tears into your business and then ideally you
want to try to sell it someday. Here's an interesting
stat Only thirty percent of businesses that go up for
sale actually sell. That's crazy, what you know, And so
(16:07):
it's like why is that? Well, there are a lot
of reasons to it, and a lot of business owners
they they're kind of their business. And so you know,
if you have a small business, have you taken the
time to basically replace yourself, to put in the team
and the processes to be effective. And so that's something
(16:29):
that as an exit planning advisor, we work on building
the value of your business today, making sure that we
can improve your processes so that you can have a
good exit later. And that process typically takes, you know,
you really want to give it five years. So even
if you're you know, you're not really thinking about selling
(16:51):
your business now, we need to start working on it
today to do the things today that's going to provide
value in the future. The other reason why businesses don't
sell is because the business owner thinks, hey, I got
this great business. I'm bringing in all this revenue, it's
got to be worth ten million dollars or whatever. But
you really got to end up putting yourself in the
(17:12):
shoes of the buyer and and look at the comps,
you know, and try to figure out, Okay, what does
the buyer think my business is worth, because that's what
I'm going to get at the end of the day.
And so so kind of getting that sense of reality
around the value of the business is something that can
be very very very helpful in the process.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
It's got it. This is you mentioned, you know, thirty percent.
I hadn't heard that number before. That's that's a pretty
alarming number, you know, when you consider how many small
businesses are out there, entrepreneurs are making pretty good money.
Right to only have thirty percent of those businesses actually
(17:55):
being able to sell when they get to that point,
that's pretty concerned. Learning And this is actually I'll do
a little plug for our event that's coming up on
May twenty first at Pride Industries. This is a topic
we're going to cover that day in depth, more in depth,
i should say, and what business owners need to do
to prepare for that. There's a lot of different variables
(18:17):
that involved, right Scott. You're you're just talking about just
the the actual planning and thinking ahead of it. There's
more to the story, right, I mean, the risks involved
in finding maybe somebody internally to take There's a lot
of different ways to approach that, right, Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 6 (18:37):
And you know also you know, the business owner he's
put it, like I said, put their life, his life
has blood, sweat and tears into the business. And then
sometimes it's hard to let go. And then if you
do let go, then what are you going to do?
Speaker 7 (18:54):
Right?
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Sometimes they just they just hang on too long and
don't really you know, build build the team around them
to be able to to carry that business on in
the future.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, I can always rely upon family to bring in
family members to continue to run the business. I've seen
this so many times in my years, where you know
an owner, he's assuming that you know, the Dutch son
or the daughter's going to come in and you know,
do what he's done or what she's done, and that
doesn't That doesn't always play out that way.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Yeah, usually it usually it doesn't. And I have some
access to some consultants specifically around family dynamics, because there's
always dynamics when you're talking about family, especially when you
talk about family and money, it can be a real
a real doozy. And if if you can get that
outside perspective on how to develop a good plan, usually
(19:51):
you can come up with a good plan that's gonna
win for the owner, for the kids, for the family,
and a lot of times it's it's not having them
take over the business.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You I think you would agree, there's there's a there's
actually a very you know, big risk that if I
just assume that, hey, when I retire or I pass away,
that you know, hey, my business is going to be
worth X. And yeah that's not always the case.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
Yeah, it's rare. It's it's rarely the case, which is
also then you're then you're dealing with somebody's ego or
pride of like, yeah, I thought out a ten million
dollar business, I'm getting offered one point five right, Yeah, Yeah,
that's a great, great point you brought up there.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
I think it's important that we help business owners with that,
and you certainly are the the expert go to on
the team for that. You guys have to you know,
before we move on to our next guest, do you
guys have any anybody questions comments for Andrew or Scott
(20:54):
before we we move on.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
The only other thing I want to touch on before
we move on, as I went and pursued my certification
for it to be a Kingdom advisor, which is which
is really more getting into.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
The why of earning.
Speaker 6 (21:17):
You know, you spend all this time trying to create wealth,
but why are you creating it? What's it for? So
obviously you know you want to have a good life.
You want to provide for your family. But also you know,
I like to go into those questions of you know,
what impact do you want to have on the community.
And something I like about our Sacrament of Executives network
(21:37):
as we're I tend to have that perspective of hey,
how can we help our community, help how can we
help others? And then also your legacy. You know, if
you're gonna do build this business, build build your wealth,
you know, again, what's it for? What do you want
to leave behind? And a lot of times people don't
have those types of conversations h and if you have
(22:00):
them early on, sometimes it can really impact what you
do now as well as what happens to your wealth
once you serve them now.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I appreciate that you know the why behind it. You
know why why you're doing what you're doing, But then
why are you doing it? And you know, what do
you want the outcome to be? Eventually? Yep, I love
that you just talked about serving the business community. I
know you you also, like Andrew, serve on some community boards.
You mind sharing that real quick with the group.
Speaker 6 (22:28):
Yeah, I've been on the board on the board of
trustees at SIRA College for the last twenty years, which
I can't believe it's been that long. But so that's
an elected position. So I represent Roseville on that board.
It's a pretty big district.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
You know.
Speaker 6 (22:43):
We go all the way up to Trucky. We have
a campus up in truck Campus and Grass Valley, and
then we're currently expanding out to out by the Dump
in Roseville doing a joint campus with sack State. So
there's a lot of exciting things happening. But I do
I do enjoy that that aspects. It's the largest employer
(23:06):
in UH in Rockland. Anyway, great, thank you for thanks
for sharing that. I appreciate your your service there. So
thanks Scott. You know, if there's any questions, we'll come
back to you.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I don't see any right now, but we're going to
go to the middle of the lineup Jung Hole, Oh,
Dave Spencer and me so and then Eric Graves is
going to be hitting forth the Aaron judge of the
group today. So uh so, Dave, go ahead, let's let's
uh let's let's dive into what you've been doing. Buddy.
You're you're you're pretty well known in the car industry
(23:41):
for what you do, and maybe talk a little about
how you have helped the car industry and what were
you doing before you were building websites.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Uh, well, I was the last place I was working
before I got involved with the Internet. I was actually
working at Foundation Health Plan as a computer consultant there,
which is a company you probably are familiar with, and
we were doing a big project to convert all of
their systems from Hewlett Packard over to another company called
(24:12):
Digital Equipment Corporation. And after that project was completed and
I went to work at the California State Legislature, they
had a big conversion project where they were converting all
of their office systems to a platform all in one,
and that was all going well and fine. While we
(24:33):
were doing that, this is about nineteen ninety three, and
I had a workstation, which is one of these predecessors
to like the Windows PCs that everybody uses. And one
of the applications we had installed on it was a
thing called Mosaic, which was the first Internet web browser.
And there weren't very many websites out there, but I
(24:55):
thought this was actually had some legs. It was very
primitive and crude, but you know, more websites kept showing
up every day, and there was this thing called Yahoo
that was trying to by hand do an index of
all the websites that were available. And I thought this
was a really interesting thing and I wanted to be
involved with it, having missed some other revolutionary technologies in
(25:19):
the past. So I actually got I had a workstation
that I owned that was at my house, so I
got an Internet connection, which was at the time the
best you could do was an ISDN line, which is
about like speed modem speed, and put a web browser
and not a web browser, web server on it, and
(25:41):
started giving away websites. So I was thinking, Worldwide Web,
who's going to be using the World Wide Web? Well,
probably people that are not in your local community, somewhere
like on the other side of the world. So I
went down to Old Sacramento, and I thought there they'd
get a lot of people to come to the Railroad Museum,
(26:03):
to the Delta King, into the historic gold Rush area
in general. So those would be really good people to
put on the Internet, because somebody, say a tourist from Germany,
would like to know more about Old sac before they
actually got there. So I went down to Old Sacramento.
I found the presidents of the president of the Merchants Association,
(26:24):
who was a fellow that actually he ran an old
collectible bookstore and his bookstore, he was already selling on
the internet, but he was using America Online and he
was very interested in putting a website together because he
wanted to reach of course, more customers. So we formed
a partnership, built started a company, and we gave away
(26:46):
Because nobody knew what internet was even was or what
websites were even worth, we just gave away websites. So
we went ga a website to all of the merchants
and Old Sacramento. We went to the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.
We gave the Chamber of Commerce, we went to all
(27:06):
of their events, and we had a little booth and
we gave away websites to all the people that wanted websites.
The president of the Chamber at that period of time
was a fellow named Roger Nilo, who's currently a State Senator.
Roger is at the time was running the Neilo Company,
which is a luxury auto import dealership chain here in Sacramento.
(27:28):
So we gave them away. I gave them a website
so we did that for a couple of years, went
to a lot of meetings, explained to people what modems were,
and you know, what the internet was and so forth.
And then after a couple of years, some of the
customers they started having people started asking what's your website address?
Where can I find you on the web. And then
(27:49):
the light went on. It's like, hey, I need to
have a website. Oh wait a minute, I do have
a website. So they started to pay us money to
actually do updates to it. The Nilo people started putting
their inventory online, and it turns out they became like
one of my biggest customers. Uh, you know, I wound
up doing websites for all of the dealership locations. We
(28:11):
put up some very sophisticated stuff, like the Porsche dealership. They're,
you know, a high end people that buy Porsches, they're
they're like toys, and they want to usually have them
very customize exactly the way they want them. Well, Porsche
is more than happy to do that, and so we
put their whole build your Porsche thing online so you
(28:33):
can actually customer configure your car exactly you went the
way you wanted it via the website. So it was
those sort of services that we put together that that
made the whole thing work.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
So that so that's interesting, Uh that you bring that
up and I saw that on your bio because now
just I would just think that it's a commonplace for me,
I go to buy a car, if I want to
customize it, that the the websites allow me to do that.
So you're saying that this was it sounds like kind
of groundbreaking almost.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
What you were doing doing it before anybody.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Was Wow, that's uh, that's pretty interesting. You were a
trailblazer there.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, it was. It was exciting times we did. We
did a lot of great stuff with them, and I've
worked for them still due to this day. I've been
working on their website stuff for twenty five years. Or
they're a great customer.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
One.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
I highly recommend anybody who wants to buy a car
go talk to NEI.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Though, go to go talk to Needle. And Roger's not
involved anymore, is he.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
No, he he's handed it off as uh yeah one
no runs is the chief financial ricause his brother still
runs the company. But it's a family health company that's
uh does a very very good business.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
So so Dave you know, the website. It is still
important for business, right because that if I'm if I'm
trying to get information about a company, the contact within
the company, I'll go to their website. But what else
in addition to just the website? How have we progressed?
(30:18):
And what what when you're meeting with a customer? Now,
what what? What is the discussion points?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Now?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Well, everybody wants to be first on Google. That's that's
the number one thing is that they want to have.
They want to be able to say that if somebody
searches for something, that that their business is going to
come up number one, which is wonderful. But there's millions
and millions of websites out there, so you know, unless
(30:45):
you're going to get very specific, it's difficult to guarantee
that you can come up number one. But there are
things that you can do. There are techniques that that
you can utilize.
Speaker 6 (30:55):
It.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
We'll make sure that we get you the best results
possible and which to hear what some of those that aren't.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
So it sounds like the search engines are kind of
the primary driver now to these websites.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Your engine optimization CEO, that's what people want.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
To Yeah, and it costs more money. Right, if I
want to be first on line, it's going to cost
me a pretty penny would I would that be fair
or no?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
No, it's Google's a free service, and so there's a
lot of people out there that will charge a lot
of money. But the secrets are basically Google primarily focuses
on text. If you're if you have a website, you
want to have a lot of text on your website
that describes exactly what it is that your business does.
(31:44):
And the more description, the better you're ranking. And as
well as but just talk about yourself and do the
best you can to describe when your business does.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
And that will mate when you say text, you're talking
about keywords.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Now keywords and and you know, just generally describe your business,
what your services are, what what you you know, all
the things that that your business can do. You can
have lots of pretty pictures, but next for search engine
is really the best.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Sure, yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Dave is going to give some advice at the event
as well. He's going to get an opportunity to talk
little more about what we're discussing right now. Just kind
of stay to the art and what's going on and
how we can you can optimize. Uh, you know, your
your your your audience out there. So looking forward to that, Dave.
(32:43):
You know, before I turned it over to Eric, I
know you're you are involved in the community as well.
You serve I believe you serve on some different boards, chamber,
et cetera. But you're also very passionate about your h
o A. Maybe just share that real quick. Yes, somebody
that loves doing that. I don't know why, but I'll
(33:03):
let you explain.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Each way is the most intense personal form of politics
because after everything is said and done, you have to
go home and you live next to your neighbor who
may not have agreed about certain things. I live the
Gold River and Gold River is a series of twenty
five villages. There's twenty seven hundred and thirty five homes,
(33:28):
so they broke them up so the villages are about
maybe one hundred and twenty homes per village. And last
year I was the president of our village that we
live in. There is a Master Association that oversees all
of the villages and I'm running for the HUA board
that for that association. So wish be luck the election.
(33:55):
Ballots will all be counted in the middle of May,
and hopefully I'll be successful be one of the new directors.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Right, great good stuff. Gold River, by the way is
part of Ranch of Cordova, but you do have your
own zip code, so you guys are recognized as a
small city.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Oh wonderful.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, I just thought i'd throw that in. Thank you, Dave.
If we need to, we'll come back to you, but
I'm gonna go ahead and turn over the time now
to Eric Graves. Hey there, Jeff, good morning body. You're
looking at you are looking at sharp Day. Look at
He's handsome man. He does clean up well, Andrew, Andrew
(34:35):
eyes look sharp, Yeah he does so. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (34:40):
My name is Eric Grayts and I've been an attorney
here in the Sacramento area for about thirty years. Through
the course of my legal career, I've had a lot
of different experience in a lot of different areas. But
if you have to distill it down and be primarily
within business, real estate, employment, and both on the litigation
(35:01):
side and the transactional side. So it helps with add
for you to kind of bounce around to a bunch
of different areas of law. The other thing that's useful
with respect to that is you have a lot of
information as you can impart to people, and there's a
lot of crossover in terms of facts in terms of law,
and it allows you to kind of structure solutions to
problems that maybe someone who just practiced in one particular
(35:24):
area couldn't do.
Speaker 8 (35:26):
So that's been useful.
Speaker 7 (35:29):
So the practice for me within the last i'd say
fifteen years has been geared about fifty percent transactional getting
businesses off the ground, doing asset purchase agreements by sales,
joint venture agreements, that kind of thing. And basically in
that regard, being a former small business owner myself, I'm
(35:49):
able to give a lot of personal insight in terms
of proper business direction and what have you.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
With that.
Speaker 7 (35:56):
From the litigation side, my primary goal at the point
is to basically counsel people to avoid litigation. It's turned
out to be not the best investment for a lot
of my clients and they're generally better off trying to
think outside the box and come up with a solution
that doesn't involve having to file a lawsuit and waiting
(36:16):
four years or five years for that to resolve. Little
counterintuitive for an attorney because I can't build for that,
but I'm going to bring that up.
Speaker 8 (36:26):
If you get good results, people will come back.
Speaker 7 (36:28):
And they were for people over too, and that's basically
been my business model throughout the time I had my
own firm, and now I'm with the Firmer Smith McDonald
Powell in Sacramento and help them put together their firm
back when they formed, I want to say, been about
eleven or twelve years that they've been around, and they've
(36:49):
established themselves very well in the local market, representing real
estate developers, a lot of construction things, and a ton
of transactional works. So it's a good group, good team
and well connected and all that. So all those connections
and all those little wealths of knowledge that people have
really helped in terms of trying to drive solutions forward.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
I noticed that on your bio, you know, you know,
you went to McGeorge School, the Law University of the Pacific,
very well known entities here in the greater Sacramento area.
I noticed that you're majoring in college was journalism, So
you know, where were you What were your thoughts, you know,
(37:34):
going into college, were you actually thinking about maybe getting
into journalism, what happened to what you turned to the
attorney's side.
Speaker 7 (37:43):
So what happened was I started college as an advertising manager.
Speaker 8 (37:48):
And the reason I did.
Speaker 7 (37:50):
That is I thought a lot of advertising was bad
and poorly put together, and so I thought I could
change that around. And then I got into my classes
and found out and it's a formula. It doesn't matter
if it's good or bad, it's what works, and you
have to stay within those lines. At the same time,
I started taking a journalism class and ended up being
(38:11):
on staff of the paper at cal State Fullerton, and
that helped me so much in terms of my writing
and trying.
Speaker 8 (38:20):
To make deadlines.
Speaker 7 (38:22):
All that has been an extraordinarily useful in practicing law
as well. When I graduated, I had a job offer
from the La Times. He was going to pay about
twelve thousand dollars a year, so I was going to
end up having to split an apartment with three other guys.
So already the signs were there that maybe journalism wasn't
(38:43):
going to be the most profitable career that I could choose,
and so I decided to go to law school at
that point and graduated from George which was a really
great experience. I like a lot of attorneys enjoyed practice
are going to law school, and I got a.
Speaker 8 (39:01):
Great education there. I feel like I made the right
choice at that particular time.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, And you did mention you know, you've owned businesses.
I think that's important for our audience to understand that
you bring that knowledge and background to the table. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (39:17):
It really builds a lot of empathy in terms of
when you have clients that have small businesses. And I've
had a couple of cases within the last two years
where someone has done something that has jeopardized a small
business that people worked hard to establish, and for whatever reason,
that that just gets the empathy gone, ignites my passion
(39:37):
to make sure that whoever's messing with them doesn't get
away with it.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, And I will say, you know, and I think
the group would concur you know, Eric is you know,
I don't even I guess would this would be the
right word.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I think.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
I think I think you're benevolent. Let me put it
that way, because you know, you mentioned that you know, hey,
I'm going to try to help my client of litigation,
and like you said, it's kind of counterintuitive to counter
intuitive to in terms of what you think about in
terms of attorneys and how they get compensated. And the
longer you know, you drag this out, the more money
(40:12):
you're going to make.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
So yeah, I mean, you get people at a very
emotionally vulnerable position for the most part. Unless you know,
there's some people who can have ten lawsuits going at
the same time.
Speaker 8 (40:22):
Don't bother them at all. They sleep like a baby
every night.
Speaker 7 (40:27):
That's not the case, and so you know, you really
have to be able to go, hey, I know you're
upset right now, but do you really want to put
a bunch of money into this at this particular point.
Speaker 8 (40:41):
With uncertain results? And some people do.
Speaker 7 (40:44):
We have clients that are you know, we have a
large developer client that he's rolled those DIYCE many times
and it's worked out for him. But you've got to
have a lot of money to play that game, and
not many people do.
Speaker 8 (40:57):
And so whenever I have a client come in and go, well, the.
Speaker 7 (41:00):
Principle of the matter or I just want to get justice,
it's like, well, you've got to have a big checkbook
for that. So you might want to just get the
best economic outcome you can get and be happy with that.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
So you're pretty upfront with the client, you know, like
this is this is what it's looking like if we
go down this path.
Speaker 7 (41:20):
Yeah, I mean I've seen other attorneys you sell and
try to basically get people flamed up to go and litigate.
Speaker 8 (41:28):
And a good sophisticated client can see that. But a
lot of people don't. This is their first.
Speaker 7 (41:34):
Experience and they just end up, you know, putting good
money after bad and when it comes down to it,
my objective is always to get a better economic outcome
than they would have got if they would have seen
somebody besides me.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Yeah, it sounds like the situation it can be very
emotional based on like.
Speaker 7 (41:56):
Pretty much and for most people that's going to be
the biggest conflict that you have maybe in your entire life.
And you know, for others, like I said, there's clients
that we have that have any litigation going on.
Speaker 8 (42:11):
They just and usually hey, there's pretty successful people.
Speaker 7 (42:15):
So says something for compartmentalization and the ability to continue
to work when you've got a bunch of potential, you know,
disastrous events are surrounding you.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
So yeah, it's it's uh, it's interesting because uh, you
know we've got well, our one of our team members
who kind of quasi oh emeritus status. Uh uh, Trevor Watson,
He's going to be speaking at our event. He's a
(42:47):
labor law attorney. I know that you get get into
that as well. You mentioned by sell agreements. I think
that's important to bring up, you know, in conjunction with
what Scott was talking about, in terms of plan right
planning for eventual risks. If you will, you maybe talk
a little bit about that. Is that something that comes
across your table very much.
Speaker 7 (43:09):
I mean, it's almost standard every time you're forming a
corporation with somebody else. The primary reason usually is people
don't want to be in business with other people's family
in case somebody dies, but there can be a ton
of other reasons to put together by sell.
Speaker 8 (43:24):
So it's just almost standard.
Speaker 7 (43:27):
Operating procedure that when you're forming a corporation with another shareholder,
you're going to want that by sell in place.
Speaker 8 (43:32):
And it's not complicated.
Speaker 7 (43:33):
I mean from the transactional side, the more transactions you do,
the more templates you get, the faster you are, the
more efficient you are and getting to the point where
you can really go through these relatively complicated transactions and
have something out in front of you, so you're not
reinventing the wheel every time.
Speaker 8 (43:49):
Is extremely helpful to the client.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah, I would second that, and I think it's super important.
There's so many times I've I've worked with a a
sole proprietor or a small business or a partnership and
they don't have anything in place, and you know, that's
that's a big, big potential problem. As you mentioned, you know,
do I really want to be working with my partner's wife. Yeah. Yeah,
(44:18):
So you know, Eric brings that expertise and knowledge to
the table. It's super important to have that risk covered
as well. So so what what what do you like
to do in your spare time?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Eric?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
You know, I know you've got a lot of different interests,
but what what what excites you?
Speaker 7 (44:37):
Well, I mean as far as you talked about community
outreach and involvement and stuff, so you know, my days
of doing that are kind of paused right now. But
you know, I was the president of my own association Dad,
and I also worked with KASA, which is organization helps
foster kids, and I was on their board of directors
and then after being on the board for about five years,
(45:00):
I believe I decided to actually volunteer and mentor a
foster youth and represent them in court, and that was
a very rewarding experience. But the most rewarding thing that
I did from a community outreach is managing coach baseball
when my son was playing, and that was just awesome
and just love helping people out and seeing kids develop
(45:23):
like that. It's it really was like kind of sort
of a dream scenario. Unfortunately I'm not very good at baseball,
and eventually all those kids got way better than I was.
Speaker 8 (45:36):
But then.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You set the foundation for them, so sure I was
the tempteva of coaching. It's like nobody there you go.
I still remember my little league coach. So yeah, hey,
you're you're playing a big part in their in their development.
I think that's awesome. But so hey, guys, we're about
ready to wrap up here. I don't see any any questions,
(45:59):
but is there anything you guys want to add to
you know, all this before we journ? If you will
go ahead, Andrew, you're Andrew's trying to speak.
Speaker 6 (46:11):
I think the thing that I would add is just
how each of us has our area of expertise, but
the idea that we have a network with each other,
but then also our networks even beyond each other. So
I enjoy working with people's CPAs or state planning attorneys.
(46:35):
If they don't have one, then I'll then I'll find one,
you know. So we have our our core within our network,
but being able to provide resources broadly for any business
issue that comes up because we've all been around the
block and we all know a lot of people, a
lot of different disciplines. I think that's that's that's something
(46:56):
I really enjoy.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
With our That's a great point that you bring up, Sky,
And that's something I mentioned to all my clients. If
there's an issue, there's a question, there's a problem, you
need to reach out to a professional and expert in
another area. Chances are I know somebody and if I
(47:17):
don't know it, know somebody someone within my networking group
is going to be able to bring you know, that
specialist to the table where the b HR payroll. You know,
there's many different areas that the business needs help with
and support. So yeah, no, love that, love it. Any
(47:37):
other comments guys before we wrap up? Yeah, so before
we wrap up again, I'll mention that we are going
to have a business event on May twenty first at
Pride Industries. Anyone that is not familiar with Pride Industries,
they're They're a nonprofit organization. They employ mentally and physically
(48:01):
challenged individuals and they've got about five thousand employees all
across the country. They provide services for many large entities.
I think I want if I remember right, Andrew, I
think Walmart was one of them. But they do a
lot of work for companies. I'm providing different types of
(48:24):
services and it's a great organization. If you don't know
much about it, I would highly recommend that you check
them out. Go to their website. You know, it's pretty
straightforward Pride Industries. If you can come to the event
May twenty first, we'd love to have you there. The
seating capacity is limited, about forty to fifty. We're going
to be sending out invites here pretty soon. We have
(48:46):
a really good lineup of speakers that day. As I mentioned,
Trevor Hot's gonna give us an update on California labor law.
Scott and John pyrin the Business Doctor are going to
be speaking about business planning. Session planning. Andrew's going to
be conducting the day. That morning it's a morning event,
(49:06):
by the way, so we'll have everyone in and out
before noon. Dave Spins just going to talk a little about,
you know, the IT side. So it's going to be
a great day. And then, as I mentioned, Jeff Turnett,
the actual president of Pride Industry. He is are keynote
speaker and just a wonderful human being, a great opportunity.
(49:27):
It is going to be a charitable event, so we're
not asking for you know, money from anyone to register
to come to event. It's free, but we will have
a link to make contributions if you feel so inclined.
So so anyway with that, guys, and let's say you
have something else you want to add up. I'll let
you get back to your day. But I really appreciate
(49:48):
you y'all showing up and looking sharp and showered and
shaved and everything. Yeah, looking good man, all right, thanks Jeff,
all right, appreciate you guys. Talk to you soon, all right,
Lets soon, take care.
Speaker 4 (50:07):
M m hmm.
Good morning everybody. This is Jeff Turner, your host for
(00:03):
another podcast with Benefits and Brief and I've got some
special guests on the show today. Before I get to
introducing them, there's a couple of housekeep keeping items I
wanted to take care of. We're going to be highlighting
the Sacramento Executives Network today. This is a new network
here in Sacramentos, and we'll talk about that in a second,
(00:24):
and their mission and how involved they are in the
business community. My name, as I mentioned, is Jeff Turner.
I am the senior partner for the Allura Group here
in Sacramento. The Allua Group is an insurance company created
twenty seventeen. We are a national firm over a billion
(00:46):
dollars in revenue. We handle all of the business insurance
needs for the business and running your business, everything from
employee benefits to workers comp and all the boxes are
checked there. I want to give each of these gentlemen
that are on the call right now an opportunity to
talk a little bit about themselves, but I'm gonna try
(01:10):
to do my best not to embarrass them. So I've
got a little I've got something here I'm going to
bring up and I'm gonna give them an opportunity to
talk about themselves. But I've got the Sacramento Executives Network
website up right now, and the guests that we have
on the call today, these are three of the members.
(01:32):
The Sacramento Executives Network was created for businesses to help
them in these hard times. It's difficult to build a business,
grow that business and keep it profitable, and you need
good experts and professionals to do that. So we created this,
as I mentioned three years ago, with that intent. You
(01:53):
can go to sackexec dot net to look at our
website and get in for more information about out the
members of the network, and we'll put that in in
the chat here in a minute. But uh, you know,
the tagline for Sacramon Executive Executive Network is experience, insight
and leadership, and I would I would concur with that
(02:15):
these these gentlemen on the call today certainly bring that
to the table. So with that, I'm go go ahead
and just say hi to uh. So the three members
are on the call now, We've got mister Andrew tag here.
He's he's our he's our banking professional. Dave Spencer, he's
our website, slash I T expert Scott Leslie, he's our
(02:41):
our investment advisor, works for Edward Jones and mister Eric Graves,
attorney elect select an elect Right. Yeah, yeah, thanks for
showing up, Budd. I appreciate it. Know you had a
court appearance earlier this morning, so ready hopefully that went well. So,
(03:04):
as I mentioned SECONDMENTSIC Network was created three years ago
to serve the business community, and I feel we've done
a pretty good job of that so far. We've got
some events that are coming up and I'll talk about
that at the end of the podcast. That's on May
twenty first at a local business called Pride Industries. Many
of you might know and are familiar with Pride Industries.
(03:28):
We're excited to co host that with them, and Jeff
Dern will be our keynote speaker for that event. So
what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna give each of
these gentlemen to a time to talk a little bit
about themselves and what they do. This will be interactive,
you know, I'm going to throw it out there if
any of the members want to try to stump the
(03:50):
guests as they're speaking, I'm okay with that.
Speaker 2 (03:53):
So we'll go.
Speaker 1 (03:54):
We'll start with mister Andrew. Tag so Andrew, and looking
at your background and your profile, you've been in the
banking business quite a while, about thirty years if I
remember right, it's right.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
Jeff.
Speaker 2 (04:09):
First of all, I'm thrilled to be on your podcast.
Speaker 4 (04:11):
I couldn't sleep last night thinking about appearing on this
esteemed show that you run and host.
Speaker 2 (04:18):
And you know you're you know, you're.
Speaker 4 (04:20):
Such an influential member of the region and what you do,
and so very excited and so kind.
Speaker 1 (04:28):
Buddy, I'm sorry that we interrupted your sweep pattern last night.
Speaker 5 (04:33):
He did go to see the other Sacramento Executive Network
members on this call, and yeah, Eric Graves, you looked
like a new man there.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
You know, hopefully the court case went really well today.
I like it. The white shirt and jacket.
Speaker 1 (04:55):
He looks start, buddy, he's well represented.
Speaker 2 (04:58):
It looks like you got a haircut an it's close shave.
Speaker 1 (05:02):
Today too, so I needed so there you go.
Speaker 2 (05:06):
But no, I'm excited to be here.
Speaker 4 (05:07):
And Jeff, when you started this three years ago, I
thought it was a great idea that Sacramento Executives Network.
Speaker 2 (05:13):
We've grown it. You know, my banking career matches perfectly.
Speaker 4 (05:19):
With what your vision was in terms of being customer centric,
helping clients achieve their goals, being part of their team.
Really is what my goal as a banker is is
to really have them look at me as you know,
an extension of their senior management team and for all
things banking, not only all things banking, but you know,
(05:40):
a referral source for other things, whether it be a
you know, a commercial broker, assurance agent, you know, an
it individual investments, a business attorney, and how you put
this group together, you've kind of made it nice to
to include those those referral sources, those COIs to introduce
(06:06):
to clients as as they as they need additional services,
and they may not know they need additional services until
you introduce somebody that gives them a different perspective, analyzes
what they're currently engaged in, and proposes maybe other ways
of doing things, new services, new opportunities, looking at the
(06:27):
cash flow, you know, expenses that maybe can be trimmed down.
Speaker 2 (06:33):
And so that's what I really love doing. I love
helping clients. I love seeing them.
Speaker 4 (06:37):
Grow and and from you know, from a.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
Beginning to to to a mid sized.
Speaker 4 (06:44):
Company and currently with River Valley Community Bank. As you know,
I just joined.
Speaker 2 (06:51):
Them about.
Speaker 4 (06:53):
Three weeks ago, and it's a community bank based out
of youb City in Marysville, but we have locations in
Grass Valley and Auburn, and I'm the market manager for
Roseville and South Plasters, so I'm really building out this
unit here in the South Plaster region. I have clients
throughout Sacramento those so we're also you know, helping those clients.
(07:17):
And it's a real exciting opportunity, new chapter in my
banking career of thirty years, and as I.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
Told my new employer, this is my last stop.
Speaker 4 (07:31):
But my background really is a combination of lending and
depository slash treasury management products and really just helping clients
achieve their goals and be a source, a problem solver
and help them get to where they need to be
and where they want to be in their individual business
cycles and personal safe And I enjoy doing this and
(07:55):
it's been a great career and I love connecting with
folks in branding the organization and being active in the
community serving on various boards and as you know, I'm
also an elected school board member, which I've done here
in Plaster County for the last eight plus years, and
I enjoy serving education and that's, you know, the backbone,
(08:19):
that's the great equalizer of course, education for all individuals
throughout the state, the country is education. And so I'm
a big proponent make sure everybody's getting that opportunity to
learn and to strive for goals and have that opportunity.
Is that only makes our economy that much better. So
(08:41):
I'm excited and I appreciate the UJEF hosting this and
being part of this.
Speaker 1 (08:46):
Yeah. Absolutely. But Andrew, there were a couple of things
that you mentioned that I feel it's important maybe to
just kind of bring to the forefront. You talked about
helping a business, not just in the lending aspect or
making deposits to your bank, but it sounds like you're
more interestingly involved in actually looking at you know, the
p and ls, the spreadsheets and helping them to maybe
(09:10):
look at some areas where they can trim the fat,
so to speak, or do better. Would that be fair
to say that you're you're more involved in just you know,
a lending institution or individual consultant.
Speaker 4 (09:20):
Yeah, No, I was just medi I'm at a client
and just this week and he may not be.
Speaker 2 (09:25):
He has some financing needs, but basically he.
Speaker 4 (09:28):
Gave he gave me his P and L and balance
sheet to review, and so my job in this case
will be to analyze those numbers and give him feedback
on where I think he needs to go.
Speaker 2 (09:38):
And he understands this that he may be.
Speaker 4 (09:40):
A few months away from, you know, qualifying for a
line of credit, but it's an opportunity to to really
dive into it and.
Speaker 2 (09:53):
Keep some feed.
Speaker 1 (09:55):
One of the questions I had is maybe you can
help explain to the audience what what is the advantage
or a difference between a community bank and let's say,
you know, a Bank of America using as an example.
Speaker 2 (10:08):
The community banks.
Speaker 4 (10:08):
Really, I think it's more invested in the actual local
community involved in you know, local decision making helps make
a difference versus a bigger bank where it's all centralized
and maybe it's located in North Carolina or Minnesota. You actually,
you know, can have conversations with the chief credit officer
(10:29):
at a bank. At a community bank, you can take
the chief credit officer out on calls. You can take
the CEO president out on calls. You can't do that
at bigger banks, So you really get to know the
business owners, get to know our decision makers. The people
that the board of directors are local, so they get
to know the board of directors.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
They're engaged in the process of developing the business as well.
Speaker 4 (10:52):
And I just think there's much a closer connection with
a community bank than you're going to get with.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
The bigger banks. I've worked for the bigger banks. They
do a lot of things well.
Speaker 4 (11:04):
I just think for small and medium sized businesses, the
community bank really is much more positioned to engage the process,
be more nimble with the process, be more commutative with
the process, and be more.
Speaker 2 (11:21):
Of a consultative entity with those businesses then the bigger
banks can. Not to say, the.
Speaker 4 (11:29):
Bigger banks has some really good people there that can
do this stuff, but you've got a collection from the
top down that's located in in the community engaged with
these businesses.
Speaker 1 (11:43):
Yeah, that's helpful. I think that it's important to understand
those differences, you know. I mean, the bigger banks have
a bigger budget, so they're they're more front of you know,
of their audiences, you know, on TV, et cetera, radio,
So I think that, you know, it's important to understand
(12:03):
what those differences are and certainly involve the community in
the discussion.
Speaker 2 (12:09):
Yeah, so.
Speaker 1 (12:12):
I might come back to you. There was a couple
other things I kind of wanted to highlight, you know,
kind of your passion for education, as you mentioned, you've
served on in a couple of boards, and I'd like
to come back to that, but I think, you know,
I'll kind of I'll segue over to Scott right now,
because I think that what he does, you know, is
(12:33):
kind of what you say, a partner to what you
doing in the banking industry. He's on the financial side,
and you might have might have some input there in
terms of, you know, how he works with his clients
and maybe there's some commonalities there and where you guys
share on that. But Scott, Ima, go ahead, turn the
(12:53):
time over to you and give you an opportunity to
talk about a little about yourself. And there's a couple
items and that I want to highlight. Okay, great, Yeah.
Speaker 2 (13:02):
So yeah, So, like.
Speaker 6 (13:05):
Andrew, we do take a very client focused approach to
how we do do our business. I make sure I
take enough time to get to know my clients and
businesses really well in order to make sure that we
can have a plan that's really tailored to them.
Speaker 2 (13:27):
I did.
Speaker 6 (13:28):
I did pursue three different professional certifications, and I'm going
to highlight those just because it kind of gives you
a well rounded picture of what what I can do
to help businesses and individuals with their you know, grow
and protect their wealth. And so the first one's an
asset management specialist, and that's kind of what you typically
(13:51):
think of in terms of a financial advisor, making sure
that that we manage your assets really well. And I
like to always make the distinction between investments and speculation.
So so I like to to take care of people's
long term assets for their long term goals. So typically
(14:15):
that's you know, retirement plans, whether it's a four one
K plan or accept irah or somebody's just personal IRA
and so, you know, so there's good, tried and true principles.
If you implement them, you're gonna you're gonna grow your wealth,
and so you don't have We were just talking earlier
(14:36):
before we started the podcast about you know, all the
different issues that come across with the economy, whether it's
tariffs or interest rates, or what the Fed's doing or
lots of different things. And if you have a really
good long term plan, we really don't need to get
(14:57):
so worried about the short term hiccup with the economy.
Speaker 2 (15:02):
So I do.
Speaker 6 (15:03):
I love to help businesses, but I'm really I tend to
really focus in on the business owner. They have some
unique demands on them because they're trying to manage their business,
manage their family, take care of their employees. And so
I really if I can provide really good service to
the business owner, I'm going to have really good impact
(15:24):
on both their personal life, on their on their professional life,
and also on the employees that they that they have
and that they serve. The other certification certified Exit Planning
Advisor kind of fits in with when I'm talking about
business owners, you know, and so exit planning you think
(15:46):
of succession planning. You know, you're putting your your your blood,
sweat and tears into your business and then ideally you
want to try to sell it someday. Here's an interesting
stat Only thirty percent of businesses that go up for
sale actually sell. That's crazy, what you know, And so
(16:07):
it's like why is that? Well, there are a lot
of reasons to it, and a lot of business owners
they they're kind of their business. And so you know,
if you have a small business, have you taken the
time to basically replace yourself, to put in the team
and the processes to be effective. And so that's something
(16:29):
that as an exit planning advisor, we work on building
the value of your business today, making sure that we
can improve your processes so that you can have a
good exit later. And that process typically takes, you know,
you really want to give it five years. So even
if you're you know, you're not really thinking about selling
(16:51):
your business now, we need to start working on it
today to do the things today that's going to provide
value in the future. The other reason why businesses don't
sell is because the business owner thinks, hey, I got
this great business. I'm bringing in all this revenue, it's
got to be worth ten million dollars or whatever. But
you really got to end up putting yourself in the
(17:12):
shoes of the buyer and and look at the comps,
you know, and try to figure out, Okay, what does
the buyer think my business is worth, because that's what
I'm going to get at the end of the day.
And so so kind of getting that sense of reality
around the value of the business is something that can
be very very very helpful in the process.
Speaker 1 (17:35):
It's got it. This is you mentioned, you know, thirty percent.
I hadn't heard that number before. That's that's a pretty
alarming number, you know, when you consider how many small
businesses are out there, entrepreneurs are making pretty good money.
Right to only have thirty percent of those businesses actually
(17:55):
being able to sell when they get to that point,
that's pretty concerned. Learning And this is actually I'll do
a little plug for our event that's coming up on
May twenty first at Pride Industries. This is a topic
we're going to cover that day in depth, more in depth,
i should say, and what business owners need to do
to prepare for that. There's a lot of different variables
(18:17):
that involved, right Scott. You're you're just talking about just
the the actual planning and thinking ahead of it. There's
more to the story, right, I mean, the risks involved
in finding maybe somebody internally to take There's a lot
of different ways to approach that, right, Yes, absolutely.
Speaker 6 (18:37):
And you know also you know, the business owner he's
put it, like I said, put their life, his life
has blood, sweat and tears into the business. And then
sometimes it's hard to let go. And then if you
do let go, then what are you going to do?
Speaker 7 (18:54):
Right?
Speaker 6 (18:54):
Sometimes they just they just hang on too long and
don't really you know, build build the team around them
to be able to to carry that business on in
the future.
Speaker 1 (19:07):
Yeah, I can always rely upon family to bring in
family members to continue to run the business. I've seen
this so many times in my years, where you know
an owner, he's assuming that you know, the Dutch son
or the daughter's going to come in and you know,
do what he's done or what she's done, and that
doesn't That doesn't always play out that way.
Speaker 6 (19:28):
Yeah, usually it usually it doesn't. And I have some
access to some consultants specifically around family dynamics, because there's
always dynamics when you're talking about family, especially when you
talk about family and money, it can be a real
a real doozy. And if if you can get that
outside perspective on how to develop a good plan, usually
(19:51):
you can come up with a good plan that's gonna
win for the owner, for the kids, for the family,
and a lot of times it's it's not having them
take over the business.
Speaker 1 (19:59):
You I think you would agree, there's there's a there's
actually a very you know, big risk that if I
just assume that, hey, when I retire or I pass away,
that you know, hey, my business is going to be
worth X. And yeah that's not always the case.
Speaker 6 (20:17):
Yeah, it's rare. It's it's rarely the case, which is
also then you're then you're dealing with somebody's ego or
pride of like, yeah, I thought out a ten million
dollar business, I'm getting offered one point five right, Yeah, Yeah,
that's a great, great point you brought up there.
Speaker 1 (20:34):
I think it's important that we help business owners with that,
and you certainly are the the expert go to on
the team for that. You guys have to you know,
before we move on to our next guest, do you
guys have any anybody questions comments for Andrew or Scott
(20:54):
before we we move on.
Speaker 6 (20:58):
The only other thing I want to touch on before
we move on, as I went and pursued my certification
for it to be a Kingdom advisor, which is which
is really more getting into.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
The why of earning.
Speaker 6 (21:17):
You know, you spend all this time trying to create wealth,
but why are you creating it? What's it for? So
obviously you know you want to have a good life.
You want to provide for your family. But also you know,
I like to go into those questions of you know,
what impact do you want to have on the community.
And something I like about our Sacrament of Executives network
(21:37):
as we're I tend to have that perspective of hey,
how can we help our community, help how can we
help others? And then also your legacy. You know, if
you're gonna do build this business, build build your wealth,
you know, again, what's it for? What do you want
to leave behind? And a lot of times people don't
have those types of conversations h and if you have
(22:00):
them early on, sometimes it can really impact what you
do now as well as what happens to your wealth
once you serve them now.
Speaker 1 (22:07):
I appreciate that you know the why behind it. You
know why why you're doing what you're doing, But then
why are you doing it? And you know, what do
you want the outcome to be? Eventually? Yep, I love
that you just talked about serving the business community. I
know you you also, like Andrew, serve on some community boards.
You mind sharing that real quick with the group.
Speaker 6 (22:28):
Yeah, I've been on the board on the board of
trustees at SIRA College for the last twenty years, which
I can't believe it's been that long. But so that's
an elected position. So I represent Roseville on that board.
It's a pretty big district.
Speaker 3 (22:43):
You know.
Speaker 6 (22:43):
We go all the way up to Trucky. We have
a campus up in truck Campus and Grass Valley, and
then we're currently expanding out to out by the Dump
in Roseville doing a joint campus with sack State. So
there's a lot of exciting things happening. But I do
I do enjoy that that aspects. It's the largest employer
(23:06):
in UH in Rockland. Anyway, great, thank you for thanks
for sharing that. I appreciate your your service there. So
thanks Scott. You know, if there's any questions, we'll come
back to you.
Speaker 3 (23:17):
Guys.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
I don't see any right now, but we're going to
go to the middle of the lineup Jung Hole, Oh,
Dave Spencer and me so and then Eric Graves is
going to be hitting forth the Aaron judge of the
group today. So uh so, Dave, go ahead, let's let's
uh let's let's dive into what you've been doing. Buddy.
You're you're you're pretty well known in the car industry
(23:41):
for what you do, and maybe talk a little about
how you have helped the car industry and what were
you doing before you were building websites.
Speaker 3 (23:49):
Uh, well, I was the last place I was working
before I got involved with the Internet. I was actually
working at Foundation Health Plan as a computer consultant there,
which is a company you probably are familiar with, and
we were doing a big project to convert all of
their systems from Hewlett Packard over to another company called
(24:12):
Digital Equipment Corporation. And after that project was completed and
I went to work at the California State Legislature, they
had a big conversion project where they were converting all
of their office systems to a platform all in one,
and that was all going well and fine. While we
(24:33):
were doing that, this is about nineteen ninety three, and
I had a workstation, which is one of these predecessors
to like the Windows PCs that everybody uses. And one
of the applications we had installed on it was a
thing called Mosaic, which was the first Internet web browser.
And there weren't very many websites out there, but I
(24:55):
thought this was actually had some legs. It was very
primitive and crude, but you know, more websites kept showing
up every day, and there was this thing called Yahoo
that was trying to by hand do an index of
all the websites that were available. And I thought this
was a really interesting thing and I wanted to be
involved with it, having missed some other revolutionary technologies in
(25:19):
the past. So I actually got I had a workstation
that I owned that was at my house, so I
got an Internet connection, which was at the time the
best you could do was an ISDN line, which is
about like speed modem speed, and put a web browser
and not a web browser, web server on it, and
(25:41):
started giving away websites. So I was thinking, Worldwide Web,
who's going to be using the World Wide Web? Well,
probably people that are not in your local community, somewhere
like on the other side of the world. So I
went down to Old Sacramento, and I thought there they'd
get a lot of people to come to the Railroad Museum,
(26:03):
to the Delta King, into the historic gold Rush area
in general. So those would be really good people to
put on the Internet, because somebody, say a tourist from Germany,
would like to know more about Old sac before they
actually got there. So I went down to Old Sacramento.
I found the presidents of the president of the Merchants Association,
(26:24):
who was a fellow that actually he ran an old
collectible bookstore and his bookstore, he was already selling on
the internet, but he was using America Online and he
was very interested in putting a website together because he
wanted to reach of course, more customers. So we formed
a partnership, built started a company, and we gave away
(26:46):
Because nobody knew what internet was even was or what
websites were even worth, we just gave away websites. So
we went ga a website to all of the merchants
and Old Sacramento. We went to the Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce.
We gave the Chamber of Commerce, we went to all
(27:06):
of their events, and we had a little booth and
we gave away websites to all the people that wanted websites.
The president of the Chamber at that period of time
was a fellow named Roger Nilo, who's currently a State Senator.
Roger is at the time was running the Neilo Company,
which is a luxury auto import dealership chain here in Sacramento.
(27:28):
So we gave them away. I gave them a website
so we did that for a couple of years, went
to a lot of meetings, explained to people what modems were,
and you know, what the internet was and so forth.
And then after a couple of years, some of the
customers they started having people started asking what's your website address?
Where can I find you on the web. And then
(27:49):
the light went on. It's like, hey, I need to
have a website. Oh wait a minute, I do have
a website. So they started to pay us money to
actually do updates to it. The Nilo people started putting
their inventory online, and it turns out they became like
one of my biggest customers. Uh, you know, I wound
up doing websites for all of the dealership locations. We
(28:11):
put up some very sophisticated stuff, like the Porsche dealership. They're,
you know, a high end people that buy Porsches, they're
they're like toys, and they want to usually have them
very customize exactly the way they want them. Well, Porsche
is more than happy to do that, and so we
put their whole build your Porsche thing online so you
(28:33):
can actually customer configure your car exactly you went the
way you wanted it via the website. So it was
those sort of services that we put together that that
made the whole thing work.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
So that so that's interesting, Uh that you bring that
up and I saw that on your bio because now
just I would just think that it's a commonplace for me,
I go to buy a car, if I want to
customize it, that the the websites allow me to do that.
So you're saying that this was it sounds like kind
of groundbreaking almost.
Speaker 3 (29:04):
What you were doing doing it before anybody.
Speaker 1 (29:06):
Was Wow, that's uh, that's pretty interesting. You were a
trailblazer there.
Speaker 3 (29:17):
Yeah, it was. It was exciting times we did. We
did a lot of great stuff with them, and I've
worked for them still due to this day. I've been
working on their website stuff for twenty five years. Or
they're a great customer.
Speaker 2 (29:31):
One.
Speaker 3 (29:32):
I highly recommend anybody who wants to buy a car
go talk to NEI.
Speaker 1 (29:35):
Though, go to go talk to Needle. And Roger's not
involved anymore, is he.
Speaker 3 (29:40):
No, he he's handed it off as uh yeah one
no runs is the chief financial ricause his brother still
runs the company. But it's a family health company that's
uh does a very very good business.
Speaker 1 (29:57):
So so Dave you know, the website. It is still
important for business, right because that if I'm if I'm
trying to get information about a company, the contact within
the company, I'll go to their website. But what else
in addition to just the website? How have we progressed?
(30:18):
And what what when you're meeting with a customer? Now,
what what? What is the discussion points?
Speaker 2 (30:23):
Now?
Speaker 3 (30:24):
Well, everybody wants to be first on Google. That's that's
the number one thing is that they want to have.
They want to be able to say that if somebody
searches for something, that that their business is going to
come up number one, which is wonderful. But there's millions
and millions of websites out there, so you know, unless
(30:45):
you're going to get very specific, it's difficult to guarantee
that you can come up number one. But there are
things that you can do. There are techniques that that
you can utilize.
Speaker 6 (30:55):
It.
Speaker 3 (30:55):
We'll make sure that we get you the best results
possible and which to hear what some of those that aren't.
Speaker 1 (31:02):
So it sounds like the search engines are kind of
the primary driver now to these websites.
Speaker 3 (31:09):
Your engine optimization CEO, that's what people want.
Speaker 1 (31:12):
To Yeah, and it costs more money. Right, if I
want to be first on line, it's going to cost
me a pretty penny would I would that be fair
or no?
Speaker 3 (31:22):
No, it's Google's a free service, and so there's a
lot of people out there that will charge a lot
of money. But the secrets are basically Google primarily focuses
on text. If you're if you have a website, you
want to have a lot of text on your website
that describes exactly what it is that your business does.
(31:44):
And the more description, the better you're ranking. And as
well as but just talk about yourself and do the
best you can to describe when your business does.
Speaker 1 (31:57):
And that will mate when you say text, you're talking
about keywords.
Speaker 3 (32:02):
Now keywords and and you know, just generally describe your business,
what your services are, what what you you know, all
the things that that your business can do. You can
have lots of pretty pictures, but next for search engine
is really the best.
Speaker 1 (32:18):
Sure, yeah, okay, that makes sense.
Speaker 3 (32:20):
Uh.
Speaker 1 (32:21):
Dave is going to give some advice at the event
as well. He's going to get an opportunity to talk
little more about what we're discussing right now. Just kind
of stay to the art and what's going on and
how we can you can optimize. Uh, you know, your
your your your audience out there. So looking forward to that, Dave.
(32:43):
You know, before I turned it over to Eric, I
know you're you are involved in the community as well.
You serve I believe you serve on some different boards, chamber,
et cetera. But you're also very passionate about your h
o A. Maybe just share that real quick. Yes, somebody
that loves doing that. I don't know why, but I'll
(33:03):
let you explain.
Speaker 3 (33:06):
Each way is the most intense personal form of politics
because after everything is said and done, you have to
go home and you live next to your neighbor who
may not have agreed about certain things. I live the
Gold River and Gold River is a series of twenty
five villages. There's twenty seven hundred and thirty five homes,
(33:28):
so they broke them up so the villages are about
maybe one hundred and twenty homes per village. And last
year I was the president of our village that we
live in. There is a Master Association that oversees all
of the villages and I'm running for the HUA board
that for that association. So wish be luck the election.
(33:55):
Ballots will all be counted in the middle of May,
and hopefully I'll be successful be one of the new directors.
Speaker 1 (34:04):
Right, great good stuff. Gold River, by the way is
part of Ranch of Cordova, but you do have your
own zip code, so you guys are recognized as a
small city.
Speaker 3 (34:14):
Oh wonderful.
Speaker 1 (34:15):
Yeah, I just thought i'd throw that in. Thank you, Dave.
If we need to, we'll come back to you, but
I'm gonna go ahead and turn over the time now
to Eric Graves. Hey there, Jeff, good morning body. You're
looking at you are looking at sharp Day. Look at
He's handsome man. He does clean up well, Andrew, Andrew
(34:35):
eyes look sharp, Yeah he does so. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (34:40):
My name is Eric Grayts and I've been an attorney
here in the Sacramento area for about thirty years. Through
the course of my legal career, I've had a lot
of different experience in a lot of different areas. But
if you have to distill it down and be primarily
within business, real estate, employment, and both on the litigation
(35:01):
side and the transactional side. So it helps with add
for you to kind of bounce around to a bunch
of different areas of law. The other thing that's useful
with respect to that is you have a lot of
information as you can impart to people, and there's a
lot of crossover in terms of facts in terms of law,
and it allows you to kind of structure solutions to
problems that maybe someone who just practiced in one particular
(35:24):
area couldn't do.
Speaker 8 (35:26):
So that's been useful.
Speaker 7 (35:29):
So the practice for me within the last i'd say
fifteen years has been geared about fifty percent transactional getting
businesses off the ground, doing asset purchase agreements by sales,
joint venture agreements, that kind of thing. And basically in
that regard, being a former small business owner myself, I'm
(35:49):
able to give a lot of personal insight in terms
of proper business direction and what have you.
Speaker 2 (35:54):
With that.
Speaker 7 (35:56):
From the litigation side, my primary goal at the point
is to basically counsel people to avoid litigation. It's turned
out to be not the best investment for a lot
of my clients and they're generally better off trying to
think outside the box and come up with a solution
that doesn't involve having to file a lawsuit and waiting
(36:16):
four years or five years for that to resolve. Little
counterintuitive for an attorney because I can't build for that,
but I'm going to bring that up.
Speaker 8 (36:26):
If you get good results, people will come back.
Speaker 7 (36:28):
And they were for people over too, and that's basically
been my business model throughout the time I had my
own firm, and now I'm with the Firmer Smith McDonald
Powell in Sacramento and help them put together their firm
back when they formed, I want to say, been about
eleven or twelve years that they've been around, and they've
(36:49):
established themselves very well in the local market, representing real
estate developers, a lot of construction things, and a ton
of transactional works. So it's a good group, good team
and well connected and all that. So all those connections
and all those little wealths of knowledge that people have
really helped in terms of trying to drive solutions forward.
Speaker 1 (37:14):
I noticed that on your bio, you know, you know,
you went to McGeorge School, the Law University of the Pacific,
very well known entities here in the greater Sacramento area.
I noticed that you're majoring in college was journalism, So
you know, where were you What were your thoughts, you know,
(37:34):
going into college, were you actually thinking about maybe getting
into journalism, what happened to what you turned to the
attorney's side.
Speaker 7 (37:43):
So what happened was I started college as an advertising manager.
Speaker 8 (37:48):
And the reason I did.
Speaker 7 (37:50):
That is I thought a lot of advertising was bad
and poorly put together, and so I thought I could
change that around. And then I got into my classes
and found out and it's a formula. It doesn't matter
if it's good or bad, it's what works, and you
have to stay within those lines. At the same time,
I started taking a journalism class and ended up being
(38:11):
on staff of the paper at cal State Fullerton, and
that helped me so much in terms of my writing
and trying.
Speaker 8 (38:20):
To make deadlines.
Speaker 7 (38:22):
All that has been an extraordinarily useful in practicing law
as well. When I graduated, I had a job offer
from the La Times. He was going to pay about
twelve thousand dollars a year, so I was going to
end up having to split an apartment with three other guys.
So already the signs were there that maybe journalism wasn't
(38:43):
going to be the most profitable career that I could choose,
and so I decided to go to law school at
that point and graduated from George which was a really
great experience. I like a lot of attorneys enjoyed practice
are going to law school, and I got a.
Speaker 8 (39:01):
Great education there. I feel like I made the right
choice at that particular time.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:06):
Yeah, And you did mention you know, you've owned businesses.
I think that's important for our audience to understand that
you bring that knowledge and background to the table. Yeah.
Speaker 7 (39:17):
It really builds a lot of empathy in terms of
when you have clients that have small businesses. And I've
had a couple of cases within the last two years
where someone has done something that has jeopardized a small
business that people worked hard to establish, and for whatever reason,
that that just gets the empathy gone, ignites my passion
(39:37):
to make sure that whoever's messing with them doesn't get
away with it.
Speaker 2 (39:42):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (39:42):
Yeah, And I will say, you know, and I think
the group would concur you know, Eric is you know,
I don't even I guess would this would be the
right word.
Speaker 3 (39:51):
I think.
Speaker 1 (39:51):
I think I think you're benevolent. Let me put it
that way, because you know, you mentioned that you know, hey,
I'm going to try to help my client of litigation,
and like you said, it's kind of counterintuitive to counter
intuitive to in terms of what you think about in
terms of attorneys and how they get compensated. And the
longer you know, you drag this out, the more money
(40:12):
you're going to make.
Speaker 7 (40:14):
So yeah, I mean, you get people at a very
emotionally vulnerable position for the most part. Unless you know,
there's some people who can have ten lawsuits going at
the same time.
Speaker 8 (40:22):
Don't bother them at all. They sleep like a baby
every night.
Speaker 7 (40:27):
That's not the case, and so you know, you really
have to be able to go, hey, I know you're
upset right now, but do you really want to put
a bunch of money into this at this particular point.
Speaker 8 (40:41):
With uncertain results? And some people do.
Speaker 7 (40:44):
We have clients that are you know, we have a
large developer client that he's rolled those DIYCE many times
and it's worked out for him. But you've got to
have a lot of money to play that game, and
not many people do.
Speaker 8 (40:57):
And so whenever I have a client come in and go, well, the.
Speaker 7 (41:00):
Principle of the matter or I just want to get justice,
it's like, well, you've got to have a big checkbook
for that. So you might want to just get the
best economic outcome you can get and be happy with that.
Speaker 1 (41:12):
So you're pretty upfront with the client, you know, like
this is this is what it's looking like if we
go down this path.
Speaker 7 (41:20):
Yeah, I mean I've seen other attorneys you sell and
try to basically get people flamed up to go and litigate.
Speaker 8 (41:28):
And a good sophisticated client can see that. But a
lot of people don't. This is their first.
Speaker 7 (41:34):
Experience and they just end up, you know, putting good
money after bad and when it comes down to it,
my objective is always to get a better economic outcome
than they would have got if they would have seen
somebody besides me.
Speaker 1 (41:48):
Yeah, it sounds like the situation it can be very
emotional based on like.
Speaker 7 (41:56):
Pretty much and for most people that's going to be
the biggest conflict that you have maybe in your entire life.
And you know, for others, like I said, there's clients
that we have that have any litigation going on.
Speaker 8 (42:11):
They just and usually hey, there's pretty successful people.
Speaker 7 (42:15):
So says something for compartmentalization and the ability to continue
to work when you've got a bunch of potential, you know,
disastrous events are surrounding you.
Speaker 1 (42:25):
So yeah, it's it's uh, it's interesting because uh, you
know we've got well, our one of our team members
who kind of quasi oh emeritus status. Uh uh, Trevor Watson,
He's going to be speaking at our event. He's a
(42:47):
labor law attorney. I know that you get get into
that as well. You mentioned by sell agreements. I think
that's important to bring up, you know, in conjunction with
what Scott was talking about, in terms of plan right
planning for eventual risks. If you will, you maybe talk
a little bit about that. Is that something that comes
across your table very much.
Speaker 7 (43:09):
I mean, it's almost standard every time you're forming a
corporation with somebody else. The primary reason usually is people
don't want to be in business with other people's family
in case somebody dies, but there can be a ton
of other reasons to put together by sell.
Speaker 8 (43:24):
So it's just almost standard.
Speaker 7 (43:27):
Operating procedure that when you're forming a corporation with another shareholder,
you're going to want that by sell in place.
Speaker 8 (43:32):
And it's not complicated.
Speaker 7 (43:33):
I mean from the transactional side, the more transactions you do,
the more templates you get, the faster you are, the
more efficient you are and getting to the point where
you can really go through these relatively complicated transactions and
have something out in front of you, so you're not
reinventing the wheel every time.
Speaker 8 (43:49):
Is extremely helpful to the client.
Speaker 1 (43:52):
Yeah, I would second that, and I think it's super important.
There's so many times I've I've worked with a a
sole proprietor or a small business or a partnership and
they don't have anything in place, and you know, that's
that's a big, big potential problem. As you mentioned, you know,
do I really want to be working with my partner's wife. Yeah. Yeah,
(44:18):
So you know, Eric brings that expertise and knowledge to
the table. It's super important to have that risk covered
as well. So so what what what do you like
to do in your spare time?
Speaker 3 (44:31):
Eric?
Speaker 1 (44:31):
You know, I know you've got a lot of different interests,
but what what what excites you?
Speaker 7 (44:37):
Well, I mean as far as you talked about community
outreach and involvement and stuff, so you know, my days
of doing that are kind of paused right now. But
you know, I was the president of my own association Dad,
and I also worked with KASA, which is organization helps
foster kids, and I was on their board of directors
and then after being on the board for about five years,
(45:00):
I believe I decided to actually volunteer and mentor a
foster youth and represent them in court, and that was
a very rewarding experience. But the most rewarding thing that
I did from a community outreach is managing coach baseball
when my son was playing, and that was just awesome
and just love helping people out and seeing kids develop
(45:23):
like that. It's it really was like kind of sort
of a dream scenario. Unfortunately I'm not very good at baseball,
and eventually all those kids got way better than I was.
Speaker 8 (45:36):
But then.
Speaker 1 (45:38):
You set the foundation for them, so sure I was
the tempteva of coaching. It's like nobody there you go.
I still remember my little league coach. So yeah, hey,
you're you're playing a big part in their in their development.
I think that's awesome. But so hey, guys, we're about
ready to wrap up here. I don't see any any questions,
(45:59):
but is there anything you guys want to add to
you know, all this before we journ? If you will
go ahead, Andrew, you're Andrew's trying to speak.
Speaker 6 (46:11):
I think the thing that I would add is just
how each of us has our area of expertise, but
the idea that we have a network with each other,
but then also our networks even beyond each other. So
I enjoy working with people's CPAs or state planning attorneys.
(46:35):
If they don't have one, then I'll then I'll find one,
you know. So we have our our core within our network,
but being able to provide resources broadly for any business
issue that comes up because we've all been around the
block and we all know a lot of people, a
lot of different disciplines. I think that's that's that's something
(46:56):
I really enjoy.
Speaker 1 (46:56):
With our That's a great point that you bring up, Sky,
And that's something I mentioned to all my clients. If
there's an issue, there's a question, there's a problem, you
need to reach out to a professional and expert in
another area. Chances are I know somebody and if I
(47:17):
don't know it, know somebody someone within my networking group
is going to be able to bring you know, that
specialist to the table where the b HR payroll. You know,
there's many different areas that the business needs help with
and support. So yeah, no, love that, love it. Any
(47:37):
other comments guys before we wrap up? Yeah, so before
we wrap up again, I'll mention that we are going
to have a business event on May twenty first at
Pride Industries. Anyone that is not familiar with Pride Industries,
they're They're a nonprofit organization. They employ mentally and physically
(48:01):
challenged individuals and they've got about five thousand employees all
across the country. They provide services for many large entities.
I think I want if I remember right, Andrew, I
think Walmart was one of them. But they do a
lot of work for companies. I'm providing different types of
(48:24):
services and it's a great organization. If you don't know
much about it, I would highly recommend that you check
them out. Go to their website. You know, it's pretty
straightforward Pride Industries. If you can come to the event
May twenty first, we'd love to have you there. The
seating capacity is limited, about forty to fifty. We're going
to be sending out invites here pretty soon. We have
(48:46):
a really good lineup of speakers that day. As I mentioned,
Trevor Hot's gonna give us an update on California labor law.
Scott and John pyrin the Business Doctor are going to
be speaking about business planning. Session planning. Andrew's going to
be conducting the day. That morning it's a morning event,
(49:06):
by the way, so we'll have everyone in and out
before noon. Dave Spins just going to talk a little about,
you know, the IT side. So it's going to be
a great day. And then, as I mentioned, Jeff Turnett,
the actual president of Pride Industry. He is are keynote
speaker and just a wonderful human being, a great opportunity.
(49:27):
It is going to be a charitable event, so we're
not asking for you know, money from anyone to register
to come to event. It's free, but we will have
a link to make contributions if you feel so inclined.
So so anyway with that, guys, and let's say you
have something else you want to add up. I'll let
you get back to your day. But I really appreciate
(49:48):
you y'all showing up and looking sharp and showered and
shaved and everything. Yeah, looking good man, all right, thanks Jeff,
all right, appreciate you guys. Talk to you soon, all right,
Lets soon, take care.
Speaker 4 (50:07):
M m hmm.
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