Chili’s, Children, and the CEO Playbook: Kevin Hochman’s Guide to Legacy

Can I just say this?

My kids, so Kevin, I've got a seven-year-old, an almost 5-year-old, and a 2-year-old. The 2-year-old doesn't know what's going on, but the seven-year-old and 5-year-old do not care about this podcast, but they love chili.

No doubt about it.

Yeah, I was the youngest of three boys. I grew up in Miami, Florida. My mom was like a real servant leader. So that's probably where I get it from, and it has helped me in hospitality. Today I've been the Brinker CEO for a little over three years. I'm on year four of our turnaround. We live in Dallas, Texas. I have two children and a wife of 23 years, and she's the love of my life. My children are Jane, who is 19, and she is a sophomore, an incoming sophomore at Wake Forest, where she is premed. We couldn't be more proud of her. This summer, she shadowed a neurosurgeon, and now I think she might be excited about surgery. She was telling me the stories about it, and I almost fainted just hearing about it. She's a really tough person. And then she's also been training to be an EMT, and she's doing her overnights now.

So, literally like riding around in an ambulance and treating people, and I had no idea. She's just grown up overnight. Incredible. And doing really well in school. And then I have a son, Alex, who's 17 years old. He is a student athlete. He does great in his studies here in Dallas as a senior in high school. But he's also a 6'5" volleyball player. So he's very tall. He got it from my wife's family. He's an awesome young man, just super kind. We couldn't be more pleased. I have to say, my wife has probably been the lead parent in this, and she's done a wonderful job. So I've been very blessed.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, you know his uncle. So my wife's tall. Andy McMillan. Incredible leader at Coca-Cola.

And yeah, Andy's tall. That's a I married good. So.

That's right.

I don't know if it's going to be on a club team or actually on a real team. I think he's trying to figure that out. But he's really talented, and we'll support him whatever he wants to do, whatever he's excited about. My job as a parent is just to support that. I don't want him to feel like he has any requirements. The only requirement is that he is excited about where he goes. So that's what we're going to support him on.

Yeah. Well, I think everybody would always want to spend more time with their children. So I don't want to declare I'm successful at it or not, but I do think it's important. I tell this to our employees that they have to make sure that they're deliberately making time for their family. One of my rules is if you have a choice between family and work, always choose family because they're going to still be around for you. Work may not be. So you have to trust that you've got to put the time in with your family and be there at the moments that are important. And there's lots of different physical things that you can do to protect your time. Not just about saying you're going to make the commitment. Like, I learned over the years having one calendar is a great way to protect your time because if you put all the key dates in, let's say you have your kids' sporting events or graduations or whatever it is, those dates a year in advance, there's no reason why you can't put that in the calendar, start of school year, and then lo and behold, people just schedule around it. Every once in a while you've got an unavoidable conflict and maybe it's a board meeting or something in your own career, but for the most part I would say 95 times out of a hundred that time gets protected, and then you've got to be like a dog on a bone and not let people schedule over it. So that's one thing that we do. Another thing that I do is I try to take deliberate vacations with my family and I get ahead of that a year in advance. So my wife knows that if she wants to do a last minute vacation, I'll do my best to go on it. But if we just get ahead of the schedule, it's much easier. So we've already got our next summer vacation, family vacation with other families booked for next summer, and we'll do the same thing the following summer. So that helps protect time. And then the last thing I try to do is deliberately have some vacations alone with the kids. I learned that from my CFO at KFC years ago where he would tell me when his kids were 13, they each get to go on a trip alone with each parent, which I thought was so cool. And I started it with Jane. We went to Portland, Oregon. She had never been to the Pacific Northwest. I had some kind of advertising presentation I needed to do on a Friday morning. I said, 'Hey, let's do a long weekend in Portland.' We had the best time ever. We went fishing, we went hiking. And she had never been in that part of the country. It was incredible. So that was the first time I did a deliberate trip alone with a child. And I try to do it more often. Most recently, my son and I went to Japan for spring break. With the girls. My daughter, when she was graduating from high school last year, she goes to a girls' school and they all go to Cabo with their moms. So I was like, 'Son, this is our chance. We can go anywhere in the world that you want to go.' And he said, 'I want to go to Japan.' I was like, 'I've never been to Japan either.' And we did a guys' trip. So he was at the time 16, and we're into eating and cooking and sports, and he loves history. And we just created a seven-day plan around that with the travel agent. And it was just the best time ever. I mean, I'll never have that chance again. But then this year for spring break, his mom could then come, and he's like, 'I want to go back to Asia.' We went to Vietnam. So it's not just the trip. It's like you're going to plan for that for six months. You're going to look up things together over dinner, like where should we go when we're in Hanoi and where should we go when we're in Tokyo? And so it's not just about the actual trip, which is amazing. It's that it gives you something to bond with them for a long period of time. And when they're at that age, you kind of have to figure out things that they want to do with you. You can't just say, 'Hey, we're going to go to the movies or we're going to go bowling or we're going to go to mini golf.' At this age, you have to think about what are you going to do to get them excited about spending time with you, and that's going to create some quality moments. Whether it's, my son when we lived in Louisville, we were members of a golf club and that was a thing that we could do together, and I got to play golf again because he wanted to play golf. But as they get older, it's a little bit harder to just say, 'Let's go do something.' You've got to figure out ways to create opportunities because they have their own independent lives.

Yeah, you know, I wish I was better. I saw when I was looking at some of the questions that you might ask, it made me think about that, and I was like, boy, I wish I was more deliberate about creating a culture at home. I tell you, I think about the chili head culture here. And that was here before I got here. I think I kind of reignited it because it maybe lost our way a little bit during COVID when everybody wasn't together. And there are lots of things that got challenged during COVID, and I've tried to reignite it here. But a chili head is someone that likes to serve others, and they don't take themselves too seriously because after all we're just selling margaritas and hamburgers, right? And we get joy in doing things together, especially if it's a busy service. So we're in the trenches together serving others, serving each other. And after that service, it's a huge accomplishment, a feeling of we did this together. And we try to do that at home where we don't take ourselves too seriously. It's funny, I think kids today actually put more pressure on themselves a lot of times than the parents do because they have so much access to all this information and people are also posting on social, so they're comparing themselves to others. And we just try to diffuse all that. My thing with my kids, and it's the same thing here at work, is how do we live up to the potential that we've been given? At the end of the day, it's more important to do that than to win or lose. Because if you can say, 'Hey, I showed up and I did everything in my power to realize whatever potential I've been given,' whatever happens happens. It doesn't matter. What matters is did you put all in that you needed to put in to give yourself a chance of being successful? That in itself is successful. So that's what we try to do with our kids. I don't really care what my son got on his APs, but I do care that he did his best in terms of studying for them and he felt prepared, and he ended up getting great APs. But I go out of my way to say, 'That's great, that's icing on the cake. But why I was proud of you was well before you ever got the grade because you did all the things to live up to your potential.' And that's all we can ask as parents, and that's all you can ask of yourself. At the end of the day, did you give it your all and were you deliberate about preparing and serving others? So that's probably the biggest thing I take from my work is making sure that our kids understand what success really looks like. It's not whether you get the job or whether you get the stock price, it's really did you give it your all. Did you put yourself in a position to have success based on the potential that you've been given? And if you can do that and look yourself in the mirror, you've already won. It doesn't really matter what the outcome is. There's a book by Bill Walsh, the late football coach for the San Francisco 49ers, called 'The Scoreboard Takes Care of Itself.' The whole idea was focus on the behaviors and the things to live up to what you can do. And if you do that, that other stuff will take care of itself. I couldn't agree more. I think people get hung up on 'Did I get into this college?' or 'Did I get this grade?' or 'Did I get this stock price?' or 'Did I get this customer service metric?' None of that matters. What matters is are you doing the things that are going to put you in a better position to deliver those metrics? But if you focus on the metrics, you're never going to get where you want to go. That's not focus on the metric. Anybody can game a metric. It's really are you doing the things in your power to better yourself and to live up to your potential. So that's probably the biggest thing I do with my kids is just making sure they understand what true success and true happiness looks like. Sometimes they believe me, sometimes they don't, but it's a journey and you've got to be patient with it.

Yeah, you know, I do. I have a formal corporate coach who's amazing. He was the Applebee's CEO for seven years a long time ago, and now his name is Dave Goble, and he's a corporate coach now. He has several CEOs that he coaches, and I love having him because there's nothing I can't stump him with. Like, 'Hey, we got this earnings call coming up and this is what I think the challenge is going to be.' He's like, 'Oh, this happened in 2007 and this is what happened and this is how I handled it.' I can't stump the guy. He's literally lived everything that I'm going through right now, and he's made me a much better leader. I really appreciate him. I will say as far as mentors for dads, it's an interesting thing because it's a guy thing that guys don't a lot of times really talk about that stuff. I know, in fact we built the whole brand of Old Spice at Procter & Gamble on this idea. Old Spice for years was a tired old brand, and an advertising agency helped us understand an angle. Old Spice was known as a brand for men because it started as a female brand. Nobody knows this, in the 1930s, and then there was a shortage of grooming products during World War II, and they started using Old Spice for men for the soldiers. They came back and they all wanted Old Spice, and that became a man's brand. It always stood for being a man. We had lost our way, and we were trying to reinvent the brand. The idea was if you're a young guy and you want to get young guys into grooming products, you use Old Spice because if you get them in early, guys don't like to talk about guy stuff. They don't want to talk about first dates, how to kiss a girl, how to propose marriage, how to ask the dad for their hand in marriage, and they sure as hell don't want to talk about how to do grooming, how to shave, or how to use deodorant. The thought of this advertising was, 'We're going to be like that older brother voice that says, "Hey, let me tell you how I failed on this date."' And then you're more open to taking that grooming advice because it's coming from an older brother, not a parent. And it's through their lived experience about what you know, 'When I asked this girl out, it was a total flop, so don't do this, maybe do this.' That's how the whole voice of that campaign started, and it's still going years later, 15 years later. That's why everybody thinks it's funny and irreverent. It's a very deliberate voice about attacking with irreverence the way an older friend or older brother would, so you're more apt to listen. So I think it's a tough thing for guys to find personal mentors to help me be a better dad or help me be a better friend because I just don't think we do that. I will tell you that there was a guy at Procter & Gamble who left a very big mark on me and many others there. His name is Jim Laferty. He was the president of Asia, I think he ended up working for Coke at some point as a big executive. He did a work-life balance presentation, about an hour to an hour and a half. He would do it all around the world in addition to being the president of Asia. He would fly around the world and deliver this. I codified the things that he taught me, and I'll talk a couple of them, but I think they're all really valuable. I've shared a video with people when I feel like they don't have work-life balance and they need some mentorship. I always give him this DVD. Do you still have a DVD? I think I have codified it now. So for example, one of the lessons, he gives you 15 lessons, and he says you may not agree with all of them, but even if you take one or two of them home today on Monday, you will see a difference in how you can balance your work and life. One example was define your five roles in life and make choices on those roles. It could be four, could be six. But have a finite amount of roles that you can play. Then when something new comes up that's going to fill your life, don't just say yes to it. You have to say, is it going to replace one of the other things I have? He gives examples like he was a dad, at the time he was a son to parents, that was a time thing. He was a golfer, he was a corporate leader, and he was on some charity board. Those were his five roles. Then someone asked him to be on another board that was going to take up time, and he said, 'Okay, am I willing to give up something?' He ended up not being a golfer for a period of time because it was really important to him. I think it's hard to see in the moment when you're an adult and something happens where it's going to take more of your time, and to be honest about can I do all these things? At some point you may not be able to be a sibling anymore. It doesn't mean you don't have brothers and sisters, but it does mean when your brother or sister has a child, you may not be able to fly out there and be there for the birth because you're in a different place now. Sometimes you've got to give up stuff like that. You've got to make choices about what's important to you. Like when I became a dad, I had to give up golf. I didn't play golf for 14 years from the day I had Jane until my son became of age and wanted to start playing golf again, and it was a thing I could do with him. I took up golf again. But right now, I haven't played golf in three years because I have a new job as CEO of a company, and that probably takes up two roles because it's a lot. You just can't do it all. If I want to be a golfer, I'm going to have to give up family time, and I don't want to do that. So I think that idea of having roles is a really important one, and then being honest about when you have a new role come up, are you going to give up on something? And it's always going to be something important because those five roles have to be important, otherwise they shouldn't be a role in your life.

You know, another one I thought was really good was the idea of training your people and trusting your people. Especially as you, you know this Eric, like you know you're bigger and bigger leader, you have more people under you. There's no way you can do what you need to do alone. So you really have to learn how to train people and coach them, and that becomes your primary job, not to do anything. And then you've got to trust them. So when you need to get into something different at work or you're going on vacation or whatever, the business is still going to be here. If you did a good job, you put the time in to train them, you're going to get a return from that. And you see that with a lot of people that can't let things go either because they've got to work on it.

Something else or they're going on vacation and they don't really disconnect from whatever it is and then they become less effective because they never really learned how to train and delegate, right? Because you know, nobody hits a switch at some point and goes, you got to stop leading things and you got to start coaching and delegating. It just happens, right? And sometimes it's a sometimes you have roles that have a mix of those things and it's really so that's another but really like 13 lessons that I've codified and it's really kind of changed my life and my work life balance like I run a very big business. I have 72,000 employees. I don't for once feel ever like I'm overwhelmed in any way depending no I mean I just don't because

I've learned these things that this man has taught me. From that one session has made a huge difference in my life and so if anybody ever complains about like what's happening to them from their company, I always sit them down and say that's kind of on you, right? Like you know, maybe once in a while you got a leadership example where you just got such a hard leader, but maybe that's not a situation you want to be in and you want to remove yourself from that situation, but nine times out of 10, it's within your purview to figure this out, right? And I don't think anybody looks at me and says Kevin doesn't work hard and Kevin is not committed to the business. But I've found a way to manage it all through these. I mean, they're just very functional techniques. It's not a magic box and they're all very practical and common sense. So I'd say that would be my mentor in personal would be this fellow Jim Laferdy who I got to thank one time for what an impact he had on his life. I think a lot of people he's impacted that way who maybe have never met just because he's presenting to them.

Yes.

Yeah, you know, I was looking at the questions that you had submitted and I kind of wish I had done that in my personal life. So what I believe in is if you want to accomplish anything great in business, you got to have a vision about what that is because you need all these people to follow it and if they don't know where you're going, they're never going to be excited about doing that. So you got to create a vision and you got to create it with them and then they got to believe in it and then you got to create stair steps on how to get there, right? So like for example in the Chili's business,

We want to be a brand that is growing, is exciting to young people, is delivering an amazing experience and we're outpacing the industry. That was the vision, right? And then we had to break it down to like how do we, we're so far away from that three years ago. So like where do we start? Let's start with we need to have clean restaurants and we need to have properly staffed restaurants and we need to have a tighter menu and you just build building blocks that are all manageable so that when you add them all up three years later, you're like wow, I'm at the top of the heap. And I remember I literally said that vision to the managers. I was two months into the business. I had enough listening sessions with the field to understand what we needed to do with their ideas. And I showed them a fake magazine cover. I said, 'This is what we're going to do. The magazine cover was going to be Chili's is back and here are all the stories about how it was your ideas and how we simplified the menu and we added labor and we fixed the restaurants. It was all the stuff we did.' And in fact, I showed him the cover last week when we had a conference and said, 'It's been three years. How have we done? What are the real headlines written?' And they're all the same headlines that we had talked about, right? And it's because we made it into manageable chunks that people could see themselves in what they did. So when you asked that question in the pre-read, I was like, boy, I wish I had done that because I think if you ask dads like what does success look like to you? What is your envision of being a dad? I think people would have different articulations of it. Like mine would be I want my kids when we're at rehearsal dinner and we toasting them, I want them to say, 'Oh my god, I'm so glad my dad was in my life and here are the things that my dad meant to me and why I'm a better adult because of him.' That's the Chili's back magazine cover, right? So then you'd say, what are the things that you need to do to get to that point? Well, you probably got to spend a lot more time with your kids, right? So how do I make time with the kids? How do I make time in my life to make sure? That's about making sure we have vacations and making sure we have things to do. How do I get them to be interested in spending time with me? I'll tell you the family I married into, the McMillan, so Andy McMillan and my wife and her maiden name was McMillan, they are masters at creating ideas that all the kids want to do. So for example, the last Christmas they had something they had ask me anything with the grandpa, Papa John, my father-in-law. And so he sat by the fire and they could ask him anything like, 'What was your first date like?' or 'What was your first kiss like?' and they asked crazy stuff. And it was the most fun two hours you could ever imagine because the kids had a role in that. And it was like, how do you get kids aged 15 all the way up to 25 to be interested in spending two hours with their grandpa and their family? And they came up with a great idea. So that's the second building block: you got to find things that are going to meet kids where they are that they're going to be excited about. And whether it's vacations or sporting events, I try to go at least to one sporting trip with my son every year because it's something we look forward to that we can do together. But the point would be you start with your endgame of what relationship you want to be and then what are the things that you need to do that are in your control that you can get there? And then you got to go make it happen. So if I need to have more time to be at my son's sporting events when he plays volleyball, like, hey, Ann, I need every one of his volleyball games that are here in Dallas. I need them to be loaded into my calendar. I may not get to all 20 of them, but if I get to 15 of them, I've won, right?

And he'll even be like, 'I don't want you to be there.' And it's like, TSF, son. Like, I'm going to your volleyball games. And it ends up being great, right? He ends up still going to go out to eat with his buds afterward because he's got his own car, but he knows his dad was there with his mom and we were there for him at life's important moments. Nobody's going to remember that we had a record fiscal this year and we had delivered an incredible EBITDA, whatever. But my son is going to remember whether I was in his life during his high school years. So to me, I think you just got to be deliberate about what's your end vision of what you want your takeaway as a dad to be and then are you doing things to get you there? I wish I was more deliberate about it the way you asked the question, the way I would on a business thing, but I did do some building blocks on that. I would have to do it over again. No, it's so if we literally were just talking about that, like whether it's at a wedding or at another event, trying to put yourself in that moment and what do you want to be said and reverse engineering that, we just were talking about that. So I love that you articulated that the same thing. And getting there is gradual, but you got to have consistency in those experiences you're trying to give. So I love that. I think it's on board with what we've been saying. A couple more for you and we'll let you roll. But I've heard you talk about this. I think it's an amazing kind of principle and I'm curious if it translated at home, but like the importance and the discipline on doing what's right versus what's urgent. Talk a little bit about that as you think about the importance of that, like teaching those things like, hey, there's going to be things that happen in life, but we got to continue to do what's right.

Yeah. You know, it's like the thing you're told when you're a kid, like just do what's right and it'll all work itself out. And then you grow up and you get all these pressures and you start telling yourself, well, you start convincing yourself what's right is not really right so you can do those other things. And it's like everybody knows what's right. I had some recognition a few months ago on restaurants and they asked me to say a few words and I was looking at the room of all these restaurant executives and I'm like, you know, everybody asked me, 'Oh, how do we do this at Chili's?' And it's like there's no secret sauce here. We're just kind of using common sense on the fundamentals of why people go out to eat and we're just delivering on those things. The problem is that there's so many pressures that get in the way of doing the right thing that very few people do the right thing. So we all know the right thing is and a lot of the casual diners that have not done well over the years, including Chili's, we cut corners on food quality or we overextend the menu or we start pulling back on labor. We have all this data that says, 'Oh, this new technology, we don't need all these servers because the technology is so good and so we're able to take out $50 million of labor. It's a miracle.' And then we wonder why our experience scores are down, right? Because we're lying to ourselves. There's no technology that's going to allow you to remove a bunch of servers. People go out to eat, they don't want to use a kiosk or their phone. They want to talk to somebody. That's why they go out to eat. If they don't want to talk to somebody, they can go to a fast casual, they can go to a fast food restaurant, they can order on their phone. It's a lot cheaper. So it happens all the time in business where we talk ourselves out of doing the right thing because it's convenient. Or the business is like right now a lot of restaurants are struggling for traffic and they're all going to throw a bunch of coupons and short-term discounts. It's going to provide some short-term relief and they're all going to be high-fiving about the discount and then they're going to have to roll it over with a better discount and it's an endless spiral to disaster. And that's true about life. There are so many things that you can get short-term relief.

That can make you feel good for a few hours, but you wake up and your problems are even worse. And the thing is with your kids, you really got to explain why doing the right thing all the time is so important because of the hole it can dig you. So if it's studying for a test or deciding whether to go out with your buds when you need to do something, it's not that in that short-term moment that's going to derail you. What's going to derail you is it now it's easier the next time to skip it, to go out with your buds, to spend another hour with them, to come home at 11:00 p.m. instead of 10 p.m., because you're creating habits at that time because it's providing relief. And it's hard because they don't understand it in the short term, just like business people don't understand the short term. I want relief now. I want excitement now. So that's what I try to do. Sometimes it's successful and they're never going to be like, 'Hey, thanks for that lesson, Dad. I'm going to do this now.' But I know I'm landing some punches when like, oh, he stayed home. He's studying. This is great. So you just got to be okay with not getting that feedback. It's going to be like, 'Stop talking to me. I know.' And then maybe one out of three things, the punch lands and it's like, great. You do what you can. You don't realize it, but when you were that age, you're really independent. You really don't want people to tell you what to do, especially when you got a car and you can kind of do things on your own. It's just hard to get parental advice on that stuff. But that's what we try to do is explain the long term and the wisdom behind why that one decision is not a great decision. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. I like what you said, the feedback loop is long and you got to just have faith that the more consistent I am with these really important principles, you'll start to see it, but it's not an immediate gratification for dad for sure.

Yeah. Sometimes I try to use the business situation so that they see like what in their life, so it's not talking about them. I'm talking about something at work. But I found my son in particular, he's always looking two steps around and he's like, 'Oh, you're just telling me that because you want me to do this.' I'm like, 'Well, if I just told you to do this, you wouldn't want to do it, so I'm using my work thing so you can't claim me.' And he starts laughing. They're all really smart. I find that kids today are way smarter than we were at our age. And it's probably because they have so much more information that they get earlier in age that they just seem a lot more deliberate and knowledgeable, which stinks for a parent because you can't really use the old tricks.

Well, usually I sit them down with these 13 codified lessons and I walk them through it. I can do them real quick. They're great. Define the five roles that we talked about. Use one schedule in your life. That was a big changer for me because I used to have a personal schedule and a work schedule and then my wife would be like, 'Hey, the kindergarten graduation is on Thursday. Are you gonna go?' If you tell me on Monday, we're screwed. If I know about that a year ahead of time, it's going to be really easy to block my calendar. So using one calendar is really important and being deliberate about scheduling ahead of time. Undefining moments. Always choose family. That is never a debate. I see people do that all the time. 'Oh, I was supposed to be there, but now I found out about this.' And it's like, I hate to tell you, work may not be there for you next year or the year after that, but your family will be if you put time into them. So they're never going anywhere. Take real vacations. I think it's a great one. Master efficient communication. So how do you communicate well with your people underneath you, people above you, your stakeholders? It's critically important to bring people along. It's going to result in a lot less work for you trying to explain things on the back end. Practice the 80 for 20. I think it's a great lesson, which is get 80% of what you need with 20% of the work and then stop and move on to the next thing. Don't try to be a perfectionist because 80% is what matters in any business or any situation. Train your people and then delegate and let them lead. 30 minutes of exercise a day. That's a really important thing that I think people don't make time to do. They always have reasons why they're too busy and it's like that doesn't cut it. You got to wake up earlier or work out at night, but you got to have some time for yourself to get some kind of physical activity. Leverage technology. So technology is awesome. There's so many things you can do with it in terms of reminders and alarms and all kinds of stuff that we didn't have when we were growing up in corporate America. Number 11 is develop a list of a hundred things to do before you die. So pick one or two every year. And the reason why that's important is you can't just as a working dad or working mom, you can't just click the fiscals. Life is not just a series of quarters that you roll over. You need to have things that you look forward to and plan for. Whether it's running a marathon, which was on my list, or whether it's going to Asia, or whatever it is, you got to have one or two things every year that you're going to train for or prepare for so that you're not just clicking the fiscals. And the last one is use the mother rule, which is really about just using common sense. If mom thinks that was dumb, you probably shouldn't be doing it that way. It's true about communication too. I talk about the mom rule. If my mom doesn't understand how we're communicating our organization, nobody's going to understand. So keep it real simple.

Yeah, focus on a few things that are important that are going to make a difference. And it's so hard to do that in work and in life. It's so hard because everybody's grabbing you and it's hard to say no, but you have to have a focus and a constant purpose because you only have so many hours in the day, especially when you get to our level, Eric, where you have more of a poverty of time. That's the most precious thing that you have. And you have to spend it on things that are important. People always wonder how we've been able to do our turnaround so fast. We don't work on anything small. Doesn't matter whether my board asked me to do something small or a friend calls and wants me to meet with this supplier. It's like no, if it's not on our strategy, we don't do it. We don't waste money. We don't waste people's time. We only focus on the important things. And that's why we've been able to progress things faster. A lot of times your organization will say, 'I can do all that stuff.' I know you can. It's going to take longer to do all the things. And we don't have the leisure of time, especially in a turnaround. You got to go fast and move with deliberation. And it's true about your life. There's only so many things that you can do well. And if you try to overextend yourself on things that are not as important, you can't have quality relationships or whatever you want.

It's just tough because people don't like to say no, right? But you have to figure out how to set yourself up. I hate getting calls from friends asking for favors. The answer is going to be no, whether it's a work thing or a personal thing.

But you got to do it because the 80/20 rule is so important.

Well, I just want them to think I've supported them, right? Like I was a loving dad that supported them in whatever they wanted to do and that they got great advice and I made a difference in their lives. That's all that I helped them live up to whatever potential they've been given. That's my hope. I don't know if I'm going to get that right now, but I'm going to get a little bit, but not a lot.

Well, I married into a remarkable family that's taught me a ton about how to be a leader and be a great family person, too. So I'm very appreciative of the McMillan. They are an incredible family. So that's probably why I talk about them a lot.

Thanks.

Great.