Flipping The Barrel: Ron Gusek - CEO at Liberty Energy

Five years.

It feels like it wasn't that long ago. Oh, the five years have gone by fast.

Thank you.

Yes. Yes. A lot has.

All right. Yeah. Quick backstory. So I'm a transplant from Canada that finds myself down here now. I am an accidental oil field services person, I would say. I grew up outside of Edmonton, Alberta, a little town called Ardson. My parents still live in the same place that they have. My dad built the house when I was a year old and mom and dad have been there ever since. That's been home for a long time. I went to mechanical engineering at the University of Alberta, so just in Edmonton, and ultimately ended up in heating, ventilation, and air conditioning. I had been a kid who grew up during the 80s downturn when oil went pretty sideways, mid to late 80s, Alberta 35% of our GDP came from oil and gas. It was hard on the province when that happened. And I remember having lots of friends whose parents were out of work and thinking that industry is much too volatile for me. I'm not going to go there.

I'm not going to go there. And so, of course, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, people need that all the time. That's a good stable industry. And so that was where I started out of school. And I spent four years working for a great little manufacturing company doing acoustics and vibration and design work there and had a lot of fun doing it. But I had a roommate who was in oil and gas. He was a coil tuber at the time. And he came home one day and said, 'Ron, we're interviewing for engineers. Would you be interested in a job interview?' And so I went and that was a Monday and they offered me a job on a Friday. And as it turns out, it paid 50% more than I was earning in HVAC. And you know, when you're young, that feels like a lot of money. So I made the jump into fracking. I didn't know what a frack was at the time. I'd never seen frack equipment. I had no understanding of what I was taking on. It turned out to be the greatest thing that ever happened to me.

You know, you look back over the course of your life, you think about those places where you had an opportunity to turn right or turn left, and for whatever reason, you make that decision and you point yourself in that direction. And all of those decisions have had me end up in the place I'm in today, which is just phenomenal. And I don't know why all those decisions happened the way they did, but I'm so grateful I ended up in oil and gas and so extremely happy for it, for where that has taken me and all the people I've gotten to know over that time. Between then, which was January of 98 I guess, I started with a company called Nowsco, was bought by BJ Services, and between then and now I have always pretty much been frack or frack adjacent. I have worked on the service side almost that entire time save for one little stint on the E&P side where I got a bit of exposure to drilling wells and understanding what a completion was like from the other side of the table, and a little bit of work on facilities and pipelines and things. So it was a good learning experience for me. But aside from that little junket, otherwise I have been at a frack company or at a company that did work with frack. So I love it. I certainly love the services side of the world. It's been a lot of fun.

Pinnacle got bought by Halliburton. Yeah. So that was how I first met Chris and really a good portion of what is now the Liberty family was at Pinnacle. They were opening a Canadian office and I had the opportunity to interview for that job. Again, good fortune and a lot of things that just come together in the right way and I found myself running Pinnacle Canada. I met Chris Wright at the start of that. I guess that was probably May of 2003. I did that. It was really my first exposure to this whole idea of an organization that was culture focused, people first, and great technology. You bring those things together and amazing things happen. We were a small company of course, I think only a few hundred people when Halliburton bought the company at the end of 2008. But one of those very cool places to work that had you at the tip of the spear when unconventional gas was just becoming a thing, and we were out working on all of those first wells in each of those plays. For a nerdy engineer like myself, what a cool opportunity.

There are those people that you meet and right away you know you're going to be friends for life. That you just get along, things click, and you recognize that this is a special person and somebody I'm pretty fired up to be associated with. Chris is just one of those personalities. Of course, for everybody who gets to meet him, you find out what an engaging, thoughtful, kind human he is, passionate about everything that he does, driven, motivated, and all of those things just resonate with me. But beyond that, Chris is also a passionate outdoors guy. One of my hobbies is something called adventure racing. They're these long endurance races out in the wilderness. And as it turns out, I was going out on a 36-hour race two weeks after I started at Pinnacle. So my first two weeks at Pinnacle was actually a trip around the US parts of the company. So I first of all, I flew to San Francisco, which is where it was headquartered, then to Bakersfield, and then over to Houston, and then I was going home, and I was going straight out to this race. And so I was telling Chris about this, and for those who know Chris, he is an avid outdoors person who does a lot of crazy stuff in the wilderness. And so I don't know if that was the first thing that tied us together, but we clicked and we have been friends ever since. And I said when Chris got the Wildcatter of the year award in Colorado, I was pleased to give the introductory speech and I was talking about the opportunity to work with Chris at Pinnacle, but really just how grateful I was that I got a second opportunity to work with such an amazing person. And so that doesn't happen to everybody. Sometimes you only get those once in a lifetime chances. For me, that was a twice in a lifetime chance. And so I was pretty fired up when he started Liberty and had the chance to come and join the Pinnacle team again doing that.

That's a very important question because it really is the reason Liberty is the company we are today. We have had a tremendous track record of success; we turned 15 years old this year.

Yeah, that's awesome. But if you know, I would say never in my wildest dreams did I envision we would be where we are today. But I shouldn't be surprised given the genesis of the company and the idea around which it was founded. Chris has always been very thoughtful about that. And at Pinnacle it was 100% true that you find a way to attract and retain great individuals. Amazing things happen inside of a company. And of course Pinnacle was a small company and a leading edge technology company, a very different company than Liberty is, particularly in the business we're in which people would often call commoditized. But no business is ever commoditized if there are people involved in it. Yes. People can be a huge differentiator if they are bought into a mission. If they believe in what you're doing, if they have the opportunity to go out and create great things, if they're allowed to be innovative and step outside the box, if you create an environment where all of those things can happen, then the trajectory for a company can be simply amazing. And so that was the goal right from the outset. Of course, as a frack company, the vast majority of our employees are out in the field. They're not in an office. They're not sitting behind a computer. They are boots on the ground in minus 40 or plus 110 degrees. Whatever the weather might be outside, they are out there making things happen. That's not an easy job. And while people might find it attractive when they're young, fresh out of high school, I can go and do that for a while, ultimately the travel, the time away from families and whatnot gets to be too much and so people choose to exit that and you have this continuous turnover in the field that makes it very hard to be great. And so our goal right from the outset was to create this culture where whether you had a role in the office or a role in the field, we attracted great people and that we had an environment where those people wanted to come and stay, that they wanted to be a part of something special not for a few years but for their entire career. And that has been the focus since the beginning. Chris and Jim Brady, who was employee number one, he's our SVP of operations today, deserve an immense amount of credit for what has happened at Liberty. What has been created at Liberty and ultimately what still exists today is this environment where particularly in the field, people want to come, they want to stay, they're part of a family, a cohesive unit on a frack location or a wireline location, on a mine or hauling CNG for us, whatever the case might be, and that they make a career of it. I would say that historically, of course I've been through a few service companies in my life, turnover in the field was maybe 40 or 50% on an annual basis. Today at Liberty, we are 5,600, 5,700 people big, our turnover is about 11% on an annual basis. So it is a fraction of what I had seen in my past. That's a testament to this culture that we have created and managed to sustain through all of this growth. That enables that to happen. And that's what enables greatness. And while we never set out to be a big company, by virtue of being great at what we do, there has been a lot to do. So it naturally happens. You have a natural path to growth, which has been incredibly exciting and rewarding for all of the people who've been a part of it for so long.

You know, I think there's probably a lot of things that go into that. A huge amount of credit just goes to the people who support everyone inside of Liberty. That starts with you've talked with Tracy on the podcast. If you have a sense of what Liberty's HR team is like, they are unlike any HR team I've spent time with. They are like a warm blanket wrapped around. But that mentality of just taking care of the team certainly goes well beyond the HR team. I think that's true in the field, that's true for our safety team, that's true across the board. There are a lot of other things that absolutely go into that. Some of them very tangible. You mentioned the schedule. We're two weeks on, two weeks off. I don't know that there's another service company in our world that does that. That means we employ 30% more people to do the same amount of work. But that trade-off is absolutely worth it. It pays itself back in spades. To be able to have half of your year at home, especially when you get to that phase in your life when maybe you have a family at home and you want to be at a football game or a baseball game or a dance recital, you have to be able to have time for those things. And two weeks on, one week off, two days of travel, meaning five days at home. If you were on night shift before that, you spend a few days catching up on your sleep. It's very hard to be engaged with your family when that happens. And so two weeks on, two weeks off just makes that so much more manageable. Two weeks away from your family is a long time. It's a lot to ask. And so to have that two weeks to build that relationship, to spend that time with your family is critical to us. I think there are a lot of other things that go into that as well. All of our crews are named. They all have a cool name for their frack crew or wireline crew. They all wear patches on their shoulders. They are a family. That crew works together day in and day out. They are, as it says, their brother's keeper. And I think that's a pretty special environment to be a part of. I think a lot of people liken it to the military where you build those strong bonds with the people that you're in the field with. I don't view that any different in our world. And there's a list of things that goes on like that, but every one of those little things just makes it that much better a place to get up and go to work at every day. And I think it's a combination of all those things that lead to that low turnover and people wanting to be a part of Liberty for a career.

That's a good question and there's certainly a lot to think about there. I would tell you, of course, we have been through some very challenging times. Liberty, as I said, 15 years old. We were founded in 2011, first commercial operations in 2012. In that time frame, we've been through two of the worst downturns I've experienced in my career: 2015-2016 and COVID. The 2015-2016 downturn we were a relatively small company. We were five frack crews big going into that, headed to number six. So pretty early on in our days. And then COVID, of course, the rug got yanked out from under us. Nobody saw that coming. Nobody had any playbook for what you do when literally work stops. We had 24 going on 25 frack crews headed into COVID. We were probably on the order of 2,500 employees and doing several billion dollars a year in revenue. And for 10 days in the month of May, our company earned not a dollar. Zero. You sit around as a circle of leaders trying to navigate your way through something that catastrophic, and it is a real challenge. One of the things I loved about working with Chris is this huge belief in people. One of the fastest ways you can lose the loyalty of people is to treat them like numbers, to hire them when you need them, to fire them when you don't. So we just didn't lay off people. We did not lay off a single person in the 2015-2016 downturn. COVID was the first time in working together as a management team that we ever laid somebody off. That was heartbreaking for us. We ultimately got to a place where we could offer all those people a job back, and that was fantastic. But for the well-being of the company, that was a decision that had to be made. And so sometimes despite all of the effort you make, you have to make very hard decisions. Far and away the hardest decision we've ever had to make as a team in our careers in oil and gas. And we hope we never see that situation again. Fast forward to today, we're not in a great situation. Pricing has been deteriorating in the frack space for probably 24 months now. We are victims of our own success. We have gotten so good at what we do. We find ourselves here with record oil production and record natural gas production, and we're doing so with a fraction of the frack crews we used to have. There were probably 450 frack crews running when Liberty started. I think we're running 185 now to accomplish the same thing. So we are really good at getting better at things. I never bet against our industry and our ability to innovate. But that comes with some challenges. It means that we don't need the same amount of capacity, and that has meant that people end up with white space on their calendars. That sometimes means aggressive bidding for work. And we have seen the pricing trajectory come down. Our conversation with our team in an environment like this is actually a pretty straightforward one. We have worked very hard to set ourselves up for success in this particular type of environment. You want to do everything you can to be the last fleet standing. If your customer believes that you are the best asset they have out on location, best people, best safety, best technology, best performance, highest efficiency, that's the last thing they want to let go of. And so as long as you build an organization that delivers greatness and excellence each and every day, even in times like this when utilization is falling, it's not something you have to worry about. And so we remind our team, and it's easy for me to stay positive because they knock it out of the park every day. They go out and deliver at the highest level. Jim Brady, our VP of ops, reminds them that you're only as good as your last stage. That's all your customer is going to remember. So be great every stage, because that's what's going to keep you going. And as long as you do that, regardless of what happens in the macro environment, Liberty is going to be fine. And we absolutely find ourselves in that position today. I'd say we're at the trough in the completion side of things for frack and wireline and associated businesses. Liberty's fleet is in the field fully utilized and working hard every day. That's because of what the team does in the field every day. Because of the excellence that they deliver and because our customers believe that we are the best asset to have in the field. And that makes my job pretty easy to stay positive.

Yeah. So, let me back up a little bit. That's an important story for us. We have always been of the belief that you never want somebody else to be in control of something that is critical to your success. And in frac there are a few things that specifically fall into that bucket. In this case, that is power. So as we thought about this idea of transitioning a fleet from a diesel fuel fleet or even dual fuel to a fleet that is run on natural gas, the initial way to do that was using natural gas to generate electricity and then having an electric frac pump. We started from the ground up building an electric frac pump maybe 2018 or thereabouts and then quickly recognized that if we were going to do that we had to have control over power generation as well. And so we made a very intentional decision that alongside the electric pump we were also going to take care of building, designing, building and operating the power generation. And so we had built up this experience in that regard. We run maybe 130 megawatts of power generation out in the field today for frac, and frac only.

What that meant was that as this opportunity became apparent around power generation for other needs that might be electrification of the oil field or data centers, other commercial and industrial opportunities. We saw an opportunity. We recognized that we had experience, capabilities, the supply chain, the manufacturing, the controls and all of those things to be able to participate in that space. And so it was clear to us that we had an opportunity to take that skill set and build an adjacent business to our core oil field services business. We started looking at that probably 24 months ago now, really starting to think about that, understanding the space, what the requirements would be, capital needs, opportunities for places we could participate from the oil field to remote mining and things like that, and then ultimately this data center space. We decided that it was going to be a great fit for us and so announced on our Q4 call last year that we were taking a step into power generation, that we'd ordered some amount of generation capacity and that we were in the market with that. The last year has been a very interesting year around how collocated behind-the-meter power has evolved in terms of its place in the market. You would have heard probably 12 months ago that the grid was the panacea that everybody wanted to end up on the grid and that this collocated behind-the-meter solution would just be a temporary one, that you would maybe be there for a few years until the grid could get there and then that was it. Over the course of the last 12 months, that opinion has absolutely pivoted, and for a number of reasons. Of course, the grid remains very, very challenged, but you've heard the public backlash around the cost of electricity and what's happening, and everybody jumping on that to power everything else. People are worried about their electricity prices. They view the data center as an evil thing that's coming to their community that's just going to make power more expensive for them. And so what that has meant is that there's been a real pivot to this idea that collocated behind-the-meter power is the right long-term solution. I think there are actually a number of other great reasons why that is the case, that while grid connectivity can bring some positive things, there are some advantages to that grid connection, but regardless, the right long-term answer is this collocated power. The hyperscalers in the form of Meta, Google, and Oracle and those organizations have started to recognize that too, and that has meant that those intermediaries who build and lease data centers to the hyperscalers have also headed down that road. There is a real urgency to get AI running at levels beyond where it is today. But of course, that consumes a massive amount of power. Time is of the essence. You've heard the federal government. In fact, I think Secretary Wright described it as our next Manhattan Project, a race that we have to win. There's been this real urgency around the desire to get more data centers up and running.

The ability to meet that need with the grid is also very, very challenged. The interconnection queues are measured in years. We can respond far more quickly with modular behind-the-meter power than the grid could ever respond. Meaning that probably in 18 months from the time a contract is signed, we can have a data center up and running. Vantage recognizes that desire to have speed to market, certainty around access to power. They want to be able to communicate that certainty to their customers, whoever that might be. And that was ultimately the genesis of this relationship. So we started talking to them last year sometime, and that ultimately culminated in the announcement you heard a little earlier this year, which is a reservation program where Vantage is guaranteed access to 400 megawatts of power generation in 2027 for deployment at a site of their choice. They're a large builder of data centers. I think they operate north of 40 of them around the world today, and they continue to see meaningful demand for that. But critical to them is knowing that they have access to the electricity required to make this happen. This arrangement, this partnership between Vantage and Liberty, allows them that certainty and allows them to tell their customer they have that certainty. So we're excited about that. I expect it grows meaningfully beyond that. Of course, you're hearing the size of these data centers now. They are massive. In some cases, a few hundred megawatts, but in some cases, several gigawatts of power on a single campus.

Yeah, that's a good question. And certainly that answer is going to vary depending on who you talk to. In our case, we don't have turbines in our supply chain today. It's a choice we've made specifically around the technology that we're going to deploy. There's a few reasons for that. Some of the very simple reasons are I don't have somebody who can maintain a turbine inside the Liberty world. Not that we couldn't go and find that person, but our team is very, very good at natural gas reciprocating engines today. That's what we own and operate. That's what our mechanics know and understand. And so that is a very natural transition for us. It's a pretty natural path, as you say. There are some other advantages I think that are inherent in a gas reciprocating engine versus a gas turbine. And it comes down to the combustion cycle involved in those. We have always said that we want to build longevity into our business, that we want to make sure that we have a path to a generational company regardless of whether that's oil field services or now power generation. And so as you think about this power world, the question is how do you differentiate yourself? How do you stand apart? How do you ensure that you're competitive not just for the next two or three years while things are tight, but five or 10 or 15 years from now? One of the critical inputs I would argue to that is your efficiency in converting a molecule of natural gas into an electron over here, and exactly how much that spark spread is, so to speak. Natural gas reciprocating engines are incredibly efficient at that. In the power business they talk in heat rate. The simpler way probably for those who aren't familiar with heat rate is just efficiency of conversion. You would think about that as fuel economy in your car, miles per gallon, and in this case, it's BTU per kilowatt hour. If you looked at a gas turbine, and a simple example straight down the fairway, GE's LM2500, and I may get the numbers slightly wrong, but I think I'm in the ballpark here. The efficiency of that turbine in converting energy available in a unit of gas into electricity is about 37%. A little over a third of the useful energy in the gas gets turned into electricity, and that's at sea level and maybe 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 60% relative humidity, what's called ISO conditions. As you change from ISO conditions, for example as you move higher in elevation so less oxygen available, as the outdoor air temperature gets higher again the air gets less dense and you have less oxygen available, that efficiency will fall modestly, and so you might find that instead of 37% you might find yourself down in the low 30s under operating conditions in West Texas, for example. For a gas reciprocating engine, the starting point for that number is much, much higher. Now it depends on the engine just like it depends on the turbine, so not all turbines are 37%, some are lower and there's some that are even a little higher than that now. But in the gas reciprocating engine space, for a high-speed gas engine, so that's a 2.5 megawatt platform or Jenbacher's 4.3 megawatt platform, that number is 45% efficiency. And when you move up to the larger engines, to the big medium-speed engines, so you'd get 10 or 11 or 12 megawatts from Caterpillar or Wärtsilä or Jenbacher or not Jenbacher, sorry, a Bergen, you're talking about an engine that's now north of 50% efficient in converting the available energy in natural gas to electricity. So you're going to burn on the order of 30% less fuel than a turbine to accomplish the same work under simple cycle conditions. So this doesn't assume combined cycle or anything like that. Just a turbine or engine burning gas to generate electricity. That's meaningful over 15 years. You can imagine the cost differential between generating the power with this asset versus this asset.

There are some inherent disadvantages to a gas reciprocating engine. They do not have the same power density that you can get out of a turbine. If space was a constraint, if you were constrained in the amount of land that you had access to, you would use a turbine all day long. You can get turbines that will generate hundreds of megawatts of electricity in a single footprint. The footprint is much smaller. You can't do that with a gas reciprocating engine. You're going to be building a larger power hall. You're going to have a series of these lined up. And so there are some puts and takes for each of those. Data centers are mostly being built in more remote environments today, closer to natural gas access, typically where land is not a consideration. And so with that in mind, we have tended towards this road of gas reciprocating engines. I don't want to suggest that there will never come a day when we don't have a gas turbine in the world, because I actually don't think that's the case. But for some very strong technical reasons, we have headed down the gas reciprocating road.

It definitely has been a change, of course. As much as people can tell you that you might be prepared for the role, of course I had the privilege of sitting alongside Chris for more than a decade and watching him take the role. There is nothing that can prepare you for stepping into the role of CEO. It is just a very, very different place. And of course in our scenario, it was actually a pretty rapid transition. I would tell you I had always envisioned this environment where Chris would one day decide to take a step back in terms of his time commitment, but he would remain part of the board of directors, that we'd have he would be there so you could connect with him, and we could sit down every now and then and have a conversation. I could talk to him about, hey, I'm struggling with this today or that. And of course, we don't have that today. We have a very hard wall between us when he chose to go and serve our country. And I bless his heart for doing that. Of course, I think he's doing an awesome job there. And I don't think there's a better person for the role. I'm incredibly proud to be a part of enabling that to happen. Yeah, I missed that a little bit, and so it has been a little bit different. That was probably the first big thing that was just a bit of a change from how I envisioned it. Like I could see that I could call you up, we could talk, we could see, and it's like a hard breakup, like you cannot call, do not call me, block my number. So I miss him. I miss him immensely, but I enjoy seeing him doing great work there, and it's important work. So I'm glad he's got the opportunity to serve our country in that regard.

For me, last year was different than my previous years in that there were a few other things I had to do. Of course, Chris's job was very outward facing, he was very present in our industry, while my role as president was probably a little more inward facing. I was focused a little more on operations and R&D and tech development, supply chain, things like that. There was a bit of a change there. Chris spent a lot of time engaging with our customers, and that was not a piece of the world that I had done. And so last year meant a lot of time just trying to get out in front of our customers to make sure that I got to know them and they got to know who I was to the extent they hadn't already met me before. Spent a lot of time in front of our investors just making sure they were comfortable with the transition. I'd done a fair bit of IR stuff before that, so they knew who I was, but it was important to be out there in front of them, and it was important to be in front of the Liberty team maybe most importantly of all. Chris was a founder of this company, and for anybody who's worked for Chris, he's a man that people would run through brick walls for. And so to have the founder and CEO of the company exit stage right to take on this other role, I didn't want people to think that Liberty was going off in some other direction. So it was important to get out and see our team. So I spent a lot of time on the road last year. Maybe 130 flights, I think I took last year. Spent a little over a third of my year in a hotel. But it was wonderful, all of it. A great journey. It was an awesome time to engage with the Liberty family, an awesome time to engage with our customers, and an awesome time to engage with the people who choose to invest their dollars in our company. So I had a lot of fun doing it. But it was different than my years previous had been from that regard. I will tell you the scariest moment was the first earnings call. I was part of the team that did the earnings calls. Chris and Michael and I would sit there, and Chris would take the lead on most of the questions. Michael did the financial stuff, and Ron got to jump in whenever there was a technical question about Digi or something like that. But now for the first time, you're the point person on this. And it's not that there's a chance to rewind and fix an answer or something like that. You're doing it in real time. So the first one was scary as heck. I was glad to get that one behind me. And after that, they get a little easier. Each one a bit easier after that. So a few of those things probably the biggest transition. But at the end of the day, the truth of the matter is the Liberty team is such an amazing team that it makes stepping into that role really something that is pretty special rather than daunting. Of course, don't want to screw it up. But they carry a huge amount of the load, and they enabled me to go out and do all of that stuff that I wanted to do last year, all of that travel that I wanted to do. And behind the scenes, the organization just keeps running seamlessly, and that's just a testament to an amazing group of people that are inside our organization.

Certainly excitement, of course. I mean, this had always been my dream to ultimately fill this role one day. I didn't know where that would happen and when that would happen, and maybe this was a little sooner than anticipated, but incredibly exciting, of course, and they were very excited for me. Our girls are growing up now. They are 20 and 23. One is a junior at CU in Boulder. Our oldest Abby is in Kansas City doing a master's in speech therapy. And so we're scattered all over the place. We have Jody mostly back in Calgary full-time now. So we built a house back there last year with the goal of spending more time closer to our parents. They are getting a little older. And of course, you don't want to get to a place where you regret not having seen them more often. And so we made a very intentional decision once the girls were out of the house that we could spend a little more time traveling, but that we were going to put our roots down back in Calgary, and that meant that we would get to see mom and dad, both hers and mine, a little more often. And so we're navigating all of that right now. I have an apartment in Denver, and Jody's in Calgary most of the time. She travels with me when I get to go someplace cool. Midland maybe not so much. No offense to anybody in Midland. But yeah, we're figuring that all out. And I'm incredibly blessed to have been able to have the career I have by virtue of the support of my family. I certainly have been one of those people who've missed some birthday parties and dance recitals and things like that. But thanks to the love and support and care from Jody and the girls and my parents, I've been able to do all of this. So it's not without some challenges sometimes. Jody and I will sometimes go three or four weeks without seeing each other right now. But we've got 26 years behind us and a strong foundation on which to navigate that. So it came at the right time in life for us, and I think that's the timing is so important.

That's a pretty easy one for me. There was a time in my career when I left a job maybe a bit sooner than I typically would have. An opportunity arose that I was incredibly excited about. And I'm not normally one to turn my back on something pretty quickly. I love to see a challenge through. But in this case, I really wanted to jump on this. And I'm incredibly grateful to one of the members of the executive team there who said to me, 'You only need to make sure that you leave a place better than when you came in the door. And if you did that, then you can leave knowing that you have done good for the organization and you should be okay with moving on.' And I think that's the best piece of advice that somebody could ever give you, that regardless of how long you have to interact with whether that's an individual or a company or a mentee or whatever the case might be, that you do everything you can to leave that relationship, that organization, that person stronger than when you first met them. And if you do that, if you go into life with that mindset that you're going to make someplace better, and then it's okay to move on, then you're going to be okay.

You can find me on LinkedIn. I'm on there pretty regularly. So thanks so much for having me. It was a ton of fun. I hope it's not five years before we do it again.