Ep637: Rick Elmore – Your Entrepreneurial Journey Is the Dream

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. Ladies and gentlemen I'm on a mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives and that mission has led me to create the become a better investor community where you get access to the tools you need to create, grow and protect your wealth go to my worst investment ever.com right now to claim your spot. Fellow risk takers this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy and I'm here with featured guests, Rick Elmore. Rick, are you ready to join the mission?

Rick Elmore 00:42
Absolutely. It's great to be here, Andrew, thanks for having me.

Andrew Stotz 00:44
I am looking forward to learning from you. Let me introduce you to the audience. Rick Elmore is an entrepreneur sales and marketing expert. As the founder and CEO of simply noted, Rick developed a proprietary technology that puts real pen and ink to paper to skill, handwritten communication, helping businesses of all industries scale, this unique marketing platform to stand out from their competition and build meaningful relationships with clients, customers and employees. Founded in 2018, and based in Tempe, Arizona, simply noted has grown into a thriving company, with clients of various sizes across the country, including in hospitality, real estate insurance, nonprofit franchise, b2b and others. Rick has served as the company's CEO since its founding for more than five years and has over a decade of sales and marketing industry experience. Rick, take a minute and tell us about the unique value that you bring to this wonderful world.

Rick Elmore 01:47
Yeah, that's a great question. The first thing that comes to mind, I feel like I'm a provider and a protector for my, my, my circle, and that's my close friends and family. I feel like I've always kind of been the one to take that flag or that sword and go forward and lead into the uncertainty and help you know, bring my friends and family with me. So yeah, I would say that's kind of thing that comes to mind.

Andrew Stotz 02:13
That's interesting, because, um, you know, when you think about being an entrepreneur, you have two functions. One is grabbing the flag, and getting people rallying behind you and moving that flag forward. But you're setting Yeah, which is, as entrepreneurs ourselves, we both kind of go like, Oh, yeah, sometimes that's really hard. But that's what we do. And the other part that I've been talking about recently with people around me is that we also have an obligation to protect the interests of our team, when people come in and say, Hey, can you do this? Can you do that? Oh, can you reduce your price and all that, you know, ultimately, I say to people, look, I have a team and they have family, I have to make sure that I'm providing for them and getting a fair deal for them. And that's a new challenge, kind of, that I've thought a lot about. And so whenever I go out, for instance, to bid on something, I say, Look, I've talked with my team, I'm not doing this on my own, I have a lot of interests I'm representing, and it makes it more comfortable. But sometimes it can be hard, because you want to get the deal.

Rick Elmore 03:16
I think you I mean, I use that analogy all the time, you hit the nail on the head, especially in the service based type of companies where when somebody buys something, and it takes people to do that, you know, service for you. I'm always talking about those, like, Look, we're not getting rich off of this order, like there are costs to this job. You know, and I have that same analogy with, you know, our clients, it's like, no, I gotta take care of our employees and make sure they can put food on their tables and, and provide for their kids and all that stuff. So it's funny, you said that because I say all the time to the ones who were like, I want to pay like 50% of what we're asking for service.

Andrew Stotz 03:53
Yeah. Where's that whole stakeholder capitalism, when it comes time to negotiate prices with these guys. Now, I just want to talk a little bit about simply noted, and, you know, I have my number one listener out there that I know is listening. She is absolute number one, never misses an episode and even talks to me about every episode. And that is my mother. And my mother is a handwritten notes woman, in fact, her friend who was dying of cancer, when I talked to her towards the end of her life, she said, you realize that your mother sent me a letter almost every day for the last year and a half. And that provided me so much inspiration, and I just thought what a jerk I am because I just don't write letters and and I don't take advantage of that really personal communication. So that's probably reason why I wanted to get you on the show because I just feel like what you're doing is so interesting. So maybe you can tell people a little bit about what you're doing and help people understand it and how they can Take advantage of it.

Rick Elmore 05:01
Yeah, my first thought that's an incredibly powerful story. You know, connecting with somebody like that. It's just so rare nowadays, especially that we live in a digital world. I grew up with handwritten notes. You know, I didn't sell them until I was 16. So like, I have a box of handwritten notes, you know, that I kept from like middle school in high school, and I played college football, and you know, the coaches that wrote me handwritten notes, I kept them. So they mean something, the keepsakes and they're, they're powerful. But yeah, so it's simply noted, as, you know, we're handwritten notes platform help companies of all sizes from different industries, either automate sending a handwritten note, and these are authentic, real, genuine pen written notes. They're not like laser printed. So they're really nice, you know, we use really thick, luxurious cardstock really nice pens, really nice gel pens, you know, real physical forever stamps. Or, you know, we can help them automate it or help them scale it, you know, so for the companies who have like, 20,000 clients, you know, it's just incredibly impossible for, you know, a rep or a CEO to sit down and say, Thank you. Because we just believe, you know, you know, in the digital age that we live in today, you know, the average person receives over 4000 notifications on their cellphone a month. Think of each social X messages, phone calls, like, I want to take my phone, and just chuck it some days, I'm just like, there's, it's appalling, so much attention, right. But we've created that monster. And so what we're trying to do is to kind of, you know, when everybody's Zig all these companies that are going digital with these email marketing tools, social tools, texting tools, they zig zag, and we're going back to the good old fashioned, real, authentic handwritten note, you know, that's kind of like a Trojan horse gets in there gets opened, gets read, you know, gets appreciated, gets kept, right, you know, it gets put on a desk, the shelf lives, you know, 678 weeks. So, we're really just trying to help companies, either, you know, a, you know, on retention, keep their clients happy, increased lifetime value referrals, or reviews, or, you know, make some pretty unique, you know, outbound acquisition campaigns. So, some handwritten notes

Andrew Stotz 07:14
such an interesting thing. And so, I mean, I can imagine the same questions you get over and over again, you know, that I'm, you know, that you've tried to answer right there, because the first question is, uh, wait a minute, this is just going to arrive and appear as a pseudo handwritten note.

Rick Elmore 07:31
Yeah, yeah, we've done we've spent a lot of money to make sure it doesn't look like a fake handwritten note. So, you know, maybe in the early days, we used to actually draw a pen potters and quickly found out now there's a ton of quality issues, not only with the machine, but with the how it writes, you know, there's really too many, there's a lot of patterns within how it right, so it does look a little bit robotic. Now, it doesn't give you the flexibility to introduce like writing nuances. So like, people don't write in perfectly straight lines, they can either write up, they write down and little wavy, you know, the horizontal offset on the left hand side of the card, it kind of varies. ligature styles, you know, what two T's look like next to each other versus a T by itself, you know, what's an E look like at the beginning of a word versus inside a word versus at the end of the word? You know, so we've spent so much time in research and development in creating this writing robot that we just got done building intentionally because we wanted to make sure if someone was going to use our service, we have the responsibility to make sure that that handwritten note looks, you know, as real as possible, because that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to connect people with an authentic experience or in an authentic handwritten note. And just the technologies, technologies that were available cannot do that. So.

Andrew Stotz 08:53
Okay. And the second question is, do notes really work? In other words, you know, do people go all Oh, this is not really from the heart? Or I, you know, I just, I'm curious, like, how somebody, and maybe the best way to answer that is kind of like how some of your clients have really made it so that it does work.

Rick Elmore 09:15
Yeah. So, you know, for the store, like your mom, we always recommend like if you have the stationery and the stamps and the pen, like in house, and you're going to send like one card a day, we always recommend to do it yourself, then, you know, there's just you can't beat it, right? But for those times, when you don't have a stamp and you don't have a card and you want to just send one, you can always go to the website or website and send it. But really what sadly not it is, you know, we're a tool for businesses to integrate and automate or scale. So if you think about a client who has a CRM or new a billing system, and they want to automate, a thank you card that goes out on time, we would get notified through that trigger and the action would be send a handwritten note and it's all completely cost them Trying to make it more efficient, because we all know what happens. Everybody has an intention to do it. But we just don't have the time to do it. And then if you wait a week, right things build up, and then it just gets pushed to the side. So we're just trying to, you know, help companies do it. But we absolutely recommend, you know, nothing really, truly beats a genuine sit down, do it yourself type of handwritten note, but we're just there to help, you know, if you can't do that.

Andrew Stotz 10:29
And the other question is, you know, let's say half of my audience is outside of America. So a lot of times when we see services like this, you're like, oh, yeah, this is only going to go out to, you know, in the US or something? Or is it something that could be used internationally? Or is it better for someone who's trying to communicate with people in the US.

Rick Elmore 10:50
So we do work internationally, it would not be a good tool for someone to send one card at a time internationally, because we would have to put an international stamp on it. So it really wouldn't make sense to see that big international stamp on a card, you know, but for the businesses, you know, are individuals who want to, you know, put a bulk order in or buy cards for the year. And somehow we can help them with that object, we just put them in a box and dropship it to them. And that way, you know, the envelopes are done, or the cards are done, all they need to do is put a stamp on it, and it gets shipped locally. So it has a local post stamp on it. Or a postmark.

Andrew Stotz 11:25
That's fascinating. And so let's just say someone in Thailand, as an example, has 1000 customers that they want to communicate in this way. And maybe three holidays out of the year, they may decide or twice a year, they may decide they want to do that. It sounds like that. That can make sense.

Rick Elmore 11:43
Yeah. Exactly. Companies outside the US do.

Andrew Stotz 11:48
It's great. I mean, I find it so hard, I'm sure I mean, and I come from an age of writing handwriting. But I know, as I've heard from my friends, is that kids these days, can't even sign their names sometimes, like they don't have the right skills. So this is gonna be something that's going to be fantastic. And where are you as far as in the business is concerned? Or where do you see growth? What about funding kind of just as if we were doing an interview on a StartUp podcast, you know, what would you what would be your pitch about kind of where you're at and where you're going?

Rick Elmore 12:21
Yeah, so simply, is completely customer funded, we have no loans, no debt, no investors, that was done on purpose. We wanted to prove, you know, basically have a proof of concept before we ever went to raise money. Also, I knew this was going to be something pretty big. And I didn't want to give away too much too early. I started this on a $10,000 0% interest credit card, you know, fast forward five years, we have millions in revenue, we should qualify for the Inc 5000 This year, which is the US is fastest growing 5000 private companies, loving full time employees, we have the robot that we just put $800,000 into and that's all, you know, funds from customers, that's not our money. We just reinvested it. We have six patents on it three, design three utility, we got only company in the world that's truly built its own handwriting robot. Other there are a couple companies out there, but they use actually draw pen plotters, which there's a lot of problems, it's impossible to scale. But yeah, I think simply not, it's just getting to the part two, we're coming into a whole new problems, you know, our website had over 324,000 users last month. And with that type of volume, it's incredibly difficult that customer experience, you know, your servers are crashing, because, you know, our user base kind of grew a little bit too quickly. And it's creating a bunch of new problems we never even saw or even thought about that we'd have. So try on for as long as I can. But you know, funding is in the future. But simply not it was built to sell, you know, this was my first business my first idea. This, this can be $100 billion business, but it's going to take you know, some type of investment banker, you know, large corporation with the deep pockets and systems in place to do that. No, I wouldn't need, you know, a 40,000 square foot building and like 100 employees and in to grow to that you need to be in debt for three or four or five years. And that's nothing I want to deal with, you know, so yeah, but we're getting there. You know, we're almost five years into this. I've been really eat sleeping and dreaming and working and crying about sniffer dogs. I have a ticket. It's extremely hard, right?

Andrew Stotz 14:40
That's part of what we're going to talk about probably next but before we do that, let me ask you who would be the ideal buyer.

Rick Elmore 14:50
So an ideal buyer would be seeing like Mark tech, you know, marketing business, direct mail company who wants to get into this type of space? We do have a few You know, companies that were eyeing to position and think about, you know, probably exiting in the next year or so. But, yeah, I would say it's either like the direct mail space, like the MAR tech space, you know, like a SaaS company who wants to add a physical handwritten note service and a user base, or just like an investment banker who wants to just come in, buy most of this out? Let me run it and grow it. Yeah, so I'd say those are probably like the three or four ideal acquisition partners,

Andrew Stotz 15:31
I asked that question because one of the one of the most successful people that I knew that I helped sell his business, which we eventually sold it to Microsoft, from almost day one, he knew who his buyer was, and I really admired that. Like he That's awesome. Yeah. And so I always tell people, you know, start writing down the names of the buyers now.

Rick Elmore 15:55
Yeah, yeah. Make friends with all of them. Something Yeah, I reach out when I see them post something. I'm always right on their stuff. Congratulations. I'm trying to I planted the seed a while ago, and just keep watering a little bit. The sprout Yeah,

Andrew Stotz 16:14
he went to every trade show that Microsoft did. And he used any demonstrated to them, like the things he was employing of the tools that they were developing. So exciting. Well, you know, I look forward to seeing your continued, you know, growth and all that. But now it is time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be. Tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it. And then tell us your story.

Rick Elmore 16:40
Yeah, so it's a great question. So my background is in athletics. And I had the bright idea of starting a software robotics and industrial automation company. This has been an incredibly wild ride, to say the least. I was incredibly ambitious, you know, incredibly ignorant to, you know, ambitious to see the big goal, big picture, but incredibly ignorant to know like, what was actually going to go into this. It's been really hard. And over the last, so we started this in 2017, I've worked with three different developers. And the thing that will make or break your business, if it's online is a good developer, especially if you have like back in programs or technology that are running, you know, off site, you know, behind the scenes to make everything run online. Because when you're working with developers, what's hard if you can't explain the perfect picture upfront of what you want, which can never happen, as you get three months into the project, you run into new problems. And that changes the scope of work that you talked about three months ago. And as that gets harder, costs go up, right projects get delayed. And then if you get six months down the line, or a year into it, and you realize crap, this wasn't the right platform to build this on. Because now we want to go in this direction, and it doesn't work properly. We have to start over. So you just wasted 12 months budget. Plus now you got to go through the whole process again, start over and go through it all again. So that's the ignorant part of what I've had to go through. You know, we started on a I mean, it was like Squarespace. Like it was like a terrible website had no clue what I was doing. Then we went to was it it was another old, outdated platform. I forget, but I mean, we're on three different platforms. But what we've realized that in order to be able to integrate and play well, with all the other software's you have to have a fully custom app, you have to be able to fully control everything that you're building. And right now, you know, we're on Shopify, with Shopify kind of keeps you in a box, they, they want you to play within their ecosystem. But that's not what the world wants. So, yeah, I would say, definitely, definitely the hard thing about a business is seeing the future even though the future is really hard to predict. Because you have to write that clear picture, you gonna have those wireframes of what you want, how they're going to work, be very clear about the expectations about how it's going to be the functions are going to operate, which is impossible. So I would think, you know, a lot of people have talked about the same headaches of dealing with software because it's just no matter how clear you are with expectations. It's, it's going to be a headache, and then there's always gonna be bugs, like, there'll be no problems with our website, and then Shopify will release like, an update, and then one of my API's is is outdated, you know, it crashes everything's just like it's like incredibly frustrating. So, yeah, first off, I recommend, you know, start a business where you're complete expert don't just go off in a left field and say Got a softer robotic or you know something that's completely out of there. But

Andrew Stotz 20:04
But yeah, left field a sports reference?

Rick Elmore 20:08
Yeah, I know, shocker, right?

Andrew Stotz 20:12
I'm just curious, like, when was the most what was the day that you were most disappointed by, you know, developers software, the situation, you know, in this aspect.

Rick Elmore 20:26
So doing this with no money or no money like we've had to we live and die by what we eat or hunt and kill every single month, right? So what we go out, and I work really hard and so does our sales team to go out prospect and bring interested clients in. And we had a seven figure contract with, you know, the client we were already working with for almost a year, and we were trying to sign a multi year contract with them. But it really predicated on getting a robot done, the current robot that we were using, could not scale with them, it wasn't good enough. And we were talking with them saying, hey, like, this is where we're at, come look at it, it's been done. And we had a software development team, electrical engineering team and a mechanical engineering engineering team. And they were supposed to be done six months before our new contract negotiation was gonna get done. So they're already way behind on it, like way behind. So like, we should have had a robot done before we even got to the new contract negotiation. So yeah, that was so hard to swallow. But yeah, when we got to that new contract negotiation, we put in all that work for almost three years, a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of money. We've done everything that I can control, right? It was in the hands of the people who were paying, you know, our developers and our engineers, and they just couldn't get it done. And we ended up losing that sub contract. And, again, being a no debt, no funds, no Investors Business, like, it was a hard, hard pill to swallow. But, you know, me, I just, it makes me I don't say it makes me angry, but like, it makes me more like competitive, like, I can do this. It's okay, I'm gonna make it work. I'm gonna figure it out. I'm gonna work but you know, like, my athletic background kicked, and I was like, no, no worries, wake up the next day, and get to work again. So

Andrew Stotz 22:15
kind of like Michael Jordan, when he finds his nemesis that, you know, pisses him off and just fires him up. So. So how would you summarize the lessons? I mean, you think about it from a perspective of there's a lot of new people out there that are starting up startup businesses in the modern era of software and apps. And it's amazing, and all of that, what, tell us about the lessons that you learned from this experience?

Rick Elmore 22:42
Yeah, well, the first thing is that there's going to be like, no straight line to success, it's going to be constant ups and downs, there may be a lot more downs than ups. And you can't not start something because you're afraid of how hard it's going to be or because you don't have all the answers. I think a lot of self discovery happens within the journey. And, you know, like, looking back at my own football career, you know, my last year in the NFL, you know, some of the things I enjoyed the most about football was the 15 years that led up to that last year, you know, things I love doing, you know, it was the working out, it was the competing, you know, the locker room lifestyle, the friends, the relationships, right? So the journey, you know, I realized was, what was really what I love most. And the journey is really part of the dream, or the journey is the dream, you know, you're going through it, you're figuring it out, you're growing, you're becoming better, not generic, it's really hard. You're trying to birth, something that doesn't exist, you're trying to create something that never was, you're trying to sell it, you're trying to scale it, you're trying to sell other people why they should come work for you, right? So it's an incredible amount of work. But I would say to anybody starting it's just you have to get started, you can't be afraid to fail, you have to fail early. And often you have to learn can't give up, you get knocked down just like how we lost that seven figure contract, you get up and you let it motivate you, you know, even more, you know, motivation you let drive you right, like there's a reason that we lost that. Right? Like, I can cry about it, I can get out, you know, upset about it, but no, I'm gonna learn from it. I should have probably started that project earlier. Or I should have, you know, made the project requirements a lot less, you know, I could have done things differently that kind of got us across that finish line. So it was just a learning experience.

Andrew Stotz 24:38
Maybe I'll share a few things. I mean, first of all, you know, let me just summarize some of the things that I heard from you obviously, simply noted is trying to get this real handwritten notes out there. You mentioned that people are hit by 4000 messages or incoming contacts per month. I was gonna say Oh, per day. But yeah, per month. Okay, probably Even under estimating it, you know, you also mentioned that your custom customer funded, I've never actually heard someone say that normally, we would say self funded. So I'd love that because it really shows that customers are contributing to the expansion of the business. And hopefully, as you mentioned, you're gonna get on that Inc 5000 coming up. So that's really exciting. Amazing that you customer funded, you're where you're at with 11 employees, and you've spent $800,000 on this robot. That's incredible. And then the one thing that that made me think when you were talking about, we had 324,000 website users last month, which brings all kinds of new problems. And I just thought, how the listeners and myself are thinking to myself, God, I'd love to have those problems. And

Rick Elmore 25:52
bigger problems. A lot more money.

Andrew Stotz 25:55
Yeah, exactly. Because the 324 people who visit my website last night didn't cause any problem.

Rick Elmore 26:04
Yeah, I actually just learned, that's a that type of web traffic's in the top 2% of all websites on the web. So that was pretty cool to figure it out, as well.

Andrew Stotz 26:14
And then, you know, we talked about exiting, which actually, what you're talking about more like is transitioning, as opposed to you exiting, because it sounds like you got more fire in you to run this business, but it's about to go to the next big level, you really got to scale. And so that's something you don't want to do alone. So those are the things that I gained from what you said about the business. But I just wanted to mention a couple of things. You also, you know, talked about the journey. And I just love the idea that there's no straight line to success. It is a lot of ups and downs. And you talked also about self discovery, and you said kind of that the journey is the dream, it's like, I think that so much of the time, we're so focused on getting the result because it's food on the table. So it's natural that we're focused on the result. But I think what I take away from what you're saying is the idea that, you know, step back, you got food on the table, 365 days last year or this year, what are you learning? And that, I think is a huge thing. And the final thing I took away is, you know, let your losses drive you. And that really, I think, from my own perspective, I've lost a lot of opportunities. And in most cases, it was very justified. There was a good, why they walked away, it's,

Rick Elmore 27:46
it's hard to acknowledge that right? We just weren't good enough at the time, right? Or there's something was not there at the time, or it maybe just wasn't a good fit at the time. I think that's really powerful. I mean, maybe anybody can take that as the most powerful thing from this podcast. So yeah, okay. There's a reason we failed learning from it, right? You have to pay attention be self critical, right? Don't ignore it. Because a lot of people when bad things happen, they don't like to, they don't like to look at it, they like to turn their head because looking at it's painful, right? Like, I have a couple of situations like that it took me 10 years to get over, you know, looking back at my football career, and it's just like, Man, I would have been X hanging 10x more successful if this didn't happen, you know? Yeah, and a lot of them were self controllable.

Andrew Stotz 28:35
And that, and that's another lesson I've learned through the podcast is you're gonna make mistakes, and you're going to go wrong directions. And you won't even know it at the time. So that's just part of life. One of my guests, Atlanta, Pugh is a really excellent investor with many years of experience. And he described this amazing investment that he's been buying and holding for 20 years and eventually sold at a massive loss. And I said, at the end, I was just like, You did everything right. You know, as a financial guy and an analyst. But you know, my conclusion from this, his story was just simply that you're going to lose, there are times that you're going to lose, and that is just life. So let me ask you for Think about a young person, like yourself when you started off this company based on what you learned from this story and what you continue to learn what one action would you take or recommend that our listeners take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Rick Elmore 29:33
So there's, there's a good quote by Jim Collins, it's called bullets and cannon Knology but this is the only reason we've been successful. I would say this is like one of my best business capabilities or disciplines is that you have to do a lot of tests. You know, say you have $5,000 And that's all you have to start a business. You shouldn't just go throw all that money away at the first opera. Trinity, what you need to do is you need to do a bunch of test shots. So imagine like you're on a pirate ship, and you're fighting one on one against another pirate ship. And you'll have one cannonball. So you what you need to do is line up that cannon. Right take a few test shots, right? And then when you know it's going to be a dead on hit, you throw that cannonball. And that cannonball is gonna save you, right? So that's what we've done here at simply noted. It's a lot of test, test, test, test, test, shoot, test, test, test, test, test, shoot. And that's how we've mitigated risk. To be an entrepreneur and a successful entrepreneur, you have to be disciplined, you have to mitigate risk, you got to take risk, but you got to take the right risk. You got to take calculated risk. And the only way you can do that is just by test. Like, you're gonna be tempted like, oh, this sounds great. This is gonna change everything. There's no easy but there's no software out there trying to change anything. Don't listen to these YouTube gurus, you know, I'm a content consumer, I listened to a lot of stuff. The only way to become an overnight success. It takes years, you know, my I have a business mentor, he said, it took me 20 years to become an overnight success. I love that, quote. Pay attention to these Gary V's like, Oh, we're 27 hours a day and you'll become successful. This you know, like it just walk your own path. Try to become better every single day. Seek growth rates, education, tests, test and,

Andrew Stotz 31:25
and don't put all your money down on red.

Rick Elmore 31:28
No. Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Stotz 31:32
So what I mean, I think the answer is obvious. And I'm gonna say your website, but what's a resource that you'd recommend for our listeners?

Rick Elmore 31:42
Um, well, I'm a big self education person. So if I'm not going to like, you know, shamelessly, plug simply know that I, I use Coursera. And Coursera a lot for self education. So I'm going through like a CS 50s class right now. It's. So again, my pain point is working with software developers. So I'm going through a software development course on Coursera, to learn how to be more competent when talking to them, and asking the right questions. So I'm trying to solve my own problem by self educating. So I would say become a student, you know, a student at life a student at your craft, and you never will have all the answers. There's someone out there that's better than you. There's someone on your heels that's trying to come and take you down, sir, take your clients, like I feel that every day. But if you just, you know, spend 30 minutes a day, you know, researching, testing, developing learning, nobody else is going to do that. And we didn't have anybody else. I mean, in five years, you'll be years ahead of everybody else.

Andrew Stotz 32:43
Great. Alright, last question, what is your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Rick Elmore 32:49
My work production phase of our robots. And then now we're starting off a new web app for our website. So we just now that we have a robot, we just want to get the best experience in product to our clients. So that's where we're going with building our new website. So if anybody has any feature ideas, you know, if they want to see something that we don't offer, we highly, highly recommend you reach out to us because we're in that building phase right now. And, yeah, because the next big hurdle is an enterprise level website app. And then hopefully, within a year or two after that, we're exiting or taking an investment in scaling and really growing.

Andrew Stotz 33:25
Fantastic. Well, listeners, there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. If you haven't yet joined the become a better investor community just go to my worst investment ever.com Right now, as we conclude, Rick, I want to thank you again for joining our mission and on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Rick Elmore 33:50
Never give up. Don't fail until you quit.

Andrew Stotz 33:54
Beautiful. And that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. Let's celebrate that today. We added one more person to our mission to help 1 million people reduce risk in their lives. This is your worst podcast hose Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.