Escapee Collective Session: Fractional 101 with Jake Stahl

Brett Trainor (: 00:14

Hey, Brett. Hey, Jake. How you doing? Good, you? Good. Good, good, good.

Brett Trainor (: 00:23

How's everything up north? Getting cooler, but it's nice. I could live this time of year all year long. It is nice. It's been chilled in the morning, but I think we'll be 90 tomorrow. So it was short lived, but yeah. Yep. agree. 100%. I'm going to remove my note taker, Brett. So doesn't slow things down. Yeah. According it's for the.

rest of the group, can't make it tonight, so.

We go. I think I'm still recording. Did you get the note that I was recording? Yeah, I see what's going on.

Yeah, you're running this show. So I think your recorder won't show on my side. Okay. Usually it has to give you the opt -in though for whatever. I think I said it that I just allow everybody. Yeah. I won't say anything incriminating. Exactly.

Brett Trainor (: 01:27

So just so you know, Jake, we'll end up with recording. I'll give you 10, 15, 20 minutes. We'll do Q and A and then I'll post it to the entire community afterwards so folks can download it. So. Sure. Did we have any specific areas of fractional one -on -one we wanted to cover Brett? I just think you're going to have some folks that are doing it, some folks that are considering it. So I think kind of our last conversation where we bounced ideas that, different definitions of it.

talk a little bit about Frac: 2024

Yeah, and I have the chat open so if people have questions, they can just go ahead and throw it in the chat.

Brett Trainor (: 02:38

and you're gonna let me ramble for 20 minutes, that's dangerous. 15 to 20, I'll cut you out if you go too long.

My wife does the very same thing.

subtly or does she just say that's enough?

It's body language. It's all about the body language. Exactly. Well, it is kind of the beauty of zoom. You can see it, you can read reactions. So yeah.

Brett Trainor (: 03:10

See, people are letting me see their shiny faces now. This is good. Yes.

Brett Trainor (: 03:23

We'll give it to the 503 mark and then we'll get started. Yeah, sure.

So this is the only time of any Zoom meeting within this community or otherwise where I run the risk of sounding like a corporate where I say, we'll give people a few more minutes to join. Yeah, we try to avoid corporate buzzword bingo if we can. It's really hard, right? I know. go back and take it offline. Bonus points if anybody catches you saying one.

I'm sure you'll catch me at least once. Just real quick, for those of you who have joined already, can you throw in the chat where you are in your fractional journey? Are you just starting? Are you just investigating? Are you already doing it for a year or two? I'd just love to get a temperature gauge as to where we are. All right, we got one. Thank you, John. Appreciate that. Nate, great. Thank you.

Brett Trainor (: 04:26

And to Nate or Jake, you'll also see some folks that are kind of structured as an agency or doing some consulting, but fractional revenue stream, lot of folks are interested in. So that's where you'll get a full next year. Wow. We have gotten the full next. see Don's been out there already journeying for eight years. That's great. Stacey's investigating as is Lou. That's fantastic.

And James, help me out a little bit. said returning after six years of corporate. Does that mean you took six years off or you've been doing entrepreneurship for six years? I haven't even dreamed of six years off. That would be awesome. I did a lot of freelance work. I'm rounding, but like 10 years of freelance development.

And then got up, got an offer that was a lot of money. and I took it and I didn't enjoy it. was six years of ugliness and probably six weeks ago, I gave my notice and said, thank you. I'm Great. took some time off and here I am. Burn those ships, baby.

Brett and I have talked a number of times. That's a good strategy. I also see somebody is currently in corporate investigating, Lou, and that's a great plan as well. There's no set in stone exit strategy that's better than the other, at least I've found. Exactly, the one universal truth, and it's funny, I had somebody on the podcast today, think the interview will come out in a couple of weeks. So she's been doing this for nine years.

So she's one of the OGs that have been escaping corporate does marketing, but she started, you'll have to tune in full episode to see why it makes sense to have her on. I'm like, well, you know, it's tough. said, I'm yet to meet anybody that's really would want to go back into corporate. She's like, I'd rather be homeless and go back. So there's the title of this episode. So, said, I said more than once. Yeah. would rather go live under a bridge than keep doing this.

Brett Trainor (: 06:48

Yeah, I can. Keely, thanks for joining us. Would you do me a favor and just throw into the chat where you are in your fractional journey? Are you just starting investigating? You've been around for a while. Just give me a little bit of an overview as to where you are.

Brett Trainor (: 07:05

Can you hear me okay?

OK, cool. Alright, so I think we've got good recording this. I'll post this up in the community later tonight or tomorrow morning for folks. I'm just here. You will be listening to it unless you want to go back and pull notes from it. So I've asked Jake Stall to come on and talk all things fractional 101. Jake, you've been doing this for how long now? 10 years. There you go. So before fractional was even considered fractional.

e executive committee of frac: 2023

2024 up here in October. I mean, you have him give a little plug here at the end as well. So with that Jake, like said, I'll be here to pull questions and, know, call you down a rabbit hole maybe when you're going. I'll let you run with it. And if you guys do have questions, don't hesitate to throw your hand up or throw it into the chat. And that's where we really want to make sure that all questions do get answered in the fastest 30 minutes.

in Happy Hour and Learns. So with that, it's yours. Cool. Thank you very much, Brett. I would love if you had questions, if you'd throw them in there, because I think that's the best way to do a journey together. Just to give you the 30 second Jake Stahl capsule, I worked for a long time in corporate America through a variety of industries, mostly in training and development. Over the past 10 years, I have been doing fractional work.

Brett Trainor (: 09:01

And my experience goes back 30 years in training and development. I've trained in six different countries, spoken in 47 states on the topic of learning and development, especially on a shoestring. And honestly, until a year and a half ago, I didn't realize I was fractional until they came out with the definition. and I have discussed the definition for a while. So I'm to give you my definition.

And I'm going to tell you openly that you will hear people contradicting this. My opinion of Fractional is when you give a certain amount of your time per week and per month to a company in return for high level services, I think it needs to be in a leadership point of view. I am not a believer that it needs to be C -suite, nor does it need to be VP level. I think you can run any gamut of

titles or positions as long as it's leadership or you're actually helping to guide the company in some way or some project in some way. My company is Jake Saul Consulting. So to be honest with all of you, when I'm between fractional gigs, I do do consulting work. I'm a firm believer that what pays the bills pays the bills. It doesn't need to have a great definition to it or fantastic glittery title to make it work.

One of the things I get asked a lot is about what made me go this direction. And a couple of you were kind enough to say you either blown up the bridge or you're ready to, or you're just exploring it. For me, it was, I got really tired of performance reviews. I got tired of sitting in a meeting where somebody said to me, my God, you blew away every objective and you were astounding and.

and you made the earth tilt on his axis and everything was wonderful. So out of five, you get a three. And I'd say, well, why was it a three? Well, we only give away so many fours and honestly, nobody gets a five. And if I'm being truthful, that's what spurred me to leave. If I'm gonna do peak performance and I'm gonna do a great job, then I wanna be in charge of either lighting up my world or...

Brett Trainor (: 11:20

I also am content with being the tragedy of my own world, but at least I know who to point a finger to when push comes to shove. So what led me out of that was my lack of enjoyment with performance reviews. And then when you do get a performance review, the raise of half a percent, I just couldn't deal with that anymore. So I separated from a company I was with for 16 years.

And I started doing light corporate gigs. And while I was doing the corporate gigs, I would do a lot of consulting and a lot of just advising work. And I had a reputation already in the training and development community. So I just started building on that and started doing a lot of fractional work. And it's just kind of grown. The thing I will say about the journey.

is it's not always great. As a matter of fact, there are weeks and months straight where it's just not great. And as long as you can take that high and low, the satisfaction rate is staggering. If I could give one piece of advice out to this group and for people just starting, even people have been veterans for a while, is come up with a definition of networking networks for you.

In other words, a lot of people treat networking as I'm going to attend as many groups as I can for as long as I can and talk to as many people as I can. I would argue vehemently do the exact opposite of that. Get involved with worthwhile groups like Bret's where you're going to get a quality group of people, not just people that are doing a 30 minute thing where you get half a second to talk about what you do. Then the rest of it is everybody else doing that.

start to form a network from a base group of people. Brett is what I call a person that's in my five. So you take five people that are as concerned about your success as you are, and you're as concerned about their success as they are, and you just give. And when you give, they want to give in return.

Brett Trainor (: 13:41

And then that leads into if I can get every person that I give to, to give me just two introductions, it starts to blossom. When I aggressively started building my network, I found that it grew super quick without me doing any type of automation or marketing outreach, but everybody in my network I knew. I could call on my name.

I could introduce people too easily. felt confident with them. Take your time, build your network slow. The people with 300 ,000 connections, it looks phenomenal and it looks great. But if you know five of them,

the value of the network is something that I think you want to think about.

I would also suggest getting super involved with people that are in the community that you want to be in. Brett and I met, how long ago Brett? You and I met a year and a half ago, maybe.

You're on mute, buddy. I was clicking my own microphone. Yeah, it's probably, it's hard to believe it's been at least that now. Okay. So yeah. And by the way, Jake, is you're gonna keep going. I love that idea of the foundational five or whatever you want to call those. And I think it's a really good idea. I mean, if you do it in, in not intentionally, but being more intentional is something like that. It was nodding my head a lot as you were saying. I think it's a really great idea.

Brett Trainor (: 15:15

Well, and thank you for that. And Stacey, I see you put in something too that it goes with Seth Godin's philosophy. Here's the premise. The premise is everybody wants to build quick and they want to have a thousand people to dip into because it's playing the odds. If I can talk to 25 people, maybe I can close one. I believe this wholeheartedly. And if you listen to any podcast I'm on, I am a foe of the whole sales as a math game.

It's not. Sales is a relationship game. And if you're willing to put in the time to get to know somebody else, I can guarantee you they're gonna put in the time to get to know you. Some of my best clients are the ones that say, hey, if I call 25 people, I'm bound to get one. Because I can show them that I can show you how to get one out of every four or five that you talk to.

Brett Trainor (: 16:12

Another thing I would suggest is when you're networking on LinkedIn, do not sell who you are or what you do for the first three or four outreaches. So if there's somebody you want to get to know, let's say Stacey, I hope you don't mind if I use an example, but let me say I want to get to know Stacey. My first outreach to her is Stacey, see you're a fellow fractional, really cool journey I see you're making. Would you mind connecting?

Stacey, 9 .9 times out of 10 is going to go, sure, and connect with me. Then my next outreach to Stacey is, Stacey, thank you so much for connecting. I'm just curious, what's your ideal customer look like? And Stacey's going to write back to me and she's going to tell me what her ideal customer looks like. I am genuinely interested in Stacey's journey. And then I'm going to ask her things like, what verticals do you go in? How can I best support you?

Are you doing anything on LinkedIn? Can I do a like or a comment? And Stacey's gonna say, wow, Jake's really interested. Man, he's somebody I should really get to know. And by the third or fourth outreach, magic happens. Stacey's gonna say, I've talked enough about me. Tell me about you.

That's when she gets most receptive to me and my message. I've developed a strong connection. She now has somebody who genuinely wants to help her. And as part of my network, I'm going to do everything that I can to help Stacey. I'm going to watch her LinkedIn posts. I'm going to support her. I'm going to like it. I'm going to genuinely comment.

If I build an entire network on that premise alone, that is going to be the most powerful network on the planet. I will tell you with great pride, I get a face -to -face with 80 % of people I reach out to, and it's nothing magic. It's just showing a genuine interest in that other person, whether it's a business owner or a fractional or whatever it is. But don't...

Brett Trainor (: 18:23

Go after the carrot of getting a thousand people per week because you're paying a company 200 bucks to make that happen. Grow it organically.

And then you know what, when you reach out to them, follow up with a steady reach out cycle. Every month and a half, reach out to all of them and just say, hey, you know what? We haven't talked in a bit. Just wanted to see where you were and how you're doing. And the strength of your relationships is gonna go. This is how Brett and I built ours.

ow I became the CSO for Fract: 2024

spray and pray approach.

Brett Trainor (: 19:20

Is that being helpful to people? I don't want to go off on a tangent that's not being helpful.

Now I think it's absolutely as we do reinforce or try to reinforce and get different perspectives on the networking. But I think it's so true. So even if you look at this community, right, we've got almost 900 that are in and out and some are popping on a monthly basis or not. And then we've got some more, they're really starting to get interested, but then all the way down to our mastermind, kind of the same thing. That group, I know them really well. I know who to introduce every one of them into in different businesses.

But it took a little bit of time, right? So it's a lot of it's it's I think your message is spot on and we forget that. And that's a good thing. Again, if I was just coming out of corporate, it would have been better to have this conversation four years ago. But I mean, it is the truth and it is really the more you try to not sell yourself and just connect and ask the question and be genuinely interested the faster that that process is going to go just because it's.

I get energized with those types of conversations versus the somebody that's just calling to pitch me on something that those never go well. And I may end up taking the call, but it just doesn't, it doesn't work. So, yeah, long game is definitely the strategy and doesn't have to be super long because you can act and get the opportunities come from surprising places just by having these connections. Yeah, it's, it's a long game, but

but it's a worthwhile long game. I will tell you, I just had a client sign on with me that I'd been courting for a year and a half. Nothing feels better than bringing that to a close. Would I have loved to have closed them in two meetings? my God, yes. Absolutely. But the fact that it came to a successful conclusion was a year of hard work. I see Nate, you have a question. After you build a relationship, do you discuss offerings?

Brett Trainor (: 21:17

or do you lead with a shorter term, lower risk offering and then work into fractional? That's an excellent question. I'm gonna tell you the way I did it, but I'm gonna tell you that I don't know all the answers. This worked for me and may or may not work. So what I started doing was I started with low risk, short term offerings so I could start to build my portfolio, so to speak.

So I could build that list of companies that say I've worked with, I've done it. Because what I didn't want to do, Nate, was jeopardize my corporate full -time job for the sake of going into something I couldn't afford to commit to fully. I couldn't afford to burn the boats and just say, I'm here, let's make this happen. So I did discuss fractional offering. I did look for shorter term just to prove to myself I could do it.

And to be honest with you, I undercut people because I wanted to get to work. Now that I've been doing this for 10 years, I make no apologies about my prices. I make no apologies about how long or short my offering is, or even what my terms are when it comes to payment. And we can talk about that too, because I know that gets touchy. But I almost looked at it, Nate, from the I have to earn the right to play in the league.

And I looked at my shorter term lower cost offering as ways to do that. Does that make sense, Nate? And more importantly, does it answer your question? Yeah, for sure. Sure. And Jay, maybe I can just give you a quick example today. mean, real world example. I had a networking call with a business owner here in Chicago. He owns 12 locations. I wasn't 100 % sure. Somebody else had introduced me. So I wasn't sure if he was looking for help. I wasn't going in.

And he's, what it turned out is he got introduced to another consultant that actually pitched him a statement work, a full MSA. And he was, he got, he wanted my opinion. He got referred that I could maybe give him some advice on what it, so I didn't pitch him. just take and gave him, share my thoughts. like, yeah, this looks really expensive. There's not a whole lot of detail around what you're getting. I don't know this group. And then we talked more, well, what do you do? And then I kind of talked about how I work with small businesses and different ways.

Brett Trainor (: 23:40

So we never even got to what my offer was, but he did ask a lot of questions of, maybe there is some ways that we can work together. So I was quick not to plant that flag and say, yeah, I can come in and do this whole thing that this company is doing. I took in all this information in the sense of, about the business. said, give me 24 hours to think through this. I'm sure I'm going have a bunch of other questions. I'm really excited about what you're doing. I think I can help, but then we're going to meet again on Thursday to kind of talk through.

some of the questions that had. So again, that's just one of my, that's my approach, even though I do see a full fractional type of role with this, didn't plant that yet. I just wanted him to understand that he's gonna get value from me and we'll cross that bridge after the next conversation probably. And to build on what Brett said, there's,

There's two huge secrets. I wish somebody would have told me when I got started, or maybe somebody did, and I was in too much of a cocky mode to listen or try it or whatever. The first one was in order to be interesting, you need to be interested. I would argue after 10 years of doing this across six different countries, that it's the same everywhere. The more interest I show in somebody,

the higher my chance of getting a contract with them. I have a fathom note taker and I religiously look at the percent of time I'm talking and I find the lower it goes, the higher my chances of getting the contract. So when we think of selling ourselves, I would argue, what is the best way to not sell at all while you're selling? And the best way to do that is buying being interested.

in every single facet of what a person has to say.

Brett Trainor (: 25:36

The second thing I found again, wish I would have known this in the beginning, the more you're fussy about your pricing and your terms, and the more you have the ability to tell someone no, the more they're going to want you. It's almost like this bizarre unwritten rule. It's if somebody says, well, you're really high priced and I negotiate.

And Brett will tell you, I don't believe in negotiating at this stage of my fractional career. But if somebody thinks my price is high and I negotiate, I find that I didn't have a very good hit rate with people. But if I give somebody a high price and I tell them, you've learned from the day you were born that you get what you pay for. In this circumstance, you are definitely getting what you pay for. I find my close rate goes through the roof. And I would have never guessed this.

I always thought the lower the price, the more flexible I am, the better it's going to be. And I will tell you unequivocally, I have not found that to be accurate at all.

Brett Trainor (: 26:47

And it seems counterintuitive because we want business and we say, my God, Jake, but I got to get the business.

I, I just feel that you sticking by your guns and believing in what you do is the biggest selling point you have. Confidence. Yeah. No, you're right. It's, it's hard to do that, but it is hard. I'm with you because as soon as you start to do that, then they start to doubt again, just human nature. not an expert in this, but once you do that, then they start to doubt and the sales cycle gets on longer and longer. it just, right. Either they see the value or they don't.

And if you can stick this and reinforce why the value is there and you're confident in it, that tends to definitely help the close rate for sure. And again, it takes a few rotations through to get more. And so maybe, Jake, maybe this is a good time to talk about some different types of engagements. Are all of yours monthly retainers? Again, there's no one size fits all, but would love to get some, your general, how you approach the engagement.

Yeah. And then would you mind if we went into how we talk about pricing a little bit, Brett? Cause I know you talked about that. So my engagements right now, 100 % of my work is referral. I don't do any cold outreach at all unless I'm trying to build my network. So a hundred percent of it is referral because I started trying to master a long time ago how to ask somebody for a referral. And I would say that's going to be the single biggest generator of your business.

Learn to ask for referrals. It takes less time than it does to do cold outreach and it will yield 100 times the results you would get from cold outreach. So my business model works in a couple of different ways. First is I do a lot of one -on -one consulting. I have a lot of individual clients that call me about business development and I do a monthly contract with them, but I do it in blocks of hours. So we'll cross over into my pricing real quick.

Brett Trainor (: 28:51

I never sell hour at a time. It's very difficult because when a client hears how much you make per hour, the first thing they do naturally is, I don't make that much per hour. I don't pay my employees that much per hour. And it gets to be a conditioned response. So I sell what I call blocks of hours. And I price the block. Now, probably what's going through your head is, well, Jake, it's

Pretty common sense. You take the overall place and you divide it by the number of hours in your block and you have the hourly price. And that is 100 % accurate. But it doesn't work that way in the client's mind. What they hear is one price tag for X number of hours. And what I do is I sell in blocks of four. So nobody can book me an hour at a time. You buy blocks of four hours. You want to six hours of my time, you have to buy eight.

And I do that for a couple of reasons. First of all, the psychology of buying one block is more acceptable for people than buying four or eight hours.

The second thing is people typically don't do the math of what that boils down per hour. It's like when you go to a sale and you hear there's 15 % off, it's the rare person that looks at a price tag and goes, so 15 % off, $10 is, people just accept that it's 15 % off. So my block pricing strategy works out great. So I would encourage you to do that. I charge this per week, I charge this per month.

them how many hours, but there's a security psychologically for people to buy one big grouping versus a bunch of smaller ones. So I work with individual clients. I have sales teams that hire me to ramp up their sales. And then I have corporate clients who hire me on to do everything from instructional design to coaching their sales team. So I work fractionally contractually where I tell them how many months, how many weeks, et cetera.

Brett Trainor (: 30:55

I work consulting, which means I'll work on projects. And then I work on retainer. But every single one of that I sell in blocks of my time. And I will tell you again, since I started doing that, I get very little argument on pricing.

Brett Trainor (: 31:18

Any questions on that? And once again, I'm not saying this is gonna work for all of you. I'm saying I found this to be literally the magic bullets when it comes to pricing. Is people more accepting when you're not pricing per hour?

Don, you had a question? Could you offer some insights as to how you ask for a referral? Yeah, absolutely. Would you to track or something like that? Yeah, I'd be happy to. So when I'm coming to the end of my contract with a client, I never wait until the end, the end. If I'm like a month out or two blocks out, something like that, I start to stoke the referral engine. And I start to ask things like,

Is there anything you would have changed? Did this meet your expectations? I try to get them to the point where they're very happy with my work and we're talking about it. Usually about a week before our engagement ends, I say them specifically, do you ever network in other circles? CEO circles, vice president of sales circles, networks, things like that. Inevitably people do. Networking, everybody does.

So I start with a benign question. Are you involved in any circles for your profession? When they say yes, I say, how often do you run into scenarios like you experienced when I came on board? Jake, my God, all the time. Just a curiosity, have you gotten to know those people well? Yeah, I really have. We talk once a week on our networking sessions. Would you have any objections to, and this is important on how you phrase it.

would you have any objections to referring me? I'm doing two things there. First, I'm establishing that they will give me referrals. And second, if they wouldn't, it gives me a chance to answer the objections right away. If I just say to them, will you refer me? And they say no, then I'm in a weird position of saying, well, why not? So instead, I get those out of the way right in the beginning.

Brett Trainor (: 33:27

My training, just everybody knows, is I have a degree in psychology with a master's certification in neuro -linguistic programming. So for me, every word counts. And the way I phrase things counts. So if I have somebody to connect with me, I say, would you be kind enough to connect with me? If I want to get an in -person meeting with somebody, I'll say, would it make sense for us to meet live? So I'm always making it in a way that they have the choice, which they do.

f in spades. My talk at Fract: 2024

and avoiding the sales hustle because I think our job as fractionals and solopreneurs is how do we attract them? How do we get them to want to talk to us? And one of my biggest practices instead of persuasion, I call it persuasion. What can I do before we even meet to make them want to talk to me? And I spend an inordinate amount of time doing persuasion with people.

Brett Trainor (: 34:53

Any questions on that? know we've covered a lot.

Brett Trainor (: 35:00

I think it was good. threw it in there. If anybody had any questions. I know we ran a couple of minutes over, but Jake, I do apologize. No, no, no, this was good. I already got a page of notes. We talk all the time. talk a little bit, if you don't mind a little bit about Frac 2024 for those folks who don't know what this is. Yeah. So last year in a weird spur of moment decision by John Arms, who I will argue to the end of time is the father of fractional is in the U S or the fractional movement.

Hot father, that's probably more appropriate. John and a couple of colleagues decided to put together a conference last year with about three months to prep. They got 220 people who were investigating fractionals to a conference where they put keynote speakers in front of them, panel discussions, form networking groups, and they created a conference that went over very well. I was lucky enough to be there. Brett, were you there? I was there. I know one of the panels. Awesome.

So they had powerhouses like Brett on the panels to attract people. When they asked me if I would come this year to do it, I said I would gladly act as this chief sales officer and help facilitate the process. But here's what you're gonna get. Right now, I believe we have 26 keynote speakers and panelists that are coming. People that are well -documented thoroughbreds in the fractional solopreneur arena.

They've got world -class advice that you would pay 2 ,500 bucks a month to be coached by these people. They're all lined up. We're expecting 500 fractionals. We are having hives to help people network while we're there. And we're actually having a VIP event that will be taking place before the conference that you can sign up for.

that you can come in and again, get exposure to some world -class people talking about fractional. It's gonna cover everything from negotiating skills to how to write a contract, to how to formulate your pricing. A lot of people take a lot of different approaches to pricing, how to build a referral machine and build a referral network.

Brett Trainor (: 37:16

even if you're just thinking about Fractionals, by the time you leave this two -day conference, which is October 21st and 22nd in Minneapolis, by the time you leave this conference, you're gonna have all the tools you'll need to build a business. And if you've got one, it's gonna show you how to make it reproducible and sustainable and scalable. And I know I'm the CSO and I've got skin in the game.

But I will tell you, I'm not getting paid a dime to do this. I'm doing it because it's worthwhile and it's exciting to be a part of this movement all across the country. So I would encourage you to attend. If you'd like to attend, I can give Brett a code that you can get money off what is currently online to attend the conference. But the value you'll get out of this is just, it's amazing. I went to last year's conference and I still keep in touch with most of the people there.

It was that good. And Brett, I think you can attest to that. was just. Well, and the fact is if you're getting 500 people to a conference in Minneapolis at the end of October, it you the content has to be good because you're not going there for the weather. And there are people who really want to be there. But yeah, so I know I stumped a little bit for the fractional conference, but it is literally, it's been a return on my investment tenfold from last year.

And if you want Jake, send me the information I'll post it into the community. will send you. James just asked the website, the website I will put in the chat. If I can get my keyboard to work.

Brett Trainor (: 39:03

So it's www .fractionalconference .com and you can see the agenda, how to get involved. I believe there's even opportunities to volunteer at the conference if you'd like. And it talks about the pricing, the speakers and everybody who's gonna be there. Awesome. Yeah, and Brett, I'll send you a discount code separate from this meeting. And if you wanna share it out with all the people in your network, they can get a discount. Awesome.

Awesome. Well, Jake, I really, really appreciate this taking some time. sure. What we're going to cover, but I think it was super helpful. Hopefully everybody else agrees with that. But like I if I'm, I listen to this all the time and I've learned something. I, again, I appreciate your time. Well, if any of you, I'd like to make the offer and I didn't clear this with Brett in advance. I hope this is okay. But if any of you want to reach out to me individually with follow -up questions, please connect with me on LinkedIn.

Send me an email, set up a time. I'd be glad to give you a half hour of time if you just want to bounce ideas. I want to see all of you succeed. And if you succeed, that makes me happy. And if you book a time with me to talk, I'm not going to charge you for your time because you know Brett and you're part of his network. I'd be happy to donate time to help you get off the ground, talk about pricing, how to build a referral network.

I'd be glad to give you a free time to help you succeed. Awesome. I would definitely take him up on that if you guys are curious. Highly recommend. Awesome. All right. Well, thank you everybody for sticking around. I think it was worth it. Jake, good luck. Like I I'll post everything in the community for the event. And we've got to get this in a warmer weather next year, get this thing to expand.

I had a discussion with John. like, understand Minnesota is a hub for fractionals, but it's not a hub for people who want to meet in October. So you really need to rethink that location. Now in his defense, just so everybody knows, there's a lot of other conferences we're probably going to build around this. We've gotten invitations from New Zealand. We've gotten invitations from Las Vegas. We've gotten invitations from a lot of towns and countries to bring the show on the road. So that should give you a

Brett Trainor (: 41:24

Also a little bit of peek into how valuable the conference is if we're getting invitations to take it on the road. Awesome, awesome. Well, thanks again, Jake. Thank you, everybody else for joining us tonight. And we'll catch everybody really soon. Thanks, everybody. Hope to connect with you soon. Thank you. Cheers. Thank you.