Summary

Morgan Templar, founder of First CDO Partners, shares her journey from starting as a secretary to becoming a successful entrepreneur. She discusses the importance of data governance and the role of a chief data officer (CDO) in organizations. Morgan emphasizes the need for good data management and governance, especially in the era of AI. She also opens up about the personal challenges she faced, including her daughter's health issues and her husband's medical condition. Despite the difficulties, Morgan's determination and resilience have propelled her career and led to the founding of her own company.

Takeaways

Data governance is crucial for organizations, especially in the age of AI.

The role of a chief data officer (CDO) involves managing data strategy, bringing together business and technology teams, and ensuring data quality and governance.

Personal challenges can shape one's career and provide the strength and determination to overcome obstacles.

Resilience and a positive mindset are key to navigating difficult times and achieving success.

Scaling a company requires careful planning and consideration, including potential funding rounds and an exit strategy.

Sound Bites

"We're seeing the downside of not having good governance, especially as all of a sudden AI is all anybody wants to talk about. You have to have good data to have good AI."

"Life is to learn."

Links

Please leave us a review: https://podchaser.com/AdventuresOnTheCanDo

Think Like a Startup Founder (book): https://www.manning.com/books/think-like-a-startup-founder

Jothy’s website: https://jothyrosenberg.com

The Who Says I Can’t Foundation: https://whosaysicant.org

Jothy’s TEDx talk on disabilities: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNtOawXAx5A

Morgan’s books

“Get Governed: Building World Class Data Governance Programs” by Morgan Templar

https://www.amazon.com/Get-Governed-Building-Governance-Programs/dp/069295175X/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1506495103&sr=8-1

“A Culture of Governance” by Morgan Templar

https://www.amazon.com/Culture-Governance-Morgan-Templar/dp/0692185100/ref=sr_1_6?dchild=1&keywords=a+culture+of+governance&qid=1616373445&sr=8-6

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Small Talk

01:39 Background and Current Work

05:28 The Role of a Chief Data Officer

07:26 Identifying an Unsolved Problem in the Market

09:16 The Challenges of Being a Chief Data Officer

10:02 Gaining Confidence to Start a Company

12:09 Breaking Glass Ceilings and Overcoming Adversity

14:36 The Impact of Personal Challenges on Career

19:33 The Effect of Family Challenges on Career

24:16 Balancing Work and Personal Life

28:42 Medium and Long-Term Vision for the Company

32:07 Expectation of Selling the Company

35:49 Conclusion and Reflections

And here's Morgan Templar. Hi, Morgan.

Hi, how are you today? Great. Fantastic. It's a wonderful day. Summer's coming. Birds are singing. Can't beat it.

I'm good, and you?

It is nice here too. It's just in New England, springtime just explodes because everything's been so sort of tamped down all winter. And then the trees and everything are just changing so fast. And yeah, we're having great bird activity now. I always like to ask people,

where they're originally from and where they live now.

That's it. Well, that's an easy question. I guess it's only two two of my hops I Was born in Utah and I was raised in Utah in Oram Utah, which is south of Salt Lake City so I grew up with the the red rock in my backyard and The literally the Rockies in my backyard. So we we hiked we camped we fished we spent all that time

in both the beautiful Rocky Mountains and then also in the beautiful Red Rock. I'm currently, we live in West Virginia and we're in the process of building a house on 47 acres of beautiful forested hill. So we're really excited about getting back to nature and spending that time looking at the deer instead of looking at traffic.

So are you in sort of, are you in a rental house right now? Yeah.

We are, yeah. We're renting above a CPA firm. It's an adorable little village called Chester and it's the very, very farthest tip north of West Virginia. If I look out one window, it's Ohio and out the other, it's Pennsylvania.

Well, it's a beautiful state. I've been there a number of times. Either whitewater rafting on the Gauley, which is still a pretty wild river and a class four river, or with my family vacationing in the Pipestem portion, both of which have been fantastic. OK, so you are a founder of and it's

It's CDO Partners.

first CDL partners.

First CDO partners. And I guess first question is, why did you become a founder?

You know, there is a, I guess I would say a pretty significant gap in the market right now. There have been a lot of tech layoffs. There's been a lot more, more movement than normal of CDOs leaving their roles of people not really being able to show the value of what they've done. And I've noticed that as we've done that, we've lost the capabilities. We've lost the knowledge and the experience.

of people who know how to stand up or run a data governance program. And so we focused in on a very narrow niche. My background takes me full width data management. I can talk tech stack all day. And, you know, I've had data engineering and warehousing and all of that. But we focus our business on the people.

So we mostly go in and understand where they are. We do a gap analysis. We present that and then we make a plan for how we bring them up to a level of maturity that they choose on a set of capabilities that we've established that are important for a mature organization. And we work with the people. We work with culture change. We work with data lineage, or excuse me, data literature.

Data literacy, that's the right L word, data literacy, to make sure that people understand what it is that they're doing. So I've written two books on data governance. So even though my career has taken me like far into the tech side, my beginnings were in the business and I was running large scale transformations. And so as I wrote, as I developed my first data governance program, I realized there's not a really how to book.

So I wrote a how -to book. How do you, how do you, may I show my book? Is that okay? I want to make sure it's okay. So this is my first book, Get Governed, Building World Class Data Governance Program.

Of course.

And let's make sure we put the link to that in the show notes.

Yeah, I will absolutely do that. And I have a second one called a culture of governance, which is about establishing that culture and strengthening it. But it's really been a gap. I have a lot of CDO friends that are not working anymore. They've been let go for whatever reason. And it's, we're seeing the downside of not having good governance, especially as all of a sudden AI is all anybody wants to talk about. You have to have good data to have good data.

AI.

So a chief data officer, besides having to deal with governance, what are the other big things that just so people understand? Because I don't think everybody knows what a chief data officer is.

You're right. I think they don't. So a chief data officer may be different in every organization, but primarily they have these accountabilities. First and foremost, they're accountable for the strategy of the data in the organization. So that's not the strategy of the data use, it's not the strategy of the data management, which is your larger scale technology, but you are accountable for the strategy of the data in the organization.

So it does include all of those things. It touches everything. Secondly, it is the bringing the people together because the business owns the data. And so a CDO helps the business understand their role in owning the data. And they then are able to get engaged in committees and councils and make joint decisions about the data and how it's used and how it's.

taken care of and the tools that they want to use, how close to self -service data do they want to get versus right now we have usually teams of analysts that give you reports and metrics. On the other side of that, they also interact with the technology team, make sure that there's an appropriate technology stack to support both the business and their needs, but also the data management and data governance functions.

So it's a lot about that, about the understanding of what data is, how it's going to be used, what the strategy is going to be in the long term. And then of course, you know, working with the executives and the board to make sure they all understand.

OK, so yours is not the first chief data officer oriented consultancy. But what did you see in the market that called out to you that there's still an unsolved problem that you are uniquely positioned to solve?

Well, obviously, that AI, really, generative AI opened the door for people even up to the board level to suddenly realize what is the health of our data. And when people started actually looking at the health of their data, because to be honest, work in data has been underfunded and ignored forever. And so every organization has this enormous amount of data debt.

which is like technical debt where you've got systems that are not invested in and not updated. You have data that's not invested in and not updated. You haven't cleaned it. You haven't managed it. You haven't taken care of it because it takes time and it takes money. And I think that the issue why CDOs don't last very long in their role is it takes a long time to make things happen. It's not a fast, data's clean.

So that's what I saw in the market. All of a sudden, a lot of chief data officers were not being able to show the value of what they do. And so then their organizations were not getting ready for AI, but they all want AI. So it's left everybody with this perspective of if we don't do something, we're not going to be able to get to where we want to go with AI. And there's no magic bullet. There's no boom.

the data is clean. So I saw that in the market. I saw that among my peers. I listened to that at conferences. And really, that was what I've been hearing is the this is the ideal moment to take somebody like me who came up out of the business, who understands analytics, who understands data, who understands data governance and AI governance and analytics governance and be able to apply my knowledge and

my experience to organ, a wide breadth of organizations instead of just one.

So what kind of experiences did you have that gave you the confidence that you were ready to found a new company?

Well, you know, it's interesting because I'm very comfortable with all of the governance and the data work where I'm a little bit uncomfortable. I was okay. Now I'm a founder. What does that really mean? Not exactly sure, but we're bootstrapping and we're making it. So we're going to make it. I, I think the biggest reason that I feel that way is that I came up through the business. I've, I've been mostly in the last 24 years. I've spent 20 of them in healthcare.

And I started as a secretary in the security department of a hospital. And I went from there to an administrative assistant to one of the C -suite. And I went from there to I'm a credentialing specialist and I was an individual contributor about data. And then I was kind of had time to the way to become a manager. And then I worked my way up to director and along the way I became a business solution architect.

So I've really been through, as I, you know, all the way up into the role of vice president of information management and data management, which is essentially the CDO. I've worked my way up. I understand the entire ecosystem from what affects the entry front frontline employees to what affects the executives and the bottom line with the board. And because I've had that experience of being able to work my way up.

I, I really do feel like that's a, that's something most people don't get. Most people either start halfway and move up or they make it to halfway. There are some very significant glass ceilings that I've had to break through to be able to get to where I got. And, I think now as a founder, I recognize that and I try to help, chief data officers or that new director who's the head of governance actually get through that.

to an executive point of view and being able to work with executives and make data a first class citizen in your organization.

Were some of those glass ceilings because you started off as a secretary or because you're a woman or what?

Yes and yes. So to be honest with you, I mean, it's so 24 years, it's been a very long journey and I was in management for 18 of those. So I got into a management role relatively quickly and very accidentally. But the glass ceilings of getting to director, that's a really hard role because the director in most organizations is that.

first level executive, where you start getting to go to the big meetings and seeing, you know, go, going to the big planning and strategy sessions. And so getting to the point where I was a director, there were definitely glass ceilings and a lot of road, of roadmap or roadblocks that I had to overcome. And so I went around them by saying, well, I'm going to just go look at data. You don't know anything about data. by the way, here I am.

And I started doing large scale transformations. And by doing that and having the executives know that I could do that, they did allow me to kind of make that end run and get through that first glass ceiling. To get to vice president is also an incredibly hard thing to do. And yes, it is very much because I'm a woman and it is because that's not expected.

Even in data, it's mostly men who are coders. There aren't that many women who actually code. Maybe 20 to 25 % is the last number that I saw, and the rest are men, and that's globally. And so getting past that of, you know, I'm not illiterate. I understand the technology side, and I understand leadership. Getting through that...

honestly took a very strong mentor who saw that in me. She actually had hunted me in and she asked me to join the organization because she had worked her way up from business analyst to senior vice president of a $20 billion a year company. So she brought me in and helped me break that glass ceiling because I don't think I could have broken it alone.

but you still had to have a lot of drive and determination to move up. Where did you come up with that? I mean, somebody that starts as a secretary in a healthcare company, probably most of them don't do what you did.

That's very true. I guess I would say I embrace and embody change and that's because I've had to deal with a lot of, I guess you'd say adversities in my life. And when you're dealing with things that are hard, like really hard, like your husband's going to die tomorrow if he doesn't get the surgery or your daughter's getting chemo and having a bone marrow transplant or...

you're having surgery and by the way, all of those things happened, you know, in one year period for me. You just start to learn to live breath by breath. And when you plan something out, you just say, well, I have a roadblock I've got to get through. We're just going to plow through it. And so building that core strength, that core grit, I guess I would say of being willing to take the blows, being willing to be buffered by the winds.

and realize that I'm doing the right thing anyway, and there's nothing you can do about it. I don't know how personal you want me to get in these stories, but my father was also disabled. And so the year that I was born, he became disabled with, he broke his back in the coal mine. And he was disabled my whole life. So my mom went to work at minimum wage, and my dad and I were home, and I was a baby.

And I would have to bully him to feed me because I was too little to do it on my own. And until I remembered, I remember now, you know, going back when I was three, climbing up on the counters and getting down cornflakes and a piece of bread. And I would make ketchup and cornflakes sandwiches because it's what I could find. We didn't have a lot of, we didn't have any money. We didn't have anything. And that's what I would make. And.

So I would have to feed myself and I body trained myself because my dad was very depressed and in a lot of pain. So from earliest years of my life, I've been independent. I've been willing to solve a problem, maybe in an unusual way. I mean, who eats ketchup in cornflakes? I mean, I think back now, I think that's just horrible, but you know what? I survived that and it gave me the strength to just do whatever, whatever needs to be done. There is a path to get through it.

I think if I mentioned this concoction to my seven -year -old grandson, he would actually try it. He would actually like it.

I mean, it's not actually that terrible. I mean, I made one when I was telling that story and people like, my gosh, that sounds terrible. And I thought, yeah, I remember what that's like. It's not terrible. I mean, it's not ideal, but you know, yeah, it wasn't, I survived on that. And even when I was a little older and in the summers, I would graze. I knew what plants in our yard were edible. We planted edible plants.

And so I would eat the leaves or I would eat the little buds that came in on all of our edible plants. And we had a cherry tree and I'd eat unripe cherries and unripe apples because my dad wasn't going to make lunch for me. So I would kind of graze all summer throughout the yard. And then, you know, that was just kind of the way it was. You just, you get by. I mean, life is, no one said life should be easy. Life is to learn.

So this was all these apple trees, and this was in Orem, Utah.

Yes, it was. Yeah. You know, we lived in HUD housing. So we were low income housing and my dad loved cherries and apples. And so we planted those trees when we first moved in and we, we would do a garden some years, but mostly we had edible things that you could eat that other people would call weeds and we would let grow it because we knew they were edibles. Now you find them in your salad.

So you talked a little bit about your dad and when you were really little, but you very briefly mentioned your daughter and your husband and yourself. How did all of those things, all of those challenges and the needs that those people had affect your career along the way?

So that is a, it's one of those things that I have been really been pondering recently and thanking people for the roles that they played for me. 2003, March 24th, one week before my one year anniversary to my husband. I have four children from my first marriage. My daughter who was 13, she was 12 still, she didn't turn 13.

She went to, she had a sleepover at my mom's and woke up dying. Her hands were cramped up. She was completely gray. They rushed her to the hospital, which luckily was only a mile away. And we live 30 miles away. We'd never have made it. She had no blood in her system, like zero. And they said they've seen dead people with more blood than her and she wasn't dead yet.

They managed to find a vein in her leg and give her blood and we were rushing in 30 miles from where we live.

Can I just ask, sorry to interrupt, but where did her blood go?

No one knows. She had a one of a kind blood disorder that nobody's ever had something about the seventh chromosome being inverted. And she would make baby blood cells and then they would disappear, not die or break up. When you have leukemia and your blood cells get broken, you can see the parts and pieces in your blood. They were just gone. Nobody knows.

I used to tease her that she had a vampire because it was that dramatic. I mean, you know, we laugh about it now, you know, long time past, but yeah, they just disappeared. Nobody really knew. And she had had severe anemia with being blonde. And you can tell how pale I am. She was as pale as I am. It was hard to tell that she was getting more pale. So.

She, yeah, she just had no blood in her system. And when she was actually transfusion dependent, every three days, three to four days, she'd get a blood transfusion for a year. And her story ends after blood transfusions. And I think we tried six different modalities to try to cure it because it's a blood disorder. These things work for blood disorders. Let's just try it.

So whatever it was that made it go away, because her sister did not have inversion seven on her chromosome.

So she's ever since then, that's 20 years ago, ever since then she's been totally fine.

you know, there are side effects forever from chemo and from having that kind of decision she had to make. She had a choice of either staying transfusion dependent, and having the ability to have children or to have chemo, very serious chemo and not ever be able to have children. And she had to make that decision at 12 years old. and, and I had to make, let her make that decision.

So she made the decision to have the chemo and not stay transfusion dependent because generally people who are transfusion dependent, at least at that time, they said they will die, you'll die in your thirties because you have too much iron in your system. We can only pull so much out and you'll die of iron poisoning. And that's, that's the way it is if you're transfusion dependent. And so she had to make that call. And so we had to counsel and talk and

decide what is the best choice for you. What do you ever feel like that's going to be an issue for you? And so in the end, that was the right choice for her. Unfortunately, it's not a particularly happy story because she took her own life two years ago. She always had mental health issues ever since that having to go through that. She never really found a place of acceptance in a place of happiness again.

So it was definitely a challenge. I would say it was not easy.

Well, and while that was going on, there were issues with other members of your family. So it had to be hard to concentrate.

Yeah, so that day...

Yeah, I worked full time through all of this, by the way. I didn't, I took a few days off, but I worked full time. So the day that she was in the hospital, my husband, one week before our first wedding anniversary, sat down on our bed and took her hand and he felt his left ear kind of go ring and then pop, but he couldn't hear out of it anymore. But he didn't tell me. He wanted to focus on our daughter and make sure that she was okay and she was comfortable.

And it wasn't, it wasn't until we'd gotten her stable that he really said, you know, I haven't been able to hear out of my left ear since that day. So maybe I'd better go to the doctor. And we went to the doctor and they, they did all the tests and they couldn't figure out why they did an MRI and he had a tumor in his, in his ear. Well, they thought it was on the, on the, on the hearing nerve, which is a fairly common tumor, rarely cancerous.

and usually pretty easy to get out except that it wasn't. It was actually a tumor on the facial nerve, which is aggressive. And it wasn't cancer, but it took the facial nerve, the hearing nerve and the balance nerve on his left side and basically created this tumor that rolled them into a little knot. And he had to have that removed surgically. It was our son's birthday party. He gets a call from the doctor who says,

go to a quiet place and sit down, let's talk. And he says, you have a tumor and we need to get that out right away. So that was in July. So I'm still taking my daughter every four days to get a bone marrow transplant. We're trying to make life as normal as possible for the other three kids. I'm another girl and two boys and we're just trying, life was just different. We didn't go to cheerleading and football and.

soccer anymore. We went to the doctor and we went to transfusions and they stayed with grandma while I took their sister in for another, you know, another treatment that we're going to try. So, so my husband was like, okay, he tells me he's got a tumor. We go look at it. They said, okay, well you need to see this one neurologist. There's one neurologist in Utah who can take care of this. So we called his office and he's, he said, well, it's a four month wait to even get a consultation.

And our doctor had already told us you have to get this out within, you maybe have three or four months period. It's going to shut down your brainstem because that's what it started doing. It was pushing on his brainstem, which meant his heart and lungs were failing him. And he would just pass out, which was loads of fun for me when I was taking care of our daughter and then taking care of him. And another act of kindness.

is really the thing that saved his life and hands up mine too. But I worked in the, this is when I was in the hospital and I worked in the executive office as an administrative assistant. And I walked into the, I guess I was an executive assistant, whatever the title was. I walked into the CEO of the hospital's office and I said, Dan, I need to see this doctor. I need to get my husband in for a consultation.

He's gonna die if we don't get him in. He picks up the phone, he calls that office and he says, okay, you have an appointment tomorrow at two. And that act of kindness is what saved my husband's life because he would not have survived it. We did get in to see him. They did schedule a surgery by the time they got it out that what they thought was a one centimeter tumor was four centimeters, which is pretty significant. And...

they went through the ear, which is normal. They go in through the ear, they take out the hardware and then they can get to that auditory nerve where they think those tumors are. By the time he came out eight hours from his two hour surgery, they had taken the side of his head off and it had taken eight hours to get the tumor out. And he was rehospitalized one time during that. Meanwhile, I have four kids I'm taking care of. We're still doing bone marrow.

blood transfusions and all of that. And so he's in the hospital for a month and then comes home for two weeks and then is back in the hospital for another month. When he came home, he couldn't walk, he couldn't shower, he couldn't eat. I had to help him with everything. I had to teach him how to wash himself again. And that lasted about three years where I was still...

I wouldn't let him be alone in the shower because he would fall because he had chronic vertigo when he came out. He woke up from surgery with no balance nerve. They took his balance nerve out. And so he has no balance at all. And so it was really difficult. So I guess all of this stress compounded with my ongoing problems. And then I personally had to have his direct to me three months after his surgery and two months before our daughter's bone marrow transplant.

So we, from October to March, all three of us had a procedure, pretty serious procedure. So yeah, it was a year of difficulty, I would say, and I worked full time. And my employers were patient. And I have another really amazing kindness story in there. The...

negativity of all of that. It was so hard and so much stress. I mean, I would sleep at the hospital and shower in the CEO's private shower because I was there with my husband in one hospital, my daughter in the other at the same time and having to go back and forth and still do my job. And I had a lot of anger issues and I would get upset really easily.

and one of the administrators and she eventually became the CEO of that hospital and then on to their administrative office. She took me aside one day and she just said, I want you to tell me everything that's wrong. And she closed the door of this conference room. And I remember just yelling at her and telling her everything that was frustrating me and making me angry. And it was all about the inequality and inequity that I saw. Like they would have executive lunches that were, you know,

probably $25 a plate to discuss why they should reprimand the housekeepers for stealing toilet paper because the housekeepers couldn't afford toilet paper. So they were stealing it from the hospitals and that would just make me so angry that they would do that and not see how privileged and pompous that looked. And so she listened and we talked and she let me get the anger out.

we talked about things then some of what I said she said you know what you're right we need to make a change and be more thoughtful and empathetic and some of it was like okay you've vented it out now you need to let it go and you know that that afternoon of like spending two hours with me changed everything for me that I I wasn't angry anymore I was like dealing with it it's fine I can't change that that isn't mine to fix.

But this is mine to fix and being able to focus on the thing that's mine to fix, which has also pushed my career forward because I can focus on the thing that's mine to fix.

So your grit story is pretty amazing, which you had to deal with. And then you still advanced your career step by step by step, many steps to get where you are. So are things a lot better now? I mean, you've got your.

company that you and another person, your partner started. Very sad news about your daughter. You've got three other great kids. And is your husband's balance any better? Is he able to? No.

No, it never will be that he doesn't have a balanced nerve at all. They thought the one on the right, because you have one on each ear, they thought the one on the right might have compensated. But in his young years, he was a police officer. And I guess he said several guns going off near his ear. His left one had already been compensating for the right one, which didn't work. So he basically lives his life like he's standing in a canoe.

And I would say he's dealt with it incredibly well. And he's a big reason. Honestly, I feel like, things are great because he's Winnie the Pooh. And I, I don't know what you, what you remember from the Winnie the Pooh stories, but you know, I always think of the one where Winnie the Pooh is stuck in a hole because he was trying to get the honey. He can't get out and he's like, well, you know, there's honey here. And at some point things will happen and somebody will get me out. I'm not really worried about it. That's my husband. So.

So his attitude of it is what it is, you know, life goes on and we're going to just make the most of it has made it easy for me to be able to say life goes on and just be okay with it. And yeah, things are fantastic. I, you know, again, like you said, my, my kids are great and the company's going well and we're excited about what we offer to people because it's such a, a needed thing right now. And part of the,

by the way, part of the reason people hire us rather than hire an employee is that we have a guaranteed end date. And there's an expectation that we're going to leave at that date. So our plan is to get to that point and go. And so that's, I have a motto, I know I am done when, which comes from agile development. And that's how we run our company too. We know when we're done when. But yeah, that's.

All of that is happening because we've just stayed positive. My career advanced because I was willing to say yes. And when someone asked, you live in Utah, would you come to Pennsylvania? And I said, yes. And another company said, would you come from Pennsylvania to Virginia? And I said, yes. Another one said, would you come to Boston? And I said, yes. Another one said, would you come back down to California? And I said, yes.

And then we went back to Pennsylvania and now I'm in West Virginia. So that ability to be flexible and agile and just do what needs to be done and saying yes to me and saying yes to my career, bringing my family along with that. That's, I think, been the biggest, I guess, reason that I'm, I feel like right now things are terrific. We've done really great things in a year getting a company stood up.

So are you able to do your job leading the company, mostly staying put in West Virginia? Or do you have to get on a plane and go places a lot still?

Well, a lot of companies are in the office. So we're technically a Pittsburgh based company. And so I do have to go into their office once in a while to meet with the client that we're working with right now. But we're a fully remote company. We don't have a physical office. So we will always work from home unless we're at a client site. So I've always had to travel. I've had whole years where I traveled like three weeks of the month.

several years of my life, I've done that. So lots of travel, lots of getting on a plane and, and going to sitting face to face with the people who you're working with and truth now as well, that most companies are hybrid in some way or another. So important meetings, we go into the office, regular every day or every week meetings. We just, we use whatever, you know, zoom teams, Google, Google meet, whichever.

So what are your medium and long -term vision goals for your company?

So medium, we're looking to scale. We're looking to scale up and looking to be very thoughtful about scaling up. I mentioned before that we bootstrapped. So we put our own investment money in to start the business. We haven't asked for funding. We haven't taken any funding or any debt. I do know that when we are ready to scale, we're going to need to do a funding round. But I want to be really thoughtful about scaling.

our mid market, our market is the mid market. So 500 million to 10 billion. And that's kind of where we focus because that's what we can do at our scale. but if we do decide or do happen to just get one of my client who's we'll say a hundred billion dollar a year company, that ability to scale is going to require some type of, investment because you have to bring in so many people and it's, it's a big, very big deal.

So we're thinking mid market until two or three years, and then we'd be ready to really do the big, big companies. Although to be honest, I've consulted with a lot of those, you know, fortune 100 companies and provided them individual service as opposed to our company coming in and doing a gap assessment and doing our whole thing. So it's not that we don't understand what they need. It's simply a matter of.

being able to financially afford to bring in dirty people that we currently don't have on the payroll.

So this represents your investment money. So do you, therefore, have expectation of selling it at some point?

We do. We started with the expectation that we would have an exit strategy. So our exit strategy is five to six years. So let's see, we started in 23. So we're looking before 2030, I guess I would say, in that 28, 29, 30 time period. We definitely plan to have an exit. So we're building a, even though we're a services company, we teach people, we've got products that we build out to do that. We have...

systems built out to do that. And we're relying on AI as much as possible. So there is something to buy. You're not just buying Morgan's brain and what I know and what I can bring to the organization, but literally there are systems that can be reused by others. And so that's our goal.

Very good. Well, this has been quite a story. Thank you very much for sharing it with us. And I think, you know, this is good. I appreciate your being on an episode. I consider this your episode.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much. I have appreciated the ability to share. I've never been this open about my background professionally because there is a stigma of you started as a secretary. And so I'm past that. I don't care. I mean, there's no there's no stigma today, but coming up in the in business there was. And so I've just never told anybody all of this.

So thank you for giving me an opportunity to share and opening up and letting my friends and colleagues in business have an opportunity to get to know me a little better than they do.

It's a point of pride now.

It is. It absolutely is. Very proud of what I've done and what I've accomplished.

Yes. Yes.

as you should be. Well, thank you again. And...