Summary

Doug Weisman, the founder of VideoLink, shares his journey of starting and growing the company. VideoLink provided live television production services and became a premier broadcast entity. Doug and his team took risks, worked long hours, and built a unique business that attracted clients from major networks. They focused on providing exceptional service and treating employees and clients with respect. After 26 years, Doug and his partners sold the company and retired. Their success was a result of their dedication, hard work, and commitment to excellence.

Takeaways

• Building a successful startup requires dedication, hard work, and taking risks.
• Treating employees and clients with respect and providing exceptional service are key to long-term success.
• Having a unique offering and intellectual property can make a company attractive to potential buyers.
• Selling a company requires careful preparation, including cleaning up financials and operations.
• Retiring after selling a successful company is a rewarding outcome of years of hard work.

Sound Bites

"I was brought up in a family where the work ethic was not the number one thing, but it was serious."

"I worked very hard. I was the so-called breadwinner. I knew I had to provide for my family."

"You treat your employees the way you want to be treated and you treat your clients the way you want to be treated and they'll all come back to work every day."

Links

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

Tech Startup Toolkit: https://www.manning.com/books/tech-startup-toolkit

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

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

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

Chapters

00:00 Introduction and Background

02:31 The Germinating Idea for VideoLink

06:21 The Game-Changing Introduction of Fiber Optic Cable

09:09 Building VideoLink Organically

13:36 Managing Growth and Expanding to New Locations

18:06 Preparing for Sale and Hiring a CEO

30:40 Motivation for Selling and Finding a Buyer

37:46 Selling the Company and Retiring

And here's Doug. Hello. I am good. It's good to see you. Been looking forward to this because you're like the ultimate startup guy. Self -funded, ran it for years and years, sold it. It's going to be a great story for people to hear. let's start with

Hi there, Chelsea. How are you?

Likewise.

Where are you originally from and where do you live now?

Okay, I grew up in Newton, Massachusetts on the south side of the city and post getting married moved to the north side of the city in Newtonville and yeah, it is. was long. had to go across the tracks literally and we lived there for 41 years in the same house, a two family Victorian in Newtonville. Our kids went to Newton North High School.

That's a long move, man. That's a long move.

and we had a great time there. And in fact, that's where we met you and Carol. So that was fun too. Now I live in Northern New Hampshire in the White Mountains. My family's had a presence in this town since the 60s and we built a new home here two years ago and we're loving living in the mountains.

Sounds awesome. Somebody that lives in the same town that they were born in, I don't run into that that often. I mean, up until just two years ago.

Yeah, it's unusual, I guess, but I really loved being in New England. I liked being close to the ocean and being close to the mountains. I had, when I got out of college, I had some opportunities to move to New York or to Los Angeles, and I just never really enjoyed the big cities. So Boston was big enough for me.

When we were moving here from California, we didn't know anything about the area. We just did some research. And we knew we had to live near Boston, because that was where the startup was. And we researched it. And it came up and said, you either want to live in Lexington or Newton. And so we came out and we looked at both. And we picked Newton. And we lived right around the corner from you.

Yeah. Right.

Okay, so let's start talking about video link, the startup. And anybody that goes through the difficult process of starting a company from scratch has some really compelling idea or problem that they think needs to be solved. And so what was it that was sort of the germinating idea for

Okay.

video link.

Well, we had already been in the television production industry. I had a small production company that grew out of my freelance business. I was in the freelance TV production services part of the world in the New England area for seven or eight years. And I started a small company with my name on it to provide production services in the field. Subsequent to that, I was working with many different

types of production companies as well as news networks and sort of cut my teeth with CBS News and NBC News and McNeil -Larra NewsHour, the big sort of high end at the time broadcast news outlets. In addition, I was doing a lot of corporate television and by corporate I mean generally non -broadcast image pieces, public relations, corporate.

overview type video and I was working for a big telecommunications company based in Los Angeles at the time when cable TV exploded in terms of the offerings and the availability of lots of channels all at once. That was the early 90s and all of these channels sort of came onto the landscape

and had to discover programming. had to create programming. And the best way to produce programming inexpensively, believe it or not, was live television. And so I married the corporate side of what we're doing with live television by going to this telecommunications company, which was entrenched in the satellite world, satellite transmission world. And I said to them, is it possible for us to get some kind of a link

from our facility at the time in Watertown, Mass. To the world. And they said, yeah, no problem. We'll just write a letter for you and we'll hook you up with a fiber. A fiber optic cable. And this was at a time when fiber was really new beyond governments and broadcasters. And we said great, know, we knew it was gonna cost some money but.

the obligation was on the telecom companies to put fiber into anybody who requested it. So we jumped on that bandwagon and we had fiber installed in our facility. We were the first ones, the first non -broadcaster technically in New England to have a fiber optic connection.

That must have given you a huge amount of bandwidth.

It was more bandwidth than anybody could ever imagine because everybody had been used to copper lines, know, coax lines. And it was, they were very difficult to deploy. They were limited in terms of how many, how much you could put down at the time. It wasn't even packets. was, it was literally video pumped into a copper line. the packet industry hadn't really been created yet. You were just literally feeding raw video down a copper line.

But with Fiber, it changed the game. And we were able to connect to any network that we wanted to via various independent hubs. And what happened was we went to all of our broadcast clients. We went to CBS News. We went to NBC News. We went to PBS. And we went to all these existing customers that we had and said, we have live capability. Let us help you.

from New England. And that, as I said, that was at the time when cable TV was starved for content and live content was right at our doorstep. We had the universities within 10 minutes, Harvard, MIT, BU, BC, all of the major universities which had talent who were being requested to be on TV. We had all the major hospitals. We had many major businesses. We had all of the biotech.

So anybody that was a player who was being requested on TV could literally walk into our studio. We made a makeshift studio on site and said, sit down on the chair. We'll put you out to the world. And it just happened sort of organically. We were at the cusp of what you're seeing here, these live talking heads. We sort of created that industry by putting

people like you or any other newsmaker on TV.

Was the equipment that you needed in your office that could directly talk to the fiber network readily available? It seems like you were so early.

Well, so what we were doing was using our broadcast TV cameras that we would use in the field and broadcast audio gear. And we were literally plugging it into a very basic rack of equipment that connected to the fiber facility. it was literally down the hall. The rack of equipment that we had was down the hall from our makeshift studio at the time. And we would literally take one camera for one part of the house and

and plunk it down in an office in front of a background and plug it into the rack. And it was literally feeding raw video and audio into a line that could handle that bandwidth. It was at the time in the early 90s, pretty basic, but it was providing broadcast quality video to the world. And it really opened lots of doors for us.

And then you built the whole thing, the whole company organically. You never had investors, you never raised money. How did you do that?

That's correct, yeah.

sweat equity mostly. Well, it was myself and I had a partner who was in a similar production company in the same building and we were very friendly and we got together and said you know we could do this you you work for certain networks I work for other networks. We had I had a person on staff who was a salesperson and I said to her go out to the world and and find out who wants this service.

You

And basically what we were doing was providing live shot material so guests would come into our studios. And generally it was happening in the early morning hours for sort of breakfast TV time and in the evening like six to 11 at night when they had all these programs on that were basically talk shows. So for instance, as

One of our biggest guests at the time was Alan Dershowitz, the attorney from Boston, who was working on the O .J. Simpson trial. And that trial just blew up talk television. And he was in our backyard. His home was 10 minutes away from our studio and his office was equally 10 minutes away. And he was a media hound. He wanted to be on TV and three, sometimes four times a day.

He would show up in our studio and we would connect him to every major news talk, television show. those types of people, Doris Kearns Goodwin was another one. She was highly requested as an expert on presidential politics. And these people would come into our studios, we would treat them well, and they weren't our client. They were simply the guest and we connected them to the world.

you

Would the big networks call you when there was something as mundane as a big snowstorm or was that not?

They would. In fact, that's actually a really great example of what we did. And this is a tune to what it means by sweat equity. We were doing this, basically we created a live shop rate, if you will, a cost per live shop. It had nothing to do with necessarily the labor involved and how much time we were spending, my partner and I and our minimal staffs.

We had a huge snowstorm in Boston around that time and the mayor of Boston was being requested to be on TV. So we literally ran wires, cables outside of our front door. We plugged in these heavy duty lights. We brought a camera out into this raging blizzard and we put the mayor on TV outside in the snow.

for the Weather Channel, for NBC News, for whoever wanted to talk to him about what it's like to have a snowstorm in your city and be totally inundated. So we did whatever it took to put the shot on TV, to keep the networks happy, and our biggest tagline was, we will never say no. We never said no to any of these projects.

And that, when I say sweat equity, we were working on our regular projects during the day from six or seven in the morning until six or seven at night. And then we'd come back to the studio and do live shots until 11, 12, one in the morning. And that's the sweat equity part that really got us over the hump. By not having to have big expenses of additional personnel, by using our same facility, we were started to generate revenue.

and we just banked that revenue. The only outside money that we took were some small equipment loans just to get us over the hump of having to buy certain equipment to make the transmissions happy. But otherwise we owned everything. We owned the lighting, we owned the sound equipment, we owned the cameras, and we had staff that was in place. So that's how, sort of how we did it.

So was the business climate, this would have been the early 90s, I guess, was the business climate particularly conducive to this? I mean, other than where the television industry was, but I just mean the overall business climate.

yeah, when you start to talk to any, if you start to talk to a bank for instance, or you start to talk to anybody who is in the equipment business at the time, the live television industry was growing at exponential rates. Everybody loved it. It was the star of the block. Cable television was just in an exponential growth phase.

So everybody was clamoring for content and everybody was clamoring for more channels. We want more channels. We want more channels. And we were able to fill the live void in New England. And for a long time, we were the only ones doing this because the TV networks and the local affiliates, they didn't want any part of it. They had enough trouble putting their own news and local programming on their local channels. And they didn't want any part of

outside work because they were just inundated. And so that left this hole that we filled by taking up all that extra space and providing the networks at the network level everything that they wanted.

Was there someone like you in every major metropolitan area?

It was growing. was there was a trend. Yes, there were there were like companies in major metropolitan areas and in some, you know off the beaten path areas where they were You know potential guests that it was it was growing and and what we discovered that Through one particular event which was World Cup soccer when World Cup soccer came to the US the first time which was

1996 or 98, there were nine cities across the US that hosted World Cup soccer. But there were no outside facilities available for the people that were not connected to the rights holders. So what we did was we got production companies like us in those nine cities, and we basically had a summit. We went to

Oklahoma City where the fiber interface provider, the company that was providing fiber services across the country and across the world, hosted us and we brought up these nine production companies from nine cities together and we all collaborated on, let's have the same rates for crews, let's have the same rates for live shots, let's have the same rates for tape feeds and we'll all set up live show facilities near each stadium so that

we could provide services to the 250 countries and broadcasters that were non -right holders. And that sort of showed us that there were like companies around the country who were trying to do the same thing. And it worked.

It's interesting because by definition, you weren't really competing with them because it was geographical. And so you could form a club and really share ideas and best practices.

Yeah, absolutely. One of the things that we discovered out of that was that these foreign entities that are covering World Cup soccer, they weren't going to hire video link crew to travel around the country. The travel was just too expensive and too cumbersome. And it happened very quickly. One game would happen in Boston and the next game would happen in Los Angeles and it would be the next day. There's just no way that you're going to travel a crew and have them be set up.

in time to do what you needed them to do. So yeah, there was sort of a non -competition and more collaborative effort to make that happen.

So you had VideoLink growing steadily for 25 years. What did you have to do to manage the growth that you were seeing?

Well, eventually we had to start hiring people beyond the three of us that were doing everything. It was just untenable when you have a family at home and you're working 15, 16 hours a day to put live television and regular television on the table. So we had to start hiring people, which is what we did. We started slowly and we hired, we had a few, I had some interns, college interns for summers and.

My partner had some low level employees and we just elevated those people to start taking over this part of the business so that our other side of the house, the production company side of the business could keep flourishing. And that's basically how we sort of funded it by moving some of the mundane tasks to people that literally stayed in the office all day.

The other thing that we did to really launch the business, the salesperson that we had on staff, her name was Gina, is Gina. We sent her out into the world and said, this is what we can do for you. went and sent her to all the major networks and she made friends with all of the people that we knew who were broadcasters and said, you know, we have these facilities, we can do this for you. And by putting a face to our business,

Those clients became our best clients and our longest lasting clients. They lasted until we sold the business. were the same people, the same entities. We working for them every single day. So it became a very tight community of clientele that we were working

At some point you had to move out of Watertown or you decided to move out of Watertown. What precipitated you?

Well, first what we did was we expanded in Watertown. So we had no more space in our building, but the building directly next door to us had a huge space available and we went to the owner and said, we need the space and we need it immediately and you need to give us the best deal that you possibly can. It was totally raw industrial space and we needed to create a big studio. And so they went out on a limb with us because it was a new kind of business and we renovated

3 ,000 square feet and turned most of it into studio and control room. And after that, we realized that we really needed much more space. We needed people space, we needed office space, we needed, you know, engineering areas and equipment storage. And we sort of regrouped and decided that this business was really taking off and our other businesses, although they were doing well.

we could let them sort of run their course. So we went out and searched for other space and we found a big, raw space in West Newton before it actually hit the real estate market. We had a great real estate agent who was searching all around and our whole goal was to remain as close as possible to our best resources, which

Back when I started talking about this, the universities, the hospitals, the medical centers, the high tech neighborhoods, we wanted to be right off the highway from anybody so that it was a really easy way to get to us. And so we found this building right at an exit ramp in West Newton and we took over 16 ,000 square feet and built a state of the art broadcast facility there.

The other thing I should mention, and you'd probably ask me anyways, but the way that we grew the business was by taking a lot of risks. Anytime a network called us and said, can you do X? We said, sure, no problem. Not even knowing what it was, not even knowing what the challenges were, we said, we can absolutely find a way to help you. And so we took a lot of risks at a time when

It was risky to take risks. weren't, they, you know, it hadn't been proven before. So we, for instance, another big news event that happened in the Boston area was what was affectionately known as the nanny trial, which was a legal case that came up with a nanny from a foreign country who was in charge of a small child who died. And she was British.

And the risk that we took was British television had this breakfast TV at one of the British networks had a breakfast TV show. Their breakfast, not our breakfast. So it was at like four o 'clock in the morning. And the trial was, went on for something like three months and they wanted a broadcast every morning, five days a week from in front of the courthouse. Now,

That's no easy task because the courthouse is public private property. It's in the middle of downtown Boston. It doesn't face a street. It's on an interior courtyard. And it's four o 'clock in the morning. So, you know, how do you do that? And it's dark, exactly. And there's no studio there and there's no equipment and there's no easy access.

So it's dark.

You

So the network came to us and said, can you do this? And we said, sure, absolutely. So we went to our fiber optic supplier first and said, we need a fiber drop in the middle of this courtyard. Of course, we got permission from the court and from the city of Boston. And we literally set up an outdoor venue for live shots every morning of every weekday that the trial was happening for like three months.

And we had to, of course it was winter, right? It was like October through December, right? So, you know, we had to convince our staff that, you know, we had to staff this every morning at four o 'clock in the morning for like three hours. And that put us, launched us into the international broadcast community because we could do it. We made it happen. And it was,

What months was it during the war?

I was good.

You know, we had a heck of a lot of fun doing these crazy events. So that's how we took risks.

I was going to ask on this, you know, when you said yes before you had, you know, done all the things to make it possible, I've tried to get permission from both the courthouse and from the city of Boston for things. And it's not a foregone conclusion that you're going to get approval. did you have a...

No, that's true.

Did you have a fallback? Like, some?

The well the fallback would have been to attempt to try to do it from a studio but the whole concept for them was we need to be outside the courthouse and For us being a non broadcaster We didn't have some of the things that the local affiliates had like microwave trucks for instance or some place to beam the signal to another place and take it down and then rebroadcast it we didn't have those kinds of facilities, but

the people that did have those kinds of facilities didn't want to do this kind of work. So we had to find a way to make that happen and to make it happen daily. And it was a challenge. But what we became was more tuned into logistics, managing the logistics than managing the production because logistics were generally, as you say, harder to do.

But if you go in with the right attitude, if you go in with the, you know, not demanding things, but saying, you know, begging, can we do this? Can we make this happen? We won't interrupt anything that you're doing. You know, people are generally, were generally at the time receptive. So it, you know, and it was so new to all of these organizations that it was hard for them to say no.

Was there, can you remember a risky situation? Cause you said, yeah, you took lots of risks. there one you can think of where it didn't work out well?

Well, okay, this isn't so much like that. So one of the risks that we took was we were tuned into politics and the fact that each presidential election year like this year, New Hampshire becomes a hotbed of the political races. the New Hampshire primaries at the time, back in the 90s and early 2000s were the

would have a place to land in the center of New Hampshire politics. So we, in the summer before the primary season, we leased a large empty space in downtown Manchester, New Hampshire, where there was no fiber connection and, but it was, it was good and expensive real estate that we could build multiple live show studios. So going in there with no fiber was a challenge and

And when we proposed to the building owner that we wanted to put fiber in, they sort of looked at us and said, what's that? And we said, well, it's this fiber optic cable that gets us video to the world. And the problem that we had was the building was a block away from where the fiber was on a main street or could be accessed on a main street. And there was a bus station between the building and the street.

And the bus station was the stumbling block. They wouldn't let us dig up the parking lot to put fiber underground and we couldn't physically string fiber across the driveway. So we had to figure out another solution and the solution was we'll have to do a microwave hop from our building to some other building where we could take the fiber, get onto the fiber network.

which was just adds a challenge and adds delay in the signal. So that was a kind of stumbling block that we would come up against, but surmountable. We figured out ways around it.

All right, so and then as we've said at the top of this, so you did sell the company. So what was the motivating factor for selling? then also, how did you go about doing that?

Well, there was a long time between what we just talked about and selling the company, which was 26 years of building the company. And our goal was to build a premier broadcast, private broadcast entity, which we did. And we also incorporated a creative arm. So we had a big creative team that was doing non -broadcast production and creative way. were doing corporate webcasting. Webcasting came onto the scene.

We were doing image pieces. We were doing live public relations. you know, any time some new product was introduced to the world or a new branding or something like that, we could do a live show to basically anywhere. And we could do these media hits all over the country and do it from our studios, our own location. So we built an entity that

just kept growing and we were trying to refine it and make it great. And so our goal was at some point in time in that process was to build the company to a point where it had a lot of value and it was very unique and that someday, know, partners and I could sell the entity and walk away and retire.

Our goal was to just clean up everything, make sure our financials were in order, make sure our accounting department was top notch, make sure that all of the departments within the company were chugging along and producing at the right pace and that we had the right people and we cleaned up all of our leases. We had leases in many cities. So we brought in somebody who could manage all of that while my partners and I were

doing the work, basically, where we're managing the production. And we thought it was gonna be a four to five year process. It ended up being a six to seven year process. And then what we didn't anticipate was that the business was so unique because we were not your ordinary video production company. At the time, there were video production companies that just did video production. We did a lot of other things.

To market that uniqueness was very difficult and we didn't realize that at first. So it took a lot longer to market what we had than we anticipated.

Did you hire an investment banker type person?

We did. We interviewed five or six investment banking firms from the Boston area and we did hire a company that was specialized in mostly tech businesses. And they got us. They understood us. They could see the uniqueness. They understood what we were talking about and they were able to translate that into layman's terms to some degree or to market it appropriately.

And now you...

And so we marketed around the world actually. marketed, we sent our information to about 250 different organizations that requested it, that were interested. And we had one failure in that process. There was a British company that was very interested in us and they owned a bunch of companies that were private equity backed group that owned a lot of

companies that were suppliers of equipment to our industry. So they were suppliers of equipment to the video, film, audio production industries. So they understood the technical side of what we were doing. I don't think they quite understood the production side of what we were doing. So that was sort of a difficult thing. And they unfortunately couldn't get out of their own way in terms of creating a deal.

And eventually we said to them, you know, this isn't working. You know, we have to go back to the drawing board and we parted. That was try number one. And then try number two was also a private equity backed company, a much bigger company, almost a billion dollars in sales. And they were, they still are a audio visual integration firm. So a company that, that builds audio visual systems into corporations and industry and

universities and governments. So they were very keen on the technical side of things. But at that time, we had a bunch of intellectual property. We had some very sophisticated intellectual property that allowed us to control studios that we were building in remote places and we could operate them by remote control. And we built the software package and we actually patented

the software that we used to do that. And then in addition, we built and patented a transmission system over the internet with very high quality and very low latency so that you and I could have this conversation over the internet, but in a broadcast quality format. So we had these bits of intellectual property and that was something that the company wanted.

They didn't quite understand how it could be used yet, but that was sort of the icing on the cake that made us attractive in addition to the production side of those. So that deal took about eight or nine months to come to fruition, but it ultimately did. And that's the deal we went with. And my partner and I set up the deal so that...

there would be no tail and there would be no consulting contract and we would just walk away and the company would remain intact, which is what happened.

and you skied off into the sunset.

Pretty much, yes. I did a little bit of follow on freelance work with them as a director and as a producer and after about two years I said that's enough, I don't need to do this anymore and went on to other things.

so starting this up in the first place and, standing in front of a courthouse in the winter at four in the morning and, and, working 15 hour days. pretty obvious, like, like most startup people, you have a lot of grit. yeah. Where do you think that kind of, where do think that comes from?

Yeah.

That's a good question. I was brought up in a family where the was not the number one thing, but it was serious. So my dad and his brother and father had started a business in Boston, a manufacturing business, and I observed

what they did. I observed their work ethic. I understood that it took hard work to make something for yourself. so that was sort of ingrained in me. I knew that none of this was going to come easy. And I knew a lot of it too. When I got out of school with a communications degree from a great film and TV school,

you know, jobs just weren't handed to you. You had to go after them. And at the time in the late 70s, were 10 ,000 or so graduates from film schools and about a thousand jobs across the country. you know, the ability to get a job in your, you know, selected field was not as easy as one would think. So I, you know, I knew from that,

starting out as a freelancer in a very sort cold environment where you get more rejections than acceptances, you need to work for it. You need to prove yourself. You need to be out there and make a name for yourself in whatever way you can. And I did that. The first seven years of my career was all freelance. was, as my mother says, don't you have an office to go to?

I never had an office to go to. My office was wherever the next job was. I would sit by the phone on Sunday night and wait for that call to ring to say, you you're going to cover this or you're going to shoot this next week or whatever it might be. So it was really a lot of, you know, hitting the ground and meeting as many people in the industry as possible and getting your name and your talents out in front of them. So I guess that's where the grit came from. I worked very hard.

I, you know, work was, it was also, you know, my, my livelihood, my income. was my, my wife was taking care of three kids and, know, I, she didn't necessarily need to work because she had enough work at home. And so I was, I was the, so -called breadwinner. I knew I had to provide for my family. So I needed to do the work. so that translated into a lot of time, not at home, you know,

a lot of hours spent doing what I was doing, whether it was local or travel and making it work for the job and for the family. I was traveling a lot. I was traveling all over the country regularly. I was traveling around the world on different events. so time at home was not, was quality time when I was there, but

Everybody had to understand that I'm building this business for us and we need to make it work somehow.

And you know, you're a dedicated skier and I'm guessing that finding time to go off and ski during those early years was probably pretty tough.

Yeah, I mean that wasn't my life, but I love to ski and I still do today. And yes, it was. And if I could steal a day in the middle of the week, it was because I was probably working on a weekend. And there were often times where, you know, I would take a vacation and somebody would call and say, you know, we need to do this live shot from Manchester, New Hampshire, and you're the only one in New England. So, you know, get up off your butt or get out of the water or.

whatever it is and go do this live shot and that happened a lot. So we were very dedicated to making this business a great success and if that meant getting up on a Sunday morning at six o 'clock and going to do a news live shot, we did that. It was just a given. There were no set in stone weekends for us.

I think most people that are thinking about doing a startup are not afraid of working hard, but I think it's great for them to hear how hard you worked on this.

Yeah, I think that that's true. think if it's your baby, you need to treat it like a baby and take care of it and nurture it and have it grow. And that's the game. That's the end game is that once you get to that growth point where it starts to work by itself and your staff is able to do what you used to do, then you know you've made certain successes. And all of that time that we spent, you know, before the

I would leave, there were days that I would leave my house before my kids were awake and come home after they were already in bed. So they would think that I'm traveling and I'm right down the street. So, you know, it's, those types of, days and hours that you spend because you want to make certain successes. And there were clients. I mean, my, my wife will attest to this today. There are clients that, would demand our time.

Mm -hmm.

and I would never say no to them. And you can imagine that that doesn't always go over so well, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, this has been great because I think it's, I think the business you built is fascinating to hear about and your journey through starting it and all the way to eventually selling it. Even the selling part was obviously really hard work. It's, it's a, think this is, this is making a great episode of this podcast, which I appreciate.

Good. I will say that there's one thing that I will say and that is, you treat your employees the way you want to be treated and you treat your clients the way you want to be treated and they'll all come back to work every day. a testament to video link was that we had client, excuse me, clients from day one who stayed with us the entire time we were in business. We had

client and you think about it, these are news networks. They're big organizations with thousands of people and multi -billion dollars in revenue. And here's this little company, VideoLink, who's providing this service to them that they generally don't do themselves and we're making them happy and they could rely on us. So that type of relationship is really important.

keeping everybody on all sides happy is the way to make business grow.

You're right. But thanks for saying that. That's a great way to end this episode. Thanks so much for your time. And this has been wonderful.

Sure, no problem, glad to do it.