Austin Peterson | Backbone Planning Partners

Josh Hile: Welcome back to The Advisor View. I’m Josh Hile, CEO and co-founder of Citizen Mint. Each episode I sit down with wealth advisors to hear their journey, how they built their practice, and how they actually serve their clients on a day-to-day basis. Today I have Austin Peterson of Backbone Planning Partners. Thanks for jumping on, Austin. Maybe just to start, you can give us a quick background on yourself and kind of your journey into wealth management.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, yeah, I appreciate it, Josh. Um, excited to be here. So, uh, I’ve got a little different journey, I guess, into financial planning and wealth management. I grew up in a family that was pretty poor, did not have a financial advisor, wouldn’t have needed one. Um, my dad was an independent business owner, but pretty small. I mean, it was basically him and a couple of guys that kind of helped him out. And it was enough most of the time. But in 9th grade, I took a class that just kind of fit a hole in my schedule. I had to fill some sort of an elective in there, and it was called Entrepreneurship and the Stock Market. And it kind of just opened my eyes to what was out there. I don’t know that I even knew what the stock market was before then. And I’ll date myself, I’m clearly older than you are, Josh, but when we, when we were researching stocks in that class, we did so by looking up the tickers in the newspaper and then going to the library to find information. So a little different than stock research today, but that’s kind of what got me excited about it and realizing, man, I think I want to be a business owner and this stock market stuff is pretty cool. And that kind of launch that direction, because prior to that, I was, I was sure I was headed to law school, and that was the way that I saw a bright future for me.

Josh Hile: Okay. And then, um, I guess, like, maybe you can talk about that, like, you know, journey along, like, uh, you know, reading your bio, you know, you kind of go through a number of different iterations on your background and kind of where you were within that. like financial services realm. So maybe you can just give us a quick view to where— how you came all the way to where you are now, uh, and the backbone of Planning Partners.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I mean, I originally got started in the business, I was 23 years old. Uh, I didn’t have any family with money. I didn’t have any friends with money. You know, when you’re 23, none of your friends have money. So kind of getting started was tough. I did okay, actually, looking back now and understanding how the industry works. But I was young, I had a child, and I needed something a little bit more stable. And so I went to work for Pacific Life Insurance Company.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: And then I just kind of bounced around at some different insurance companies and brokerages throughout the years before I finally realized that one, I want to get off the road, stop traveling as much as I am. And 2, now I’ve got some gray hairs not just on my head but in my, you know, in my beard. Um, it might be a little bit easier to kind of go back into business on my own. And so I, I made that transition back into personal practice, um, in 2019.

Josh Hile: And, um, yeah, so, and then maybe just kind of how you brought together Backbone Planning Partners and like you know, who your co-founder was and how that all kind of came together and like what you were trying to build. And because, I mean, like a lot of the wealth managers and financial planners we talked to, you know, it’s like they saw something in the industry that they didn’t like and then they’re like, okay, I want to build something different and here’s who I want to kind of serve with that different business.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I think there was definitely part of that. You know, I got connected with my business partner, Landon Mance, through, um, basically just attending different conferences together, doing some meetings together. Uh, we were both with Lincoln Financial. That was actually my last stop on the, you know, on the insurance/corporate side. And so when I jumped into the personal production side, I stayed with Lincoln as my broker-dealer and RIA at the time. He was already there. Um, we started doing a little bit of joint work together. And then ultimately became, you know, full-time partner starting in 2019. So, um, yeah, we, we basically saw that there was this gap, and we’re not the only ones that, that do this, but we’re definitely in the minority, um, with working with private business owners. And, and that’s, you know, the reality is, I hate to say it this way, but there are a lot of financial advisors, either if they’re working with business owners, they’ve got to have other investments to manage and something for them do, if they don’t have those investments, they’re basically going to walk right past a business owner until they know that the business owner is getting ready to sell because they see an ability to kind of make some money helping that business owner. And our model is just completely different. We look at it and say, well, look, these business owners need help getting their largest asset or their largest investment ready to be some sort of liquid investment in the future. And so we tell business owners that they should be hiring us 3 to 10 years before they are planning to exit so that we can help them not only get that business ready, but in the meantime, try to move some of their investments or their net worth, if you will, off of their business balance sheet and onto their personal balance sheet.

Josh Hile: Yeah, no, that makes sense. And, and why do you think your like you were drawn to business owners specifically?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I mean, I grew up— my dad, like I said, he owned his own, his own business. My uncle owned his own business. And so I, I would say that I kind of grew up in this, you know, business owner background. And my business partner was the same way. His family was kind of all independent business owners his whole life. Um, but it was really that entrepreneurship class that I took in high school that sparked in me, I think I want to be a business owner. But there’s also this lack of advice in a lot of ways for business owners who are running really successful companies but not massively successful companies. Right? So think about anybody who runs a business that does $5 million in revenue up to maybe $100 million in revenue. Most of those business owners don’t have great advisors around them, and I’m sure that some people would listen to this and think that that sounds shocking to me to them. You know why would that be the case? But they’re just head down; they’re building their business. They they know they have something that’s providing them a good income, and they’re building a business that’s that’s great. But they don’t necessarily know what to do next: how to build it the right way, how to get it ready for that exit, how do we offset taxes today along the way? Is my estate plan set up correctly? Like, they know they have a CPA or need a CPA, but that’s— and maybe they need an attorney from time to time, but that’s kind of the extent of what most business owners have in terms of advisors.

Josh Hile: And so maybe you can walk us through the process from, you know, talking to that specific business owner and just because that’s your focus and like, what are you actually talking to them about, especially when they don’t have that liquidity event, you know, 6 months out, but a few years like 3 to 5 years out? Like, what do you actually work with them from a planning perspective?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, so I mean, step one is, is typically the, the D word, right? Diversification. You know, most investment advisors are thinking diversification with inside of an investment portfolio, but if they don’t have an investment portfolio, the only asset that they have is their business or maybe their primary residence. Then we talk to them about the importance of kind of diversifying away from that and recognizing that they do have a diversification issue or a risk issue, right? Because think of it this way, if somebody told me that they had a $50 million net worth and— or they told you that they had a $50 million net worth and it’s all in Tesla stock or Apple stock, you would think they were crazy, right? Because it’s tied into one company. Yet most of the time, if somebody tells you that they own a business that is valued at $50 million, your inclination is to say, congratulations, that’s amazing, you built something cool.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: One thing still exists, right? There’s still massive risk. And even though you control that company, there’s massive risk that’s tied— their entire net worth is tied to one asset or one investment. Yeah.

Josh Hile: Yeah. And then, so how do you create that diversification at that early stage in the business? Is that through being like, hey, we need to start allocating your salary to some other places, or what do you look at there?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I mean, I would say that most of the clients we work with are not in the early stages, right? The startup stage where they’re just kind of maybe barely making a paycheck for themselves and trying to build things. It’s— they’ve typically been running the business for at least 5 years, and there’s a little bit of stability involved there. But the principles would remain the same, right? It’s like, let’s set up a 401 company— 401 for the company. Let’s make sure that you’ve got your own retirement accounts and maybe a, you know, traditional investment brokerage account or a trust-owned account or, you know, something like that. To just start that process of, you know, saving along the way. Because ideally what we tell our clients is, ideally when it’s time to sell your business, we’re hoping that you don’t need to sell that business to meet the financial goals that you have. We want you to be financially independent before we even think about selling the business. Not always feasible, right? Not always possible. But in an ideal scenario, we would like them to be financially independent before it’s time to do that. And a couple of reasons. One, peace of mind, right? We all know stories. I mean, Blockbuster is the one that gets thrown out all the time, right? But these stories of businesses that don’t end up actually being able to be sold, or— yeah, and there’s a high percentage of businesses in the country that just won’t. And that’s because most of them are, you know, mom-and-pop-owned companies. There’s no value there. There’s maybe a client list, whatever. And so if we can show them that they need to be financially independent without their business, if at all possible, they’ve got peace of mind that they’re going to be good no matter what. If the industry completely shifts and their business is not worth anything, but then when it does come time to go to the table and sell the business, You have full control at that point as to how that gets structured, who you sell it to, how you want to make it work, because you don’t need that money to be able to walk out the door and retire. You have full autonomy as to how you want to structure that, and it could be just gifting it to your kids because you don’t need the money. Why not just gift it to the kids and give them the ability to take it to the next level? So It just gives you options that don’t exist if you don’t build anything besides the business, right? Because what I hear all the time from business owners is my business is my retirement plan.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Yeah.

Austin Peterson: So we’re trying to avoid that.

Josh Hile: And how, like you mentioned that you usually try to help business owners in the process to get it ready for sale or some liquidity event, like How ingrained is that in kind of your model of like, you know, and how like are you essentially, do you get paid for any of that work? How do you actually like monetize the value you bring there?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, so we do charge financial planning fees to our business owner clients regardless, right? So the first year there’s always an upfront financial planning fee. And that’s to kind of get everything organized, know what’s going on, set up an actual plan. After that, it can be a hybrid, and we’ll just kind of see, you know, the way things look. If they have investments that they do need managed, and we can charge them an AUM-based fee like most investment managers charge, and that covers kind of our minimum. So we’ve, we’ve set our minimum at $12,000 a year per client. Right? And so if we can cover that in the assets that we’re managing for them, great. We’re not gonna double dip and charge additional inside of the business unless the complexity warrants it and there’s more time being spent. And that will be a joint conversation with the business owner. But if there’s not, a lot of our business owners are paying us a monthly, almost like a retainer that you would pay to a CPA or a an attorney to provide that ongoing advice. And depending on the business owner, it could be a monthly meeting, it could be quarterly, it could be twice a year. Just depends on where they are in, in the process, what the complexity is, if they have people on staff that are helping them with certain things that they need help with, they’ve got a good bookkeeper, good CPA, you know, whatever the case may be. But, um, so it can vary quite a bit. just based on the complexity. But we’re looking at all the things that you might think that we’d be looking at, right? What does your cash flow look like? What does your balance sheet look like? What does your management team look like? What can we do to start offloading some of the things that you do on a day-to-day basis as the business owner so that you can be freed up to do the things that you’re uniquely qualified to do and that drives the business to the next level? Because The reality is, if you could take 6 months off and walk away from the business and have the business maintain, or better yet, grow during that 6-month period because your entire team is set up to do that, your business is worth massively more than if you’re ingrained and doing everything day to day.

Josh Hile: Yeah, yeah. No, that’s such a key point. So Maybe just thinking about this and thinking about the ways that business owners, because as a business owner myself, both you and I, like, what do you see business owners, what are their biggest mistakes? Because I know they can get so focused on the business and so they’re not always thinking about the financials. And so what do you see as kind of continual mistakes that you see business owners make from a financial perspective?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I mean, I, I would say number one that I see is not being willing or able to delegate.

Josh Hile: Hmm.

Austin Peterson: Um, that, that holds back businesses so much. You know, you’re, you’re gonna hit a plateau if you can’t start to delegate. And some, for some people that plateau is higher, but for most people, you hit that plateau, you can’t go any further. And we hear stuff like, well, they They just don’t get it, or I’m the only one who understands that, or you know they don’t care as much as I do. All of those things are true, but if they can’t get over that and understand that if you can delegate a task to somebody and they can do it even at 70% of how good you would do that that same task, it needs to be delegated to somebody else. Yeah, because you need to be able to go out and do what you do best, and a lot of times that’s. business development, sometimes it’s vision, you know, sometimes it’s strategy. But, you know, if you’re, if you’re the one who’s entering stuff into the books or, you know, you’re paying the bills or, you know, whatever the case may be, it’s just, it’s not a good use of your time. And you can pay somebody a lot less than your hourly rate to do that for you.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: But the biggest value is giving you your time back to focus on those high-value activities.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Yeah. Sales. That’s the highest value activity every single time.

Austin Peterson: Yeah. They say sales cures all, right? But I don’t know if that’s fully true, but it definitely helps.

Josh Hile: Yeah. So, and then maybe just when you’re talking to business owners, because this is probably something that you always have to balance, but this idea of, you know, if it’s a cash flow machine kind of business, It’s like, how much do you reinvest in that business and use that for working capital to grow the business versus essentially pulling money out of the business for those— through those distributions and getting their investments started? And you kind of mentioned it about really like getting them less dependent on the business, but how do those conversations go?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I mean, it’s tough early on, right? Because I’ve heard thousands of times, well, I can reinvest this money back into the business and my profit margin is X, pick a number, 30%. So, can you give me an investment that pays 30%? I mean, I hear that all the time.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: And it’s a very difficult thing early on to get past because there’s truth to it. But again, at some point, they either hit the plateau, but they definitely are not diversifying, right? So, you can look at Tesla and it had periods of time where the rates of return were north of 30%. but then they have a big downturn, right? And so regardless, every portfolio— and that’s the biggest shift, is getting them to view their business as an investment rather than their business or their job, right? And so if you view it as an investment, yes, you want to reinvest in that business as much as you can to kind of drive that, but there has to be some diversification built in. So What’s the optimal way to grow? What can we do? So what can we do safely? How can we add people quickly enough to do it without breaking the machine? Like, let’s, let’s make responsible decisions the way that a CFO would guide you to drive those decisions or make those decisions. And then the rest, we need to start to build towards your financial independence. And so that’s easier to figure out, right? How much do you need to live on in today’s dollars and how do we build that?

Josh Hile: Okay.

Austin Peterson: Well, you’re gonna plan on running the business until this date. So in order to pull that off, you need to be saving this much money. So can you carve that much out of the business? If you wanna reinvest the rest, I can get on board. I may point out a few other things that you should be looking at and investing, but we’re definitely on the side of helping you grow your business by reinvesting. But we still need that diversification to be a key part of your plan.

Josh Hile: Okay. And then what about just how you build portfolios for these particular clients? Like, how do you start out those portfolios? How do you build them over time? I know you mentioned tax management and thinking about, you know, before and after an exit and how you’re going to manage taxes in those ways. What does that actually look like in practicality?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, so we’re, we’re actually pretty big believers in private or alternative investments.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: Um, we certainly have a heavy lean towards public investments, as most investment managers do.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: Um, but in terms of, you know, RIAs that are out there, I would say that we’re definitely on the, on the edge of RIAs that are putting more in alternatives than most.

Josh Hile: Yep.

Austin Peterson: You know, so most people would talk about, you know, an 80/20 portfolio, right? 80% equities, 20% fixed income or bonds. Uh, whatever the portfolio is, the equity portion will be what the equity portion is, and maybe there’s some alternative equities in there. But on the fixed income side, rather than it being 20% fixed income, it’s likely going to be 10% fixed income and the other 10% some sort of alternative investment.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: Because here’s what I know about working with business owners for as long as I’ve been working with business owners. Now, 2019, back in personal production, but a good portion of the planning work that I’ve done the entire 27 years was business owner focused. And, and what I’ve learned is there’s 2 types of investments that business owners like: other businesses and real estate.

Josh Hile: Mm-hmm.

Austin Peterson: Those, those are the 2 that they, that they, they like, and it’s because they understand them better and they feel like it’s tangible, right? Like if I own a real estate investment, a, uh, you know, an Airbnb property, short-term rental, long-term rental, whatever, like I can go and put my hands physically on that. Um, that’s just kind of where they, they feel. And then on the private business, like they may know the business owner or they’re investing in a startup that they, that they know. Now they don’t connect that there might be a much higher risk with that than just buying Apple stock, right?

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: But that’s where their mind goes because I, you know, I’ve heard it 1,000 times. Well, this stock market, like, it just reprices every day and it’s just whatever they think that it’s worth. That’s kind of a typical response from business owners and it just comes down to not fully understanding it all the time. Um, but we play into that and say, look, we’re with you. You should have private investments in your portfolio. Foundations have been doing it for years, you know, pensions, all these types of large institutional investors have been doing it. Now it’s becoming more mainstream and available to individual investors through their financial advisors. So we will deploy part of your capital into that. But history is on our side here. Public markets, they are efficient, they do work. Let’s have some investment here, but we’ll sprinkle in the private side as well.

Josh Hile: And where do you usually play on the private side? And does any of those private investments play into your tax strategy for the business owners?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, they definitely do. I mean, there’s some different real estate plays that we will do where there’s an added tax benefit to the business owner to offset passive income, for example, or if they’re a real estate professional, it can be against their— their, uh, uh, what am I thinking of?

Josh Hile: W-2 income.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, yeah, their W-2 income or whatever income they make, you know, earned income was what I was searching for. And so, yeah, we will play into all kinds of strategies that are going to be beneficial to the client, whether it’s Qualified Opportunity Zone fund or different, you know, gas stations and truck stops, different things like that to kind of help offset the taxes. Got it.

Josh Hile: And then what about just like, so is it usually about a 10% sizing on the private market side for your clients?

Austin Peterson: It’s typically half of whatever the fixed income side of the portfolio would be based on their risk tolerance and time horizon.

Josh Hile: Got it. Got it. And then do you do any of the other things around like 1/30/30s long-short to try and prepare for capital gains exits?

Austin Peterson: Yep. Yep. So we’re actually in the process of setting some of those accounts up currently because we’ve got clients that have exited recently and have exits coming up. And so that is a strategy that we will deploy in the right way. it takes on some additional risk, right? And they’ve got to understand what, what they’re doing there, but, um, it can be very beneficial to the client.

Josh Hile: And so if, like, when you’re talking to a business owner, I guess, for the first time, what should business owners think about wealth planning? Because I’m sure there’s business owners out there that are just like, like, do I even need a financial advisor? Or what are you going to help me with? And so it— what should they— how should they think of you as kind of like for what you provide to them? Because I’m sure the value you provide is incredibly high, especially compared to a lot of financial advisors. So I think, I think it would be, you know, just hitting on that.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, we, I mean, we sure hope that the, that the value is there. We, we think it is. The feedback that we receive from our current clients is that, that the value is there. Um, I would say about half of our clients worked with an advisor previous to us, and they do see a night and day difference in what we do, right? Just the understanding of the business and weighing in on those types of things sets us apart. But there’s kind of 2 ways that I would look at it. One, I would say they should look at us as a partner.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: We’re definitely taking on an advisory role, But we’re really going to partner with them to kind of get their business to where they want it to be and that they can exit or transfer that business the way that they want to do that or envision doing that. And sometimes that changes, right? I mean, we’ve— we have a client recently where we just changed the way that the trust is structured and the way that she’s going to transition her business because she kind of changed her mind on how she wanted to do it. And once she realized that we had her on a path to be financially independent no matter what, it gave her an opportunity to say, well, gosh, I might not want or need to sell this business. So let’s structure it in a way that I can have my kids ready to take over. I can offset some of my estate taxes along the way. And if they ultimately don’t want to be involved, okay, we’ll sell the business anyway, but I’ve already gifted shares to them. So it’s going into their trust, not mine, because I don’t need it. So, you know, there’s, they’re seeing the difference along the way with the value that we provide. But the way that we kind of look at it overall is that you should see us as the quarterback of your team, and we will help you coordinate and collaborate with your other advisors. So it’s common for us to be on meetings like this. with the CPA, with the estate planning attorney, with their business attorney, with their CFO, to make sure that everything’s being coordinated and collaborated together rather than getting advice from each of those people in a vacuum.

Josh Hile: Mm-hmm. Got it. And do you see any changes happening to— or like, where do you see kind of the business owner planning evolving over the next 3 to 5 years?

Austin Peterson: Uh, that’s a good question. I mean, there’s definitely more technology that’s coming into play. AI is, is changing a lot of things, even in, in what we do. Um, it’s making us more efficient in the way that we operate our practice and gives us the ability to be more present with our clients, right?

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: Because I mean, rather than me making notes and writing everything down, my AI note-taker is capturing all that information and I’m present with the client, looking in their eyes and hearing what they’re saying, right? So I definitely think that those things are helping to benefit. I do think that there’s going to have to be more people who enter the marketplace doing what I do because we can’t cover everybody. We’re a small-ish shop, right? We’re not Fidelity or Vanguard or any of the groups that are out there. that are that large. But because there is such a massive transition of wealth that’s going to happen specifically with business owners, there’s going to be an increased number of advisors, I think, that are going to become ready to do this type, to provide this type of advice and do this type of work for business owners.

Josh Hile: And maybe that’s a good question to just dig in on. Because, okay, so I would assume most of these business owners are essentially closer to the end of their career. Some are holding these businesses even after they’re 65, and then their kids don’t want the business in most cases. And so how do you develop that kind of relationship with the next gen as well? Because I know that’s, you know, they have the stats out there. It’s like next gen fires advisor within 6 months of Yeah, there being a transition of wealth. So what does that look like for you and kind of the business owners you’re working with?

Austin Peterson: Yeah, so I mean, the biggest thing that we do in that area is offering to do family meetings with the client and their kids. Gives us an opportunity to meet the kids, to understand what it is that they understand about the whole situation and what their intentions are. It takes the pressure off of the business owner themselves or the mom or the dad. to have that conversation without like a professional there who’s saying, hey, this is kind of what the trust says, this is what, you know, to expect. So that’s, that’s the biggest thing that we do. The other thing to kind of keep in mind is, you know, all advisors, us included, don’t always necessarily want to hold on to the clients to the next generation because a good client to us that has 5 children might be 5 so-so clients and the business is not around any longer. It doesn’t really play to our strengths. And so we might help facilitate that getting to another advisor in that particular instance. But when it’s appropriate and there’s a desire, we will certainly service into the next generation. And we have younger advisors who work for us who are prepared and ready to kind of take that take that on as well so that there’s not even a concern about me. I’m not, I’m not young, but I’m not old, right? I’m going to be 50 next, or the end of this week I’ll be 50.

Josh Hile: Well, congrats.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, thank you. But, uh, it’s, you know, we’ve got a plan for the next generation as well. But family meetings is the, is the most important thing I think that we do to kind of make sure that the next generation is taken care of, whether it’s with us or just overall.

Josh Hile: Okay. What about, and this, I’m just interested on your take. You kind of mentioned AI as a way to get you more efficient. How do you think that affects the industry as a whole and kind of wealth management in general? You know, obviously there’s these AI wealth managers popping up here and there, a little bit different than robo-advisors given the capabilities are a little bit different, but just your thoughts on what that will do.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, I mean, I remember when the robo-advisor kind of came onto the scene and everybody said there’s going to be massive fee compression and we’re going to lose a bunch of clients, and it just, it didn’t happen. Um, there were some younger clients who were, who were using it and, and okay with it. The, the problem that exists is that personal connection can’t ever be replicated by AI.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: Can, can they get you to the right answer? Most of the time, right? We all know that there are flaws in AI and the answers that are given sometimes, but most of the time you’re going to get to the right answer. But there’s a couple of things. One, the client doesn’t know for sure that they got the right answer because they might not know the right questions to ask ChatGPT or any of the other, you know, search engines that are out there. And then they just don’t know they can’t have a conversation with you to understand the emotions behind the decision that’s being made.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: That just, it can’t ever be replicated by AI. So I don’t think that it’s gonna replace, but I do see that it could have maybe a larger impact than we saw with the robo-advisors. But I don’t think that they can ever replace the human side of of personalized financial planning.

Josh Hile: Yeah. Um, so to close us out, uh, I always like to ask this question, which is a little bit of a curveball, but what’s one thing that people don’t know about you or one hobby that you have?

Austin Peterson: Uh, well, you can see my background. I’m a massive baseball fan. Um, the Red Sox are my team, but I’m, I’m trying to visit all of the parks in the country. So that’s a map of all the parks. I visited about half of them so far. Um, but so that’s one thing.

Josh Hile: But then what’s your favorite other than Fenway?

Austin Peterson: Oh, my favorite other than Fenway. Um, I would probably say Wrigley. Yeah, I mean, when I turned 30, I saw the old Yankee Stadium, Fenway Park, and Wrigley Field on 3 successive days. I saw games at at those parks. And so Wrigley definitely, I would say, is probably second to Fenway. Both of those fan bases are very engaged fan bases. They’re watching very closely. It’s not phones out, I’m sitting at a baseball game, but they’re watching every pitch. They might even be scoring the game in the scorebook. I mean, there’s engaged fans.

Josh Hile: Yeah.

Austin Peterson: Um, I would say that for sure. But probably the thing that most people don’t know about me, even my clients, um, for the most part, is that I would consider myself an adrenaline junkie.

Josh Hile: Okay.

Austin Peterson: If there’s adrenaline involved, I’m, I’m interested. So I fly airplanes, I’ve been skydiving, I’ve been bungee jumping. In 2 weeks, I’m hiking Mount Kilimanjaro. Like, I— if there’s some sort of adrenaline involved, I am interested.

Josh Hile: Okay. I love that. No, that’s awesome. That is a good one. And well, I appreciate the time so much and really thank you for being on and excited to, for everybody to learn more about how to service business owners.

Austin Peterson: Yeah, no, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.