Ep. 190- DAVE GERHARDT: Founder Exit 5 [The #1 community for B2B marketers!] How to build a THRIVING online COMMUNITY! 👨‍💻

Foreign.

Welcome to do this, not that, the podcast for marketers.

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I'm Jay Schwedelson.

Let's do this, not that.

We are back for do this, not that.

And I got, like a really important dude here today.

I'm not kidding.

I do.

So who's here?

Before he starts talking, I want to tell you about him.

We got Dave Gerhardt.

Now, you probably know who that is because the guy's got 170,000 followers on LinkedIn, which is.

I know that's a vanity metric, but I'm one of those followers and I have been for a long time.

And so let me tell you, Dave became Dave.

He was the chief brand officer at Drift, okay?

And he drove them to like a billion dollar valuation.

Then he headed over to Privy as the CMO and he helped to lead them to $100 million acquisition.

This guy only does big numbers, right?

And then he's like, you know what?

I'm going out on my own.

And.

And then he lied.

He's probably listening to this right now.

Be like, I lied.

What did I lie about?

I'm following him, right?

He goes, I'm going to be a solopreneur.

I'm going to be by myself.

I just want to do my own thing, have this nice little business and I'm going to go on in Vermont and relax and it's going to be great.

But that's not what happened, unfortunately.

He started this thing called Exit 5, which just blew up into this community of 4,000 paying B2B marketers that are engaged, getting inspired and, and learning.

And he's not a solopreneur anymore because too many people wanted to jump on board and he's crushing it with this world of community.

And that's what we're going to talk about.

So, Dave, welcome to the podcast.

That was an amazing intro.

Everybody out there, take notes.

If you want to have me on your podcast, just say all the things Jay said and I will come up.

Call you a liar.

Right?

Call me a liar.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So I do wish there's a lot of, like, it's easy to say, like Drift and Privy and all those numbers.

Like, there's amazing teams there.

I got to be a small piece of those things.

And that was fun and, and really transformative in my career, but I do.

One of my biggest gripes is, like, you look at LinkedIn and someone's like, LinkedIn profile says, like, you know, generated $50 million of pipeline at XYZ company.

And I'm like, no, no, no, you didn't.

You worked at the company, and the company generated 50.

So I.

I don't have that big of an ego where I can't acknowledge that, like, we had great teams and other.

Other people there.

And I think that's a key ingredient in marketing.

And I got to ride that wave twice before going out on my own.

And see, that's why you're a good dude.

You know, for me, I'd be like, yeah, it was a billion dollars.

I was.

That was me.

No one else did anything.

I do have one correction, though.

In your intro on that, you said 170,000 followers, and you said vanity metric.

And I actually completely disagree that it's a vanity metric at all.

And this is a myth that I like to dispel for founders and other people.

Because it's absolutely not a myth.

It's actually not a vanity metric because we're doing a webinar next week.

I can go to my LinkedIn tomorrow.

And while other people out there are, like, subscribers spending money on ads and banging their heads against their wall, trying the wall, trying to find out, how do I get more people to register for our webinar?

I can post on LinkedIn and we can get 3, 4, 500 people from that post.

Right?

And we will talk about this later.

But it's also what has led me to build exit 5.

And so I.

I don't think social followers at all are a vanity metric.

Now, if you have them and they don't, the audience you've built doesn't match.

If you just build a meme page and then you try to sell B2B marketing services to that audience, it's not going to work.

But if you can build an audience in a niche and then the followers are not vanity metrics.

And I'm not saying that because you don't know it.

I'm saying it because it's just a common trope to say, like, oh, followers don't matter.

They absolutely matter.

It's like saying the size of your email list doesn't matter.

Absolutely matters.

So I'm really glad you said that, and I'm going to talk out of both sides of my mouth now.

I call it a value metric for exactly the reason that you just said that.

If your followers, if they're not Part of the audience that you're trying to communicate with and you're not engaging with them and they're not engaging with you, then it is.

It's a big fat.

Who cares?

Right?

But to your point, it's a launch pad.

It's been the same way for my career.

It's a launch pad to have a group of people that at any moment you can communicate with.

So I'm glad you.

You clear that up.

But let's talk about what you've done with Exit 5.

Not that I'm trying to make it a commercial for Exit 5, but I really.

It's more about community, everybody.

I mean, for the last, I don't know how many years, community we are, we need to have a community.

We need to bring people together.

Nobody knows how the hell to do this.

Nobody even knows what it means.

It's not some stupid Slack channel that nobody goes to after a month.

Why did you go down the path of community?

What does that even mean to you?

Yeah, so I think.

I think there.

There's multiple definitions for community, right?

And I think what we're talking about, like exit.

Exit 5, we have built a community, a private community.

And people host these things on.

Ours is on Circle.

People host them on Slack.

We had ours on Facebook, Facebook group for a while.

Like, there's lots of different ways you could have a community, but then there's also like community.

I don't know if it's capital C or lowercase C.

But there's also community, which is like having a shared interest together, a local running community.

CrossFit is a community.

They don't necessarily have a Slack group.

And so I.

You can go about building community in different ways.

Like when I was at Drift, we had a strong community as a brand, but we did not have a private.

Behind the paywall, like behind the login community.

We had brand advocates, we had marketers who had a lot of shared interests, and we connected with them through social media and our podcast, and we built a brand that way for Exit 5.

The reason this came to be was because I had already built a large following on social media and I had an opportunity.

I wanted to try to basically move that discussion from one platform to another.

And it started off initially as my kind of personal channel, and it started off on Patreon.

And so I basically tried to monetize my audience, my following on LinkedIn.

My wife was listening to this comedian's podcast and she had a Patreon and it was like 20 for 20 bucks a month, you get access to separate content.

And I was like, well, why would you listen to that?

And it's like, well, because she's, like, a little bit more raw.

It's funnier than her other, like, mainstream podcast.

And I was like, oh, interesting.

I want to try something like that.

And so I had, like, 70,000 followers on LinkedIn, and I started a Patreon, and I announced it the day that I left Drift, and I recorded just, literally, I recorded a voice memo into my phone and I uploaded it.

And that was the first episode on Patreon.

And I published a piece of content every single day for, like, two years there, sharing screenshots.

Hey, I just did this podcast with this guy, Jay, and he told me this interesting thing.

He does four episodes a week.

Like, my brain just kind of always switched on to marketing ideas, I'm sure, just like yours is.

And I launched it on Patreon, and I just thought I might get 20 to 30 subscribers and make an additional 2, 300 bucks a month.

And within the first two months, I had, like, 3, 400 members.

And so I went from, like, no side income to 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, $12,000 a month coming in from Patreon on the side, in addition to my job.

And that was the first dip into this.

Now, once we hit a thousand members, this guy in my Patreon group, Henry Johnson, he's like, hey, man, this is really cool.

We love hearing your marketing takes, but there's a thousand of us here.

Like, you should let us connect with each other.

And I was like, oh, yeah, it's a great idea.

Yeah.

And Patreon didn't have a community feature.

And so he was like, you should launch a Facebook group.

I'm in a bunch of them.

I was like, cool.

So we added a Facebook group.

And that was when I saw this thing take off.

And that was really powerful for me because then the community started to scale.

It became a true community.

Instead of me having to say something, I would go into the Facebook group after not being there for, like, two days, and there's 15 new discussions, and someone found a job and someone helped each other.

And that was kind of when I realized that this could be something bigger and eventually invested and turned it into the product that it is today.

So let me ask you something that I'm.

This is my number one thing about, like, what you've built, but you're successful doing it.

Maybe others have not.

So I get it.

Maybe the first 90 days you launch them like this, people are all in posting, doing whatever, do you have to constantly be in there kind of juicing the community to make sure there's enough activity that everybody feels that the money that they're spending to be a part of it is worthwhile?

Or is there a tipping point where people just start doing it and you could sit back and be like, this thing is alive and well, I don't need to juice the content flow here.

Yeah, I think it's both.

So first I, I think for two years I probably posted in there every single day.

And so I was doing that.

And I think at a lot of companies I see companies, they start a community and it's like really hot for the first 90 days.

And then the engagement, like you said, the slack group just goes down to zero.

And that's, that's because I think oftentimes the person running that slack group or whatever is like an intern.

Like they delegate it down to like the social media intern at the company.

And the reason that it worked for, for us is like, hey, I'm starting a community that I have deep real experience in, right?

And so like, I'm not in that slack.

I've been in Slack groups when they're like, it's, it's, you know, Wild Wednesday.

Everyone share your wildest story from work or something.

They do these like, corny, like community engagement prompts and that stuff doesn't work over time.

What works is me being in there, being like, man, here's three things I learned from like my first time presenting to the board and then I'm commenting on other people's posts.

So I, yes, I did have to stoke the fire for a lot of that.

And then eventually there is a tipping point where the community does start to take over.

We have enough members to do that now.

I also think who you target really matters here too.

And so I think like we, we had a lot of churn when I, when I left Facebook and I rebranded From DGMG to exit 5, we had a lot of churn because it went from a community around my personal brand to a community very clearly for B2B marketers, most of whom who work with SAS, who work in SaaS.

But now that we've made that tough switch, the quality is so good.

Like the quality of a new member that comes in is like a VP of marketing at a, you know, series b venture backed SaaS company in fintech.

And just that by the nature of like the better people coming in, the discussions and the questions and the comments are going to be better.

So that was a big part of it, too.

Now it's not just about posting and trying to stoke the fire.

What I've learned is it's like, it's almost like management or parenting in some way.

The best thing that I learned was reinforcing good behavior in the community.

So it's not necessarily like I have to post a conversation starter, but if I go in the community and I see Jay wrote this awesome post about, like, you know, email, subject line tips or whatever, I'm going to go out of my way to write you a comment and be like, holy cow, Jay.

This is amazing.

I learned three things from this post.

This is exactly the type of stuff that I love seeing in exit 5.

I do that all the time.

And on the flip side of that, we do the opposite, which is like, if someone writes a kind of weak, lame, overly promotional post, we'll either take it down or we'll go and comment and be like, hey, can you please go back in your post and update it?

And so there is a lot of coaching like that, but I think to charge money for it, to treat it like a paid product, to really get the most value from it.

Yeah.

You have to treat it like this is.

We don't write code, but this is our software.

And I think if you just want to, like, set up a community and like, hope that it's going to be mailbox money, it's.

It's not going to work.

We have spent so much time in here.

It's why we have.

We have basically no website content, we have no blog content, we have no articles, we have nothing because it's all been in the community for two and a half, three years.

Yeah.

And I think what, I think the secret sauce that you guys have going on is that for a lot of other companies or media companies, their community is.

Is an.

Is an add on.

We also have a community and like you said, they have some rando who barely knows what they're doing running it.

Right.

Whereas you guys, your community, that's your business.

Yeah.

Can I also, can I also tell you the other secret sauce, though, is that the secret sauce is like, we actually really know our stuff.

Like, we did not create a community in an area that we don't know well.

Right.

I have been in B2B marketing for 10 years.

I went from PR intern to CMO.

I've been in a bunch of the roles.

I've also been a content creator in this space for a long time now.

I've done thousands of podcast interviews.

I've Spoken at, you know, dozens of conferences.

I've given a million presentations, I've had hundreds, if not thousands of conversations with B2B marketers through as a hiring manager, as a somebody recruiting somebody doing content, having a podcast, like, I feel like we know the content, we can be tastemakers in this space.

And I think that is what separates a great community is like, I feel like we know what our audience wants and we know how to curate those things.

And, and then when you have a large social media presence at the top of that, we get to use my LinkedIn and now the team and others as like signals for immediate feedback about what topics people want.

And so if I write a LinkedIn post about how like, you know, here's how to, here's how to, here's how to do internal marketing, here's how to manage up inside of your company and that post on LinkedIn goes, blows up that we treat that as a signal.

We post that in our Slack channel.

Our team is talking about that and they're like, man, this thing Dave wrote about internal marketing really blew up.

Maybe we should do a, an AMA or we should bring in someone in our community to educate on that session.

And so we have this like amazing flywheel going where I do think a big part of the secret sauce is like we, we really know this.

I don't think I could create a community as well as deep in a space that I haven't spent basically my entire career working in.

And I think that is like people always want the growth hack.

They want the, they, they, they, they want to believe that the secret to the, our community's success is that because we we' this platform or that far.

All the questions are like, well Dave, why did you choose this versus Slack?

That's not the, that, that's not the answer.

I think you could actually be successful in multiple places.

It's it, it's really about this stuff that we're talking about now.

That's where the success comes from.

Right?

You can't be first year out of college, be like, I'm going to start a community about whatever and never having done it because you don't even, like you said, you have no idea what the pulse is of that sector or anything like that.

But let me ask you along, along those lines.

Can you have a big following?

That's very, very helpful.

Right?

And you did all this stuff.

But is a community for anybody and the work community may not be the right word, but if I, if I have a thousand followers, I'm really I work really hard in this one sector.

I've been doing it for a long time and I want to start a little community.

Maybe it's only going to be 50 people.

Is, is a community for everybody or is there a threshold that you need to have in order to start a community?

No, it absolutely could be.

I mean, I live in a neighborhood and there's a Facebook group for our neighbors, maybe 20 people in it.

Quality is amazing.

Content is amazing.

Why?

Because we all have this shared interest and we're right here and we're active.

That doesn't need to be any bigger.

And so you absolutely can.

It just depends on your interests.

Can you start a 20 person community and quit your job and make it your whole thing like I have with Exit 5 now?

Probably not, but maybe that's not why you're doing it.

Maybe you just want to have a small community of other first time dads who like to do CrossFit.

And that is your little niche and it starts with your friends.

But I'd also say that can also be the breadcrumb that could lead you to that other thing that everyone starts somewhere.

Everyone starts small.

So even in that example where you said fresh out of college you want to start this thing, you don't have the knowledge.

Okay, that's fine, you can still do it.

You just have to change your angle.

And so you have to be like the curator, you have to be the interviewer, you have to be like, I don't know anything.

I'm gonna go and get the best guests and experts and I'm gonna try to do that through content.

I'm gonna curate it that way.

And so I think you just need to find your angle.

But I do think anyone can have a, a community.

I would just kind of ask you why, like what do you want to achieve?

Because maybe, why does it have to be a community?

Why does it have to be a community where people have to log in or go to Slack or whatever?

Why not make that a YouTube channel?

Why not start a TikTok page?

Why not start a newsletter?

It doesn't have to necessarily be a community.

I think in this realm that I'm in, I think a community made a lot of sense.

And there was also an opportunity where like Salesforce had the CMO club that went away.

HubSpot had Inbound.org that went away.

A couple venture backed SaaS companies have communities, but they had them for a while and they kind of eventually go to nothing.

And then the marketing team is just like turns it into A sales channel and then that breaks.

And so there also happened to be a nice little like, you know, niche for us to create this community.

And that was a factor too.

So one, I have one other question about community that I'm personally interested to know.

You charge for your community.

Some do and some don't.

Is charging for your community, Forget about the fact you make money, that's obvious.

But is charging for your community very helpful in that people then are invested in, they're like, okay, I got to participate because I'm spending money on this thing.

Or is it annoying that you charge because people then feel entitled to be like, hey, I'm paying.

This is not exactly the way it is.

Or I'm not getting this.

Like, yeah, which side of it is better?

Or both?

It's both.

It's both.

There's definitely been a few characters over the years.

It's always men.

Never had an issue with a woman.

Always men who are like, how could, how dare you remove my posts?

Like you should be treating me like a customer.

And I'm like, I kind of get that logic.

But it's like a, it's a content business, a community business.

And so like you're a customer, but not kind of.

There's definitely some of that, but it's very, very, very small and it's never worth the money.

And so like I'd much rather not have the $300 than have like a cranky member in there who's just going to be self promoting and get pissed about it if we try to regulate that.

So you do get some of that for sure.

I do think that people, I think in B2B it's, you know, we're talking about work, right?

And so there's a large appetite for people to invest in their self, themselves and their careers.

And so I think a lot of people expense this membership.

It's 300 bucks a year.

They, they have their company expense it, which is like the CFO never even notices that it's a drop in the bucket from a learning and development standpoint or people pay for it themselves because it's a, it's a career investment.

And so I think there's some percept where they, they like that, I will say for sure.

And I've talked to other people who have much, much bigger communities that are free.

Talk to a friend of mine who ran a Facebook group that had 20,000 people in it that was free.

Can you imagine the level of spam and nonsense in that group?

And so I think it's an incredible, you know, forget about the money.

I think forget about the, you know, I should get to post this thing or not from a spam and quality bar.

Charging is an incredible lever for that.

And I think that's, that's been a big thing now.

It is.

It's also like a gym membership though, right?

There are plenty of people who never log in and then like month 11 comes around or they bought an annual membership and we get a ton of churn on the end of an annual period because people are like, I'm just not using it.

And so I think it, it is a high, it's a high churn business by nature.

I think it's like, you know, between 6 and 8% churn.

And that's, that's uncomfortable.

But at the same time, I think we're trying to frame it differently in that I care about engagement.

I want people in there commenting and being active because that they need to be there for other people to care about it.

But we also have so much knowledge and content in there now that you could get your whole ROI in one year by, by one post, right?

You're like, hey, I gotta present to the board, like next week.

And I've never done this before.

Does anybody have any tips?

And like, you get 20 comments and your, your, your quarter is made, or hey, my boss wants me to look into ABM and I have no idea where to start.

And you go and you find, you know, an amazing thread about, like, where to start with abm.

I'm trying to shift the perception from, like, we're not going to be LinkedIn.

You're not going to go into Exit 5 and post something and you're not gonna have 300 likes and 47 comments on every single post.

But you might get one comment and that comment might be the thing that you need to, like, do your job better.

And we're trying to bottle that.

And it's something that I'm really trying to push from like a positioning standpoint just to set the expectation.

But to answer your question, I 100% think that we could do this for free.

I think it just would be a different strategy because it's paid.

We don't do any sponsor stuff inside of the community.

It's truly like, you pay and you pay for a community membership.

All that stuff is in is, is there for you.

All the sponsored stuff that we do takes place like at the top of the funnel.

It's webinars, it's podcasts, it's newsletters, it's Social media.

So you get this pass that's 30 bucks a month or 300 a year.

You get access to this exclusive club of B2B marketers.

I think it's a.

Well, a worthwhile expense for those who understand how to think about it.

Happens all the time.

Somebody joins.

Ah, this is not worth the $30 a month.

I'm going to cancel.

That's fine.

No worries.

Yeah.

And I honestly don't feel like it's churn as much as a community's not always for everybody.

You know, people come into a community.

Oh, you know what?

This community is not for me.

For whatever reason, I'm going somewhere else.

And if your community is not defined enough and it doesn't have enough of its own Persona and it tries to be for everybody, then it's really not.

It's really not a community.

So, yeah, and I think.

I think over time, like, you need to spin out more subgroups and communities.

So.

So I think, like, I think our community could be much, much, much bigger.

But similar to, like, you and me talking offline about podcasting before, I'm not willing to do the things that it would require to make the community much bigger.

And so instead of it being our whole business, we see it as like one of our products now, and there's 4,000 members, and it's awesome.

But, like, to be fair, we.

We make almost double the amount of revenue through content and sponsorships as we do for the community.

However, the community is incred.

It's an incredible moat.

Like, the.

The folks that are in the community are super engaged.

They're sharing our stuff online.

They're coming to our event, they want to do meetups.

They are recommending us.

We're getting feedback from them.

It's incredibly valuable.

Even if over time, it becomes a smaller chunk of, like, our revenue as a business, I see it as an asset that we're going to continue to invest in because the payoff is not just in the fact that it generates revenue.

It's this amazing piece of our kind of feedback.

Flywheel.

Oh, yeah.

It's like the heart of everything you guys are doing.

Well, let me jump into some chaos.

Now.

You talked about gym memberships on.

I want to pivot this to the chaos portion of this podcast.

So you might follow Dave on LinkedIn and see all this really smart stuff he does, but you need to follow him on Instagram.

That's where the magic happens.

So this dude will show you.

Hey, I just lifted this weight and I did this exercise and I hit a Horrible golf shot and all this stuff.

How do you get comfortable sticking the camera on yourself, not talking about pipeline and flywheel and marketing automation and be like, yeah, this is my new, new exercise.

I'm crushing it here.

Like, is that hard for you or no?

No, but I just deleted, I deleted that Instagram a couple months ago because it was a distraction.

Oh, come on.

So there's your answer to chaos.

Why, why would you delete it though?

It just was not a channel that was, it was fun for me to post there, but it just, it was not, it was not productive.

And I've also, I don't know, I've kind of hit a weirder point in life now where I'm like, I'm less comfortable sharing lots about my life online, as I think I, I were, I was before.

I think part of that is like, with a little bit more success, more people who have no idea who you actually are will just proactively hate you online.

And it's not good for my mental health to like open myself up to that and like, it could literally just be like, me, a video of me doing pull ups just because, like, it's fun to do and you get some comment like, look at this arrogant male tech bro.

And I'm like, wait, what?

Like, most of the people that I talk to on stuff like this or I meet them in, in person or at events or whatever, they're like, wow, you're so much nicer than I thought you would be because of how you write on LinkedIn.

And I'm like, hold on, is that a, is that you projecting something on me?

Like, I, I don't understand.

And so it just wasn't, I didn't have a real strategy for it.

I, I don't want to build a, a following that way.

And then actually it started like years and years ago when I was at Drift.

I started to get a lot of followers on my personal Instagram and then I had kids and I didn't want all these like, strangers who know me from like the marketing world seeing pictures of like my family, my kids, my house, my life.

You know, everybody just judges everything.

Or like, I just didn't want that information out there.

And so I split off to this other Instagram.

I just kind of messed around and posted there for a little bit and I didn't have a real strategy there.

I think I could like create.

I just would post random stuff and just ended up being a time suck.

I decided I'm just going to talk about marketing on LinkedIn and I'll sprinkle my personality into that stuff and that, that should do the trick.

Yeah, I probably need to learn from you something because I literally did an episode, I'll have to send it to you called hate mail and I just read all of the horrible things that people sent to me and oh, I love that.

F bombs.

I should die.

I mean, just like unbelievable.

Yeah, I'm talking about subject lines like, what's the problem here, bro?

No, it's crazy.

Like the, the, the privilege of me sitting in this chair right now.

Like, you know, someone wants me to, to get canceled over being on this podcast or something.

It's just like I don't need any of that.

Like I, I know who I am in real life and so I just stop, stop posting there and that's fine.

Yeah, well, that's good.

It's, you got, it's good to have a, a separation there because the world is just b, I'll still do it on Twitter.

Like I have a Twitter page and like I'll, I'll post.

I just was like, I'm just gonna, if I want to post stuff like that, I'll just, I'll just run my.

Well now I am going to ask you a personal question though, because now you, you did the dream thing.

For those of you don't know, the reason Exit 5 is named Exit 5 is that Dave's in laws had a house up there in Maine and exit 5 is the exit.

Right.

He would leave and get off.

Exit 5, that's, we named it.

And so you went up there because it's like beautiful and chill and you could do all this stuff.

So like, do you just walk around with your headphones on all day and you're not really in like a work mode and you're just, you're just relaxed dude and zen guy on the planet.

I should like move to Maine.

I mean, is this the advice you're giving to the world right now?

Yeah, it's Verm, it's Vermont.

Vermont's much better than I meant.

Vermont.

That's okay.

That's okay.

I, I, you didn't lose any points over that.

Yeah, except you don't know the number one move is you're, you're so zen that you don't even have headphones in.

You're just there with you and your thoughts.

Like nobody uses headphones anymore.

Wow, this is amazing.

No, it is great.

I do.

There was a one, there's one fairly influential person in the business and tech world who said to me very directly like told me I was basically nuts for moving to Vermont because I'm going to lose all my network and not be able to do anything meaningful.

And that person clearly had no idea how social media and online marketing works.

And so I've been able to be quite successful from up here.

But for me, most importantly is I have, I don't know if balance is the right word because I don't think things are ever really in balance.

But I've had the ability to create a business and create a company that doesn't force me to have any trade offs with my family, with my wife, with my kids.

It's just something really important to me.

Like I'll see some posts from like Fortune 100 CMOs on LinkedIn about, you know, this one person like, you know, had to FaceTime their kids, graduation or some, some, something like that.

It's just insanity.

And just like family's so important to me.

I really want to set an example of like showing people that you can build a successful business and also be a successful father, husband, you know, partner, whatever.

And so it's not necessarily about me being Zen and walking around the woods, it's just being able to, to do those things.

I'm going to go pick up my kids from camp in an hour and my day is going to be done because I've done what I needed to do.

Now, even with a team of five people, like, I think it's important for me to set that example for them.

And I really want to build a business that is successful and allows us all to have personal lives.

Because man, I mean you've been in this game.

Like I know so, I know so many examples of founders, entrepreneurs who have built successful companies, but it was at the detriment of their health.

They look like they gained a hundred pounds, they lost a marriage, they lost a friend, they lost friendships.

You so many people lose all that stuff over the pursuit of business.

For me that's not worth it.

And so I want to be able to do both.

I love that.

And you know, when I was starting out my career, my mother said to me, I'll never forget, she goes, when the grim reaper comes for you and you're on your deathbed, you're not going to say the grim reaper.

I wish I had one more day in the office.

You're going to say, I wish I had one more day with my family.

You know, and so I subscribe to everything you just said.

And you know, following Dave is not just about his community stuff, but watching him build this incredible company as it's on the rise.

So I encourage you to do that.

So we're going to put this all in the show Notes.

You got to follow him on LinkedIn.

You got check out his podcast, the Exit 5 podcast.

I listen to it every episode.

It's fantastic.

Dave, what else should they check out about your world?

Yeah, if you want to see the community, one of my biggest gripes is people.

I'll get messages all day, email LinkedIn, people who want to want to know about the community.

I'm like, go join it.

Go look around.

It's a seven day free trial.

You can go to exit5.com you can see two years of content in there.

That's it.

You talked about the community, you talked about the podcast.

It's, it's all on the website, exit5.com and you can follow me on LinkedIn if you want.

Amazing.

All right, Dave, I really appreciate the time.

Thanks for being here.

Jay.

I'm a look, you came on something of ours and our team.

I don't know why you're not that great.

Our team became like super fans of you and they're like, do more stuff with Jay.

So when I sent him a note that I was coming on your podcast say everyone's fired up.

So I, I, I'm happy to come on and chop it up with you.

Oh, this is great, dude.

No, I've been following you long before you knew who I was.

I've been following you for years.

So this is, this has been a big deal for me.

So super excited that you're here and excited to just watch your whole Jo, so appreciate, thanks.

All right, talk soon.

Yes, sir.

You did it.

You made it to the end.

Nice.

But the party's not over.

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