Mike Kaeding: Becoming The Best In The World At What You Do

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Mike Kaeding has a big mission "to solve America's housing shortage by transforming the way apartments are built and managed. And in doing so, I will improve the way we all live." Having taken over the family business after his dad unexpectedly passed away, Mike didn't know how things "were supposed to be done." He used his ignorance as an asset. He asked questions. He looked at things from a fresh perspective. In doing so, he's been able to build Norhart into a company that does things differently than most.

Norhart is able to build apartment building for 20-30% less than other developers. They are extremely passionate about hiring the best people they can, which led them to hire 14 recruiters to go out and find the best! How about flying in construction employees from across the US to work on their development projects? How about offering them unlimited time off? They are building an attractive culture unique to the construction industry where the top people can 5x-10x the output of an average employee. Learn how Mike Kaeding is disrupting the construction and development industry.

In this episode hosted by Mike Swenson, we discussed:

• How Mike Kaeding wanted to be impactful to the world and solve America's housing affordability crisis
• The magic during Mike's challenging point when the city shut them down 
• How Mike's team saved money and started success by working on their own and bringing stuff in-house
• Unlocking the doors that you didn't know could be unlocked by hiring the best people
  
• Their new investment platform that gives people access to invest in what they're doing and earn a great rate of return
  
• How does Mike earn profits on all the subcontractor work and quickly get the cash replenished
  
• How Mike plans to reach 192,000 units under management with 60,000 units/year in 10 years
  
• Lowering the construction costs to allow you to rent for cheaper rates

Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro To Mike Kaeding's Career
8:48 - Expanding To Other Locations
10:41 - Finding The Best People And Ramping Up The Team
17:16 - Worker's Payment, Hours, And Benefits
19:00 - Overcoming The Obstacles In Finding The Right Financing
22:42 - Shift And Growing In The Future
24:48 - Managing Construction Projects
29:31 - How To Find Mike Kaeding

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Minnesota Real Estate

Read the full transcript here:

Mike Swenson
Welcome to The REL Freedom Podcast where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson, let's get some REL freedom together.

Mike Swenson
Welcome everybody to another episode of The REL Freedom Podcast where we talk about building wealth, gaining time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. And today, I had to search far and wide all across the united states all across the world to find my guest today who can share his story of growing his company. And actually, he's less than probably 15 minutes away from me, he's got a development project that's less than a mile away from me. So it's fun to be able to interview somebody that is so closely connected to where I'm at. But we've got Mike cating. Here, Mike is the CEO of Noor heart, a real estate builder and developer. And so your goal, which I really love is transforming the ways that apartments are built, and manage and incorporating new technologies, new approaches, really trying to be a disruptor in the space. And so this was a family business for you, we'll kind of talk about that story and how that came to be. But really, you're a disrupter looking to change the way that things are done. And so we'll deep dive into that. Welcome, Mike to the show. We're so excited to have you. Yeah, thanks for having me. Why don't you just go ahead and share a little bit about your background and kind of how you got to where we're at. And then we'll dig in deeper from there.

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, so my parents originally started the business, you know, it was really small and growing up, we were only building a few units per year. And I can remember a days where my family would take us on family outings to the local hardware store, about a half an hour away, stocked up on supplies, and my dad's little trailer and raisonne back and we rebuilding these buildings growing up. So that was my summers. And then during the winter, I would go off to school. And we'd still we were slowly building this company up. And then I went off to college. And when I went off to college, I wanted nothing to do anything more with the family business. And looking back, I think the reason that was is that I don't want people to think it was given to me. So I really wrestled with my own ego in that regard. But after graduating, my dad really wanted me to join and what I realised deep down as I wanted to make some kind of meaningful, positive impact on the world, like life has shortlist to something impactful. And I realised I could take this small business and grow it into something much larger that can have a meaningful impact. And what we're shooting to do today is solving America's housing affordability crisis. That's our dream.

Mike Swenson
It's interesting that you that you talked about, you know, taking over the family business, I was an entrepreneurship major in college. And the funny thing is, I had no desire of starting a business right out of college, because I was I wasn't a risk taker, but a lot of my classmates were kind of in your shoes, where it's like, you know, this is a family company. And either they think I'm gonna take it over, I really want to take it over, or my parents sent me here, because they want me to take it over. And I don't know if I want to take it over. And so that is kind of that that piece where some people are like, you're gonna do the family business, no matter what some people are, like, whatever they choose is great. But yeah, it is a tough a tough spot to be in, like you said, because you don't want people to feel like you didn't have to work for it. It was just handed to you. So

Mike Kaeding
yeah, so I jumped into my dad and I worked in the business for a couple of years together, we double the size of the company in that time period, which is exciting.

Mike Swenson
And then what type of out of curiosity, then like what what types of projects were you doing? And where was it all in Minnesota? Or were you guys out of state yet? Or where was that app?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, that time again, we were very, very small. It was all in Minnesota, it was all in the north Metro is in fact, it was all in one little city here in the state. And so we were we were building, it was growing up, it was maybe eight or 10 units at a time. By the time my dad and I were doing it together. It was 30 units at a time per year. And then within a couple of years of working together my dad, he unexpectedly passed away. And so one day he was here one day he wasn't. And that was a huge challenge. But looking back, there was almost a magic in it. Because it was through that experience. That we got to start experimenting and trying new things because I didn't really know the way things were supposed to be done right. At that point. I had nobody to tell me no. And so we started to experiment, starting trying new things. And this is where we started to have success changing the way construction is done because that's our dream to solve housing affordability by reducing construction costs, but there was a lot of painful moments, right because I didn't know what I was doing and I had some really tough acts Brandon says, in fact, the city at the time even shut us down because they didn't think I could do what I needed to do. So it was a challenging point in that at that point in my life, I liked

Mike Swenson
the opportunity. There were, like you said, you kind of didn't know what you didn't know. And so you're asking questions. I think sometimes, you know, when I was new into residential real estate, when I got into real estate, I didn't necessarily know how things were done. And so I kind of had this eyes wide open mentality. And sometimes people would look at you like, you think you can do that? Or we're like, what, what are you trying to do? It's like, well, I worked in a nonprofit for 10 years, I don't know what I can and can't do or what's possible or what's not, not possible. And so yeah, you kind of get this eyes wide open approach where you can you can kind of turn things on its side, look at it from a different perspective. Oh, absolutely.

Mike Kaeding
It's such a, you know, looking back at it, that sounds a little bit weird. But ignorance is almost an asset. You know, certainly ignorance creates problems, there's pain, you need to gain some experience. But I think there's a negative side of having too much experience and that you start to think that like, you know, how it works, this is how it should be done. And you just start getting stuck in your ways, and you can't dream or invent something new. So I see a lot of value in that point in my life,

Mike Swenson
as you're looking at things, you know, analysing costs, analysing way that things are being done, what's the size of the company, how many other people are with you, and kind of making those types of decisions and kind of deciding which which path you guys are gonna go on?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, so at that point, we were building about 30 units a year, once my dad passed away, we actually dropped down to eight units for one year. And there was, like, 20 or so employees at the time. And we're, we're starting experiment, new stuff. I remember one of the big things that happened around that time, as one of the plumbers, the plumbing contractor, we had came to us and said, dude, Mike, you know, that bid that we've been consistently at with all your projects, we're now going to triple our price. And I look at I'm like, Dude, I just can't afford it. I don't have the money. And we talked to other plumbing contractors, and everyone was just as expensive. And sometimes necessity is the mother of invention. We're like, well, can't we do plumbing? Okay, it can't be that hard, can it? So I bought a bunch of books. And we didn't hire one guy with a licence, we could do the plumbing ourselves, and a bunch of inexperienced people and it was a disaster. But what was great is that we were able to do it and do it right. It was really painful ended up costing quite a bit initially. Then we started to build the right team in place. Right? And now we started now we have this capability, we're actually doing plumbing, we're doing a pretty well, Wow, can we now expand it into other areas and start bringing that under our roof as well. And so that was some of the starts of the change,

Mike Swenson
to being able to bring stuff in house kind of have that vertical integration. So instead of the plumber making, you know, X percent of profit. Now that's coming back to you, because you're able to do that in house at cost cost to you.

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, we see not only a savings in cost, but the other benefit there is quality goes up, right, because I used to have drywallers as a separate company, and I would walk in on the drywallers. And in some walls, they have to have two layers of drywall and the first layer has to be the same as the second. The first layer looks like kindergarteners are put it up. And they did that because they knew they can hide it. Right? When you start to have your own team and you don't incentivize them to take shortcuts, they do better work. And so yeah, we started having some success with that.

Mike Swenson
So you're you're working on your own stuff, you're starting to bring stuff in house, what happened in terms of expanding to other locations that are expanding outside of your mall area that you were beginning with. So for the first

Mike Kaeding
few years, we're growing at a pretty regular rate, maybe 10 or 15% per year. But then one of the biggest, most key transitions that happened for us is people much smarter than me kind of told me an important lesson just to hire the best people. I wasn't doing that at the time I was hiring, you know, average people. We really made a big transition. We let a lot of people go we went back and re hire a bunch of people. We ended up hiring our 14 recruiters and really diving in and when I say the best, I truly mean the best right now we fly people in from other states or states to come work for us during the week from home. One of our employees, you know, Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in 2007. Steve Jobs walks off stage and this employee follows him on stage. It's that kind of calibre of rural class people, because when you start to have that level of people, they change the game. They start unlocking doors for you that you didn't know could be unlocked. And so at this point, a lot of people come to me and say Mike, dude, that sounds really expensive, on a cost per person basis it is you gotta pay top of market because these kind of people, but what most people fail to understand is that the the best people outperform the average by two to five to 10 times as much. And I've seen it over and over again. So when you look at a cost per unit produced, the best people are actually less expensive. So when people ask me and say they can't afford to hire the best people I tell them they can't afford not to. And that was the turning point when we went from being just a small company, to doubling in size, almost every year.

Mike Swenson
So how do you go find these people? Then if like you said, you're you're flying in people, from out of state? Are these trades people? Are these leadership management type people, project managers, or kind of everybody?

Mike Kaeding
It's everybody. And it was sort of the debates we had early on as well. Do we only need the best people at the top? No. In fact, you need the best people, like more importantly, at the bottom to the whole organisation. So how do we solve? How do we find that the reality is in the world of construction is it's hard to find good people. And we're faced with exactly the same issue. So I alluded this earlier, but we ended up hiring on 14 recruiters. Let that sink in, we were bought at that point, we're probably about 100 or so employees, when we hired 14 recruiters. So 15% of our staff are now recruiting. And what that did for us is allowed our team to start finding and identifying the best people in other companies, because guess what, the best people are not looking for jobs, you think they're gonna post a job and indeed, and get great people, you'll get okay, but you're not gonna get the best in the world. So recruiters identify the people and other organisations, they start building relationships with them. And then once jobs open up, they pull them in to be interviewed for those kinds of positions. And that that was a key part that changed the game for us. There's a lot you have to do in the culture side as well. But yeah, a lot of moving parts to get right.

Mike Swenson
I'm curious how the the cost of that works like in terms of being able to defend that because like you said, recruiters, it takes time to build relationships. And so did you lay out, Hey, this is going to take us a year to kind of really start to see traction, or how much money or kind of what what were you looking at to identify? Is this really going to work for us? Bring these people in, hire the recruiters take the time, develop the relationships, and then finally, as spots open, they're like, yes, I want to come work with you. That's a that's a long runway of investment there to be able to see the fruit from that.

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, and this is, goes back to that ignorance is is sometimes the blessing but there's skins it, you know, I thought originally like, oh, we hired 14 recruiters, and we'll get this figured out in no time. Oh, boy, I was wrong.

Mike Swenson
Because they're not gonna be like, oh, yeah, thanks. After our first conversation, I'm ready to pack up and move right.

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, I had dreams. But I was wrong. It I mean, it took probably a month or two just to ramp up the team to get them running effectively. And then it probably took another three or four months before we started seeing real significant output in hiring great people. And we get a trickle early on. You know, I think that calculus for me, wasn't even an ROI question. I kind of go back a step and say, What am I trying to do? I'm trying to make an impact in the world. Trying to do that through solving housing affordability, okay, what components? What things do I need in place to make that reality piece of that as I need the right people, and I needed to get the recruiters to the right people. From a financial standpoint, we will have a pretty good spot because our costs are typically about 20 to 30%, less than other developers today, we think we can actually hit a 50% reduction in cost. But that gives me some wiggle room to try things and make mistakes. I don't need to make sure every decision doesn't have to be a guaranteed positive ROI. But I think it's the right thing in the long term. We'll do it

Mike Swenson
out of curiosity, sorry to kind of bumped back half a step here going back to bringing on the staff. What's the pitch to them? I'm curious, here's this guy in another state that wants to hire me, is it you know, we're going to change the world through how construction is done. And we want you to be a part of it as a kind of this big life piece. And you know, world peace and solving world hunger mentality that is attracting people to you like we're gonna be the best, we want to hire the best. And that was kind of the tickler in their head that's like, oh, yeah, I want to be a part of that. Versus, hey, we'll pay you more come here. Like, how do you recruit? How do you kind of pull people in like a magnet to what you're trying to build?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah. So I think that that vision is really important. And so for us, you know, we're 20 to 30% Less hoping to hit a 50% reduction in cost. And we say imagine what that means. I mean, someday your rent, could be half your mortgage payment could be half. And when you think about life, you know, my dad died young really live about 5000 weeks here on Earth. And I asked myself, How do I want to spend the minutes I have here on Earth? For me at least, I want to spend that time, at least in large part making a positive impact on the world, we want to make a dent in the universe. And we share that with people like what do you want your life to be? What impact do you want to make? And a lot of people are like, not for me, which is totally okay. Right. That's

Mike Swenson
what we're trying to finding the right people that fit with your vision.

Mike Kaeding
But yeah, the people that resonate with that, that they Another aspect is that we want to be best in the world at what we do, right. And so we want a team of people that have that energy and drive to become best in the world at what they do. And again, if that's them, they get excited by that. Another key aspect is the culture. The world of construction is typically a pretty rough and tumble and not a always the most positive environment. But you go on our site, I hear this over and over again, from new people to join us. They can't believe the experience they have people are welcoming. They're engaging, they're positive. In fact, I was at one engagement team meeting last week, and one of the staff members said, dude, Mike, we got so many problems as we do new stuff. And it's that that's hard, right? It's hard inventing the future. And that that's tough. But I never want to leave, because my coworkers have become my closest friends. Right? You create that kind of environment as well. And you communicate that, then they're also very attracted to that space, and then pay and benefits. We are benefits, we actually look at what Google does. And we give that to our team, almost exactly the same benefits, including unlimited time off for hourly construction workers, hyper hetero Veyron that it's crazy. But then the pay we always say needs to be top of market. But that's never like a reason necessarily people join, it's just a requirement to get the conversation going.

Mike Swenson
So you're paying them hourly. And if somebody's like, hey, I want to work 30 hours a week, this week, you're like, okay, great, how far in advance to they have to kind of schedule that? But for somebody that's like, like, I love hearing these new ideas, and it's always like, okay, I get that. But there's obviously people that are out there that are like, no way that doesn't work. So how do you how does that conversation work with those employees to where they start to see like, oh, yeah, this is, this is great, I can't do that,

Mike Kaeding
it really comes back to who you hire. Right? It doesn't work, I would say it would not work at all in a traditional construction environment, because you just get a bunch of people abusing it. Because you want to take time off, there's a conversation with the manager, but you get paid your 40 hours of work or whatever you get paid for. Even if you're out there. And you get overtime and stuff. It's crazy. It's a huge benefit. But the right people don't abuse it, right. They know it, we're here, we're trying to solve America's housing affordability crisis, we're trying to invent the future, with construction. And that's where your mind is. And that's where your heart is that a lot of these guys will put in the extra effort to achieve what they're trying to achieve. And that's their vision, their dream. So when they need to take time off, it's like no problem, do it, do what's right for you, so that you're living a well balanced life, while changing the world. If someone is abusing it, if they're taken off every Monday after a football game, right, then it's not so much about the time off policy, it's more about like, Are you the right fit for our culture? Right? Are you really here to become best in the world what you're doing? That's what I'm more concerned about? The time off is the secondary result of a deeper emotional state that people are in

Mike Swenson
growing a company like this being able to finance all these large projects, what challenges are what obstacles have you had to overcome? Just being able to find the right financing? You know, how does that work on that side? For somebody that does want to do development, you know, in the future?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, so depends on what stage of growth we're talking about. But for us to stay the last few years, because our costs are so low. If we have $100 million building, a bank will typically fund like 75% of construction. So 75 million, if our costs are 70 million. Well, guess what? We're just filling that we do we actually generate cash, which is crazy. Now there's there's details that are that we could talk about if you wanted to. But the reality what we're actually running into more recently is interest rates have come down or come up, which means that loan proceeds have gone down. So let's say $100 million building may have dropped in value to say 95 million. But the bank's willingness to lend drops to 55 million. So our costs are still 70. Now we're having to bridge that gap. And so I think the key is just to pivot, like, realise what's going on in the market and make changes. So for us, the big change that we made, is we're launching a new investment platform in a month, and that, that gives people access to invest in what we're doing and earn a great rate of return. And, and allows us to bridge that financial gap.

Mike Swenson
It's amazing, talking about being able to get a $75 million loan, only have to spend 70 of it and generate so how kind of how long of your lifecycle, were you going through that where you were coming under the costs of what the financing was? Up until just like the last year, just

Mike Kaeding
always up until just recently with interest rates are changing? Yeah.

Mike Swenson
Yeah. That's amazing. So how does that work? Where you're saying, okay, typically, the building costs 100. So the bank's looking at just general numbers from other construction companies to determine that 100. And then like, you're in the back of your head going? Well, I know we can do it for 70. You're not telling them, Hey, we know we can do it for 70. And then they want you to only finance part of that, or kind of how does that conversation go with a bank or a lender?

Mike Kaeding
No, you need to be fully upfront with the bank never never mislead. I'm not

Mike Swenson
saying you're trying to hide anything. But I'm just curious, like how that works,

Mike Kaeding
banks will only lend up to 75 or 80% of value, or a cost, whichever is lower. And we just went in literally met with all the major banks here in Minnesota, and said, Hey, our costs are lower, how can we work out something that you're not going to care as much about cost? Well, they still do care about cost. But what we're able to do, what we worked out with him is a few things. One is we can add a developer fee to boost that cost. And we're all transparent, that's just a fee that we get that is only about five or 10% of that gap. The bigger part of the gap that we we solve it is we have a general contractor. Then underneath that we have all of our subcontractors, those are separate companies. And so the subcontractor is allowed to charge a fair market price for the work that they do. But they then earn a profit on that. And so, so ultimately, what happens is we do deposit cash into a project at the beginning to pay the initial expense. But as the building goes on, we actually earn profits on all the subcontractor work. And so that cash quickly gets replenished.

Mike Swenson
We've kind of covered a lot of these these big pieces here, too, right now, it kind of sounds like you're you're pivoting a bit on the financing side trying to figure out, okay, how do we solve this at higher interest rates? What are some of the other things that you're looking at here? As you're looking to shift and grow, you know, and kind of the next five to 10 years? What are you having to kind of adjust in your business plan?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, our dream in 10 years is to reach 192,000 units under management with a 60,000 unit per year construction pace. At that point, I think we could start having a meaningful impact on the market. So then it's all about how do we build that kind of level. And so part of it is just geographic expansion. So right now, we're primarily in Minnesota, although we have manufacturing capabilities in Wisconsin, as well. But we're expanding our properties into Texas or manufacturing into Mexico. And we have about 15% of our staff are actually International. The other big part of it beyond just geographic expansion is improving the way construction is done. Russia working on building the system that builds our housing, in that system, is where all the magic is, you know, Elon Musk talks about how it's hard to produce a car. But it's 10 to 100 to 1000 times harder to produce the system that builds cars. And so there are parts of that system is offsite construction and factories that we have. Other parts of it is the systems that we use to actually build within the building. Our, I would say pretty cutting edge. And then another one is the sourcing, because we're sourcing all these materials across the world to fly in our building and getting that supply chain just right is another big part of it. Yeah, so that's a flavour of what we're working on.

Mike Swenson
How does that work? Because I know I hear a lot of, you know, talk to other construction companies across the United States. And a lot of them are like, Hey, we like to do construction in the South because it's warm all the time. And we can work year round, you guys, you know, still being here in Minnesota. For those that don't know, it's cold here, and there's a lot of snow that happens in the winter. So how do you plan for that? In terms of of the construction on your projects?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah, it's tough. So we have a very continuous flow of work right now every five hours a brand new apartment units completed, and that's continuous Right. And so that means we have to pour footings at all times, they're gonna pour concrete walls at all times there. And it's just being thoughtful. There's no one silver bullet. So part of the solution is, you can let the concrete team get out ahead a little bit so that I'm particularly cold days, they can take those days off, and you don't impact the entire flow. There is things like tenting, and covering concrete that can be used in the precast facility that's all outdoors at the moment. So they're pouring concrete literally around, and they have these collapsible tents that they use to keep the space warm throughout the winter. And so yeah, it's just looking at each individual problem, say, What's the best way to solve this particular problem?

Mike Swenson
The other piece that I know you mentioned was so obviously, the lower construction costs allows you then to rent for for cheaper rates. So you're owning all these properties and then continuing to manage them after you build them. Correct.

Mike Kaeding
That's right, we're dirt all the way to key the whole entire process.

Mike Swenson
Yeah. So talk about kind of the the property management piece and the upkeep and then to, you know, from from tenants that, you know, are living in these buildings, the response you've heard, you know, what are you kind of charging for rents compared to market and that sort of thing?

Mike Kaeding
Yeah. So if you look at our rents, our rents our market rate, and people often ask me is I didn't like you just talked about creating affordable housing, and you're charging fair market rents. That's intentional. The reason that is is we're taking those profits and putting it into building the system that builds housing, we're hoping to expand up that 192,000 levels 60,000 units per year. But at that point, we can start having a meaningful impact on housing supply. And with enough supply naturally brings down prices, but not just for our residents, for everyone. That's our dream is to solve housing affordability nationwide, not just for our own staff. So that's why prices are not lower today. As far as the property management side, took me a while to get this right to it. It was really about hiring the right people. We ended up hiring the right people, and it has been amazing. The experience, the response times are great, the response I get from residents is awesome. The relationships that build a residence are great. And then also just from a amenities standpoint, like some of our newest properties, the one in Oakdale, for example, that has a restaurant coffee shop, co working space, a pool, it has a spa sauna, it has Penthouse Suites has a rooftop patio and grill the the views the downtown a great views of downtown, there's a brand new transit line that's topping right at the front door. And so we're thinking a lot about how do we create almost a resort style experience for our residents. So like, all the, as many of the pain points that we can take out of their life are just removed?

Mike Swenson
Yeah, that's amazing. I mean, I can, I can totally see I've talked in the past with even people just buying buildings, you know, for as investment properties, talking about the property management being important, because, you know, a lot of times you think about the people that manage properties, you know, they're there, they have their own third party company, you know, they've got other stuff to worry about. But when it's vertically aligned with the construction, taking care of the asset that your company helped to build. And then you've got this bigger vision aligned with it, of helping solving affordable housing and providing a great place for people, I can absolutely see how the property management just fits in line with that, from a vision standpoint of we care about this building, we care about this people because it's part of something bigger than just Joe Schmo over here hired me to, you know, to hack this building, well, they own it for the next couple years, and then somebody else will probably own it. And we'll move on to the next thing, you know,

Mike Kaeding
exactly, you're exactly right. And even with property management, when I started off, I thought, okay, property management, that's kind of a solved problem, just hire a few people and make it happen, right? Why that's the wrong approach to take. Because again, this is human beings you're dealing with unless you hire and support an amazing team, they'll they're not going to provide the right experience that resident. And so getting that experience, right is critical

Mike Swenson
for people that want to get a hold of you. How can they how can they learn more about your projects and these investment opportunities? Yeah,

Mike Kaeding
you can learn more by visiting Nora hart.com. That's n o r h ar t.com. We have the investment platform there. But the one interesting thing that we're launching very shortly now is a new podcast called Zero to unicorn. It's about the journey of small business growing to a billion dollar enterprise and really looking at what is that experience? Really like? What's the good the bad and ugly going from literally nothing to billion dollar Todd

Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, thank you Mike so much for coming on and sharing it's, it's cool to see somebody who's got values tied behind what they're doing, wanting to solve some of the world's larger issues, versus just hey, we're gonna make a business that's gonna make me some money and, and go from there. So I really appreciate you coming on and sharing your story. And I'm excited for people to be a part of it. I mean, it's a it's a company that people want to be a part of, like working there. And so thank you so much for for sharing the journey.

Mike Kaeding
Yeah. Thanks for having me. This is fun.