How to Recession-Proof Your Business
Q4 may be in the rearview mirror but another Q4 is always around the corner. How will you set your business up for a stress-free (or less stressful) year?
Do you know who your core customer is?
The first step in building a recession proof business is knowing who your core customer is, what they want, and what problems they face.
Identifying your core customer can be clear as mud, especially if you are too close to your product or service to gain an outside perspective. StoryBrand is the most powerful messaging framework to help bring clarity to who your core customers are, what they want and the problems they face.
If you’re struggling to bring clarity to your messaging or just need help identifying your core customer, we can help!
Once you know who your core customers are, how do you find where they are?
We like to say, “meet your customers where they are.” What we mean by this is, understand the goals and motivations of your core customer as it relates to your product, identify what additional value you have to offer and innovate a new product or service offering that sets you apart from your competition.
If you’re in a highly competitive or saturated market, you may feel like hunkering down, focusing on your core product and waiting for *it* to blow over is your best move, like a mouse hiding from a house cat; no sudden moves.
Businesses who don’t fear innovation dominate their industries and find a new market segment of their core consumers.
On episode 21 of Growing a Fruitful Brand, Ben sits down with StoryBrand guide and host of the Good Business with Clay Vaughan podcast, Clay Vaughan for a convo about how to build a more resilient business and a healthy sales pipeline.
Listen where you get your podcasts for more on how to recession proof your business in what feels like a never-ending cycle of feast or famine for small to medium sized businesses.
Check out episode 21 where you listen to podcasts or watch it on YouTube!
Ep. 21:
How to Recession-Proof Your Business
Automated Transcript
Ben Lueders:
Welcome to Growing a Fruitful Brand where we discuss how to create and grow a brand that makes the world a better place for you, your customers, and your employees. I'm Ben Lueders, founder and art director of Fruitful Design & Strategy.
Clay Vaughan is the owner and founder of Good Agency, formerly Reverent Media, based in the Houston, Texas area. They're a StoryBrand certified agency, much like us. I met Clay a few months ago at a StoryBrand meetup in Nashville and enjoyed our conversation a lot. During that conversation, I discovered that Clay has a podcast of his own called Good Business with Clay Vaughan. We've included a link in our show notes. In October, he released an episode entitled How to Build a Recession Proof Marketing Plan, and it really resonated with me.
Today, Clay tells us more about developing a blue ocean strategy, focusing your core offerings to eliminate competition and strengthening your processes to be able to weather any storm the economy brings your way. Clay, thanks so much for being on Growing a Fruitful Brand.
Clay Vaughan:
Absolutely. Happy to be here. Thanks for the invitation.
Ben Lueders:
So I met Clay a few months ago at a StoryBrand conference, and we immediately hit it off. Very friendly guy, super awesome. And Raj and I had just launched this podcast and I looked you up and you had your own podcast, is that right?
Clay Vaughan:
Yeah, sure do. Yeah, Good Business. Really, I just take all the knowledge that I gain and use that as an opportunity to really have great conversations just like this one with a lot of smarter people than me. And it's a lot of fun to be able to host that podcast and get to talk about things that you wouldn't normally be able to talk about in business, things like hiring and firing and how to address the economy as it pivots because we're not all billion dollar ad budgets that can "make it through the storms." And so it's good to have somebody in the boat with you.
Ben Lueders:
Well, you had just done an episode about recession proofing your business, and that was a big hot button issue at the time, and it still is. And you talked about a bunch of stuff on that podcast that I just thought was really great, and I thought it'd be great for our listeners as well.
So first of all, you can of course go and follow Clay's podcast, Good Business, but at the same time, I'd love for you to get into a little bit today about blue ocean strategy, which you talked a lot about in that episode-
Clay Vaughan:
Sure.
Ben Lueders:
... that kind of framework. But before that, any comments on just the economic landscape that we find ourselves in as business owners right now?
Clay Vaughan:
Yeah. So most of the small businesses that I was working with in Q4 last year, they were feeling the pinch quite dramatically. It was when everyone was like, "Okay, our budgets are starting to deplete. We're not hitting our goals the way we were expecting to." That's when all of the big Fortune 500 companies were issuing their adjustments to their revenue for the year and profitability. It was just kind of a weird time in Q4 of last year.
And then naturally, anytime January comes around, there's this, I say, artificial excitement about the new year. And when I use the word artificial, I mean that people are just kind of forcing themselves into an excitement for the year. Even though things are burning down around you, you're like, "Yeah, everything's fine. You want a cup of coffee?"
And so I think that's the general sentiment, but I have seen a shift. I keep a really close eye on real estate, not because I'm a real estate expert, because I know several real estate experts who are really the ones keeping me in the loop, and they're getting some interesting signs. So people who are in a healthy place financially from a cash perspective, they're taking advantage of the softer seller market in real estate. And so that indicates the shift that we were expecting from an overall consumption economy.
We're still seeing side effects from global pandemic and war and all that kind of stuff, but just from an overarching standpoint, the economy's still about where it was in Q4, if not just a little bit worse, but you have that artificial surge at the beginning of the year when all these big companies are flush with their new budgets and they're wanting to force things to be a little bit different. But the consumer's really feeling it right now, and that obviously drives a lot of our economy.
Ben Lueders:
How has that affected your business? Because everything you're saying sounds like it lines up with our experience. Our Q4 was much like that, a lot of people battening down the hatches, cutting back on their budgets. Our contact form started slowing down for the first time in a long time. And then January comes around and we are just off to the races and we're like, "Are we still in a recession?" And I think calling it artificial, there's something to that. But how has it been for you guys?
Clay Vaughan:
Yeah, great question. So Q4 was pretty rough for us in regard to closing deals. We had never had more deals in the pipeline, though. So one of the reasons January has been so good for us at Good Agency is strictly because we had everybody still in the pipeline from Q4 that had not closed.
I think the final number was we were 40% below projections in Q4. It was a rough quarter for us, but we were around 30% above projections for new leads. So it was just a really strange quarter where people were like, "I really want to move on this, but I want to hold onto my cash." And I'm guilty as charged for that as well.
So Q1 is looking a little bit differently just because there's just that mindset shift. It's not like anything has changed. Nothing really has changed. Interest rates are getting worse, they're worse, so available cash is harder to find now.
I will say we haven't been working with any startups in our business and the startups we were working with, they got put on ice last year. They were like, "You know what? We're going to revisit this when the economy looks a little bit better."
So it's really just a matter of, I mean just from a business owner's perspective, making sure that you have a good pipeline so that when consumer confidence, whether you're dealing B2B or B2C, I like to say H2H, human to human, because that's really what it is, but when they are ready to move, you want to be there, available to help them.
Ben Lueders:
That's really good, Clay. So one of the values that we have here at Fruitful is this idea of abundance that we believe in an abundant world, there's always more out there. However, when you're facing economic uncertainty, when people are starting to tighten up their pocketbooks, it's harder to believe in abundance sometimes. It might look a little bit different.
But when I was listening to your episode on recession proofing your business, you were talking about this blue ocean strategy, and I felt like that seemed like a really abundant mindset, and I would love for you to unpack what that means and where that comes from for our listeners.
Clay Vaughan:
Yeah. Well, I'll just start out that this is not a novel idea. I got the concept of blue ocean strategy from the book Blue Ocean Strategy by some really smart people, and I highly recommend you go check that book out. It is a big book, so it is not for the faint of heart, but it's worth the read. And so what I did is I just boiled down the ideas of that in that presentation I gave back in October of last year.
And it all boils down to this that the entrepreneur mindset, and I've worked with, I don't know if I can call them old school entrepreneurs versus new school entrepreneurs. In reality, I think old school entrepreneurs have been in it, and they're a little bit more reserved than most, and new school, they're not reserved enough, meaning they tend to make big decisions a little bit too lightly. And once again, guilty as charged on that front.
But I think overall, when things are not going well, the natural inclination is just to kind of go into that ... I'll use the StoryBrand mindset. You and I are on StoryBrand, a theme these days ... it's that survival mode. When you get into survival mode, you take the path of least resistance. And so when you're taking the path of least resistance with your business, that typically means don't touch anything, don't change anything, don't touch anything, we're just going to ride this out, and hopefully we'll still be able to stand when it's all said and done.
But the blue ocean strategy, that mindset is about not fearing innovation. Innovation on its own is really one of the things that tends to be lost when you're in survival mode. It's hard to find in a small business, an R&D budget.
And it's really just making sure, and the concept that I'm pushing for anybody that I speak with, as long as they're in a healthy position financially, if you have a hard time making payroll, then this is not the topic that you should be considering right now. But if you are simply just trying to achieve growth goals, instead of fearing the big ideas, it's important to embrace those big ideas, but with some context to that.
When the market shifts like it has over the past year, but even over the past few years, I mean, our consumer has changed, consumer mindset has changed. And so things that you were doing two, three years ago for the consumer of two to three years ago may have worked then, but they may not work now and it's important to have this perspective of pivoting to what your consumer cares about and how your consumer engages with whatever it is that you're selling. If you don't do that, then you're going to become irrelevant, and obviously no one wants to do that in business.
And the folks that will continue to buy your products at the old consumer mindset, you are leaving money on the table because first off, if you haven't raised your prices in the past year, just stop listening to this podcast and go raise your prices, then come back and talk to us.
Ben Lueders:
Oh yeah, absolutely.
Clay Vaughan:
It's because the consumer is expecting that, the consumer's expecting a price increase. They don't want it, but they're expecting it. So, if you were to rewind three years and you raised your prices, it would almost have felt like hell froze over with your customers, but now it's, you raise your prices 7, 10%.
I have in any of my long-term contracts now that are auto-renewing, there's an automatic 7% escalator every single year now. And that way I don't even have to have the discussion. It's, "Just so you know, prices will go up every 12 months by 7%." Now I have the right to not do that, but just by putting things in there that will help protect you and it'll engage with your consumers' expectations when it comes to what they care about, especially in a B2C space. You've got to stay relevant to what they care about.
I was on a call right before this, and we were talking about this VA company called BELAY Solutions. If you're looking for a VA, highly recommend it. I've had a great experience and I know a lot of other people have as well. But that company, it's nuts. They started around five or six years ago, something along those lines, but from 2019 to 2020, they doubled from 18 million to almost $40 million in revenue, and they sold last year for $120 million.
Ben Lueders:
Wow.
Clay Vaughan:
So as you can imagine, they pivoted to how their consumer needed their services. Needing a virtual assistant was never more important because people were like, "Okay, well, I can't afford to have these people on payroll anymore, so let me just work with a contracting group for half the price and still get the same great quality."
So there's a lot of ways that there are businesses currently pivoting. And then, if you're struggling right now, then you probably haven't pivoted to match your new consumer. So that's pretty much what the whole concept is.
Ben Lueders:
For myself personally, I know I've had times where I just feel like I can't raise my rates or I feel weird or guilty about raising my rates on people. What do you have to say to those out there who just feel like, "Oh man, everything's getting so expensive. I don't want to raise my rates too." What's your advice there?
Clay Vaughan:
So I'm the same way. I'm a two on the Enneagrams, I'm a helper mindset. The last thing I want to do is come to somebody and say, "Yeah, your prices are going up." That doesn't seem very helpful, right? But the thing is, whenever historically I've raised my rates, I increase not just the revenue that's coming in, but I increase the volume of clients coming in for whatever reason. It could just be tied to my own confidence level, I don't know.
But whatever it is, as long as you're not ... I mean, if you are reasonably priced. If you're already way outside the average, like if you're charging, I don't know, $700 an hour for your marketing services, well, you're probably not going to want to raise your rates. If anything, you should probably have a coaching call with Ben or myself after this. But, if you're within the context of reasonable rates, then a 7% increase or even a 10 to 15% increase is not the end of the world for your client. It just requires some innovation into how you repackage your services.
And typically the best thing to do is you not necessarily increase the number or even maintain the number of services that you're offering for the price, it's just you package it with less for the same price. That's essentially what ... I mean, if any of you guys are chips and guac fans like myself, for whatever reason, the bag of chips has become emptier and emptier every single year, and I know it's not me.
So the reason is the bag has stayed the same, they just pump it with more air and they increase the price as well. So I mean, that's essentially what people ... They're still buying it, but it doesn't feel as bad as it would if they kept the package as full as they did maybe four or five years ago.
So when it comes to just the concept of raising rates, it's easier to raise rates on new clients than it is on old ones. So just go easy with the old clients, give them plenty of fair warning, I mean, we are actually in the process. My team is recording videos, giving monthly marketing updates for all of our clients just today and yesterday, and they're sending updates warning them of a Q2 price increase. And it's sad, but I mean, it is what it is. If you want to maintain the service that you're getting, you're going to have to pay for it.
Ben Lueders:
Especially when we're in an economy where inflation's out of control and all this stuff, it's like, you have to do it, it is a survival technique. And people get it, you're totally right that people do kind of expect it. How good is it to raise rates at a time when it's just expected already? And so it shouldn't be a huge surprise, everything has had to raise a little bit.
And so when it comes to recession proofing your business, what are a few just simple things that people can do, that business owners can do to recession proof themselves?
Clay Vaughan:
So I think really what it boils down to, and we could be talking here for a really long time about how to recession proof your business, but I think in just the context of this conversation about trying to find these blue oceans, what is a blue ocean? What is this concept?
Well, the idea the original author of the book came up with was that if you realize that you're in a saturated market or a highly competitive market, view it often like you would view shark infested waters. It's a little bit graphic of a concept, but it's hard to compete when there's very few fish available because all of your competitors are gobbling them all up.
So the concept is, all right, well, let's think about how to go fish somewhere else, how to get to a place where you are still being relevant to your consumer and you're pivoting with your consumer, but where ideally your competitors have not yet fully gone. And so there are so many different examples of successful businesses who have pivoted with their consumer.
Some of the best examples I would say would be Netflix. If you're around my age or older, then we all remember Blockbuster and movie rentals and all that kind of stuff. And so that was the big deal, we'd go to Blockbuster on Friday after school and we'd go rent a movie or two movies or four movies. And that was so much fun, but lo and behold, Netflix started mail DVDs. And then beyond that, they invented a lot of technology tied to CDN so that you could deliver digitally this content.
I mean, Netflix was on the verge of streaming content right around the same time YouTube was on that verge as well. And so they were thinking, "Okay, well, our customer's pivoting. There's new opportunities for new content that can be consumed. So let's meet them where they're at with the evolution of technology."
Ben Lueders:
Well, I love how it really, the whole concept rejects this kind of limited mindset thinking of we just do things this way, and it really embraces the fact that, no, let's think outside the box. Let's see where things are going. Let's try to get ahead of that, and let's not be afraid to completely reinvent who we are if that's going to help us survive. And it's got to be scary. I'm sure it's scary. It always is scary in one sense, but it's also super exciting because it's like, "Hey, how can we create our own market where there's not sharks everywhere?"
And that was one of the things as I was looking into blue ocean I thought was so cool is it has this really ... It kind of reminded me of Hero on a Mission, Donald Miller talking about creating your own communities. This kind of, don't just take the communities that you have fallen into, but maybe make your own communities of people passionate about stuff that you're passionate about.
And I really love that idea and it's very similar where it's like, hey, if you've exhausted this, you've tried this, there's lots of people trying this, how about create your own community of a new audience, a new clientele, or pivot what you do so that there's no competition? That's a crazy idea, but it just might work.
Clay Vaughan:
And I love, there's this chart that is in the book and it's so simple, it's so elementary, and you're like, "Well, of course that sounds amazing." If you want to truly find an innovative idea, you find a way to decrease your cost and increase buyer value. If you can decrease your cost and increase buyer value, well, that is blue ocean. That's the whole concept.
Netflix did it, they decreased the cost. I mean, you're not having to get in your car and drive to Blockbuster, you're not having to rent each individual movie anymore. They decreased their cost because Netflix is no longer holding onto hundreds of thousands of scratchable DVDs and VHS tapes. No, it's all digital content that can be resold infinitely. And-
Ben Lueders:
Clay, our kids will never understand what we went through.
Clay Vaughan:
They won't.
Ben Lueders:
They'll just never understand.
Clay Vaughan:
They won't.
Ben Lueders:
I'm sorry.
Clay Vaughan:
Oh man, we had a Blu-ray player in our last car, and they understand it briefly when they plug in Finding Dory, and it's like, "It's not working. It's not loading." "It's because you took a knife to the back of the Blu-ray disc, kids. That's why."
Ben Lueders:
"Stop playing with those knives back there, kids." I just picture them whittling away at the back of the DVD or whatever. Oh, man. That's so funny.
Clay Vaughan:
Full disclosure, I did not hand my kids a knife in the car, just to be clear. Not good.
Ben Lueders:
Oh, man.
Clay Vaughan:
It's going to take a while to dig out of that one.
Ben Lueders:
I love that disclosure. [inaudible 00:22:43]. Oh, man.
Clay Vaughan:
But in reality, you're right, it's all about creating something that is so relevant and increasing buyer value in a way that the buyer didn't even know possible.
Ben Lueders:
If you had any advice for a business owner who really wants to do this, they're tired of swimming in a sea of sharks and they want to be in a blue ocean where there's a lot less competition, what would be your first piece of advice to them?
Clay Vaughan:
So first piece of advice would definitely be to figure out who your core customer is. If you've been in business for a while, you may have an idea of who your core customer is. But just this past week, and I'm sure Ben, you've experienced this as well, I sat down with someone who's been in business for 40 years and had never really asked himself, who's my core customer? It was just, "Yeah, I sell to these people. Whoever buys from me, they're my customer."
Ben Lueders:
"Whoever's got money, that's my core customer." I've been there before. That's how Fruitful started.
Clay Vaughan:
Hey, that's how most businesses start, and that's okay. It's really just if you want to know how to innovate for your core customer, you have to know who your core customer is, and that's where StoryBrand comes in.
And if you guys are not familiar with the StoryBrand framework, it is vital. Successfully working with a guide or a certified agency to walk through this process of understanding who your customer is, what they want, the problems they're facing, and so on, all of that needs to be identified. And when you do that, you're going to find yourself in a situation where you know who your current customer is and you know the problem that they're facing.
And you'd be surprised how difficult it is to do on your own. I love the analogy that Donald Miller uses. He says it's like trying to read the label on a box from inside that box, and it's very difficult to read it backwards and peering through. So that's why it's so important to bring an outside perspective in, especially when you've been so close to your customer for so long.
And I'll tell you this, anytime we go through the process of messaging and doing that for ourselves, we always bring in somebody who's got an outside perspective. And it's just because it's so difficult to create the message for yourself. But once you've done that, once you've gone through that process, that's when you have a better grasp of really how to begin this process of identifying what your strategy should be.
Ben Lueders:
I think about even, you and I starting our own podcasts too. That's another way to reach new oceans of people and break into new sectors and really embrace that abundant mindset as well.
Clay Vaughan:
Oh yeah, absolutely, couldn't agree more with that. I just want to encourage any business owner or leader that's listening in, you don't necessarily have to think that your blue ocean is going to be tied to technology. Technology I'm sure will play a role in that, but don't think that it all has to be done in-house, find partners.
If you think of an idea as it relates to maybe developing a technology that could serve your customers in a new way, well, find another group to partner up with on that. It can be quite expensive to get into a new industry. Unless you are already a full stack development team, you probably don't have the capacity to do that in house, but it doesn't mean you shouldn't, it just means that you need to get creative about partnerships.
And I've seen that play out in my business, partnering in the ad technology space and making sure that when we're trying to find areas in our business to expand, we're not trying to be the best at everything because we can't be. We need to find people who are the best at the areas that they are the best in and say, "Hey, look, I think we can partner up on this project."
And get creative with equity sharing or profit sharing or what have you, because if you fully believe in the idea, then it doesn't matter, because a blue ocean is very lucrative. I mean, it's what takes businesses out of small business into big business. So from a technology standpoint, don't get overwhelmed by that, but also don't think that it has to be this extravagant idea either. It just simply needs to be different than what your competitors are offering and still relevant to your consumer.
Ben Lueders:
That actually reminds me of something that you said in your podcast episode. I can't even remember exactly how you got into it, but you were talking about how important it is for business owners to document what they do and document their processes and how that can help them become more valuable whether they want to sell or not. And I think you've mentioned that you've sold companies before and that actually having some kind of documentation of your processes can really help make it more valuable. Anything to speak along those terms?
Clay Vaughan:
Yeah, absolutely. Let's assume that you've locked in your core audience, that you've explored the concept of developing some sort of strategy to decrease your cost, increase your buyer value. Once you've done that, you want to lock in your proven sales process and then do it.
And when I say sales process, obviously you need to lock in your sales process, but you want to lock in all the associated processes as well because when you go to sell your company ... I'm on a Facebook group with probably 150,000 other business owners, and it's essentially a place, if you don't want to go through a broker, to sell your business. You go here and you say, "Hey, I'm selling my business. Who wants to buy it from me?"
And so I see so many, and I receive so many requests for me to evaluate their pitch deck, and I'm like, "Hey, look, do you have processes?" "No. No, why do I need those?" I don't look at it because there's no value in it, because the moment that the owner steps away, all of that knowledge goes with them.
And so the value in a business, obviously, if we're talking about a service-based business or a smaller E-commerce or consumer focused business where your assets might be a little bit more on the limited side, and the potential is what you're buying more so than what you actually have.
So, if you're buying into a business or wanting to sell a business and you're wanting it to be at least seven figures, then you've got to have your processes written down. When you have your processes written down, you can ask any broker out there, it will increase your multiple in the multiple of what your valuation is, meaning your EBITDA multiplier. That will absolutely help you get more for your money.
So you may not be interested in selling your business now, but you absolutely plan on retiring at some point. And unless you're planning on building a publicly traded company, it's probably going to need to be sold at some point in time. And so if you want to sell, you absolutely need to put all those processes into place. Every step that you take to run your business, to service a client, to send out a product, it all has to be documented as if a third-grader was reading it.
And so when you do that, a couple benefits will happen. It's not just that you'll be preparing your business for sale, but you're going to start to see areas in your processes that need to be improved. And when your processes improve, well, that improves your bottom line, that improves your client retention, your team member retention, which obviously will improve your bottom line as well. So when you put your processes in writing, you also have the ability to onboard new people faster. And so it's a force multiplier on your business.
And I'll tell you this, I am not an administrator. I was talking to my assistant the other day and saying, "Hey, I'm grateful that you're doing this because I would never do this." And it's just because I'm that visionary. I'm the guy that at the beginning of this episode I said, "Hey, I like to be dramatic." I do make dramatic things happen, which is why I've been able to be so successful in some respects. But I've also put myself through a whole lot of things that have caused my gray hair to show up a little bit earlier.
And so when it comes to processes, I'm the first person to say, "Oh, man, you want me to write down and follow a process, really?" But then again, I'm also reinforcing its value right now because of how important it is for the short-term and long-term stability of your organization.
Ben Lueders:
Yeah, I love that. I love that you say it's also for the short term too, because whether ... So we're going through this right now where we're starting to document a lot more, creating standard operating procedures for everything we do. And part of it is, yeah, it'd be great to retire or if someone wants to buy us years from now that we have that all documented. And I do understand the value, but at the same time, I want all that documented now so that I don't have to be the one that does it all.
Clay Vaughan:
What a concept, right?
Ben Lueders:
Yeah. The more you have documented, the more you have to train, the more that you have out there, the more people can operate without you being the bottleneck to everything.
Clay Vaughan:
It's so true.
Ben Lueders:
And as someone who, I got into this all by my lonesome in the beginning, it was just me and everything was just living up in my head. And the more and more that I open up and I share and I give or let other people create even better processes and then document them, it makes us more valuable now and makes us be able to more confidently do the work so that when our sales guy goes out in there and sells something huge and says, "Hey, by the way, we're doing this now," we've got processes, we've got things in place. We're not freaking out because we know what to do.
Man. Well, I could talk all day with you, Clay.
Clay Vaughan:
Yeah, likewise.
Ben Lueders:
You're super awesome. How can people find you and follow you?
Clay Vaughan:
Oh, yeah. So definitely check out my podcast and subscribe and hopefully I can get Ben over-
Ben Lueders:
Yes.
Clay Vaughan:
... on an upcoming episode as well. But it's the Good Business podcast with Clay Vaughan. Check it out on Apple, Spotify, subscribe there and we'd love to have you over there.
Ben Lueders:
That's awesome. Well, Clay, thanks so much for being on Growing a Fruitful brand. I just want to say I love Good Business, Good Agency. I love the naming, the branding. It's simple, to the point, and I think it describes you perfectly.
Clay Vaughan:
Awesome. Well, thank you, Ben. I appreciate it. Thanks for having me on, and hope you have a great one.
Ben Lueders:
Thanks for joining us today on Growing a Fruitful Brand. If you found today's show helpful, don't forget to subscribe and consider sharing it with someone who might also enjoy it. If you'd like to work with Fruitful on a branding website or messaging project of your own, you can always reach out on our website fruitful.design. So until next time, don't forget to grow something good.
