160: Create Systems and Outsource: Grow Your Business and Get Your Life Back with Ric Thompson

Robert Plank: Our guest today is Ric Thompson. He's the CEO and Founder of Done For You Solutions. His website is DoneForYouSolutions.com and he's helping small businesses around the world put into action the principles he teaches every day as far as outsourcing, as far as getting more leverage in the day, as far as improving the operations of your small businesses. We're going to have a lot of fun, we're going to talk about a lot of ways that everyone listening can get more done in less time and have more fun and remove themselves from the business, so how are things today, Ric?

Ric Thompson: Things are fantastic, Robert. Great to be here.

Robert Plank: Awesome, I'm glad you're here. As far as what it is you do and as far as outsourcing, what would... Just to make sure we're all on the same page, what is outsourcing and as far as outsourcing goes what makes you stand out, what makes you special?

Ric Thompson: Great questions, thanks for that. There is some debate like a technical or legal definition of what outsourcing is. There's a blurring of the words of outsourcing and out-tasking. Without being too anal, shall we say, in general outsourcing is having other people get tasks done that are not inside your company. They're not you, they're not your employees, that you are going beyond those boundaries to get tasks done that have to get done for your business to grow and to succeed.

Robert Plank: Okay, great, so then how do you stand out from everyone else who teaches this kind of thing?

Ric Thompson: Great question and, of course, a lot of folks do. A lot of folks have heard about the Four-Hour Workweek and getting a virtual assistant. What I came to the realization of was before VAs and outsourcing really became the hot trend I had already been doing that. I had sworn off having employees years ago for a variety of reasons and realized rapidly that you can't rely upon one person to do all the things that need to get done in today's modern world of technology, of business building, of marketing. You've got to have a team. Whether you have... I used to have employees, I had a team, I got away from that, went into the outsourcing and found it was exactly the same thing, it didn't matter. One virtual assistant couldn't do everything.

When I started Done For You Solutions back a few years ago I said, okay, I'm going to build this company based upon what I know what works for me which is let's get a team going. Instead of the virtual assistant company I'm a virtual team company. I've got web developers, I've got graphic designers, I've got, yes, virtual assistants, too, and I've got coordinators to help the clients move all that forward. The idea is that with another company if you have a single hole that you need to fill and a VA can fill it, great. For us we fill a wide range of those day-to-day holes, if you will, for website work, for research work or customer support work. Again just a wide range of that, that worker B did A type of stuff, so hit the button and get an entire team instead of having to build yourself one by one.

Robert Plank: That's cool and that sounds like... If you hire all these little specialists as opposed to the jack of all trades person then that way you have the best people for each job. You have the best writers, or the best graphic designers, or the best virtual assistants and things like that and because... First of all because you have this team of specialists then you can get the best of everything. The other side of that is that you also don't have to risk your business on some stranger, some random workers in India or the Philippines or even in the U.S. You don't have to give out your password to someone just who found you off the street that you don't trust, is that right?

Ric Thompson: Yeah, a number of things in there are all right. Yeah, and all these folks work full-time for me, so it's not like some pool of random contractors like you said. Of course, obviously at some level there is still a trust level, Robert, and let's be honest, no matter if you've got an employee or if you're outsourcing you're going to have to trust those folks with the logins to your hosting account or what have you if you want to do website work.

The biggest thing there I think to comment on is that a lot of entrepreneurs would love to have that magic, silver bullet. Let me just get that one person and have them do everything. Once in a while you do find one person with such a huge range of skills that are good enough that you can do that with. The challenge is is that I've never heard of a situation where that ends well because if you get one person doing all those things in effect that one person's your business.

What happens when they get a better job offer or god forbid, something happens to them health-wise or family-wise. When that one person is gone so is your business. By having a team you not only, like you mentioned, leverage experts at their own fields of experience and skills you're also spreading that risk around. If one person becomes sick or one person has a family problem, whatever, your business does not stop. It hits a little bump in the road, but then you keep on going.

Robert Plank: That makes a lot of sense. It's like if one piece of the machine breaks down and you can get a new part to put it in the machine, but they're not the whole machine. It's not just something where if that one person goes away you don't have to replace your entire business. Kind of along those lines as far as having a team and building a team, have you found... Is there a secret to avoiding the traps, the traps of...

One trap might be if someone ends up having to become a micro manager and they've almost made a whole other job that entails babysitting all these other workers or the trap of maybe this whole thing becoming too expensive. Or maybe if someone's paying all these other workers all this extra money maybe there's no money left over for the business or for the owner of the business. Or maybe even if they're at the mercy of some of these workers. Have you found... Is there a secret or a few secrets to building a good team like this?

Ric Thompson: Yeah, of course, there are lots of secrets that come, “secrets” that come with hard won experience. Let me share with you the top ones that I've seen, that have really tanked people's businesses or have proven to be the most costly mistakes. Number one, when you're outsourcing wherever humanly possible start small. You and I I'm sure... You've heard the nightmare stories of I hired a web design company, I paid them $10,000 to do the site, it's eight months later and I still have nothing.

Robert Plank: Oh, yeah.

Ric Thompson: It's like why, why'd you do that? Why don't you hire them to build you a homepage or break that project down to milestones where listen, I'll tell you what, first step let's design a new homepage for me. If you guys can do that on a great timeline and I like it we'll continue with the rest of this $10,000 project, but I'm not going to cut you a blank check in the get go. Start small, get them to prove themselves. Whether you're outsourcing with me or you're outsourcing with anybody else that's the idea because if they can't do that small part of the project first the odds of them doing the whole thing the way you want them to do it are slim and none.

Other scenarios like that. I have people, gosh, I'm on the speaker. I've got 120 slides, I need to make this new presentation or rebranding because I just did my logo and I need them next week. Okay, great, how fast can they turn around the first 10 or 20 slides? Did they do a great job with that? If so then give them the rest of the project. Don't give them all 120 slides and find out that next week they haven't even done one for you. Just whatever project it is start small.

Now the second biggest mistake is one that a lot of people don't think of. There's a lot of confusion with this. I draw a very, very hard line between strategic level outsourcing and execution level outsourcing. Let me dive into this here, Robert. Strategic level outsourcing is where you're at the point in a project or your business where you're asking the question should, what should I do here, how should I do this. It's conceptual in nature. If you're like hey, how should I drive more traffic, how should I use SEO, or how should I use social media, or how should I do this? That's a question for a consultant or a coach. You don't ask a web developer about marketing. You don't ask a VA about a business building

device. That is way beyond their skill set.

When you're down to this is what I need, I need these webpages built, I need this opt-in page built, I need this research done, I need these clients handled with these tasks, now we're down to execution level and you're looking for execution level workers. Two very, very different types of areas of skill set, shall we say, areas of knowledge and, quite frankly, pricing. Just like you don't want to hire a VA to give you business building advice because, of course, it's going to end in disaster you also don't want to pay a consultant for worker B level tasks. They're going to charge you consultant rates for little day-to-day tasks.

In your own mind make it very clear what you're trying to outsource. Are you trying to outsource the planning, the strategic side of things, or are you trying to outsource specific tasks and be clear in your own mind what direction you're going in. Not only do you find a good solution, you're paying appropriate pricing. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does and I hadn't even thought about that until you explained it that way. It's so simple, but I think that a lot of people are missing out on that, that there's a clear difference between a coach and a worker. It sounds like a lot of the disaster stories, so to speak, where someone turned over too much to someone or where they weren't satisfied with a job was due to the fact that they were trying to hire a worker for more of the creative or the decisions or the strategic stuff as you said.

If someone's looking to outsource their business or to remove some of the load off of themselves in the business then they'll get some time back. It might cost a little bit of money, but they can pay the high dollars to a coach to figure out the planning and figure out what should I do next and what should the webpage look like or what should I do in my marketing, get the real CEO-level types of decisions. Then when it comes time to implement then go to a worker with that clear final picture in mind and tell the worker what you want and start small on all that good stuff. That way you go to the coach and you figure out the plan and then you give the plan to the worker. Then it's very clear if the plan was fulfilled or not. Am I understanding that right?

Ric Thompson: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely, because kind of flipping this around you get in situations where somebody pays a web designer thousands of dollars for a great new website. It looks great and from a marketing perspective it's horrible, it doesn't work. Or gosh, in our house with new clients I'll have a number of conversations where people are like you guys are the experts, you tell me. It's like, well, I'll tell you, I can consult with you, but my personal time having done this for decades is going to be very different than a virtual assistant or a web developer who's in there just building your WordPress pages. That WordPress developer, they'll do anything you want them to do. If they were a master marketer they would not be building WordPress pages. It's almost commonsense and yet it's just so tempting, it's so easy, Robert, to say you guys are the experts, you figure it out and let me know what I need because I'm too busy. That's never a recipe for success, shall we say.

Robert Plank: Yeah, and I think we've all heard of... We've all had at least one or maybe even one person per year or even more frequent than that try to coast on that, try to coast on saying I'm going to have the idea and I'll just give it to this team and the team will do it. Is that possible? Is it possible to have a 100% outsourced business or do people have to have at least 5 or 10% of themselves in it?

Ric Thompson: That's a great question, that's a great question. There are certainly situations where you can create systems, so that at some point in time you are removed or mostly removed because the business is on autopilot. That can absolutely be done. If you are at the very beginning stage where this is your baby, this is your vision, then like it or not you have to be involved.

Let me dive into this real quick. For any project you're looking to do or even your overall business there are four phases that a project has to go through to succeed. Phase one is dream it. This is, wow, Robert, wouldn't it be cool if we did this. Let's create a killer new podcast called The Robert Plank Show. You got all these why's. Here's why I want to do it, here's why it'd be a great idea. It's very, very sexy, very high-energy and not very structured. Phase two is to think this out where you're working with a... either by yourself or with a coach or a consultant, so you can outsource that mapping process. You can say let me go find a podcasting expert to create a game plan for me. Then you can walk through that and say here are the pieces that I need, you have to be involved.

Now as you move into the third stage which is tasking let's break this down, what does this have to be? We got to have the interview done every week or every two weeks. We got to have a webpage we have to do, we got to edit those audios, all those different pieces. Then phase four is do it where somebody's actually doing it. Now obviously in your situation your podcast is an example. You're doing it, it's your baby, you're the great interviewer, you want to have hands on.

There are larger companies, publishing companies, or even smaller companies where the interviewing skills are not the wheelhouse of the CEO. They can get somebody on their team, they can outsource that interviewing task and it could literally get to the point where the owner, the CEO is not doing anything once those systems are created and up and running. In the beginning stages, that dreaming it and the thinking it they have to be involved. It doesn't matter who it is, you can't pass off that strategic level to somebody else because you're the one... It's your vision, it's your dream, it has to be you involved at some level. Does that make sense?

Robert Plank: Yeah, it does and so I'm sort of a computer programmer and just my computer programming brain hears from you that there's a little bit of debugging involved, I guess. As you figure out what you want to do and you figure out the system and you get the kinks worked out and what it also reminds me of is... I'm sure that you have some favorite channels you watch on YouTube, right, Ric?

Ric Thompson: Sure.

Robert Plank: I think about the most successful YouTube channels or the ones that I watch a lot of are the ones that they consistently put out content, maybe something like once a week and they've been doing it for years. When I go back and look at the earliest, earliest stuff, I look at... There's a channel called Epic Meal Time or there's Gary Vaynerchuk. If you look at any of these popular YouTube people, if you look at the earliest stuff from five, seven years ago and it's drastically different. In a lot of cases they didn't have the character, so to speak, worked out. They didn't have the format worked out. Some videos were long, some were short and then you compare it to what the result is today and it could just have been a matter of they outsourced pieces of that business to make it more professional.

I always look at those content creators and just YouTube video stars springs to mind in this case. I look at the early stuff where it's rough around the edges, they haven't quite gotten all the bugs knocked out yet, but then you fast forward to today and it was definitely not an overnight process. Then the more current day stuff is better video quality, better editing, better sounds, just more slick and smooth and rehearsed and stuff like that. That's what I'm hearing from you is that there definitely is a point where people can get the well-oiled machine in place, but they definitely have to be along for the ride in the getting it all figured out stage just so that they know if they're happy with the end result or not.

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, absolutely. It's like anything else in life, it's not going to be perfect the first time around. It's going to be a learning curve for you to outsource to your team. It's going to be a learning curve for your team potentially and to get clear on what you're trying to do and how you're trying to accomplish it. Just overall anything's going to get better the tenth time you do it, the fiftieth time you do it, the hundredth time you do it. That's just how it works. When you want to get started, when you're in the very, very beginning stage and here are these tasks that I've got lined up to get my first episode or my first few episodes up and running, a quick rule of thumb, and this is not mine by the way, I've heard this probably a bunch of different times, probably a dozen different times from different experts.

When you get that list of tasks and you look at those tasks, hey, I need this video edited for my YouTube channel, ask yourself can somebody else do this task faster, cheaper, or better than I can. If the answer is yes outsource it. You just created leverage in your business. Whether that leverage is speed or that leverage is cost or what have you or quality, so just use that as a rule of thumb as you go through with your first episodes and you're trying to figure out it as part of that machine you were talking about, what do I want to do versus what should I have my team do for me. That's a great way to do it. Can they do it faster, cheaper, or better than me? Yep, fantastic, that should be somebody else's job to do then.

Robert Plank: Am I hearing and understanding you right in that you said faster, cheaper, or better, not faster, cheaper, and better. Is that right?

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, and that's a great point. Obviously, in a perfect world, Robert, hey, fantastic, a massive leverage if somebody can do it faster, cheaper, and better. Yes, that does happen. However, let's be very clear that if any one of those three conditions exists you've created leverage in your business. Yes, in a perfect world I would love to have somebody who could do it faster than I can, so I can leverage speed, who could do it cheaper than I can, so I can leverage money and who can do it better than I can which would leverage quality. That's certainly very, very possible. If only one of those exists I still win, my company still wins, my business still wins.

Robert Plank: Right, yeah, because even if one of those things are met and someone performs this task that maybe you could have done it 10% or 1% better, but that just might be a matter of you being a perfectionist. Then now that someone is performing this task that you don't have to do and that frees up an hour or a couple of hours in the day or in the week that you wouldn't have had otherwise then that's time you can then dedicate to more revenue-generating activities.

Ric Thompson: Let's take it even further out. Let's say that you can do a task in an hour that takes somebody else five hours to do it. What is that hour of your time worth? Could you be out landing the next interviewee? Could you be putting together your next product? Could you be... All those high-revenue items that you could be doing with your one hour could be worth tons more than the five hours of somebody that can do as good as a job, but they're slower at it. It's not a black and white type of question.

You really have to weigh all the different aspects and what your time is worth and what you could be doing with that because at the end of the day, Robert, here's one more huge, huge mindset shift for a lot of entrepreneurs. We are action takers. We want to jump right in there, we want to get stuff done and why would I pay somebody to do a task that I can do in an hour that takes them 5 hours? That's ridiculous. Here's the problem. You as an individual only have 24 hours in a day. No matter how efficient you are, no matter how productive you are, no matter how good you are you will never, ever, ever get more than 24 hours in a day.

You've got to treat that as your most scarce resource because you have a hard limit. Whereas with your business you are not your business, your business is not you. Your business can have 24 hours in a day, it could have 48 hours a day, it could have thousands of hours in a day because it can borrow time from people all over the world to be applied to the business needs. You, you only have 24 hours, so you really have to weigh that. Is my 1 hour of time out of that very limited pool worth it to do video editing, just to put things in perspective.

Robert Plank: Yeah, that's a pretty good insight in a number of ways because if someone were to calculate their income versus the time they put into that business and let's say that that's $100 or $200 an hour and then there's some video editor that they can hire for $50 an hour then great, in a way you just made $50 per hour that that person's working because you didn't have to put in that effort. As you're describing that it's almost like it's okay to take a little bit of a hit as I'm understanding this. It's okay to take a little bit of a hit on quality or even things like if this task takes me 1 hour to complete, but it takes someone else 5 hours, who cares, that's not my 5 hours. If I was going to edit a video and it would have taken me from 9am to 10am, but then I hire somebody to do it at 9am, I do whatever I'm going to do and they come back to me at 1pm, who cares if it took all that extra time because, guess what, it got done and I didn't have to do it.

Ric Thompson: Exactly, that kind of situation it's more a matter of what am I paying, what's my cost there. If I'm hiring somebody else to do that task for five hours and it's costing me X, or like you said what was my one hour that I regained it in my life worth X dollars or better yet X plus. If it was then it's a no brainer unless you want to be the one doing that task for the rest of that business's life.

Robert Plank: There are tasks that you've seen or that some of your clients have seen that they want to continue doing because that's what makes their business unique and that's what makes their business do its thing.

Ric Thompson: Absolutely. For instance, let's go back to your great show, The Robert Plank Show. If you had anybody else doing interviews it would be a hard sell to say this is The Robert Plank Show.

Robert Plank: Yeah.

Ric Thompson: You're a fantastic interviewer. There are other great interviewers out there and the tradeoff there would not be worth it. There are some things that as the CEO, as the visionary, as the president of the business, if you will, that's not worth trading off no matter what. However, the list of what you can get rid of is far larger than what a lot of entrepreneurs initially think of.

Robert Plank: You know what, too, if I was ever confused or lost or indecisive about what tasks that I could take out of my business, I could always go and hire a coach and have that figured out for me. I could outsource the outsourcing.

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, absolutely. I do that all the time as a matter of fact with my company, Done For You Solutions. A new client comes in, I do an introductory call where we talk about that. What are you doing in your business right now? What is not getting done? What are you doing repetitively? Let's go back to your YouTube channel. Maybe I'm talking to somebody who's got a YouTube channel. Gosh, Ric, every week I have to edit this video and get it uploaded on the YouTube channel and then I go do these postings on my social media.

It's like why are you spending your time as the CEO doing that. Go shoot the show, we can go ahead and edit that video, we can get it loaded up in your YouTube channel and update your website with it and post it on social media for you. All those tasks that are repetitive it's a great place to start to say stop, I'm done with that. Let me get somebody else to do that. I'm going to remain shooting the show because that's what I love to do and I'm the star, but all these other maintenance tasks there's no value in it. Yes, it has to get done, but not by the CEO of the company, not by the president of the company.

Robert Plank: Interesting, so the repetitive, the maintenance, the non-creative tasks are the ones that can go. Speaking of this and speaking of Done For You Solutions can you walk us through really quickly some case study where someone came to you and things just were not good and maybe they were stressed out or overworked. Things were not in the place they wanted to be and then you refined things and made it better.

Ric Thompson: Oh, gosh, we do that all the time. That's the whole idea of taking these things off of people's plates that are stressing them out or because they're having to do them or because it's not getting done. It could be a website. Hey, in the past couple of years if your website is not mobile-friendly you're toast. You're losing 60, 70% of your traffic typically in many markets. My website's 4 or 5 years old, Ric, my traffic has dropped dramatically, my sales have dropped. I have no idea what the heck I'm doing here. Now it's time to get a new website. Let's get it redesigned, let's get it modernized, let's get it going. We do that all the time.

Repetitive tasks, we mentioned that. A number of years ago one of my first clients was an email marketer and he managed multiple accounts and was constantly getting out... managing these email lists and getting out promotional emails. He spent 20 hours a week not looking for fantastic new deals and vetting new products, but 20 hours a week just taking those emails, formatting them for each of the different platforms he had and getting them out there, the grunt work if you will.

Once he turned that over to us you could imagine. Imagine adding 20 hours a week to your life. It's huge, it's transformational. It could be a matter of time and reclaiming your life a bit or it could be a matter of expanding your business or moving your business forward by getting those tasks done like websites or other type stuff that are not being done and really should be done to make your business succeed.

Robert Plank: Awesome, and I'm looking at Done For You Solutions right now and what's cool about this is that... It looks like this whole outsourcing thing isn't as expensive as many people might think that it might be. I'm looking at right now you have a package that for $400 in a month someone will put in 20 hours and for tasks like if someone needs blog content or if they need a membership site or WordPress site or even office stuff like Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint or Keyword Research.

It's pretty cool and I think that a lot of people out there maybe they think of themselves as a starving artist or they need to do everything, but what I'm hearing from you in this whole conversation is a lot of people need to figure out where the herd is and where are they working themselves too hard with these repetitive tasks. Once the business is chopped up in that way then once it's in pieces then they could hand off just a little piece to an outsourcer to try them out. Then if that's a success they can hand off a bigger piece to that outsourcer and if that's a success they can go to another outsourcer with a different skill set.

That all sounds good, but it just sounds to me like if someone were to try to do that all themselves they'd have to do a lot of research, a lot of hiring and firing and trying people out and things like that. I understand that you have this thing called Done For You Solutions where you take a lot of the guesswork out of that. Is that correct?

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, that's the whole reason we're here, kind of think of us as an HR department. We've got all those different people already in place. They're the exact same people I use for all my stuff, we use it for clients around the world. The idea here, Robert, is to keep the client focused on the more strategic aspect of their business. Like, for instance, you've got a new information product that you're going to launch out. You've got a new audio series shall we say. Okay, so your job is to figure out what's the sales model. I'm going to do an opt-in page, I'm going to do a sales page, I'm going to do a thank you page. Here's my copy for those because we don't do writing, we don't do copywriting.

Once the client comes to us and says, okay, here's what I need. I need an opt-in page. We're going to connect that to AWeber or MailChimp or Infusionsoft or whatever I've got. Here's my sales page and the copy for this. I do need you guys to find some great images. Let's connect that to PayPal, let's connect this to my shopping cart and here's the thank you page they should get when they buy. If you can map that out, if you can say this is what I need, here's the flow, do you really, really want to be the one to have to figure out all the different platforms, figure out how to build those pages, go research those images.

You've taken a project that could be up in a week, maybe two weeks by outsourcing and you've now turned it into a five or six-month project. Speed is a massive, massive advantage in your business and so you're sacrificing it if you're putting all those tasks on you. Now if you're absolutely, completely flat broke and you have no other options I understand, but be aware that you're adding a boatload of time before you can actually be making money. You're losing months potentially of that income potential, so again it's a tradeoff.

Robert Plank: Right, and as you're describing that if someone is delaying the destination, I guess, or they're delaying the time it takes to get to that moneymaking stage they might give up. It's like if you have this business and if someone's only a month away from making money then great, they can have that month to power through and do those things that need to be done. If you tell someone you're not going to make money for nine months, you're not going to make money for two years I might as well give up now, so that sounds really great.

Also, as you were describing that, going back to the computer programming brain that I have, there's this thing called the Iceberg Principle where you see an iceberg and it looks really tiny because what you're only seeing is 10% of it. The Titanic sunk because they said oh, it's just a piece of ice above water, but then the whole city-sized chunk of ice was underwater, so there's that part of it in that a lot of the time and work that goes into things is just getting it just right.

It's easy to say, okay, make a landing page, hook it up to AWeber, make a webpage, hook it up to PayPal. Then if the AWeber form isn't performing correctly or if the PayPal button doesn't work or if that form or that landing page is a little bit off, that could easily be hours or days or weeks for someone who is inexperienced going down the rabbit hole trying to learn. It's almost like getting multiple college degrees just to do this thing that would take an expert two minutes to get figured out. I love this idea of outsourcing, I love the way that you've laid it out for us, Ric. Your website is DoneForYouSolutions.com and you have a free gift for our listeners for this show, correct?

Ric Thompson: Absolutely, and this goes back to some of the comments you made earlier in the show. We didn't really dive into it too much, but we want to start small, kind of going back to that. I understand that people had challenges with outsourcing before, so what I'd like to do for the listeners of The Robert Plank Show is I'd like to offer to buy the first 10 hours. We're not talking about a life-changing offer here, we're not talking about totally revamping your business, but there are a number of things that can get done in 10 hours to really give us a great trial run, shall we say, see how we do. Then we can go into from there an ongoing membership with you of a minimum of 5 hours a month up to 40, 80, 100 hours a month, whatever your business needs. The idea is let's go back to start small. I'll pay for the first 10 hours, give us a shot. That is at DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial.

Robert Plank: Awesome, DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial. Everyone listening should go right there right now and once again that is DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial. If you're listening in the car, pull over, write that down. If you're listening on the website we'll have a link to that in the show notes. Thanks so much, Ric, for opening all of our eyes about outsourcing and showing us that there is a better way where we can have a better business, have a business that grows more, have a business that is less stressful, takes less time and at the same time having all of that doesn't require having a lot of overhead. We can have the best of both worlds, we can have our cake and eat it, too, whatever analogy people want to use. Outsourcing is definitely the way to a better business and a better life. Thanks for telling us about all that cool stuff and DoneForYouSolutions.com/trial, so I appreciate you being on the show, Ric.

Ric Thompson: Thanks for having me. I'm very excited to be in the latest episode here and in a fantastic, fantastic series.