Kendrick Disch, Vertical River

[00:00:55] Sanjay Parekh: Kendrick Dish started his branded content studio Vertical River at the beginning of 2019. Before starting his own business, Kendrick worked as a video production manager, a studio manager, and a photographer. Today he's focused on sustainable storytelling and growing his business from his home base in Atlanta to wherever the story takes him next. Kendrick, let's get into it and welcome to the show.

[00:01:18] Kendrick Disch: Hey, happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:20] Sanjay Parekh: I gave a little bit about your background, but I'd love for you to give us like 30 seconds or a minute about your background and what got you to the point that you're at right now.

[00:01:28] Kendrick Disch: Sure. There's a fairly straight path that goes through a lot of different directions. Started with music and was really into music and then realized that I wanted to record, I was in a band, I wanted the band to have music videos and concert videos, and so I got a camera, and I started filming the shows and then editing and sharing those shows. And then I realized I was really passionate about that, and I was actually pretty terrible at music. So, I sold all my music equipment. Went all in on video stuff, bought cameras, bought an editing computer, and kind of hit the ground running. And it's been my career since — well it's been my whole career. I started doing that stuff in college and since this is a podcast about business, I did start freelancing for people on the side while I was in college. That's how far back my video production goes.

[00:02:20] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, I got to ask, what kind of music was it that you were playing in the band?

[00:02:24] Kendrick Disch: Oh man. We played ska music. Do you know ska?

[00:02:27] Sanjay Parekh: Love ska! Hello? Mighty, mighty Bosstones. Come on!

[00:02:31] Kendrick Disch: Yeah. We had a little eight-piece band. And then when I got to college, I realized that there's a whole ‘nother level of skill involved. And it, like we were okay in high school. We were cool in high school, but like you get to college and like people are actually really good. And we're like oh, that. Oh, okay. I see. They're good.

[00:02:49] Sanjay Parekh: That's funny. Where did you go to college and what were you studying?

[00:02:53] Kendrick Disch: I went to the University of Arkansas. And I built my own major, really, out of a bunch of pieces of other majors. But yeah, it says on my degree a communications major. But I took drama classes. I took all the film lecture classes. I took the broadcast journalism classes so I could learn how to do news studio stuff, and took creative writing, a whole lot of creative writing to learn how to write. And so, I built my own, what I call it as my own film degree, but since they didn't offer a film degree, I had to settle for a communications degree.

[00:03:27] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Looking back at your time in college, do you feel like that helped set you up for what you're doing now and what you've done through your career? Were there things that you, like now looking back oh, I wish I'd taken this class or that class that would've helped me out in doing this?

[00:03:42] Kendrick Disch: I don't know if I was sheltered, that's probably the wrong word, a little too harsh for what my situation was. I just didn't realize that going to a different school that had a film program was even an option. It wasn't like, oh, you could do that if you wanted. You could go to USC; you could go to University of Texas. You could go to these programs that are really good. It just seemed too farfetched money-wise. It was like, that didn't seem like reality. So, what it really taught me is to use what you have and go after it anyway. Like use your resources, build from what you have. Don't sit there and just wish for something that you can't get. Just use what you have and work towards it. And I've always worked my way out of whatever pickle I find myself in. I think hard work gets you out of those.

[00:04:30] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah, that's interesting. So, when you started at University of Arkansas, was it a communications major or did you start with that or did you like figure it out along the way?

[00:04:42] Kendrick Disch: I landed on that after a couple years. I started as an English major.

[00:04:47] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. Okay. I gotcha. So, you didn't realize during that path that like, hey, maybe you would've been better served by switching schools or maybe it was because of the cost and everything that it wasn't even an option.

[00:04:58] Kendrick Disch: Part of it was all my friends were at that school and my girlfriend was at that school and so switching schools wasn't even on my radar.

[00:05:06] Sanjay Parekh: Okay. Okay, so in college then you're like, okay, the band's not working. And so, you start freelancing and side hustling this stuff.

Was that the first time — I mean, the band was probably an entrepreneurial venture too, because you had to go get clients. Was there anything before then that you did entrepreneurial.

[00:05:23] Kendrick Disch: Both my parents were entrepreneurs. And so, it's been one of those things where it wasn't even talked about in my house. It wasn't like, this is entrepreneurship, and you should have a business. They didn't talk in terms of business. They just did what they did. And I thought that was what people should do. They just do what they do. My mom was a midwife. She had clients who were pregnant, and she would help them have home births. My dad had a variety of businesses, but he was a computer technician basically, or a networking engineer basically. And so, he had his own business clients that he would serve.

I guess one of the interesting things I learned though, it's obvious to me now, but back then, my dad pivoted in a major way at a certain point. He used to work at Walmart. He cashed out his stocks at a certain point and started his own business. But he started a woodworking business. He was like, I'm going to be a woodworker. I'm going to make stuff and I'm going to sell it. And so, he was doing all that. He bought all these tools. One of the things he bought was a computer so he could print things and put them on the wood, like plaques or like whatever. So, he started messing with the computer. He got really interested in the computer and he pivoted his whole business to computer stuff. So, then, the woodworking stopped, the computer stuff began. He ended up opening a company with some other people and they did business consulting and computer-y stuff when I was in high school. And then he went on his own and just did that. And he still, he's mostly retired now, but he's been doing that since then. So that pivot to his interests — like he thought he was going to do woodworking, but he pivoted to computers because that was what he was passionate about. And I just thought in hindsight, that's kind of interesting.

[00:07:11] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. And back then you wouldn't even call it a pivot. That's a new term now for that kind of shift too. Like for him it was probably like, this is just much more interesting. And he was probably on the early edge of computers coming out in business and home as well.

[00:07:27] Kendrick Disch: Yeah. I was definitely one of the first kids to have a home computer, and I was definitely, I was able to nerd out at the young age, like I was always getting on the internet before anyone else even knew what the internet was. What they just had it at school and played Oregon Trail. But that was it. But I was like, I started building websites at the age of 13 because I just thought, it was fun.

[00:07:49] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, yeah. I'm right there with you and I've played a lot of Oregon Trail in my day. What a great game that does not really exist, I don't think anymore. Like I wonder if there's an updated version of Oregon Trail for kids now. I don't know. Maybe not.

[00:08:05] Kendrick Disch: There's got to be.

[00:08:07] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Okay. So, you started freelancing and at what point did you realize hey, this is actually a business and I need to be serious about this?

[00:08:20] Kendrick Disch: I don't know exactly. I think there's a lot of fear. I think because I actually didn't take any business classes in college. I wish I probably, I could have, I should have. I don't know why I really didn't. But so, the idea of a business — like, that seemed scary. And I didn't really have an example of somebody who had built a business as a video producer, video production person. They all just ended up working for the news stations. I didn't really have the example to follow, and I didn't think too much about business. I just thought about getting a job. And so I just ended up with jobs. It didn't really occur to me to think that I'm going to be a business owner. But I just, I liked the freelancing, I liked the extra income.

And I liked just working on these fun projects. It still really didn't occur to me to pursue it as a business. That didn't come until later when I moved to Atlanta. I moved to Atlanta in order to just go to a school called the Portfolio Center. And I studied photography while I was there. And they were teaching you about how to do commercial photography as a business. And so that really opened my mind as I'm in charge of my own destiny here. I can start a business and that takes me to the story of actually my first business. If you want me to go there, I'll tell you about it.

[00:09:45] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah.

[00:09:47] Kendrick Disch: It failed, it failed. It wasn't even an epic fail, it was just a quiet fade out, fade to black sort of a thing. I realized, I had done a few different employment places in the photography and video education world. And they do these things called workshops. It's a pretty popular way to learn. It's like summer camp for adults who are interested in playing with cameras and stuff. So, I was involved with two different places, the Santa Fe Photography Workshops and the Maine Media Workshops, and I worked both of those places and realized that these workshops are really cool. There's a lot of opportunity, there's a lot of people doing these as well, but there's not really a directory site. If you want to search for, for example, underwater flower arranging workshop. Where does that happen? Where do you look for that? You can Google it. That's kind of the only way you're going to find it. And it turns out, oh, it's this small place off the coast of South Carolina and they're the only ones in the country doing underwater flower arranging. And you're like, it's January, or let's say June 1st, June 7th, at this location, you're like, wow, that's really cool. We going to sign up for it. But there's no directory to search for that stuff.

So, I wanted to build a directory to help people find these workshops that are happening all over the place and basically a search engine for them. So, I started a company called workshoppers.org. Okay. And I learned a whole lot about how to fail at running a business. Basically, I focused on the wrong things. I didn't have the right people around me. I was naive and I didn't have a runway, so it lasted for four years. Active development for two, had a bunch of listings, but it never made a dime. And then ultimately, we just made some technology mistakes that cost us our SEO and we were getting blacklisted basically by Google. And then it just sat there for two years and then somebody shut the server off and that was that.

[00:11:40] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Was that a company that was just you or were there other folks that were...

[00:11:46] Kendrick Disch: I started with a couple of people who wanted to be co-founders but pretty quickly they just decided maybe co-founding wasn't what they wanted, so they drifted away, and I found somebody else who I was paying to help develop the site. Because even though I'm fairly technical, I wasn't technical enough to do development and I paid them and they did stuff, but I was paying them not that well, and not enough to keep their interest. And they had a job and a family and all, and it was just like, it wasn't getting the attention it needed and I wasn't able to give it the attention and, just a slow fade out.

[00:12:23] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Looking back at that, what do you feel like you learned from that experience that you use today?

[00:12:31] Kendrick Disch: Runway is an important concept. At the time, at that point in time, I had no business trying to do a startup because I had no capital. At all. I had zero money. And I still have to pay rent and I still have to eat. And to start a website, it was free to have your stuff on there. And I was hoping ads would eventually be the thing that made money. But I didn't have anybody selling ads. So, it was a disaster. It was just a disaster, a slow disaster. And I was also trying to do video stuff at the time. And that's another flavor of my entrepreneurial non-success.

I was spending so much time on this website that wasn't making any money, that I wasn't marketing my services very well. I wasn't out there hustling. I wasn't out there meeting new people. I wasn't out there even updating my own stuff. I would post a little bit here and there, but I was focused on this thing that was just, what I wanted to do instead of what I needed to do. And I think that's a lesson I had to learn the hard way. And eventually my financial situation just got worse and worse and worse and I had to go get a job. So, I went, and I did that job, and then I built up some capital and I built up a long runway. So, eventually it took me seven years to then start Vertical River, once I felt more financially comfortable to, to take that leap.

[00:13:58] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. So, when you got to that point, what did you feel like you needed in terms of personal runway before you left to start Vertical River?

[00:14:08] Kendrick Disch: Interesting. How much do I think I needed?

[00:14:10] Sanjay Parekh: How much did you collect? Like how much did you think about and then, I need a year's runway personally, or I need three years runway. What was the number for you?

[00:14:21] Kendrick Disch: That's not quite the way it played out. I got laid off from my job and so it was go time. It was go time whether or not I had the money or not. But the company I got laid off from, it was a video marketing team. They laid off the whole team in Atlanta. They shut down the Atlanta office. And I negotiated with the CEO of that company who did the layoffs. I said, listen, if you're going to liquidate this office, I would like to, me and some of these other people in this office would like to buy the video equipment. So that took up most of any capital I did have, I just immediately invested it in buying equipment. So, we negotiated with them. They made us a good deal. We bought a whole bunch of camera stuff and that was the seed of starting my own video production content company, is buying that equipment. And so, it helped that I got a good deal on the equipment. And then I was ready to run with what we were doing. But it still had to make money pretty fast in order to pay rent. And of course, I got spousal support. My wife works and she was able to help out and we pretty quickly moved to a lower overhead situation. We were right in the hotspot of town. We had a town home that was nice, and we were like living the two job, no kids kind of thing. And so, then when it was decided that I was going to start this business, we moved, we lowered our overhead quite a bit further out in the, we're not quite super far out, but like much cheaper cost of living out here where we are. And we were able to like just lower our overhead quite a bit. And so, living with a lower overhead is a big lesson learned. It's a real big lesson learned.

[00:16:03] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. And I think that's true regardless, right? Like a lot of times people that become successful, and their overhead goes up and they acclimate to that level, and it's fine, as long as everything's okay. It's just when something goes wrong, then it's not a good thing.

[00:16:18] Kendrick Disch: Yeah. And people's situations change. You decide you want to do something different, or, my wife was a freelance consultant for several years and she just decided I'd rather go work which was fine. You're not stuck in whatever situation you're in. You're not stuck in it. You can pivot.

[00:16:36] Sanjay Parekh: Right, right. Exactly. The challenge is that as your overhead goes up, you do start becoming more and more stuck because opportunities close off, right? Like you can't do the fun. You can't go from woodworker to a computer person because you're like I don't know if that's going to work. And my overhead is X and I need to make sure I make it all work.

[00:16:55] Kendrick Disch: Yeah. When you box yourself in by having these financial commitments, that are not negotiable then, yeah. You're you can get yourself stuck.

[00:17:04] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And I don't know if we talk about that enough, especially with founders and people that are doing side hustles, because a lot of time people that are doing side hustles in small businesses, they're trying to uplift themselves. But I think there's a benefit of uplifting yourself, but also making sure that you don't overspend and overextend yourself.

[00:17:24] Kendrick Disch: Yeah. I guess for the listeners of this, I just want to, also this seems like a fine time to just mention that, like we have lower overhead, but my income is pretty low too because I've been working my butt off in this business working more than I work when I work full-time for someone else. But a lot of it goes back into the business. A lot of the work I do is non-billable type stuff. And it's just a case of, it's after four years, I'm finally starting to feel like I have a reasonable income now. It's been, and of course we went through Covid times. We started in 2019, but then, within a year of opening our business, Covid hit and that really reduced our income a whole lot. So, it's been a couple years of digging out of that. And even, I guess surviving through Covid was something that wasn't a guarantee. It was pretty tough.

00:18:21] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. No, absolutely. How would you think about or how do you think about your happiness. That's another dimension that I don't know that we talk about, like your happiness before when you were an employee and working for somebody else, and now where you're doing whatever you want to do, basically.

[00:18:41] Kendrick Disch: It's interesting. I am a fantastic worker. Like I work really hard. I get along with most people, but I'm very opinionated. And it turns out that even if you're a hard worker, and even if you get along with people, being very opinionated is not always appreciated in a corporate environment or working for someone else. A lot of times they don't want to hear what you have to say, or they just think you're a know-it-all. And so, I found myself up against, in a lot of my jobs, I've found myself up against just some friction with my bosses and that creates unhappiness, right? So, working for myself, even if it's not paying all that well at certain points in time, it's fantastic. I love working for myself and it makes me really happy, even though it sometimes makes me more stressed. I get pretty stressed. I get pretty worried. I get pretty like anxious about things, but there's not really very often a day when I'm like, I'd rather be working for so and so. It just, it doesn't happen.

[00:19:53] Adam Walker: Support for this podcast comes from Hiscox, committed to helping small businesses protect their dreams since 1901. Quotes and information on customized insurance for specific risks are available. At Hiscox.com. Hiscox, the business insurance experts.

[00:20:15] Sanjay Parekh: Let's dig into what you just mentioned there, talking about stress. How do you think about and how do you balance stress between work and then, keep boundaries with the rest of life, right? Family, friends, all that stuff. Are there routines that you go through, like exercise or meditation or anything else like that, that you use to help balance all this stuff too?

[00:20:39] Kendrick Disch: Let's call that an area of opportunity for me. But the truth is that I have learned a lot about that side of my life. And how important it is. I've learned it because I haven't had good habits, I haven't had good practice. I've gone too far in the not taking care of myself direction. And I've had to work my way back to understanding the different ways that my life is impacted by things. And it's not an easy thing, but I think what I didn't realize, and if I could give some of my thinking to other people, I would say it is really hard to fathom how it's all connected, how deeply it is all connected. Your mental health is connected to your nutrition. Your intelligence and how – I’m stumbling while I say this, but like how quickly your brain works is related to how often you exercise. All those things are so interconnected that, and if you're missing one of them, you're not paying attention to a certain area, you're going to suffer in some way. And giving all those things the right importance in the moment is what seems to be difficult.

And I go through periods. Right now, I'm in a period of time where I'm probably, where I'm not exercising as much as I should. And I know that, but it happens to be a busy time with my business as well. And so, I've got to learn a new way of managing both of those two priorities. Earlier when the business wasn't as quite as busy, I found the time to go to the gym quite often. And then just like we have mentors in our business, or we have people we ask for advice, and we have people we rely on. That seems very normal. That's oh yeah, you have a mentor, cool. But we usually don't have a mentor for our health. We don't have a health mentor.

And so, a couple years ago I found a health mentor. And his name is Tyler Buckingham. Easy to find on the internet. But he's local in Atlanta and he focuses on helping people with their nutrition, their mental health, and their fitness. He's a personal coach, personal trainer, wonderful guy. And he helped me understand how these things are also connected. And I was working out with him a couple times a week and he was advising on some of the other areas of my health. And so it's one of those things where you just have to pay attention to these things, and you have to learn it just like another business. You have to learn accounting, or you have to learn bookkeeping, or you have to learn SEO strategy. Or you have to learn email marketing. You have to learn. You have to learn all these things to run. You have to be a manager. You have to be a leader. You have to be like sales. You got to learn this stuff to be a good business owner. And learning about your own health is one of those things that you need to learn. You just got to.

[00:23:40] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, that's a fantastic piece of advice. I don't think I've ever thought about getting a health mentor. That's just something, it's obvious, but I just never really thought about it.

[00:23:52] Kendrick Disch: Yeah, I didn't think about it. I didn't really think about that phrasing until I was thinking about this interview. I was like, that's a big part of success, making sure that you have your life in order is more than just the business. It's about making sure your body and brain and your whole being is good. Even if you're just a little stressed, your mood can be impacted and then you blow a sale and then your wife is mad at you because you yelled at her about the dishes or whatever. It's like all these things are all impacted so much. So it's an equal priority.

[00:24:28] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah. And if you can't bring your best self to the business, then the business is never going to be as good as it could be. Right?

[00:24:35] Kendrick Disch: So yeah, you owe it to, you owe it to everybody that you work with. You owe it to them to be in good health.

[00:24:44] Sanjay Parekh: Absolutely. Okay so let's switch gears a little bit and talk about running the business and the things that you might use, either it's technology or apps or systems that you've implemented that help you run your business better. Is there one thing that you can think of that you're like, man, if I didn't have this, it would be a lot harder to do?

[00:25:07] Kendrick Disch: I'm a big fan of software technologies. And we use quite a few of them in our business. And then just getting them all to talk to each other is the hiccup. So, when I was looking for a primary piece of business tool that we use, I wanted one that did a lot of things and, we settled on one called Hive. Hive is a project management tool and a communications tool. And so, it takes a lot of the elements for many of the others that people are familiar with. It takes a whole lot of what Slack has to offer. Has a whole lot of what Asana has to offer. And it puts those together. And you can bring in and it allows you to look at your emails within its platform and reply to email within its platform too. So, at least it ties in with Google. So, we use Google Business to run our back end, so our emails and our calendars and all that. But that ties into Hive as well. So, you can look at your calendar and schedule appointments and you can look at your email and reply to emails. And then if there are action items within that email, you can highlight it and then make a new task and assign it to people or assign it to yourself or set reminders and you can do all these things.

And so, from a streamlined perspective really there's not that many pieces of software I've found that have the chat functionality that Slack, has built into the project management side of it. And a few of them have it, but it's not really well implemented. But in this tool called Hive, it's very well implemented. So that you can have these little chat rooms if you want, for projects or for company culture things. So, you can have individual DM conversations or group DMs and you can have comments also on tasks. And so, there's a lot of places where communication can happen, and I think that's an important piece of our business because we're fully remote. All of our people are, they're all over. And so having a very organized, centralized place where all the work, and the communication about the work, is being talked about and tracked within one app, so you're not looking all over the place.

[00:27:13] Sanjay Parekh: So, looking back now you've been doing this for a bit at least a few years now, right? Four years. Is there something like looking back now with hindsight, that you would be like, man, knowing what I know now I would've done this way, I would've done it differently? Is there something that stands out to you?

[00:27:35] Kendrick Disch: I'm still trying to figure out what works and I'm trying a lot of new things. Especially when it comes to business development. I think that's the area where we struggle the most. It seems like a lot of people do. And I'll say this, that I don't want to take credit for everything Vertical River has ever done. When I started this company, I started with a partner and his area of ownership had a lot to do with business development and account management and some of the other things we were doing. And he got us set with a good foundation. And we eventually split as business partners. I was able to buy his side of the company from him and I learned a lot from what he set up and how he approached things. And so, I was able to take what he had given us and run with it. But I think we're still learning a lot about different ways of trying to get our name in front of people and get meetings with people and even how to properly pitch them. Because it's not an area that I'm like super gifted at.

So, I'm still trying to figure a lot of it out and I don't think I have a particularly magic recipe to give out other than, invest in people. That's the only thing I know of so far that has worked is, relationships with people pay off. And I'm not looking at an ROI of somebody. I'm not saying, what's the ROI of this person I just met? I don't look at it like that. I say I just met somebody cool. I want to stay in touch with them. I want to make sure they know what we're doing. But that's the extent of my efforts to, like, harvest them. But then it turns out that like in six months they think of me for something and then they hire us, or they refer us.

And that's really the basis of it, is you just network with people, build authentic relationships and those relationships grow. And you don't necessarily know what they're going to grow up to be. It's like planting seeds that you don't really know what the seed is. It's, oh no, that one's a mango tree. This one is a watermelon. This one turned out to be a mushroom or whatever. It's like you don't know what they are, but you just keep growing your relationships. And we're not necessarily growing super-fast because we're not aggressive about our sales generation, but I will say that we keep clients. We do good work. We keep our clients happy, and they refer us to other people, and we grow from there. That's been our growth strategy.

[00:30:06] Sanjay Parekh: Yeah, yeah. And that's absolutely important, right? Churn is probably one of the most expensive things that happens for a small business. So, if you can keep clients, sometimes better than getting a new client right there. Okay, so last question for you, actually, I have two questions for you. One is if you've got somebody that's on the verge, one of our listeners, on the verge of starting that side hustle or going into a small business, is there like a piece of advice that you would give them if they're on the fence and thinking about doing this or not?

[00:30:39] Kendrick Disch: Yeah, there's some advice I would give. A whole lot of what you do as a business owner is not the fun part, a whole lot of it. And if you really want to do something, it might be easier to do it for someone else because you get to spend more of your time doing the thing you want to be doing. So, if you want to be a writer it might not be your best interest to become a business owner. You should just be a writer, right? Or, like, for video production, you want to start a video business and you really like shooting and you really making videos. I don't spend much of my time making videos. I spend a bunch of time in meetings. I spend a bunch of time writing proposals. I spend a bunch of time doing bookkeeping. I don't make that many videos. I have other people that make videos. They're doing the fun stuff while I'm doing the boring stuff.

And so, I think you really need to think hard about what the life of a business owner actually is. And what you do day to day. And if you can enjoy that. And I turns out I actually like this process quite a bit. And I'm feeling pretty good, but if I really just wanted to be behind the camera shooting all day long, this wouldn't be the right situation for me. So really, the advice is really think hard about what your lifestyle is and what you want it to be, and look at the lifestyle of a business owner and understand that what they do day to day. Do you want to spend a lot of time behind the computer doing a bunch of random stuff, or do you want to do what you want to do?

[00:32:24] Sanjay Parekh: That is fantastic advice. I love that. Where can our listeners find and connect with you, Kendrick?

[00:32:33] Kendrick Disch: I'm easy to find. I'm one of the only Kendrick Disch’s on the internet, so my last name is D I S C H. So, I'm easy to find my personal stuffs out there. Vertical River is pretty easy to find too because we chose a name that not many other people ever heard of or used. So Vertical River is also easy to find. And we're pretty busy making stuff for our clients, so we're not real active on social. We're hoping to change that, of course, in the future. But I do think it's fun to share our experiences and so we put up some behind the scenes videos on our YouTube channel every now and then and our Instagram has some pictures and behind the scenes stuff too. You can enjoy those, but we're not super active.

[00:33:16] Sanjay Parekh: Awesome. Thanks for coming on today, Kendrick.

[00:33:19] Kendrick Disch: Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

[00:33:24] Sanjay Parekh: Thank you for listening to this week's episode of the Side Hustle to Small Business Podcast, powered by Hiscox. To learn more about how Hiscox can help protect your small business through intelligent insurance solutions, visit hiscox.com. And if you have a story you want to hear on this podcast, please visit www.hiscox.com/shareyourstory. I'm your host Sanjay Parekh. You can find me on Twitter at @sanjay or on my website at www.sanjayparekh.com.