Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the SkyLounge. It’s a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories. If you can like and subscribe; James, our producer, would be very happy. And he asked me to mention our Speedrun sister playlist, where we go through current breaking AI topics, and we give you very practical examples of how to become personally productive in AI. So, today’s guest in the SkyLounge, Ted Stone. Hey, Ted, how are you?

Ted Stone:

Well, or any better, Todd, I would have to be you.

Todd Merrill:

That’s awesome. Yeah. Well, thank you, Ted. It’s great having you here. So, first question, who are you and what are you working on?

Ted Stone:

I am a career CFO who’s found a way to keep doing it long past my sell-by date, working on five really interesting clients, cover an incredible breadth of industries right now.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Very cool. Well, I want to ask you about some of your clients, and we’re talking off the air. You have a lot of contact with private equity, from what I understand. Is that true for some of your clients now? Are they in the earlier stage or later stage, or where are your clients typically in their growth phase?

Ted Stone:

My longest running client made half a billion dollars running a private equity fund, and he’s now spending it buying up beautiful pieces of property all around, from Tierra del Fuego to Northern Maine, turning them into private parks that he opens to the public for free.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Ted Stone:

With more education programs on them for free. The dude owns 500 mountain bikes, and 500 sets of cross-country skis, and 200 kayaks…

Todd Merrill:

…wow!

Ted Stone:

That he moves around and teaches kids how to get wide-eyed and inspired about the outdoors. So, there’s a private equity contact. That’s where he made his money.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Another client that is in the process of doing their exit, and it’s going to be a bake-off between a strategic and a private equity firm for who’s going to make the founding family rich when they exit their business. Got another client that needs to recapitalize their company. They’ve got a 51% shareholder that they’ve kind of agreed, all the things we thought were going to make this make sense, maybe not so much. So, the 51% shareholder wants to get bought out, and we’re talking to several private equity firms to manage that process.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

So yeah, private equity touches my world with some frequency today.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah. We’ll get into that in just a second, but I had a thought while we’re sitting here talking. And somebody was talking about the silver tsunami. And so there’s the baby boomers.

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

All started businesses and became successful, and they’re looking at, okay, I can’t keep doing this forever, and I kind of want to go golfing or mountain biking or skiing. So, I think that’s a secular trend. I don’t know if you’re just lucky to have clients that seem to kind of fall into that, but do you feel like that’s a thing? What do you think the consequences of that are, or how should we take advantage of this or think about it?

Ted Stone:

Come back to this several times, because I think there are like 46 different ways of interpreting that question.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

The first thing I thought of when you went to the whole silver tsunami thing is I’m part of it.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

I’m 72 years old. I should have retired seven years ago by “normal standards.” I love what I do. And you heard me talk about past my sell-by date. I’m probably never going to have another full-time CFO job, because who hires a guy on Medicare to do that? But for what I’m doing as a fractional CFO for companies that need the experience but aren’t ready to pay for it five days a week, I get all the satisfaction I got as a full-time CFO. And I get it, five different businesses, or three different businesses, depending on intensity. And nobody cares. In fact, they kind of look at it as, wow, this is cool. I’m non-threatening. I’m not going to take anybody’s job away from them, because he’ll be dead before that happens. Now, I’m a nice enough guy, and I listen well enough, and I’ve heard enough stories that I’ve had enough experiences that when a client is facing an issue, I can say, I’ve seen that four times before. Let’s talk about the four different times I saw it. Let’s figure out which of those things are relevant to you in your situation, because it’s not one-size-fits-all. Let’s figure out the answer. Now, I’m getting the satisfaction that I got as a full-time CFO three or four or five times over, and nobody cares that I’m old. And I love to ski, I love to hike, but not 365 days of the year, so I’m never going to stop doing this. I mean, it’s just … yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Well, you hear about the folks that worked in corporate America, had a pretty good career, rose up the ranks to upper middle management, and then retired, played golf for about three and a half months, and then keeled over at six months, because they just didn’t have anything left to live for, right?

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And then nobody wants to do that.

Ted Stone:

When you get to that age of retirement, I’ve studied this in a couple of groups I’m part of. I’ve studied this in a more systematic way than any one person does. You need at least three things to be happy and successful in retirement. Physical health, financial health, and a reason to get out of bed in the morning.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah 

Ted Stone:

If that’s the reason, as I’m trying to take points off my handicap, great. If that reason is, I just take pleasure in watching bright young financial professionals grow up to become full-scope CFOs, or I like helping companies that are struggling to figure out why they’re struggling, fix it and grow again. That’s fun too.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

That purpose. It goes like this. I think the CFO’s job is to help everybody else in the company do their jobs better because they’ve got the right information at the right time in a format that makes sense to them, with analytical support to help them torture the numbers, even if they don’t know they need it at first. You want to get to the place where the CFO, whenever anybody has a question about some analytical report they’re looking at, talk to Ted. He’s going to have some insights on this. The fun that I get is going into a business with a bunch of really bright, hardworking people who are kind of ticked off and frustrated because the business just isn’t doing very well. Depending on how long a sales cycle is, anywhere from 3 months to 18 months later, you give those same bright, hardworking people the right information at the right time. They make better decisions, the business does better, and 3 to 18 months later, the business is doing better and they come in and they’ve got a spring in their step. I’m not ticked off and frustrated anymore. This is kind of cool. Look what I did. Watching that happen and knowing that I had something to do with it is why I’m still doing this seven years after normal retirement age and why I’m never going to stop doing it. I just wrapped up with a client literally yesterday. I got this really nice note from the CEO, “Kevin is ready to fly without you. Thank you so much. You’ve taken us through this, this, and this. That’s probably going to turn into a case study on our website.”

Todd Merrill:

Speaking on a microphone.

Ted Stone:

That’s the fun of this.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

Watching the finance people grow, and then watching all the people around them just find that going to work is more fun when all the pieces are fitting together.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

As I said, it’s hard enough to be challenging, rewarding enough to be rewarding, so why would I ever stop doing it?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. In our company, in our capacity as fractional executives, it’s kind of the gig economy. Everybody talks about the gig economy. It’s kind of sort of what it is. I had a conversation this morning with a young guy that was starting a company, and he said, “You can’t and should not afford me as a full-time CTO, but boy, you sure need me for some foundational things to get off the ground.” Having seen it dozens of times. I know exactly what he needs. He has no idea, but he knows he needs help. That gets you up in the morning, regardless of how much you get paid for it.

Ted Stone:

Back to that first thing, it’s called Butler Parkland, as the client.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

It’s a not-for-profit. He’s never going to raise money. He’s just endowed the not-for-profit with the money that he made owning and running this private equity firm. I’ve been there since July of 2018 and I met our business plan through 26, at least. We’ve got a full-time controller on the team. She’s great. An accounting team, that’s great. We check in every week, how are we doing? Inevitably, one of those weekly check-ins turns into a, “Hey, we’re struggling with this. What do you know about it? We’re now in the middle of…” As I said, the guys built parks from Southern Patagonia to Northern Maine. He’s got $100 million of physical assets in the field.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Ted Stone:

And gosh, shouldn’t we have a fixed assets tracking system so that we can have a constant maintenance program for that?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

We just finished putting in a modern accounting system from Sage Intacct, and now we’re kicking off the project of activating the fixed asset module within it so that we can do long-range planning of maintenance needs for all of these parks. That’s more than an hour a week. Now, that’s turned into a project and we’re going to fix that and then we’re going to move into something else.

Todd Merrill:

Super valuable. You’ve done it once or probably a bunch of times and you go, oh, a fixed asset tracking program.

Ted Stone:

Over the course of my career. Now, why I went down that rabbit hole is I just got back from one of their parks in Maine. Where can you ride a mountain bike to 15 miles away from the nearest road on what … crusher fine is the surface that he puts on all his trails. It’s like what you would find on an old-fashioned track with the old cinder tracks. Now, 14 miles, 10 feet wide, where you can take a baby stroller.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Ted Stone:

Now, through, and other than that path, it’s the wild woods of Northern Maine.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Some scary bears up there from what I understand, right?

Ted Stone:

Yeah, and they’ve probably figured it out too. And at the end of the 14 miles, there’s a warming hut. So, when you get there on your cross-country skis, and it’s a warming hut like something you would see at Deer Valley, Utah.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, wow! Nice.

Ted Stone:

I just, he’s just, how can you not get excited about something like that? Of getting youth excited about being outdoors, exercising aerobically, and I can run, every client I’ve got, I can tell them like, wow, isn’t it cool to be able to help these people run their business better?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah. So, kind of coming back to the question you asked me to ask 42 times. So personally, I think this is a trend, right? People want to slow down and maybe shift gears into something else but they’re not going to stop, right? So, there’s interesting, probably not a second wind, but a 10th wind of your career we’re going to watch that segment. You know, what are people who’ve been successful going to do now that they’re not running a business day-to-day, they’re going to start something interesting and do something kind of cool, you know, with their experience and their resources. They’re not going to just go, you know, move to Sarasota and play golf probably. That’s kind of cool.

Ted Stone:

I wasn’t thinking it when I started down the Butler Parklands story, but now Gilbert Butler, the founder of this firm turns 88 next week.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

So, silver tsunami. I mean, he’s not even a baby boomer. He’s greatest generation stuff, who went from a mile a minute running a private equity firm to a mile a minute building parks And that’s his purpose in life.

Todd Merrill:

Sure

Ted Stone:

And it’s kept him young.

Todd Merrill:

So do you think, I guess kind of the first thing I thought of was, you know, there’s people that want to slow down. There’s going to be a lot of businesses for sale or takeover. Is this going to spur a lot of maybe M&A activity from private equity, you know, an opportunity there? Or is it going to be, you know, I get a lot of inbound on LinkedIn from people who want me to buy a franchise or buy a business. Is that going to be a, like, we haven’t seen that a lot, but are individuals just going to go and purchase these businesses or is there some kind of interesting opportunity there, do you think?

Ted Stone:

All over the place. I’m going to exaggerate to make the point. Every private equity firm I know has a rollup strategy for a bunch of small consulting businesses or small something businesses that grew up. When something happened in the late 60s or early 70s, somebody in their 20s at that time founded and started a business. Now they’re ready to exit. You can buy those businesses for four times EBITDA, you put them together, it becomes $200 million in revenue, and now you can sell it for eight times EBITDA.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, wow!

Ted Stone:

So, and it’s driven by this excess of the supply of small businesses that need to get sold.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Like HVAC, Dentist.

Ted Stone:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

Plumber

Ted Stone:

A few years back, it was Arisa Consultants.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Yeah. Arisa went in place in 1974, I think, and a whole lot of, you know, insurance salespeople and other folks early in their careers at that point set up their little Arisa consulting firms. Now, reach retirement age late in the last century or early in this century. And there were at least three that I know of, rollups of, let’s pull all of those things together. Because everyone developed a little bit differently, you know, some had a wealth management piece, some had a tax planning piece, some had a pension management piece, put 30 of those together, and learn from each other, and you create something that’s way bigger, way more valuable.

Now, I actually had a client taking advantage of the same thing with pool service companies. The guy that comes, not the people that install your pool, but the people that come every week and rake out the bottom, make sure that the pH is right, minor, minor repairs. It’s another one of those businesses that lots of people got into when they were in their 20s, because it was really easy to get into the business. Now they’re in their 60s or 70s, and they want to sell. And these are anywhere from a $2 million to $10 million business. And this company is now, last I checked with Gary, I think he’s up to 15 of them, a little over $75 million run rate, getting back-office synergies, don’t have to have 15 billing departments, one will do, thank you. I buy a hell of a lot more chemical now, so I get way better pricing on the chemicals. And he’s 15 families who built businesses and wanted to go do something else. He’s given them the retirement fund for them to go do that.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Yeah, that’s happening. And then, so we talked about economic conditions. So, there’s kind of like a three gears in the growth curve. You have friends and family, angel investment, and then you kind of have that venture capital, and then you have private equity, kind of at the late stage. Maybe we talk about conditions on the ground. I haven’t seen very much venture activity. Something weird happened like 2020, ‘21, ‘22, and then the interest rates started going up, and then everything kind of got out of whack, it seems like. And then, I don’t know what happened in the venture, but I definitely see all this stuff going on in private equity, kind of cleaning up mature companies. And they seem to have a lot of dry powder. What do you see? You see it differently, or can you add any color to that?

Ted Stone:

I see it some, mostly through other partners in the New York metro area.  I’m the managing partner for our New York practice. You know, 20 of us in total, 12 of us are CFOs. So, I’ve got 11 other CFOs seeing this, and some of them have venture-backed businesses or businesses that are trying to raise venture money. And people are adjusting. I mean, the venture capital world went crazy in the early years of the pandemic. You know, really big checks. Interest rates were still zero or close to it. As that shifted in the last two or three years, yeah, you now need venture capitalists to remember that when money is not free. The math that you do to figure out if this is a good investment begins to change.

Todd Merrill:

Are we back to profits matter, revenue matters?

Ted Stone:

Yeah, I think so, except in a couple of areas. All the biotech stuff, everybody knows you’re not going to make a nickel until you’ve got a commercial product. So that engines continued. It ebbs and flows, but it hasn’t stopped from what I’ve seen. Obviously, AI, you don’t have to make money. You just need to attract eyeballs and show better response scores, reduced error rates, that kind of stuff. It’s not a piece of my practice, but what I see is that it’s changing, but not drastically. Just people are raising their standards.

Todd Merrill:

So, it wouldn’t be a podcast without saying the word AI. So, there’s this kind of weird thing going on where I think you see a lot of companies laying off and then laying off and then laying off. It feels to me like the dot-com boom and bust did, where it’s just kind of like we’re just trying to survive until the next kind of uptick. But then some people come in and they say, “Oh, AI is going to eat everybody’s jobs.” I kind of don’t think that’s happening, but I do think people are retooling in some interesting ways. Do you have a theory on that? Is this a secular downturn? Are we going to see some gains here in the short term from optimization?

Ted Stone:

I’m putting two questions together there.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

The economy, I think, is probably headed for a slowdown. I’m not actually going to turn to negative.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

I don’t think it’s driven by AI. I think it’s driven by all the other things that are driving uncertainty in the market.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Ted Stone:

Now, what I’m seeing with several of my clients is that AI is just helping them go to market way more intelligently…

Todd Merrill:

…yeah

Ted Stone:

Or offer a way cooler service offering to their clients. I have a client that does institutional medical second opinions focused only on serious and complex diseases. So, if your doctor tells you you need a knee replacement, that ain’t us. If you’ve got some form of pulmonary cancer and you want a second opinion on that, that’s us. And it’s not, you know, Dr. Merrill is smarter than Dr. Stone. It’s the Pulmonary Oncology Department at Mass General Hospital, Dana-Farber, is going to pull together a cancer panel. You’re going to have six different physicians looking at your cancer from all of their different perspectives. 25% of the time, we change the diagnosis, you know, the initial diagnosis; 75% of the time, we change the treatment plan.

Todd Merrill:

Oh!

Ted Stone:

And we have to translate some really sophisticated research scientists’ opinions about, you know, okay, this is why we think that this is the correct diagnosis and the correct treatment plan. We have to then translate that to, you know, a really sick, you know, 52-year-old father of four who just got this really horrible diagnosis. And we’re using AI to take that really sophisticated thing and say, restate this for a 52-year-old metal worker with a high school education. And that then gives us the script for our nurses to explain to the guy. And after they’ve had that call, you know, a transcript of, you know, this is what we said. And the feedback we get is, you know, I take this list that you gave me into every doctor’s appointment as I go through the treatment plan to make sure I’m asking the right questions. I’ve got another prospective client. There’s built-in iPhone app. Plunk it down on the table while you’re talking to your oncologist or whatever. Records what he said, uses AI to translate it into these are the four critical things he said, these are the three next steps you’ve agreed to, and helps you book the next appointment. He’s not taking anybody’s job away. But he’s vastly improving the service that that oncologist in that hypothetical case can deliver…

Todd Merrill:

… yeah

Ted Stone:

Probably improving an outcome. And by improving outcomes, probably saving some, you know, statistically some fraction of lives. Now, that’s pretty neat stuff.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. It’s on the margin. I think there’s a lot of creative things that are now going to come to market that might not have made sense or might have been too difficult or too weird or technical. Now, the barrier to getting that into reality is diminished. Why wouldn’t you do something like that?

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Now we can have a conversation, just looking at each other, talking like humans, and then not have to worry about taking detailed notes. And then, boy, that’s a win. That wasn’t happening before in any way.

Ted Stone:

Right

Todd Merrill:

I’m hopeful that we’re going to see a renaissance of a million little flowers blooming with all these little things that can turn into big things.

Ted Stone:

Yeah. You’re probably on some of the same news feeds I am. There was one today that Y Combinator is just, you know, they’re soliciting now for their next class. And one of the things that they’re specifically looking for is the next 10-person, $100 billion valuation company.

Todd Merrill:

$100 billion?

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Wow! It’s not a billion unicorn. It’s a hundred X?

Ted Stone:

Yeah. 10 people leveraging AI to create billions of dollars of value per employee rather than, you know, if you can get millions per employee, pretty good.

Todd Merrill:

I’m seeing that pressure on the early-stage investors now, where in order to get any kind of serious institutional money attention, they’re now expecting you as table stakes to get to a million ARR with AI, you know, doing whatever it is you do. And then I want to see, you know, a hockey stick, you know, within 18 months, and then ideally an exit within literally 24 to 36 months. I sat in a Southeast Investor Forum like two weeks ago, and that’s literally what they said. We’re not going to do a deal unless I got to put one round of money in, and you’re going to exit within two to three years. I thought, good Lord. Like, that’s the pressure, you know? And so, yeah, you better have 10 guys in a shop and leverage the heck out of AI and have a story to get to a hundred billion, not just a billion.

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

It’s nuts.

Ted Stone:

I’m hoping that particular VC was just toward the end of their, you know, their contract period with their LP. So, they needed an in-and-out fast because, yes, it allows you to scale really quickly, but what about the business that takes six years?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I think that particular set of folks was tired because they had had 10- and 12-year, 15-year portfolio holds as a first money in, you know?

Ted Stone:

And an LP contract is typically 10 years, and you can extend it once or twice to get it out to 12 years, but then you got to give them their money back.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

If you’re two years away from, geez, we got to give them their money back, you have a different perspective on investments than if you’re in your first one or two years of the LP deal.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. You had some phenomenal private equity stories through your career. You want to share a couple of them with us?

Ted Stone:

Sure. Do you have one in particular you like?

Todd Merrill:

Velocity Express, you want to talk about that one?

Ted Stone:

Yeah, for sure. It’s a best of both worlds experience. Majority owned by a private equity firm, but publicly traded.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, wow!

Ted Stone:

So had all the pleasures of quarterly earnings calls and 10-Ks and 10-Qs and 8-Ks every time somebody got a cold. With a private equity, we got to build for an exit. And it probably was sort of an early version of the silver tsunami thing. They’d been rolling up last-mile delivery providers all over the country. And FedEx and UPS and the Postal Service obviously do last-mile delivery. But this was the specialized last-mile delivery for, you know, it’s got to be delivered not before 10 o’clock or not. It’s got to be delivered in a window between 10 and 10:30. So a lot of pharmacies use that. 

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Staples.com was our biggest customer, actually. The use case for that is that you’re sitting there at 10 o’clock at night, and you’ve got a presentation that you got to deliver the next morning, and oh, crap, the printer is empty. The ink has run out. You go to staples.com, you place the order, and you don’t trust the receptionist to pick up the packet from FedEx and bring it back to you. So, you click the button on staples.com to pay an extra five bucks to have the driver bring the package to your office.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Ted Stone:

And that’s invaluable service. But if UPS did that, they’d never make their 100 deliveries a day because the drivers would be wandering around the office building looking for Todd’s office. So, we did that. Low barriers to entry, so lots of people did it in their area. But Staples doesn’t want to deal with 100 different local people. They want to have one place they can go and cover the whole damn country.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Ted Stone:

So, we built this up, private equity firm that funded it, built it up, took it public, but never integrated all the businesses.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, man!

Ted Stone:

So, it was just two dozen businesses like this. And they didn’t have enough geographic coverage to be a one-stop shop for everybody else. Somebody else had done the same thing. Built up a company, dozens of predecessor companies built up, not integrated. Let’s buy them, integrate the whole thing. We’ll have a nationwide scale. We’d done the geographic mapping to say this fills in the holes in each of our maps. Now, they’d been trying to do this thing for, gosh, three years before I got there. Now, they’d been through their series A, B, C, D, all the way up to the letter P, preferred style.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, God!

Ted Stone:

Hadn’t made money. They’d had four CFOs in the previous 24 months.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, wow!

Ted Stone:

And I went there in February, got my arms around it. We closed on the financing in June, the acquisition in July, dove into the integration. By Q1 of the following year, we were profitable just because the integration plan had worked. And it was a pretty intense period between February and July. We raised our series. It was 125 million bucks that we raised through our series Q preferred stock and a convertible bond and a bank line.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha, yeah.

Ted Stone:

And the other company we were buying was a public company. And there was some personal animosity between the two CEOs.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, geez.

Ted Stone:

So, I was in the room where we… you’ve done a few deals in the course of your career. And we’ll figure out what we do with curse words and podcasts.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

One of the calls ended up with a, fuck you.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Ted Stone:

And the deal survived, the fuck you.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, man.

Ted Stone:

Ultimately closed.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, wow!

Ted Stone:

Obviously a very intense period of time.

Todd Merrill:

Sure. And you’re a fly on the wall as a CFO. You get to be in all these meetings, but you don’t have to take the slings and arrows, but you have to kind of dodge them sometimes, right? That’s got to be exciting.

Ted Stone:

And wing a few. And yeah, I mean, the CEO and I, he was so grateful to finally have a CFO. Remember, he’d been through four CFOs in the previous two years. To finally have a CFO that could stand with him, reinforce the points that he needed to make, amplify where he needed to be amplified, pick up the pieces if he said something dumb without making him look bad. And all of those things contributed to our getting the deal done. And then all the people on the other side began to figure out, maybe he’s a guy we could talk to. Maybe that’s a way to get the message across that the bankers are struggling with. And then I became the back channel for some of that stuff as well, going in both directions.

Todd Merrill:

Gosh. Diplomacy, right? In those situations, somebody is going to have the back channel to Russia. 

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And it’s always people problems that derail a lot of that stuff, right? And even like the integration, you probably had one or two friction points.

Ted Stone:

The integration was a very successful failure. The finance piece of it all came together, standardized processes across 106 locations all around the country. People voluntarily complying with this, embracing, we’re all going to do this the same way. We didn’t do that on our sales and operations side. It was much more my way or the highway. And we drove a substantial fraction of revenue out of the company because all these mom-and-pop guys that sold into us, they still belong to the same country club and the same rotary club. And they’d say, crap, I’ll just go set up another business. I don’t want to put up with this BS. I’ll go set up another business and I’ll take 40% of my clients, are all members of the rotary club with me. We’ll all go over and do that. Now, had we done the same kind of get everybody actively involved from both of the finance teams in my case, we do it this way, we do it this way. We’ve always been frustrated about this. Yeah, we too, finding the right way together, got buy-in from all the people on both sides that, yeah, we really can do this. It wasn’t what I thought it was going to be when we started. It wasn’t what my counterpart in the other company thought it was going to be when we got started. But it was better. So, the whole change management piece and the alignment of people piece that you are referring to, it worked in the finance and back-office side. It didn’t work so well on the sales and operations side. So, thank God we got back to profitability in a big damn hurry. And then we had to stay profitable as the revenue went away.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah, and it’s sometimes you just have to take your lumps and then get past it. And then if there’s kind of friction on personalities that are going to hold you back, go ahead and take the hit and move on.

Ted Stone:

Yeah, and that’s a legit conversation. You do have to put your foot down sometimes.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, wow!

Ted Stone:

So, when do you put your foot down and when do you collaborate, compromise, find the way forward? If you get too focused on compromising, you’ll never get anything done.

Todd Merrill:

So, there’s an interesting piece here with people. So, you have mom and pa on a couple million-dollar business, nice little business and they all roll up. What’s the spot for somebody like that? It suddenly went from, hey, let’s take Friday off and go water skiing or to now you have quarterly financial reports. It’s a totally different culture.

Ted Stone:

Yeah, yeah.

Todd Merrill:

It’s got to be shocking. Do they stick around? Do you find that some of them can grow into the new organization or do you just kind of say, hey, we’d love to have you around, you’re not in charge anymore?

Ted Stone:

Yeah. A lot of that you have to kind of address in my, says me, you need to address that hypothetically before the deal.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

This is going to change. Being owned by a private equity firm is different from being owned by you and your husband. And these are what the differences look like. We’d love to have you because you’ve got these relationships, you’ve got these skill sets, people respect you and like to work for you, all the reasons why you might want somebody to stick around, but you can’t do it the way you used to because we’ve got new owners that have expectations and ways of doing things and they’ve just put a lot of money in your pocket. So, we’d love you to adapt to doing things their way. And we’ll help you. But if you don’t want to, either don’t sell to us or figure out a way to achieve your objectives where we achieve ours.

Todd Merrill:

Just be honest.

Ted Stone:

Yeah, it’s easy to do hypothetically. Third to the last full-time gig, I worked with a partner to develop an investment thesis to consolidate the custom market research industry. Four, but three major players, a bunch of midsize and then this really long tail of little companies. Elaine had done this twice before for two of the three big ones, rolling up a lot of little ones to create a service line. And she said, “Yeah, I want to do this for myself this time. So, we put this deal together. We had three companies, all very interested, got a private equity firm backing us. And then we got into the very clear, it’s Elaine’s vision. She’s going to be the CEO. And then we got to exchanging term sheets and it was like, oh, wait a minute. You meant me? I’m the CEO. No, I don’t want that.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha. Yeah. Oh, no.

Ted Stone:

It’s one thing to have a hypothetical conversation when it gets really concrete.

Todd Merrill:

Right. You’re going to take your 15 million bucks for selling the business to us. But you’re not going to be in charge anymore. You’re going to be part of the team. 

Ted Stone:

Right

Todd Merrill:

If you want to be or not.

Ted Stone:

If you want to be. Well, in any case, I mean, the deal wasn’t done yet. So, they backed out of the deal. Said, “Hey, I’m perfectly happy running my own business. Why would I sell to something else? No matter how compelling the business is, I like what I’m doing.”

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. It’s a hard thing to be the big cheese, to go to a member of the team and not be in charge.

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Yep

Ted Stone:

So we did that twice before we finally just said, yeah, we’ll let somebody else figure this one out. And both went out and found other jobs.

Todd Merrill:

So, Velocity Express, that was cool. Bunch of little companies, roll them up, create efficiencies where you streamline back-office departments, obviously there. Let’s talk about a contrast deal. The … what was the one, what’s the executive, the office telephone company you were telling me about?

Ted Stone:

[00:40:05 – inaudible]

 Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Okay.

Ted Stone:

Another public company, three businesses. The core business had been what’s referred to as CPE (customer premise equipment). You know, when offices had office phone networks with a switchboard, a receptionist in the front, blah, blah, blah. And then call centers that came out of that. That’s what they did. Some of that technology, they poured into hospital environments for the nurse call system. You know, you’re sitting in your bed and you want the nurse to show up, and they won’t answer the button that you keep pushing. And then out of their call center business, they created call centers for lottery organizations. Now, a lot of Native American lottery organizations. And as the internet came along, this is in the late 90s. Now, you know, people started saying, well, you know, why 1-800 lottery? How about elottery.com?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

Now, so they started, one of the very first people to think about, think through, how do I create an environment where people want to place, you know, make their lottery picks online, comply with the regulations in each state where they’re authorized. And, you know, in the late 1990s, that was a pretty cool place to be.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Three very different businesses.

Ted Stone:

Yeah. And one was pretty exciting. Now, the two equipment businesses were losing money. So, the board brought in a new CEO who determined that the previous CFO was not the guy he could work with well. So, he brought me in. We turned around the two businesses, the healthcare equipment business and the telecommunications equipment business, and sold them to larger players in the industry. And instead of having to go out and do an IPO for eLottery, we just gave a pile of money.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Having sold the other businesses.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Ted Stone:

And we spent the better part of a year as a top 10 Yahoo Finance chat board with all the excitement about, you know, this company is going to be emerging. It’s a really cool company buried in this, you know, legacy old technology business. But think of the great things that are going to happen when that’s done. So, we got it done. In order to get it done, we found a buyer for the telecom business pretty quickly. I didn’t find a buyer for the healthcare business, but I was pretty jazzed about it. So, I put together a group of management. We went out and found a private equity firm to back us to be the buyers of the healthcare business.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Now, we brought that deal to the board and then the board did what they had to do. It’s a public company board. They’ve got to be responsible to the shareholders. They took our offer and just shopped it back to everybody else who had said no thank you before. And one of them was a Fortune 100 company and they came in with $1 more than our bid and no financing contingency. So, I got sold.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

The business got sold. The funding was unavailable for eLottery. We’d hired a CFO for eLottery at that point so that I could focus on leading the healthcare buyout. And they went off. They’re not one of the survivors of that whole, you know, there were a lot of really cool internet companies that didn’t get through it. They either got consolidated or gazumped by somebody else. They were one of them. Took them a few years before it happened, but it was a really fun time, you know, to be in the top 10 on Yahoo chat.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

And not be able to log in and answer because God knows, you know, you don’t want the officers of a public company getting into a chat room.

Todd Merrill:

Do not touch. Yeah.

Ted Stone:

You know, with a bunch of individual investors.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, you got to be super careful. So, if the first one was a roll-up. What do you call this? What’s that play where you take an existing business and you spin out? Is that a spin out or is it, what’s the term?

Ted Stone:

Yeah. Close enough. Break down, sell off. Yeah. We found the piece that was most valuable and it got it funded.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Polishing the gem, I guess.

Ted Stone:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

And then spinning out sectors. And you never know, right? You never know which one of the pieces of the business is going to make it or be valuable for whatever reason. It’s kind of fun. It’s fun to think about these little chunks. They’re like little Legos. You snap together and make something really cool and then bust it apart and, you know, do something again.

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

You had another one, Solution, that sounded pretty fun.

Ted Stone:

Yeah. That was all about culture.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

Four companies that a private equity firm had partnered with others to do, to roll together all serving information needs of hospitals. Some of their marketing needs, you know, how do I segment, you know, how many people with this disease stayed in my service area? How do I reach them? One with clinical needs. What’s the right treatment to produce the best outcomes? Some with operational financial needs. How do I organize treatment plans in a way to make some money on this procedure, this procedure, this procedure? All working off much of the same data. And there’s a Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services, you know, has a form where they collect all this data. And it’s publicly available. Anybody can get it. You and I can download it and put it on our laptop. But the analysis of it and repurposing of it, you know, it’s at a time when terabytes were considered big. We had 17 of them.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Okay.

Ted Stone:

Four completely different cultures. You had one that was all about client service. One that was all about the really cool analytical interface so you could really torture the numbers and do this stuff. We had one that was all about the quality of the data is just pristine, no errors in there, whatsoever. It’s a Six Sigma company. Another one that was, nobody’s got a bigger database than this one. Now, how do those four cultural approaches to the market merge together? Well, we got the leaders of all those businesses together and literally locked ourselves in a conference room for a week. Now, with me sort of providing it, here’s the financial returns that we’re seeing in all of these things and just what we can afford to pay. And this is what the investment thesis says we need to earn in order to stay in the good graces of our private equity backers, and started picking, you know, the best of here, the best of here. I think we did actually move a couple of people from Company A to Company C, you know, start cross-fertilizing. The CEO and I had offices in four different cities around the country so that we could kind of be the corporate bumblebees of making sure culture came together.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

And over the next couple of years, it did. It exceeded our profit goals, exceeded our new growth goals, vast improvements in our renewal case. All of these companies, you know, had problems with not getting people to renew, you know, a three-year contract. And you want to be embedded in the way a client uses your product so they cannot do business with you.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Ted Stone:

And we weren’t doing that very well. None of the companies were doing that very well, but we got way better at it. Our renewal rate went from the high 50s to the high 80s over the next three years as we took a whole bunch of cost savings from merging all these businesses together and vastly ramped up our new product spending so that we could do what I just said, you know, create a product that’s so embedded that the client just can’t imagine doing business without us.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So that’s another strategy, right? It’s an intentional roll-up, strategic put together.

Ted Stone:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

You know, we did one of those. I was in one of the tiny little companies, it was like 10 million, you know, and then the acquiring company came in and they did that PowerPoint of, here’s why we’re buying you. And then here’s the next three that we got to figure out. Your pie piece goes here and this is what we’re doing, everybody in. And then everybody kind of went, “Oh yeah, that’s really cool.” You know, we can help you. And then, you know, a couple of people maybe don’t belong or they wish they were in company CD or E. And that, I think the cross-pollination is super important. You kind of, you know, you can’t be an island, right?

Ted Stone:

Yep. Now, I did not deal together, the CFO with the company that helped, that was there when the company was put together, with the CEO who was there when the company was put together, both were pushed out after a year. And again, I came in, the board put in a new CEO. He said, “I need a different CFO to get it done.” So they were a year into not getting this integration done before Chuck and I joined and put it back together.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, that’s so cool. And then it kind of worked out and then you go organic and now you’re a nice midsize company who can grow organically.

Ted Stone:

They sold to Thomson Reuters, to the Thomson Reuters Health and the PE firm got a decent return.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Very cool. Yeah, so it’s like three different ways PE works, and then, you know, like PE is not like venture, they’re going to invest, you know what the play is, right? They’re going to invest, they’ll catch you early, invest a bunch of money, get you to go fast, and then sell to somebody, a corporate or a go public maybe that used to be a thing. But like private equity, there’s all kinds of cool things, and they all talk to each other and buy and sell for different reasons. It’s kind of fascinating.

Ted Stone:

Yeah. I’ve got a current client with TechCXO where they have a director of finance. My real role with them is she’s a first-time top finance person. We’ll call her CFO, that’s not her title and it shouldn’t be her title yet because although she’s the top finance person, she’s not a full scope strategic CFO. You know, that’s my job to help her get there. But in the meantime, they have a 51% shareholder that they brought in back in 2018 with a strategy in the industry with some really neat ideas about the synergies that a strategic in the industry could bring to this farther down the food chain engineering-driven company. But it hasn’t worked out. Certainly, the pandemic kind of kicked a lot of things around. So, seven years later, they’ve kind of agreed. If you could get somebody to buy us out for what we put into the company back in 2018, we’d like to do that. And the 49% owner, who’s one of the founders, said, “I’d like to have a partner in here that’s actually doing all the cool stuff we talked about years ago.”

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, better partner.

Ted Stone:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Not the wrong, you know, not that anybody’s good or bad, it’s just not a fit. Right?

Ted Stone:

Yeah. So, we’re in the process of figuring out how we are going to recapitalize the 51% shareholder? And there’s another private equity firm that’s rolling up. The company does what’s known as building management systems. That’s the systems behind the scenes that keep your office a nice, comfortable 72 degrees, even when it’s 98 outside or when it’s 10 below zero outside. So, regulating all the various HVAC equipment, lighting, elevators, other plug loads. They’re pretty sophisticated systems. And there’s a lot of small companies that do it. The equipment comes from a few big ones, Honeywell, Johnson Control, Siemens. The major, major companies sell the equipment, but they don’t do the installations in the buildings. They’ve got this whole network of folks the size of my client, anywhere from 10 to 75 million bucks. But there’s a private equity firm now who’s rolling them up. They started in Europe. They bought their first US company a year ago, and they’re looking at my client as potentially being the second US company in that rollup. In that case, I don’t think it’s going to work. The terms of it, they’re a control investor. They’re not interested in sharing. They want the CEO of my client to be a shareholder, but a 20% shareholder in his company or a 5% shareholder in the parent company. And we’ve worked out the economics. It’s not a good deal for my client. So, we’re now looking at an ESOP.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, okay.

Ted Stone:

They’ve introduced them to an investment bank that specializes in ESOPs. They do like 50 or 60 a year. So, they’ve got a playbook for if this goes this way on your ESOP playbook. If that, go the other way. With a lot of people, ESOPs have this reputation, it’s kind of too damn hard and you don’t get as much money and so on and so forth. And because every company has so many… its own individual things that are important to them. One of the phrases that the guys at this particular bank have talked about is, if you’ve done one ESOP, you’ve done one ESOP.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, right. Yeah, it’s all messy.

Ted Stone:

On ESOPs, you know about the one you did. These guys have been doing 50 or 60 a year for 10 years. They’ve done a lot. We’ve sat down with them and we’ve worked out, okay, we got to buy out the 51% holder early. You know, they want their money now. So, the first tranche of the ESOP refinancing needs to go to them. And then we’ve got to line up the bank financing to make that happen on terms that the business can live with so they can pay it back and go out and refinance it two years from now. Now, let’s start distributing money to the other shareholders and start distributing shares to the employees. That’s been a lot of fun.

Todd Merrill:

Yep

Ted Stone:

We’re early days in it right now. We’ve just signed an NDA and we’re filling a data room and they’re going to come back to us in early September with all the conditions that you’ve described that you want. I think your ESOP is going to look like this.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah. I have a buddy that’s doing that now. You know, he had a kind of, I don’t want to name names, but a blue-collar kind of business that did pretty well, double-digit millions a year. A couple of them were in partnership and then they did ESOP, and then set growth goals. So, they’re kind of in that early couple of years where you go into the office and all the employees are just like, “Hey, how’s it going? Here’s my card. What can I do for you?” You know, it’s neat. And they felt like, you know, all these people have been working with them for so long, like they wanted to share, but they kind of also wanted to exit. And then it was like, it’s a really neat, you know, it’s a neat kind of middle ground where we’re not selling to some soulless private equity on the West Coast or Boston or some weird place they’d never been to. But, you know, the founder’s Bubba’s still around, you know, and that’s good, right? And then we’re going to grow and then everybody’s going to get a little piece of it. And then at the same time, the cash exits for the founders who’ve spent a decade building this up and then need a little breathing room. It’s a good thing.

Ted Stone:

Yeah. This one fits so beautifully with what my client’s trying to accomplish that he’s in his mid-60s now. He’s in the same boat as I am, he loves running this business. He doesn’t want to retire anytime soon, but he also knows that he’s not immortal and that someday he will need to retire. And he frankly couldn’t retire from the business now because too much of it runs through him, which is a piece of my assignment there is to help build up the rest of the leadership team so that the business can run without him. And this is now creating kind of a five-to-seven-year glide path to his transferring ownership to the people that helped him build the business. And inspiring those people, they’re on their way to becoming owners and probably have the same experience that you saw in your buddy’s company. And it’s creating optionality for him as he goes along is, you know, how long do I want to stick with this? You know, creating accountability for his people too, yeah, we better hit these numbers so we can pay back that loan so that this good thing can happen for me.

Todd Merrill:

For us, for us, right.

Ted Stone:

For both, that’s right. For the company, us, and for me personally.

Todd Merrill:

Right

Ted Stone:

One of the problems of a lot of founder-driven businesses is you’re asking people to work their buns off to make that guy rich.

Todd Merrill:

Yes

Ted Stone:

Well, wouldn’t it be cooler if I were working my buns off to make that guy rich and me a little bit rich?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, well, I’ll get a taste. Yeah. In a much better culture. 

Ted Stone:

I’m excited about it. No, it’s been a lot of fun. And it’s, you know, it’s a day, a week for me, just helping the director of finance kind of learn what she needs to do to support this stuff, being a thought partner for the CEO to, you know, what about this question? What about that question on the deal? And helping him with, you know, how should we deal with this operational issue? You know, so, you know, we’re about to spend a day, you know, at an offsite that I’ll be invited to, along with a fractional CHRO to plot strategy for the next 30 months.

Todd Merrill:

Nice

Ted Stone:

By the end of ‘27.

Todd Merrill:

So, I want to ask you about something you did earlier in your career, the Executive Forum

Ted Stone:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

That seems like something you stuck with, and that’s a peer group. I find that those things are super valuable. You want to kind of opine on your experience?

Ted Stone:

I love to. The group was founded in 1995. I joined in April of ‘98 when I was leaving Thomson Corporation. The group was founded on three principles. The only people who are in it are C-level executives who have been C-level executives for at least 10 years. You know, our definition of a C-level executive is you’re setting policy and then leading large groups of people to execute it. Now, it is purposefully the whole C-suite. 40% of the group are general managers, CEOs, COOs, division presidents. The other 60% is the rest of the C-suite. Literally the rest of the C-suite, attorneys, IT people, HR people, and obviously some CFOs. If you all have that in common, then everybody in your network looks at you as you’re a C-level person. I mean, it’s not, right? Someday, wow, Todd’s going to be an amazing CEO someday. It’s Todd is an amazing CEO. The second thing we look for is this pay it forward DNA. You bump into somebody who has a need, you just want to help them. Don’t worry about whether it’s a quid pro quo. So, you surround yourself with 500 people who are trying to help you. You’re probably going to get some help. In 1998, the group was 65 people. Today, it’s 500.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Ted Stone:

And the third thing that we say is you have to be unemployed to get in, but you join for life.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

It starts out with that sort of period in an executive’s life, you know, when you’re kind of most fragile. I mean, you asked me who I am. You asked me who I was. I said, I’m a CFO. But what do I say when I’m unemployed? So, it’s a tough time in any executive’s life when you’re in transition and we can help you through the transition because of all the networks of all those members. And we’ve built up a whole lot of skills on how to do the focus career networking that you need to do, a whole bunch of skills on how to think through what do I want to do next? Do I really want to do another executive gig? Do I want to stay in this industry? Values clarification stuff. Those are the three criteria to be in the group. I joined in ‘98. I landed with Executone within about three months. We sold Executone off, became an “active” member again, landed with Solucient four months after that, etc., etc. So, you go back and forth between helping out. Everybody’s helping the people in transition find their next jobs. But when you’re in transition, we’re really helping. We have eight TechCXO partners who are also Executive Forum members.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, no kidding. Okay. Yeah.

Ted Stone:

Just, the overlap, you know, 10 years in the C-suite, that’s a requirement to join TechCXO. We have our rule number one, no A-holes. That’s kind of the same as pay it forward DNA. We require when you join TechCXO, this is a career change. This is not a creative job search. Now, I want to change my career and be a fractional CEO, CTO, CEO, whatever. And the metaphor on the other side is, I am an executive. I just happened to be in transition now, and I’m looking for my next executive role. So, there’s enough in parallel that there’s, I’ve probably got two other Executive Forum members who are considering joining TechCXO. It just makes sense for a lot of people.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. And, you know, you hear, EO and YPO and Vistage. And, you know, I think it’s important to find your tribe and get professional support. You know, not necessarily in your swim lane, in that org chart, but it’s important at the executive level, to kind of branch out and have friends in other disciplines who can help you.

Ted Stone:

That’s a huge piece of the power of the Executive Forum is it is the whole darn C-suite. The introductions you get, the advice you get on how to position yourself from somebody who is not in the same functional specialty as you are, is just really helpful. I’ve been there 20, what are we up to? 27 years so far.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! That’s pretty cool.

Ted Stone:

I’ll remain an EF member probably even after I retire.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Ted Stone:

Just for the fun of giving back to a whole bunch of people who have in common with me that they’ve been helping set strategy and leading large groups of people to execute.

Todd Merrill:

And the more you get, the more you want to give or you feel like you should, right?

Ted Stone:

Absolutely

Todd Merrill:

Ted, it’s been great having you here. You know, it’s all about getting out there in the world and make it happen. I imagine you have a couple of really cool travel stories. You got any you want to share with us today?

Ted Stone:

Very early in my career, I was working at Pfizer and heading up to the Tuck School where I got my MBA to do recruiting. Now, Tuck School is in Hanover, New Hampshire. You fly into the Lebanon, New Hampshire Airport. The Pfizer’s offices are on the east side of Manhattan. How do I get to Newark Airport to get my flight? Well, I jump on a helicopter at 34th Street, flying over to Newark, way faster than a taxi. And the trains weren’t running at the time. Now, somewhere over Jersey City, one of the rotors on the helicopter hit a seagull.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, no!

Ted Stone:

Very bad for the seagull, but also very bad for the helicopter because it had a dent in the end of one rotor. So, it was completely imbalanced. So, the rotor is going around like this instead of smoothly, it’s rattling all over the place. You can feel the whole helicopter shaking. So, the pilot said, I know what’s happening. Look at that, an abandoned baseball field over there. So, he swoops over the stands and lands the helicopter, thunk, right at shortstop in the middle of this abandoned baseball field in Jersey City. As he’s coming in to land, he says, don’t worry, folks, we’ve had a mechanical problem. We’ll get another helicopter in here and get you to Newark right away. Thump, we landed. Well, of course, the Jersey City police did not want two helicopters in their abandoned baseball field. So, they had to send a limo for us and it was rush hour. So, we got to Newark late. So I walk up to the New York helicopter desk at Newark airport and say, “Yeah, hey, I was on the flight ABC.” And the girl goes, “Oh my God, you were on the helicopter that crashed.”

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha!

Ted Stone:

“Yes, I was. I still need to get on a plane to go to Lebanon, New Hampshire. Can you help me?” So, she gets onto her computer screen and she says, “Oh, look at that. There’s a flight leaving LaGuardia in 45 minutes.” Now, great, I’m at Newark airport. LaGuardia is a long way away. “Don’t worry. We’ve got another helicopter leaving for there right now.” So I climbed on the next helicopter, flew over to the 34th street heliport, landed, picked up a passenger, dropped off a passenger. The helicopter got 100 feet up, 100 feet out over the East River, something right back down where it started.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, man!

Ted Stone:

“Oh, sorry, folks. We’d like you to take that helicopter over there.”

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Climbed on the third helicopter, got to LaGuardia, made the flight, made the substitute flight, got to Lebanon, got to Hanover, interviewed kids. But yeah, I finally got to Hanover about 2 o’clock in the morning, and I called my wife, who was sound asleep, hadn’t seen the news, and said, “Lynn, I just wanted you to know I’m okay.” “What? I’m glad to hear that.”

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

I believe in statistics. Helicopters just don’t crash that often. So…

Todd Merrill:

…except when they do.

Ted Stone:

Yeah, except when they do. Yeah, obviously I’m here.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! And so what’s the final tally on the planes, trains, automobiles count for that trip?

Ted Stone:

Three helicopters and an airplane.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

And then an airplane home.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Ted Stone:

Came back into LaGuardia, I think, and took a cab home. So yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. And then you walked for the rest of the week.

Ted Stone:

Happily, I live five blocks from the Pfizer’s office in Midtown Manhattan. So walking was what you did.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Heck yeah. Well, Ted, it’s been great having you here. How can people follow up with you after the show, on the internet if they want to get in touch with you?

Ted Stone:

Yeah. I am still that old school guy who likes email. Ted.stone@techcxo. That’s T-E-C-H-C-X-O dot com. I’m honored. It’s been surgically attached to me, just like it’s been surgically attached to everybody who’s watching this.

Todd Merrill:

Awesome. Well, Ted, thanks for coming today. It’s been really fun having you.

Ted Stone:

Oh, my pleasure. Oh, look, my flight’s about to leave.

Todd Merrill:

Oh God, it’s a duck. Okay, bye for now.

Ted Stone:

Thanks so much, Todd.