E68: The Complex World of Business Valuations with Scott Abels

Sarah Florer (00:17.228)
Welcome everyone to Alt Investing Made Easy. Thanks for joining us today. We're very excited today to have our new friend and colleague, Scott Abel, CPA and President of Precision Valuation Services. He is a specialist in complex business valuations, which is a topic I think is important to a lot of people actually. So thanks for joining us today, Scott.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (00:39.865)
Thank you for having me. Looking forward to the conversation.

Sarah Florer (00:42.208)
Me too.

Roland Wiederaenders (00:43.649)
Yeah, thanks for joining us, Scott. It's been great getting to know you and we'll give a shout out to Provisors. It's a networking group that we all belong to and that's where we met. then everybody that I've met through that group so far has been real great focus, but also friendly and you are no exception, Scott. It's been great getting to know you. And why don't we start out hearing a little bit little about your business and when, what

we're really headed towards is why does a company need to use your services?

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (01:20.153)
Absolutely. Thank you for the for the introduction there to you Roland. So a little bit about my background I'm a CPA by education, but most of my career my early career this first 25 years or so was in corporate America So my business was running businesses at places like Dell or Motorola And obviously you have to understand how the financials work how the business model works

And those are the basic things that you do in valuing a business, it turns out.

I'd love to tell you that I planned that 35 years ago, that I had the whole progression planned out, but it really just kind of happened. And after spending two-thirds of my career in corporate America, I started on my own. Initially, I started out, I called myself a virtual CFO, just doing some of the same kind of things for small businesses that I had been doing at Dell and Motorola.

And what I found was there was an opportunity there for business valuation. I had clients who needed to value their business. I think the first valuation I did was a client who wanted to buy out a minority partner of his business.

So that's when I kind of learned more about business valuation. I went away and got the credential, the CVA credential. I started doing valuation and I realized pretty quickly a couple of things. I realized that I love doing the work. So business valuation is like a business puzzle is what I tell people. Every one of these is different. So as a CFO, you may be doing the same thing over and over at a lot of different clients.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (03:05.903)
But as a as valuation professional, it's different every time and you get to look at a bunch of different business models and You know think about it if you were say you were a car guy and you love looking at classic cars And just think about you know What if somebody came and dropped off a really cool classic car in your driveway every two or three weeks and said hey Just tinker with it look under the hood, you know, try it out That's kind of the way it is for me with business valuation I get to look at business models the good ones and the bad ones and

everything in between. A couple other things that I realized too is I realized that as a business valuation professional there's not very many people around that do that and that do it exclusively. As a CFO it's very very competitive and there are a lot of really well qualified folks in Austin and around that do that. So to me it was almost a business decision there as well. And then lastly

You know since there's fewer people that do it the effective rates for business valuation are better than they are for a CFO. So when I put all those things together again, I'd like to say that I planned all this and everything but it really just kind of organically happened and as I started doing business valuations I realized that my background in corporate America and as a CFO consultant was really ideally suited to

in a way that very few valuation professionals have. Many of them are good at doing the calculations and such, but very few of them have been a CFO of a business or have run a large business organization.

So that's a little bit about my background. I've been in Austin for 35 years. My wife and I have been married for 35 years as well. so I've gotten to know Austin pretty well and I've gotten to know a lot of fine folks like you Roland and Sarah as well along the way. So our business, just a idea of what we do there. Got a small team, there's four folks,

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (05:14.655)
along with myself and we specialize we say that we specialize in the complex valuations we do the simple ones as well but but you know our team is especially

Sarah Florer (05:23.16)
Mm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (05:28.281)
skilled and experienced in some of the very more complex work coming from the big four accounting firms, some of the big offices, they've seen a lot of really complex stuff. So that's a little bit about my background, kind of how I got here and how Precision got started.

Roland Wiederaenders (05:48.06)
Hey, Sarah, let's talk. Part of what we're doing here is trying to educate investors and our audience members, maybe entrepreneurs. But what are the main circumstances when businesses need your services, Scott?

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (06:03.354)
Good question, Roland. So our services usually come because a client has to report something to the IRS. They have to report it to the Department of Labor. It's a GAAP accounting requirement.

Sarah Florer (06:13.506)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (06:19.897)
Those are those are some drivers of what we do more specifically though &A is a driver of that because at some point somebody is probably going to want to value that business that's being bought or sold and understand the issues within within EBITDA and

quality of earnings. Those are kinds of things that drive business for us. Other than that, it's things that may involve attorneys or CPAs, things like a divorce, things like having a new partner come in or leave a business, a business dispute. A state and trust is another area that we do quite a bit of work as well. And it's not because people think, I just want to do this. It's a good thing to do. It's because they got to report it to the IRS or somebody, to a court or

Sarah Florer (06:50.958)
Hmm.

Sarah Florer (06:59.352)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (07:07.555)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (07:09.829)
to the IRS or to, you know, as part of their GAAP financial reporting. So we get involved and typically, Roland, we get involved when an attorney or a CPA or a wealth planner reaches out to us. So most of the time the client is not confident in that or they may not even quite know what they need. So we are typically involved when one of their professional advisors, and again, it's usually gonna be attorneys when they get involved.

Sarah Florer (07:29.965)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (07:38.766)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (07:39.763)
and they would, if they got questions about valuation, that's when we would come into the picture.

Sarah Florer (07:45.166)
So Scott, just to go back to what you saying earlier, do you mind going into a little bit more about what would be a simple business valuation versus a complex one? I know every complex business valuation will be its own puzzle, which I love that term, a business puzzle. But that might help our audience just understand a little bit in concrete terms, maybe with an example or something.

Roland Wiederaenders (08:04.323)
Yeah.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (08:10.915)
Sure.

Sure, so a simple business valuation, kind of a standard one for us, would be one that's gonna be a single business entity. It really doesn't matter how large the revenue is so much, but the key is it's a single entity that has one set of financial statements, all right? And it doesn't have any interrelationships that are consolidations that roll up underneath there. So it's one business. Oftentimes it'll have just a handful of owners or maybe even just one shareholder. And it's gonna have one type of equity

Sarah Florer (08:25.24)
Huh. Yeah.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (08:41.721)
Usually they'll have common stock. And the financials are cleaned, so they've got a financial system that generates their financial statements and it ties to their tax returns.

Sarah Florer (08:49.303)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (08:53.613)
That in a nutshell is a simple valuation. When it gets complex is things like it may be a parent entity that has two or three sub entities underneath there that are different businesses that aren't complimentary to each other. They just happen to roll up under the same parent. Now the complexity there is you really have to go in and look at those individual sub entities as well to understand what's going on there because

Sarah Florer (08:56.334)
Mm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (09:23.547)
If they're doing different things on different trajectories, you need to understand, hey, this one's going away and this one's really going to be ramping up. You need to know those kinds of things in order to figure out what the forecast is for the business and how to do a discounted cash flow. Other things that make it complex in a divorce, when there's a dispute, there's lots of back and forth, there's lots of rebuttals, reports, there's lots of ticking and tying depositions, things like that.

Sarah Florer (09:35.617)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (09:53.42)
It makes it much more complex because as you both understand the standard is much higher when it's going to be going to court potentially All right Something else that makes it that makes it very complex is when you have multiple types of equity So it's not just common stock. It may be preferred. It may be several types of preferred There may be convertible debt warrants all of those types of things when you get into those things they multiply, know, it's it's not a you know, goes from from you

Sarah Florer (10:01.176)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (10:23.413)
twice or three times as much, it's almost an exponential multiplier when you do that. Because now you've got to value the business and then you've got to figure out how to split it between these different types of equity that all have different rights and responsibilities. And you have to weigh those against each other. There are methods that we use to do that, but they are complex and time consuming to do those. So that's a couple of examples, of the difference between complex and more of a standard valuation.

Sarah Florer (10:37.634)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (10:44.896)
Right.

Sarah Florer (10:52.012)
That was brilliant. I thought that was really clear examples.

Roland Wiederaenders (10:57.859)
Yeah, for sure. And I bet that the simple are few and far between.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (11:03.875)
Well...

They all start out simple, Roland, as you know. Every time I get the call, it's a simple valuation, you know, and it's not very big. you know, a lot of times I tell folks, it really doesn't matter how big they are, all right? How many zeros it has behind it is not what really drives the complexity. It's the business model and those other things I told you about. And so, you know, it's the same thing. If I go to the barber, it doesn't matter if I only have a half a head of hair, he's still gonna charge me for a full haircut, you know? It doesn't matter how small.

Sarah Florer (11:07.18)
You

Sarah Florer (11:25.506)
Yeah.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (11:35.436)
it is, that doesn't really drive the price at the end of the day. It really is the complexity. everybody starts out thinking it's not complex and then you ask a few questions. You know, and I'll always have this short conversation with the potential clients or the referral partner. You know, how many shareholders? How many entities? Oh, there's three different lines of business and they're all separate and they have their own financials. Well, it's not a single entity that we're valuing. It's really three or

Sarah Florer (11:40.227)
Yeah.

Sarah Florer (11:46.989)
Mm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (12:05.359)
forward now in order to get to the answer that you need. So yeah you're right they start out simple and a lot of them multiply pretty quickly.

Sarah Florer (12:05.774)
Hmm.

Sarah Florer (12:15.938)
I think we share that in common in our professions. I just need a simple agreement for this really simple deal that I've agreed on a paper with my friend. Yeah, it's just I'm going to pay you an hour. I wish I wish for you. really do. So over the course of your long experience with this, what would you say? Could you give us an anonymous example of like your favorite complex deal that you had to sort out?

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (12:25.987)
hour of your time. take any more than that.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (12:46.295)
You know, I'm glad you asked that question now because I've just been doing a couple of posts on LinkedIn recently about some of these cases and this one comes to mind. First of all, it was a divorce case, which immediately makes it adversarial and just makes it, you know, it ups the ante a notch or two. But the case was,

Sarah Florer (12:59.566)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (13:11.234)
the client that I represented was the business owner and this gentleman was an entrepreneur and so he was really good at cobbling together businesses.

just based on what the market and the day and time was, would go out and he was really good at understanding leading trends in the market for whatever it is. And he would go out and seize that opportunity and build a business and it may last for a few years. And then along the way, he would be doing that serially, right? So he's got two or three different business lines that are underneath one company name and one set of financials. Well, the other side,

The other valuation team who are very well known and very well respected just took one look at that and said, this is a $6 million a year revenue business. The business is worth several million dollars.

We looked at it and immediately I saw that it was several different lines of business and when we started asking a few questions and doing a little bit of analysis what we realized was that the main line of business that contributed 80 % of the profit he had he had missed the market signal on this thing and the market had completely leaped over him and he was basically having to liquidate the assets from that line of business because he had he had missed the opportunity he'd missed the next stage if you will of

Sarah Florer (14:33.826)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (14:34.267)
that particular industry. so now all of a sudden he's got a business, these other two lines of business were not big enough to even pay for the overhead and the overall business entity.

Sarah Florer (14:49.519)
wow.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (14:49.581)
He's laying off people and the business is still not break even. He can't borrow any more money because he's already over leveraged. The banks want to call their notes. We looked at it and what we realized pretty quickly was the value of the business was the assets that were left in these other two lines of business because all the assets in the main line of business were already pledged to the bank. There was nothing valuing them. And it was unsustainable. We said it was not going to continue as a going concern.

Sarah Florer (14:55.893)
Wow.

Sarah Florer (15:09.399)
Yeah.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (15:17.545)
And so our value was less than half a million dollars. And as it turns out, this is where my corporate America background kind of comes in. I love to package this stuff into an easy to understand presentation, which is kind of what we did. And we just showed with a number of different slides with the typical analysis that I would do in a business line of Dell.

Sarah Florer (15:21.036)
Wow.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (15:42.266)
And we showed, know, here's what's going on. Here's the three lines of business. Here's what the expenses are related. Here's the profit. Here's the key things that are happening underneath this. And when we got through, the expert on the other side was, he was kind of like, okay, well, I guess you're right on this. I mean, there was really no room for negotiation because the facts were clean cut and very clear, but you had to dig deep enough to find them.

Sarah Florer (15:50.52)
Hmm.

Sarah Florer (15:59.224)
Wow. Yeah.

Sarah Florer (16:07.159)
Yeah.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (16:08.467)
And I think that is just like the poster, you know, client for our business because we've got the background to go in there and do that deep analysis that a lot of people just frankly, other valuators may not have that, that background because they haven't done those things. So that's a long-winded answer to your...

Sarah Florer (16:15.928)
Mm.

Sarah Florer (16:27.309)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (16:32.75)
That's a great answer and a really important example because as you said earlier, this is something that you have to go defend in court potentially. And as an expert witness, know, it's, you have to be ready to defend. You don't want to be the other evaluator who's like, my God, I missed half this stuff. That's not the place you want to be if you're trying to win something or prove your point or just impose sense onto a complex or difficult situation.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (16:40.963)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (17:02.809)
Sarah, you know this way better than I do as an attorney, but my thought process when I'm working on a case like that is, as I'm putting together my report and the key findings, I'm reading this as though I'm being questioned on the stand. Why did you find this? What were the reasons that you decided on this or that?

Sarah Florer (17:19.33)
Mmm.

Sarah Florer (17:26.466)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (17:27.577)
And I'm assuming that I'm going to be cross-examined. And that's how we prepare our report is to already assuming that we're going to be called on those things. And obviously that's more complex than a basic valuation where you're just, you just, know, the person needs a value and they don't have anybody on the other side that's picking and poking on this thing.

Sarah Florer (17:35.757)
Wow.

Sarah Florer (17:50.605)
Yeah.

Roland Wiederaenders (17:51.897)
Well, you know, the other situation, not only, you know, court, but going before the IRS, you know, that's another department of labor you mentioned as well. I hadn't even thought about that. you know, one of the places that this comes up so frequently with our clients is granting of stock options to get the favorable employee incentive stock option treatment where you avoid taxation upon the grant. The one of the requirements is that the exercise price has to equal the

fair market value on the date of grant. And so you determine that specifically with the help of a qualified third party appraiser and their rules in the IRS and the code regarding how those appraisals must be done. And if you don't do it correctly, I mean, just extraordinarily adverse, you know, tax consequences and tax consequences for your employees, you know.

That would be awful, having employees angry at you because they got taxed on the... I'm sure that's happened somewhere before.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (18:56.499)
That is another one and you're right, I think the IRS is probably worse than the most difficult cross-examination in a courtroom. Because they don't have to be the smartest person in the room and they don't even have to know the rules because they're in charge and they can interpret them their way and they usually don't come down on your side. Their job is to find money and so they're really good at that.

Sarah Florer (19:03.051)
I was thinking that.

Sarah Florer (19:09.965)
Yeah.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (19:18.649)
And you know, I find sometimes it's harder to reason with people who really don't understand the depth of evaluation than it is with somebody else who does understand it and who's just, who is very...

You know going to ask you lots of pointed and detailed questions It's harder to debate with somebody else who doesn't really understand it's like, okay You got to prove it to me and I don't believe you whatever it is But yes, the IRS is a is a key thing there for things that you mentioned Stock options and such as that like a 409a valuation the Department of Labor comes in when we're doing a valuation of an ESOP plan for example that you might set up business So yeah, those are

Roland Wiederaenders (19:55.424)
Mmm, okay.

Sarah Florer (19:55.874)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (20:00.824)
This is part of the reason I think, Roland and Sarah, why a lot of people don't want to do valuations or complex ones on a regular basis. That's all we do. We do valuations 100%. You know, have a lot of the accounting firms that do that as a minor part of their practice. But a lot of people just don't want to deal with the headache and the risk that goes with that. And I can understand why.

Sarah Florer (20:12.686)
Mm.

Sarah Florer (20:22.018)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (20:26.338)
Yeah.

Roland Wiederaenders (20:28.804)
Well, it's great to make your acquaintance get to know you, Scott. And this is valuable information, I think, for our clients because it comes up all the time. And we drop these company agreements. You already mentioned a situation with divorce. But the question is always, well, what happens if we have to fire that person for cause and we get to repurchase their interest at fair market value? How do we determine that? Well, we really have an answer now in you that we haven't had in the past.

Sarah Florer (20:35.992)
Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (20:57.688)
Mm-hmm.

Roland Wiederaenders (20:58.368)
So it's great. You're going to be, I think, a great resource for our practice, Scott.

Sarah Florer (21:03.744)
Yeah, thank you for that.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (21:06.105)
I look forward to that and as you can tell I love talking about business valuation and so it's always an enjoyable conversation for me.

Sarah Florer (21:15.606)
Well, I can tell you, I feel like I'm slightly smarter about it. In all these years, I can't even tell you how much I've read about this. of course, things change as you go. I guess some things change. Once you get into publicly traded companies and all of the really, really gigantic deals that big investment banks work on and whatnot, was a prior part, an early part of my career, I did get to work on some of that kind of stuff. And that was always where it felt really sort of mystical to me in the sense that

You had a whole team of people dedicated to doing that and obviously it's needed work, but I didn't really quite understand why you needed like 20 people dedicated to that. But actually you've just completely made it clear because I'm thinking of a client that we know that we have that has his business tied into 35 entities, which is actually typical corporate structure chart for any kind of big corporate, especially if they have operations in multiple places.

But I'm just thinking, wow, he probably does need your services at some point in the future. But the other thing I just wanted to reiterate about what you said, Scott, that I think is important about what you said in terms of how you prepare to be ready to be interrogated, essentially. just to make the point, Roland, we talk about this sometimes with our clients too that...

Don't be penny wise pound foolish. If you have to go through a business valuation process because it's essentially mandated by laws, you've just cited specific sections of the IRS code and et cetera, you should pay one time, right? Pay one time. Don't pay multiple times because you cut corners at the beginning.

and don't get the in-depth that you need and then have to come back with the in-depth, know, second or third time. You just end up multiplying your costs. And I think that's what is so important about being professional service providers is that the kind of value and experience you can provide that comes, yes, with a bit of a higher price tag, but it also means almost universally that you need those services once or ongoing for different deals, you know, as a long-term client would.

Sarah Florer (23:29.464)
but you're not going to have to have somebody's work redone. So I really like that standard that you shared, just to be ready from the beginning with a presentation that you can use in any circumstance. That's really excellent, actually. And when I've seen what other CPAs sometimes put together for valuation, probably because their clients are pressuring them, you know, it's not court-ready, it's not IRS-ready.

It's a person who probably doesn't want to be doing valuations, who's kind trying to do it as a value add for a client, and when it would be better done by somebody that's a specialist.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (24:05.11)
And you know, one of the, I speak in analogies a lot you've already seen, you know, I say it's kind of like if you needed a hip replacement, your family doctor could probably do it. And you know, and maybe he does two or three of those a year and he'd probably be able to get his way through it, but you'd much rather go to that guy who does four or five of these a day. And that's all he does. And he's seen every problem and he knows how to handle any kind of, you know, off the wall situation.

Sarah Florer (24:25.496)
Yeah. Yeah.

Sarah Florer (24:33.132)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (24:33.857)
It's kind of the same way with valuation. A lot of times they may be pretty simple and your CPAs can handle them oftentimes. But as I tell clients from time to time, you're not paying me for 60 minutes of work, you're paying me for 35 years of experience. And that makes a difference.

Sarah Florer (24:49.453)
Yeah.

Yeah, I feel like we have to talk about that more directly these days, Scott. Now that we have AI in the background, who people feel can replace certain things, some people feel that. There is, I think, we're going to have a pushback against all of that because you can't replace 35 years of experience, really.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (25:12.377)
It's funny you mention that Sarah because that's that has come up a lot Lately I've seen you know, I've talked I've had folks talk to me. I've seen you know articles on LinkedIn and otherwise about AI and specifically, you know AI replacing business valuation and

I agree that AI can, there are some things that it can do better and that is assimilating vast amounts of information and doing calculations. It can do better than people can. I don't think there's any doubt.

Sarah Florer (25:43.149)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (25:44.674)
So AI to me is going to go hand in hand with a skilled evaluation professional. And it may help us to reduce our costs and it may do a lot of these simple, repetitive tasks because it can just assemble tons and tons of information and do it very efficiently. But what it can't do is it can't sit down across the table and explain why it did what it did and the strengths and the weaknesses in its case.

Sarah Florer (25:59.662)
Mmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (26:14.647)
other side and it can't sign a certified valuation report either. So until AI can handle those two things, it's never going to completely displace business valuation. But I'd be silly to say that it's never going to change the way we do business. It already has to some degree.

Sarah Florer (26:18.872)
Well, there's that.

Sarah Florer (26:37.216)
Yeah, think that's completely correlated in the legal profession. And you know, there's always the underlying question of professionals of tomorrow need to be trained today. And if you replace them in the early days, how does that work? And I know that's across every industry that's contemplating or that's having AI as part of it. So it's common issue that I guess a lot of us are thinking about. But Scott, so...

As we discussed earlier, just towards the end of our interview, we'd love to give you the opportunity to share a little bit more about yourself personally. so do you have a, I mean, you're a business owner, you were an entrepreneur to start your business, probably pretty busy. And so do you have a personal motto or anything like specifically that motivates you? Classic cars kind of came up, made me wonder if you're an aficionado or...

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (27:33.369)
Well, so there's two different things that I would say to that, Sarah. So the thing that really motivates me these days is, you know, I'm at the point in life where I've spent 60 years trying to gain things, trying to gain an education, you try to gain wealth, you try to gain experience and all those things.

And I really am at the point in life where I would like to start giving those things away. And I think that when we reach this point that that's a good thing that more of us should do, especially just our experience and the knowledge that we've gained. So that really is one of the things at the top of my mind. I enjoy sharing whatever little bits of life wisdom that I can with younger folks.

Sarah Florer (28:00.366)
Mm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (28:22.457)
And you know you could say it's a mentor. don't know that it's even that may be too big of a word for it but but just encouraging the next generation and You know sharing with them when they're thinking about should I make this career move or should I stay here? and you can say you know here's here's my experience. I've been there, and I've done that a couple of times. think that's invaluable One of the things that drove me that was my passion for the longest time was was running marathon running

Sarah Florer (28:40.942)
Hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (28:50.937)
So fitness has always been big for me. I'm actually not a car guy believe it or not. I just use that I like looking at them, I just don't know what I don't know about them. But running was my passion for a long time and my claim to fame is that I ran the Boston Marathon twice.

Sarah Florer (28:56.462)
Norris Rowland, by the way.

Sarah Florer (29:13.101)
Amazing.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (29:14.209)
back when I was younger and more fit. that's kind of the, you know, the, if you want to say that the physical day-to-day goals is fitness. I like to stay fit. I've got grandkids now. I like to be able to do things with them and go places and that sort thing.

Sarah Florer (29:28.598)
Yeah, it's funny because I've never been a distance runner like that. I had a stint of running 10 Ks, but that ended in my 20s. But I do know there's a, you know, people who are dedicated runners, think it's basically a form of your meditation in a sense. So it's like it's about physical fitness, but it's really your whole person and the mental state you need to be to maintain that kind of a training is, you know, very...

has all these other benefits.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (30:00.929)
It's interesting you mentioned that Sarah because I thought that I was just the lone nut who did that when I was out there running those long Saturday morning runs. And that's when I would just think about things. Whether it was current events or whether it's meditative prayer, whatever it is that you do, that was my thinking time. And it was...

Sarah Florer (30:13.592)
Yeah.

Sarah Florer (30:21.506)
Mm-hmm.

Scott Abels, CPA CVA (30:23.929)
And you get down with that you feel great and you feel like you you're better equipped now physically and spiritually and emotionally to deal with the day or the coming week so Definitely, there's a big mental piece to the running It's not just about you know, just about pushing your body. You got you have to tone your mind as well

Sarah Florer (30:32.716)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Sarah Florer (30:38.893)
Yeah.

Sarah Florer (30:45.794)
That's tone your mind like it. Up there with solving business puzzles.

Roland Wiederaenders (30:47.938)
That's really good. The balance is important. Yeah, for sure.

Sarah Florer (30:55.02)
Rolling.

Roland Wiederaenders (30:55.204)
Well, that's great, Scott. Thank you for sharing that. And it's good to know people on a personal basis and really understand what motivates them internally. And I relate for sure. I know Sarah does, is this idea of giving away and we're servants to our clients. And so we do give a lot of ourselves to what we do and try to share that experience with them that the AI is never going to be able to replace. So I think this was a great conversation and Sarah, think we could

Sarah Florer (31:23.01)
Yeah. Wrap it up. Yeah. Okay. Well, thanks everyone for joining us today on Alt Investing Made Easy. Thanks to you, Scott. And we'll see you next time. Actually, Roland, I forgot your part.

Roland Wiederaenders (31:24.75)
probably move towards wrapping things up.

Roland Wiederaenders (31:38.53)
Yeah, no, remember everybody take aim with your alternative investing strategies.

Sarah Florer (31:43.534)
See you next time.

Sarah Florer (31:47.433)
Scott.