Turning Setbacks into Success: Navigating Business Growth with Funding Nav's Stephen Sacks

Speaker 1: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast, where we explore cutting- edge strategies to keep teams human- centered, drive innovation, and empower you with the tools and insights need to help your team excel and thrive in today's rapidly changing world. Your host is Dane Groeneveld, a seasoned expert with over 20 years of experience in enhancing team dynamics and innovation. Are you concerned about falling short on your quarter one goals or worried about navigating the challenges of the entire year ahead? Discover the unexpected power of failure in driving success. Tune into this week's episode of the Future of Teamwork, where we explore how embracing setbacks can be your greatest asset in achieving your aspirations. Today's guest is Stephen Sacks, founder and CEO Funding Nav. Stephen brings over 30 years of experience in transforming business challenges, including his own experiences with failure into opportunities for growth. His expertise in strategic funding at tax optimization has been pivotal in aiding businesses to navigate and thrive through financial hurdles. And this episode will uncover first, the transformative power of failure. Learn from Stephen's personal story of turning a business setback into a driving force behind Funding Nav. Second, strategic business insights in financial acumen delve into Stephen's expertise in navigating financial challenges and strategic decision- making in business, highlighting the importance of innovative funding solutions and efficient growth strategies. Third, empathy and learning from failure dive into the concept of fucked up nights and the importance of learning from failures. A theme that Stephen passionately advocates for in his entrepreneurial journey. So teamwork makes the dream work and we're here to inspire your next collaborative breakthrough. Gather your team or put on your headphones and let's dive in together.

Dane Groeneveld: Welcome to the Future of Teamwork podcast. My name is Dane Groeneveld CEO of the HUDDL3 Group, and today I'm joined from London by Stephen Sacks. Stephen is the founder and CEO of Funding Nav, and we've just been having a good conversation before the show about some of the other initiatives he's a part of, so it's going to be a great conversation. Welcome to the show, Stephen.

Stephen Sacks: Thank you very much, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: So for the benefit of our listeners, perhaps you could give us all a little bit more of a background on how you came to be doing the work you do today.

Stephen Sacks: I came to be doing the work I do today through failure. Essentially I was running a burnishing business and what happened was that it was mostly UK- based, sorry, we were based in the UK effectively. We were importing large items of furniture from far east and payment was in US dollars. And then we were recruiting customers largely through newspaper advertising and other forms of media. And we were able to monetize the cost of acquisition on the first sale, and that was effectively what the business model was and it was very successful. And then in June, 2016, the United Kingdom for some reason decided to embark on the biggest project of national value destruction that I think I've ever seen, which was called Brexit. And two things happened instantly, and almost overnight, which had a very negative impact on that business. The first was that the currency tanked and that means that the products we were buying effectively started to cost 20% more than they cost previously. And because of the high levels of uncertainty that existed, it was much more expensive to recruit customers, and that meant our cash went up by about 20% too. So suddenly I went from a situation where I was able to monetize customers on one sale to where I couldn't, and that meant that the business all of a sudden needed external finance in order to continue. And I went out into the market and for the same reasons of high levels of uncertainty, I found it very difficult to attract that funding. And I had numerous meetings over the second half of 2016 with investors, bankers, advisors. And I started to develop a very firm feeling that in most of these negotiations I was sitting on the wrong side of the table. So I approached this in a very stressful state, talking to people who I felt couldn't really empathize with me, didn't really understand what I was going through, and I thought as I sat there that or when I get out of this a really painful place, I want to sit on that side of the table. And the business failed in early 2017 and I walked away from it and just felt, yeah, now I can do that. And so that's what prompted me to found Funding Nav, which started in early 2017. And so yeah, I founded it on the basis that I'm not an ex- banker or accountant, but entrepreneur and I've had failures and I've had successes, but all of that allows me to empathize and to be able to offer, I suppose, more entrepreneurial solutions to business owners that might be looking to raise funding for whatever reason. It might not be a sort of turnaround situation that I was looking for. It might be scale up, it might be for acquisition, it might be because they want to exit the business. There could be numerous reasons. But fundamentally it is much easier for me and for my team to work with them than I think is for a number of other organizations because they don't really get what it's like to be in a situation where you've got to make payroll by Friday and there's just enough money coming in. You think, " How am I going to do this?" You want somebody there who's going to be able to understand that who's been there before and can help you through it. So yeah, it came from failure, Dane.

Dane Groeneveld: It's a great origin story, obviously painful to have gone through, but one that I think a lot of listeners on the show and a lot of others in our community have felt firsthand too. And I love the way that you bring that empathy in. And there was another word that you used there, which was creativity and being more entrepreneurial in how you position funding solutions now. And those are definitely two gaps. You talk to so many entrepreneurs out there in the market that get stuck between a conventional bank and a private equity firm and there's no one there to serve them or who really knows them. And it can be a pretty thankless task going and exploring that landscape.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah, I think it's a huge diversion for business founders. They've got a very definite set of skills which are often quite specific to the business that they're in, and all of a sudden they need to move into this other market of funding and trying to bridge a gap, trying to get the money to meet their ambition. Meanwhile, whilst they're doing that, the business is not progressing at the rate of the momentum it should do because obviously they've got their eye off the bull. Yeah, we should be plug and play accelerator to actually get that funding in. And also to challenge the entrepreneur because often what I find is that the strategy, the funding strategy that the business has decided upon is often based on false assumptions and there's often a much better way of getting to the place where they want to go to.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. Funding strategy is an interesting one, particularly for entrepreneurs that are first time or solopreneurs and they don't have a team that's been there before. And I guess that starts to, it's a big reason to bring in someone like funding there, but brings this concept of, well, how big is your team outside of the organization? Who's giving you the advice? Who's helping you test those assumptions? What have you found in your approach working with customers that you've had success with that helps in that sort of early discovery of why are we seeking funding? Have we got the right plan? How does that sort of take shape for you?

Stephen Sacks: Yeah, so I think I start from an unusual place from a funder, which is that, I think that seeking external funding is essentially a kind of failure in your strategy. So if your business is truly successful, then to be honest with you, it should be throwing off so much cash that you don't know what to do with it and you shouldn't be seeking funding. So the reason why businesses seek funding is that there's not enough profit in the business or it's not generating sufficient cash flow in order to fund its ongoing operations at the time when it needs the money. So there could be lots of other solutions to that before you ever get to funding. And I can remember a particular example actually, which we never actually made any money out of, but I'm pleased that we offered the advice and that was a London- based snack business that was making, we call them crisps, I think you call them chips in states. But not potato ones like, made out of things like kale and parsnip and vegetables, sort of trendy chips. And the business had 30, 000 square foot state- of- the- art manufacturing facility in quite an expensive rental location actually. And it was going 24/7, and they had their own brand, which was the higher margin business, and then they were doing, most of their business was for a large chain of sandwich shops, like huge chain of sandwich shops. And this is where the real volume of the business was. Anyway, overall, whilst the revenue line looked great and they'd been in business some time, they had a negative net margin, they were actually losing money. Anyway, their solution was we need to ramp up production, we need to do more in order to get ourselves over the break- even level and accelerate. Anyway, after we analyzed it, our advice was actually you don't need funding, what you need to do is put your prices up because there's a large element in your business that you're losing money on and it's too much. And it was the big part of their business. And business owners find it mentally really, really difficult often to increase prices and often undersell what it is they've got and are petrified of course that the customer's going to walk away and find someone else. But honestly in this case, that would've been a good result. And filling the vacuum that was left with better quality, higher margin customers, developing their own brand further was definitely a much better strategy. So that's the advice we gave. We told them not to, they went away and did their own thing. I'm not quite sure what happened. We didn't get the gig actually, but I'm pleased that we didn't because I would rather not be a facilitator to a strategy which I don't believe in myself. And I'd rather tell people the way that we think and have that integrity even if they don't want to hear it.

Dane Groeneveld: I like that story a lot, Stephen. What it makes me think of right now with the business environment, a lot of people are seeing at the end of'23, going into'24 is that, funding is becoming harder, cost of capital's up. But there's still a shortage of talent, there's still supply chain challenges. So looking at where those hidden gems are in your business and where you might be carrying the ego customers or the ego products that aren't really supporting the team to be sustainable. It is a tough analysis for any entrepreneur or team because no one, as you said, no one ever likes saying no to a customer or increasing pricing or God forbid losing a customer. But sometimes that recognizing that failure to pick up on that theme that we've started this conversation with is actually freeing. It unlocks a lot of opportunity.

Stephen Sacks: I think that the most successful businesses regularly sack customers. Have that confidence. And the least successful businesses lack the confidence or the ability to actually do that. I think that shows huge strength if you can actually do that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. And actually I've seen that some of our businesses have grown through acquisition in the last few years. And when you see the companies that have lost a customer because they didn't agree to an unfavorable term or because they went and asked for pricing and couldn't pull it off, the really good businesses are the ones that replace that customer very quickly and have a better story coming out of it.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah, no, 100%.

Dane Groeneveld: When it comes to doing that analysis, you mentioned it earlier, you're not a banker. How is your analysis process different from what some of the banks do? The banks are looking at P& Ls and LSS and balance sheets and age debt reports and a lot of financial instruments. I assume you look at that too, but do you then go a little bit deeper on the customer product data sets?

Stephen Sacks: Yeah, I suppose we start with the character of the founder themselves. Ultimately, that's why people start businesses. They've got an itch, they've got something that they want to bring to the world, and people get lost along the way, don't they? They leave the rat race and often they find themselves in a much more aggressive hamster wheel than the one that they were in when they had a boss who wasn't themselves. So I think that, you should start by analyzing or remembering what it was that got you into the business in the first place and then trying to get back to that, always trying to get back to that. And then beyond that, the team, is that right? Or have you taken on people along the way, which maybe you shouldn't have? Often, especially in the current market where there's a shortage challenge, as you mentioned, there's people may have taken on people just because it was quick and easy, but it isn't necessarily the right thing to do. As we mentioned, the customers, the suppliers, the product mix, what other opportunities are there? We ourselves have recently in order to help our customers, we were raising money for businesses that were looking to expand the size of their team. And when we were talking to them afterwards, they were saying, well, inflation has meant that and shortage of skills have meant that A, it's going to be much more expensive to scale up the team than we thought. And secondly, the quality is not what we thought. So they end up in a place which is not necessarily a good place. And what I've seen is that, that's really, you don't want that to happen because if you take other people's money and blow it on a strategy which is poorly executed and then you go back for more money having not got the results, then it's really difficult to get the money a second time and people rightly doubt your ability. So I mentioned to you earlier, Dane that we've developed a big back office team in South Africa, which we find is a really great place to source talent for many different reasons. I mean for us in the United Kingdom, the time zone is very similar. So obviously for you in the United States, that's not the case, but for us it's like a one two hours difference. English first language, and not just English first language, culturally similar, culturally similar. So if you use slang, if you say something which is like a shortcut, they get it in the way that you intend it, rather than if you go to, I don't know, you go to Philippines, you go to India, great people and cheaper, they don't get it in the same way and you have to work very hard to confirm the people's understanding is what they think. And we are benefiting from positive discrimination. So if you are white graduate in South Africa, you're going to struggle to get work because the scales are tipped against you. And I'm making no judgment about whether that's right or wrong strategy. But nonetheless, that's the politics that exist in the country. And the issue is that if you just left university and you are in your early 20s and you've got to really struggle to find work, whereas if you've got a laptop and an internet connection, world your oyster. So we are not restricted in the same way as employers, local employers are. So there's a large pool of highly skilled labour where unemployment rates are like 30% desperate, desperate to work, desperate to work, and where obviously the rates are, as I said, not as cheap as the Philippines or India, but nonetheless considerably cheaper than we are paying in the United Kingdom. Certainly cheaper than what you'd be paying in the United States. So yeah, we've been helping businesses to outsource because we've done it very successfully ourselves. So that was an opportunity that we saw. And in all businesses that we go into, there's often other opportunities within them like that.

Dane Groeneveld: That's cool. So you are not only using that talent location for your own platform, but the folks that you are providing access to funding, they'll be able to come in and will that talent sit within a facility that you are providing or do you just identify the talent and then they work remote? How does that play out?

Stephen Sacks: So working remotely is something I know that we're going to be talking about. And I mean obviously it's been a game changer for many different businesses, but control is much more difficult and you need to be careful of the legal situation too. So yeah, I think that businesses need a helping hand once you've done the recruitment in the compliance and then control. So you've got to have a way to make sure that people are actually working and not necessarily the hours but in doing what they say they're doing when they're supposed to be doing it. And we use technology to help us with that. And also in terms of compliance, you've got to make sure you're not falling foul and the people have kind of-

Dane Groeneveld: Paid the appropriate wage.

Stephen Sacks: Paying the appropriate wage and tax all the rest of it, and that all sorted. So yeah, we help with all of that.

Dane Groeneveld: That's great. No, I didn't realize that. I think some of the customers I've worked with in the past when we're offshoring talent have had those same concerns. Are we compliant with local label legislation? How are we managing IT? Because if someone's employed to work from home and the laptop breaks or an internet connection goes down if we've got any contingency or fallback. And then also another big challenge with global workforces is, is the person that I'm hiring, the person that turns up to do the work? And we've seen a lot of what the industry gets classed as resume fraud where you'll have someone who's out interviewing, getting the jobs, and then they've got friends that are actually doing the work. Because as long as the logins, it doesn't really matter who's showing up. So there are some nuances there to making that model work. So I bet it's good for your customers to have a partner that's on the ground doing it.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah, that's what the four- hour work week was all about, wasn't it?

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah. inaudible.

Stephen Sacks: Effectively. Get a job and get somebody in another country to do it for you.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I'd never looked at it in that way, but you're absolutely right. He had a great way of outsourcing the demand that he generated. Tell me a little bit more, Stephen, on the types of talent that you're supporting businesses when they're getting funded, what types of talent are you bringing in? Is it mainly, you mentioned before the show heavy on sales and marketing and being able to acquire customers. Is that the main sphere or is it much broader than that?

Stephen Sacks: It's broader than that, but that's definitely the most, I think that's the most difficult area because people that are skilled in sales and marketing are obviously skilled in selling themselves. And in creating empathy, in creating trust. But that doesn't mean that just because they can do that and sell themselves doesn't mean necessarily they can sell your product or service. So I think that's where we see the biggest issues in that area. But outside of that area, general administration, accounts, virtually any area that you can do locally, you can do remotely too. Tech obviously, tech too, of course.

Dane Groeneveld: I was going to ask tech, so supporting with some programming, UX, UI type.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: That's really helpful. So with that access to talent pool and the access to funding, the types of teams that are coming to you to accelerate into their growth, all sorts of products and services or are you seeing any sort of niche industry or service offerings that are emerging as well suited to that?

Stephen Sacks: No, I wouldn't say we're seeing a niche. I think that if we do see niches, then that's largely to do with deficiencies in our own sales and marketing strategies. So I don't know, for example, if I go along to a networking event, which is property- based, and I do that quite a lot because I've got property business too, then you get a lot of leads which are property- based, and then you see, well, property is popular, but actually that's only because that's what you shoved in the top of the funnel. But I think it is broad across everything.

Dane Groeneveld: That's helpful. So the best teams then when you get excited, when a new customer turns up and they're saying, " Hey Stephen, we need some help with cash because we've got this growth plan." You mentioned here earlier, you look at the character of founder, you look at the team, you look at the customer, you look at the supply chain. When you're looking at that team element, what is it that just stands out? Or might there be an example of someone that you've said, " Hey, I see where the bank's missing this, but you've got a great team and I've got real belief that you're going to hit this mission, this objective?"

Stephen Sacks: I'm not sure Dane, that we've drooled down into companies that much where we are looking specifically at the team. I mean, I often see deficiencies that are funding related. So for example, for many types of funding, especially debt- based funding, what I find is that, I don't know, for example, the guy running the finance function just isn't strong enough. And so, one of the things that we often have to do is to help to set up something. And we're not ourselves, as I said, we're not accountants, but to bring in a sort of a CFO that's substantially enough to actually get the deal over the line. But in terms of the team, generally, I see great teams and I see teams which are not so great. I suppose the best teams are the ones that where it's not just all about the work, it's beyond that. So they don't work together, they play together. There's a lot of camaraderie going on around. So yeah, I suppose that's the best thing. When you go into something you think, wow, this is kind of really, it is really works on so many levels, you can kind of see it.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I hear that actually. We look at team impact and often when you look at team impact, it's not just a matter of who's in what role doing what job? It's why they're there, it's the way of working. It's some of the other cultural elements that just start to, they're exuded by the team members you meet and the business and the marketing. You can kind of see it in every aspect of the business.

Stephen Sacks: Absolutely, yes. Yeah.

Dane Groeneveld: The CFO pieces is interesting though, and naturally you'd see that deficiency when you're looking at supporting funding. But, I see that as a deficiency more universally with small to medium enterprises. I mean, it's a big step- up when you go from running a business and a team that's small, maybe they're making a million or a few million in revenue to then you're hitting sort of 10 million in revenue and now you're going to 30. These steps, you get different levels of sophistication from basic bookkeeping and an outsourced accountant to bringing it in house, but you're still really only managing the statutory requirements. You're not starting to think strategically or really look at cash flow and some of those other elements. That just seems to be a gap in general.

Stephen Sacks: No, I agree. I think that at that level, accounting tends to be backward looking. How did we do last year? Yeah, we did fine, but last year finished six, seven months ago. It's like, what's happening now? What's going to be happening next year? Well, it's kind of finger in the air stuff, I'm not really sure. And can we afford to do that? And then variances, right? So what happens if this happens? And that's obviously where I went wrong six or seven years ago. We never expected Brexit to happen. Honestly, I just didn't think that was going to happen at all. And to be honest with you, I should have thought about that more.

Dane Groeneveld: And you see that now, we've had a number of guests on the show that constantly talk about disruption, whether it's self- led or whether it's enforced upon you, enacted upon you by the market or a competitor. But we all need to be in all of our teams creating time, not just to be doing the today work, but thinking about what tomorrow's work could look like.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah, absolutely.

Dane Groeneveld: That's probably a good lead- in to the fuck up nights, which I enjoyed hearing about before the show. That kind of broadens people's perspectives.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah. So like I said, I think that failure is the biggest learning. So I believe that really, really, really strongly. I think that you can go along and everything's working and so there's no motivation to really change and just carry on doing the same thing. What are you learning? Well, nothing really. You're just reinforcing the same views that just carry on doing it, but you're not stressing your thinking. You're not thinking about or learning what an alternative route might be. And the internet and the bookstores are full of people's success stories and there are no shortage of TED talks telling you people how fantastic they are. And listen to me and you're going, you're going to go a long way. But honestly, whilst Jeff Bezos' story is inspirational and Bill Gates' story is amazing and Elon Musk's is inspiration just because you read that stuff, you try and take on some of those attributes and try and do what they did, will that work for you? No, probably not, it worked for them at that time. And there's a lot of stuff which didn't work and a lot of happenstance, a lot of chance along the way where things either fell in their lap or a failure didn't take them out in the way that it did to someone else. So I think that it's really interesting focusing on failure. And it's a bit like Roadrunner and when it is running away from wheel Coyote and it is running, running, running, and the wolf behind him and the wolf often runs off the cliff and he's always running in fresh air and until he looks down and then gravity only kind of in realizes gravity at the point with no return when he can't get back. And I think that as entrepreneurs and founders, we are evidently optimists, we're all very glass half full. If you were glass half empty, you couldn't do that, right? The anxiety would be just too great, you literally should be working with somebody else. So we tend to look at all the positive stuff and we take that in and we see negative stuff. You brush it under the carpet, you think, " I'll just move on, I'll just move on." But at some point, sometimes you're too far gone, you can't, and when you're in a hole, you've got to stop digging and sometimes you're just too deep in the hole. So a fucked up Nights, which is an international organization that started in Mexico City 12 years ago and now is in 90 countries around the world in around two to 300 different cities, including many, many, I just imagine the United States is probably the number one place where it actually exists. So you should definitely go out there and look for that.

Dane Groeneveld: Yeah, I will.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah. So what I do in London is I bring in four entrepreneurs each quarter who have suffered a huge failure. That was life- changing, not just, and I hear this a lot, especially now. I opened up a restaurant in early 2020 and COVID came along and no customers and we had to close down and business failed. I say, well politely, whilst I can fully understand that that was a tragedy for you and your plans and everything, actually not really interesting to my audience because everybody experienced that. I'm interested in the mega fuck- ups. So I've got one coming up. For example, a guy that took 550 million of US government money invested into a Middle Eastern wealth fund that failed and FBI raided him. He wound up in the New York Times, not in a good way, by the way, in a really bad way. Huge life- changing issue. One guy I had a few sessions ago started off running an investment scheme and wound up running a Ponzi scheme. Wound up in prison for got 13 years.

Dane Groeneveld: That's real impact.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah. Really. And the story about how somebody gets there, and I'm certainly not saying that, that he's a good role model or that people should follow that, or ultimately he owns the narrative that he tells. And we are not looking at that, but it's like, how'd you get to that position? Because it started off in the steps. So at the beginning everything's going great, he's doing really well, people are really trusting him, he's making great returns, and suddenly the market starts to move. And either, and you tend to try and bridge it, you say, I said, well, entrepreneurs do. So you say, " Hey, Dane it's going a bit better than, I'm not going to tell you exactly how bad it is, but it is fine, don't worry." And then I'm taking bigger and bigger risks with your money. I'm sticking to derivatives, I'm gambling with it effectively. And then there's this huge divergence, the great divergence in the end, it was a lot of money, a lot of money out. And then he went to the serious fraud office here and he thought that by going there they would give him a sympathetic here, but he's really wrong about that. So that's an example. And they're inaudible both. And there are other small ones. I've got had a guy actually who got into electric cars too early, literally at the same store, say too early at the similar time to Tesla the beginning and had a car. She's a lot better, a lot better looking than at Tesla. But obviously he's not Elon Musk and also-

Dane Groeneveld: Couldn't pull it off.

Stephen Sacks: Our one amazing business, one of the most valuable businesses in the world, and another guy that would started something very similar at the same time. And it's not the most, in fact, it's a failed business, it just didn't work at all. So it's just huge learning in those things. And people like it. It's fun. I don't know any real money out of it, but it's something interesting to talk about.

Dane Groeneveld: It builds community. Yeah, it is. I actually just pulled up this quote that I saw the other day by Machiavelli and it said, it reminds me of your Wiley Coyote example too, on the way that entrepreneurs keep kind of throwing good energy after bad energy. It said, " One ought never to allow a disorder to take place in order to avoid a war, for war is not thereby avoided, but only deferred to your disadvantage." And that just jumped off the page when I saw it at the weekend. And your stories of failures and people sharing failures, you often see it. They know that they're in trouble, but before they stop, they keep trying to get out of trouble and they only dig that hole deeper so often in businesses.

Stephen Sacks: One of my favorite quotes actually around this whole subject is from Winston Churchill who said that, " The definition of success is the ability to move from failure to failure without any apparent loss of enthusiasm."

Dane Groeneveld: I could see him saying that with the glass of champagne a cigar too.

Stephen Sacks: And you can see that it's kind of like, you know what? You've got to accept, we're all human. We're going to cut. And on a daily basis that's going to happen. And you've got two choices. Either you pick yourself up and move on to the next one and fuck up again, but sooner or later, you are going to succeed. If you carry on, you will succeed. If you're smart and you are improving as a result of each of those changes, you're evolving, it's Darwinian. You will get there in the end, but you're going to fail a lot along the way and you've try to be able to handle that.

Dane Groeneveld: And we actually had a guest on the show, a fellow Australian Luke Williams who wrote the book Disrupt. And to that point, Stephen, what he talks about is getting a team together and saying, " Hey, go and find a way to break our existing business model. If you can break it, someone else could. And that might, we may not be able to break it, but it might allow us to better understand what's strong in our model and what's weak in our model." So I think not only embracing the failure of others, but almost encouraging your team to start looking for failures ahead of time. It can be really healthy for a business.

Stephen Sacks: Yeah. No, I agree.

Dane Groeneveld: Well, that's neat. It's been a great conversation, Steven. I love the way that you've shared your story of failure in the furnishing business to build Funding Nav. I think it's fascinating that you're bringing that empathy and that entrepreneurial spirit to funding, particularly in a time in the market like we're all seeing now a lot of great small to medium businesses that need to refocus in this market and have the right supporters to go to the next level. And I thought it was particularly interesting the way that you raised the character of the founder and helping founders get back to why they're there doing it, because it is easy to get lost. So many good talking points. If there's any listeners who want to reach out and learn more about Funding Nav or potentially seek some help from you in their funding journeys, how do they best find you in the business?

Stephen Sacks: So I'm super active on LinkedIn, so just look me up. Stephen Sacks on LinkedIn or else the fundingnav. com website.

Dane Groeneveld: Great. We'll make sure to attach those links. Well, thanks for taking the time to share your experience and insights.

Stephen Sacks: Thank you.

Speaker 1: Thank you for joining us. Remember that by embracing vulnerability, trusting our intuition and approaching challenges with compassion, we not only strengthen our teams, but also pave the way for a future where collaboration thrives. If you're hungry for more insights, strategies, and research on collaboration, head over to the futureofteamwork. com. There. You can join our mailing list to stay updated with the latest episodes and get access to exclusive content tailored to make your team thrive. Together we can build the Future of Teamwork. Until next time.