John Corcoran 12:17
Yeah. And did you like your computer science background? Did you pour your energy into, you know, improving it to improve your SEO? What sorts of things did you do to add value to these businesses?
Chris Yates 12:30
Yeah, so well, just to bridge the gap. But when I said fast forward, I actually started a digital marketing agency. So it’s helping a bunch of smaller companies with their digital marketing, you know, pay per click, SEO, all of those the traffic driving strategies you can use, as well as improving conversion on websites and things like that. So I had all this knowledge. And I had never applied it to my own assets. So this was an opportunity to do that with these sites we were buying. So we would, you know, like, in a perfect world, what we would look for is a business or a website that had really strong quality traffic that was just under monetized.
So it’s way easier to take something that already has traffic, and then increase the average revenue per visitor to that website through better monetization strategies. And a simple example might be all they had was one little banner ad in the bottom left corner of their website that nobody really sees, and doesn’t get very many displays. If we can flip that to maybe an affiliate program or partnering with a brand who wants to get exposure to that audience who would pay five or 10 times that amount for the exact same traffic that they’re generating.
They’re generating already, you know, we make 10 times the amount from the same traffic, and thus, the value of that actual asset, the business itself, because businesses are typically valued on a revenue or or profit multiple would go up by a similar amount. So that was kind of the idea. We’d buy under monetized stuff, improve the monetization and hold it or flip it.
John Corcoran 14:02
And, did you have any big wins that you can recall from that time period?
Chris Yates 14:06
Yeah, really days. I mean, you could buy these things for like, less than one year’s earnings, which is kind of crazy. Nowadays. That’s not the case. Usually, it’s more like, you know, three or four, whatever. Two to four, let’s say on typically on on profit of the annual profits. So yeah, I mean, we liked what we were getting. I don’t think this is the case today, and wouldn’t be the case today. But we were getting triple digit and annualized returns when we were doing this in the early days through this strategy.
John Corcoran 14:35
Wow. And how about big setbacks? Because I know there’s a lot of Google updates and things like that, that killed people’s traffic, or maybe, you know, the founder that disappears or servers that crash any big, you know, setbacks or challenges during this time period?
Chris Yates 14:54
Yeah, for sure. So we had an investor who was interested in what we were doing. Give us is a really good valuation to put in like a chunk of money and also give us like, essentially a deadline. And so we did our first I think, you know, like, bigger sort of six figure deal at the time. And I think about it was probably about three or four months later, for those of you remember Google Penguin, an algorithm change that Google made, relating to backlink issues like, we, that particular website got hit really bad, like 70%, within a couple day period where that traffic dropped in revenue went right down with it, because we didn’t really know, you know, like, number one, we didn’t do really good due diligence, because we didn’t really know any better.
And then number two was we Yeah, the website was set up to where if it wasn’t getting new traffic, it wasn’t making any money. So it was all built around new traffic. So that was like, learning a lot, a lot of good lessons about that, on that particular one, I was able to change the model of that business and kind of get it turned around. But yeah, it was, that was definitely painful, you know, like a learning opportunity, let’s say.
John Corcoran 16:03
A few sleepless nights I imagined during that time period over that one. Okay, so let’s flash forward to Rhodium. We were originally called Rhodium weekend, when did this start like a meet up that you were doing in Montana? No, actually.
Chris Yates 16:17
So my old business partner that I mentioned, had experienced running events and those kinds of things. And so, you know, the idea was, hey, let’s find other people who are doing what we were doing. You know, because it’s hard to find these people like and why there’s no industry events, who are interested in people who are interested in, you know, acquiring businesses, operating them as portfolios, and all those kinds of things. So, he lived in Vegas. So we did the first event at the Wynn in Las Vegas, which is a nice resort that happened to have a local connection, who was able to hook us up a little bit to be able to get a conference room at a reasonable rate.
It was still expensive. And funnily enough, we had bought a training program that somebody else had built around teaching people how to buy and sell online businesses. So we have this list that we had acquired as part of that acquisition. So we were able to promote this as an event to that list plus the network we built, you know, doing this stuff ourselves. And the idea was, let’s teach people what we’re doing. And maybe we’ll get, you know, some benefits as being like a connector in the industry like deals we might not see. And then we get to learn from some other people and what they’re doing. So that was kind of the impetus of it. And so the first event was in 2012, in an app with maybe like, 2030 people in a small room.
John Corcoran 17:34
Are you happy with that or face?
Chris Yates 17:36
I mean, we maybe got close to breaking even but yeah, like, first events are always so stressful. Yeah, I always say like, the first events always gonna suck, the second events still gonna suck. By the third iteration. If it’s not starting to feel a little bit better, then something’s wrong.
John Corcoran 17:51
So, yeah, yeah. And so at what point did it start to? Did it evolve into becoming, you know, more of a community rather than just an event that you do once a year?
Chris Yates 18:03
Yeah, I think a couple of things there. So one is we really listened to people who showed up. And when you get a small group, a room, a small group of people in a room who are tended to be a higher level entrepreneurial person, we didn’t really realize that it’s kind of a byproduct, if somebody’s interested in buying businesses and that kind of stuff, they’re probably going to be at least savvy, you know, in some degree. So and that’s kind of who we were targeting is not necessarily like the business opportunity is more like, you know, actual entrepreneurial experience, business owners, things like that.
So when you get a small group of people, and you know, you get them talking to one another and things like that, we really started hearing feedback that, hey, that I love the fact that there’s so many great people here, and we create this environment, we’re all kind of sharing with one another. So we really, we kind of listened to that feedback we were getting at that first event, and sort of similar feedback over the years. At some point, I ended up buying out my own business partner, and I didn’t have any interest. I was much more of an introvert. I don’t like to be the guy who’s, you know, up on the stage performing for people and training people and anything like that.
So to make my job easier, and to kind of run this thing as, as in a way where it really fits my skill set. And my personality was where I got to put the shot to shine the light on other members doing interesting things in the community, and sort of get to people talking to each other. So I didn’t have to talk. Right? And so that really, I think probably like 2014 2015 was when I really started to lean in heavily to the community aspect of it.
John Corcoran 19:40
And it’s interesting because it was probably a smart business decision, especially for something that happened in 2020 but also reflected your personality and your specific interests in running that community.
Chris Yates 19:54
And, one other point I didn’t make which I think is also important is that this relates to listening to the feedback from members but also seeing behavior over time. So if you like to take an event or a conference or really any business, let’s say that there’s two flavors of this one is people come once and you never see him again. And then the other flavor is people come once they love it, and they come back every year, I would much rather have the latter of those two. And what I started to realize is the acquisition side of things, if that’s what the brand was really known for, those people tended to be higher churn. And people don’t typically do acquisitions, like every month, or even every year, like they’ll do one maybe every few years or five years.
And after they did an acquisition, now they’re in this operating mode. And they sort of churn out of the event because they feel like, Oh, this is about buying businesses I’m not buying right now. So this isn’t relevant, I’m not going to come again. So having the flexibility to go a little bit more broad and up market with the brand was also a key decision as well.
John Corcoran 21:00
Now, another thing I want to ask you about is, you know, you grew up in an entrepreneurial household, you’re an entrepreneurial guy, the traditional model of people that are buying and selling businesses is like an m&a broker. But you never pursued that model, did you? You’re you, you kind of monetize this community based on buying a ticket once a year to an event.
Chris Yates 21:20
Yeah, it’s, it’s interesting. So I want I always had, I guess, there was something in me that felt like being a broker felt like being a car salesman, and it felt like it would taint the purity of, of this community where everybody felt like I have this ulterior motive to try to do a deal or sell them some deal I’m trying to sell or something like that. And yes, there were a lot of people who did very, very well with brokering along the way. But you know, there really wasn’t, I didn’t feel like there was there was like more of a pure community that was more unbiased. And so that was one of the, I guess, strategic decisions of not going down the brokering route. We definitely support and love a lot of the brokers in the industry and have been able to send a lot of business to them, and vice versa and stuff. So that’s been a key, you know, definitely a key partnership over the years. But in order for us to do that, well, we realized that, you know, it didn’t make sense for us to be the brokers. Instead, you know, let’s fill this niche that we’re in and talk about some.
John Corcoran 22:24
Of the members of the community and some successes that you’ve seen through that couple of my past guests on my podcast, Bjork and Lindsey Ostrom from the Pentium community. Walker Dyball. I think he said depot evil dipole. I always say it wrong. The Biden built community. So you’ve had a couple of people like that, that have gotten some real successes through the community.
Chris Yates 22:49
Yeah, I mean, so going back, like one of the early ones, this was 2013. So this was the second year of hosting the annual event. Two guys ended up at Taco Bell in the middle of the night together, talking because one had heard that one’s considering selling his business.,
John Corcoran 23:05
Yeah naturally talk about late night where all the big deals are done.
Chris Yates 23:08
Yeah, exactly. And I don’t know if you’ve ever interviewed him. But if you’ve interviewed anybody from quiet light, I’m guessing you have.
John Corcoran 23:15
But they are a client of ours, actually. Yeah, we do the caucus. Yeah. Awesome.
Chris Yates 23:19
Yeah. So, when other broker brokers are guess he’s now in a leadership position, Chuck Molins, before he ever became a broker had came came to the 2013 event, and another member of the community, Jason Glasby, was looking to sell his business and they ended up putting a deal together in 2013, just by meeting and connecting at that event. So I was like, wow, this is really cool. Like, you know, get this, I get to smash these people together, and cool things tend to happen. And so I started to track these deals as they went over the years.
And at some point, it hit like $100 million in these deals that had happened. People meeting in the community and I stopped even trying to track it just because you know, when you get to multiple hundreds of millions, it starts to get really difficult, probably over a billion now. I have no idea. But yeah, it’s pretty cool. So yeah, that’s definitely like, you get people who are thinking this way together, and cool things can happen. We’ve also had business partnerships. So there’s a couple guys in the community who have bought like, I think, I won’t say like five businesses together, they met through Rhodium.
And they ended up starting a warehouse, third party logistics company together to run their businesses that they had bought together. And they built like, I think a multiple seven figure portfolio of e-commerce businesses by now as a result of that. A couple of people got married for a meeting at one of my events. So it’s so cool. Like I always say like, Man, what a great business to be in when you feel like you would do this for free and but you still get paid for it.
John Corcoran 24:46
So yeah, that is the coolest feeling. I’ve had a couple of people who I introduced through the podcast, who started a business together in one move to another city so they could move together and start a business together. Another two guys that we introduced came fast. Friends or families went on vacations together. One of them ended up moving from California to Puerto Rico and then talked to the other one to move his family to Puerto Rico also, so cool, you know, is this neat seeing that sort of thing.
So so and so you’re seeing some concrete results from all the different members of the community, getting together, building businesses together, starting businesses, things along those lines, and you ended up acquiring a synth Turco, which is a business that does due diligence. And then you build it up with a member of that community with the assistance of a member of the Union, and you end up selling it to another member of the community. So talk us through that one.
Chris Yates 25:36
Yeah. So 2015 had been running this, this event annually for I guess, what, three or four years, and there was one of the attendees slash speakers who was the original Founder of Centrica, he approached me and said, Chris, I’m ready to move on to the next thing, I want to build like a SaaS company and grow it to a billion dollars. And there’s like two people in the world that sell this business, too. And you’re one of them. So would you want to do a deal on this, so we ended up doing a deal. And if you think about it, like, you know, Rhodium certainly was known for the buying and the selling and the operating of these businesses.
And what he was providing was essentially risk reduction, when you’re acquiring these online businesses. And so sort of like in a real estate deal, you always hire a property inspector to check it out, make sure you don’t have any leaky pipes or whatever. So that this business was doing essentially the same thing. And it wasn’t brokering because we touched on that it was much more of, you know, more of like an agency, a service business where we were providing a really good service that you know, to help reduce risk for people and, and made a lot of sense for both businesses to benefit, you know, running would benefit because the clients of Centrica could potentially come out and do the event thing and all that and then the credibility that I had as already being in the industry and operating this event and being connector and things like that helped centric as brand as well, like me being at the helm of that.
So I acquired that in 2015. Actually, that year, just before the event I hosted, I knew I was going to be buying it and there was another member of the community, Brian, who was going to be there and I was thinking about him as like, I need to hire somebody to help me actually do this. These reports are kind of like the end product is almost like a Carfax report on a business. Right.
John Corcoran 27:25
Yeah. And similarities by the way to your father’s business as a kid like you produce a report for people.
Chris Yates 27:29
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, there’s so many funny things when you look back at the connections over the years, but yeah, so Brian was a member of the community already. And I kind of sat down with him at breakfast one day and said, Hey, I’m by Ensign cherica. And he was interested in going in on this. And, you know, he started out as a contractor and ended up eventually buying in as a partner in the business. And together, we grew that thing to over seven figures a year in profit, and ended up selling it to a third member of the community, his name’s Nate Ginsberg. And if you’ve ever heard of a brand called cellar plaques, and a couple other brands that he has, he’d already been kind of in the space and had been doing some due diligence and stuff like that. So in a way, he was a bit of a competitor and up and coming competitor. But we ended up approaching us to say hey, you know, you shouldn’t sell vintage shirts and Czerka so we did a deal. So yeah, I bought it from a roadie member, you know, partnered with a Rhodium member to grow it and then sold it to a third party.
John Corcoran 28:24
Amazing, so at that point in time did you view it as Rhodium was kind of the business that supported Centrica as your main business, that’s because over seven figures in profit is pretty darn good. And we rarely see that in the event space. Unless it’s a huge business.
Chris Yates 28:42
Yeah, no Rhodium. I’ve always kept it more like I think of it like you know, you have indie music and you have indie movies and stuff I think of Rhodium is much more of like an indie event, you know, indie community, we’re not trying to be a really big at least I’m not trying to make a really big thing. Like it’s really much more of a you know, more of a lifestyle like craft, I see it as kind of my craft where it allows me to make an impact on people, you know, pays for itself and pays for some of our living expenses. And then I can make bigger plays like Centrica while still you know, operating.
Rhodium is kind of the through line through that. There’s a lot of benefits to having a community around you like, you know, there were a lot of times where people in the Rhodium community would tell me, Chris, you need to raise prices for Centrica. Chris, you need to raise prices for Cynthia. It took me a while to do it. And I kicked myself that it took me so long but after doing it I grew the business by about 500% over about five months. Once I introduced a higher price point off.
John Corcoran 29:45
We will tell you to raise your prices, you got to listen to them. Even if we’re resistant sometimes. Okay, so I love to ask people, especially those that have an event business, what 2020 was like, because now I know your Rhodium Summit is This year, it’s in October of 2024. The 2020 event was in October. Yep. Okay, so you had eight or nine months’ warning, which probably was a little helpful, though. But what was it like for you in February, March 2020, when you started hearing about this COVID unfolding and thought, Oh, crap is gonna really affect my business.
Chris Yates 30:21
Yeah, John, we don’t want to, we don’t want to think about these things.
John Corcoran 30:27
We certainly don’t have these memories.
Chris Yates 30:30
There’s a couple of things I’ll mention. So I feel like I took the COVID thing a little bit more in stride. But this is kind of a sad story. But I remember, we were hosting our event like a year or two earlier, at the Mandalay Bay, and this was just after that really bad mass shooting that occurred.
John Corcoran 30:49
At the same hotel that the shooting occurred. Wow, you I met you were locked into a contract and you couldn’t move it.
Chris Yates 30:56
Yeah. and, and like, it was still, you know, a couple of months away, but I remember that day, because like, I heard about the news in the morning. And, like, I was getting my kids ready for school, I sat down next to him. I just started crying. I’m like, man, like, for a lot of reasons. Like part of it was like, Yeah, this is such a horrible situation. But shit. Like, what happens if I can’t like people who don’t want to be at the Mandalay Bay, like they’re scared to be there or something like that. Like, what does that mean to me? So?
Yeah, so it’s sort of like almost in a way that was priming the pump for the future, like, you know, and I’m laughing just because it’s like, not because of the situation that occurred. But just like the fact that like, you know, in a way, I felt like, it’s good that I had been through a tough time like that previously, because COVID was, was, was very difficult. In the event space, a lot of businesses didn’t come out of the other end of it. And so I realized that. So number one is, I had Centrica from a financial perspective that was, you know, more than supporting me at the time.
John Corcoran 31:58
And, that probably got busier, I imagine, because deals that were done in 2020, and 2001.
Chris Yates 32:03
Yep, digital businesses are becoming more and more hot. And like one of the big things that helps ensure IQ as there were some e-commerce like aggregator roll up companies that really started to grow during that time, and COVID was really benefiting them. So there was like this big wave that occurred in the e-commerce space that’s ensure it could benefit from so luckily enough, I had, the benefit of having a portfolio of businesses is you know, sometimes seasonality, or you know, macro events can negatively impact one while it could potentially, you know, you might have another one that you’re lucky enough that it’s negatively correlated, so you get a benefit from it on the other side.
So that’s probably like, you know, one of the reasons why I wasn’t totally freaking out, but every year prior to that I’d always done a one year contract with my venues. But But before I knew anything about what was going to happen in 2020, I signed a two year agreement for the first time with the Waldorf Astoria and this was you know, this is more expensive like higher end hotel because I was going a little bit more upmarket over the years and improving Rhodium and yeah, so I just signed that contract and then realizing that man, what’s we know what’s going to happen here?
And luckily enough, like you know, the venue’s were pretty understanding, they were able to essentially just say, hey, look, let’s just push it out. We’re not going to like to let you out of a contract, but we’re not going to make you pay the entire year’s agreement. Because in events, you actually end up guaranteeing not only the food and beverage minimum, the space, but also people don’t realize this, you’re guaranteeing all the attendee hotel room revenue.
John Corcoran 33:35
Yeah, that’s actually, personally, when we did events, that was the most stressful part about it, because especially with the rise of Airbnb, people like staying in other places, or in Las Vegas, there’s other hotels around so people like to look at prices, other places. So you’re like, please stay at our hotel.
Chris Yates 33:51
Exactly. So it Yeah, I mean, we’re talking hundreds of 1000s of dollars that that, you know, and potentially no revenue in that business. So I can see how some of these bigger events would have really struggled. But yeah, so we were able to pivot to what became Rhodium remote. So the mindset I had at the time, and I feel like I should go back and listen, I did a few podcasts after these interviews, where people interviewed me about how I did this, but I thought about this like, Okay, let’s go to first principles here. What is an actual in – person conference, it’s two humans sitting next to each other, you know, first principles, they’re using their voice to communicate, you know, they might shake hands and things like that. So if you take that experience to like, let’s say zoom as an example, you know, first principles what can we what can we replicate?
So voice you know, that’s easy enough. Yeah, we can’t touch. Maybe we’re missing some smells. But you know, at the end of the day, it’s it’s, you know, it’s that connection you get and things like that. So I took first principles of an in person event and applied it to zoom so I did a lot with like, breakout sessions matchmaking, bringing in special guests and actually doing like, a multi multi day event. As part of that, through zoom in a way that wasn’t just what everybody else was doing, which was typically they pre record a bunch of content, and they just have like this conveyor belt of speakers.
So I tried to make the platforms, I tried to use them for what they could do well, so as a simple example of this, on Zoom, okay, if a if a presenter is onstage at a conference, and they’re doing a screen share live of a website, you can’t see it, it’s like really hard to see on that projector. But if you’re on Zoom, it’s almost like you’re looking over their shoulder and exactly what they’re doing. So I leaned into some of those kinds of things. But anyway, long story short on that is I did kind of a kickoff event and had Derek Severs as a special surprise guest on that.
John Corcoran 35:52
And I think he’s in Australia or something like that. Or maybe he hadn’t moved there yet. But sometimes you can get even bigger speakers because they don’t have to travel as far.
Chris Yates 36:00
Yeah, yeah, that’s a great point. New Zealand. Yeah. And what we did with that was, we raised a bunch of money through charity. And, you know, because he’s not real money oriented, he’s made plenty of money and doesn’t really care too much about money. So instead, I said, Hey, man, if we do something together, like I’ll help save some lives. And so we ended up donating to a couple of charities that did things like mosquito netting and malaria prevention and things like that, that actually, you can figure out about, I think it’s like $3,000, every $3,000, you donate, you end up saving a life. So we were able to save multiple lives, you know, by doing that with him, anyway.
But I ended up launching a membership, which is essentially essentially putting people into mastermind groups and putting facilitators in place to help them run their sessions and things like that. And that became a continuity, a recurring revenue component to Rhodium that I’m still doing today. And so, you know, I realized that having a business that all its revenue was generated on, you know, a three day period and in person event, I woke up and realized, Hey, that’s not the most anti fragile business model. So I started having Rhodium remote and, and that’s been great for the community because it gives people an opportunity to connect on a deeper level between the in person events.
John Corcoran 37:12
Yeah, so you end up selling centric, as you mentioned earlier to another business owner. Things have come back now; we’re recording this in 2024. So we’re back in person, you’ve got an event coming up in October. What else are you excited about? What else? You know, are you looking to the future now that you’ve sold since Erica and Rhodium now rebranded as Rhodium network from Rhodium weekend is your primary focus?
Chris Yates 37:39
Yeah, well, I’m excited that I got a three letter.com I’ve been looking for the right domain name for a while to rebrand Rhodium, and I ended up picking up Rh n.com. So that was super exciting. Wow, it’s such a maybe it’s an ego thing. But I do feel like it’s, you know, long term it will be a good investment. But yeah, so there’s a few things I’m excited about. So number one is I host as part of the Rhodium remote membership, a retreat. So cool thing I get to do for the community for usually it’s around 50 people that we do this with and it all runs out like an all inclusive resort. And we’ll all get together for five or six days.
So next Friday, I’m leaving to go to an area just south of Cancun, Mexico, beach front, where we’ll be together for several days. Last year, we went to Costa Rica. So that’s been like the event stuff that I do. That’s one of my favorite things, a lot less stressful than all the things that go into a typical conference, rehab speakers and venues and that are a little different. So I’m really excited about that. I’m excited about leveraging AI for matchmaking as well. A big part of what I do in Rhodium is connect people, right? And so I’ve always thought, Man, if I could just take my brain and turn it into a system that will say, Hey, what are three people if I could just type in Hey, what are who are three people, John Corcoran should meet right now based on his goals of XYZ. And it just spits it out for me and then makes the intros and all that kind of stuff. I’m super stoked about that.
John Corcoran 39:05
So I went by that. And I would buy that that’s a pain point for me, for sure. I love making introductions, but it is a bit of a pain to kind of keep track of all the different ones that you could do.
Chris Yates 39:15
Yeah, I’m sure you’re familiar with the idea of Dunbar’s number, but you can imagine humans are actually wired to roughly be able to manage about 150 connections in their brain. When you have a community like mine of 1000, it’s almost impossible to do that, right? So you tend to work with the people who are most engaged at the smaller part of it, and you miss this whole, you know, 800 or so people that are also amazing humans that you would love to support and connect and all that. And you just forget you can’t keep that all in your brain. So I don’t know if I’ll produce it, but it’s something I want to do for Rhodium. And so I’m really excited about that.
John Corcoran 39:48
Yeah, I love the idea of that because I’m the same way. I mean, Jeremy, my business partner and I would just like to know who just interviewed you recently. He’s the same way we both do over 100 interviews a year of different people. We’d love introducing them. I think personally, the best way to get introductions is to make, you know, hundreds of different podcast episodes that we’re doing every month for clients. So it’s a real challenge. And there’s not really a great way, there’s not an elegant solution for that, in spite of all the different elegant solutions that have been created over the years in the digital space.
Chris Yates 40:19
Just real quick, I want to mention what really made this real for me. Last year, we had a gentleman named Andrew Oman from 93 Digital who did a presentation about how they’ve been building AI. Software for like fortune 500 companies and like, exactly, they were using something called rad, which, you know, you can search Ra, GMAIL, and you’ll learn all about that retrieval augmented, whatever, blah, blah. Point is, he actually mapped out exactly how this would work, utilizing some of these new amazing tools of GPT, and open AI and all that kind of stuff.
And so, it is because it actually is really possible right now. And if you layer that on to the transcripts that you have of all your podcasts, you can dump all those transcript transcripts into this database, and just tag them with the person and now you know, the expertise of every single person. And maybe even, you know, somebody asked you like, hey, I need somebody who I don’t know, like, who do you know, in the agency space? Who does? You know, compliance with privacy in California? Maybe you’ve got a podcast that you did six months ago, you totally forgot about, but you search in there anyway. So I just wanted to know.
John Corcoran 41:29
No, I totally agree there’s going to be those sorts of solutions going to be coming out. I’m excited about that. Because I’ve been doing a podcast for 14 years, I’ve had a lot of past stuff that I’ve forgotten about, you know, that could be relevant. And I think that’s going to extract some of that past value for people going forward in the future. Well, Chris has a great wrap up. I love to ask people, and usually I warn them beforehand, which I forgot to warn you beforehand. So tough luck, you’re gonna have to wing it. But I’m a big fan of gratitude.
And I’m a big fan of expressing gratitude to those who helped you along the way. And you’ve mentioned some names of some people that helped you along the way you mentioned, you know, various different business partners, members, your community, advocates, champions, that sort of thing. You know, sometimes people mentioned their family. That’s cool. But I’d love to especially hear like, Are there any members of your community? Are there key advocates who have been supporters of yours, who you would just want to thank and shout out for for being there for you over the years?
Chris Yates 42:28
Sure. Yeah, I’d love to do that. So number one, David gas, the the person who hired me in that first job out of college, currently, he is the CEO of a great organization that helps. It helps entrepreneurs win, especially real estate investors with estate planning and tax tax strategies and things like that called Anderson advisors. Number two, I would say, Jason Glaspie. And Chuck Mullins who I mentioned from already in this podcast, like they, they’re the kind of the Oh, geez of Rhodium for certainly. Mike Nunez, Mike nunes.com. He’s awesome. He used to operate before he sold it, a business called affiliate manager, as well as building up a pretty amazing portfolio of e-commerce businesses, including one called outdoor play. But there’s been a few people that consistently in Rhodium, I hear from other members that they made a huge impact on them. And Mike Nunez, his name continuously comes up as like, he gave me this like, actually, there’s one guy, I’ll mention who runs a YouTube channel. Mike gave him one tip. And apparently he grew his business by like, I don’t know, it was like some crazy amount. Like it was like 5000. And now he’s doing like 60 or 70,000 a month or something like that. So just from that one little tip. So anyway, yeah, those are a few off the top of my head.
John Corcoran 43:50
That’s awesome. Chris, where can people go to connect with you to learn more about the Rhodium network?
Chris Yates 43:56
Yeah, I mean, Rh en.com, I’m proud to say this is the place to go. The way I do it is I actually interview everybody before inviting them into the community. So if you think this is something you want to explore, you know, you can actually as part of the application process, you’ll get on a call with me. So even if you’re not I love connecting with other entrepreneurs like you do, John, so happy to chat with anybody.
John Corcoran 44:17
Awesome. Thanks so much, Chris.
Chris Yates 44:18
Thank you.
Chad Franzen 44:23
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