The Number One Reason Why Deals Close

The Number One Reason Why Deals Close—with Dan King

Our guest is Dan King. He is a recovering lawyer, turned business growth strategist and executive coach who has worked with billionaires, high-net-worth investors, CEOs, senior politicians and military leaders, as well as small business owners across different industries. He combines razor-sharp business strategy with down-to-earth warmth and kindness. A philosophy that his company, Fireside Strategic, uses to grow their clients’ B2B businesses. He also, in his previous life, was a corporate lawyer and worked behind the scenes for some of the sharks on the Shark Tank TV show. That’s why we started off our episode going in and digging deeper on what’s happening behind the scenes on Shark Tank deals. He revealed to us some interesting facts that you as readers will enjoy.

What percentage of sales do not close even when you saw the handshake on the show? What is the number one reason a deal will not close or will close behind the scene, even though the economics don’t make sense? There’s more that you’re going to read in the blog. Pay also close attention to how we discussed the importance of knowing who your ideal client is and how you could define who your ideal client should be. Also, the importance of setting up a proper relationship when you’re going after leads, the difference between relationship building, trust factor and so much more. This is a great interview you don’t want to miss. Without further ado, here is my interview.

LTB 85 | Perfect Business Deal
Perfect Business Deal: Here’s a little Shark Tank secret: If your pitch airs, your chances of getting a deal go up because Shark Tank is not just a deal-making platform. It’s also an advertising and marketing platform.

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Dan, thank you so much for joining me on the show.

It’s a pleasure to be here with you, Meny.

My guests know that whoever I invite on the show is people that I’ve seen some of the stuff they do and what they’re up to and I feel that we could deliver no-nonsense advice. We connected and I saw some of the stuff you’re up to and some of the background on the stuff that you have done in the past. I figured that there is definitely a lot of good valuable content that could come out of the conversation that we bring to our audience. Thank you for joining us. I appreciate it. I want to get right to it, which I always do, especially if it’s a person that it’s their first time on the show. Give us a background, so our audience knows where you’re coming from, what you have done and what you do. The questions and answers will have a different meaning.

I’m a fairly new New Yorker. I grew up on the East Coast of Canada. I started my professional life as a corporate lawyer. I worked at a large law firm. Soon after that, I was doing some of the legal work on the Shark Tank TV show, which readers are probably familiar with. When you see an entrepreneur come on the show, they’re looking most of the time for an investment and sometimes just for free PR. My role was to do some of the due diligence on the deals that closed on air. A deal might close on air, but that doesn’t mean that it closes in real life. There’s a whole due diligence process because the producers of Shark Tank don’t do any due diligence prior to someone appearing. My role was to do that, negotiate and draft some of the contracts that you might have seen for the deals on the show. It was a wonderful business education. I learned a ton.

I realized that I absolutely wanted to be an entrepreneur. I never had that thought before, but you’re surrounded by entrepreneurs every day and it’s inspiring. I also realized, though, that I didn’t want to be spending the next 30 years of my life writing 300-page contracts. I realized being a lawyer wasn’t exactly what I wanted to do. I found myself caring so much about the leadership, performance and business growth challenges of the entrepreneurs, much more than their legal challenges. I knew I would be an entrepreneur and it would be in some kind of human-oriented business.

At the beginning of my career, I started Fireside, a company I run now and is my third company. I started two companies prior to that. The first one failed, which is a great experience to go through in retrospect, which was not at that time. The second company I built was a lawyer career transition company. The majority of lawyers in America, sadly, do not like the work they do. People find their way into law like I did, not knowing what law is and what the work is actually like. So, I built a company to solve that problem, grew it and sold it.

I now run a company called Fireside Strategic. The focus of Fireside is C-Suite relationship building and shortening the B2B sales cycle. This interest I have in connecting with people and relationship building has always been core to how I’ve operated. I have this deep belief that if you want to grow a business, stop wasting time and connect directly, especially if it’s a B2B business. You don’t have to spend years working through the hierarchy of an organization to close a deal. If you build a human relationship directly with the decision-maker, business owner or C-Suite leader, you can massively shorten your sales cycle. That’s my genius and that’s what birthed Fireside.

[bctt tweet=”If you want to grow a business, stop wasting time and connect with your clients directly.” via=”no”]

Thank you for the intro. It has given us some background information. I want to go there on which that’s the purpose I ask for that intro because sometimes I find some golden nuggets where I want to dissect and dig deeper. Is that okay with you?

I am an open book. Ask whatever you want.

I want to speak about the Shark Tank experience. There are a lot of lessons for entrepreneurs from that show and from the dealings from the show. I want to ask some specific questions. I know we had Kevin Harrington, which was one of the former sharks on the show already in the past and we discussed some of it. We also had a business owner or two that presented on the Shark Tank, but now we’re hearing it from an attorney in the background, negotiating some of those deals. The question to you is: yes, there’s the frontend of the show, which you could hear the words that the sharks use a lot, which is, “We’re investing more in the entrepreneur than the business or more in the entrepreneur than the economics.” At the end of the day, when you’re doing the background, doing the due diligence, auditing the books and seeing what’s happening, what are the core reasons why a deal will fall through the cracks later on? What could be the lessons from that for entrepreneurs reading this?

I’m going to answer it and another question you sort of asked but didn’t ask, which is, “Is it true that an entrepreneur gets invested in like sharks choose to invest in an entrepreneur because of the person, as opposed to the economics of the business?” My experience is that’s true in terms of getting a handshake deal on air. There’s a limited amount of time for sharks to dig into the economics of the business to understand everything they would want to do. You can’t do a full due diligence process in 1 hour or 1.5 hours, which is how long the pitches really are. You see on-air 5 or 7 minutes. The pitches tend to be maybe 1 hour to 1 hour and 20 minutes, but you can’t know everything about the economics.

The personality and the confidence that an entrepreneur’s personality instills in a shark is the biggest factor to getting to the stage where you’re shaking hands with the shark. But, the reality is, majority of the deals do not close as a result of what we might uncover in due diligence. We might find, for example, that an entrepreneur inflates the sales figures. We might find that, “This purchase order isn’t quite as airtight as they claimed it was on-air.” All of these little things mean that, at least when I was there, maybe 20% to 30% of the deals that closed on air actually closed in real life because there are all kinds of incentives for people to exaggerate when they go on TV.

How much have you seen that carries over that even when the numbers don’t end up matching up to what they anticipated when they made a deal on the show, that they will still say, “Even though the numbers changed, but I still believe in you as an entrepreneur?”

It does happen and I’ll tell you one big factor, which you won’t know about. If you’re ready for a little fun Shark Tank secret, I don’t think there’s any harm in me disclosing this. I think the audience may enjoy this. If your pitch airs—many pitches do not—your chances of getting a deal go up massively. There are a few reasons for that. A big one is that Shark Tank is not just a deal-making platform. It’s also an advertising and marketing platform. A big reason a lot of companies go on air is for the exposure. Many pitches don’t air. In fact, long after a pitch is filmed, sometimes the decision to air it or not is made. I’ve been a part of deals where the investor was thinking like, “Probably, even though all the economics aren’t quite what I thought they were, this company is going to explode if the pitch airs. I know they’re going to have one day of sales, which could 10X their valuation, one day of sales from appearing on Shark Tank.” That alone is often a big factor.

This is an interesting fact. Is that something that the sharks could dictate or that’s run by the show and the producers?

When I was there, that was mostly the producer’s decision. It doesn’t mean that we couldn’t lobby. It doesn’t mean that we couldn’t say, “This pitch is cool.” But national airtime is valuable. Ultimately, it’s the producer’s discretion.

I want to get to one more point on that and then we’ll move on from this conversation. What have you seen and then you would say being there, part of that negotiation, “If only the entrepreneur will have better bookkeeping or if only the entrepreneur will be truthful what they say?” What are the things that you say, “Guys, this is not how you do business?” What will be those points?

You’ve put your finger on an important answer, which is integrity. If you want to go on the show and get exposure, this doesn’t matter as much. But if you ultimately want to get a deal, understand that these sharks have done a lot of deals. They have a lot of choices. Many of them get approached outside of the TV show. They’ve got all kinds of deals there. They are looking to rule out people who are lower integrity. That makes total sense because I’m sure if you did a study, odds are that deals with lower-integrity founders aren’t going to do as well. In entrepreneurship, we need to be honest. We need to see data objectively and make good decisions on the basis of honest feedback for ourselves and our teams. It is such a massive red flag to me as I’ve done some of my own deals and what I’ve seen on Shark Tank. People who don’t tell the truth, you develop a radar to see it. It’s a massive factor in determining whether someone is investable or not.

LTB 85 | Perfect Business Deal
Perfect Business Deal: Most entrepreneurs try to figure out everything in their heads. If you get out into the world and have real conversations, most of the answers are there for you to discover.

It’s so important because, as a business owner, there’s airtime. Sometimes you see those follow-up episodes. Even sometimes I read up about certain companies that were a deal on Shark Tank and all of a sudden, that company was dismantled, but those people are now part of the sharks’ C-level executive team. Because it didn’t so much need the business, they needed those people that are running the business. Integrity comes into play because it’s not so much about the product. If the leaders and the founders don’t have integrity, one way or the other, it’s going to fall apart. This is an interesting sum from behind the scene. Sometimes we see the show and most people know that there is a closing process after the show at this point.

Let’s move on to where this led you, what you’re doing with your relationships and then helping building out getting leads for B2B companies. There is this challenge of a company that needs to be set up in order so they should be able to properly get leads into the funnel. Sometimes you could see the terminology out there that, “The leads are coming in, but the bucket has a hole and everything is going out or it’s not being backed up.” What is the proper setup of a company even before they think about going out, regardless if it’s your process or any other process in going and getting new leads?

It’s exactly the question that so many small business owners, in particular, don’t ask. They get so excited about booking sales conversations that they usually jump into the fray of a lead generation too early or maybe not too early, but unfortunately, a little thoughtlessly. The first big thing is research is so fundamentally important to get to product-market fit. You want to do something scalable in lead generation. You need to go 0 to 1 first. You can’t go 0 to 10 in most cases. Good research requires understanding exactly who a customer is and what challenges you are going to solve for them. You don’t necessarily need to have one customer avatar per se. That can be a bit of a myth, but you do need to have some clearly defined target markets. You need to have a solid grasp of what problem you’re solving for them. Through research conversations, you should uncover whether it’s a problem that’s a bleeding neck problem.

We’re ultimately in business to make some money. We want to solve important problems, but to convince people to spend money, you need to be solving a problem that ideally is pretty significant for them. It’s not just that little challenge. It’s something that matters. The first big thing you want to have in place is a solid research process. For years, one of the reasons that my first company didn’t do as well as it might have is I used to skip over research, or I would do it shoddily. Thorough research enables you to get crisp and clear on the problems that you’re solving, who you’re solving them for and the gravity of those problems. Armed with that knowledge, you’re much better positioned to do something scalable in the lead generation space.

That’s helpful. You mentioned before like, “Business owners are loving to find more leads and they’re not set up for it.” I would even say even and go further than that in saying that they’re not even spending enough time nurturing the existing business and the customer base. They’re finding every shiny object of, “How could I run using Clubhouse now to get more leads? I don’t even know who is on that platform. How many followers? Are those followers the right consumer?” When they have existing customers, it could double their sales by just nurturing their clients in the right way.

Let me add that in this pandemic moment, I have seen so many business owners even more compelled by the shiny object syndrome than I have ordinarily. There’s something about some of the scarcity that can creep into our decision-making process that we want to be careful about. Clubhouse is great, but it’s a classic example of the shiny object syndrome. You see this with investing all the time. People get excited about a stock. You can see that it’s the momentum, almost like a bubble, in the financial markets. You can also see bubbles pop up in the lead generation space all the time.

I want to dive into the process of defining, “Who is your ideal client?” That’s an important factor and what goes into that part. I want to speak about building that relationship with those leads. What could you share on, as far as a typical business owner, that sometimes you could speak to a business owner and say, “Who is your ideal client?” We had this healthy conversation about, “Who is the target market for a PTEX client and a business that’s looking to get to the next level? We can help them with branding, marketing and all the other services that you might need to get the word out.” A lot of business owners will say, “Anybody that wants to buy my product. I have a whole warehouse of goods and anybody could buy my product.” What are the fundamentals of how a business owner needs to look at segmenting their clients and coming up with their ideal client?

I’m going to answer the question and tell you the biggest mistake that I frequently see here and that’s trying to figure this out in your head. Sometimes we’ll search in our head for patterns of people that we’ve spoken with in the past and people that we like to work with. That’s not entirely a bad way to go, but if you try to figure this out exclusively in your head, you’re going to get confused. Most of the answers are there for you to discover if you get out into the world and have real conversations. Simple research conversations are a powerful way to spot patterns organically, as opposed to in your head. In your head, there are going to be all kinds of misperceptions and assumptions, but the data doesn’t lie.

If you go to the world and have 10 or 15 research conversations, you’re going to start to notice patterns. Then you can grab almost like a magnifying glass and go deeper into a pattern. For example, you might notice that, “There’s something about 30-person companies in the industrial space that seems like a good fit for what we do.” Then you can organize research conversations with 30-person businesses in the industrial space. You notice the patterns if you just get out there and have conversations. I think having the conversations, whether it’s for sales or research, especially for beginning business owners, there can be some fear there. The biggest thing is to let the market give you the answers as opposed to trying to figuring out in your head.

This is a little more of a deeper question on this. When somebody starts a business, anybody wants to walk into the store or the business. They want to take money because they’re starting a business. They don’t even know yet who their ideal client is. At which point in the business growth mode are they ready to say, “Wait a minute. Let’s stop taking these types of clients. Let’s focus on these types of clients?” What is the maturity level of a business at that point, so you would say, “They’re ready for that?”

I’m sure a good answer is going to vary from industry to industry. I’ll give you a couple of signs that come to mind. The first is if you’re at the point where you can learn from having enrolled the wrong customers and clients. I’m speaking here mostly for service businesses or productized service businesses that sell at an expensive $10,000 and up price point. That’s who I work with. That’s who we are. In that business, in the beginning, you’re going to enroll some of the wrong clients. You’re going to enroll people who don’t get results probably. You’re going to enroll people who either weren’t ready for any kind of service like yours or not a fit for yours.

We don’t want that to be repeated. We want to learn from it. We don’t want to be ashamed of it because we all make mistakes. If you genuinely thought you could help this person and this company, there’s nothing to be ashamed of but to learn from the mistake. Understand, “Why was it that they didn’t get results? Where was the lack of fit?” You’re at a decent stage of maturity as a business owner in the services or productized services space, where we go back to honesty and integrity when you can honestly learn from the mistakes of the clients that you shouldn’t have enrolled. Make a list and write down, “Why didn’t this work?”

Let me move on to speaking about leads coming in. Let’s say your company knows the ideal client. You have the proper infrastructure. Now, you’re looking for more business. This is something that I don’t think anybody is exempt from. You have this situation where a lead comes in. You’re so excited that you somehow connected in that first conversation. Somehow in that conversation, you’re saying, “I got this massive lead.” Ultimately, either they go missing or at a later date, you find out they’re totally not interested in your service. This is what you do for a living at this point and you’re trying to connect, “Why are there no red flags? Why are they so apart?” It’s this belief thinking, “I just had a good conversation, but I’m not interested in moving on.” The person that’s servicing or offering the service or product is feeling, “This is our next biggest client.”

The biggest thing is not uncovering as early as possible in the process what the objections of this prospect could be and not being, in your own mind, solid and confident enough in what you do to think that you can be upfront about what could go wrong. I was in a sales conversation. I was watching the body language of the prospect carefully. He’s a wonderful guy who I think is a good fit for us. I’m excited for him, but in the elements of the process, I could see something I was saying wasn’t quite landing. I could see this in his facial expression and tone of voice. I would stop and ask him, “I’m not sure what I said just landed. Is that right?” If you keep checking in, you’re going to unearth the actual objections as early as possible in the process.

The reality is that you should want to do that and that’s because you should want to enroll people who are going to get good results. An objection that doesn’t come up in a sales conversation, a sales conversation might close, but it’s possible that objection will derail the ability of the client to get results. It will derail your ability to get a great testimonial and your confidence in yourself. A great marker of maturity and confidence here is to know that you are going to have people and be fine in the end. It’s in everyone’s interests to do due diligence. Maybe this is my lawyer due diligence training coming up. You want to constantly be doing emotional and business due diligence.

Is that one of the secrets that what you’re doing now is shortening new clients’ B2B sales cycles? Is that one of the main reasons how you’re able to shorten the clients’ B2B sales cycles?

It is a big part of it, yes. When you find yourself spending a lot of time in the B2B space, deals can take a long time. We work on $100,000 and up B2B deals. When you’re in that space, there are often multiple decision-makers. There are a lot of human beings sometimes that need to believe in what you’re doing for that deal to come through. People are often polite. They don’t want to have tricky conversations. The sooner you can get to a point where a variety of decision-makers voice their objections, then it’s going to be much easier for you to determine whether there is a deal here so that you can save your time, move on and allocate it elsewhere if there are going to be too many of these objections that you can’t handle.

What would you say, from the deals that you helped initiate, are the main reasons when maybe, let’s say printing services? You reached out to someone and they will say, “We’re fine. We already have a service provider doing our printing services,” but you know that this is the proper client. This is the client fit. What is part of that script? What is part of that messaging that you feel that could convey to say, “Wait a minute. Let me listen more and maybe even quote a project with you?” Sometimes those salespeople hit a roadblock or this stop sign so early in the process that they’re not even given a chance to even share what they have to offer.

If that happens, odds are higher than with a typical case that this probably isn’t the client, but if you stop and, first of all, express that, that’s great that they have a provider. If you are able to build a little bit of a human relationship with this person, rather than a purely transactional one, you can explore a little bit as to what’s working with that provider relationship or not. They may have a provider, but it may be that provider isn’t serving in as cost-effective way as they might. It might be that provider isn’t delivering results as effectively as they might. Just because someone has a provider doesn’t mean that you should give up. On the other hand, though, we do want to be careful about our time in lead generation and sales. It’s a good thing if you learn this because it’s a sign that this might not be the most qualified lead. It probably isn’t going to be an uphill battle and that’s okay because there are many other printing companies in the world to reach out to.

I want to ask you a controversial question, at least on the show. When it comes to sales, the way you thought about doing sales is you got to first build up a relationship with that lead and ultimately then understand their pain points. That’s how you funnel through the sales process. We had a guest on the show, which said, “Building relationships is with your clients. You never want to build a relationship with a person that you’re trying to get as a lead. Why? Because they’re not your client.” He phrased it, “You might want to build a trust with that person, so there is a chemistry between the two, but not you building a relationship.” He didn’t use the words of transactional, but it is about, “You have a challenge. We have the solution. Work yourself up from there.” What’s your take on that?

That’s going to be Ari Galper, I would guess.

You can’t imagine how many questions I filled in. It’s everything I learned about sales, obsolete. I said, “My job is to bring you great content and you have to use them in the way it’s appropriate for you.”

Ari is a great guy. He’s very sharp.

That was a sharp interview.

Can I both answer your question and also tell the audience a little bit about our unique process for lead generation?

By all means, absolutely.

LTB 85 | Perfect Business Deal
Perfect Business Deal: As a business owner, you’re at a decent stage of maturity when you can learn from and accept your mistakes.

My initial answer to the question is, in terms of whether to build a relationship or not, sales and lead generation are contextual. Any human engagement is contextual. What I mean by that is that not all leads are created equal. What has happened before a sales conversation? All of those things contribute to the nature of a sales conversation. As an example, a sales conversation I had was a referral. Another one that I had come from a podcast appearance I did. Someone reached out and said, “I’m interested in what you do.” It actually is, in my view, I definitely respect what Ari does. A certain amount of friendliness created some warmth and enabled him to trust me. Friendliness and trust aren’t necessarily distinct.

In cases where you’re doing heavy outbound lead generation, you need to be careful about some people would say getting friend-zoned. There’s some truth to that. If you put yourself in a position of less power, you find yourself chasing constantly and always being nice and not defending your boundaries. As an example, when I was first starting out, I generated an outbound lead who is a CEO of a business. No name is being named. This person began a meeting with me saying, “I nearly canceled this meeting. It’s not that high priority for me.” That was a case of me having spent a little too much time with this person being a little too friendly and nice. I didn’t defend my boundaries and said, “It probably means you’re not all that interested in.” That could have been a challenging and fair thing to say to her, given that she wasn’t being respectful of my time or hers.

If someone comes to you through a referral, if there’s a little more warmth, that there’s trust, you can lean into that trust. Friendliness is a powerful contributor to trust. I agree with Ari that trust matters a lot. We can go too far in being too nice as salespeople and lead generators and not defending our boundaries, but different strokes for different folks. You need to pay attention to your personality. That’s important in lead gen and sales. What you say needs to be authentic, “I’m a warm human being. I’m pretty fuzzy.” When I try to be authoritative and not have fun, I suck. I’ll be honest. A certain amount of friendliness is essential to creating trust when I do sales.

That’s the healthy balance between old-school sales and also trust-building sales. It’s not clear-cut. It’s one way or the highway. Meaning to say, it also depends on the characterization of the nature of what you’re selling and how you’re selling. It’s similar to these debates for years about, “Who is a better salesperson, the introvert or the extrovert?” You could find data on both sides and the answer will always be depending on what you’re selling. If you’re selling a commodity product, then probably the extrovert could sell way more in quantity. If it’s a quality long-term life, it’s a decision I’m buying my house in the long run or whatever it is, then maybe the introvert has a better way of closing that sale because they could connect on a deeper and build that relationship. It’s not one or the other. It’s a combination of both and you use them on the appropriate occasions.

It’s important that when we pick a lead generation approach and a sales approach that it’s aligned with our strengths. We have a particular and pretty unique model of lead generation. It’s a fit for people that love one-on-one connection and going deep with people. Our focus at Fireside Strategic, our main lead generation strategy is called Straight to the C-Suite. The idea is that instead of spending all of your time working your way up the hierarchy of a B2B organization, the biggest way that we shorten the sales cycle is by building a warm human relationship directly with a C-Suite leader or a decision-maker. Go right to the top of an organization, meet that human and connect with them. Don’t spend hours and hours, but spend some time building that connection because then, they’re going to be much more open to having a sales conversation with you.

The crux of how we do it, we use videocasts and podcasts not just to create content and build an audience, although we do that. We’ve found that videocasts and podcasts are compelling for C-Suite leaders and business owners. As human beings, we’re all storytelling creatures. We want to make that initial connection point with a business owner or a C-Suite leader, both to potentially sell but also perhaps to form a referral relationship or strategic advisory relationship. A podcast and a videocast have a phenomenal way to build a relationship with someone. It takes much longer to build an audience. A much shorter path to sell B2B at a high price point is to build a great relationship with a C-Suite leader. Podcasts and videocasts are a powerful way to do it.

Tell me more about the current business model for getting leads. What is your unique selling point as far as what sets you apart from other lead generation services? Something that our audience could understand more and if they have a need, they can reach out.

We do high-touch relational lead generation and sales. What that means is, we want to build human relationships. We don’t automate much. It’s only a fit for companies that sell at a high price point B2B and struggled to get to decision-makers. Those are the best fits to work with us. There are all kinds of automated solutions out there on LinkedIn. Some of them, frankly, don’t feel human. We all get pitched by characters on LinkedIn. I’m imagining you do, Meny. You probably get a few messages from people on LinkedIn.

The one that I love is, a company that I already deal with and all of a sudden, I’m getting a LinkedIn message that, “Let me introduce you to our company.” I feel so stupid. I usually play along with the salesperson and say, “Tell me more about your company.” After five messages, I tell them, “Do your company have a database that you could check if I’m already there?” “I’m sorry. I see you doing business with us for years.”

This automation can often diminish the humanity in business. One of our broader missions is, “We’re efficient. We’re systems thinkers. We’re business people, but we got to be careful not to diminish the humanity of business. We don’t just want to make money. We want to have fun.” When you can bring that sense of warmth to an interview with a C-Suite leader, you’ll build a real human connection. Not only is it a great way to shorten your sales cycle, because now, if you interview a C-Suite leader, they’re also going to be more open to an actual pitch from you because they see you as a human. You’re going to have fun doing it. Often, sales and lead generation are not fun. I bet you, for those automated people that are sending 500 LinkedIn messages a day and getting 500 rejections, their life is not fun. It doesn’t feel human.

Where could people find more about you?

The way to find out more about us is to go to FiresideStrategic.com/sttcs. That stands for Straight to the C-Suite. This is our model for connecting with 50 C-Suite leaders in three months for B2B businesses. You can find out more details about it there.

Let’s close with the four rapid-fire questions. A book that changed your life?

The Presence Process by Michael Brown.

Number two, a piece of advice you got that you never forget?

Be true to yourself in business because a good business model is not necessarily a good business model for you.

Number three, anything you wish you could go back and do differently?

Not a thing.

Number four, the final question, what’s still on your bucket list to achieve?

At the top of my bucket list, I have a cousin and he and I compete to go to as many Major League ballparks as we can. Now that the pandemic is starting to wind down, I would definitely high on the bucket list is to get to all of them. I’m about half of the way there, but there’s still so much work to do. I’m getting increasingly eager to do it.

Dan, thank you so much for joining us. I know your time is valuable. That is why in the name of our readers, we will forever be grateful for sharing some of your time with us.

Thanks so much, Meny. It’s always a pleasure.