For four-time franchise CEO Dave Keil, it’s all about scaling companies for good. A few years back, Dave had a hypothesis that if you applied the same processes and operations of franchising commercial businesses to nonprofits, you could scale them just as successfully, and with massive positive impact. This is how Franchise for Good was born. Before that, Dave spent his career leading and growing businesses like HoneyBaked Ham and Pure Barre where he fell in love with the art of franchising. Now, he’s bringing those lessons to the nonprofit world and unlocking potential for organizations to scale their missions. Dave chats with Breaking Schemas co-host John Branch about his career journey from engineer to franchise CEO, how he has helped grow franchise brands through incubators like Franworth, and how he plans to disrupt the nonprofit space with the franchising model. *Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*
For four-time franchise CEO Dave Keil, it’s all about scaling companies for good. A few years back, Dave had a hypothesis that if you applied the same processes and operations of franchising commercial businesses to nonprofits, you could scale them just as successfully, and with massive positive impact.
This is how Franchise for Good was born. Before that, Dave spent his career leading and growing businesses like HoneyBaked Ham and Pure Barre where he fell in love with the art of franchising. Now, he’s bringing those lessons to the nonprofit world and unlocking potential for organizations to scale their missions.
Dave chats with Breaking Schemas co-host John Branch about his career journey from engineer to franchise CEO, how he has helped grow franchise brands through incubators like Franworth, and how he plans to disrupt the nonprofit space with the franchising model.
*Breaking Schemas is a production of the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative at Michigan Ross and is produced by University FM.*
His first CEO job
05:02: I ended up going and leading three different franchise companies as chief executive. So, the first one was the Honey Baked Ham Company. A family held company who had been operating for 59 years. I had been on the board. They needed an M&A person and someone that knew CPG because their desire was to move. They had shops that they sold hams in, but they wanted to expand, and they wanted to go into grocery. And they were needing to do some M&A’s. So, I went in. I'd been on the board and saying, “Guys, you got to bring this together. We're leaving a bunch of money on the table.” And they finally convinced me to come join.
Only 16% of all franchisors make money
12:00: The secret in franchising is that there's only 16% of all franchisors that actually make money. And franchising, as you know, it's not just McDonald's. It's every fast food on the planet. It's every hotel. It's every boutique fitness, every boutique beauty business there, every service-based business. Molly Maid, Mr. Handyman, Garage Kings, those types of businesses are all franchises. So, it's a great way to scale and replicate, but it's hard to do only 16% get to that 100 mark. And that tends to be the number, John. If you can go and get 100 units open, then you have a successful franchise.
Disrupting the franchise business by taking off the hurdle of half a million dollar net worth
25:39: We're building what we're calling Beloved Brands, our seven brand portfolio. And we're removing $500,000 as the hurdle to buy a franchise. We're going to test for your competence as a leader. Yes, you've got to be fiscally responsible. Yes, you're going to have to show leadership capabilities and be able to follow a system and lead a team and go deliver milkshakes or garage floor coating, whatever that is, but honestly, we were using half a million bucks of net worth as the proxy for your ability to be a great owner of a business. And that's not right. What it should be is testing for grit and leadership skills and fiscal responsibility. So that's what we're changing.
(Transcripts may contain a few typographical errors due to audio quality during the podcast recording.)
[00:00:00] Marcus: Welcome to Breaking Schemas, a podcast that explores the dynamic changes of contemporary business through the lenses of the disruptors who have not only navigated the changes but have also rewritten the rules of the game. We'll be sitting down with business leaders across a wide spectrum of industries to discuss their victories, their failures, and the biggest lessons they've experienced throughout their career to prepare tomorrow's leaders, that's you, for an ever-changing marketplace. I'm Marcus Collins, marketing professor here at the Ross School of Business, University of Michigan. I'll be your host, along with my co-conspirator, Professor John Branch. Now, let's get into it.
[00:00:45] John: Hello, friends. Professor John Branch here. Welcome to another episode of Breaking Schemas, where we talk about all things, disruption, change, evolution, new ways of thinking, new ways of doing things. Unfortunately, this week, we are absent, my co-pilot, my co-author, my co-host, Professor Marcus Collins. He's off on leave, but I'm super excited to welcome an old friend of mine, and of course, a Michigan alum, Dave Keil. Dave, how are you today?
[00:01:21] Dave: I'm great, John. Thanks for having me on, man. I'm excited. And what did you mean by old? Like, did you mean...
[00:01:26] John: Old like we've known each other for a long time.
[00:01:28] Dave: We've [crosstalk 00:01:28] for a long time.
[00:01:29] John: Yes, a long time.
[00:01:30] Dave: All right. Good. Perfect. Okay. Thank you.
[00:01:31] John: Dave, we're going to get into Franworth, we're going to get into all of your recent not-for-profit agency kind of work, but let's take it way back. I know that you leveraged your bachelor's degree in engineering from Michigan, like, straight after graduation, in an engineering-oriented position, but in CPG, consumer packaged goods. Tell us a little bit more about that.
[00:01:55] Dave: Yeah. So, the first, you know, first job out of school was FritoLay. They were recruiting engineers to go be the future leaders of the company. And so, I was the second class that they did that. That group today are the leaders of FritoLay and PepsiCo. So, it worked really incredible. So, I started supervising the team in a plan in San Antonio, Texas right out of school.
I mean, by August, after graduation, I was working, leading a team, in manufacturing, and spent a good 10 years at Frito, just learning everything operations. Along the way, John, I went back and got my MBA. And so, that was an important turning point as well. I found that the things that drew me most in that profession of leading a team at FritoLay was the team leadership, was setting goals, leading a team. That's where I found I was gifted.
Didn't want to have my full career be in operations. I wanted to move more into general management leadership. So, after FritoLay, I went to General Mills, and that time really jumped to finance function. So, you know, sat on the CFO staff, and later led the Häagen-Dazs business, the ice cream business within Pillsbury, later General Mills, as the CFO. So, really went from being engineer in leadership into much more hardcore finance. And then loved being on a break.
So, I was able to take that, continued CPG type of activity. And then that's where I fell in love with mergers and acquisitions, John. I got to do a deal. At Häagen-Dazs, we put a deal together to partner with Ben and Jerry's. So, that was the first time I sat down in the deal table and absolutely fell in love with the art of the deal, and since done, you know, 55-some-odd mergers and acquisitions along the way. Loved it. And then got a taste of franchising.
So, we did another deal combining Nestle ice cream business with Häagen-Dazs ice cream business in a joint venture called Ice Cream Partners. While I was on that board, there were a lot of things left over, international, research and development, and this little business called the Häagen-Dazs Shops business, which was actually a franchise. And I got a chance to lead that for three years. So, that was my first taste of leading a franchise team.
I later then jumped to Ecolab. What first got me in that was M&A. So, this was, as you know, the first B2B company that I began to work with and found it fascinating because, as you know, in CPG, you know the consumer through surveys and scanner data and focus groups.
In B2B, you know the customer. You actually are meeting with Marriott and Coca Cola and the acute care hospitals. So, did M&A, and then moved in to lead Ecolab's healthcare business. And that's where you and I crossed paths when I was coming to recruit bunch of MBAs, and you helped me go find some of the best of the best.
[00:04:40] John: So, it's no surprise to me, and I know you're a humble guy, but it's no surprise to me that people came calling. And the next, next couple of steps in your careers were CEO positions. Tell us more about that.
[00:04:56] Dave: So, that, yeah, I ended up going and leading three different franchise companies as chief executive. So, the first one was the HoneyBaked Ham Company, so a family held company, who had been operating for 59 years. So, I had been on the board. They needed an M&A person and someone that knew CPG because their desire was to move. They had shops that they sold hams in, but they wanted to expand, and they wanted to go into grocery.
And they were needing to do some M&A's. So, I went in. I'd been on the board and saying, "Guys, you got to bring this together. It's too... We're leaving a bunch of money on the table." And they finally convinced me to come join. So, that was my first CEO job, had a blast there, double EBITDA in about a year and a half there.
Really combining that balance of CPG, we added efficiencies in the supply chain and simplified that, brought three disparate organizations, three supply chains, three websites, three leadership teams, brought those together. So, we've got a bunch of cost synergies, but also began to grow differently. We expanded the straight to home. So, you can now today order a honey baked ham and have it delivered frozen to your doorstep versus going into a shop.
So, it was really a great, great experience. So, my first chance, really, within a family-owned business, coming from Fortune 500 land into a family-owned business, and then set me up for the next role, which was to go lead Pure Barre, which was a boutique fitness chain, franchise chain, in a hot, hot market. So, this was 2016, 2017, early 2018 that I led that business. And that was one that was really needing some help. The founder had been gone for three or four years. They had negative same-store sales for two and a half years.
The franchisees, there were more than 500 open units. They were disgruntled. So, that was a massive transformational change, John. I brought the founder back. I learned how important that was. We, again, added innovation. We actually, at the time, sold DVDs, if you believe it or not. We made $1 million selling DVDs. And I still remember the board winning when I'm like, "Okay, guys. How many of you have a DVD player?"
And we moved and launched what was called Pure Barre on Demand, which now, everybody... you know, it's ubiquitous working out online at the time. We were early movers in that. Built out an incredible leadership team. We turned the company around, built great relationships with the franchisees, and then later sold that business to private equity, to Xponential Fitness, who was rolling up fitness companies. And then, I mean, the next chapter brought me back to Ann Arbor.
[00:07:33] John: Well, let's pause there, Ann Arbor, because, audience members, I've known Dave for years and years and years, as he said, when we collaborated on recruiting MBA students to Ecolab up in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, but we re-met, you know, family level, when he retired to Ann Arbor, but I think he was retired for less than six months.
And I think his wife had the divorce papers already signed. Dave had promised Jenny that they would retire to Ann Arbor. But now, what I think is really, kind of, the culmination of all these wonderful experiences this last chapter of your life. And this is where I want to, to really focus the remaining time. Franworth, tell us more about that.
[00:08:20] Dave: So, I was moving back to Ann Arbor, as you said, to retire. It was a failed retirement, John. There was not even a six-month break. I came to try to sit on the board. So, my vision six years ago was come back to Ann Arbor where Jenny and I met. She's from Michigan. So, I married a Michigan gal. We were going to move back. And so, I heard of this company called Franworth that was a franchise incubator.
I didn't know the founder, a guy named John Rotche, but I met him for lunch. And that lunch turned into a four-and-a-half-hour meeting. And during that meeting, he offered me the job to lead one of our emerging brands within the Franworth portfolio called The Lash Lounge that does boutique beauty, eyelash extensions primarily for women. And it actually was a great landing because what it did was bring everything together for me.
Starting a franchise, business is very difficult. It's a great way to scale a successful, you know, regional business because you can use other people's capital, but you have to build out the processes and systems to scale. So, The Lash Lounge was a great example. The founder, Anna Phillips, had developed and was the innovator in eyelash extensions, making a woman's face look beautiful.
The one thing a woman will do first thing in the morning, the data show, if you could pick one thing in the beauty regime, would do mascara, fix eyelashes because that's the window to your soul. It's how we communicate, looking each other in the eye. So, it was a budding business with 19 units open in Dallas, but we wanted to scale. And so, we sold a bunch of franchises and had to go build all the processes and systems to move from 19 units to what today is about 150 units. So, I came in and partnered with them.
That's what Franworth does, partners with founders, brings intellectual and financial capital to bear, take equity in the company. So, we took half the company. And I had the other half. We started with 19 units. We grew it. Long story short, this last February, we sold the company to private equity for, you know, mid-double digits, EBITDA multiple, and, you know, life changing for the founder and, you know, a great win for the Franworth team.
[00:10:25] John: Yeah.
[00:10:25] Dave: So, that's, you know, that's, kind of, what we were up to.
[00:10:28] John: I find the Franworth model fascinating. It's headquartered here in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It's not a, not a big location, but doing very, very impressive work, as you say, helping franchisers, franchisees, franchise...-
[00:10:42] Dave: Ors, ors. So, the or is the national body. The franchisee is the local unit operator.
[00:10:47] John: ... helping the franchisors to scale. Now, I remember you telling me about this magic number 100 units. think our listeners would be interested in knowing more about that.
[00:10:59] Dave: So, a franchise is nothing but... a definition of a franchise is a license between a franchisor, someone who owns the intellectual property, and an operating system. So, they know how to go run a Lash Lounge. So, they license that to a franchisee who opens their own store. So, John, if I sold you a Lash Lounge, I would give you a license to the intellectual property, the marks, and teach you how to do it, everything, how to pick your site, how to open your store, how to price it, how to hire, how to market.
And for that, you pay me a royalty. In this case, it's 6%. So, of every dollar that you bring in from an end consumer, you pay me 6 cents. And with those 6 cents, I have to build out a team. Well, the secret in franchising is that there's only 16% of all franchisors that actually make money. And franchising, as you know, it's not just McDonald's. It's every fast food on the planet. It's every hotel.
It's every boutique fitness, every boutique beauty business there, every service-based business. So, Molly Maid, Mr. Handyman, Garage Kings, those types of businesses are all franchises. So, it's a great way to scale and replicate, but it's hard to do only 16% get to that 100 mark. And that tends to be the number, John. If you can go and get 100 units open, then you have a successful franchise.
And that's really what Franworth existed to do by our founder, John Rotche, who has founded a company on mentorship to go help mentor small business owners grow. Well, you've got to sprint to get to 100 open or you won't be able to support all the franchisees properly. So, again, franchising is a great way for a franchisee to win. 85% of franchise-backed businesses are still open.
The unit is still open after five years. Only 18%, 18% of the sole proprietorship is still open after five years. Opening a small business is not easy to do. You're more successful if you're backed by a company like ours, but it's still really hard to do. So, that's where that 100 came from.
[00:13:06] John: It's fascinating, absolutely fascinating. Can you give our listeners a sense of the other companies in the Franworth portfolio?
[00:13:14] Dave: Yeah. There's seven today. And those have morphed over time. So, we look for three things, John. We look for great founders. We get probably, I don't know, three or four calls a week. So, hundreds of people want to partner with us. We're very selective, maybe add one per year. So, we have one called the MilkShake Factory. In fact, it's opening. We just opened our first unit. We've sold 97 units. So, well on our way to success.
We just opened our first unit in Salt Lake City a couple of weeks ago. It's doing fantastic. We're opening at Ann Arbor, here, in August. And so, we're off to the races. We've got one that we're just started, that we just opened and launched called Degree Wellness. It's a cryotherapy, infrared sauna, cold plunge, IV therapy, even going to launch GLP. So, that's a great business.
A couple of service-based businesses, one called Garage Kings that does... We'll come take care of your garage, John. We'll put garage floor coating, epoxy coating. One called MosquitoNix that does killing of mosquitoes. We have one in boutique beauty still called sugaringLA that does hair removal. Waxing is the most ubiquitous, in a way, to remove hair.
Sugaring is a more natural way to do it. We've even got a chiropractic chain called HealthSource Chiropractic, 150 units already and growing. And then we're about ready to launch one that I'm super excited about called the Laundry Spot. This is the first time I've talked about this publicly. Think about a high-end laundromat that just, you know, got high-end machines.
And typically, you're going to put a laundromat in a place that indexes less than $50,000 household income, you know, high-rental income, lower-educated folks, but we're bringing dignity in those areas. And we've just partnered with a group out of Ohio. And we're getting ready to launch that business. So, that's the portfolio. The commonalities are there's nothing in common between laundry, chiropractic care, hair removal, and milkshakes, right? What's in common?
Well, the thing in common is they've got an amazing founder who wants to grow the right reason. They've got great unit level economics. So, we try to target a franchisee. When I sold you that Lash Lounge, we want you to break even cash-on-cash return in three years. And it's got a really dynamic end market. So, all of those end markets are growing significantly. We've shed.
We used to be a lot in fitness. You knew we were in CityRow and Barcode and others. And we've exited that because we think that business, it's fine, but the big boys are really taken over there, F45, Orangetheory, all the exponential businesses. So, we, we are focused on emerging brands and helping them grow and scale. And in fact, we've just renamed our portfolio, John, Beloved Brands. So, that's something that we haven't gone public with, again, kind of, breaking this on your podcast because it's you, but we couldn't be more excited. I'm happy to tell you more about what Beloved Brands means.
[00:16:16] John: Well, I'd love to hear more about Beloved Brands, but what I'm really excited to hear about is the next stage in your career because I know that you're stepping away at some point, but you're taking all of this experience and, of course, the passion to the not-for-profit world, and in particular, leveraging your knowledge of franchising and how franchising can scale and disrupt to the world of not for profit. So, tell us a bit about Beloved, but also then segue into your now not-for-profit mission-based activities.
[00:16:54] Dave: Thanks, John. Yeah. So, I turned 60 in October. And my life plan is to really retire this time from president of Franworth in October. So, that's the plan. So, I will remain with Franworth as an operating partner. We'll continue to coach our brand presidents. I've done it a number of times. I'm one of four partners in the business with the founder, John Rotche, this great social philanthropist Michigan guy, former hedge fund guy, Paul Blavin, and then the football player, Drew Brees. We're the partners at Franworth.
I'll remain engaged. And they'll sit on a couple of boards. But the most important thing that I'm working on for my life mission is I found it about five years ago, right in the middle of COVID, a non-profit called Franchise for Good. So, I had a hypothesis that... You know, I've had some success in my career as I pointed the balance of my time on this earth to, you know, things of significance.
My hypothesis was that all the scaling things that I was describing today, all the processes and systems and the way that franchisors have been replicating for decades, my hypothesis was that could be applied to the non-profit space. I didn't know much about it other than sitting on a couple of non-profit boards. So, I began to dive in. And where that landed was me defining my mission.
So, my mission in life is to honor God by doing three things, honoring my family, which, you know, that's super important to me, sharing life lessons, I have a blog called lessonsonpurpose.com where I share some of these life lessons, but importantly, scaling companies for good. And so, I had always been not the founder, John, but the guy that come in after and turn it around, fix it, scale, but this time, I decided just to start.
So, I started a... it's a 501(c)(3), it's a non-profit, with a mission to scale other non-profits. I started with one, found luckily, my first client was a billionaire. And he had developed a thing called Colorado Homebuilding Academy, a trade job training academy. He was based in Denver, largest homebuilder in Colorado. If you've been in Colorado, they're building a home every day.
I mean, there's thousands of... you know, I think he builds 3,000 a year in Colorado, but there's a dearth of qualified labor, homeless problem, unemployed problem. So, he created a trade job academy to teach people who were... skills of how to be a carpenter, plumber, HVAC technician. And then we give them a job. Brilliant idea. He was looking to scale it. I needed something to scale and replicate. So, we partnered. We rebranded the company into BuildStrong Academy. And we started. We started replicating it.
Drew Brees, my business partner, we asked him if he would open one in New Orleans. And he did. And it was a huge success. So, we opened there. We now have eight open around the U.S. The vision is to create a million trade jobs, put a million people into... upscale into trade jobs. And we're well on our way. We only need to open 20 BuildStrong Academies to do that. Well in our way to do that. So, that got me started. And then I did a few other brands.
And then University of Notre Dame came calling. They heard what we were doing, got in the car, drove to Ann Arbor. This was a couple of years ago. And they're trying... Like, they have a brand that is all about football. And they're a Catholic university. They're trying to ship their brand into really making a difference socially by impacting poverty in a positive way.
They have a think tank called LEO, Lab for Economic Opportunity, that studies some 90 non-profits. And they do random control trials and actually proved that that non-profit does what it says it's going to do. If they're trying to do one that, that I work with, one called Corner to Corner that equips Black women in Nashville how to be entrepreneurs, they prove that that works, but what would happen was they would do a study, have statistical data that it worked, but then didn't do anything with it. I mean, they would publish it in a journal.
Certainly, it helped that local non-profit raise money because they could prove it worked, but they were looking for a scaling body. So, we've partnered. We've worked with eight different non-profits to go replicate them. So, I'm working with several right now in the portfolio to just help them effectively franchise. It's why we call the company Franchise for Good. So, what we did found and have proved that hypothesis was right, that the same processes and systems that franchises use to scale and replicate do work in non-profit.
In fact, we just had a meeting yesterday with two of them that are... they're running the playbook, John, they're running the playbook that, you know, we use the Pure Barre and HoneyBaked Ham and Häagen-Dazs Shops and The Lash Lounge. It's working for, you know, one group called NPower that equips people of color how to be coders. And the results are unbelievable. They come in making six grand a year. They leave making 65 grand a year.
Another one, Catholic Charities of Fort Worth have a cool wraparound program called Padua. So, we were just meeting with them yesterday. And it was just warming my heart because they're talking about the essence of their brand and then refining their offer and building out their strategy as good as any Fortune 500 type of processes. And these are, you know, small-scaling non-profits. So, it's just super... You can hear my excitement. I mean, it's, it's so fun to do.
[00:22:11] John: Well, you know, I've been on a not-for-profit board for a while now. And you and I have been in the business long enough to know that these organizations do amazing work in their communities, but most of them, the vast majority, remain small, not even regional, small, municipal level, because they don't know how to scale. And your hypothesis has proved to be true, that the lessons of franchising can be applied to not for profit.
And to bring it full circle, remember, this podcast is about disruption. I would say the big lesson today is franchising as a disruptive business model or franchising as a disruptive approach, particularly now in this latter part of your career in the not-for-profit space. And I applaud what you're doing. It's, it's amazing, amazing, amazing, amazing.
[00:23:04] Dave: Thank you, John. Let me bring it back to what we're doing now at Franworth. So, we had an aha, brought a new investor in named Paul Blavin, another Michigan guy, undergrad, graduated with me out of, out of Ross or Michigan Business School back in the day, went out Harvard MBA, went and started a hedge fund in New York, raised over $2 billion, and then about 15 years ago, gave his money back, had incredible returns, gave his money back, and started moving to philanthropy.
The tunnel at Crisler Arena is named the Blavin Tunnel. It's Paul Blavin. He's done this incredible thing called Blavin Scholars at University of Michigan, where he's taking people that came out of the foster care system, giving them a scholarship, but more than that, wrapping around a whole set of services, a cohort, and coaching. So, that's the type of man he is. He found out, he met John Rotche through Michigan Football, my partner, and joined our team.
And what's interesting, he's a guy that didn't come from franchising, but came from, you know, hedge fund and now a lot of social work. He's like, "You, guys, you're incredible at creating jobs and putting small businesspeople into business." So, in many ways, John, the American dream is not thriving. You know, people don't believe that... you know, it used to be you could bootstrap yourself, start your own business, and be successful.
And he's like, "You, guys, you know how to go put people in business. Why aren't we doing it more?" And we're like, "Well, the problem is franchising is set up that you have to have half a million dollars of net worth to buy a franchise." And Paul said, "Why do we do that?" And we're like, "I don't know why we do that. That's what we do." And so, by asking really hard questions, we're disrupting the business, John. We're building what we're calling Beloved Brands, our seven brand portfolio.
And we're removing $500,000 as the hurdle to buy a franchise. We're going to test for your competence as a leader. Yes, you've got to be fiscally responsible. Yes, you're going to have to show leadership capabilities and be able to follow a system and lead a team and go deliver milkshakes or garage floor coating, whatever that is, but honestly, we were using half a million bucks of net worth as the proxy for your ability to be a great owner of a business.
And that's not right. What it should be is testing for grit and leadership skills and, yeah, fiscal responsibility. So, that's what we're changing. So, Beloved Brands has got two parts. One, we're seeking funding right now to invest in us, at Franworth, to be able to go give you, John, a Garage Kings franchise, a MosquitoNix franchise, give it to you, you have to come up with $10,000.
Normally, you would have to come up with $150,000 to go start your business. So, we're going to fund you to start your own business, allow yourself to take a living wage, say 55 grand, 60 grand a year you'll be able to take out of the business, and then once you get your business ramped up to where you're making money more than covering your salary, then you'll pay us back over time. And you'll actually pay into a fund that funds the next people coming down the road. So, that's one part of Beloved Brands.
The other part is making sure that we're measuring and delighting our end customers, so making sure we're measuring that promoter score, measuring, you know, Google reviews, measuring how we're treating our employees. Companies like Chick-fil-A have been doing this, you know, in one brand. So, Chick-fil-A, as you may know, they get 100,000 applicants a year, and maybe put 50 or a hundred people into a unit.
We're disrupting the franchise business by taking off that hurdle of half-a-million-dollar net worth and opening the aperture and putting somebody in any one of our portfolio brands. So, we believe we're the only ones doing that across the portfolio, and really going to disrupt the industry. So, again, we've not talked about this a lot, John, we're breaking this now with you, but really excited about the promise that this has to truly be disruptive in small business ownership.
[00:26:56] John: Breaking the schema.
[00:26:58] Dave: Breaking the schema.
[00:26:59] John: Absolutely brilliant. Hey, listen, we've run out of time. Thank you for coming along for another ride of Breaking Schemas with me, Professor John Branch. My guest today, good friend, Dave Keil, from Ann Arbor here. Dave, I'll give you the last word. Do you want to leave us with a, a piece of sage advice as we depart?
[00:27:18] Dave: Yeah, I mean, the thing that changed everything for me was when I... because I always had an inkling to go be innovative and go do my own thing. And someone once told me once, he did, "What would you do if you weren't afraid, afraid to fail, fail, look dumb, afraid that it might not work?" And that really changed the game for me, John. I think if you're going to break the schema, you got to ask yourself what would you do if you weren't afraid?
[00:27:42] John: Very nice. Thank you very much, Dave. It was such a pleasure to speak with you. I look forward to seeing you soon. Listeners, thank you for coming along for the ride. And we'll see you on the next episode of Breaking Schemas. Take care. And as always, go blue.
[00:27:58] Marcus: Breaking Schemas is a Michigan Ross podcast powered by the Yaffe Digital Media Initiative and produced by University FM. Go Blue!