EP 005 - The Shadow Side of Your Strengths with William Vanderbloemen

Transcript

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Chris Hanslik: Today’s guest is William Vanderblumen, the founder and CEO of Vanderblumen, a Christian executive search firm. William has been able to combine over 15 years of ministry experience as a senior pastor with the best practices of executive search to provide churches with a unique offering, a deep understanding of local church work with the very best knowledge and practices of professional executive search. William also has experience as a manager in human resources in a Fortune 200 company, where he focused on integration of corporate culture and succession planning. All of these experiences have come together with his pastoral work to form a unique gift for helping churches and ministries connect with the right key people. Welcome to the podcast, William. Thanks for having me, Chris. It’s great to be here. Good to see you. Let’s get started with tell us a little more about your business and what it’s known for.

William Vanderbloemen: I don’t know that it’s known. It’s a weird little niche. I’ll try and keep it short. I tell people I’m a recovering preacher, so I ramble on and on and on. But after being in the church world, and I got to serve one of the, frankly, in the Presbyterian church world, one of the best Presbyterian churches in the country is here in Houston. It’s the first Presbyterian church. actually Sam Houston attended there so like it’s been around right and they brought me in. I was 31 years old when I came here to be the senior pastor which I’m afraid speaks to the scarcity of talent in the Presbyterian Church but I came in and The only thing I had going for me because I was 31, I knew everything, which was awesome. Got to spend time there. They took about three years to find me, which is not really uncommon for a church that size. I left. They took about two and a half years to find my successor, and I only served there about six years. It’s a great church. It’s not like some dysfunctional, can’t find somebody to work here, place. That was all kind of normal. Went to work after leaving First Press Chain at a company that is no longer in existence, Anadarko, that Houstonians will know and remember, and served on the HR team and kind of got to be, if you want to be ambitious, you could say I was Helping on the succession team, but the reality is I was the water boy for the succession teams I got to watch and they brought in a this thing. I’ve never heard of called a search consultant and it was from corn fairy, which is the the largest search firm in the world and You like 90 maybe a hundred days later. They’ve named their new CEO and I just thought okay first Christian Church 11 year run, half the time they’ve got a pastor, half the time they’re looking for a pastor. Big giant oil company, 90 to 100 days. And I thought, why in the world does the church not have as good a solution as the business world? And Adrian and I had just gotten married. We’d blended our families with a Brady Bunch. And I came home from work and said, babe, I think I’m supposed to quit my job. and start something new for churches. And she looked at me, I’ll never forget, and said, that’s because churches love new ideas, right? And she should have said, I’m kind of the dreamer in our marriage, and she’s the realist. I have ideas. She makes sure there’s money in the bank. She should have said, go back to work. And she said, you know what? Let’s give it a try. So she actually gets credit for starting. And that’s a long-winded answer to say, we started by saying, could we help churches find their pastor more quickly and with higher quality. And since then it’s grown quite a bit. We work with, if there is, this is so bad, y’all are going to think there’s no way this guy goes to church, but if there were a Fortune 500 in church, like the 500 largest churches, about 275 of them are clients of ours. So we’re known for a lot of work with some of the larger Churches and unfortunately when there’s a bad headline out there about a pastor had to leave because we get the call Can you help clean up the mess and find the next but but well over half our work? Probably like your client base is for a normal-sized church It’s the people who are just trying to figure it out It’s a hundred two hundred three hundred people that are getting together We do a whole lot of work for people that are starting their own church So kind of like you, I think you guys love serial entrepreneurs. I think we do too, but helping people that are trying to help the Christian idea and mindset move forward, we help them find their key staff. So now that has turned into Woodland’s Christian Academy, or Dave Ramsey might be a name, he would be a very regular client. And for lack of a better way of saying it, the Chick-fil-A’s of the world, the companies that are sort of owned by families that have a set of values that match the church. So we help churches find their pastor, schools that are Christian find their top staff and then relief organizations and a small part is in the for-profit world.

Chris Hanslik: That’s great. So it sounds like the inspiration for you to start this was really founded in your faith. It was.

William Vanderbloemen: It was. I just hate seeing the church stumble. And I’m a big believer that if you get a really great church, it can bring more hope into a community and help change it. And you get enough good churches, you can change a city. And the chain goes on and on. And we serve every kind of denomination. type of church you can imagine. So it’s not like just the Presbyterians or just the this or that. Yeah, very much a values-based idea for a business. But it’s this line that I know you guys walk as well. It’s like, we’ve got to be a business, but we’ve got values that drive that business. So how do you walk that tightrope? That’s right.

Chris Hanslik: I think all businesses struggle with that or can. Let me ask As far as the entrepreneurial spirit that I guess you found, maybe you didn’t know you had. How did that come about? How did you realize that maybe deep down inside you had this burning desire to kind of start and grow a business?

William Vanderbloemen: You know, I am probably much better at being an entrepreneur than I ever was at being a pastor. I always rock the boat too much, too many new ideas, and always a little bit too much of a know-it-all. I didn’t want to go into ministry at all. I went to Wake Forest from undergrad. entered my freshman year with almost 40 hours of credit I’d earned during my senior year of high school at a state university and was going to do an MBA in three years and then take over just the western hemisphere. I did a really, really good job of doing what many people call a prodigal journey. Like I did everything. I know you’ve got girls. I’ve got five daughters. I know everything about the person they better not bring home because I was that guy. And like in high school, in high school I was voted, you know, the senior superlatives, right? I was most likely to succeed. Went to my 10-year reunion, now a pastor, and I unanimously, I was the only unanimous winner of any of the new superlatives, I was the unanimous winner of Least likely career choice They were like man if they’ll let him do pastoring anybody can because he’s just ridiculous so I was much more entrepreneur than pastor and and really only hit my stride as a pastor when I ran into What I would call some entrepreneurial pastors who were like, you know what? I? We could try to overpopulate heaven. Let’s try and get more and more people involved. And so the entrepreneurial thing is much more natural for me than being a pastor and leading a church.

Chris Hanslik: So what are maybe one or two of the setbacks that you’ve encountered along the way in starting this company? And what did you do to overcome them?

William Vanderbloemen: Not having a good lawyer. I mean, when we send contracts out and we send them to churches, like every three years or so, I’ll go back to our attorney and say, can you just simplify our contract, please? But every clause in our contract, I can tell you the story of the reason why that clause is there. That was that church that thought XYZ and it took me forever to realize, you know, Paying my attorney actually saves me money, and you did not pay me to say that, but it really was a major setback. I’m a philosophy minor, religion major, and Adrienne helped me start the company. She’s a biology major, so we had no business experience and no idea how many ramifications there are legally the things that you do so I would say learning as you go on the business side and learning man you better think through the what if this goes sideways and build that into contracts and into service agreements and that’s where they and and no audience he did not pay me to say that I my dad’s an attorney my brother’s an IP attorney Ironically, we own the trademark for my last name now and he’s using it for his firm I thought about sending him a cease and desist, but I don’t I don’t think they go over very well may not at Thanksgiving, right?

Chris Hanslik: So when you think about what you’re doing there at Vanderbilt and What would you describe as innovative?

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah, well I didn’t know how to do search and I learned from a wonderful guy who had been with a big firm called Russell Reynolds and he wanted to serve his niche was healthcare. He wanted to serve Christian hospitals so he started a firm and when I came to him to start learning search said I can teach you the right way but I can’t really pay you much and I’m not going to give you equity and so I just kind of apprenticed under him in a way that worked out really well but The coolest part was I didn’t have to learn all the old tired ways. The search industry is a calcified old industry. I mean they still use words like Rolodex. Like what in the world is that? Your staff don’t even know what that means. So I would say because we’ve built it as we’ve gone, we’ve done things in a way that’s very innovative for our industry enough so that we get invited to There’s a bar association for search guys called the AESC, and I get asked all the time to come up and tell us how you’re doing this. For instance, we have completely separated our consultants who do search work from our sales team. In a traditional model, you go in as the consultant and then you try and sell the after work. You try and upsell to the next thing. You try and extend the contract. We’ve told our consultants, you are not allowed to sell anything. Partly because I couldn’t stand when I was a pastor having a consultant coming in trying to upsell me. So it’s partly just my own hang up. Sure. But for our clients, it goes light years because they don’t think like businesses. They don’t get that when you hire the consultant, they’re going to. So that would be one innovation. The biggest one probably is early on. I just decided we’re not going to do any outbound sales calls. We’re not going to do any outbound calls to candidates to say, would you like to try a new job? Well, how the content became our king. So we said, instead of making cold calls, why don’t we start a blog early on? Like maybe 10 years ago, we started a podcast when it was a unheard of thing. We started using inbound software that tracks people, like what are they reading, and it scores them so we know probably it’s time to call them and ask them if they’re ready to look for a job. That’s been a pretty big innovation. We also started, when I told Adrian I wanted to quit my job, it was the fall of 2008. So if you think back like… Yeah, that’s great timing. Brilliant, right? But it was also the same year Twitter started. And the same year, Facebook came off college campuses and into the main ecosphere of life. So we just jumped on social media, like just right place, right time, couldn’t take credit for it. It totally like if you read the book Outliers, that’s sort of our story. We just happen to be in the right place, right time. And it’s led us to instead of cold calling people about succession planning, we wrote a book on succession planning for churches. My mother thought she was going to have to buy all 12 copies, right? And the publisher said, this is a great idea. If you sell $2,000, it’ll be awesome. Well, we sold $50,000 and it’s in every seminary library. So like, instead of saying, let’s cold call people about, let’s say we’re the people who wrote the book on it. We’re going to do content that’s helpful. We’re going to give it all away. I think they’re, 3,000 or so resources on our website that are completely free and they bridge a gap. So I did my seminar at Princeton and I graduated not knowing anything about how to run a staff meeting or a board meeting or fire somebody or hire somebody or what to pay them. So all this content bridges that gap for people and we tried to be innovative by saying we’re going to provide free thought leadership And let that be the reason people trust us and want to come to us when it’s time to do business.

Chris Hanslik: That’s great. Sounds like the first part of that answer, a lot of data and analytics. Absolutely. And then I like the share of the sentiment of providing good content to get people to look you up and find out more about you. Yeah. I’ve read some of the stuff you’ve written before, and I know that culture is important to you and your company. What are the values or the culture that you have created at Vanderbilt?

William Vanderbloemen: Well, I think I can answer honestly when I say we have nine cultural values that really do describe who we are. you know early on when we were startup and bootstrap we started winning all these best places to work awards and we named our cultural values we hired around and we wrote a whole book on it called culture wins that’s not church specific at all i think if you go to amazon the only reason we named our firm vander bloemen is because the search engine people said william your last name is so screwed up you can misspell it a hundred ways into google and it’ll feed back to you so you go to amazon Type Vanderbilt in however you want. You’ll find a culture book. You can learn a lot from what we learned. We studied 150 companies that were winning best places to work and how they built their culture. And we realized some of the things we were doing were actually congruent. One of them is figuring out who you really are when you’re at your best. Not who you want to be. But like one question, if you’re listening today and you’re like, we need to work on our culture, ask your staff, to tell stories about what was the day you left the office saying today we did a good thing. We really like this was a good day. People love that meeting, by the way. They don’t look at their watch. They want to tell a story that then you can ask the distilling question. Say, let’s look at all these stories and say, all right, when we are functioning at our very best, what do we do as a team that’s common to us, but uncommon to other teams around us? Like for us, it’s ridiculous responsiveness is one of our values. We get back to people really fast. Partly because when I started the company, if you called me, if I didn’t call you back, my family didn’t eat. So I called you really fast. There’s motivation there. There’s motivation. But now it’s turned into a thing. Like we interviewed, I interviewed somebody today for a pretty high up role in our company and people are texting the poor lady like at weird hours just to see if she’ll get back to them So we’re interviewing around those values. But the key is, what do you do when you’re at your best that you actually do? In studying for the book, I read about a lobby of a business office here in Houston. And the four walls of the lobby had their four core values, right? Pretty cool. And one of them was integrity. And this was the lobby of the Enron office building. So I mean, I can say, One of our values is, I’m going to win the NBA slam dunk contest. Not going to happen. Like, that’s not who I am. So for us, distilling who we are when we’re at our very best, that’s led to nine very specific values. We hire around it. We score people around it. Frankly, your bonus is determined by how well you’re living out values. I don’t know if you guys have it, but I have a friend who writes for the New York Times who his most popular column ever was, what do you do with the brilliant jerk? Yeah, and everybody’s gallon, right? It’s the rainmaker that really brings in the money, but is an absolute rear end. And we said one way we’re going to try and prevent that is your bonus is determined partly by how well you live out our nine core values.

Chris Hanslik: You said you hire from culture. We say the same thing here. We also say we fire from culture.

William Vanderbloemen: Absolutely.

Chris Hanslik: If you get inconsistent with the cultural values, you can’t work here. And Jack Welch in his book Winning calls that high-performer, low-culture cancer, right? It is. He says you eradicate cancer.

William Vanderbloemen: And I don’t know that you can teach culture. Agreed. I think people either fit or they don’t. And I’ve said it many times, we’re the weird one. You’re not. So if you don’t fit, it’s probably our problem. Not you. You could be totally normal and not want to work for us and that’s fine.

Chris Hanslik: One of our philosophies here, William, and I think it’s similar to what you alluded to, is we are who we are. We’re not trying to be the biggest law firm in the world. In our view, the best. But it just means this isn’t the right place for you. There’ll be somewhere else that you connect.

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah. And culture can be seasonal, Chris. I’ll use ridiculous responsiveness. We use this inbound software where you fill out a form saying, hey, could you give me a call? We’re looking for a new headmaster, a new pastor, a new whatever the thing is. And we have a rule within US time zones. International is a little harder. But you get back to it in 60 seconds if it’s a waking hour in the US. That’s it. And if you don’t that’s out of bounds, right? Well that worked great and then one of our really great people had twins and You know her husband decided to go be a missionary and he’s doing a great job, but she’s like I can’t Like I no longer fit the culture and it gave her a really elegant way to leave. She didn’t do anything wrong She didn’t hate us. It’s just like This is who you guys are. I can’t be that right now. And that’s OK. So I think people sometimes mistake leaving a company with something went wrong. Sometimes culture is just seasonal. It’s a good point.

Chris Hanslik: So when you think about your leadership style, how would you describe your leadership style, philosophy when you’re there in the office? kind of leading the charge.

William Vanderbloemen: I think it’s changed over the years. I would say we’re in our 13th year now and we’ve probably had five or six companies. I think if you’re an entrepreneur and you think it’s going to be the same every year, it’s not. Unless you just want to stay the same size, which is no fun. But as we’ve grown, I’ve had to shift and change. I did everything in the beginning. Knew every little detail of everything. My challenge as a leader as we have grown is, so I have one question annual review with my board. It’s pass fail tests. This year, William, did you make yourself less essential to the growth and running of this firm? That’s my job now. For the next 10 years, that’s my job. Now, unfortunately, it’s way easier for me to be unnecessary at our office than I’d like it to be. My ego would rather me be a little more essential, but it’s changed. I mean, it went from do everything to having five direct reports, and then we went through a season where I just had one, and then we went back to four. But I think the thing I’m trying to do is there’s a line in the scriptures that we quoted quite a bit during the pandemic. There is a little-known verse. There are these men called the men of Issachar and they were known for being able to read and understand their times. And I think, now that’s what I need to do as a leader. I need to look at our company. Where are we as a company now? And how do I make this the most sustainable, long-term growth thing I can? Sometimes that means rolling up my sleeves and doing things I don’t want to. In the season we’re in now, it’s me handing things off more and more and decreasing every year so that I am not the lid for the company. That’s good.

Chris Hanslik: Speaking of that, though, what trends are you seeing in your industry that you’re adapting to or guarding against to ensure that long-term success?

William Vanderbloemen: Well, on the church side, which is the lion’s share of what we do, innovation, my granddad, who is a great businessman and a deacon in his local Baptist church, he’s telling me, William, innovation in church isn’t hard. I said, what do you mean? He said, the church is always behind. I’ve heard this a lot in other places. He said, the church is great at raising the flag at sunset. so you know instead of the beginning of the day right so if you want to innovate in church just look at what the business world did as an innovation 40 years ago that’s your next unit so if we we can kind of watch and like what’s happening in our in the church industry if you will i hope that doesn’t offend your your listeners just like law firms the bigger getting bigger the smaller having the boutique and the midsize guys better find something that makes them of serious value because it’s getting harder and harder in the church world to be the midsize church. You’re either a smaller church and we’re our big deal is we provide clean water to places in the world that don’t have it or we’re all about human trafficking prevention you know that kind of thing or you’re a giant church and you keep adding sites and you keep adding so bigger getting bigger Smaller having the boutique, mid-size are in a tricky spot of having to figure out what makes us who we are.

Chris Hanslik: Yeah, they sound very similar to what’s going on just in business in general. So let’s talk about failure.

William Vanderbloemen: How long do we have?

Chris Hanslik: Think about one you can share with us that the listeners can learn from, right? A failure that you’ve experienced and the learning you took from it and how that might help someone either avoid it or they may be dealing with it right now.

William Vanderbloemen: I think if I understand your client base, you’ve got a lot of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs that are successful, they have this ability to just almost bend reality to their will. You know, one guy who was on my lead team for a long time, he’s a wonderful guy. He’s always been a number two. And he wrote an article, you can Google it, Tim Stevens, How to Work for a Narcissist. And he said, you know, it’s not a bad term. Narcissism is actually somewhat of a gift and not like clinical narcissism. entrepreneurs really believe they have the idea that’s going to change the world. And that’s a beautiful thing, but I think all of my biggest failures have been shadow sides of my biggest strengths. And so you can pick, ask my staff, there’s lots of failures. You know, they’re always a shadow side of strength. So many, many times it’s my pride Or belief that I’ve got the right idea that gets in the way of doing what I’m trying to do now and decrease and let others have the ideas let others do the Hard work and that’s led to a lot of failures. I think another big failure came on the culture front I came out of the church world we’re great churches, but very high control boards, you know where I You do it a certain way. I come out and start my own company. I’m like, we’re going to be lax. We’re going to have a fun place to work. Well, fun’s a great idea, but it makes for a lousy culture, because it leads to having to hire people like you. So I think it’s always the shadow side of my strengths. So I guess if you’re saying what can listeners learn from, hey, go figure out what your top three strengths are, and then watch out for the shadow side. And for me, it’s pride and arrogance. One of my favorite Ted Turner quotes, and there are a lot, he said, you know, if I had a little more humility, I’d be perfect.

Chris Hanslik: That’s great. You alluded to a little bit earlier, I think, about a mentor, at least in this business. And I just want to ask you, in your

William Vanderbloemen: Professional life maybe even before you start the business any mentor or mentors that come to mind and what made them such a good mentor for you Yeah, I you know, I have had to figure everything out that I know how to do on my own and when I say on my own, I mean Most people who are pastors had a dad and a granddad and five uncles that were all pastors. I didn’t have that like Everything, my golf swing, I bought Jack Nicklaus golf my way, read a book, learned how to do it. I wanted to build a deck on my house. I bought a book, I went and learned how to do it. But aside from that one trait, finding someone who’s better at what I want to do than I am and saying, can I learn from you? Man, that’s been everything. When I was a young pastor, I just went and found three mentors. I figured out they played golf. I went and made tee times at really great courses at the conferences where they were speaking at. And I just pounded on their door and got to know their assistants and eventually got in the door and found a good mentor. I don’t know what I would do without a mentor, whether it’s, you know, wisdom of a book, or a person in general. And I try and make them mentors that aren’t necessarily people that do exactly what I do. But for me, the best mentors are the ones who ask me questions that expand my thinking. Not just, here’s how you do this, but like, have you asked yourself this? And it opens the door. When we were starting to grow, I’ve got a mentor who said, I think you’re either going to be a one-man shop and that’s fine, that’s what I am, or this is gonna be much bigger than you think and you’re gonna have a hundred people working for you and which one do you wanna be? Well, I’d never even thought of that. So, great mentors to me are the ones that ask questions that expand my thinking.

Chris Hanslik: I think that’s the golden kind of secret is the ability to ask the right questions and not give people less of the answers, let them think through it. guide them. Sounds like you’ve found inventors.

William Vanderbloemen: Yeah.

Chris Hanslik: Any specific you want to shout out to?

William Vanderbloemen: Oh man, you wouldn’t know them. There’s this wonderful man, Sam Chand in Atlanta, and he helps high-growth people figure out what’s next. He’s Indian and he’s like Yoda. He’s not much taller than Yoda, but he’s a great guy and he’s been a huge mentor to me.

Chris Hanslik: Great. What advice would you give to someone out there, entrepreneur, starting a business or thinking about starting a business? What would be one or two key things you might tell them to consider? And is there a book or a podcast or something you say, go read this, go listen to that?

William Vanderbloemen: I would say if you’re considering starting a business, try everything else first. This is a wonderful season of startups and entrepreneurs and everybody. I think it was three years ago, you would no better know it Chris, but I think three years ago the MBA graduates at Stanford for the first time ever, more of them went into startups than into investment banking. And it never happened. So startup fever is everywhere. There are church plants everywhere. Look at old abandoned Walmarts. I guarantee you’ll find a church that’s less than 10 years old. But that doesn’t mean it’s right. I think entrepreneurs are the crazy people who can step on a rake and get hit in the face nine times in a row and then look at that tenth rake and say, I bet it works out this time. So if you think it’s cool to start a business, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. Staff meetings are pretty cool and it starts with just you. When it was just me, all our staff meetings, we all got along. All your ideas were good? They were all good. Everybody agreed. My evaluation was really good too. The failure rate for small business startups is staggering. I would say try everything else first. Second thing I’d do, find somebody who is willing to talk to you about what they wish they knew when they were your age. You can start a business at any age, but most people that want to start a business are on the front half of their career. And I have found a great question to ask people is, go find an older, wiser guy. I did it with Russ Reynolds, the owner and founder of the firm where my search mentor came from. I said, Russ, and Russ is a good friend now and he’s well on in years, Russ, what Do you wish you would have known when you were my age and starting out? I have never had an old wise person refuse to answer that. Everybody likes to hear that. Oh, you think I’m wise. You think so. I’d say try everything else first and then go find older, wiser people that will share with you what they wish they would have known.

Chris Hanslik: There’s something I think is servant about that where they feel like it’s time to maybe pass it on and share. So that’s good. OK, well, let’s Let’s maybe go a little more informal. So tell us, what was your first job?

William Vanderbloemen: I polished my grandmother’s silver. And she paid me and I thought, oh, this is cool. So I said, grandmother, do you have any friends with silver? And so then of course I conscripted my younger brothers to, you know, do it at a lower rate and, you know, took my portion off the top and I’m bad, bad, bad. There you go. Entrepreneur from the beginning. Best first job was paperboy. I hate that kids can’t do that anymore. I had to manage my own budget. I had to go buy the papers from the newspaper. I had to collect. I had to keep my own P&L. And eventually, I realized the routes were terrible. I had this one dog that would chase me forever. I was his highlight of the day. I mean, he waited all day on me. Couldn’t stand the dog. I looked at the routes around me. I was maybe fifth grade and realized they were really badly designed. So I bought out my buddies who had the routes around me, redistributed everything, got rid of the dog, and kept a denser route and sold off the new ones back to new people. disease of mine.

Chris Hanslik: Sounds like it. All right, Houston is a food town, so Tex-Mex or barbecue?

William Vanderbloemen: Oh, yes. Yes. I’ve been in North Carolina for a week. I can’t wait to get to something Tex-Mex. There you go. So anything you’re currently reading book wise? Well, I try and read about a book a week. And I would say for Houstonians, the the new James Baker biography is awesome and it goes back to I’m 51 so it goes back to a lot of the the days of the Reagan Bush era and and not like you got to be a Reagan Bush fan to read it but like the Bakers have been here forever and it it really is great for knowing your city and I don’t know anything more important Every great pastor I know is an expert historian on their city and I would say every great business person I know knows their city in context. So the new James Baker biography is great. The second one that I recommend that’s been really good lately is a book called The Storm Before the Calm. It was written in 2015 I think. I’ll buy a he teaches geopolitics effort at what school but real quick the theory is about every 40 years our economy goes through a big disruption right and then also about every 70 years our government goes through a big disruption so you think like Revolutionary to Civil War, Civil War to New Deal. Okay, so back in 2015, he said, I don’t know what’s gonna cause it, but somewhere around 2020, this will be the first time these two things have intersected. And here’s what you need to know to get ready. And here’s how you write it out. And on the other side of it is great prosperity. That book did more good to me. I mean, it was like, it was voyeuristic. Yeah, The Storm Before the Calm.

Chris Hanslik: Very good. I’m going to look that one up. Last thing, what do you do in your free time? What hobbies do you have?

William Vanderbloemen: I have seven children. I try and run a little bit. I’m trying to take golf back up. I wasted a good bit of my childhood playing, so I’m trying to recover a little bit of that. Adrian and I spend a lot of time together. She’s my best friend and so whatever she’s doing, I’m doing. That’s great.

Chris Hanslik: William, I want to thank you for coming on the show and being a part of this. Loved your insight and I know the listeners are going to find value in it as well.

William Vanderbloemen: Well, I can’t thank you enough for doing this for our city. I love Houston. Moved here 20 years ago and somebody said to me, You know, it’s a great place to live, but I wouldn’t want to visit there. And it’s so true. It’s such a good city. And to have you guys putting good content out for people that are trying to drive growth in our city by starting businesses, that’s really good. Thanks for what you’re doing. You got it.

Chris Hanslik: And there we have it. Another great episode. Don’t forget to check out the show notes at boyarmiller.com forward slash podcast. and you can find out more about all the ways our firm can help you at boyarmiller.com. That’s it for this episode. Have a great week and we’ll talk to you next time.