Episode 86 | Sales Leadership at the Speed of Light with Darr Aley

Darr Aley  00:00

We’re trying to really leverage the good stuff out of Gen AI, to really help a salesperson when they get all this information – we send them an email every morning, if we’ve got a lead for them – what we want to do is automate that. Because if you’re if you get 11, leads that all have good connections, would it be great to just press a button and send emails out to all of those people.

Voiceover  00:05

Welcome to the “Lead at the Top of Your Game” podcast, where we equip you to more effectively lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. Each week, we help you sharpen your leadership acumen by cracking open the playbooks of dynamic leaders who are doing big things in their professional endeavors. And now, your host, leadership tactics, and organizational development expert, Karan Ferrell-Rhodes.

Karan Rhodes  00:37

Welcome back to the podcast everyone and thanks for joining another episode designed to help you better lead at the top of your game. As you know for season three, each month we’re featuring leaders who have fascinating roles in a particular profession or industry. Today’s episode is part of our special series featuring leaders who focus on an aspect of sales performance. And now enjoy the show. Hello, my superstars This is KarAn and welcome to another episode of the Lead at the Top of Your Game podcast. You know, when you run in the professional circles, which include, you know, prominent people such as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, you know, I’m sure you really gather very interesting perspectives and experiences in the world of work, I’m sure they’re abundant, and I’m so excited to tap into our guest today on his brilliance that I’m sure he has gained over the years working with such great leaders who’ve made a difference in our world of work. We are so pleased to have on today’s show Darr Aley, I think I missed it for announced that, but he’s gonna correct me in a second, we’re gonna get it right. But he is the Chief Commercial Officer and co founder of Aidentify, which is a software company that uses AI and data to help sales and Wealth Management Professionals prospect and engage their top prospects. Now that is a mouthful. But when we had a chance to really dive deep into what the company did it is they’re doing some absolutely amazing work. So we’re gonna allow Dart to go deeper in that with you in just a second. But before we do, so, we want to welcome into the podcast. So welcome to the podcast, Darr!

Darr Aley  02:22

Thanks, Karan, great to see you and great to be on the show today.

Karan Rhodes  02:25

Oh, it’s fantastic to have you on the show as well. Well, we definitely want to learn what you and a identified have been up to and what you all are doing in your sliver of the world. But before we do that, we’d love to learn a little bit more about you personally. So for just as much as you feel comfortable. Would you not mind given us a sneak peek into a little bit of your life outside work?

Darr Aley  02:52

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, so I grew up in the Boston area moved to the west coast to the San Francisco Bay area, right around 1992. So I think last year was my cut over between spending same amount of time growing up in the east coast as I did on the west coast. But I’m married to have two sons in college, so those 529s are fast at work, and I’m a big fan of golfing whenever I have a chance. Got a twin brother and four other siblings.

Karan Rhodes  03:20

Wow, what a sounds like a large but exciting family. I’m sure they keep you on your toes, right?

Darr Aley  03:29

Absolutely. Absolutely.

Karan Rhodes  03:31

Well as some recent empty nesters, we have a daughter that just graduated from college, those 529s were put to work, thank goodness. And we live to tell the story on the other side. So I wish you tons of luck.

Darr Aley  03:44

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Karan Rhodes  03:46

And by the way, my husband’s probably gonna hunt you down because anybody that loves to golf, he or his best friends. And that’s it and my other connection there.

Darr Aley  03:56

Are you’re in a beautiful place with lots of great golf courses for sure.

Karan Rhodes  03:59

Oh, I know and great weather. So we’re so jealous. Well, let’s dive right in Dar and start out by letting you share with us a bit more about Aidentify because I know I didn’t do it justice. And we were talking about some of the great work you all are doing before we started recording. So would you please give our listeners a bit more of an overview of the company and in and how you help sales professionals probably of all types really get to their target markets.

Darr Aley  04:31

Yeah, thank you. It’s, it’s been a wild ride kind of, you know, always wanted to be an entrepreneur. I like to tell people my last kind of real job was working at Amazon with back in 2001 to 2005. It’s just an explosive time period to be at Amazon. But it taught me a lot and I know we’ll get into that as we kind of walk through this podcast. But the tale begins right after that. I like twin brothers I mentioned earlier he and I have started three companies. together, he while I was at Amazon was working at a company called Reed Elsevier ventures, which owns a big media company, but they own LexisNexis among other companies. And he came to me, he came me with this idea in 2005, that said, hey, I really like what LinkedIn is doing. At the time, Reed Hoffman, the founder of Lakeland, was just starting out. And we got so excited about this connectivity between people first and second degree connections, we said, wow, wouldn’t it be cool if we could build a tool like that, but given kind of a company view, so who in our company knows people in other companies, so we started a company called Generate, which was a very early version of what we’re doing today, and it basically slapped together kind of a prospect search engine, you know, some of those zoom information today, back then we were competing against the likes of Hoover’s if you guys remember, Hoover’s, and then, and then we blend it in a little bit of news. So a salesperson could get the news and their territory in the morning, see what companies are either raising money or looking for growth, and then see, hey, how many connections do we have in our firm, and it didn’t matter if you had 10 people in the company, or 10,000. It was it was a very powerful tool, but rudimentary using old technology. So we sold that company in 2008, to Dow Jones, who had just gotten acquired by News Corp, and then invested in a really early stage company called net prospects. And they were set up to basically clean it were kind of a washing machine for data. So in our first company, we realized that all this marketing data contact information we were getting from our licensing partners was 40%. Wrong, which is really bad when a sales person is relying on you for a phone number, and you get it wrong four times. So we invested in this company, it grew like crazy, and basically helped marketers get cleaner data by kind of scoring email addresses and phone numbers, ended up selling that company in 2016, to Dun and Bradstreet, and then yeah, at that time kind of machine learning had finally gotten to where we all wanted it to. Dare I say AI. And a couple of the companies that we were working with way back when said, could you guys go do this again, but expand on this relationship mapping stuff, and build a stronger, faster prospect engine. So that’s what they identified really became, was the cornerstone of what we built over the last the previous 10 years, that really leveraged a lot of the management teams for both companies, which allowed us to run a lot faster. But today, we have about 2000 customers, we are basically we lead sales, people bring in their address books and their LinkedIn first degree connections, allowing them to clean them up, because we all clicked too fast, with eagerness to 1000, and then 1500 contacts, but we clean that up. And then our technology really does is it. It mines, the career data of working America, so think 110 million working professionals, and then we look for and score the relationships we believe you have. So those second degree connections that most companies would never know, unless they had technology like this. So we sell that as a software piece. And we’ve targeted initially kind of financial services, private wealth estate planning, those folks really kind of adopted our technology very, very much. So I hope that helps.

Karan Rhodes  08:29

Oh, it does, it does an absolutely fascinating. And I’m just curious, I know they were the early adopters, but it seems like that kind of technology would be desirable by a lot of different industries. Anybody who carries a bag, who has to, you know, sell right when should want to do that. But is it because those markets were a little bit more lucrative and have the budgets for it? Are you focused on like, a certain revenue level or enterprise level? Or can anyone use it?

Darr Aley  09:03

Yeah, it’s a great question. We really did a lot of strategic thinking to get to where we were. But when we were doing our, like, we wanted to eat our own dog food. And this is basically a tool my brother Tom and I wanted to build. Since the early days when we we think we did a pretty bad job first time around. We wanted to include relationships in your community, relationships in your neighborhood and relationships in your business. And that was really, really important, but also impossible to do 15 years ago, what we had to do is we had to fold in kind of career data business data that you’d find on monster or Zoom information. Were Hoover’s and combine it with household level data you might find in consumer data sources TransUnion, Experian live ramp. A problem is that those two, those two industries are very separate. So we had to find a match technology and match engine technology. And that’s how we started the company. We bought a company in Charlotte And that basically had been working on this problem for six years. And now we’re 12 years and if we include that technology. So when you see John Smith from coming in from a business license that we have, we can combine it for the right John Smith that lives in Atlanta, Georgia, that works at IBM. So that was the real difficult piece of bringing this together. But once we did, you could surface all those connections. And to your point, Karan, it’s really vertically agnostic, we, you know, our first two companies were built kind of business to business sales teams. Same thing goes today, we just we have a small team of 35 that can only handle so much outbound. So if your point, you wanted to focus on industries where we knew we’d be immediate, we’d really get some traction. That’s why financial services made such great sense. And I’d said that the software, you know, speaks to any sales or marketing person that’s looking for an advantage to getting into somewhere in the organization that they’re chasing.

Karan Rhodes  10:58

Right. Absolutely. And do you is it by subscription, you sell seats to it? Or is it for a whole company to kind of buy the technology, embrace it and implement it into their workstreams?

Darr Aley  11:11

Yeah, it’s a we have two different ways to kind of consume it. For salespeople, yes, we have a SaaS application, not too dissimilar to zoom information or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. So yeah, it’s a monthly subscription, charge credit card. And, you know, we’re onboarding takes about 10 minutes, we can show you had to bring in your address books and LinkedIn connections if you want to. And then we’ve gotten this number is going to seem arbitrary, we found as close to a trillion second degree connections in all of this data. So we’ve got a team of 30 people, small company, and we have found over 550 1,002nd degree connections, just to have small team. So it’s it really shows the power, the exponential power of being able to leverage, you know, connective tissue that you really without technology couldn’t have found before. So that’s important. The other way that we consume it for marketers is we’ve got this kind of data data as a service. So we take that huge data lake that we have, and we help marketers keep their data clean, and then rich. So most of us in Salesforce or whatever, you know, Microsoft Dynamics or, you know, HubSpot, keep contact information, but 34% of America change jobs last year, or in the last 12 months, and 25% people moved. So, if you listen to you know, Salesforce is like what CRM is mostly 60% Wrong 100% of the time. Now, it’s even worse than that. So we thought, we could create a digital way for you to keep your CRM as clean, and also enriched, and we can talk about that later, it really kind of helps the salesperson stay current to especially if they missed that, you know, our company raised a series B, or, you know, their clients sold their company, because their territories are so big generally that they want to have a better way to organize it, we then fold in news and information. So we’ve we bought the news company a couple years ago, we’re looking for that kind of intent, purchase intent. And so we fold that into the into the pizza dough as well. So really gives the salesperson like, if these are 20 things you need to do today that we discovered for you, you should focus on these five, because that’s where your relationships are stronger.

Karan Rhodes  13:22

Oh, my goodness. That is I can just vouch for everything you just said because as as, you know, a smaller size company ourselves. I mean, we’re not, you know, we have a good number of consultants, about 300 consultants in our firm, but still small compared to your enterprise level firms. That is one of our biggest pain points is keeping our CRM up to date. Because as your, as you said, people change jobs do different things, and making sure that we you know, track them and see and continue our relationships with them, you know, is there’s a huge need out there. And I can only imagine your company is bigger than ours.

Darr Aley  13:58

Yea, Well, and, you know, for every we we work with a lot of venture capitalists and, you know, for CEOs, the first question always is, hey, if you’re my investor, do you know somebody at fill in the blank? To do it without having to bother them? You know, it’s just instantaneous. It allows you to say, hey, how many people do we know? Do we know anybody at Airbnb because we’re trying to get to the VP of engineering. So this way that solves that that question.

Karan Rhodes  14:27

That’s amazing. Well, so where is that? It sounds like you have a fantastic business model. It’s doing extremely well. Where does a identify? What are some of your short term plans for growth? Or do you have them or do you have other business you can handle right now?

Darr Aley  14:46

The more the merrier? And I know we’ll talk about this later. But you know, any entrepreneur that’s been in business for the last five or six years, you know, my hat’s off to everyone that struggled through, you know, COVID Ukrainian war, the economy going up and down. sideways, and that’ll be election year. It’s tumultuous and you know, having been a part of startups, in 2001, when the first kind of tech implosion happened, and then 2008, nine and 10 There’s a really, you know, incredible message. And I think learning that we all kind of took away from each one of those. And I think that made us all very much stronger, as leadership teams, as individuals, you know, risk portfolios get harmed, you know, as we talk about courageous agility a little bit later. You know, that’s those trappings. If you’re not learning something, that there’s something very wrong, but for us in the short term, you know, we’ve just recently raised our series B financing, uh, you know, I’ve said…

Karan Rhodes  15:38

Oh, Congratulations.

Darr Aley  15:41

Uh, thank you. And it’s fantastic strategic partner. You know, you’ve choices as your leadership team trying to determine how best to finance your company through debt, or convertible notes or venture capital. We chose strategic partners, it’s always worked with us in the past, strategic partners, will not only will invest capital in your company for growth, but are integrating your product for expansion. And this, this partner we just announced a week or two ago is called FactSet. They’re one of the three big workstation terminal businesses in the U.S. that compete against Bloomberg and London Stock Exchange’s refinitiv. So what they do is they stop, you know, on your desk, and allow you to bring in all the data, you need to make good decisions on private companies and public companies, we’re going to be going in as you know, to help them for sales and marketing solutions. So if you’re in financial services, that name is a very well known brand, in turn to answer your question, you know, we’re always looking six months ahead on our roadmap. So we’re, we’re trying to really leverage the good stuff out of Gen AI, to really help a salesperson, when they get all this information, we send them an email every morning, if we’ve got a lead for them. What we want to do is automate that. Because if you’re if you get 11, leads that all have good connections, would it be great to just press a button and send emails out to all of those people. So it’d be a dream. So we’re feeding that data now. And our next step is to just automate that. So your focus is building your relationships with your clients or your prospects, which is what we, you know, if you’re in sales, that’s your gift. I mean, that’s where you want. It’s like, you know, if you’re a physician, you don’t want to be focused on, you know, doing bills, and, you know, chasing insurance companies, you care about the care of your patients. And it’s the same thing for sales, and marketing folks, like I love doing my job, which is meeting people every day.

Karan Rhodes  17:35

Yeah, I love that. And, you know, it’s amazing the type of, you know, shared with us kind of your career aspects of your career, I would say, well, two things I want to point out. The first one is I don’t want the video to be lost on our listeners. You have mentioned that in your early days, in some of the earlier companies, you did a quote unquote, bad job, if you will. But I beg to differ. Because I think with the technology that was available at the time, you all did amazing, innovative thinking and implementation. And we always talked about leadership execution on the show, you did the best was what she had so much to the fact that someone wanted to purchase you all so so I would just want to, you know, give you kudos for that. And it sounds like you continue to fold in technology as we continue to advance and making your businesses even better. So I just wanted to stop there and say sometimes when it’s tough, have you continue to go and I know we’re going to talk about this in a second. But it sounds like you did great early on. But then also you’ve had the unique experience of witnessing high growth, fast growing companies, both in their early stages all the way through becoming more mature companies. And so I’m curious if there are any insights that you have as a leader on, you know, how do you stay an effective leader, no matter what stage of the business you’re in, because I knew in some of our previous podcasts, some people said some are more suited for early stage companies, when some in some people are more suited for established companies. So I’m curious, do you have any perspectives or thoughts on that?

Darr Aley  19:20

Yeah. And I, I was lucky I got started. When I moved out to California. I was actually in a really horrible startup. And I said, you know, what my father said, like, you know, when you get out of college, go work for bigger companies. So you learn, you know, and maybe make mistakes on their dime. But I moved out to California from Boston, as I mentioned earlier, got to work with Ziff Davis publishing, which was acquired about a year after I took a job there by Southbank and Softbank, you know, this was 1996 97. They were just about to explode. They, they took Yahoo public, and then they wanted to invest in everything. And so I was four It’s enough to work with a couple of individuals that went on to fame. And then they, they said, Hey, Doc, can you help us invest in companies locally? I’m like, Yeah, sure, I know what I’m doing, which I had no idea. But part of that journey was finding this small little company, guarded by this drop out from Stanford, named Elon Musk had Softbank came in and gave Elon the first money. And Elon hired me and another individual by the name of Aaron Bonnatta to help them build that business. And we it was basically a city guide that we did night Ritter in New York Times, basically, initially tried to convince some vendors to put their information online, which was no easy task. But it was, it was a wonderful ride, Elon was an incredible thought leader, he never literally never left the office, he was found many mornings by me, because I had to drag them out to you know, a distribution partner and advertisers sleeping under his desk. But you know, what he taught me was just that, you know, the city doesn’t sleep, right? You’ve got to keep going much faster than the pace of everybody else, that innovation, that really kind of stuck to me. From there. I went up to work at Amazon, as I mentioned earlier, and, you know, you talk about a team that was just so unbelievable. I always called that the largest startup I ever worked for, because I got there in 2001, they had already gone public, but the markets were down, I think they were trading at $13.50 when I took a job, and that’s a little different today. But yeah, what I really discovered from Amazon was how to hire people, and how to, you know, really, how important those those relationships were, at the time, I had no idea how relationships, those relationships would help my businesses in five years, 10 years and 15 years. But, you know, we had a couple of tenants that were super important that have been written about many times, so I won’t get into it. But the thing that struck me the most with me was that just hire smarter than you. And a plus people hire a plus people, and B plus people hire C level people. And, Oooh…yes, really understanding that you put a lot of pressure on you to like, well, am I good enough to pick those people, right. But I think you know, as you as an entrepreneur, you’re kind of leaving that big nest at Amazon, what was important to me was to surround myself with people that were smarter than me. And for me, that was engineering operations. And so that’s what my brother Tom and I did, when we started that first business, we’ve been blessed to have three companies that have had very similar management teams. And that’s really led us, you know, as I mentioned earlier, to kind of run at the speed of light much faster than people were just kind of getting to know each other, because it takes six to nine months to hire that perfect person, and then six to nine months to get that glue. I don’t care how many off sites you have. So having that consistency, that team that knows each other can really be a catalyst to just real acceleration.

Karan Rhodes  23:00

I agree with everything you said. And I’m curious, do you think there are some interventions you can do to accelerate that onboarding and cohesiveness? Or does it just have to happen over time as people deepen relationships?

Darr Aley  23:14

I, you know, what, we all have networks, you know, we part of our software, it’s weird, we’ve got this beautiful side of our business that goes after universities, and they use our relationship mapping to see where all their alumni are, because most entrepreneurs move 1000 times in their lifetime. So universities, I went to university, New Hampshire, and Durham, New Hampshire, and they couldn’t find me, you know, until I popped up in the press, you know, 20 years later selling my company, right? So they use this tool to go and look for those alumni who are very successful. And even the graduates from those college programs, we’ve got a company that we spun out called who you know, that’s about to launch this year, that is specifically for using these relationship maps, for people that are either changing careers or are new to career. So think alumni, college alumni, who are, you know, basically can go into this program and say, I want to work in San Francisco, and I would love to work at Amazon, or Google or Salesforce or IBM, could you show how many relationships I have to those teams. So it will go into your university alumni, it’ll go into your family, into your friends, and really find those opportunities. So again, to your point, when you start a company, we all have networks, whether you’re in real estate, which the network is your product, or you’re in financial services, where you’re you’re relying on a team and as much as your own relationships. Those really, I think drive growth and so for from my brothers and my perspective, leveraging those relationships as we started our first company together was was easy. So we were saying, Okay, well, you know, we want to be in Boston. Well, actually, I wanted to be in California, but he wouldn’t leave Boston.

Karan Rhodes  24:55

I love, I love both places but yeah, I see

Darr  25:00

But we hired our CTO there because my brother, you know, had worked with him at Ziff Davis, our CFO there, cuz he had helped us, you know, write our first business plan together. And we hired our first lawyer, this incredible woman, Giuliana Spofford, who fast forward years later, all three of those people are still working with us. So they, they’re gluttons for punishment. But it’s sometimes, you know, organizations aren’t that lucky. But that doesn’t matter if you’re starting a company at 19, or, you know, or 62, we all have these networks that are discoverable. And by the way, part of our short term roadmap is to kind of create this freemium product, so people can come in and test it for themselves. So we’re hoping that helps, you know, you know, everybody who can say, oh, I want to try that out. You know,

Karan Rhodes  25:49

Of course, try before you buy that demo that you get sold, once you see the power of the technology and what y’all are doing. Now, Darr be remiss if I didn’t give you at least a few seconds to talk about your, your perspectives on how AI is going to affect our long term markets in general. I mean, it’s a core piece of your technology, but it’s really become in the lexicon of everyone. I was at Microsoft for longer than I want to share. So we entered about it for a long time. But you know, the din the general public they hadn’t, and they think it’s come overnight? It hasn’t. But I’m just curious, in your perspective, from your perspective, are you nervous? Are you excited? Or are you still waiting to see how it will evolve and change how we operate in the world?

Darr Aley  26:42

It’s a big question, isn’t it? And I think, you know, we had a similar chapter when the web first came out, you know, they were the supporters. You know, Marc Andreessen, you know, the advent of the browser, when mosaic came out, and everybody, everybody was terrified. And you know, if you go back to our childhoods, remember the film Odyssey and how, you know, all the bad that can happen? So yeah, I mean, there are a lot of bad things that happened with the web, and are way better things that happened as well, you know, media was a terrific from the mental health of our kids, you know, but there were other benefits to social media. So it’s such an important question to ask. And, you know, there’s so many people trying to answer that question. For me, personally, I, you know, I think this is the advent of some really beautiful, significant social impact changes that we’re going to see evolve, you know, if we can improve, you know, all of our delicate resources on this Earth using AI, it’s going to be fantastic. And you see this starting to work in water technology and poverty. That’s what I’m hoping we can lean on. Yeah, I think that from a technology perspective, what I’ve seen early hasn’t been monetized, the way it will be. But you know, all of these technologies, whether it’s open AI, a great new company called inflection AI that reed Hoffman started, it’s trying to get more personal. So instead of just being a productivity tool, like check, CBT, it’s really trying to take this use this emotional IQ, to build a much more personal, you know, relationship with the person that they’re working with. I think that that can lead to some wonderful things. And that’s what we’re going to focus on is that aspect that can truly help the sales function and the marketing function be better at what they do. There’s clearly a dark side. And I’m hoping that, you know, we learned how to tame that. And you can see the propnents like Elon Musk and others who were, you know, trying to defend against it. But, you know, with new technology, you know, there are good things and bad things. You hope that the good out measures, the Yeah,

Karan Rhodes  28:39

Always. Absolutely. I’m very hopeful. I mean, I’m aware of, you know, there’s the good, bad and the ugly of it. But I’m an optimist, kind of like you, but I’m hoping that it will do a lot to advance like, social good medicines, like that. And, and hopefully we’ll have some controls over it as we learn more, and it evolves. And I think we will, so I’m hopeful for that. So thank you for sharing that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I can’t believe we blinked and we’re closing out on time, Darr. I should I don’t know. We’re just time flies and we’re having fun, but I cannot let you go. Before we ask you our signature question for guests. As you knew we are firm did a lot of research and wrote a book about our findings on different aspects of leadership execution best practices. And so out of the seven topics that we write about in the book, we always love to ask our guests which one maybe resonated or popped out with for you. And from our new listeners, all seven are equally as important and you use them in different ways at different times. But are you so kind to say leading with courageous agility really pop for you? And for my new listeners, leading with courageous agility is all about having the courage and fortitude to take calculated risk can stand up for what you believe in and just move forward, even if the future is uncertain or unclear. So it’s all about still making baby steps, even when you have question marks and you’re not sure about everything. So dark, curious minds want to know, why did courageous agility really resonate with you?

Darr Aley  30:20

Yeah, you know, I was just came to my head. But I don’t know if you remember the Peter Gabriel song called Don’t give up. But

Karan Rhodes  30:27

Yes, yes.

Darr Aley  30:29

In the last five years, as I said earlier, you know, it would have been, it’s so easy to just fold up shop without thinking about the options that you have. And sometimes it’s the right thing to do, you got to know when to say when, you know, 1000 people have said this before me, but you know, you learn more and failure and success. And, you know, I’ve certainly had my share of it, you know, the resilience that you build from that, I think is remarkable, especially if you stay in the game. But we’ve had to take you know, it’s really about taking those those tough steps. And being having the bravery to understand if you need to pivot and what those pivots are fundraising for, you know, those of us who are entrepreneurs, it’s always, you know, it always looks so easy in the press, but it’s, it’s one of the hardest things. And I would think that most entrepreneurs, it’s the least favorite thing they have to do to start a business. But that courageous agility, anything unnecessary, right, unless you’ve got, you know, profitable from day one, which is better. But it’s really about taking risks and measured risks. And some of that comes from experience, which in my case, I’ve cut plenty of years, looking at that success and failure and modeling it. But yeah, courageous agility. Again, I look back at these last five years, and, you know, getting to the pit of despair during that first year COVID, and trying to keep a company together, put food on the families that we supported, was truly hard. And that there were a lot of venture capitalists who would just shut down the companies that were, you know, working on, because they just didn’t think it through or there was this fear, uncertainty and doubt. And thankfully for us, we had a bunch of investors, including my brother and I that were like, No, we’re gonna we’re gonna see this through, what does it take to get to the other side, and that a deal was embraced by our board and our investors. It wasn’t just us. So having good partners, and good investors is really, really important for those tough times. But yeah, that’s what resonated most with me among the great aspects of your book.

Karan Rhodes  32:31

Oh, wow, what a wonderful story. And if that’s not a perfect example of while you need to have and continue to nurture, you know, deep relationships, because you might need to pull on them sometimes when times are bad. And it sounds like you had the right people in the right seats to help support the company, even during those tough times. And you live to tell the story. So congratulations on that. Dr. Welch, do unfortunate we’re gonna have to let you go at this time. But before we do so, I want to let all the audience know we’ll have a ton of information about you and a identified in our show notes. But before we close out, I want to give you airspace to let our audience know where to find you in the company.

Darr Aley  33:15

Sure, yeah. Thank you. And thanks for listening. Everybody, our company name is Aidentified, as Karan mentioned, and it’s spelled A I D E N T I F I E D.com. That’s where you’ll find all the information on our business. And I think we win the award for the most vowels in any corporate name. So spelling, and I appreciate the time you’ve had, and you’ve been great, as always. So thank you so much.

Karan Rhodes  33:45

Oh, thank you for the kind words, I really, really appreciate you Darr, and thank you for the gift of your time and coming on the podcast.

Darr Aley  33:52

Absolutely.

Karan Rhodes  33:53

And thank you to listeners for the gift of your time. And we know there are literally millions of other podcasts that you could be listening to. So we don’t take your time lightly. And we thank you for your support. You know, all we ask you to do is to like and subscribe and share the podcast with just one friend so that we all can do better about leading at the top of our game. Thanks again. And hopefully we’ll see you next week. Take care. And that’s our show for today. Thank you for listening to the lead at the top of your game podcast, where we help you lead your seat at any employer, business, or industry in which you choose to play. You can check out the show notes, additional episodes, and bonus resources, and also submit guest recommendations on our website at leadyourgamepodcast.com. You can follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn by searching for the name Karan Rhodes with Karan being spelled K a r a n. And if you like the show, the greatest gift you can give would be to subscribe and leave a rating on your podcast platform of choice. This podcast has been a production of Shockingly Different Leadership, a global consultancy which helps organizations execute their people, talent development, and organizational effectiveness initiatives on an on-demand, project, or contract basis. Huge thanks to our production and editing team for a job well done. Goodbye for now.