Jeremy and Jason Julio on Building Last Bite While Teaching PE and Selling to Viking

00:00 Dan Leibrandt

Hey everyone and welcome back to Pest Control Legends. I'm your host Dan Leibrandt and today I'm with Jason and Jeremy Julio, better known as the Blue Collar Twins. Jason and Jeremy built Last Bite Mosquito and Tick Control and Total Home Pest Control into a multi seven-figure operation with 55 techs, all while teaching PE full-time and have now sold both companies in an eight-figure deal in 2023. Today they co-host the Boardroom Buzz podcast. Advise operators through their Blue Collar Twins platform. And they've already started running the playbook again with a new venture in dog waste removal. In this episode, we're talking about how they scaled while clocking in as teachers, what most owners get wrong before they exit, and why they think dog waste removal is the new mosquito control. Now without further ado, Jason and Jeremy, welcome to the show.

00:51 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Dan, thanks for having us, man. Excited to be here. Dan, that was a great intro, man. I love hearing that. That was awesome.

00:57 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, definitely. I told you guys before we started the show here. I see you all over the pest control industry. Saw you or I actually saw you at PestWorld, but we weren't really familiar. So we didn't talk, but I see you on our Facebook group. I see Blue Collar Twins everywhere. So yeah, no, it's great to finally connect with you guys.

01:18 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah, real quick question. PestWorld, this year you were there, you were with Jonas. I don't know if it was you or not. Are you very tall? Or, because you were standing by Jonas and he's really short, so I don't know if... So you are tall, okay.

01:31 Dan Leibrandt

Ha yeah, I'm pretty tall. But Jake is tall too, so that might have been him too. People sometimes mistake me and Jake. Yeah. You guys are tall too, right?

01:40 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Okay. I'm have to meet Jake. Six one, he's six foot, I'm six one, so yeah.

01:49 Dan Leibrandt

Okay, cool. So, sweet, I want to start the show by asking, how do you guys get into pest control? How did this whole thing start with you guys?

02:01 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So it was back in 2010, I guess Jason and I were hanging out at my house and Jason came to me with the idea. He said, what do think about starting a mosquito and tick control company? But prior to that, you got to, let's paint the picture. We're both educators, we've been teaching, let's say 12, 13 years at the time, managing beach clubs in the summer. So we're teaching full time, we're coaching three sports, we're managing large beach clubs and we're working around the clock. And I came across this magazine or something and there was an ad for a franchise or whatever. And I brought it up to my brother and I said, hey, listen, I don't know anything about mosquitoes. I didn't even think there was a service for it. And dove into it a little bit. I said, if we're going to do this, I don't want to go the franchise route. And the reason why is because of the royalties. You get kind of handcuffed. You have to buy everything from there. They have all the controls. Like, listen, if we're going to roll the dice, let's just do it ourselves. We'll come up with a name. We'll do our research. We'll build relationships. And that's what we did with one truck and an idea. And that's one thing I thought that we really had in our back pocket, maybe not really realizing at the time, it was our network, right? Know, between being in education, coaching all these youth teams, high school teams. Managing the Beach Club and working on the beaches and the public beaches in the areas that we're at we had a huge network of supporters and People that wanted to see us grow but then also the customer service that we naturally had through I guess Like our upbringing and really looking up to other people and really focusing on like respect and kindness and triple treating people fairly I think that had a lot to do with like you know, maybe the jumpstart. The jumpstart, right, yeah.

04:05 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. I find it so fascinating that you guys were PE teachers, then you started building this company, then you continued to grow it and massively scale it up to, you know, $5 million plus, and yet you stayed PE teachers. I mean, how does that work? Can you explain that?

04:25 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So I mean, up until probably year three or four, I was doing a lot of different, other than teaching, I was still running this business as was growing probably maybe 15 trucks on the road, still bartending, still coaching. Jason, I think, stopped the summer gig before I did. But listen, it wasn't easy. We were answering all the phone calls. We were doing all the sales. We were... Training technicians. But what that allowed us to do, Dan, was that we were able to live off of our income from our teaching job, from the coaching, from the beach club, and reinvest our earnings, our profits, back into the business for the first three years. That allowed us to kind of bypass some early on growing pains where some technicians, some operators kind of get stuck because they're the only technician and they need that money to survive and take care of their family. They can't reinvest that money. They don't know how to. We had that opportunity to be able to do it. And if it was the other way around, I don't know how I would have necessarily done that either because we live in an expensive area. I mean, I'm sure there's ways to do it, but you just got to work hard. But yeah, that's what kind of helped us kind of catapult those first three years was by reinvesting that money.

06:04 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Well, it is definitely a nice fresh perspective because I see a lot of people in the industry say, you have to quit your job. You have to go all in on your business. Yet you guys didn't need to do that. So would that be your same advice to other people that are maybe a tech right now and they want to start their company? Should they stay a tech?

06:25 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

They should they stay attack our...

06:28 Dan Leibrandt

Or stay with whatever their job is.

06:31 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

As long as you have the right employees and... You put the right people in place, I think you can definitely do it.

06:43 Dan Leibrandt

Is the purpose for staying a PE teacher for the income or because you guys genuinely like it?

06:51 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah, we need the money.

06:54 Dan Leibrandt

Haha...

06:57 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Well, Jeremy says this all the time, and part of me believes in it also. Otherwise, I wouldn't be doing it. A big part of our upbringing was our teachers, our coaches, the educators in our lives, the people that we looked up to. And they helped give us direction in different things. They're the guys that got us on the beaches when we were 14 years old, lifeguarding. Got us in the sports and into colleges. Willie Jacobs, my senior year, our phys ed teacher and football coach, let me borrow his car as a senior and drive to a college recruit day. Was that CCNJ? That was CCNJ. So he let us do that. Who does that? Other than guys that trust you and want to see you do well. And that's the type of. That's what we want to give back to the people that we're with. So we're passionate about what we do. We want to give back to our communities. We want to be those role models. And we share a story with our students all the time. We let them know how we grew up and what we went through and how we got to where we are today. And that they could do the same exact thing with drive, persistency, and hard work.

08:18 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, yeah, no, I really respect that. And obviously you don't need the money now, I didn't mean that, but kind of earlier in the journey.

08:24 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

No, I'm joking. No, I'm joking. Yeah.

08:27 Dan Leibrandt

So how long did you guys have the mosquito business?

08:34 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Call it 10 years? Yeah, no, 10 years. So back to your other point, I'm sorry. So I didn't touch on this. What allowed us to keep our teaching job was the fact that we had an amazing team between Margo, Marisa, Anthony, Andy. We had an amazing team of employees. That managed our operation. Met with them daily, you know, after work on the phone, we had weekly meetings, we did things and we owned our roles. And we created this awesome system and business that allowed us to still maintain our teaching jobs. So there was no reason for us to give up our teaching jobs, you know, outside of possibly trying to scale outside of New Jersey. And scaling within New Jersey was hard enough for us and there was enough stress involved in that that I didn't want to. You know, take it past that level. So, you know, that, so that was, you know, I felt I left it out from that last question.

09:38 Dan Leibrandt

No, cool, I appreciate that. Okay, so you guys have been in business or you were in business for 10 years. Walk me through those first few years, especially as also having a job. What was that like and was it tough?

09:52 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

It was tough. It wasn't easy. You're going around the clock. Remember like yesterday, I was sitting at my kitchen table, my newborns running around, just got back in from a full day of work. And I'm on my phone looking at my contact list, calling people up, trying to sell the business. So that was just the beginning. And then... Well, also... Thinking about not having any business experience either. We had zero business experience. We didn't know necessarily what we didn't know. And we had a lot of learning throughout the process. We built our own website. We did our own marketing. We designed all of our marketing pieces. We trained our technicians. We did everything that we programmed the CRM. We had to learn the hard way just by kind of doing it and looking at what is offered today between the Pest Control Millionaires and everything else that is offered out in the world. There's a lot of good information out there that people could kind of lean into.

11:15 Dan Leibrandt

Absolutely, and I want to ask you as a follow-up to that so it was definitely hard starting out you guys were doing everything on your own What were some of the breakthroughs across the journey, but were there ever any pivotal moments?

11:30 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

One of my pivotal moments was when I was like, all right, they don't necessarily need me anymore to do things. If I want to take three days off and you don't call me, don't call me, and they could operate this business without necessarily leaning on me. That was kind of like a breath of fresh air, and that was nice for me. But that didn't happen until. Year seven, year eight, where you were really like... But that was for me, that moment, that breakthrough. Yeah. My breakthrough, and I remember it was yesterday, where I was vacationing in Puerto Rico, and my phone, was beginning of season, just keeps on binging and dinging and dinging and dinging. And what that was our auto renewals going off. And it was like one after another, one after another, one after another. And I was like, wow. This is really working. And that was the first year we did AutoPay, but it was through PayPal. And it was just on auto renewal, and we just got lit up. The way we operate our business is, I think, a little different than how most people do it. And I'm not too sure. Dan, you may be able to answer this. How many businesses? So I want to say we were probably like 70 to 80 % auto-renewed year after year. We were paid in full. I'll give an example. We in our last year, probably we were flush, maybe three million dollars coming into February. Right. Like we could operate our business stress, stress free because we payroll was covered. Our chemical expenses covered. Our marketing expense. And then everything else after that was just gravy. Was new customers growing and we could just focus on the growth of the business versus how are we going to make payroll? How are we going to afford new trucks? All those things that come with owning a business. But having all that capital and cash flux in the beginning was huge for us.

13:43 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Wow, that's incredible. And at least one point to make there is most owners that I talked to, I feel like kind of the standard now or what a lot of people are pushing towards is charging monthly. So you're saying that you got people prepaid for the year and that was 70 to 80 % of people.

14:00 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right, offered a now, it wasn't everyone. Was those people who wanted to save, you know, 20%. The 20 % on this season. But that 20 % was everything for a peace of mind. That, you know, that was nice.

14:11 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, yeah, that's incredible. And I feel like, I don't know for sure, but I feel like most owners don't provide something like that. So you said something like 20 % off to pay for the whole year? Okay, sweet.

14:23 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right. And then, you know, and then if they didn't pay by January, then every month after that, that 20 % went from 20 to 18 to 15 to 12 to 10 to five, and then the season would be running and operating.

14:39 Dan Leibrandt

Gotcha, yeah, no, that definitely gives you a lot of cash reserves and now you can not play it safe, but now you have some room to maneuver. And I think, I mean, part of that is that you guys were solely mosquito, which you talked a little bit about, you know, how you happened to start it, but I mean, why start mosquito and why stay mosquito?

15:46 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Well, we pivoted and ended up acquiring a full pest control company called Total Home Pest Control. We started with pest control, which is that was the franchise that you were looking at originally. So was the franchise that we're looking at. And there was nothing like that. If you look around, there's typical pest control companies, kind of like everywhere. Could have they all been improved on? Could we start a pest control company? Yes. But again, we were very busy. And for us to say, all right, all I need is one license, license 8A or B or 8B, whatever 8B it was. Other, like Jason said, like other people in New Jersey and around us service for mosquitoes. But we were, we could tell people that we were the professionals. So we only focused on But no one knew what it was. So they were like, huh, what is this? And then we went ahead and offered 100 free services out to 100 of our closest friends, that network of people that we knew. And they're like, mosquito control what's this? Yeah, sure. I hate mosquitoes We service a yard not know if I was gonna work in it worked people were hooked people saw our signs on people's yards and they're like what's that? It's Jeremy Jason Julio's new company Last Bite Mosquito Check them out. And then we and we also had a very high we had a incentive program that we started when we first Started the business where we're giving like a hundred dollar referrals to all our maybe not. Maybe not. Was it that much or no? 20 bucks. Exactly. Just a little bit. But $20 referral card to people who are referring us. And they were referring us. And that was working. It's people who are getting over $100 in referrals because we're referring. I guess that's relative or similar to what Clicki is like now, right? Clicki is a big for businesses, which is pretty cool. And I'm going look into it for Ruff Stuff.

17:38 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah, what was I at? Referrals.

17:44 Dan Leibrandt

I'll mention something there. It's funny because you said that there's maybe a lot of pest control companies in the area, but you know that you can be the expert in mosquito. It's funny because that's basically what I've done with my agency. I continued to niche down. When I started my journey, I was just doing copywriting for anyone and anyone, any kind of copy for any kind of client. Then I was doing any kind of marketing for local businesses, then home services. Then Pest Control, then only SEO for Pest Control, let's say. And I feel like it's pretty common in the digital marketing agency space that I'm in, but I feel like it's not very common in the home services space, especially Pest Control, know, niching down on maybe, you know, I'm gonna become the best at termite control or mosquito control or whatever it is. Would you guys recommend other companies go that route too, of maybe specialize in a service?

18:38 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I don't see it staying that way. Maybe other services, for pest control. So we went from mosquito control and I think we were one of the first people that added on tick control. So now we're a mosquito and tick, right? We started advertising that we got that added service and then eventually we bought a pest control company. And the way I'm seeing it is now you have all these mosquito and tick control. I think now a lot of these businesses, what they should do is, market it like an exterior pest control. You know, have exterior pest control and interior pest control. So now it's not just mosquitoes, it's everything outside, right? So because we would get calls for gnats or for other flying flies or other flying insects that were a nuisance and they didn't just want mosquito control, they don't want any bugs outside anymore, right? And so if I had to give advice, you know, I would target like an exterior outdoor kind of package and then you do your indoor extermination differently and you kind of bundle over package it one way or another but I feel like the niche down to just mosquito I think there's a lot of a lot more people who are involved now than they were when I first started and I think you could a general pest control company can compete and offer a really nice bundle and they could get everything taken care of all at once.

20:06 Dan Leibrandt

No, okay, got it. And I mean, part of that too of niching down, like you think of maybe how Amazon got started. Amazon didn't start by distributing all kinds of products. They started only selling books. So eventually you grow out of your niche. So maybe that's the case too.

20:19 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah. People forget that. Yeah, Amazon just booked. That's wild, right?

20:26 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, Facebook was just students at Harvard, believe, or wherever Mark Zuckerberg was at. And then it was all college students, and then it was all young people, and now it's everyone. So I've noticed that in all companies, yeah.

20:39 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So like you said, maybe you start as that niche, right? That niche. And then you kind of work your way into a bigger more. And that's kind of what we did also, right? We started the mosquito, the mosquito tick, and then all around just general pest control.

20:54 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. So you guys later in the journey, maybe you said seven or eight years in the business, you had a partnership with this pest control company, but then you acquired them and scaled it. I think you grew it from like 100K to a million. Talk to me about that.

21:11 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah, so when we had Last Bite Mosquito and Tick Control, lot of our customers, they loved their service. They wanted to know if we would take care of their rodent or their ants or they had interior. And we referred all that business to Turner Pest Control, which we later acquired.

21:31 Dan Leibrandt

Mm-hmm. So, yeah.

21:33 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right, so it was an easy transition for us because of the relationships we had. So at that time, we may have had 5,000 mosquito customers. All we have to do now is just send an email saying, hey, we now own a pest control company. And it was an interesting way that we did it. And I was really kind of torn whether or not I wanted to mess with our brand of Last Bite Mosquito and Tick Control. And just make it just a pest control company, one whole pest control company, but I didn't because of our reputation and our branding and how everyone viewed us. So then when we bought this company, I made it a sister company and we named it Total Home Pest Control, a Last Bite company. So that was a little thing underneath it. So now we just kind of cross cross marketed to both companies and it just kind of quickly a half a technician to five technicians, five trucks and a million dollars in revenue in a pretty quick amount of time. I want to we owned it for about three, three, four years. But what blows my mind is after being deeply or more deeply involved now more than we ever were in the pest control industry, prior to selling, we were just kind of localized in New Jersey.

22:37 Dan Leibrandt

That's awesome. Yeah.

22:58 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

And I had several relationships with people throughout the country, just as kind of like relationships that we built throughout the years to kind of help each other and coach each other. Door-to-door marketing and the way these guys are scaling nowadays is just mind boggling. It blows my mind that we were able to take a pest control company and get it to a million in like three, four, five years. And there's guys that are doing five, 10 million in a year. That is crazy. Yeah, just the first year they can do this. Yeah.

23:37 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, no, I know. Some of the scale I hear from these guys, and you're right, a lot of it is door to door as well. It's a very easy way to, not easy way, but it's a way to scale very fast. Yeah.

23:48 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

It's a way, it's a stressful, scary way, from my perspective. And you have to do it the right way. You have to do it with integrity. Have to do it where you know that a lot of these door-to-door guys, they're selling anything. Over-promise, under-deliver. But I think a lot of the guys that we've talked to and we've built relationships, they're figuring it out. I think they're figuring out a model to really, I know some of them are building like as a jumpstart and then they maintain those relationships and they get a base and then they kind of go from there. They put the door to door on hold. Yeah.

24:26 Dan Leibrandt

Well, I was going to say definitely don't sell yourself short because I mean 90 % plus of business owners have never hit the million mark and you guys have way surpassed that you got an exit that most people dream of you know all all the people in our group are you know, maybe 200 K to a million most people that watch this podcast are Maybe zero to 500 K or maybe even haven't even started yet. So you guys have definitely done something impressive and I think it's worth noting yeah, of course, of course. And you said that it wasn't that impressive to maybe do zero to one million in a few years. But I think a lot of people would be happy to do that. So how did you do that? How did you go from zero to one million in that time period?

25:00 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Thank you. That means a lot. Thank you.

25:16 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

We had a really fun social media presence. And I know a lot of people do it now. Who are those guys? Nice is doing a nice job with it.

25:26 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, they're good.

25:28 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Dennis down in Florida, has a nice Instagram following. We did fun ads on social media. We infiltrated those groups. That was, think, one of our biggest ways to do it. I know my sister-in-law would always say, why can't you just get someone else to do that? But me and my brother were always involved in these groups, infiltrating them and building like, not building relationships, but we were the ones speaking to our customers, right? And we always felt that that was important outside of somebody else just doing that. So that's somewhat of like a guerrilla marketing tactic, but again, the cross marketing was huge and our relationships that we had, know, being a twin, an identical twin in our area and building their type of relationships that we. Built, getting involved in those chambers of commerce and getting involved in the community. We were very ingrained into the community. We have a scholarship for the high schools. We give back on the Thanksgiving and Christmas. And this was multiple communities. It wasn't just the one community that we grew up in. We spread ourselves out. Thing we did was we had satellite locations, which now we have trucks in all different spots in New Jersey when strategically hired and set people up with Last Bite trucks. And I don't think people celebrate those things. I think we're doing a good deed for people in the community. Why not celebrate and share it with the world on social media? Versus, we're doing it for the good of a heart, but we're also... Able to capitalize off of, know, showing everybody else that we're doing this as well. Which was, you know, we did that a lot. You know, we talked about a little bit prior, but the same way we celebrated the holidays, we celebrated these extreme events, what would you call them? Extreme fundraiser events? Yeah, so we, you know, rowed a boat from Cape May to Sandy Hook, 132 miles. We rode our bikes, our road bikes from New York to Cape May. Stand-up paddle, where was that? From New Jersey to Delaware, around Manhattan twice. We did four by four by 48. So all these hard like, we put that out there and we got state news coverage, right? We were on like, so we had the Julio brothers, Jeremy, Jason, Julio, business owners of Last Bite Mosquito and Tick Control, riding our bikes from the tip of New Jersey, all for a great cause, the Limelight Foundation. And people hear that. People see that. We raise over $100,000 for all these different organizations, Eli Manning and all these big organizations. So I think that went a long way also in terms of brand recognition and getting out into the community.

28:44 Dan Leibrandt

Wow, that's incredible. No, I knew you guys did those things, but I didn't know it also correlated to business growth. I think that's so awesome. I think even though people might not want to row 132 miles or what was it? Biking 200 miles or running, jogging.

29:00 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

217 miles. It's almost as good as Jonas working out in a gym doing his muscle.

29:06 Dan Leibrandt

Hahaha!

29:10 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

He's a hard worker. He works out hard, Jonas.

29:13 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, Jonas is in the gym every day at like 5 a.m. Me and Jake were around his place in Escanaba and he's like, really, you guys didn't wake up and get a lift in before we started recording stuff? So yeah, he's definitely grinding too. But yeah, I think there is something to be taken away from that. For people, maybe they don't have an identical twin or maybe they don't wanna do some crazy extreme activities, but. I totally agree with that. Getting involved in the community, doing something unique that will get local awareness. Find a way to be different, find a way to be unique. And it seems like you guys are just playing into your strengths of being athletes and being twins.

30:00 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Another cool thing we did, and again, other businesses do this as well. We give out nice stuff to customers, to friends, to family, something that we know that they would wear, right? Versus just like this stiff, hard, boxy t-shirt that they're not going to wear. We give out nice quality shirts, t-shirts, hats that, you know, and when we give to them, hey listen, If you're gonna wear it, great. If not, just let us know. We'll give it to somebody else, right? And then they walk around wearing this stuff. Yeah, I have students. If you go to my truck, when we had Last Bite, or even now with Ruff Stuff, my truck is filled with apparel, nice apparel. So I'll give it to students. I'll give it to people like friends and family, customers, just anyone who I know that would wear it. Free marketing.

30:51 Dan Leibrandt

What's the best kind of apparel? Because there's so many different kinds. You could give people mugs, you give people hats, hoodies. What have you guys seen works best and what people use most?

31:00 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

He's got this nice sweatshirt on. I think a lot of people like wearing a nice, sweatshirt. Sweatshirts, t-shirts. If you have a nice hat, we used to get legacy hats, give those out. Those are a little pricey, but again, if you get an exposure.

31:18 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, love that, cool. So you guys ran the company for 10 years. We talked about the acquisition a little bit, growing that pest control company. Then you sold. Walk me through the acquisition. Was it on your minds and how did that go?

31:37 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So for me, from what I remember, we had several situations that were pretty stressful. We had a situation where we got sued for, you know, supposedly killing someone's landscape and on like $70,000 worth of landscaping, you're right? We... That was the first headache. That was one of the first headaches, know, dealing with major car accidents when you have these guys that are working hard for you and then there's accidents and potential, you know, injuries, that was stressful. And you got to remember too, Dan, we had, there were days we had 500 jobs in a day. Oh, yeah, 500 jobs in a day. Something bad like that happens. You have rain in a forecast. You have technicians not showing up for work. Now the next day you have to push them to the next day. So now you have thousand customers that you have to do because you had 500 the day after that. I mean, and listen, I wasn't dealing with those headaches, but they were still at the end of the day. I'm hearing about it. They're looking for answers, right? So, you deal with a couple of these things and then my buddy down in Georgia, Ryan Claddesburg of Mr. Mr. He was about a year ahead of us in growth and he actually was going through the process and sold his business to Terminix. As he's going through that, we're building this relationship. I sent my team down to him and you kind of learn how they went about like. Their operations and we just continually learn from each other. And I knew that he was selling his business and what that looked like. And he introduced me to Potomac and The Boardroom Buzz. I started listening to The Boardroom Buzz and what those guys had to do. Prior to that, was reaching out whenever I had a crazy situation, I would reach out to Orkin's M&A guy and email on him and be like, just to see if there's going to be any kind of conversation and what my options were to possibly it right and probably at that time I would have took like two million dollars and I would have been good right but then got it in it they didn't call me back or maybe they did and it was a brief conversation so Ryan Cladisburg kind of like kind of showed me the ropes and again as I see what he was going through with his exit and his sale and how awesome Potomac was with them you know I end up reaching out to Franco and to Paul Giannamore and started building a relationship with them and letting them know, once you start to go down this road, you need to have an idea. I remember once someone said, hey, so what's your exit strategy? Like, I don't even know what an exit strategy is. I built this business just thinking that we were just going to get a truck and a technician and let's see where this goes. I didn't necessarily really foresee this. I had faith in it, but.

34:39 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So when this time came, was like, all right, so what is it going to take for me to maintain the current lifestyle that I have where I can travel three times a year? Live the life I want to live in the house, the neighborhood, do the things that I want to do for the rest of my life. What's that number look like? And I had these conversations with Paul and Franco and they're like, all right, well, you're about a year away, before we could possibly get you these numbers. We sat down prior to me, again, connecting with Potomac, we sat down with Paul Bergman, the president of Viking at the time, and had a conversation. He was like, you know, I'll probably buy you guys one day. You know, so as we're going through this process of due diligence and putting CIM together and going through this whole process, it is a lot of work. It can be stressful. But as we go through this process, we go to market. And we're not kind of necessarily getting what we want. Between Franco and Paul, they're like, hey, listen, be patient. Something's going to happen. And originally, Viking came in with this really not great offer. With the guidance of Paul and, again, with Franco being the bulldog he is, he's like, them or whatever. That's not where you want to be, and you don't have to take it. And then they helped us put things in place to make us a little bit more appeasing or appetizing to Viking. And they structured this deal that got us to that number. That magic number that where I know that if we sold a business and then with paying taxes and all the different things that are involved with an M&A, with an acquisition, that I was still gonna be able to take this money, put it into an account and be good for a long, long time. So, you know, that's what that process was like. It was for us, I know deals that are open and closed within, you know, three to five months, but our deal was a little bit longer.

36:53 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Because you also got to consider what type of business we were. We were a seasonal business with seasonal employees. We had the general pest control also, but a majority of our business was seasonal, right? So we had to prove to them that our customer base was loyal and that we were going to retain them year after year. We had the deal that we had, we had a... One year earn out so we had a hit a certain number we had a surpass on say five million and then we also had to have like eighty something percent retention and that's pretty much it but know like it was amazing work with Paul was amazing got to work with the kind of date they set up to everything that they said they're going to do Franco was with us the whole way so yeah, it was a neat experience. Was, Margo, my main assistant, operator manager, she was incredible on the way also. So having someone like her made it a lot easier also.

38:01 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm. Well, I'm glad it went well. I've talked to a lot of owners and I've heard a lot of nightmare stories around selling your business or maybe even acquiring other businesses. What advice would you guys give to people that are looking to sell?

38:16 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I would make sure you have everything in order. Have your books in order. Cash is no good because they're going to want to see every single penny. Know what you want. My thing is know that number that you want to walk away with. And build your business to that. Otherwise, mean, you're doing this for a reason. I would know. Your number that it's going to be able to take for you to kind of walk away and then you know aim for that. That would be my recommendation.

38:56 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, and this has been a recurring theme on the show of reverse engineering your goals. Feel like, again, I talk to all these owners that are stuck and looking to grow, and part of the problem is just they don't know what they want. And maybe part of that is just they're stuck in the truck all the time. They're busy. They don't have any time to think. But I think you'd agree that that's really the key is like, number one, figure out what you want and then make that...

39:23 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I also think that some people are scared of what's on the other side of walking away and not knowing what to do. When we sold the business, we're still teaching again because we're passionate about it. Even with just teaching, we look at teaching as a part-time job from 7 to 2 o'clock. You get bored. So that's why we're still doing this. That's why we're involved and still helping. But you take some chips off the table. Right now I have security and I don't have all those liabilities and those stresses that were involved within that business. I know a guy that has this huge business, and I know that's relative, but let's say it's 50 plus million. And he sends me this text message of a sales guy cursing off one of the customers.

39:45 Dan Leibrandt

Haha...

40:15 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

That's something you don't want to deal with. Again, them sending me pictures of major accidents. And those are stressful situations that could destroy a business. Yeah, but also people handle those things differently. Right? I remember when the first time we got sued, we talked to another guy. Was like, hey, listen, this is not going to be the last time. You have to get used to it. People who grow businesses, their accidents are going to happen. You're to have bad employees. And you know? It's all about how you deal with them. Right. And you're right that everybody handles things differently, but that's something I knew that I didn't want to handle anymore.

40:53 Dan Leibrandt

Is there around your selling your business, is there anything you guys regret?

41:01 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I don't. I don't have any regrets about selling the business. Know Jeremy would have sold the business probably sooner than I actually pulled the trigger to sell the business, maybe a year before. Yeah. But I have no regrets. I think we sold it at the right exact time. I think we got a really good number for it. Yeah, I don't have any regrets with selling the business. And then like we did, we started another business. You know, after capitalizing off of one thing and stepping back and realizing, hey, listen, I do want to be involved, but not at the same extent that I was with Last Bite. Now, so we started a business called Ruff Stuff, dog waste removal company. And the reason why we started it was because we have an awesome team of employees that worked for us who wanted to get involved into something else down the road. And they're knocking on a door.

42:01 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

What are we going to do this? Why are we going to do this? I'm like, I don't know. And then finally we're like, all right, well, let's do this. I made them partners. I gifted them equity, but it's sweat equity. So they're going to have to work. They have to, they're managing and operating the day to day of this business. I'm helping from the sideline. I'm having my daily conversations with them. But what's really cool about this business, Dan, is that I look at it the same way I looked at mosquito control when we first started. I was like, is this really going to work? Are people going to really pay for people to go in the backyard and pick up dog waste? And year two, we have 500 plus customers. We've got almost 250 five star reviews on Google. Five trucks on the road. We have amazing employees, and it's going great. But it's also a lot easier. You don't have to deal with that license, and you don't have to deal with the DEP or overspray. Drift and chemicals and it's just a lot easier and I have an amazing team running it. So we are involved and we're doing this podcast. So by any means, I'm not bored anymore and we're involved still. So it's nice. No regrets.

43:14 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, awesome. Yeah, poop scoop is a super interesting industry. Poop scoop, dog waste, whatever you wanna call it. Why choose that of all home services or other businesses?

43:26 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

It's the same reason we did mosquitoes because there's not a lot of players in the space There's not a lot of competition and whatever ones are their franchises and we have a leg up because we I think franchises You know, they have call centers and we have amazing customer service which sets us apart from a lot of these local business not local business, but from these franchises and We're good at marketing and branding and we have already established that through the...

43:31 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, smart.

43:56 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

The guerrilla style marketing that we do. So, to answer your question, why dog waste removal? Because nobody else was really doing it, or doing it the way we would be doing it.

44:08 Dan Leibrandt

That's awesome. Yeah, I think the way I would put that or consolidate that is filling gaps in the market, which is super smart. And I feel like most people, maybe they hear of a business idea from a friend or they're just, they really want to do this thing, but it should actually be whatever the market wants. If you have a local business, if you want to get into home services, mean, pick the one that has the most opportunity. People need that are underserved, that there aren't any good businesses, all of that. So I think that's really smart. People should think more of that way of not what I want, but what do the people need and want.

44:50 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right, yeah, that gap, like you said. Whenever I travel, I try and look around and see what do they have that we don't have, right? And what do they have that people are lining up for that we don't have? And I feel those are ways to find opportunities as well.

45:01 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm, yeah.

45:14 Dan Leibrandt

Hmm, absolutely. Something else I wanted to cover, which I like is almost the elephant in the room. Most people I interview, I just interview one person. You guys are identical twins. How does that work? Mean, and, you know, I was watching a ton of podcasts you guys have been on, like Jonas's and Paul's, and it seems like everything goes well and you guys have always done everything together. How does that relationship work? How do you manage being twins and doing all this stuff together?

45:41 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I think it becomes natural for us because we've been doing it our whole life, in that we've accepted each other's roles. When we first got into business, it was hard. It was hard to kind of figure out what hat each other was going to wear. There were some rough times. But I think at the end of the day, we figured it out and worked through these situations. We spend every day of our lives together from infancy till even now. We went to college together. Operate these business together. We live down the street from each other. I think that we do. I think that his wife loves me more than him. No, I'm just joking. My wife is listening, by the way.

46:28 Dan Leibrandt

Do the wives ever confuse you two?

46:30 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Just once. Confuses me all the time. I think we've really figured out each other's personalities at this point of our lives. We're different people, for sure. We have the same values. But Jeremy is tremendous at work in a room and building relationships outside. I prefer to build one-on-one relationships better. I don't like being in big rooms and I do for a short amount of time, but I get over it very quickly. If I walked into a bar with Jeremy, he'd be gone. He'd walk around the whole bar 10 times and say hello to 100 people. I'm walking in and I'm sitting down and I don't want to go anywhere. That's the difference between him and I. So, we've learned each other's strengths and weaknesses and we built off, we built off of that. What do you think? I think you nailed it.

47:27 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I'm more like you Jason. I'm more introverted. So Jeremy's the extrovert.

47:34 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right, right. And I just found out there's one in between. I forget what it's called. Was it called? Yeah. Who told us about that? It's an introvert. I mentioned it's an optiverse or something like that. There's one that's in between that really, I read them like, wow, that's me. I had a coach in me and I do some business consulting. And I entered that realm just to kind of see if I would enjoy it. And I built some nice relationships with a couple operators. Talked like three. That's it. And that was enough for me because after an hour conversation I am drained just because that's all I have I don't have more than that You know and I'm happy with that and same thing was like kind of going out and like I don't like to Small talk too much. I end up like just getting uncomfortable. So but Jeremy's very good at that. He kind of thrives on it and he's comfortable with it and So yeah I think I'm that middle one. Don't know what it's called though. Gotta look into it.

48:36 Dan Leibrandt

It sounds like you're an introvert. Which I'm the same way, trust me, it's no diss. I can only spend so long talking to people. I need a lot of alone time and that helps me do my own thing. There's pros and cons to both sides and it's on a spectrum as well. You're not 100 % introvert or extrovert. You might be 80 % introverted and then you still have some of other side. Yeah. I also wanted to ask you guys about now The Boardroom Buzz. So that was originally Paul's podcast. Now you guys have taken that over. We were talking about the background story before the show. I want to ask you, since you have such a unique perspective here, and I think pretty much all podcasts hosts do, especially when it's niche like this, you know, let's say you've done over 50 interviews in the past year of all that's a lot of the top people in the industry.

49:35 Dan Leibrandt

What are some of the top lessons you two have learned from the people that you've interviewed?

49:44 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Question because there's so much. We've had so many great guests on. I think one of the things that I feel that I've learned or pulled from listening to a lot of these operators is that they're not scared to fail and you know I think and they learn from their mistakes. I was always big at learning from other people's mistakes and I try to prevent to make as many mistakes as possible. I'm sure a lot of people do, but I'm a lot more cautious. When we started our business, it was a $7,000 investment for us. And probably at the time, that was a lot of money for me, but you know, looking at what some people spend. For investing in a business or themselves, it's tremendous. Talking to Jonas, the amount of money he'd probably spend on going to, what was his name? Hormozi?

50:43 Dan Leibrandt

Hormozi.

50:43 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right, Hormozi. That's next level, right? But it's an opportunity for him to learn. Hopefully he gets something for it and implements those things and pulls some levers. And I'm sure he does. That's not something I, if I could be making $5 million a year and I'm not doing that, just that's not how I'd like to spend my money or the risk I take. Listen to some of these door to door guys and the risk and the way they're able to operate on, know, operating a business on debt to find customers and, you know, maybe only hold on to them for a year and then lose that. That's stressful. And then try and, you know, regain that year after year and keep that same path. It's crazy. I think that's one of the things I learned from hosting these guys and listening to all these amazing guys' is that they're not scared to take chances and to bet on themselves. And they're going to bet on themselves because they believe in themselves. And if they do fall, they're going learn, and they're going to get back up, and they're going to go do it again. Better.

51:50 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, so more risk, more reward.

51:54 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Right. Yeah. And then the confidence, too, just like Jeremy says, lot of these guys are confident in what they're doing and believe in themselves and their teams and their systems that they have in place. They're hardworking, right? It's not for the faint or for, you know, they're working, they're putting in the hours. Some people, you know, they say that they want it, but do they, right? Are they willing to work seven days a week and not have an off switch? You know, that's what we did for ten years, didn't have an off switch, we worked every day, we were involved, it was our baby, it was a real thing. They have real goals, have real values and they stick to them. I think that's another thing that these operators have as well.

52:39 Dan Leibrandt

Mm. Anything to add, Jeremy?

52:43 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

He nailed it. So Jason's very good at talking. He's very good at talking and rambling. He does a great job. Was actually going to say everything that he just said.

52:54 Dan Leibrandt

No, not rambling at all. That was great. Awesome. Cool. Something else I want to jump back to, which I feel like I kind of glossed over, is the different ways you guys were growing the company and, you know, built it to over $5 million plus. And one aspect which we could, I don't know, maybe target two or three aspects here, but one is you said you were really having in groups, but I'm sure a lot of people don't even know exactly what you mean. I assume that's Facebook groups, but could you expand on what exactly you're doing?

53:28 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So on Facebook groups, we'll post something on our Facebook page and then we'll just share it to any community that we're in. So we're in Long Branch, Fair Haven, Holmdel, any county, any town that you are doing business in, am looking, I'm searching for a group in that area. And then we will share the posts that we have on our homepage. To their page and we would do that weekly. And then hopefully our wives or friends would go in and they'd be like, this is a great company. And then our customers would chime in, these guys are great. You go on to them and be like, Last Bite, Last Bite, Last Bite. They would end up following up with a promotion for Yeah, because then once you join those groups and someone says, all right, who do you guys use for mosquito control? Next thing you know, Last Bite, I see it, I get a notification about it, I jump on it. Hi, I'm the owner of Last Bite. Jason. If you have any questions, we've got, know, check out our reputation, blah, blah, blah, and we're all over it. So, you know, those are the little things we would do in those social media groups. But again, I mentioned like the fun ads. We have ones where like we would do like a Western showdown with a mosquito in a mosquito costume and... Looking down the barrel of a mosquito blower. Yeah, all those fun things. The Mortal Kombat one, that was fun. A Mortal Kombat video game and we'd have a mosquito and then Jeremy and I duplicating and then we're jumping around and then we end up finishing them. Silly things like that. You gotta have fun. You gotta have fun.

55:16 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, that's awesome. How did you come up with those ideas for the social posts? Because it seemed like they were super creative. All these different ideas. Where'd they come from?

55:27 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Before we scheduled our appointment with our media person to come over and record, Jason and I would sit down and pitch some ideas, different ideas. I'm just driving and I'm thinking about it. Jeremy was pretty good at that. He has a pretty creative mind. And still to this day, a lot of people would send stuff our way in terms of ideas for either Ruff Stuff or for in the past Last Bite. And Jeremy, this is garbage. And then he'd follow up with his ideas and those are the ideas that we would end up going with. And they were actually pretty good. I don't mean actually pretty good. They were good, yeah.

56:06 Dan Leibrandt

A lot of owners that I talk to or maybe even seeing engage in the Facebook group will say that social media is a waste of time. What do you say to those people?

56:16 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

It's where people live. People live on their phones between Instagram. You look at people's screen time as a parent. I look at my daughter's and I'm pretty on top of it. I think four hours is a lot, but that's what she gets. She gets four hours of screen time. She's a 14-year-old girl, and that's how they communicate with their friends. My wife, if you look at her screen time, and I'm worried to look at it, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't six or eight hours, right? And what they're doing with those six to eight hours is not... Writing emails or doing work, they're scrolling through Instagram or Facebook. And that's where you got to target them. You have to target them on what they're looking at. In the past, people would have promotions on commercials, on TV. People don't watch TV anymore. I sit on my couch and I'll watch something on my phone or my iPad. And that's where you need to target them, where you're going to. Where you're gonna get them to kind of see what you're doing. We used to do Valpak, that's garbage now, no one's doing that anymore. Remember, do you guys have Valpak?

57:22 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Mailers, like in the envelope, yeah. We did billboards, we had fun with the billboards. Strategically put them. Around the state. Door hangers are good. I don't necessarily believe in like door to door, but I think if you can get door hangers on people's doors, think that's a huge thing. If you could kind of get something creative and engage in, you know, not your traditional door hanger, but something good. I think door hangers are good because in order for them to, they're going to have to take it off, right? And it's not shuffled in a whole bunch of mail. I think that's a good way to kind of target people.

58:03 Dan Leibrandt

I think on Jonas's show you mentioned yard signs too. Did those work well?

58:09 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

They did. They did for us because with pest control, you're supposed to leave flags behind. So we felt like if we're going to leave a flag behind, it's going to be a nice flag. And if you drove around our towns or anywhere we service within New Jersey, you would see thousands of these yard signs that said Last Bite. Not only does the customer see it, but everybody else sees it because they tell us we saw your sign we see your signs everywhere and then and then people get like the fear of missing out and they want they want a sign on their property so they call up and get the service because now the whole the whole neighborhood needs it I can't not have it we have had the situations where I don't need your service because you do everyone else's house in the neighborhood wide like you know there's no more bugs...

59:00 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, I've found that the signal to know that you're doing a really great job on marketing, specifically top of funnel marketing and branding is when people say exactly that I see you everywhere. I've gotten that comment sometimes that people in our group have said that it's like, keep doing whatever you're doing. You want people to see you everywhere.

59:23 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah, yeah, for sure. I agree.

59:27 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, definitely. And were you guys, so we covered social media, Facebook groups. Did you say you were running ads too?

59:37 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

We ran ads. Found some of our popular, most engaging pieces, we would pay for those to be advertised, And we did LSA, we did pay-per-click. We had a marketing budget, but it wasn't big by any means. I want to say our marketing spend was less than 2 % of our revenue. Think at the end, we may have been spending maybe $75,000 to $90,000 annually in marketing spend.

1:00:06 Dan Leibrandt

Okay. And I'm sure some of these, the videos that you guys made took off. Are there any like top ideas that maybe you could share to the audience? Maybe ideas that they could borrow?

1:00:20 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

This is not an idea because I don't to make anyone upset but one of them my favorite ads door knocking was the door knocking one and We have again a lot of loyal customers and we had a door knocker come knocking on their door and so Before you go ahead with this was free. This was absolutely free. You didn't have to pay anything for it. I cut it up a little bit, but what we did was, so we had a door knocker knocking on one of our customer stores. They sent us the ring camera and interaction between the two. We blurted out their face and we had some like, we opened it and like, you, wait, what was it? Something like, who are the pests? Are these guys the pests here? Something like that. Because it wasn't just the fact that they knocked on the door. Was the fact that we see that you are using Last Bite. And then I turned the ad. So he says that, and then the ad says, yeah, because we're 100 % satisfaction guarantee, or our customers love us, or whatever it was. And then he goes into saying something else. He was basically knocking the business to try and get a sale and it wasn't working. I'll send you the video because it's pretty funny and I think it's pretty creative also. It's out there somewhere. Yeah, those cameras were great. We had another one where we had a technician going knocking on a door, know, introduce himself. Hi, I'm Jamal from Last Bite. And he went to go knock on a door and a dog... Got loose and you see our technician run towards the fence, jumped over the fence and did a flip. What was the... I think the title was like, not only we good at killing mosquitoes, we're very athletic as well. Right, so the guy did a front flip over the fence. Yeah, yeah. That was a good one. Yeah.

1:02:06 Dan Leibrandt

Haha huh, yeah, I like those too. And I've seen maybe some other companies use things like the ring camera. I think part of why that works so well is because it's so real and so authentic. I mean, maybe now people would like fake an AI video like that, but at least a few years ago, seeing like the ring camera, I mean, it doesn't get any more real than that. It is just a camera that's sitting there all the time. Things just happen to happen outside of the house and you catch this crazy glimpse of something going on and then you take advantage of that for marketing. So I'm a big advocate of that as well of like use real unique stuff in your material and social media stuff.

1:02:57 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Yeah, those are fun. I like those.

1:03:00 Dan Leibrandt

Yeah, that's awesome. And I also, before we wrap up, I want to tie back to community involvement. You guys, you mentioned all of the ways, the interesting, unique ways you got involved in your community. But for someone, let's say someone is either new to an area or maybe they've just never gotten involved in their community for whatever reason, how do you start getting involved in your community?

1:03:26 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

The chambers, find the local chamber, go to the weekly meetings that they have, shake hands, pass out cards. I want to emphasize, be authentic. Throwing $500 at a little league is not going to... Convert into customers. Throwing $500 at a little league and then showing up to two games, three games with a box of donuts and cheering on the team, that is where you're going to get your return of investment is by doing little things like that and being authentic and celebrating the teams and the wins and those victories or just being part of those moments. That's how you actually make a difference there. Yeah. So Jason and I, did those things all the time. Another thing, I brought this up probably in another podcast, t-shirts, right? It has your logo on a bag of them. We donated about 500 t-shirts to a big town called Manalapan, and it's a flag football. 500 t-shirts that these kids are gonna wear weekly. Parents are washing them, they're folding them, and what's the first thing they're gonna see? It's gonna be your logo. Right? So Jason and I, would donate him. And it's minimal, $1,000, maybe $1,500 to get all his t-shirts made. And we would go to these games. You only have to go to one, show up, shake hands, meet the board. People see you, maybe give out water bottles with your logo on Take a quick team photo, right? And then post that, right? I'm not waiting for the plaque to come in that's going to sit and collect dust. We're going to take a team. Do you mind if we take a team photo with you guys? Do you guys mind if we put it on our social page? No, go ahead. But then you don't just put it on a social page. You also put it on the community page that you're in.

1:05:21 Dan Leibrandt

Mmm.

1:05:21 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So now the community sees that you're involved as well, right? And then they want to support you because they know that you're supporting them and their team and their community. Right.

1:05:30 Dan Leibrandt

Definitely. Totally makes sense. And I love this organic, holistic approach that you guys have here. I know a lot of companies just door to door or mainly acquisitions or mainly Google ads. I mean, like you were mentioning earlier in the show, mean, you're actually connecting with the community and being helpful. Maybe the local baseball team needs money and you provide that. It's just the small things like the donuts too. Yeah.

1:05:57 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

So you might have heard this before, may have heard me say it before, you love your employees, you love your community, and you love community, people, and your community, your customers, and your employees. You love them three, they're going to love you back. And those are the three things that really matter within the business.

1:06:22 Dan Leibrandt

Amen. Well, sweet. Have one more question for you guys before we wrap up, which I asked all my guests and that is, and I want to hear from both of you. What is your message to the pest control owners out there? What do you want to tell them? What do think they need to know?

1:06:37 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I'll go first. Keep your blinders on, keep working hard. You guys are providing great service. You're in a service that is recession proof. Believe in yourself and keep going. My message to the pest control operators out there is always be looking to grow. Feel like one of the biggest things I tell people is if you're not moving forward, you're going backwards. Always look for innovation. Don't get too comfortable. Set goals, right? Realistic, attainable goals that you're going to aim for and you're going to hit. And continue to level up year after year. Be patient with yourself, understand you're all going to make mistakes. And it's part of life. Within relationships at home to being an operator, to being an owner, we're all going to make mistakes. It's just part of life. We're just going to learn from them. Shake off the dust and keep going. So that would be my advice to any operator out there. And then to Jeremy's point, believe in yourself. For sure, if... We were able to do this, anybody can do it. And again, it was hard, it wasn't easy, but we are proof that this could be done for sure.

1:08:05 Dan Leibrandt

Amen. And yeah, I know we didn't cover it in this show, but you guys come from very humble beginnings, per your words. I find it so inspiring. And I think what you guys have done is just so awesome and so respectable.

1:08:23 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I believe in most people more than they believe in themselves. And that's a shame. Wish people believed in themselves as much as I did in school, in life. But I truly believe that anybody can do anything as long as they put their mind to it and really focus and work hard at it.

1:08:45 Dan Leibrandt

Mm, me too. Well, sweet, thank you guys so much for coming on the show. This has been great. I really appreciate your time. I know how valuable it is. And where can people connect with you and find you guys online?

1:08:59 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

I would say LinkedIn. I'm very active on LinkedIn. Jason Julio and also check out Blue Collar Twins. That's where we link up with the podcast. And I also I like to blog little things, life lessons. They're short blogs that I use AI to help write, but they're all my perspective and on life and M&A and this journey. So Blue Collar Twins, LinkedIn, social media, Instagram,...

1:09:38 Dan Leibrandt

The blogs are on bluecollartwins.com. Okay, cool. And then anything from you, Jeremy?

1:09:45 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Jeremy Julio on LinkedIn and Instagram. And then we share obviously the Blue Collar Twins.

1:09:53 Dan Leibrandt

Awesome, cool. All those links will be in the description. Thank you guys again for coming on the Spin-A-Blast and I hope we stay in touch.

1:10:01 Jeremy Julio and Jason Julio

Absolutely. Thank you, buddy. You're the man, Dan. Thank you.

1:10:02 Dan Leibrandt

Of course. Thanks.