23: Taking Your Vision From Concept to Success with John McGovern

Behind Their Success: Ep 23

 [00:00:00] Welcome to Behind Their Success. This podcast is for people who are feeling stuck on their entrepreneur journey or in their careers. It's for people who want to scale and grow their businesses, learn about the power of mindset, or they just know there's more out there and they want to start making changes.

I'm Paden Squires, the host of the podcast. I was never cut out to be an employee. And when I was an employee, I was bored out of my mind. So I made a plan. I studied and passed the CPA exam in eight months while working all with the end goal in mind of quitting my job and starting my own business. I did that in 2014 and it has been an amazing wild ride since.

So now let's hear from other entrepreneurs and what mindsets and probably more important, what actions they have taken that have created and led to their success.

Paden Squires: Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Behind Their Success podcast. I'm Paden Squires, the host. and Today we have John McGovern as a guest. John [00:01:00] is located in the Waco, Texas area. He is a full stack software developer, architectural engineer, entrepreneur, and designer. With a background in electrical engineering, construction, and aviation.

Paden Squires: He is interested in building impactful companies and teams in the construction, aviation, and entertainment industries. John, good morning. Welcome to the podcast. 

John McGovern: Good morning, Peyton. Thanks for having me. 

Paden Squires: Yeah, John. give us some more detail about your background. Tell us,where you came from and how you got to where you're at now.

John McGovern: Yeah, born and raised in the Kansas City area. learned the Midwest set of values there. Work hard, play hard. my parents were in residential construction. So that's the Construction and engineering background there. my grandfather and also my uncle on my mother's side were commercial pilots, one for Continental, one for United.

John McGovern: So recently in the last few years, those companies merged, So brought some unity to the family, which [00:02:00] was fun. yeah, I went to the university of Kansas and studied architectural engineering there, graduated in 2009, which, if you remember, was not a great time for the economy or to be going into construction, especially residential construction.

John McGovern: I 

Paden Squires: I came out in 2010. same timeframe. Yeah. 

John McGovern: Yeah. I did not have a good perspective then, but a little better now as we were graduating, I just remember a lot of. He's shaking heads, from the leadership at the university. He's like, I'm sorry guys that you're graduating this year.

John McGovern: But you'll make it, you know,yeah, I took a job with Kiewit power constructors right out of college, working on electrical, cost estimating and power systems on large industrial power plants. So like natural gas fired plants, and then also they were starting to do more renewable systems. and that's, Power systems was my focus in college.

John McGovern: So anyway, I wasn't actually able to be a field engineer. They were backed up on projects. The economy was laid flat. So I was in the office. Working mostly on Microsoft Excel [00:03:00] and saw a way to basically automate what the office was doing through linking and sorting and other functions.

John McGovern: So I wrote that program for them. and then I really was out of a job because. I just didn't have anything to do. what usually took us six hours was done in about five seconds. So I turned in my two weeks notice after being there about six months. and then started my journey into the tech industry programming, and entrepreneurship.

John McGovern: So from there, I got to start doing natural language processing, learned JavaScript, and did social media data analytics for a handful of years. So, that was the case for a handful of years, and then, Did some tech programming for a music startup, all along the way. Started getting back into construction and started a construction company with my brother in Kansas city, which I ended up getting bought out of when I moved to California.skipping a handful of things.

John McGovern: Cause I just sat in tech for a while. until I came here to Waco, really got [00:04:00] back into engineering and construction. So partnered with Matt Zipperlin here in Waco to buy Abacus engineering last year. At the same time, we, I partnered with another. Local guy here to purchase advantage aircraft services in Corpus Christi.

John McGovern: and, the two of those things are occupying the majority of my time and then utilizing the skills and architecture and engineering to launch the guardian collective here in town, which is a coworking space. And the car storage concept that we're bringing to the market.

Paden Squires: Very cool. Very cool. So it sounds like you've got quite a bit going on, right? In the last, what, six months, a year or whatever that timeframe was there. You bought an engineering company and an aviation company. 

John McGovern: Yeah. 

Paden Squires: tell us a little bit about those. What you, yeah. What you do there. 

John McGovern: Yeah. So going back to the ADD point, I have learned through my thirties that three is my capacity level.

John McGovern: If I have three things going on, it's. Good. I'm pressing the envelope, but not too far over my skis. Abacus engineering focuses [00:05:00] on architectural engineering. So we do everything from civil all the way up, to architectural design here. That has been a joy getting back into and being able to work in the construction and engineering process again.

John McGovern: and then advantage aircraft specialized in, the King Air platform. So doing routine maintenance, andgetting into those airplanes. So it's been good. That has been the largest learning curve. My background has been just on the flying side. So I'm a private pilot's license with an instrument rating. I flew with my grandfather a lot while he was still alive, But lessons from him, the money to be made in aviation is on the services side.

John McGovern: So starting to get in there. Yeah. Not owning, right? not necessarily owning the things, That can be a little tough. That's correct. Owning aircraft is expensive. No, no matter how you cut it. it can be very rewarding, both business wise and also personally, but. Costs dollars, no matter how you do it.

John McGovern: Yeah. 

Paden Squires: That's right. I've had, you know, in some of my ventures, I've had a few experiences, on private planes. And [00:06:00] yeah, I mean, the convenience is amazing. Just trying to figure it out financially, how to make it make sense at times can be, um. Can be a challenge, right? It's just gotta be, it's just gotta be convenient enough for you.

Paden Squires: And you got to have the money, that it just makes sense. 

John McGovern: Yeah. I listened to an interview, this was several years ago, but it was a gentleman at a place, I believe he had a Cessna jet. And somebody was asking him, it's like, how do you justify that? Like, how do you justify the cost?

John McGovern: He's like, you can't, it's always going to be more expensive than a first class ticket, but it's a personal decision for me. Because whenever I travel, and he travels a lot for business, he said, I can take my family anytime I want. And that really resonated with me. It's actually that, that's a value set that I have in my life.

John McGovern: And I want to be able to do that as well. businesses and ventures in multiple states, families in different areas of the country. yep, it may not pencil out as far as the finances go, but the time with family is, you can't get it back. 

Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. And the ability to just go to the, go to whatever little airport you're at and jump in and just take off [00:07:00] is, man, that's sweet.

Paden Squires: That's really sweet. 

John McGovern: Yeah, that's awesome. you got quite a variety of background, John. we won't hold the Kansas thing too much against you. Um, yeah. What would you say is your number one skill or like the driver towards, your success or has led to, all these different business ventures?

John McGovern: Yeah. I take it back to an experience that I had in high school. So I went to the Lee summit, technology academy. And, I got connected with a professor there. His name was Dr. Rutherford and he was the professor of engineering. And that course marked me for life, particularly because he taught us how to learn.

John McGovern: And, those are things that were under the surface in every other course I had taken and people that I had interacted with, but it wasn't, overtly said and known. leaving high school, I set out to learn everything I could in my twenties. and that's essentially what I [00:08:00] did, one through college.

John McGovern: And then after that, just trying to pick the largest challenges that I could to work on and learn from, and that has been the foundation that really took me through my thirties.

Paden Squires: So what, I'm hearing here is just like a constant, like a lifetime learning, right? A constant, wanting to try to figure things out and by, by developing that habit or that mindset, that's led to a lot of things that you've accomplished. a follow up on a question on that would be like, you know, you learned that, you learned that from a mentor, back in high school. Like, how practically did you go about doing that? you said you, you learned all kinds of things when you were 20. Like practically, what steps were you taking at that point? 

John McGovern: Yeah. So the first, was with the decision for what to do for schooling.

John McGovern: Now we're in a bit of a different environment. Most of the people I talk to do in college? Do I not do college? that's a much bigger question now than it was when we were going through college, like you're going to college. that's just what's going to happen. 

Paden Squires: It was [00:09:00] like, you're going to live under a bridge.

John McGovern: So in that decision, it was to do a STEM program. So to go into engineering. to learn about the practical world. and then past that, yeah, it really looked like exposing myself to difficulty and places, places in communities that were dedicated to learning and challenging themselves. So I got connected with the startup community in Kansas City, which was around 2010 to 2013.

John McGovern: It was an amazing time to be in Kansas city. That's when the crossroads were taking off. and a lot of tech ventures were starting to kick up and things were going on. So I would attribute it to the decision to be part of the community that was challenging themselves. So with that, you have to participate and grow or you won't be able to stick around for very long.

John McGovern: So surrounding yourself with people that are also dedicated. 

Paden Squires: Yeah. That's huge. That's been a huge thing in my life too. You know, anytime I've taken big steps forward, it's being surrounded by a community of people and being around [00:10:00] people that may even, you know, you feel personally may.

Paden Squires: May even be intimidating to you or someone that's, you know, I don't know, you, you feel like they're 10 steps ahead of you and getting in that uncomfortable position to just be around all that. Yeah. they say like you're the average of the five people around you.

Paden Squires: Yep. or whoever you spend the most time with. I found that to be very true in my life. 

John McGovern: Yeah, very much. I think the two points in that, is one, the willingness to fail. So fail early, fail often. and then the other being able to, yeah, learn from people that have gone in front of you. So those challenging points, it's like when I started programming, I was taught how to program because I was around people like, yeah, it was YouTube university and a handful of things.

John McGovern: And it was a lot of late hours of just reading things, but the way that. It was unlocked for me because there was a business partner that I had. His name is Aaron Mars, still a great friend to this day. but he unlocked JavaScript for me. And so, [00:11:00] you know, when people ask now, they're like, okay, well, how did you get started in programming?

John McGovern: And I tell them kind of the story like, okay, so you're self taught. It's an easy way to summarize a whole lot of things, but it doesn't feel fully accurate because first, like the first code that I wrote. It was a lot of failure and a lot of humble pie, but also no, there's people that are there that help unlock that no matter how you get it done.

John McGovern: Whether it's a university or an instructor on YouTube, that's just recording sessions. But it helps a ton when you have somebody in the flesh that you can go partner with and learn something new. 

Paden Squires: Yeah. It's so true. Like none of us can do really anything a hundred percent by ourselves, right?

Paden Squires: There's always some output and some influence from the people around you. So that's why it's so important to the people you're spending time with. And then also just even you talk about what you watch on YouTube or different things like that really.

Paden Squires: Man, pay attention to what you're feeding in your mind, man. Is it a positive thing? Is it a negative thing? that stuff affects us so much more than we even realize. 

John McGovern: absolutely. And I think [00:12:00] in my journey, just the understanding of how we take our thoughts captive. that is the, and has been very crucial.

John McGovern: So for me, I've always been a bit of a visionary. going all the way back to working, um, for Keyleth, how that software came about was from a team meeting. I had seen what we were doing. We had about 5, 000 plus line spreadsheets that were tracking all the items that are going into a job.

John McGovern: At that time I took one programming course in college. It was like an intro to C plus plus is like next to nothing. I knew very little about anything programming wise at that time. but I asked our program manager. Program director, or, Hey, this seems like it would be best suited for a database. Why are we doing this in Excel?

John McGovern: And of course there was a good justification for that and it just like completely squashed it. It's like, Oh, we've tried it a hundred times and it never works. And people are in and out of the office too quickly to ever have anything apply. So basically it was like, yes, but no, like don't go there. so [00:13:00] being able to cultivate the mindset and knowing like, Hey, what I see is real and it's worth pursuing.

John McGovern: And then understanding the process of like, Hey, how, how mature does that vision have to be before it's able to be shared in the group? So there's a certain amount of like, Hey, you got to get things to a fleshed out point to share with people. Otherwise, like it's, they're not going to see what you see.

John McGovern: Kind of like when we went from horses to cars, right? You were like, Hey, I'm going to, I'm going to create a carriage, but it has no horses. nobody got that. Nobody understood it. So it's like, well, but once you put it together and they see it rolling, it's like, Oh, the horse is in the carriage.

John McGovern: Oh, I wouldn't have thought about it that way, but yes, that's true. So just being able to understand like, Hey, there's a certain amount of just grit that you have to have internally to get it to that point where you can share on the table, you The next lesson in that was actually share it on the table.

John McGovern: Don't try to get it to a hundred percent before you get feedback because some of that feedback that we get is actually really healthy and it covers our blind [00:14:00] spots. Like you may not see the outcome, but they can definitely see when things are out of place. 

Paden Squires: Yeah. That's a great point, right?

Paden Squires: Of, developing an idea, you got to get it clear enough and develop the vision clear enough to get anybody to jump on board with you. But then at the same time, like, you got to find that point, right? Where. You need outside feedback. You have to get to the point where you can kind of sell the vision, but then you need the outside feedback to actually develop the vision to get it over the finish line.

John McGovern: Yeah. 

John McGovern: And, uh, the guardian collective project that we're doing here in Waco, I would say is the maturity of that in my life.the idea came from a car ride, with Preston Seibert. He's my VP with Consular Capital, which is my holding company for all these things that we're doing.

John McGovern: But, he and I were driving to Dallas to pick up a collector car that I had. And just in that conversation, he was talking about a place that he had been to in Southern Florida that had consignment cars for sale and consignment guitars. And it was just an amazing experience. It's like, man, that just sounds so cool.

John McGovern: And we're talking about that for a little bit. And it's like, man, it'd be cool if we could have that in [00:15:00] Waco. And somewhere in the conversation is like, yeah, but it's Waco, you know, and I don't know if we'd be able to pull it off. It's like, wait a minute. No, I believe this is how life works. Like we get Downloads, if you will, or just visions of what could be from God or, what have you.

John McGovern: And let's test that out. We don't know. So it's just starting to walk through that process of okay, how much detail do we need around this? So we could put it in front of some people and get some feedback. So my background in architecture.

John McGovern: I'll start making a floor plan. We'll get some renderings going, and then we'll start talking to car guys in Waco. And as we did that, the feedback was. Resoundingly positive. And we found out there's a very large collector car enthusiast community here in Waco as well as a music community and history, a lot of what became contemporary Christian music that's now based in Nashville actually started in Waco.

John McGovern: So discovered that through this process, and getting it step by step to the point where now, yeah, we're having our first car show on Saturday, going into the [00:16:00] engineering and design phase followed by construction. So. 

Paden Squires: Yeah, that's amazing. and, I think one key point there to make maybe for the listeners is that, you found a dream or an idea, right?

Paden Squires: You got inspired by something. You were brave enough to take that first step to start exploring it. But you also were smart enough not to like, let's just jump off the clip and dump all kinds of money into it without having a bunch of different conversations, testing, like feeling out the market, right?

Paden Squires: Like you talked to all kinds of different car enthusiasts and really just feeling out, okay, before we commit a ridiculous amount of resources to something like this, is it even practical? Is it even workable in our community? Some people skip that step and they jump in and they're like, Oh man, the market doesn't even care.

John McGovern: Yeah, totally. Some jargon that is predominant in startup land is MVP. Your minimum viable product. Get to MVP and get it in front of people and see. That's different depending on what industry [00:17:00] you're in or what you're working on. But I would echo that. for any industry, whatever you're working on, get to the minimum viable product, which is what's the most cost effective and basic implementation that you can put together that either one communicates the vision or starts to provide value and get it in front of at least 10 people and then get some feedback and that feedback should be across the board.

John McGovern: If it's all positive, you need to get some more friends. no version one is perfect. somebody should at least be there to tell you that, right? Oh, Hey, even if it's great. And we had a lot of great feedback on the website and the renderings and stuff that we had built. Wow, this is really impressive for just version one.

John McGovern: It's yeah, I also spent a decade in tech. So I would hope V1 is actually a little bit better than normal, but having a good set of peers, like, Hey, this is a great start. But these areas don't flow. Hey, have you thought about the actual, cost [00:18:00] analysis to build out this space?

John McGovern: What about actual membership costs, your models are based on large cities. Will Waco support that? How do you know whether they will or they won't? So all of that feedback was great and led us into the next cycles. So first it's like, Hey, does the idea work? Will people poop on it or do they thumbs up when they see it?

John McGovern: And then the next is you have to get to a point where, someone put money behind it.will someone, put 5. 50, 500, 5, 000 and just starting to build up like, Hey, how valuable is this?

Paden Squires: Yeah. and it's, like you said, it's a constant testing. It's a constant feedback loop. And yes, get you, get you those friends That are real friends that will tear your idea apart. It's what needs to be torn apart. you certainly don't want a bunch of yes, people.

Paden Squires: And at the same time, it's important to listen to feedback from people that have the authority or experience to give feedback and [00:19:00] area they're talking about, not all feedback graded equal,the feedback you need to put the most weight on is the people that, may have actual experience in whatever you're trying to pull off.

John McGovern: Not necessarily your mom or whoever, right. Cause your mom, your mom's got your best interest in heart, And she's just trying to protect you, but she doesn't know anything about building out a car show and this car experience and all those types of things. Yeah. Yeah. a few good positions that you want to have in your repertoire, is a really good banker. a good brand, creative, position that is able to look from a design eye. And then you need to have at least a couple of technicians in whatever fields you're at that actually know the nuts and bolts of how things go together.

John McGovern: So for, if we just keep talking about the car collective, guardian collective. One of the first lunches that I had was with a president of a bank locally here and going over this concept. And, basically just completely taking it apart, [00:20:00] financially. And it's like, man, it just looks like a whole bunch of risk, but also it's a startup.

John McGovern: That's the MO there, whatever, but that perspective, that's just not the frame of mind that I sit in. So the reason why I say I have a banker in your repertoire, they are geared to eliminate risk so they can sniff it out of anywhere. Even when you think it's like, dude, this is bulletproof.

John McGovern: We got it nailed down. It's like. Hey man, this doesn't quite add up. You've got a lot of things that need to go right. Right. so it just helps. it's not a yes or a no, but it gives you a perspective of like, Hey, what else is actually out there? Especially because they're comparing it typically to very mature companies that are past,Hey, maybe the market wants this.

John McGovern: Maybe it doesn't. And then the brand, a branding expert gives you that feedback like, Hey, How ugly is my baby? I think he's beautiful, but actually, nah, on the scale of things, this may not fly in the market. 

Paden Squires: Yeah. And you know, like [00:21:00] working with thousands of entrepreneurs over the years, that relationship with banks is always an interesting one.

Paden Squires: Right. And there's, there's a push and pull there and a good push and pull between entrepreneurs and banks. It's the banks.They're looking at risk and the guys typically inside the banks aren't ever in your position, As the entrepreneur and then the entrepreneur has never been in the bank's position.

Paden Squires: So they're, you know, bankers, you know, always been a w two job guys looking at all the risks and all the things that are coming on you as the entrepreneurs, like, Hey, I'm ready to take on all the risk. Let's run, let's go, let's do all this. Yeah. And then smashing those two together to try to figure out. You know, is there anybody interested in funding this crazy idea?

Paden Squires: That's, it's kind of an interesting conversation. 

John McGovern: Yeah, it, for me, feels like rock climbing. So the actual rock climber can't have his head in the statistics of the probability of his gear failing. Like when you're on the rock face, if you're thinking [00:22:00] about all the different ways, your gear is going to fail, you're not making the next hold.

John McGovern: on the other end, if the designer, the engineer of the gear is not thinking about those things and just thinking about the next hole, that year is going to fail. So you have to be able to have people in both of those seats. Like one guy, it's like, Hey, as the entrepreneur, like you, you cannot be at least primarily from the risk seat.

John McGovern: You have to just be looking at the jump that it's going to take to get there, but you need somebody else. That's like bringing that in and helping ground when it's needed. So the dance. 

Paden Squires: Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, it's a dance. So John, tell me, about like, what's the best decision you've made on your journey here through all your different ventures,what would you credit as the best decision?

John McGovern: Man. a really good question. I think there's a handful that compound, being aggressive in my early twenties and [00:23:00] setting out to solve the biggest problem I could. which is when I got into tech. I think that is what I would credit the biggest as the biggest benefit. 

Paden Squires: say aggressive, what do you mean by that?

John McGovern: So,going back to Kiewit, I had just left Kiewit. Didn't necessarily know what to be doing. I was actually working with my parents running a furniture store and programming, trying to learn things, on the side. I got to meet Aaron Mars, who I mentioned earlier, and he was already working on this natural language processing project.

John McGovern: And, I had experience writing trading algorithms, but nothing actually programming and analytics wise and stuff. So he invited me to join the project, which was way outside my skill set at the time. I am not qualified to do that. But, It was the biggest problem I could endeavor to solve at the [00:24:00] time.

John McGovern: and back at that point, that was like 2011. That was just at the beginning of Oh, wait a minute. Twitter kind of has some sort of impact on the stock market.that's when it's like, Oh, if these CEOs tweet something positive or negative about their company, we see a direct movement in the stock price.

John McGovern: So, you know, across the country, that was the focus. So right now, I would say that's the AI space. So it'd be the equivalent of just I know nothing about AI, but I'm just going to hop in and start writing models. and doing that, it was just exercising the muscle of jumping into the unknown.

Paden Squires: That's good. You were about a decade ahead of that Twitter thing, right? Once you got into the old meme stocks and the crypto stuff, everyone, everybody saw how effective Twitter was at moving markets, right? 

John McGovern: Yeah. Yeah. I think it is a fun anecdotal story. We got to do some presentations at some startup events, including the global entrepreneurship week.

John McGovern: Yeah.but nobody knew what we were [00:25:00] doing. No one understood. No one had the even nomenclature for it. So when we're talking about bigrams and engrams and natural language processing, people like, wait, what? Like you can tell how people feel by a sentence on the internet. It's like, yep, you can. so seeing that mature from the inside was really cool.

Paden Squires: So going all the way back to the beginning, John, what piece of advice would you give yourself, Sean? If you go back and talk to the guy that's coming out of, say, maybe undergrad, from your perspective now, what would you tell him?

John McGovern: would apply to Rich Dad Poor Dad. I would have grinded out the job a little bit longer, with Kiewit. the advice I would give back to myself, it's you don't have a problem being froggy, you have a problem being sticky, so work on that, because I think the norm in communication, most of the things going across the airwaves, it's like, take risks, take risks, be okay with taking some risks, especially when you're young.

John McGovern: And that was not my problem. My [00:26:00] problem was like, dude, I'm all about the risks. I'm all about learning all the things and like getting after it. It's like, Hey, actually, instead of leaving at six months, leave at a year. there's not just more that you learn there, but I mean, I was living with my parents, I was stashing away cash.

John McGovern: I had a house in Lawrence, close to a school there in Kansas. so I sold the house, took all my cash to pay off the school debt. So I'd be free to just go learn.and at 26 months feels like an eternity. But another six months, I would have kept the house, paid off the school and had residual income, like passive income already rolling.

Paden Squires: Yeah, I tell you, you know, you make the point about rich dad, poor dad. That's anytime anybody approaches me that really doesn't have much experience or like, Hey, where do I start on a financial journey? That's the first book I always recommend. I think it can be so eye opening. To a lot of people, almost like the scales fall from their eyes.

Paden Squires: They're like, Whoa, okay. I kind of see the game that all these people are trying to play. 

John McGovern: Yeah. I [00:27:00] was now coupled with the richest man in Babylon. I didn't find that book until I was like mid thirties and I was like, God, it's so simple. yes, every time you get money in.

John McGovern: Squirrel away 10 percent and it doesn't matter whether it's a dollar or 100, 000 like you build that over time and it's the discipline that then feeds into the cycle that Rich Dad talks about in his books, but 

Paden Squires: Yeah. Yeah. And it's all a habit. It's all behavioral choices. Once you kind of understand that and start that habit, obviously the earlier, the better, but like even starting it later, give it a decade and let it compound and just follow those habits for, you know, as long as possible.

Paden Squires: And the payoffs are huge. 

John McGovern: Yep. Yeah. The incremental change over time is amazing. And I think So for me, as I'm looking and taking inventory of what are the best things that I've done and what are the things that I would be improving when I am focused on the long arc [00:28:00] of what I'm doing versus like the immediate impact, the outcome is always better.

John McGovern: So the last year and closing on these two businesses, and getting the Guardian Collective up off the ground, man, it has been. Oh, roller coasters. Crazy. So I had a, I was CTO for a tech company when all that started, that company didn't make their funding round. So I was no longer a CTO. I no longer had that income and still had to figure out how to close on the businesses in the meantime.

John McGovern: we're burning savings and value and different things. And it's like, Oh shoot. So in the moment, it's like, this is stupid. Like you're spending so much money, go get a job. But. When I'm looking at five, 10, 15 years out, it's like, what am I working towards? Okay. If I accomplish this goal, I'm going to look back in five years.

John McGovern: I'm going to say, wow,that was a little tough spot there. But when I look at the whole arc, like I have time freedom and I have freedom of capital to actually be [00:29:00] able to engage with my kids, to accomplish the things that I've set out to do since I was younger, or I can freak out. And look at the immediate pain, be like, I gotta stop the bleeding and I'm going to get a job.

Paden Squires: Yeah, and that's, in many ways I can,I can relate to that. I mean, in the last 12 months I've done similar merging of businesses and making some moves myself . In a one to two year time frame, it's certainly, I'll have less money than I would have without doing that.

Paden Squires: But it's keeping that five to 10 years, right? Where we're building this bigger machine that is going to be in. So much better place for me personally, like you said, with time and the capital to be able to do the things I want to do with me and my family. For sure. Yeah. 

John McGovern: Yeah, that's exactly right.

Paden Squires: So John, what's the best way people can connect with you man, they like what they hear talking to you. maybe want to go down to Waco and check out a car show. 

John McGovern: yeah. guardian Collective, on Instagram [00:30:00] and then consular capital.com. For the holding company. It's got information on all the companies that we have and people that we've helped, done some consulting and stuff across the board there.

John McGovern: and then, yeah, always looking to connect with other entrepreneurs. My email is john@consularcapital.com. Try to get back to everybody that sends me a message, but, yeah, the public facing portion of what we're doing is the Guardian Collective and, uh, try to run most of that through Instagram and our website.

John McGovern: So www.guardian-collective.com for that. 

Paden Squires: That's awesome, John, buddy. I appreciate you coming on the show today. Listeners. I hope you got a lot of value here and we will check you out next time. Thanks. 

John McGovern: Thanks.

Thank you so much for listening to the podcast. If you found it valuable, please rate, review, and share it. That is the best way to help us build this and reach more people as we're trying to accomplish our goal of helping create more healthy, wealthy, and wise entrepreneurs. You can follow us on social media by searching for me @padensquires or [00:31:00] going to www.padensquires.com  On the website and social media, we're always sharing tips of personal growth, and there we can actually interact. I'm looking forward to it. Thanks guys.