Hi, everyone. Welcome to What Works. This is a show for consortium advisors that taps into over 1,000 years of experience shared by our consortium advisors.

I’m your host, Don Patrick, and I’m here to guide the conversation with guest advisors and lift the hood on what works for them in business and life. It’s all about learning and growing.

So let’s go.

Don Patrick: Hello, everybody. Welcome to the IFG podcast, What Works episode number 6. And our guest today is Mark Cross, founding partner of Highland Trust Partners in Athens, Georgia. Welcome, Mark.
Mark Cross: Hey, Don. Thanks for having me today.

Don Patrick: Yeah, it’s going to be great. We’re gonna have a lot of fun. So let’s just start off some personal things about your personal life and let us know a little bit about you.

Mark Cross: Well, as you mentioned, managing partner here at Highland Trust, April was 9 years of being a member of IfG, LPL, the consortium, and it’s been great. We’re in Athens, Georgia, and we just continue to grow and we’re thankful to be a part of IfG.

Don Patrick: Great. So, you’re married.

Mark Cross: Married to Frances. Frances just retired from teaching first grade after 17 years. We have a blended family of seven children, four girls and three boys. We’ve got two dogs, Ollie and Blue. And then we got our first two kids getting married this summer. So two weddings, one in June and one in July.
Don Patrick: Oh my gosh. Never boring.

Mark Cross: No, it’s full speed around our house. We like it that way though.

Don Patrick: Obviously. And you grill and smoke and do all that stuff, right?

Mark Cross: Oh yeah. We love to cook out on the grill, whether it’s steaks, hamburgers, pork tenderloin, we use the green egg, got a Charbroil gas grill. We cook out on the grill probably three or five nights a week.
Don Patrick: Nice, that’s fun, I love that. And you’re a hunter?

Mark Cross: Yes, I love to hunt. The Two dogs I have, one’s an English Setter, Ollie, and then Blue’s a Boykin Spaniel, so he backs up the Setter and Ollie, we quail hunt, pheasant hunt, dove hunt, duck hunt, deer hunt. Yeah, we love being outside and the dogs love the exercise.

Don Patrick: Fantastic. Any kids left at home or are they off the payroll yet?

Mark Cross: Well, I don’t know if they ever get off the payroll.

Don Patrick: That was the wrong terminology.

Mark Cross: With a wishful thought. So Phillip and Annie are rising juniors. Annie’s at University of Georgia. Phillip is at Elon and so they’ll be in and out this summer.

Francis has three daughters, to go with Philip, and one of the twins just graduated with a master’s in nursing from Marquette and moved back to the South. The last got home last night and we’ll start first of August in labor and delivery at Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta. Last year we had seven kids, five different states.

As of today, we’ve got one daughter, Allison, is with Oracle in Austin, Texas. Hopefully, we’ll get her back into the true South here in the next couple of years.

Don Patrick: That is complicated. Oh my gosh. I love it. And it sounds like everybody’s doing great.

Mark Cross: They are. They’re all working hard and going in the right direction. And, as a parent, that’s what you can ask for. Everybody’s doing the best they can and enjoying life. And we always have a good time when we get together.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic. And of course, you’re proud of them.

Mark Cross: Oh, to say the least. They’re our pride and joy.

Don Patrick: I love it. Well, let’s talk a little bit about your profession. You’ve been in the profession for many years and just tell us kind of how you got started. Well, first of all, where’d you go to school?

Mark Cross: So I went to college here in Athens at the University of Georgia. I grew up in Atlanta. I went to Ridgeview High School in Sandy Springs. And how I got in the business, my ninth grade or sophomore year, a gentleman with Merrill Lynch named Jay Gary was the office manager in the downtown office, came and spoke to business education class about the stock market, about the bulls, the bears, and kind of caught my interest and I had some grass cutting money that had been 400 or 500 dollars I’d put away.
And so I got my mom to buy me Shears and Coca-Cola. That 500-dollar investment when I graduated from college was about 5,000 dollars. And it was like, “You know, I kind of like this. This might be a good way to help people and make a living.” And so that is what piqued my interest and how I got started.

Don Patrick: So, where did you start? What firm?

Mark Cross: So I did an internship when I was in college with Lehman Brothers. A little-known fact, I cold-called for one Dan Miller, Jury’s husband. I would make 350 dials a day and it went, the script went, “I’m calling for Dan Miller with Lehman Brothers. Can you hold please?” And we would make about a hundred contacts a day and dials and I would pass them over to Dan and he would work on closing them and selling them 10,000 dollars worth of whatever Lehman Brothers was interested in at that time. And then from there, I went and did an apprenticeship with a large producer at Robinson Humphrey at the Robinson Humphrey’s main office there on Peach Tree.

And that set me up to be hired on Merrill Lynch’s training program. Jay Geary, who came and spoke to my 10th-grade business class, was kind enough to hire me and put me on the training program with Merrill Lynch. So got to go to Princeton and spend three or four weeks and it was a dream and a goal from the time

I was ninth grade until he hired me to go and be part of that.

Don Patrick: And it’s a great accomplishment to be that focused and to actually make it. So how are, how were the first couple of years there at Merrill for you?

Mark Cross: Oh boy, they were tough. Looking back on it, municipal bonds were at 8% and you’re trying to figure out how to sell. And I was having a hard time selling those, but sure would like an 8% today. You got the phone book, the crisscross directory, you cold called, it was just a numbers game. Typically you would open an account on something like an Atlanta gas light that had a nice dividend or a municipal bond offering that maybe it was coming.

So it’s totally different than the financial planning approach we take today. Today’s approach is much better for my sanity and for the clients.

Don Patrick: It is. So how long were you at Merrill?

Mark Cross: I was there for two and a half years. Barnett Bank started opening branches in Atlanta and they recruited me to come and open an office out in Marietta on the square.
And I was the branch administrative officer there for, I believe, four years. Then we worked with the different bank lenders, tellers had a number of nice referrals through the years from the bankers. And they had 27 branches in Atlanta. We had four advisors that I was responsible for and it was a great way to really learn to do presentations, workshop seminars, and really develop the personal skills that are needed to have meetings and learn.

Don Patrick: So you had quite a bit of responsibility as a young man. You were still in your twenties and–

Mark Cross: Yeah, it was probably 26, 27. But I enjoyed it. I just, I enjoyed the process. I loved learning about SEPs and IRAs and being able to help people. A lot of the clients were retirees from Lockheed and it was interesting to see the dynamic as they retired from, it’s typically had a 175, 200,000 dollar rollover and they would come in and they’d take a portion of it and go down to Capital Cadillac and see Mr. Bridges to buy their Cadillac and they’d come back the next year because they had to pay the taxes. And the next thing you knew, the wife had gone back to work because she was tired of him telling her what to do.

Don Patrick: Exactly.

Mark Cross: You know, always been inquisitive and always been a student of how people react to their different transitions in life.

Don Patrick: So after Barnett, then where’d you go and why?

Mark Cross: So from there, Barnett sold their branches to the Old Bank South and we were not part of the transition and me and my partner, Charles Wellward, who’s still in the business, we had over a hundred million in assets at the time, bigger than any of the branches as part of the Barnett family in Atlanta.

We’re part of the transaction and they offered to have us come down and interview and fill out an application and about that time, we decided that maybe they weren’t as serious about financial services as Barnett was. And we opened an office at Powers Ferry for the old interstate Johnson Lane, a regional firm.
Turned out to be a good move and a good experience. Made a lot of good friends at Interstate/Johnson Lane being a regional Southern firm, and in fact, IfG and our culture reminds me of my days at Interstate/Johnson Lane, IJL. It was a family, you traveled together, you shared ideas, you shared successes, you shared sad times too.

So it was a great place to work. Ultimately, technology caught up with them, which happened to a lot of small regional firms and we got bought by what turned into Wachovia Securities.

Don Patrick: That’s how you ended up there. And you were there for some time, weren’t you?

Mark Cross: I was part of Wachovia Securities, which ultimately was bought by First Union. There was the A.G. Edwards merger, potential merger, and in ‘08, the merger with Wells Fargo. So, yes, it was over 25 years, but as the Wells Fargo entity and platform got bigger, the mode of the clients are yours and what’s best for the client really dissipated. And we began to look for a place to call home very much similar to IJL.

And when we looked for a number of years, maybe two or three, in fact, y’all kidding me, sometimes we might even talk to y’all for two of those years.

Don Patrick: I think that’s about right.

Mark Cross: We wanted a place where we could do financial planning. We’ve always wanted to stand behind our work. We’ve never been afraid of being a fiduciary and doing what’s best for the client. And in the wirehouse model, that was just not possible

Don Patrick: Constricting. So that’s how you decided to become an entrepreneur and go on the independent side.

Mark Cross: Yes. And the other ironic thing is, I thought I was running my own business and an entrepreneur, but, boy, there’s a lot of heavy lifting that goes to having your own shop.
It’s worth it. I tell people the good news is coming in the morning, you turn the lights on. Bad news is you get the bill in about 30 days, but it’s rewarding and it’s nice to have something that you’re on.

Don Patrick: So your transition was a little different. You had basically a team. You bought a building. You did branding. You rehabbed the building. You did a lot of things. You want to give us a little of that history. It’s pretty crazy.

Mark Cross: Sure. Years down the road, I think we mentioned earlier, Andrews labeled me a chronic builder, and I do love building. So when we left Wells Fargo to start Highland Trust Partners, we had bought an old building, there was an old doctor’s office that had been empty for about 10 years, and we renovated it straight down to the metal studs, created two office spaces, one for Highland Trust, and that law firm is a tenant on the other side.

We designed the office, the footprint, how it would flow best for our team, which at the time was Chris Caldwell. We had another advisor. He’s no longer with us, and Tamekia, since then, Amy Parrish has joined us. We’ve got Will Divers, Ben Butler. Ben was actually with us at Wells Fargo and Wachovia.

Ben has been with me since he was 16. He’ll be 28 in August. He started as an intern. We built the building, we were one of the last groups that LPL helped from internal and external, about the branding, from everything from the stationery to our logo, the website.

It was an intensive process taking things that we had done independently and creating a company called Highland Trust.

Don Patrick: So If I recall correctly, the transition date was right after tax day in April, is that correct?
Mark Cross: It was the 16th or 17th of April. We knew we needed to be available for our clients for 1099s, and even as back then, nine years ago, you still had a lot of paper that you had to look up, and the microfiche for call spaces wasn’t as automated as we are today, so we felt like we needed to stay through tax day and we left to the next morning.

Don Patrick: So you spent about four months at least, if I recall correctly, between buying the building, the build-out, the branding, getting prepared for the transition.

Mark Cross: It was, Don, it was probably more like six or seven months.

Don Patrick: Yeah.

Mark Cross: We’d spent most of the fall and on into the first quarter, want to get it right, do it right, make sure that it was as smooth a transition as possible for our clients. A lot of late hours. Chris Caldwell is such a good person as far as details, helping get the core set up, from red tail. And so it was,it was a labor of love, but it sure was worth it. And you guys coupled with LPL did everything y’all could to help make it as smooth as humanly possible.

Don Patrick: Yeah, it’s still big. So now you start the transition. You’ve built this literally a company from scratch. You got a good-sized company, employees. Then if I recall correctly, you got married.

Mark Cross: So that’s correct. Frances and I had dated for three years. My kids came to me in March before we launched Highland Trust and told me that I needed to go ahead and ask her to marry her and I had till the 4th of July to do it because I was going to screw things up.
And so with the building, the transition, I heeded their advice, asked her to marry me and the seven kids were just ecstatic, but it was, I wanted to, I didn’t want to come into the marriage with so much change. So I asked her two, three weeks before we launched Highland Trust so that she knew that if I was grumpy or distracted, it was not related to her, that it was me getting this dream brought into reality.

Don Patrick: That’s great. Well, she’s fantastic. I’m glad the kids encourage you. You guys are a great couple, great family.

Mark Cross: Well, she’s super supportive and she’s my biggest cheerleader and she enjoys the camaraderie and of the brain trust, whether it’s Land and his wife or Kim and Karen or Rich Lombardi, Rich is kind of spoiled, but he always buys her a chocolate martini. So she is definitely fit in and loves being part of the IfG family.

Don Patrick: So you’re going through the transition and everybody knows that’s hard. There was light at the end of the tunnel. Just got to bear down and get it done. And then you decide to build a house, if I recall.
Mark Cross: So as we approached the next year getting married, Memorial weekend, 14, 15 months after starting Highland Trust, we realized that we needed a place to house our seven children, three dogs and Frances and myself, and neither of our houses was going to work even on a remodel. And so we sold my house, bought a lot in the heart of Athens off of Westlake and began the process of building a house that each of our children had a room and a place where that they felt like they were at home, and it’s stressful building a house and stressful moving.

It’s stressful combining two houses and nine people, but you know, the end result is that when the kids come home, they come home to their home and to their space. And I think we had last night dinner because Emily was in town and four of the seven kids were there. We had six of the seven kids on Saturday night. So it served as a good nucleus for our family.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic. So when you build Highland Trust Partners, you truly want to offer financial planning and build your brand in Athens. Talk a little bit about your planning process, your tech stack, things of that nature, how you go about it, how you manage money. And it’s pretty complex what you’ve done, but you’ve also systematized things.

Mark Cross: Yeah, so the most important thing that I could take away from what we’ve done over the last nine years is building a process, very confident in my team and the people that we work together. We decided early on that we were going to come up with the right way to do it, put the time and brainpower into it, and it didn’t matter whether it was opening a new account, whether it was how we trade accounts, we were going to have a process that was uniform and carried across to everybody, that everybody was bought into. Coming on from the more of the wirehouse side, the investment side, we thought we did pretty well and we continued to improve on how we handled that.

We managed over 200 million, I believe, and swim assets. We’ve got a blue chip growth portfolio, a dividend income strategy, an equity income strategy, and then recently, in the last 60 days, I’ve launched an ETF model that’s a little more tactical. So, we spent a lot of time, had help from Brad Alford.

It’s been time at Wharton at the SEMA program, and we just put a system in place to be able to, you know, where you were in the business, you could explain stocks, bonds, and cash, and how they correlated. So as we mesh the financial planning side with the asset management side, we wanted to get people to define their priorities.

We learned back in 2008 and even in 2000 that if you plan and solve for people’s income needs, that it allowed them not to have to sell during downtimes, and if you can keep people in the market and they can still go and do with their family and meet their obligations, then their stress levels lower.

Our stress levels is lower. But that defining the priority, determining the income needs, and then determining the risk tolerance that the client himself could withstand, and then asking the question, “How much do you really risk do you really need to take?” was the cornerstone for our asset management and our financial planning side of the house with the financial planning adult people.

And when they ask, your wire, what, you know, Simon Sinek, “What do you do?” And this is defining people, helping people define their priorities, but we’re not successful if we can’t understand who you love, what you own, and who you owe. If we know those items coupled with defining your priorities and income needs, we’ve got the basis for a financial plan, helping people have goals and vision and simplify their life.

We use EMoney, the WealthVision platform. If I say the word Rolodex, most of the young people won’t know what a Rolodex is, but it’s a modern-day way to collect information over the lifetime of a relationship. And when you’re loading that they’ve got a lake house or a piece of property in South Dakota or whenever it is, they’re 401k in your inventory when they’re ready to focus on planning while they’re in a transition or something, unfortunate happens, you’re right there with most of the information and you’ve simplified their life and you can be part of the process and really walk and hold their hand through good times and bad times.

Don Patrick: So you’re using EMoney, you mentioned Redtail. I think you use white charts as well.

Mark Cross: We do use white charts. White charts does a great job with quotes. We’re able to put our model portfolios in the system and track performance. We actually, before white charts was bought, I believe they bought by either Schwab or Fidelity. We had one of their senior partners, Rougie, build us a spreadsheet so that we can track our portfolios’ return on a yearly basis, year-to-date, 10-year and an annual basis, track the yields, the alpha, the beta, the standard deviation. So at a snapshot, every Friday afternoon or Friday morning, Ben Butler, who does trading for us, sends out a report so that we’ve got a pretty good idea of which asset classes are performing or underperforming, back to that process and we do the same thing every week.

Don Patrick: You mentioned Brad Alford at Alpha Capital. You use him to kind of look over your shoulders in terms of your money management at the model building and that sort of thing. Is that correct?

Mark Cross: Yeah. So Brad and his partner are both CFAs. Brad has worked in the areas at Duke and Emory. They have a national presence as far as doing manager searches. So it’s kind of a belt and suspender. It’s nice to be able to tell a client that you have someone with that institutional quality of CFA that is overlooking your portfolios and offering you suggestions and saying, “Hey, you might have a little too much high yield from where you really want to be.”

Or, “Have you thought about this?” Then sometimes in the space, if you’re looking for a small cap, a manager, there are a lot of funds that are closed. Brad has a good feeling for the different managers. One of the managers, he actually called the guy that he knew as a portfolio manager and got them to open the fund for us so that we could add money to the Champlain Mid Cap Fund. So it’s been a nice partnership and I think the world of him and the work they do.

Don Patrick: So you are a financial planner, a money manager and a business owner.

Mark Cross: Correct.

Don Patrick: Do you like one or the other?

Mark Cross: You know, I’m really energized by all of them. It’s good to have different directions to go. I set my week up with a process and a schedule where Monday mornings and most of the, I’ve got six back-to-back meetings on Friday starting at 7:30 or managing partner times. Monday afternoon. Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays are allocated really for client reviews. So it’s exciting and it’s exciting to lead and help grow people. So we’ve got two young guys, Will and Butler and they’ve been with us now five years and getting their sea legs and growing their books of business.

And Ben’s got a one year old and Will’s got a child on the way. So I enjoy being helping and working with people, whether that’s clients or advisors on the team. I get a lot of enjoyment out of all aspects so it keeps me out of trouble, I would say,

Don Patrick: So what do you think is the biggest challenge you face as a business owner?

Mark Cross: One is wearing so many hats. I don’t think you necessarily, when you are entrepreneurial and you start something, you realize how many hats the people’s, human resource side of the business is probably the area which I was not afraid of, but it’s probably the most challenging because everybody sees situations in their own lens and you try to be objective and make the best decision for the office and the group.

But sometimes that doesn’t gel with other people on the team. And sometimes you work through that. And other times people decide to go and it can be someone you care about and really have that most respect for but at the end of the day, everybody’s doing, got to do what’s best for their family and ultimately for themselves and their clients.

So we just make sure that we’re making all the best decisions collectively as a group. It provides the best platform for our clients

Don Patrick: Along those lines in terms of people and HR and all these kinds of things so I know Tamekia spend with you quite some time and she clearly has a lot of trust and faith in Mark Cross because you made her quit her job, come over to the new building while you guys were still employed at Wells, correct?

Mark Cross: That is correct. Her husband, Anthony, told her she was crazy. She quit three weeks before we quit to come over to Highland Trust to an empty office and get it set up. He’s like, “What if they don’t show up?” I’m like, “Not showing up’s not an option. We’re coming.” The horse was out of the barn, so to speak, but no, Tamika’s been loyal. Tamekia started with us 20 years ago. Fabulous. Annie was six months old.

And Amy Parrish, who’s another advisor, I was actually out having a hip replacement and she would, had interviewed Tamekia for us and I had known Tamekia on the bank platform at Wachovia and she was great at customer service. And so we hired her 20 years ago.

Don Patrick: That’s fantastic. That’s great. So use three words to describe your talents and strengths.

Mark Cross: Talents and strengths. I’m committed to what I believe in. I’m going to do what’s right for the client and fight for what’s best for them. And then, my strength also is, I think, my faith, faith in God, making the tough decisions. Sometimes they aren’t the best decisions for me and someone else might agree, but I think just being straightforward, honest, and deliberate, I think, carry a long way in this world.

Don Patrick: They do. I agree. So you go independent, start the business, and you’re doing real financial planning. Now you can do it the way you want. Nobody’s telling you how to do it. And you’ve also, you’ve gotten some other areas about very specialized areas and special needs trusts and such. And you kind of open my eyes up to that a number of years ago ‘cause I always thought about special needs, this just doesn’t happen that often, but you open my eyes up and special needs is really a big deal and quite broadened. Most families can be impacted by that.

Mark Cross: So special needs, it really, I guess, was more of a six years ago, a catch-all phrase. You would think of somebody that had severe disabilities, but in today’s world, we’re more attuned to it. I think Facebook and the internet, if somebody had a child that had special needs, whether it was Down syndrome or something even more severe, you really didn’t see them that often.

They were kind of out of sight, out of mind. But nowadays with the selfie generation, with Facebook, and you’re seeing the birthday parties for somebody’s brother that just turned 30, who’s Down Syndrome. But the other part of the special needs aspect is they need an advocate, they need a fiduciary to take care of them and rally around for them. As a parent, you want to take care of your kids, but if your children are outliving you, which is what you always hope for, that really puts a lot of stress on the family. You have to save for an additional person for their lifelong retirement. There’s many tax ramifications, plenty of great opportunities, whether it’s Katie Beckett that really help families with special needs, severely handicapped children.

But if you don’t approach it in a very deliberate manner, you can lose a lot of money. different benefits that the child’s entitled to. So having the proper trust work coupled with making sure the family has the proper insurance, accounts are titled correctly, or a grandparent is doing planning but has a special needs grandchild, doesn’t accidentally leave them 500,000 dollars in their name and it messes all their benefits up.

The parent doesn’t, grandparent might not know and they’re doing, think they’re doing something good for the grandchild. So it’s being the quarterback, helping simplifying people’s life. It’s always nice to have a cookie-cutter. Client’s got 2 million dollars, they need it managed. You help them with the planning process, as you know, Don has been in business, as long as you have, life just didn’t, that cookie-cutter and straightforward. So Chris has the special needs designation planning. Two weeks ago, he closed a relationship for somebody that had been severely injured in an accident. I believe it was a 3 million dollar referral from an attorney. We did the structured settlement portion of it, which LPL has access to the number one carrier that does about 70% of the structured settlements in the country. Chris won that business because of defining their priorities, trying to determine what was best for them.
They sat down with three or four different financial services groups. Some of them that’s all they did was structured settlements. But the comment back to Chris from the attorney was, “You know what y’all cared. Highland Trust came at it, not from how much money they could make, but what was best for the client and I appreciate y’all taking care of our client in that manner.”

So it’s asset management, financial planning, special needs. When you take it another direction. people in crisis, when somebody goes through a divorce, I’ve actually sat in on mediations to help make sure that proper assets were delivered to the spouse that didn’t have as much knowledge on the investments.
I’ve recently got the certified exit planning designation. And so you take the knowledge that we have as a firm on asset management, financial planning, and then you take what we have done as building a firm, you also have empathy with the business owner and we have a buy-sell agreement, we have operated agreements, we have funded transition agreements with all the advisors, so something happens to them, there’s cash flow to pay their family. When you can take real life, this is what we have done to a business owner and help him through the process. And we use, you ask about technology, we use biz equity to help with the valuation. You set yourself apart from, not just being, you know, you always hate when someone says, “Oh yeah, he’s a stockbroker.”

Yeah, I was a stockbroker back in 1986 when I started, but our practice, at least at Highland Trust, has evolved into much, much more.

Don Patrick: I mean, these are complex areas that business succession planning is very complex. Divorce planning is extremely complex. Special needs is very complex.

Mark Cross: And they all have their nuances and different rules, Don. But what is the same is people are hurting, people are in transition. And they need advice, they need a quarterback, they need help simplifying what they’re hearing from the attorney, from their CPA, from their brother-in-law, sister-in-law who’s got an opinion that might or might not be relevant.

To be the eyes of the ears and just decipher for all the many things that go on when you’re in transition, whether it’s retirement, divorce, death, to be that stable, caring person, and being inquisitive and not judgmental, and being part of the process, it’s so rewarding on so many levels, and it makes what we do the best job in the world.

Don Patrick: It is an incredible, rewarding profession. I mean, it just is. So I’m going to close this up. It’s amazing what you have done, the business you’ve built, the people, you’ve, the team you’ve built, the processes, the specialized knowledge and experience, it’s impressive, Mark.

Mark Cross: That means a lot, Don. I would say that we would not be as far along if you had not had the vision to put together the consortium that you had land and now Andrews have just been tremendous and to be able to call Karen Lee, call William Black who I consider friends to bounce things off of ideas is what you believed was true made a difference in Highland Trust and in our life and we even like Crystal.

Don Patrick: Crystal’s great.

Mark Cross: Yeah, I know every time that we talk she is trying to do the best to keep me out of trouble and that’s, I need as many people on my side like that as possible.

Don Patrick: She is. She loves the advisors. She truly does, and she works hard at it. Thanks for taking the time, Mark. This is just so beneficial for all of us, and it’s very fun having this little conversation.

Mark Cross: Anytime, Don, and thanks for all you do and can’t wait to be back on your show.

Don Patrick: Thank you, Mark.

Well, that’s it for today’s show. Thanks for listening.

If you’ve got something to share, send an email to dpatrick@thebraintrust.net. We want to know what works.

Until next time. See ya.