Building for Exit:Transitioning Your Agency to a SaaS Company with Ben Sharf, Co-Founder of Platter

We sit down with Ben Sharf, Co-Founder of Platter, to discuss making the leap from being an Agency to becoming a SaaS.

🎧 Episode Highlights:

Taking The Leap: Discover what made Ben turn down a lucrative consulting job just 12 hours before his first day to join an early-stage COVID testing startup that scaled to $50 million in revenue in just five months.

Identifying Pain Points: Platter started as an e-commerce agency. Ben shares how they identified recurring pain points in the Shopify ecosystem and turned them into a productized solution. 🛒

Incentive Structures: We unpack how misaligned incentives can disrupt business processes. Ben explains why agencies often struggle to productize their services. 📊

Plotting Your Course: Ben talks about the challenges and strategies for transitioning from an Agency to a SaaS company. "You're not going to get to where you want to go if you don't know where it is that you're trying to get to." 🗺️

Monetizing Excess Value Creation: Learn why focusing on profitability instead of just revenue is crucial, especially in today's market. Ben shares how Platter aims to make and save money for their clients, at the same time. 💰

Saying No to Bad Revenue: Ben discusses the importance of recognizing and avoiding bad revenue. "The people with the least amount of money end up having the most amount of problems." 🚫💸

The Role of AI: Discover how AI is integrated into Platter's operations and the importance of staying ahead of technological advancements. 🤖

Self-Awareness & Vulnerability: Ben opens up about the importance of self-awareness and vulnerability in both personal and professional life. "Regret hurts a lot more than failure. Take the risk and do the things that consume your mind." 🧠


📌 Why You Should Listen:

This episode is packed with actionable insights and real-world experiences that can help you navigate your own entrepreneurial journey. Whether you're looking to transition from an Agency model to a SaaS company, or simply want to hear an inspiring story of resilience and innovation, this episode has something for you.

🔗 Listen Now:

🎙️ https://www.theoohinsider.com/ben-sharf-platter

📬 Connect with Ben:

• Social Media:@BenSharf
• Email: ben@platter.co

🌟 Don't Forget:

If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit. And as always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and leave us a review wherever you're listening. Your support helps us grow and continue bringing you valuable content.

Thank you for being a part of our community!

- Tim

P.S. Have feedback or questions? Email us at tim@theoohinsider.com

Mark your calendars! OOH Insider LIVE! NYC on February 11, 2024 - details to follow, stay tuned.

Transcript

Tim Rowe:
And that's exactly why today's guest is Ben Sharf. Ben, thanks so much for being here.

Ben Sharf: Thanks for having me today, Tim. Stoked to chat.

Tim Rowe: Absolutely. I'm excited to hopefully recreate some of the conversation that we had last time, because I found a lot of it to be relevant to the challenge. I think a lot of companies have in out of home even. Um, and that is the, the challenge of, of trying to make the transition from being an agency to becoming a SAS company. And that's something that you're doing with intentionality. So Ben, I'd love if we could start with your origin story. Maybe give us the, the background on Ben Sharf.

Ben Sharf: Yeah, quick background on myself. I grew up in Buffalo, New York, moved away from home when I was 15, went to a boarding school, was a hockey player, ended up playing Division I hockey at Colgate University. In my senior year, I was fully intending on playing professionally, which got interrupted by a fun thing called COVID. Our senior season got cut short by a global pandemic. That just put a lot of variables up in the air. So ultimately decided to close that chapter. I was then planning on joining one of the big four consulting firms to do M&A consulting. And 12 hours before my first day, I told them I wasn't coming. And I ended up joining an early stage COVID testing startup that scaled to $50 million in revenue in five months. I spent a handful of months there. And then after that, I went to a company called GoPuff, where I was building out a business unit for direct-to-consumer brands and Shopify. And that was where I built all my relationships and gained all my insights into this space, which ultimately led to me leaving and starting what is now known as Platter.

Tim Rowe: It's awesome. GoPuff is a great out of home brand. So you, you spent time on the come up, obviously making a bold decision. What was it that, that pulled you away at the, at the last minute from, uh, from a career in consulting?

Ben Sharf: Yeah. I mean, I think I fell into this trap, uh, early on where you live a life that other people tell you that you should live, not necessarily the one that you want to live. And I was surrounded by people at Colgate. Um, that are in like this very corporate heavy culture of like, go get the best banking job or consulting job that you can. And then after you spend a couple of years there, you can then go on and do whatever it is that you want to do. And so for me, when I was in college, I. always thought that the goal was to go do business development at a high growth tech startup. And then because of how things played out with COVID and whatnot, I essentially was able to garner the opportunity to do that without having to go into consulting. And I think the second piece of it is I got cold feet because I realized at heart that I was an entrepreneur and that regret hurts a lot more than failure. And so I don't think I would have ever been able to live with myself if I just went into that role knowing it wasn't at my core what I was actually excited by. And I realized that the same way I would wake up or go to sleep on a Sunday night with the Sunday scaries because school was starting again on Monday, I feel like I had that same feeling about waking up and going into a corporate office. And so I knew at my core that it wasn't the right thing for me. It just took a lot of guts to say the least to pull the plug when it came down to it.

Tim Rowe: Well, that'll be the undertone for this conversation is is exactly that having the having the courage to believe in yourself and really take that leap. In terms of platter, what was the first problem that you guys focused on solving?

Ben Sharf: Yeah, I mean, to be honest with you, the way that the business started was that we were just a traditional e-commerce consult like agency. And our goal was just start to work with people that you wanted to make your future customers better understand how they operate and start to identify pain points in their everyday life. and figure out how you can take those, synthesize them, look for recurring themes, and then ultimately see if there's something that can be productized there. So for us, it was just consulting with brands, recognizing the issue in building high converting e-commerce storefronts. You know, there's issues in the Shopify ecosystem around fragmentation, where brands are being stuck with so many different applications. So many support teams, not sure who to trust, what to use. And it was just a culmination of these things that we realized it wasn't optimized. And there's a reason for that, which we can talk about. But ultimately, we decided, is there a way that we can figure out how to productize not only building a high converting storefront, but helping you make more money and save more money at the same time as a brand owner?

Tim Rowe: I've jotted down three kind of pillars as you were describing that. Identify your dream customers. That's the first point of intentionality, identifying the customers you want to work with, find the problems that they have, solve the problems that they have. Did I distill that in a fair way?

Ben Sharf: Yeah, a hundred percent. That's very, very well said.

Tim Rowe: How does the incentive structure disrupt something that seems so clear? We talked about the, the agency incentive structure specifically, and there's a lot of folks that listen to this that are in some sort of agency or operating an agency. So, you know, take this with, with, you know, caution in mind is as an agency owner or operator that there is a trap of just getting stuck in a lane that isn't defined. Is that

Ben Sharf: Yeah, and I think I think that, like, there's an important distinction to that. Our general thesis and insights would, we would say are more at large, just like, broadly speaking about the ecosystem. It's not to say that every single agency falls into this bucket. But, like, specifically development agencies. oftentimes from the conversations that we've had with brands, they are not incentivized to productize any part. Let me take a step back. The notion that we're after to debunk is that building a high converting storefront is really expensive and takes a really long time. The reason that that is the sentiment in the market today is because at large, development agencies are not incentivized to productize any part of that process because they get paid for their time.

Tim Rowe: It's not too different than advertising. It's too expensive. It takes too long. It's too hard. These are oftentimes the complaints that we hear, particularly when we're working with brands who haven't done out of home before. So really, the new money that that represents, brands who haven't done out of home, as agencies, as kind of intermediaries, the first points of contact. Those are the, those are the complaints that I hear from folks too. So I think it's these same themes throughout, whether it's developing Shopify storefronts or doing out of home for brands. It's interesting. So I don't mean to distract from the point. It's interesting how those things overlap.

Ben Sharf: Yeah. I mean, look, there's, I think we're drawing from just like trends and in parallels that I'm sure are relative relevant to like many other industries or subsegments of consumer and advertising and marketing more broadly.

Tim Rowe: Yeah, absolutely. Sorry, I want to come back on something there because I felt like I asked it in a fucking clunky way. And it's been bothering me. It's been bothering me because I tried to add too much. Can we come back to the incentives thing? Yeah. How does incentive structure influence decision making?

Ben Sharf: I mean, the thing that we've come to realize is that there's a misalignment in incentives from the perspective of like a brand and then a lot of the vendors that they're working with to service them. Right. So more specifically, as it relates to our business, I referenced development agencies. And I would say this is just more broadly speaking, I always preface this in saying it doesn't relate necessarily to every individual agency. But at large, agencies are not incentivized to productize any part of the process of building a high converting storefront because they get paid for their time. So from the perspective of a brand owner, they want to get the best solution they can as fast as they can for the least amount of money. An agency, it's the balancing act of selling while also trying to make the most amount of money while spending the least amount of time on something.

Tim Rowe: So how do you, I guess, how do you then as an agency founder with the intention of becoming a SaaS company, how do you put guardrails in place for yourself to drive towards that, that end objective of becoming a SaaS? Yeah. How do you, how do you not fall into the trap of just staying in agency?

Ben Sharf: The, I think the best way to put it, and this was advice that I got from a very successful friend was that you're not going to get to where you want to go if you don't know where it is that you're trying to get to. So if I realize that my end goal is to improve some of the deficiencies in the agency model of managing e-commerce storefronts, I need to live it, I need to understand it, and I need to go through it to figure out where are those pitfalls and how can that be improved.

Tim Rowe: And I guess that can really apply for any industry. How do you, how do you go about defining that thing? We talked about identify the dream companies, find the problems, solve the problems, but it seems like, I mean, there's a ton of problems that you could solve. How do you find the ones worth solving that are solvable?

Ben Sharf: Yeah, I think there's a couple of components to that. I think the first one is you have to be honest with yourself about what's exciting. for you as a founder, right? Like there's so many, I'm sure there's so many other businesses that I could build right now that could potentially make me more money, maybe make more impact, but not necessarily make me tick the same way that the one I'm working on does now. Like, I always say, if you're not getting out of bed in the morning, like, excited about what you're working on, then you should probably reevaluate. Yesterday, you know what? Actually, I want to pull this up and read this to you quickly because it really resonated with me. But yesterday was my 28th birthday. And I have a birthday. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I sat down. Actually, I removed every single meeting off my calendar yesterday. And I sat in a coffee shop and I just wrote for an hour, just like reflecting. And one of the things I basically distilled it down into 10 different takeaways over the last year of my life of just thinking about what's important, what matters. And one of the ones that I wrote was, life is too short to not pursue the things that motivate and inspire you. And then the subtext of that bullet point was, regret hurts a lot more than failure. Take the risk and do the things that consume your mind. You should wake up every day excited to attack. If you dread the day ahead, course correct immediately.

Tim Rowe: I mean, we could just end the episode there.

Ben Sharf: And so like that sentiment to me, when you think about like, what are the problems you're trying to solve? Look, there's so many problems that we've come across, but you know, we're not, you can't boil the ocean. A master of all is a master of none. It's on you to isolate the things that are important to you or that excite you. uh, to go after. And I think for us, we kind of jumped into this world of e-commerce and direct to consumer. We knew we wanted to build some sort of software products, but I'd be lying to you if I told you on day one, that our goal was to build what we have today. Cause that's just not true. It was, it was a series of learnings and, uh, you know, synthesizing information and realizing what was interesting, what was exciting and like, what was the thing that my co-founders and I were up until two o'clock in the morning texting about.

Tim Rowe: It makes sense. So the passion, the fervor, the fire to get up and do it every day, I think that that's an understated element of this and that we can be enticed by what the market says or what the report says or what everyone else is doing. What a trap that is. really insightful as we, as we start to transition from agent to agency. Let me rerun that. As we start to transition from agency to software company, how does the company itself start to change the head count? I'm sure the, the internal dynamics, the, the, you went from probably having no developers to having developers. How do you start to manage the transition of the company itself from an agency to a SaaS.

Ben Sharf: You know, it's actually really interesting. And there's a caveat to this is that our intention is never to sunset the entire agency. We actually use the agency piece of the business as R&D for the software. So it's rather like there's a ceiling on one and the other one there's uncapped upside. And it's just like being honest with yourself and recognizing that. But the thing that we've come to learn is that that intimacy of relationship that we have, because the way that I decipher between an agency and a software product is, can someone come to your website, buy the product and use it and not talk to you, right? Our quote-unquote agency model, we still have software tooling behind it. The way that our agency business unit works is that we can redesign, build, and implement a new e-commerce storefront for you faster and cheaper than most agencies on the market. But that's not to say that there's still like hand-to-hand combat and services tied to it. With that being said, we do have a software product that is being built in parallel and all of the learnings and all of the feedback from those customers are the thing that is actually informing what we're doing on the software side of it. We've been building the software product this entire time. We've just never had a software product until this week, actually, which is why the timing is funny. We've never had a software product until this week where brands could use that tool without using the theme product, not to get too technical, without using the other product we have that requires the services piece.

Tim Rowe: So optimize towards the thing that's making you money. and then find a way to create systems and automate tools for your team and then build that into a Megazord of sorts.

Ben Sharf: Yeah, the way that I describe it is that our agency model is actually us being profitable on R&D.

Tim Rowe: Really, really interesting way to think about it. How you said something the first time we talked about how can we do everything and balancing that with the need to do it as cheap as possible and also speed to market. Oftentimes we talk about, Hey, it can be, it can be fast and cheap. It's just not going to be reliable or it can be reliable and cheap. It's just not going to be fast. The old, uh, the old ism, as it were, how are you able to do everything as cheap as possible with speed to market? Is that the kind of, is that the secret sauce is having the team plus the tech?

Ben Sharf: Yeah. I mean, it's essentially productizing the thing that usually is the trade-off conversation that you're having. There's always going to be a have to be in between the two. Someone's lying to you if they can tell you that they can do both perfect. It's always going to be a balancing act. The idea is that can we get incrementally closer to actually giving you both? Because the way that I describe it is if I can make you a couple of dollars and save you a couple of dollars, thus make you a little bit more profitable along the way, it's very hard for you to turn down the offer that I'm putting in front of you.

Tim Rowe: really interesting. I think we generally focus on one or the other. Hey, I can make you more money or I can save you money. Rarely a little bit of both and talk about the spread.

Ben Sharf: Yes. And that is the thing that we talk about. Profitability is the word that we use versus cost savings or more revenue. Profitability is the thing that we focus on because they're on the agency side of the business. because we're giving you operational efficiencies, because we're productizing a lot of that process, we're consolidating tech tools that you're already using. And then we're also giving you new ways to increase your core metrics like average order value and conversion rate. So I can actually quantify making you money and saving you money at the same time.

Tim Rowe: because it's ultimately profitability that powers the flywheel. So whether it's a little bit of this or a lot of bit of that, it's the grease in the groove that allows the train to keep going.

Ben Sharf: Especially in 2024, direct to consumer, like everything is about profitability now. The capital markets aren't what they were in 2021.

Tim Rowe: How do you say no to bad revenue as a startup?

Ben Sharf: Um, you say yes to bad revenue until it frustrates you so much that you learn.

Tim Rowe: That sounds fair. Once you, once you get frustrated enough, how do you, how do you, I guess, do you, do you, do you end up defining what bad revenue looks like? Hey, it's a customer. It sounds like this. How do you, once you've gone through it and said yes to it too many times, I guess, how do you define it? So you don't keep getting into bad relationships.

Ben Sharf: I mean, it's actually, it's a lot simpler than you think, uh, which is the people with the least amount of money end up having the most amount of problems.

Tim Rowe: That is the truth. That is the absolute truth. That is true in every business I've ever been in. It's the one that negotiates and grinds you down the hardest. That is going to be the biggest problem.

Ben Sharf: So the learning for you as the owner is when do you set those hard line rules and filters where you won't budge at the expense of anything? Because that means you're not about to budge to let another bad revenue customer in the door.

Tim Rowe: As a founder. When you're in those scenarios, though, there must be an element of, I guess, call it imposter syndrome. I mean, there's imposter syndrome all throughout this. How do you keep those voices in check?

Ben Sharf: When you get yelled at enough by your technical co-founder that his team is having issues with the person that is paying us the least amount of money, you eventually realize that you don't want him angry anymore. in that the extra little bit of money that you can get from this new customer does not outweigh those conversations that are probably going to happen in a few weeks.

Tim Rowe: Yeah, that makes sense. I think that that definitely makes it a lot easier is having good open dialogue with the team internally when they tell you, Hey, this is just a bad customer for the business from a, especially from a technical standpoint. Hey, this is not operationally efficient. We are not making money here.

Ben Sharf: It's a problem. It's mutual respect with, especially with your co-founders, right? My technical co-founder, his job is not to get on the call with brands and close them. But he needs to trust us that the ones we do close are the ones that he's building for. And we need to trust that the product he's building for the ones that he wants actually works and does what we say it does. Because me bringing him a bad customer is just as bad or worse than me bringing him a good customer and him under delivering on his side of the house.

Tim Rowe: Talk about building for customers. You, you have, you have really two targets that you're building for. You have user customers that you're building for, and you talked specifically about building for specific types of partners. When you're ready to exit, can you, can you go into those two different profiles the customers are building for?

Ben Sharf: So, I mean, I would say there's, they're like part 1A and part 1B. The first one is like, who's your target customer more broadly, right? Like for us, it's, we're, we're trying to target brands that are doing anywhere from 3 to 25 million in top line on their Shopify e-commerce store. The industry is pretty agnostic. I would say the main driver is revenue. That is the persona that we are trying to service with the business. Part 1B, which again, I alluded to this earlier, which is a friend of mine who had a successful exit. One of the pieces of advice he gave me was, if you're trying to build a company to sell it, you need to know A, who you think is going to buy it and B, what's important to them. So oftentimes I hear about founders who are building businesses that are successful businesses, but they don't actually know what the exit plan is. Are you going public? Are you getting an acquisition? Is it a lifestyle cash flowing business? And so for us, I just think as we look, we're still pretty early on in the journey in terms of like that life cycle. But with that being said, knowing like what you're building towards or who you're building for is very valuable. To actually try and manifest the outcome you're looking for. And so for us, like, there's a couple of different categories of potential outcomes for us in terms of like, what does an ideal buyer look like? And so, as we continue down this path, you start to think about what are the things that are more important to them? are most important to them to get to that point where you have that conversation. And they're like, Oh, this is an interesting business. And here are the three reasons. Those are the three reasons you knew two years ago. So you were able to properly frame the business in a way to be positioned to get acquired.

Tim Rowe: How do you think about competition?

Ben Sharf: It's a good question. I think there's a couple pieces to it. I think the first one is that if there isn't any competition, you're probably not building something that interesting. Um, I think I was, I was that 15 year old kid who would like, try to get someone to sign an NDA before I tell them about my idea. Cause every little kid thinks they're building the Facebook. Um, and then you very quickly realize that's actually not how the real world works. And part of competition, like I said, is validation of ecosystems. I think in today's day and age. Competition is really just reframing and improving upon another solution that existed. Don't get me wrong. You have the pioneers in this world, like the Sam Altman's and the Elon Musk's and the Mark Zuckerberg's of the world, but there's far and few in between. I think for us with competition, like validating that a market is there is great. I'd say the second piece of it Understanding what your competition is doing is important, but if you get fixated on your competitors, you're going to end up driving yourself into the ground. Don't build the feature all because you saw one of your competitors built it. Do it because your customers told you to. I don't think the reason that we fail as a business is because of our competition. I think we probably made a misstep somewhere else along the way because I also think one of the other misconceptions in the world of entrepreneurship is that every outcome is binary. If that was the case, then Uber and Lyft won't both exist. That would mean only one of them would.

Tim Rowe: Sure. And we do, we, we tend to think that way that it's either it's either, or it can't be. And by any stretch of the imagination and no universe could both of those outcomes possibly exist. And the reality is generally the marketplace is big enough. Generally the market look, Amazon and Alibaba both exist in the same planetary universe. Incredible.

Ben Sharf: I think that actually, to be honest with you is something that I struggled with for so long. I'm like, well, if this player exists and they're this big, like, why would we build this? It's like, well, there's millions of, you know, potential customers. Like, I don't think it's a one size fits all because if you just run the numbers on the math of like, what do you need to get to, to make this an attractive business, they can still have the outcome they want. And we can still have the outcome we want in the same market.

Tim Rowe: When you are thinking about building for exit, do you do that with a timeline in mind? Do you do that with a multiple in mind? You mentioned the having the companies in mind that would be good exit targets. Are you building with those other factors in mind?

Ben Sharf: Yeah, absolutely. I think for us, it's a sliding scale. So it's like, as time goes on, and we get older, if you know, we all have our own internal financial targets that we want to hit, those probably start to change based on time. So I think the multiple piece is more just understanding how can you back into potential outcomes from a financial perspective, right? So it's like, if you're targeting a business that's going to trade on EBITDA or, you know, top line, whatever, bottom line, whatever it is that your customer account, whatever it is that it's going to be. You just need to know generally what that looks like to be able to try to calculate something. And the reason I say I think the target moves based on timeline is because like, if you're single with no mortgage and no family, you probably have a certain target, but then if it's like, all right, like I just had my first kid, I just got married. Um, I need this faster. It will start to change. So I think like amongst the three of us, we have kind of a mutual understanding of where we want to be over the next couple of years. Um, but we haven't like closed ourself off to just one outcome because to be honest with you, like I'd be lying to you because early stage startups evolve at the speed of light.

Tim Rowe: How is AI changing the day-to-day of the agency element and also how is AI, I guess, informing roadmap and kind of how has AI changed your direction and vision as a founder?

Ben Sharf: I'll say this, we have an AI engineer who, to be honest with you, we haven't actually rolled out much of anything that he's worked on to date. His job largely has been to just make sure that we are staying at the forefront of technology to make sure that what it is that we're doing keeps in mind what AI can do to the business.

Tim Rowe: Are any of the teams internally, do you have personnel using AI to streamline workflows or optimize otherwise? Every single day. Every single day. That's interesting. Is that something that you have had to kind of instill as a founder or is that organic to the curiosity of the company?

Ben Sharf: It's organic. I would say it's also relative to like what department within the business you're working on and like, what is your level of sophistication with technology? Right. Like for example, there's some AI tooling that helps complete lines of code that like our engineers would use. There's also some AI tooling that like our marketing team will use to like strum up new marketing ideas. And there's AI tooling that our sales team will use to like AB test copy and, and things like that. Um, so it really just depends on what you're doing, uh, in terms of how much you'll use it and how often you'll use it. But I think the thing that I'm most. concerned about or what's most top of mind for me and my co-founders is just understanding what can be commoditized from AI and making sure you're not building towards something that's going to be commoditized overnight at some point. It's just a matter of time when.

Tim Rowe: really interesting and something to think about that's so hard to account for. Yeah, so hard to account for but be it's a good thing to be be thinking about. It really is.

Ben Sharf: I just think if you're not you're you're kind of just like ignoring the elephant in the room. Yeah, I will say though that like once something we've done a very good job of is not follow the shiny objects. Like how many people, how many people do you know that started a web three company that pivoted to AI and now to like VR and they're always, or, you know, AI robotics, whatever the hell the latest and greatest thing is.

Tim Rowe: Chasing the trend, chasing the trend.

Ben Sharf: And that, that's something that we've been very good about is like, no, no, we know our, we know our place in this ecosystem. Just stay the course.

Tim Rowe: Discipline strategy is sacrifice.

Ben Sharf: Exactly.

Tim Rowe: Strategy is sacrifice. Who are you doing this for, Ben? We talked about it in the open there about how sometimes I guess life kind of guides the direction that we take and we face these moments of making decisions that either define it for ourselves or ultimately follow that trajectory. How How would you, how would you help someone maybe listening to this? That's that's struggling with that. I know that that's something that you're passionate about who you're doing it for.

Ben Sharf: Yeah. I mean, I think like it's about finding your why, right? Like what I, the reasons I do what I do are going to be different than the reasons you do what you do. Maybe they're not that different, but the sooner that you can articulate what your purpose is or why you do things, I think the sooner you'll feel more at peace with yourself. I also think it's important to note that not necessarily are the reasons healthy or good or conducive. It's also just being accepting of what your reality is in that moment. I'm very open and honest about the fact that I'm largely driven by the fear of failure. I don't ever say that it's healthy. I have a therapist. I sit and talk to her every week about it. I'm not proud of it, but it drives me to push harder than most people.

Tim Rowe: Self-awareness too.

Ben Sharf: Yeah. I think those go. Yeah. Self-awareness is the most important piece. Cause like I said, at the very least, if you know what it is, that's driving you, you can either a try to work on it and make it less destructive. If it's not something that you're proud of or positive, uh, or it has a positive impact, but if you don't actually have the self-awareness of it, then you're kind of just driving into a, you know, a dark tunnel. Which I think is similar to the idea of like, if you're trying to build a company to sell it, know who you're trying to sell it to or what you're trying to build to sell. I think that same journey applies to you as an individual.

Tim Rowe: Man, you got me thinking, thinking about what drives me. I'll be honest, as a single dad, it's the fear of, it's the fear of just not waking up tomorrow. It's the fear that this conversation might be the last thing I do. So I want to do something great that my son has to remember me by. That's 100% what drives me every single day. And once I got honest with that, it changed my life.

Ben Sharf: I got chills hearing you say that, honestly.

Tim Rowe: that changed my life dude i mean you look you got the you got the air who has an air hockey table where their dining room table is supposed to be i'm a single dad i got nothing else i got nothing else except my boy so thanks for being honest about that man i appreciate i appreciate you kind of prompted me on being honest about that too yeah look i think um i think vulnerability is fucking awesome i don't think enough people do it i i don't

Ben Sharf: I don't hold it against people because it's not the easiest thing to do. Right? Like you have this persona that you try to hold up against yourself. You have this persona that you hold for other people around you. Um, and not necessarily is what, you know, I shouldn't say not necessarily most often what people see on the outside is not what's happening on the inside. And social media is the exact representation of that. And so I think like when you're honest with yourself, I think you're just better off from it. Even if it's not the, you know, sometimes it's the hard conversations and it's the hard realities, but like, at least you have a little bit of clarity.

Tim Rowe: Clarity. I think above all else, making those hard decisions will give you clarity, making, making hard decisions about your business, putting, putting guidelines, having discipline. These are our rules. We're not going to, we're going to allow ourselves to be innovative and to evolve, but we're not going to allow ourselves to get derailed and chase shiny objects. It's a, it all, it all starts there. It starts with that self-awareness. as self that percolates out to obviously the company as an organism. Ben Sharf, where do we go? Give us the lat long. That's what we use in the billboard world out of home. We use latitude and longitude. Where should we go to connect with you to learn more about platter? Give us all the places.

Ben Sharf: You can find me on all socials at Ben Sharf. It's B-E-N-S-H-A-R-F. My email is ben at platter.co. That's P-L-A-T-T-E-R dot C-O. Um, yeah, those are the, those are the best places to find me.

Tim Rowe: Excellent. We'll have it linked in the show notes below. So the lift has been done for you. Just go there. Ben, thank you again for being here and sharing as much as you have. Thanks for getting vulnerable and for prompting some vulnerability out of me too.

Ben Sharf: I appreciate it, Tim. Thanks for having me.

Tim Rowe: Absolutely. And if you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with someone who could benefit. As always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast review. That's how you help us grow and we'll see y'all next time. Let's say load.